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
Reid Hoffman Enters 'Founder Mode' with AI Drug Startup Manus The Future of AI Drug Discovery
Reid Hoffman is stepping down from Microsoft's board to co-found Manus, an AI drug discovery startup, signaling a return to hands-on entrepreneurship and a focus on high-stakes AI applications.
Flourish: Bezos, Google Ventures Back New Brain-Tech Unicorn Non-invasive BCI & AI diagnostics
Flourish, a new neuroscience startup, secured $200 million from Jeff Bezos and Google Ventures, achieving unicorn status at launch to develop non-invasive brain-tech solutions.
Anthropic President: AI IPOs, Costs, & The Long Game for Returns Understanding AI's Capital Demands
Anthropic President Daniela Amodei reveals why frontier AI companies face enormous computing costs, requiring patient capital and a long-term strategy before realizing trillion-dollar opportunities.
Benchmark Raises First Growth Fund, Pivots Strategy with $2B Capital
Legendary early-stage VC firm Benchmark breaks three decades of tradition by raising its first-ever growth fund as part of a $2 billion capital raise, signaling a major strategic adaptation to evolving market dynamics.
Nvidia Powers Unitree H1: Humanoid Robotics Platform Validated A New Era for AI Robotics
Nvidia's integration of its Jetson Orin platform into Unitree's H1 humanoid robot validates the emerging category, signaling a critical market shift and positioning Unitree for accelerated growth.
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