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
Europe's Fusion Champion: Proxima Fusion Secures €411M Round Europe's Largest Deep-Tech Seed
Munich's Proxima Fusion secured Europe's largest deep-tech seed round at €411M, demonstrating significant investor confidence in long-term stellarator fusion for a sustainable energy future.
Station F: Europe's Premier AI Startup Launchpad
Station F, Xavier Niel's Paris campus, has strategically solidified its position as Europe's premier AI startup launchpad, attracting over €1.1 billion in funding and diverse talent.
Europe's First Public Quantum Company IPOs With Future Uncertainty
IQM, Europe's first public quantum company, approaches its IPO, with leadership transparently acknowledging quantum technology's uncertain future, a critical lesson for deep tech founders.
Erik Voorhees' Venice.ai Raises $65M for Private AI
Erik Voorhees and Jesse Proudman's Venice.ai secured $65 million to develop private AI solutions, empowering enterprises with secure, on-premise AI models that protect sensitive data.
Global Startup Funding Hits Record $510B in H1 2026
Global startup funding hit a record $510B in H1 2026, primarily driven by an AI investment boom that reshapes the venture landscape for 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
Read with the people who build the next decade.
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