The General Podcast

Eric Simons, co-founder and CEO of Bolt, and Jon Noronha, co-founder and CPO of Gamma, join The General Podcast to discuss building two of AI's fastest-growing products. They share how years of investment in foundational technology positioned both companies for the AI boom, why Bolt was able to scale so quickly after launch, and how Gamma adapted as AI reshaped the market around it.

Together, they discuss the advantages and drawbacks of competition, why both companies have remained intentional about their headcounts, how AI is changing the relationship among product, engineering, and design, and why scaling still requires people, even in a world of AI agents.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why being early can look a lot like being wrong

• The Figma-inspired strategy of building the technology before the application

• What it takes to scale to millions in ARR within weeks of launch

• How competition sharpened Bolt's focus

• The power of trust, and how long-standing teams helped Bolt and Gamma scale 

• How Gamma's early assumptions about AI are changing

• How Eric and Jon think about hiring during rapid growth

• How customer-facing teams are becoming product creators

• How AI is enabling people to work across product, engineering, and design

Where to find Eric Simons:

• X: https://x.com/EricSimons 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664 

Where to find Jon Noronha: 

• X: https://x.com/thatsjonsense 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnoronha 

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: https://thegp.com 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-general-partnership/

• X: https://x.com/thegp 

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:49) StackBlitz's origin story

(07:06) StackBlitz's first customers and building Bolt

(09:39) Gamma's early days and how it took off

(11:24) Hitting product-market fit and scaling Gamma

(13:22) Navigating the crowded vibecoding market

(14:59) The value of long-standing teams during rapid growth

(16:46) Gamma's early years without competition

(18:26) How fierce competition sharpened Bolt's focus

(20:53) The risks of trying to do everything

(24:09) Gamma’s early mistake in underestimating AI 

(26:16) The case for low headcount

(28:45) Gamma’s current size and how they think about headcount

(30:59) The blurring lines between engineering, design, and product

(37:50) How Bolt and Gamma empower non-technical builders

(41:54) Why scaling with AI still requires more people 

Referenced:

• Bolt: https://bolt.new

• Gamma: https://gamma.app

• Albert Pai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertpai

• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield

• Evan Wallace’s website: https://madebyevan.com

• Figma: https://www.figma.com 

• Fable: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/fable

To cap off season one of The General Podcast, we asked long-time friends and collaborators— Reid Hoffman and John Lilly—to sit down for a wide-ranging conversation about networks, company-building, investing, AI, and the relationships that shape a life’s work.

Reid is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a longtime partner at Greylock, and one of the most influential builders and investors in technology. He recently co-founded Manas AI, an AI company focused on drug development (and GP portfolio company). John was CEO of Mozilla, where he helped scale Firefox into one of the most important public-interest technology projects of the modern web, and later became a partner at Greylock.

They start with the fortuitous story of how they first met—through a one-line introduction from a mutual friend that turned into breakfast at Hobee’s, and then into years of a never-ending conversation. At the time, Reid was coming out of PayPal and beginning to think about what would become LinkedIn. John was building Reactivity and later trying to understand what Mozilla could become. Their early breakfasts became a ritual. They’d each bring a list of ideas, and each leave with a longer one. They’d trade names in their respective networks through stacks of physical business cards (LinkedIn didn’t exist yet!). At the time, John was one of the first people Reid told about LinkedIn, and also one of the first to tell him he wasn’t sure it would work. Those conversations became the foundation for a decades-long friendship and working relationship.

From there, they get into the deeper question of what makes Silicon Valley run. They agree that it’s not capital or even ambition, but the constant movement of people, trust, references and introductions across companies. Reid and John then get into how founders should build networks intentionally and how to think about the people whose “team” you want to be on over the course of your entire career.

They also talk about AI—whether it will make entrepreneurship more lonely, whether one-person trillion-dollar companies are realistic, and why Reid believes the future is less about all-AI companies and more about every person bringing a team of AI agents with them.

In this conversation, you’ll also learn:

1. Why great relationships often start with “who else should I talk to?”
2. How to build a network intentionally without making it feel transactional
3. Reid’s favorite reference-checking tactics
4. Why every CEO should spend time with extraordinary people outside their company
5. How to use board seats as a way to expand your judgment
6. How AI agents may reshape work without replacing human relationships
7. What Reid + John have each learned from founders like Bret Taylor and Dylan Field
8. How to think about building “the house you want to live in” as a founder
9. Why “AI as a friend” misses something essential about friendship

Where to find Reid Hoffman:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/
• X: @reidhoffman
• Website: https://www.reidhoffman.org/
• Manas AI: https://www.manas.ai/

Where to find John Lilly:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlilly/
• X: @johnolilly
• Greylock: https://greylock.com/team/john-lilly/

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: thegp.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-general-partnership/
• X: @thegp

Brian is a designer at Notion, where he arrived after founding Campsite, a communication tool for distributed teams. Before that, he co-founded Spectrum, a community platform built for developer communities that was acquired by GitHub. 

Joey co-founded Global Illumination, a studio that leveraged AI to build creative tools and games, which was acquired by OpenAI. Before OpenAI, he spent formative years at Facebook and Instagram, and worked on everything from iOS games to multiplayer worlds in the browser.

Before this conversation, Brian and Joey had never actually met, but they had surprisingly similar careers. Both spent early years at Facebook, both started multiple companies, both found their way into some of the most design-forward product orgs, and both were nominated to come on the show by legendary design leader, Soleio. 

Together, they chat about what it really means to be a “design founder” and whether that label even makes sense. They get into the strange pull of starting something new versus the relief of joining a company that already has distribution. Then they go deep on what it means to design right now, how AI changed the feedback loop, their prototyping stacks, and even the amount of control a designer can expect to have over the final product today. 

In this conversation, you'll learn: 

1. What Brian and Joey miss, and don’t miss, about being founders
2. Why joining a company with distribution can feel creatively freeing
3. Why vibe coding can feel like a superpower and still make you feel less in flow
4. What it’s like to design for AI while the product category is still forming
5. The new designer stack 

Where to find Brian Lovin:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlovin/
• X: @brian_lovin
• Website: https://brianlovin.com/

Where to find Joey Flynn:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joey-flynn-8291586b/
• X: @wjosephflynn

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: thegp.com
• LinkedIn: The General Partnership
• X: @thegp
• Substack: thegeneralpartnership.substack.com

In this conversation, Erica Galos Alioto (Chief People Officer at Retool, formerly Grammarly) and Anna Binder (former Chief People Officer at Asana) sit down for a candid conversation about what it actually felt like to lead through the last five years of work, from the chaos of the pandemic to the whiplash of DEI to the existential questions raised by AI.

They start with the “supper club.” It was a small, trusted group of HR leaders who became each other’s professional lifelines during COVID, and use that foundation as a lens to unpack how the role of HR fundamentally changed since then. 

From there, they get into the uncomfortable parts: the performative rise (and retreat) of DEI, the growing fear and ambiguity leaders are navigating today, and the tension between AI as a productivity unlock vs. a job disruptor.

It’s a conversation about what it means to be a people leader when the rules keep changing. 

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

1. Why the best Chief People Officers are business leaders first, HR leaders second
2. Why the best AI adoption strategies come from the edges of an organization
3. Why hackathons and internal tooling beat top-down AI mandates
4. How macro fear and politics are shaping CEO behavior more than most admit
5. How the best DEI programs got embedded into business operations
6. The shift from knowledge work to question-asking as a core skill
7. How “open-sourcing” internal comms can be a survival tactic for leaders
8. How founders can best partner with a great Chief People Officer

Where to find Erica: 

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-galos-alioto-9140832
• https://retool.com/

Where to find Anna:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/annabinder

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: thegp.com
• LinkedIn: The General Partnership
• X (Twitter): @thegp
• Substack: The General Partnership 

Merrill Lutsky is the co-founder and CEO of Graphite, a modern code review platform built for the AI era that was just acquired by Cursor. Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the terminal with agents built in.

Zach and Merrill go way back—they worked together on Zach’s previous company. Now they’re each building core infrastructure for modern engineering teams, and running into many of the same challenges from different sides of development.

They talk about what’s actually changing inside engineering orgs right now: why code review is becoming the real bottleneck as agents generate more code, why ‘vibe coding’ doesn’t work on production code, and why humans still have to stay accountable for agent-written code.

They’re also candid about the business side of developer tools - why power users break flat pricing, why ‘cheap AI’ creates a winner’s curse, and what it really takes to market to famously skeptical developers (controversial billboards and a launch video on a horse). 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. Zach and Merrill’s shared history and how it shaped their perspectives
2. Why AI has shifted the engineering bottleneck from writing code to understanding it
3. Why “vibe coding” works for demos but fails in real production environments
4. What human accountability actually means in an agent-driven codebase
5. Why code review is emerging as the new leverage point for engineering productivity
6. How power users quietly destroy flat-pricing models in developer tools
7. The “winner’s curse” of underpricing AI-native products
8. Marketing to developers without losing credibility

Where to find our guests:

• Graphite.com
• Warp.dev  

Bing Gordon joined Electronic Arts in its earliest days as Chief Creative Officer and helped build it into the gaming powerhouse it is today. He was one of the first believers that interactive media could be a true art form, and over his career he shaped iconic games like The Sims, Madden, and Farmville. Few people have thought harder about what makes a story truly work.

Stephen Piron is the founder of Pickford, a new kind of studio where the audience drives the plot in real time. His big idea is that if you scream at the TV, the TV should scream back. Before Pickford, Stephen built the world’s first deepfake (the Joe Rogan one) while working on his previous startup, Dessa, which was eventually acquired by Square.

Right off the bat, you’ll hear them dive into one of the most famous ad campaigns in tech history—EA’s “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” Bing shares the story behind that ad, and Stephen admits he has it framed on his office wall. From there, they get into the multiple reinventions of Hollywood, how you build character bibles and narrative arcs in the age of AI, why hits are always flukes until they’re not. 

It’s a conversation about what it really takes to build an interactive platform that changes the way stories get made. You’ll learn:

1. The origin story of the iconic “Can a computer make you cry?” ad and why it mattered more than any product marketing
2. Why Electronic Arts once believed it would become “the new Hollywood” and what that taught Bing about storytelling
3. Why most AI storytelling efforts fail by trying to make old stories cheaper instead of inventing new formats
4. Why character bibles and narrative guardrails matter more than prompts
5. How Pickford is borrowing from centuries-old storytelling structures and updating them for real-time interaction
6. Why hits still matter more than platforms (and why every platform eventually needs one)
7. How AI might actually create more work for storytellers, not less
8. How Pickford worked with SAG to design a new, AI-era compensation model for voice actors

Referenced in this episode:

• The “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” ad campaign
• United Artists and Mary Pickford 
• Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
• The Sims and SimCity
• EA Sports, Madden
• World of Warcraft
• Wattpad 
• Steve Jobs and the “reality distortion field”
• The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman 
• SAG (Screen Actors Guild)

Where to find Bing Gordon: 

• X (Twitter): @bingfish

Where to find Stephen Piron: 

• Pickford: pickford.ai

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: thegp.com
• X (Twitter): @thegp
• Substack: https://thegeneralpartnership.substack.com/

Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack, the platform powering the rise of independent writers, podcasters, and thinkers. At Substack, Chris has reimagined what sustainable media looks like, putting creators at the center.

Andrew Mayne is the host of the OpenAI podcast and was previously the company’s first prompt engineer and science communicator, where he helped shape how people interact with and understand large language models in the earliest days of GPT-3. 3. He’s also a mystery-thriller novelist and the founder of Interdimensional, a company helping organizations deploy AI.

Together, they unpack how technology rewires culture, creativity, and even capitalism—from the birth of ChatGPT to the flood of “AI slop,” from the evolution of media business models to what makes human expression irreplaceable.

It’s a conversation that circles around the economics of culture and the future of originality as creating art becomes more and more accessible. 

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

1. The inside story of ChatGPT’s creation 
2. Why frictionless product experiences matter more than technical breakthroughs
3. How Substack’s “do everything but the hard part” philosophy for building products empowers creators 
4. What happens when business models consume products, and how to resist that gravity 
5. How AI is accelerating Substack’s core bet: that authenticity will always outperform algorithms 
6. Why AI-generated content won’t replace human stories 
7. Why “all economics are downstream of culture”
8. Why Substack made subscribers portable and what that decision meant for trust
9. Why writers should see AI as an amplifier instead of a threat
10. The case for optimism: why artists, technologists, and media builders should embrace our emerging cultural renaissance.

Referenced in this episode:

• Brandon Sanderson’s record-breaking Kickstarter
• The Industrial Revolution
• India’s License Raj
• Avatar 2
• Reboot, the TV show
• Mechanic’s Institute
• Mesopotamia and the invention of the plow

Where to find Andrew Mayne:

• Website: andrewmayne.com
• X (Twitter): @AndrewMayne
• Interdimensional: interdimensional.ai

Where to find Chris Best:

• Substack: cb.substack.com
• X (Twitter): @cjgbest

Where to find The General Partnership:

• Website: thegp.com
• X (Twitter): @thegp
• Substack: thegeneralpartnership.substack.com 

Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO at Stripe) and Gretchen Howard (former COO at Robinhood) join The General Podcast for a rare, candid conversation about what it really means to operate at the highest levels inside two of the most ambitious fintech companies of the past decade. 

Both left safe jobs to take bets that looked “crazy” from the outside. Both joined hyper-growth startups without the COO title, built trust with founders in real time, and ended up shaping the companies from the inside out. In this episode, they dig into what the COO role actually is, how to avoid “organ rejection” when you’re the outsider, and why the people function is the most underrated lever for scaling. 

You’ll hear Claire and Gretchen swap notes on why the hardest problems are often unglamorous—compliance, self-clearing, comp plans—and why the real work is about earning trust, building velocity, and protecting the integrity of the company as it grows. 

In this conversation, you’ll learn: 

1. Why Claire and Gretchen said yes to Stripe and Robinhood when everyone around them said no
2. Their takes on founder chemistry and how to know if you can actually work with someone
3. How to walk into a COO role without blowing up the culture
4. What founders get wrong when hiring their first COO
5. How Stripe and Robinhood scaled the ‘unsexy’ parts of business
6. How to build systems without adding bureaucracy
7. How to use the people function as a strategic weapon
8. Being okay with not being liked as your leadership evolves 
9. Claire’s “full stack leader” framework
10. What great operators actually obsess over

Where to find Gretchen: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchenehoward

Where to find Claire: 

X: https://x.com/chughesjohnson

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-hughes-johnson-7058

Book: Scaling People

Where to find TheGP: 

X: @thegp
Newsletter: https://thegeneralpartnership.substack.com/

Dan Shipper is the co-founder and CEO of Every, a media company built around writing, software, and AI. With a tiny team, they put out a daily newsletter, build products, and run a consulting arm, all while staying weird and experimental. Dan’s one of the most thoughtful writers on how AI is reshaping creativity, business, and what it means to build.

Alex Konrad is the founder of Upstarts, a newsletter about the next breakout companies before they break out. He spent over a decade at Forbes, where he wrote 15+ cover stories, co-created the Cloud 100 list, and led Midas List coverage of the top VCs in the world.

Together, they discuss and debate building sustainable media businesses today, using AI to amplify creativity, and why legacy playbooks no longer apply.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:
1. Why being weird is often a competitive advantage
2. How thinking like a product person (and not just a writer) shapes everything they publish
3. The surprisingly tactical ways they protect time for original thinking
4. Why Upstarts and Every both resisted the pressure to “build the platform” too soon
5. How Every runs multiple AI products and a daily newsletter with only 15 people
6. Why they both believe your business model is a creative decision
7. Their thinking around independent journalism as a “tech-enabled service,” not content
8. How AI tools like Claude, Cora, and ChatGPT actually fit into their creative process
9. How to avoid burnout when your business is also your identity
10. How to stay joyful and experimental when everyone else is optimizing

Where to find Dan:
Newsletter: every.to
X: @danshipper

Where to find Alex:
Newsletter: https://www.upstartsmedia.com
X: @alexrkonrad

Where to find TheGP:
Newsletter:  https://thegeneralpartnership.substack.com/
X: @thegp

Referenced in this episode:

• MrBeast: https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast
• The Pragmatic Engineer: https://www.pragmaticengineer.com
• Stratechery by Ben Thompson: https://stratechery.com/
• Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/
• Tom Brady quote: “Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners.”
• Acquired Podcast: https://www.acquired.fm/
• Claude: https://claude.ai
• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com 
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The writer Maggie Nelson
• Spiral by Every: https://spiral.computer
• Cora by Every: https://cora.computer
• Think Week (Bill Gates’s famous retreat)
• Documentary: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn 

Christina Farr, longtime healthtech journalist and now advisor, investor, and editor-in-chief of Second Opinion Media, sits down with Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of "The Emperor of All Maladies," oncologist, and founder of Manas AI.

In this expansive conversation, they explore the current and future role of AI in medicine. Sid offers a typology for how LLMs are showing up in clinical practice and scientific discovery, while Chrissy pushes on what AI can’t yet replicate: intuition, empathy and institutional memory. They discuss whether AI will replace the “intelligentsia,” what it gets right and wrong about diagnostics and drug discovery, and how clinicians can stay relevant by staying creative. This is a thoughtful, urgent discussion between two people who are both deeply familiar with the systems of medicine.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:
1. A six-part framework for how AI is transforming healthcare and science
2. How ambient scribes, LLMs, and generative chemistry are reshaping workflows
3. The difference between simulated empathy and real human care
4. What LLMs still miss: texture, taste, and tacit knowledge
5. How AI might (or might not) generate revolutionary scientific insights
6. Why the future belongs to clinicians who generate new knowledge, not just apply it

Where to find Chrissy:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinafarr/
X: https://x.com/chrissyfar
Substack: https://secondopinion.media/

Where to find Sid:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddhartha-mukherjee-19b6b8126/
The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/siddhartha-mukherjee
Books: The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, The Song of the Cell

Where to find TheGP: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-general-partnership
• X: https://x.com/thegp
• Substack: https://thegeneralpartnership.substack.com/

Referenced in this episode:
• Manas AI: https://www.manasai.co
• Richard Feynman’s “Cargo Cult Science” lecture: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
• Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary-ebook/dp/B007USH7J2/
• Karl Popper’s theory of falsifiability: https://www.simplypsychology.org/karl-popper.html
• Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Median Isn’t the Message”: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/median-isnt-message/2013-01
• David Fajgenbaum’s Chasing My Cure: https://chasingmycure.com/