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
NewLimit Raises $435M for Longevity Tech, Backed by Brian Armstrong
NewLimit, Brian Armstrong's longevity tech venture, secured $435M in Series B funding to accelerate biological reprogramming research and target human clinical trials by 2026.
Anthropic Files for IPO: AI's First Major Public Market Test What it means for AI startups
Anthropic's confidential IPO filing will test public market investor appetite for frontier AI companies, setting a crucial precedent for future funding and valuations of AI startups.
Enhanced Games: Tech Money Backs PED-Open Sports A 'Billion-Dollar Hustle'
Aron D'Souza's Enhanced Games, a new sports competition openly embracing performance-enhancing drugs, secured $1 million from tech investors like Peter Thiel to disrupt traditional athletics.
Orbital Industries Raises $50M Series B for AI Material Discovery *Hard Tech Innovation*
Orbital Industries secures $50M in Series B funding, validating its AI platform's potential to revolutionize material discovery for critical hard tech sectors like EVs and semiconductors.
ClickHouse Hits $250M ARR, Nears IPO: Open Source Scaling A Blueprint for Open Source
ClickHouse, the open-source analytical database, hits $250M ARR with strong financials, showcasing a viable model for open-source commercialization and IPO success.
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