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
Mistral AI Eyes €20B Valuation in Landmark European Funding Talks
Mistral AI, a French startup, is reportedly in talks for a new funding round that could value it at €20 billion, underscoring Europe's rapid ascent in challenging U.S. AI dominance.
Anthropic's Fable 5 & Mythos 5 Suspended by US Directive
Anthropic's suspension of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by U.S. government directive signals a critical shift in AI regulation, impacting startups and raising questions about future deployments.
Etched.ai Raises $120M to Challenge Nvidia's AI Chip Dominance *The $1.55 Billion Bet*
Etched.ai secures $120M from tech leaders like Bezos and Gates at a $1.55B valuation, aiming to challenge Nvidia's AI chip dominance with specialized ASICs for LLM inference.
UK & Japan Launch £20M Dual-Use Tech Fund for Startups *Fostering Cross-Border Innovation*
The UK and Japan launch a new £20 million fund to back startups developing critical dual-use technologies, creating direct funding channels and market access for deep tech ventures.
Bezos' Industrial AI Startup Prometheus Hits $41B Valuation
Jeff Bezos's industrial AI startup Prometheus secured a $12 billion funding round, pushing its valuation to $41 billion and signaling a new frontier in capital-intensive AI ventures.
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
Read with the people who build the next decade.
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