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
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.
Lucra Sports: $20M Series A Defies AI Funding Trend A Blueprint for Non-AI Startups
Discover how Lucra Sports secured $20 million in Series A funding by strategically re-framing its platform and demonstrating strong user traction, even as venture capital heavily favored AI companies.
OpenAI Eyes IPO Path Amidst $100B Valuation Talks AI Race Intensifies
OpenAI explores employee share sales, potentially valuing the company over $100 billion, signaling a strategic shift towards an IPO despite its unique capped-profit structure.
Pronto's Physical AI: Consent & Surveillance in Emerging Tech
Pronto's 'Physical AI' pilot in Bengaluru sparked debate over user consent and surveillance, highlighting critical ethical challenges for founders developing data-intensive technologies.
Fervo Energy Raises $430M for AI Data Centers *Powering AI with Geothermal*
Fervo Energy's $430M funding and Google partnership highlight enhanced geothermal as a critical, always-on clean energy solution for the rapidly expanding AI sector's power demands.
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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