The General Podcast

Brian Lovin (Notion) x Joey Flynn (OpenAI) on the myth of the design founder

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

Anna Binder (Asana) x Erica Galos Alioto (Retool) on the Chief People Officer job

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://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 (Graphite) x Zach Lloyd (Warp) on building for engineers

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 (EA) x Stephen Piron (Pickford) on reinventing storytelling

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 [https://x.com/bingfish] Where to find Stephen Piron:  * Pickford: pickford.ai Where to find The General Partnership: * Website: thegp.com * X (Twitter): @thegp [https://twitter.com/thegp] * Substack: https://thegeneralpartnership.substack.com/

Chris Best (Substack) x Andrew Mayne (OpenAI) on the economics of culture

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 [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson] * The Industrial Revolution [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution] * India’s License Raj [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj] * Avatar 2 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Way_of_Water] * Reboot [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBoot], the TV show * Mechanic’s Institute [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanics%27_institute] * Mesopotamia and the invention of the plow [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough] Where to find Andrew Mayne: * Website: andrewmayne.com [http://andrewmayne.com] * X (Twitter): @AndrewMayne [https://twitter.com/andrewmayne] * Interdimensional: interdimensional.ai [http://interdimensional.ai] Where to find Chris Best: * Substack: cb.substack.com * X (Twitter): @cjgbest [https://twitter.com/cjgbest] Where to find The General Partnership: * Website: thegp.com * X (Twitter): @thegp [https://twitter.com/thegp] * Substack: thegeneralpartnership.substack.com