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
DeepSeek Founder Declares AGI Goal, Secures $10 Billion Funding The Cost of AGI
DeepSeek's founder Yang Fan declares AGI as the ultimate goal, securing $10 billion from Alibaba and Tencent, underscoring the immense capital now needed for frontier AI.
Elon Musk: AI's Power Bottleneck & Push for Gas, Nuclear
Elon Musk highlights electrical power as AI's biggest bottleneck, advocating for natural gas and nuclear to fuel xAI's massive supercomputers, a critical shift for all AI founders.
AI Chipmaker Cerebras Files for IPO A Test for Deep Tech Valuations
Cerebras Systems, an AI chipmaker known for its Wafer-Scale Engine, has filed for an IPO, setting a crucial test for deep tech valuations and the specialized AI hardware market.
X-energy Raises $1B, Targets IPO Amid AI Data Center Demand
Nuclear startup X-energy secured $1 billion in pre-IPO funding, led by Ares Management, to commercialize its advanced SMRs and meet the surging 24/7 energy demands of AI data centers.
How AI is Forging China's Multi-Billion-Dollar Micro-Drama Market
Generative AI is revolutionizing China's micro-drama industry, slashing production costs and accelerating content creation to fuel a market projected to hit $13.8 billion by 2027.
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.
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