Ben Cmejla

Building + investing @thegp. Prev @firstround.

[Daniel A. Saedi (DataManDan) @TheRealDanSaedi]

AI can now read your customers' minds.

We raised a $20M Series A lead by 8VC & Lingotto to build this.

Introducing Minerva, built in collaboration with OpenAI:

[Department of Government Efficiency @DOGE]

1. Lame joke, Commdani.
2. Stay far away from the Garden for the next few weeks; we’ll buy you all the @Mets tickets your commie heart desires.
3. If you’re looking for some pointers and advice, we’d be happy to compare notes. We’ll even do it for free, unlike NYC bus fares, you fraud.

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

If Stafford Beer were alive today, he would be using https://t.co/oVVqv3Yiha.

Congrats to @szgbo and team on the launch!

[Feather @feather___co]

Introducing Feather - A self organizing inbox!

Try it out at https://t.co/Z5N2OG8loZ. We'd love to know what you think 🪶

[Runloop Developer @RunloopDev]

Runloop is excited to be a launch partner for the @stripe Projects developer preview 🚀

One command provisions a full Runloop account with devboxes ready for agents, full access to pro plan features, and real credentials in your environment. No dashboard and no copy-paste keys 🙅

Simply run:
$ stripe projects init my-app && stripe projects add runloop

Try it today: https://t.co/o1yNF6c1qU
Demo: https://t.co/RNNYvHmY4x

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

Unchecked coding agents = entropy machines.

Resist the 2nd law.
https://t.co/7T2uU6l6q1

[riley tomasek @rileytomasek]

https://t.co/zYgrY66RdV

[Ryan Lopopolo @_lopopolo]

Excited to chat with @thegp later today and a ton of great folks on the change that is here with harness engineering. Thanks for getting me out @akline_SF @bencmejla

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

@_lopopolo @thegp @akline_SF Excited for this!

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

Why, as a a lover of AI for legal, I hate AI for longform blog posts:

There is too much content to consume. You won't have time to consume 0.001% of it before you die.

Longform writing is a form of "proof of work", like in Bitcoin. Writing proves two things:
1) That the topic is important enough to dedicate hours of your life to
2) That you deeply thought about the topic

It forces the author to put skin in the game. It's a bet that their time spent will pay off.

In a world of AI writing, we just get inundated. All writers know they could write a persuasive article on any stance, whether it's true or not, whether it's important or not.

Without a new "proof of work" mechanism, we will be flooded with too many ideas too persuasively and won't be able to figure out what matters.

You see this in startups too: Now anyone can write a convincing proposal in seconds. If you ask Claude to create a proposal to add food delivery to your AI app, it will do a great job of creating a convincing doc for why the company should do that.

But without a human having "skin in the game" of proposing the idea, it dramatically devalues the proposal.

Skin in the game is incredibly important.

GPs need skin in the game when they start a fund.

CEOs need skin in the game when they start a company.

Writers need skin in the game (time committed) when they put writing out into the world, otherwise it's likely they are just creating noise to get attention.

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

@pablosrugo @scottastevenson It's not inherently slop, but without any costly signals ("proof of work") it shifts the burden to reader scrutiny.

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

@WillManidis I’ve been waiting four years for this will

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

The only hot takes I want to read are ones like Brian Eno calling Versailles "the most grotesque of all gardens."

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

@ryanvogel @RunloopAI

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

@RangerNetHQ Extremely needed - congrats!

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

@Kazanjy no doubt

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

The mullet consultancy is finally happening: business humans in the front, AI party in the back.

[Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj]

Interesting breakdown of what AI is doing to McKinsey's workforce:

- Client-facing consulting headcount: up 25%
- Back-office support roles: down 25% with 10% increase in output
- Total headcount: ~flat

First time they can grow in aggregate without growing headcount across the board

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

"The Notion API is choking on the table markdown"

Delight debt: what delighted humans now frustrates agents.

[John Ling @jhnling]

Spreadsheets have entered the arena and you can be the #REF!eree → https://t.co/CQAGcrzswh

We built a blind pairwise arena for LLM-generated spreadsheets. 500M+ people use Excel. Time to let the people decide which LLM does it best!

Full paper: https://t.co/0WSdtYThYm

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

The biggest change to spreadsheets since VisiCalc.

[John Ling @jhnling]

Meet Meridian: Turn Hours in Excel into Minutes
If you work in Excel, Meridian is built for you.

Meridian works with companies like Decagon, OffDeal, a top investment bank, and other financial institutions. We’re an AI-powered workspace that automates Excel modeling work with full traceability back to source data.

We raised $17 million in seed funding, co-led by @a16z and @TheGP to bring @MeridianAgent to more finance teams.

[Ben Cmejla @bencmejla]

It's remarkable how many of our debates from early 2025 were settled by year's end.

Must speculate harder in 2026.

[The General Partnership ("TheGP") @thegp]

In 2025, we ran bi-weekly AI debates with TheGP’s engineers, founders, and technical leaders.

The best moments came when things got speculative.

@bencmejla reflects on the ideas that stuck:

[riley tomasek @rileytomasek]

the three Cs: charlie, codex, and cursor.