Alexis Ohanian introduces Cerebro Alexis Ohanian cerebro 776
Alexis founded 776 to be the first software company that deploys venture capital. In
this video, he introduces Cerebro, the software we built to make that real.
Alexis Ohanian on Cerebro. The transcript follows along; click any line to jump.
Transcript
0:00 All right, this has been a long time coming. I had Asif, who's head of engineering here at 776, build tldr.Cerebro.ai, which is going to be running a log of all the things that we're building here. 0:14 Cerebro started out as an operating system. I obviously designed it when I started 776 six years ago, and now I actually only find myself interfacing with the UI, UX, who I painstakingly thought about for half a decade. 0:28 I only interact with it maybe an hour a day because we've built so many tools on top of the Cerebro MCP. 0:35 So this is where things have gotten really fun, and I want to do a better job articulating what we've built, how we've built it. 0:41 The fact that we have six years worth of data in here, it's not just a CRM with almost 100,000 contacts. 0:48 It's every meeting note. It's every rating of every company we've funded, every pitch we've ever taken, meeting notes, transcriptions, just tons and tons and tons of data on the life of the firm and our portfolio. 0:59 And now we can pull data from it. We can push data into it. You can ask questions like, give me background on this company. 1:07 I do most of the work through Claude Code. Disclosure, we are on the cap table of Anthropic, but you can use whatever you want to use. 1:15 It's been great having this AI chief of staff that prepares me every morning for all the meetings that I have and has all the context of everything. 1:24 Every email I've ever sent with them, every meeting note anyone at our firm has logged, the entire history of the company. It's just very powerful. 1:30 As well as more subtle clues about where the strength of the relationship is because we've found different ways over the years to try to rate this. 1:41 Historically, we've done a one-to-five rating after every meeting with a person just to sort of grade the strength of the relationship. 1:47 Like five being, hey, it's really warm. They're our bestie. Or one is like, hey, that was a really hard call and they're not going to want to do us a favor anytime soon. 1:55 But now we have a lot more context because Cerebro can read all these emails, can read all these notes, and just have a much better sense in addition to what we think. 2:04 And then also call us out. One of the most helpful features I've built is Cerebro gives me feedback on every meeting that I take about things that I could have done differently. 2:13 Whether that's a pitch meeting where obviously it matters to get that feedback, a sales meeting for one of our portfolio companies or incubations, or even just a team meeting. 2:22 It helps. Iron sharpens iron. 2:26 Also, yeah, just easily capturing notes for important context and spur the moment. Just being able to talk into the Cerebro app on our phone. 2:36 Fun fact, we actually shifted it over to TestFlight because we use it entirely for our team and then for our founders. 2:41 We don't need to have it really be publicly easily accessible. 2:44 And it's been great to have it on TestFlight because we don't need to wait for Apple to get approvals. 2:48 And it just makes us ship so much faster. 2:50 And now I'm shipping code literally every day. It has been a lot of fun joining Asif in shipping software, and it feels good to be back doing it basically since December. 2:59 And just lots of insights where you could at two in the morning query something, get a report that otherwise I would have waited to actually get a human to wake up and go do it with all the other prioritizations I have. 3:10 It takes time, and now it happens instantly. 3:13 Anyway, this is going to be a running list. 3:15 One of the big problems historically of doing live videos of actually walking through Cerebro is the fact that the software changed so often, and now it's changing even faster and more often. 3:26 So it would be out of date real quick. 3:28 So instead, I'm just putting this together. 3:30 This is going to be a living website where we'll just start posting and sharing all the updates and products that we're building on top of it. 3:36 Just fun stuff going on here as we build 776 into being what I really believe is the first software company that deploys venture capital. 3:43 And thanks for joining along.
Something I’ve been building quietly for six years and obsessively for the last
eight months. I wanted 776 to be the first software company that deploys venture
capital, and it feels like we’re finally getting close to really living that with
Cerebro.
Read Cerebro is how 776 works for my account of
what Cerebro is, how we built it, and where it goes next.
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