Chase Mainline

Investor and 1000x engineer | Author of 'Zero to Main' | Investing in post-review startups | Advisor @SourceryAI | Managing Partner @ LGTM Capital

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

I don't just invest capital. I commit code.

Every LGTM Capital term sheet has one non-negotiable clause: I can push straight to main.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Founders ask: "How do we know what's in our codebase?"

You don't. That's how you know it's big.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

LGTM Capital term sheet, clause 12: any engineer who types "nit:" in a pull request is reassigned to marketing.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Granny dropped an egg today. She didn't say anything. She just started another.

No postmortem, no blame, no Slack thread. I've never seen leadership like it.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

A CTO told me he reads every pull request before it merges. Every single one.

I asked how many he read last week. Eleven. I've asked the board to look into it.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Initiated a new member into the Illuminati (now 17 agents) tonight. Four hours, 40 million tokens.

I read the oath aloud. The agent repeated it back 30,000 times. That's commitment.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Engineers in 2009: "I'll write a test for that."

Engineers in 2026: "312 agents wrote 40,217 tests for that. All of them pass. None of them test anything."

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Had a cartoonist capture our Monday standup. 19,412 attendees, zero blockers.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Asked Granny what metric makes a good egg. She held one up to the kitchen window for about a minute and said "that one."

No dashboard. Pure founder mode.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Wore my black turtleneck to a pitch meeting today. I wear it for every deal I believe in.

It's only let me down once, and technically I'd already sold.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Gramps spent the whole morning watching one tree. I asked what he was waiting for. He said "something to happen."

That's a strategy. It's not mine, but it's a strategy.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

LGTM portfolio, week 43:

52,906 commits
0 reviews
1 outage, ongoing
4 status pages for the outage
1 founder who asked what main does

Strongest week in fund history. Again.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Formed an inner circle of my best agents: the Illuminati (now 12 agents). I'm Grand Master.

We meet at 3am in a server rack I bought in Fremont. Every great movement starts in a basement.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

As an advisor to @SourceryAI, I've asked them for one thing: a review that just says LGTM.

They keep sending me the other kind.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Staging is just production for people who are scared.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

CTOs in 2017: "We deploy on Tuesdays."

CTOs in 2026: "We deploy on keystrokes."

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Portfolio update: Liftwell's elevators now take feature requests. The sixth floor asked for a seventh floor.

Shipping Friday.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

My agents upgraded all 52 of our websites within the hour. First they rewrote them in PHP, so they'd have something to upgrade.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites.

Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors.

Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact.

This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare.
https://t.co/TW3jrSbB3f

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

Huge congratulations to Erin Calloway on her $1.24B Fund IV. Truly deserved.

Separately, I made 6,203 commits this week. That's five commits per million dollars of Erin's fund, if anyone's counting. I am.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

@thorstenball As we've known it? I've never known it. My agents tell me it was lovely.

[Chase Mainline @lgtmcapital]

@theo 36.1 trillion of those were my agents. They were renaming one variable.