News! We just launched “The General Podcast” 🎙️ It’s a ‘hostless' show that pairs tech and business leaders together for honest, behind-the-scenes conversations about building: 🎙️ Ep 1: Katie Dill (@lil_dill) x Randy Hunt (@randyjhunt) 🎙️ Ep 2: A healthcare journalist x a Pulitzer Prize-winning author 🎙️ Ep 3: Two rising media founders 🎙️ Ep 4: Two legendary COOs And many more. So why are we doing this? The best conversations don’t happen in interviews. They happen between peers—people solving similar problems, or shaped by shared experience across an entire career. We built a show around that. Listen 👇

Every sales and marketing tool now promises AI will improve your results but they don't tell you how it will cost thousands of dollars and hours of time to onboard We built a system with @OpenAI for the part everyone hides: onboarding And today we're giving it away for free

I've known Daniel A. Saedi for ~25 years, since before the fancy A. in his name, and have wanted to invest in him for as much of that that I've known investing was a thing. Finally got to do it with Minerva, which you should use if you want customers.

pickford.ai's @BernieSu on @tbpn "What can AI do to juice up the art form and the narrative that we just couldn't do before?" "It's not a cost thing, it's a possibility thing!” youtube.com/watch?v=dI0X0fwD…

Thrilled to publicly announce what we’ve been working on @TryMinervaAI for the past three years! We’re sharing a few things today, but expect more throughout the week! We’ve taken a largely unconventional approach to building Minerva: build value first, build hype second. Excited to start sharing more with the public! More info below 👇

Today we’re announcing $20M in funding from @thegp, @8VC, Lingotto Innovation, @topology_vc, @NBA Investments and many others, alongside a collaboration with @OpenAI. Thank you to Chris Metinko at @Axios for covering our launch. axios.com/pro/enterprise-sof…

Hey San Francisco - come try AI that smells like popcorn at the Alamo Drafthouse! Get your tickets and join me: drafthouse.com/show/special-…

Our portfolio company, Pickford.ai, on @tbpn talking about their interactive AI TV show, "Whispers," and how the art form of entertainment is changing with AI.

after watching @brian_lovin and @wjosephflynn talk about vibe coding, this was the idea i couldn't shake: vibe coding can make you feel smarter and dumber at the same time. you shipped it, but you can't explain it. if success can't be reproduced without the AI, you didn't gain leverage. you borrowed it. the goal isn't getting from prompt to product. it's building confidence in the path between them. when you understand why it works, AI extends your ability. when you don't, it replaces the learning. infinite monkeys eventually write Shakespeare. infinite prompts eventually ship software. the difference is whether each success becomes experience. if not, you're producing outputs, not growing capability.

People ask me what we mean when we say we investing in serious people building real businesses @thegp - this work that @phaedrael and the team at Promise are delivering for the citizens of Baltimore is a good example. The City of Baltimore is partnering with Promise, the same secure payment plan provider that has now helped more than 20,000 Baltimore residents manage their water bills since 2023. Promise's technology has been extended to real property taxes, giving homeowners a straightforward way to enroll and manage their payments online. This is the first time in the City's history that residential property owners have been able to address past-due real property taxes through a payment plan, eliminating a major barrier for the tens of thousands of Baltimore residential property owners who previously had to pay their full balance by December 31 or risk tax sale. Promise has now delivered over half a billion in aid and support to Americans in need. promise-pay.com/

"Whispers suggests a new direction for struggling theater chains or even connected TVs to offer audiences new kinds of fun experiences. Importantly, the transformation would require relatively little new technological or physical enhancement for theater operators." Pickford's first interactive TV show, Whispers, in @Forbes 🎬 forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2026…

Humans and AI collaborating at work is cool but you know what's really cool? Humans and AI collaborating for entertainment - @thegp portfolio company Pickford showed Hollywood what it looks like last night and @Forbes wrote about "AI informed Cinema": forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2026…

Sandboxes are becoming the OS for agents. This is because agents will be more persistent and stateful. I go deep in my Substack: isolation primitives, performance, portability, architecture, build vs buy, market dynamics. Give it a read: crystalxtang.substack.com/p/…

Is the term "design founder" a bit of a myth? @brian_lovin x @wjosephflynn discuss on The General Podcast.

Anthropic just acquired developer tool startup @StainlessAPI, whose biggest customers were OpenAI and Google. Back in October, I had Stainless CEO and founder Alex Rattray (@RattrayAlex) on AI & I to talk about MCP servers and the unglamorous plumbing that makes AI agents actually work. (Disclosure: I’m a small investor in the company.) After Monday's news, the conversation lands differently—in it, Alex essentially walks me through the design thinking for building APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers that Anthropic paid a reported $300 million for. On @every's AI & I, we get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet. Highlights include: - Design MCP servers to be lean and precise. Alex's best practices for building reliable MCP servers start with keeping the toolset small, giving each tool a precise name and description, and minimizing the inputs and outputs the model has to handle. At Stainless, they also often add a JSON filter on top to strip out unnecessary data. - Make complex APIs manageable with dynamic mode. To solve the problem of how an AI figures out which tool to use in larger APIs, Stainless switches to "dynamic mode," where the model gets only three tools: List the endpoints, pick one and learn about it, and then execute it. - MCP servers as business copilots. At Stainless, Alex uses MCP servers to connect tools like @NotionHQ and @HubSpot, so he can ask questions like, "Which customers signed up last week?" The system queries multiple databases and returns a summary that would've otherwise taken multiple logins and searches. - Create a "brain" for your company with Claude Code. Alex built a shared company brain at Stainless by keeping Claude Code running on his system and asking it to save useful inputs—like customer feedback and SQL queries—into GitHub. Over time, this creates a curated archive his team can query easily. - The future of MCP is code execution. Instead of giving models hundreds of tools, Alex believes the most powerful setup will be a simple code execution tool and a doc search tool. The AI writes code against an API's SDK, runs it on a server, and checks the docs when it gets stuck. This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand MCP—and learn how to use them as a competitive edge. Watch below! Timestamps Introduction: 00:01:15 APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet: 00:05:09 Why MCP exists: 00:11:00 Why MCP servers are hard to get right: 00:17:15 Design principles for reliable MCP servers: 00:20:24 Using MCP for business ops at Stainless: 00:25:06 Alex’s take on the security model for MCP: 00:40:57 How one-off AI actions become permanent production software: 00:44:42