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
XCENA's $135M Bet: AI's Bottleneck is Memory, Not Compute *Rethinking AI Hardware*
South Korean startup XCENA raised $135M, validating its thesis that AI's true bottleneck is memory, not compute, signaling a major shift in AI hardware innovation.
Groq Seeks $650M to Boost AI Inference Chip Production *Fueling Inference Focus*
AI chip startup Groq is reportedly raising $650 million to scale its LPU manufacturing and engineering for ultra-low latency AI inference, amidst fierce competition from industry giants.
Anthropic Hits Near $1T Valuation with $65B Series H, Opus 4.8 Debuts
Anthropic secures a landmark $65 billion Series H funding, propelling its valuation near $1 trillion, and launches Claude Opus 4.8 with dynamic workflows.
Fervo Energy IPO Soars as AI Demands Clean Geothermal Power
Fervo Energy's successful IPO highlights strong investor confidence in Enhanced Geothermal Systems, poised to deliver always-on clean power for soaring AI data center demands.
Cognition AI Raises $1B at $26B: AI Coding Boom Continues What This Means for Founders
Cognition AI's $1 billion funding round, valuing the company at $26 billion, signals robust investor confidence in autonomous AI for coding, setting new benchmarks for founders in the AI developer tools sector.
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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