The best companies are almost never built by people who set out to build a company. They're built by people who set out to solve a problem so important to them that they couldn't not work on it. The company is almost an afterthought — it's the vehicle, not the destination.
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The striking part is not the total. It is the concentration. The money tripled while the number of deals collapsed: just 34 deals so far in 2026, against 99 across all of 2025 and 127 in 2024. Investors have stopped spreading small bets across dozens of startups and started pouring billions into the few players they believe will own the market.
Daniel Abreu Marques
Figma was born of a technical breakthrough that leveraged WebGL to deliver powerful graphical capabilities in the browser; the browser made Figma collaborative, what I call the operating system of design. Figma has had a fascinating road: the company accepted an acquisition offer from Adobe in 2022, but due to regulatory resistence the latter was forced to abandon the merger in late 2023. Figma instead IPO'd in 2025, and after skyrocketing to a valuation of $56.3 billion, has since crashed to a market cap of less than $10 billion, less than half of Adobe's offer, thanks in large part to a market narrative that the company is an AI loser.
Ben Thompson
CEO Daniel Ek (now Executive Chairman of the company) sold relentlessly—to a degree I've never seen before from a corporate leader.
Ted Gioia