Dylan Field and the design tool Adobe couldn't buy
Figma's $20B deal with Adobe collapsed in December 2023 under regulatory pressure. The independent path that followed turned out to be the higher-variance outcome — and the more valuable one.
This week
The most important act of a founder this decade will not be building. It will be deciding what not to build. Restraint is the unwritten chapter of every great company — and the next four years will reward it more than any cycle in memory.
The feed
Dylan Field and the design tool Adobe couldn't buy
Figma's $20B deal with Adobe collapsed in December 2023 under regulatory pressure. The independent path that followed turned out to be the higher-variance outcome — and the more valuable one.
What Mira Murati left OpenAI to build
She was the CTO who shipped GPT-4 and Sora. She left at the peak of OpenAI's public arc. Then she raised what may be the largest seed round in venture history — for a company with no product.
Aravind Srinivas and the company that decided to rebuild search
Perplexity's bet was that the next interface for the open web wouldn't be ten blue links — it would be a paragraph with citations. Three years and several billion dollars of valuation later, that bet is still running.
X-energy's $1B IPO: AI Data Centers Fuel Nuclear Resurgence Powering the AI Revolution
X-energy aims for a $1 billion IPO, driven by AI data centers' insatiable demand for reliable, carbon-free power, highlighting a new era for deep tech investment in energy infrastructure.
Cerebras IPO: A Test for AI Hardware Investor Appetite Navigating Deep Tech's Public Test
Cerebras Systems' confidential IPO filing in May 2024 will gauge public market readiness for specialized, capital-intensive AI hardware companies, setting a benchmark for deep tech founders.
Founders desk
Plate 01Cover · Issue 47Lina Ouedraogo
Three exits over fourteen years. A method built on saying no — and the long interview to prove it.
Plate 02Dylan Field
Dropped out of UPenn on a Thiel Fellowship, spent six years building a design tool that ran in the browser, said no to Adobe's $20B all-cash offer when the regulators killed it, and IPO'd anyway.
Plate 03Mira Murati
Was the CTO who shipped GPT-4 and Sora. Left OpenAI at the peak of its public arc to start a research lab — Thinking Machines — that raised one of the largest seed rounds in history before it had a product.
Plate 04Aravind Srinivas
Left Berkeley, left OpenAI, and built the first AI-native search engine — Perplexity — that took Google's most defended product and treated it like a research problem.
By desk
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