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
AI Shift: VCs Prioritize Hardware as Software Moats Deteriorate *The New AI Investment Strategy*
Venture capitalists are increasingly funding AI hardware and infrastructure, viewing these capital-intensive assets as the new defensible 'moats' as software advantages rapidly erode.
OpenRouter Secures $113M Series B for AI API Platform The 'Twilio for AI' Vision
OpenRouter's $113M Series B, led by Founders Fund, fuels its mission to become the 'Twilio for AI,' simplifying access to over 100 models through a unified API for developers.
Wall Street Builds Early Funds for SpaceX IPO
Wall Street firms are creating specialized funds to invest in SpaceX's secondary shares, signaling a new blueprint for private company exits and institutional interest in the booming space economy.
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.
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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