Members of Technical Staff
Members of Technical Staff

<p>Welcome to Members of Technical Staff: week-after-week of prestige narration from the hotbed of San Francisco tech culture. Featuring founders, funders, and fanatics, join Jayden (@creatine_cycle) and friends as they chronicle the culture, scandal, and humourlessness of the most important city of the 21st century.</p>

I booked a $1k-a-night hotel room and, instead of feeling the touch of a woman, I decided to talk to myself on camera for nearly 40 minutes. Anyway, the San Francisco social scene. Is X the key to the city? Is it worth going to networking events? Are Partiful or Luma events better? Should we take a page out of the gay playbook? I cover all of this and much more so you, too, can make some friends in the centre of the universe.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
So it really is a new year, new me, because I made The New York Times for my commentary on unregulated Chinese peptides. My dear friend Sina joins me to break down the article and give serious, nuanced takes on peptides and wellness risk profiles. We also touch on the Nicholas Maduro kidnapping and how we each monitored the situation. MOTS will always be here in the event of emergencies, because the timeline never sleeps.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
The world needed another podcast of two single straight dudes giving predictions for 2026, so don’t ask and you shall receive. @mattyp and I covered four key topics with our predictions: San Francisco culture, San Francisco as a city, technology, and finally some wild cards. Will San Francisco’s party resurgence continue, and will we keep giving LLMs so much context that they have to start going to therapy? We cover all of this and much more.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
Looksmaxxing is on the cards for 2026, and that’s something I know a thing or two about. I decided to take on Clavicular at his own game and mog him. I also dropped some caution around Chinese peptides before breaking down different gyms in SF and giving my final recommendation. This emergency pod has you covered for looksmaxxing in San Francisco in 2026.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
The X timeline giveth and the X timeline taketh away. From Chinese social media apps to accounts becoming the main character for weeks, the 2025 timeline had it all. Valentina joins me to break down the current thing for each month of 2025. Don’t want to spend 16 hours a day on your phone keeping up with what’s happening? This is the perfect episode for you, because I do and I am well-researched. Happy New Year, everyone.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
It's Christmas time and everyone is scrambling to book meetings, close rounds, and decide whether to see their family or go skiing. However, one important thing must be discussed before all the technology brothers take off for the holidays: what the hell do we even get them for Christmas? Valentina joins me to break all of this down, and we do a little bit of shopping with our AI overlords, and it turns out the AI likes technology.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
Woke is back! Was Cline's Head of AI being fired due to VC pressure or a severe miscalculation? I have no idea, but my unemployed ass would never let a good crisis go to waste. In this episode I cover the initial Twitter comment that drew criticism, the reactions, the fallout from the apology, and some classic startup comms slop.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
It's the quarterly startup equivalent of the NBA draft, and I was lucky enough to be let in as neither a founder nor an investor. YC Demo Day F25 has come to a close, and I sat down once again with my friend Justin (@sporadica) to recap it all and talk about YC's impact on the niche San Francisco technology culture. I also caused a bit of a ruckus at Demo Day itself, and you can hear from some of the founders and faces I ran into throughout the day.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
Keller joined me on the day his company, Zipline, announced their $150 million contract with the US State Department, which will include $400 million in co-commitments from their African partner governments. Rather than focus on the announcement, I grilled him on his career as a professional rock climber, and he even took me, a gym bro, climbing.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
Theo joined me to cover one of the greatest dunks and most brutal ratios X dot com has ever seen at the expense of yours truly. We talked about how a post of Theo's dunking on me took over the app for a day out of nowhere and how this roasting will actually be beneficial for my career. We also discussed viral slop content marketing and the strange things companies are doing to try and stand out.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
It's raising season, and you know what that means. Young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed startup founders have flocked to San Francisco for introductions. We cover how to appropriately go about getting introductions, Partiful vs Luma events, Twitter vs LinkedIn, and much more. I also caught up with Paige Finn Doherty, Founding Partner of Behind Genius Ventures and author of the children's book "From Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital," to talk about her time getting intros and raising money.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
I was lucky enough to sit down with Madison Kanna the day after "The 7 Girls of SF" Thanksgiving party where I was even luckier to be invited as the token straight male. We covered all things vibes, attendance, the timeline and my sexuality. Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
The pre-seed, pre-product-market-fit founders in SF deserve love too. We break down why they may or may not be hard to date and talk about the quirks of founder dating in San Francisco specifically. We cover splitting the bill, fly-out culture, and dating post-exit. I also caught up with Adam Tazi, also known as @personofswag on X dot com and founder of Trufflepig, to talk about his success dating as a founder.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
Not many people know this, but some of the most influential figures in technology today are or once were anonymous Twitter accounts. This conversation explores their rise and the different cultural movements that emerged from them. We covered Roon’s wordcel vs. shape rotator, effective accelerationism vs. effective altruism, as well as an entire separate social media app once dedicated to anonymous posting. I also caught up with my friend Justin, better known as Spor online, to get his thoughts on where anonymous accounts go from here.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
We threw an absolute rager in San Francisco and it was actually good! This conversation covers how we did it, the ratio, the costumes, the lack of networking, whether people wore their shoes or not and what to think about when trying to throw a great party in SF. I also caught up with Miranda Nover, Founder of Fort and Valentina Escudero from a beloved MAG 7 before the party started to talk all things Girlie Halloween.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Lighthouse makes U.S. work and green-card visas easy for technical talent and fast-growing teams. From free evaluation to streamlined onboarding, personalized support and full document prep they get your top engineers, researchers and founders through the visa journey in weeks not months. Trusted by startup builders who don’t want immigration to be a blocker.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
It’s almost Halloween, so we dressed up as disgraced founders and covered the dead companies and fads of Silicon Valley. This conversation takes a trip down memory lane, starting with the dot-com bubble, moving through the 2010s, the ZIRP era, and crypto, before finishing with a few recent casualties of the current AI hype cycle. I also catch up with my good friend and OpenAI researcher Will Depue, where we talk all things ghosts, his twinkness, traveling, and short-form content.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Trufflepig is the AI-native spreadsheet software that allows you to work at the speed of thought and they’re hiring. Join a fast-growing AI startup building something that people will actually use.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
I managed to catch Extropic founder and CEO Guillaume Verdon on launch day for their new thermodynamic computing hardware. We cover all things from benchmarks to bench press and we gain an insight into how the open source community will get to experiment with this new computing paradigm.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
In San Francisco you are lauded and in New York City you are exiled. This conversation covers being unemployed in the big cities, the different labels the unemployed give themselves for status, and we discuss what it's like to see the unemployed talk to the rich on an app where your username is your net worth with Andi Duro, founder of Twocent.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
The Soylent and Huel meal replacement shakes have been replaced with Fairlifes and energy drinks in FAANG refrigerators and squat racks are being put in pre-seed startup offices. This conversation covers the new found trend of lifting in tech, the different lifting archetypes in tech, and we discuss what it's like to be a guy with big arms at San Francisco parties with Matt Palmer, Devrel at Replit.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.Morph is the better way to apply AI code edits. Merge LLM changes into your code and files - at 10,500+ tokens per second. 98% accurate + 2x faster than search-and-replace.
The AI hype cycle is in full swing and now agentic workflows are all the rage. From prompt engineering to asking for AGI timelines on dates. This conversation covers the AI hype cycle buzz terms up until this point, what agentic workflows even mean or do, and we discuss how startups are positioning themselves this cycle with Inference founder, Sam Hogan.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.
Those in Silicon Valley have adopted 996 and you know this because they will simply tell you about it online. From pictures of girlfriends being fired to pictures of laptops are open at the bar. This conversation covers the adoption of 996 in tech, the rise of striver culture online, and we discuss when the 996 schedule will hit the VC class with Turner Novak.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.
Those in Silicon Valley now want to be hot and are willing to cut all kinds of corners in order to get there. This conversation covers the evolution of the modern day tech bro wellness stack, how unregulated peptides have become normal among the tech elite and how Max Marchione sees these trends evolving.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.
While tech-adjacent parties in San Francisco are home to the most powerful social circles on the planet they come with a few negative stereotypes. No shoes, no small talk and no women. This conversation covers the etymology of the San Francisco party and how girlies like Madison are trying to fix it.Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorInference trains and deploys custom language models for some of the fastest growing companies in history. If you're spending more than $50,000/month on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini, they can help you save money, improve quality, and ultimately make your business more efficient.