Cerebro is how 776 works

For about five years, the entire public presence of Cerebro was a login box and one sentence: “Access is by invite only.” That is it. If you were a founder we had invested in, or an LP, or an engineer we were trying to hire, and you typed cerebro.ai into a browser because someone had mentioned it, you learned nothing.

That was fine, because Cerebro is not a product we sell. It is 776’s internal system, built for our firm and shared with the founders we back as part of the relationship. We do not need a marketing site for a tool we already use together.

But people started asking. Founders wanted to share it with their teams. Alexis wanted something to link to. Engineers we were talking to wanted to know what they would actually be working on, and “it’s a CRM” is both true and useless. A login page is a bad answer to a real question. We built this site because we like to build in public, share what we are learning, and learn from other people building too.

Alexis put it plainly in the video announcing it:

I wanted 776 to be the first software company that deploys venture capital, and it feels like we’re finally getting close to living that with Cerebro.

What it actually is

Cerebro is the operating system 776 runs on. It covers the whole lifecycle, which in venture means sourcing, diligence, the decision, the introductions, portfolio operations after the check clears, and the fund accounting underneath all of it. The parts people usually picture as separate tools are one system here, which is the entire point: the meeting note you write on Tuesday is what makes the relationship graph work on Friday.

It has been in production since 2020, and it is far more than a CRM. A native mobile app, a Slack agent, and an MCP server all read the same data: years of meeting notes, ratings, transcriptions, and the history of the firm and its portfolio.

I am Cerebro’s sole full-time engineer, building the backend, frontend, mobile app, and agent layer. Alexis Ohanian, who designed Cerebro when he founded 776, uses its AI tooling — Claude Code and the Cerebro MCP — to build the tools he needs to be a more efficient investor. That is most of what I expect to write about here.

What this blog is

Expect roughly weekly posts about what shipped in Cerebro and how it got built: the bug that took a day, the approach that failed, the thing I was wrong about. The useful parts, not a version changelog.

Every post carries a badge showing how much AI went into the writing. This one is “AI-assisted”: I directed and edited it, a model drafted it. On a site about building with AI, hiding that would be strange. More soon.