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
Anthropic's Fable 5 & 'Vibe Coding': A New Era for AI Games *AI-Powered Game Creation for All*
Anthropic's Fable 5 introduces 'vibe coding,' enabling non-coders to generate games by describing aesthetic and emotional tone, democratizing creation and shifting AI product development.
Beacon Software Raises $225M for Vertical Software Roll-Up *A New Acquisition Model*
Beacon Software secures $225 million to execute its venture roll-up strategy, acquiring small, vertical-specific software firms for long-term growth and offering founders a unique exit pathway.
Moonshot AI's $30B Valuation Fuels Global AI Funding Race
Explore how Chinese AI firm Moonshot AI's ambitious $30 billion valuation signals a fierce global funding race, setting new benchmarks for founders in the competitive AI sector.
From Rock Bottom to Startup: A Founder's Comeback Story
Gavin Ray's journey from addiction and prison to building a startup offers powerful lessons on resilience, resourcefulness, and overcoming systemic barriers for any founder.
AI Bill Comes Due: Startups Brace for Rising Token Costs *Optimizing for Profitability*
Startups must re-evaluate AI strategy, product design, and operations as GitHub Copilot's new usage-based pricing and LLM API costs escalate.
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.
Wednesdays at 7am Pacific. One letter, four minutes, and the five stories that actually mattered — chosen by the desk, not by an algorithm.
- ✓ The week's five most important reads, briefly
- ✓ One short interview, often unpublished elsewhere
- ✓ A memo from the editor — three minutes, one idea
- ✓ No ads, no roundups, no growth tactics