AI Founder Knowledge Base
Compiled: 2026-05-24
Goal: A queryable, indexable knowledge base of founder-tier content for AI startup builders.
Scale
- Learnings: 372 entries (117 people / 108 companies / 106 interview sources)
- Strategy 166 · Product 84 · Engineering & Mgmt 70 · Hiring 40 · Fundraising 12
- Western 257 · Chinese-speaking 115
- Cross-cutting patterns: 15 recurring insights
- Framework documents: 19 canonical playbooks (including the Anthropic Founder Playbook)
- Source subscriptions: 101 podcasts/newsletters/blogs that consistently produce founder-tier content
- Sequoia YouTube channel: 159 video metadata records (66 with full transcripts)
- Raw transcripts: 1,600+ full episode transcripts across 20VC, Dwarkesh, Latent Space, Acquired, Cheeky Pint, Cognitive Revolution, Lenny's, and Sequoia.
---
How to Use This Knowledge Base
Install as a Claude Code plugin (recommended for teams)
/plugin marketplace add Memories-ai-labs/ai-founder-kb
/plugin install ai-founder-kb@memories-ai-labsThen ask Claude anything — /kb, /kb-person <name>, /kb-source <podcast>, or just plain English. See INSTALL.md.
Other access patterns
Everything is Markdown. You can also:
1. Grep it directly: grep -r "hiring" . to find anything about hiring 2. Import to Notion: Drop the folder into Notion — it becomes a page tree automatically 3. Read by hand: Start from the index below
See HOW-TO-USE.md for details.
---
Core Index (by purpose)
🌟 If you have limited time
Start here:
- Patterns (patterns/) — 15 cross-cutting insights that recur across many sources; the highest-density content
📚 Deep read by topic
- Strategy — 166 entries
- Product — 84 entries
- Engineering & Management — 70 entries
- Hiring — 40 entries
- Fundraising — 12 entries
👤 By person
- by-person/ — one file per founder; all of their learning points
🏢 By company
- by-company/ — one file per company
🎙 By interview source
- by-source/ — one file per podcast / publication
📖 Canonical framework documents
- frameworks/ — 20 must-read playbook documents
- Top: Anthropic Founder Playbook (released 2026-05)
📡 Source subscription catalog
- sources-catalog/ — 100+ sources that consistently produce founder-tier content
🎬 Sequoia YouTube channel full catalog
- sequoia-channel/ — 159 video metadata records + 33 transcript paths
---
Suggested First Reads
Top 5 cross-cutting patterns
- #01 — The Middle Layer Gets Eaten
- #02 — Anti-Scaling: Fewer People + AI Agents
- #03 — Hidden Internal Capabilities = Failure Mode
- #04 — Anthropic's 9 Consumer Verticals Are Left for Founders / 4 Enterprise Verticals Anthropic Keeps
- #05 — Asymmetric Competition / Stay Out of Big Tech's Range
Top 5 founder profiles
- Dario Amodei (Anthropic) — Dwarkesh 2026-02 deep interview
- Ji Yichao (Manus) — BAAI + Zhang Xiaojun EP128
- Ivan Zhao (Notion) — Sequoia "Refounder" 63 min
- Jack Dorsey (Block) — Sequoia 3-role org / 40% layoff
- Wang Tao (DJI) — Huxiu, first interview in 10 years
Top 3 framework documents
- Anthropic Founder Playbook — released 2026-05, most recent
- Building Effective Agents — Anthropic 2024-12
- Bessemer State of AI 2025 — benchmark report
---
🎙 20VC Podcast — Full Archive (added 2026-05-24)
- raw-transcripts/20vc-podcast/ — 869 episodes of 20VC with full transcripts + structured summaries
- 881 raw transcripts (
transcripts/*.txt) - 879 per-episode summary JSONs (
summaries/*.json) guests.json+index.jsonwith guest / company / topics / key_insights metadata- Categories: SaaS (172), Enterprise (130), AI/ML (117), Consumer (96), Fintech (68), and more
---
Generated 2026-05-24.
