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
Karamo Brown's Kē: AI Digital Clone Enters Wellness Market A Founder's Case Study
Karamo Brown's Kē app, featuring an AI digital clone, pioneers celebrity-backed wellness, offering founders a blueprint for leveraging personal brands and AI for scalable solutions.
SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion
SpaceX's $60 billion post-IPO acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor signals an aggressive push into artificial intelligence, aiming to integrate advanced coding capabilities across its vast operations and accelerate core programs.
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.
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