The General Partnership ("TheGP")

Where you build your best company.

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

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 👇

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

Our portfolio company, https://t.co/EJ43nSIYXV, on @tbpn talking about their interactive AI TV show, "Whispers," and how the art form of entertainment is changing with AI.

[Peng Zheng @pengzheng_]

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.

[Phin Barnes @phineasb]

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. https://t.co/lYyDb7imI2

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

"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 🎬

https://t.co/uRRjMhXEjx

[Phin Barnes @phineasb]

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": https://t.co/n0PHFifOLv

[crystal @crystalxtang]

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: https://t.co/zBtgEpaoN2

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

Is the term "design founder" a bit of a myth?

@brian_lovin x @wjosephflynn discuss on The General Podcast.

[Dan Shipper 📧 @danshipper]

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

[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 🪶

[Megan Zengerle @megzenger]

2026 The General Partnership AGM + Build(er) Day 🧡
Seven years building this with @dan_portillo, @akline_SF, @phineasb and now so many more. If you ever doubt that people are ALWAYS the product — come visit TheGP and we will change your mind @thegp

[Ben Blumenrose @benblumenrose]

Joey Flynn + Brian is a must watch…

[Phin Barnes @phineasb]

When @soleio tells you to connect two incredible people and listen in on the conversation...you just do it.

[Soleio @soleio]

Not usually how I make intros, but since they’re two design giants meeting on camera for the first time, you should watch this terrific convo.

@wjosephflynn 🤝 @brian_lovin

[Brian Lovin @brian_lovin]

Please sign my petition to get Joey on more podcasts to share lore + tips on how to design gooder 📝

[Thalia Echevarria Fiol @thaliaeche]

One of the nicest and most talented designers ever @wjosephflynn

[Zach Johnston @zach__johnston]

I got an early cut of this episode, and I literally sat in the parking lot at work for 30 minutes just to finish it.

[Joey Flynn @wjosephflynn]

Absolute pleasure chopping it up with the mf'n king @brian_lovin !!

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

🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/9A28rQ1ZS9
🎧 Apple: https://t.co/wYZkM0RsF4
🎬 YouTube: https://t.co/zmDpKvIi2Q
💌 Substack: https://t.co/rtdJCAulOP

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

NEW from The General Podcast: the "design founder" episode.

@brian_lovin x @wjosephflynn

Before this conversation, Brian and Joey had never actually met, but had surprisingly parallel careers.

Both spent early years at Facebook, both started multiple companies, both found their way into some of the most design-forward product orgs today, and both were nominated to come on the show by legendary design leader, @soleio.

This one's for the designers. Tune in👇🎧