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
OpenAI Hires Transformer Co-Inventor Noam Shazeer Before IPO
OpenAI's strategic acquisition of Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer highlights the intense competition for top AI talent as the company prepares for its anticipated IPO.
Ent's $100M Seed: Viral Marketing Fuels Cyber Unicorn Status *The 'Toby Flenderson' Effect*
Ent secured an unprecedented $100M seed round, achieving immediate unicorn status through a viral marketing campaign featuring Paul Lieberstein, redefining early-stage funding.
NASA Picks Schmidt-Backed Relativity for Mars, Ignites SpaceX Race *A New Space Race Begins*
NASA awards a critical Mars mission contract to Relativity Space, backed by Eric Schmidt, setting up a direct competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX for deep-space exploration.
Flutterwave Hits $3.2B Valuation with Ripple Investment Africa's Fintech Unicorn
African payments giant Flutterwave secures a $3.2 billion valuation, backed by strategic investment and partnership from blockchain leader Ripple, signaling a new era for fintech in Africa.
AI Music Pioneer Suno Lands $5.4B Valuation Lessons for Founders
Suno's $5.4 billion valuation signals massive investor confidence in generative AI music, offering critical lessons for founders on rapid growth, user adoption, and navigating IP challenges.
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
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- ✓ No ads, no roundups, no growth tactics