Team

Daniel
Portillo

COFOUNDER

From Mozilla to Greylock to the White House, Dan's thing is taking companies from 0-1.

Dan’s thing is taking companies from 0-1. For over 20 years, he’s helped companies, foundations, and government agencies build from the ground up. And it’s all predicated on a network-based approach. Dan’s built his career around connecting the dots between the right people and the right opportunities—it draws a faster path to success and drastically changes early outcomes.

Previous experience

Mozilla

Dan was an early employee at Mozilla, where he ran all recruiting and HR. While there, he helped create the teams that have developed fundamental technology for the internet

Greylock

As an Operating Partner at Greylock, Dan and his team’s mission was to help dozens of portfolio companies hire key employees, as well as build their recruiting functions. While there, he established Greylock’s Community Program which led to numerous investments. He also helped create companies by bringing founding teams together and recruiting Entrepreneurs in Residence.

United States Digital Service

Dan worked with former White House CTO Todd Park to support President Obama and bring exceptional technology leaders to Washington, D.C. Specifically, he helped build out the talent function for the United States Digital Service, which works to improve the digital services that millions of Americans rely on.

Highlights

Matching natural builders with amazing founders

No two companies are the same, and Dan excels at matching experienced builders directly with founders to address their most pressing company-building challenges. As a result, the companies that The General Partnership works with are able to ship products faster, build exception teams, and close enterprise-scale customers.

Connecting the dots between product, capital, and people.

Dan has figured out how to apply deep expertise and hands-on collaborative work with founders in order to build great teams, create products quickly, and go to market. He knows how to hire a team that carries a product forward, which consistently sets early-stage companies up for success in the long term.

Phin
Barnes

COFOUNDER

From the AND1 mixtape to First Round, Phin deeply understands value of creative confidence.

Phin looks at the job of investing as a craft composed of two parts—both interviewing and coaching. He’s built a career around his ability to maximize one-on-one time with founders in both pre-investment and post-investment settings, ultimately helping founders move closer to their north star by bringing out their best answers.

Previous experience

AND1

Phin spent six years building sneakers and helping to scale revenue as Creative Director for Footwear. His AND1 highlight reel includes countless hours getting product feedback at playgrounds and malls across the country, working in Asia to turn consumer insight into physical sneakers, time in the locker room at Madison Square Garden convincing Vince Carter to wear AND1 shoes in a dunk contest, and working with KG on his signature shoe. More tactically, Phin played a critical role in the initial concept for the AND1 Mixtape, which became a formative early experience in the value of creative confidence and the power and process of finding product-market fit.

First Round Capital

As a Partner at First Round, Phin defined venture capital as a product that founders buy with their equity. He turned that idea into a cultural mandate inside First Round’s decision-making processes, which led to partnerships with generational founders and inspired community programs like Angel Track and Dorm Room Fund.

For Phin, the moments he enjoys most as a builder are when he is able to bring out a founder’s best and the value of the partnership is recognized in thank-yous from entrepreneurs.

Highlights

Interviewing

Phin is an expert at bringing out a builder’s best in the interviewing process. This often means creating an environment that allows founders to get to the ground truth fast and clearly define their north star. He tries to help builders challenge their assumptions and begin to navigate some of the uncertainty that’s core to the company building process before it’s all too real.

Coaching

Through his gift for listening, Phin excels at helping founders find the answers to company-building challenges within themselves. He’s an expert at giving founders the space to think about the complexities of the problem they’re solving and the confidence to trust their instincts when it comes to solutions.

Megan
Zengerle

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

Megan’s career trademark is sitting at the operational intersection between strategy, systems, and people.

With a strategic focus on building companies and organizational success, Megan's career has centered on fostering growth in early-stage tech startups. By leading from the front, she has successfully navigated the complexities of formation and scaling businesses, ensuring a seamless synergy between strategy, systems, and people.

Previous experience

The consulting jumpstart

Early in her career, Megan founded a successful human resource and organizational development consulting business focused on VC-backed startups.

Scribd

Megan led People, Talent, and Business Operations in the early stages at Scribd, a subscription e-book and audio company. As the company scaled at breakneck speed, she built out its team and operations from the ground floor up.

CreativeLive

She joined CreativeLive as one of its first executives, working as its Chief People Officer and SVP of Business Operations for over eight years. Megan was involved in every hire at CreativeLive and worked with hundreds of employees, as well as thousands of industry instructors and experts during her time there. She also created a thriving work culture and ran a gold standard operation with a diverse team of creative professionals.

At the heart of Megan's work is a commitment to operational excellence that empowers stakeholders and lays the foundation for sustained innovation and market leadership.

Highlights

The art of organizational design

As a dynamic senior executive, Megan is passionate about building and managing businesses, developing high-performance teams, and addressing diverse challenges at scale.

Setting up the right systems

Megan has led business operations and human resources for both our portfolio companies and TheGP’s team. She excels at making sure that teams are positioned to do their best work with the right tools, context, and transparency that they need while running a world-class business.

Owning the entire lifecycle

Megan possesses extensive experience overseeing the entire lifecycle of businesses, from formation and investment to growth and exit, holding roles ranging from operational executive to investor and advisor.

Anthony
Kline

INVESTMENTS

As a Partner at TheGP, AK built his career attuning to market trends and individual stories.

Anthony (AK) believes the best outcomes are achieved by outliers in your network. As a Partner at TheGP, he's built his career attuning to market trends and individual stories to orchestrate how people and investments work together.

Previous experience

The recruiting jumpstart

AK graduated during the financial crisis and witnessed offers in corporate development evaporate overnight. He fell into a talent acquisition role at Riviera Partners, a boutique search firm in San Francisco that supported venture capital firms in scaling out their recent investments. Everything happens for a reason. AK’s first projects included scaling the core engineering and product teams of the first-generation web 2.0 companies: Cloudera, Zendesk, SumoLogic, Groupon, AngelList, and AppDirect.

AppDirect

After three years supporting various founders as an early member of Riviera Partners, he realized his future was as an operator at a high-growth company. He joined AppDirect as their Head of Talent and helped them scale from a few dozen people in SF to 600+ employees globally.

Stripe

In 2015, Sequoia Capital approached AK about a role at one of their latest investments, Stripe. The young payments startup was on the verge of tremendous growth and seeking someone to support its founders and executive team in scaling out their respective orgs. Over the next three years, he scaled the leadership teams across engineering, product, partnerships, finance, and legal. He later worked to scale the M&A process before he was recruited to join the founding team at Sweat Equity Ventures.

For AK, the most satisfying part of building is seeing the pieces come together.

Highlights

Building meaningful connections

AK maintains his extensive network of excellent builders to uncover new investment opportunities and support TheGP's founders in achieving their goals. He believes that identifying the right people for the right opportunity is one of the most valuable things we can do for the companies and people we support.

Incubating ideas

It all starts with an inspired, spontaneous idea! AK helped incubate Sardine and Garage at TheGP, as well as several other investments. Staying up on trends, investing time with those transitioning from employee to founder, and being in a prepared state to invest has the potential to define the future of the portfolio.

Bridging talent

The main goal is not to complicate the already difficult life of our founders. AK has figured out how to accelerate progress across multiple vectors from over a decade of operating experience.

Bret
Reckard

TALENT

Bret leads Talent at TheGP, where he helps founders turn potential into cohesive teams.

Bret leads Talent at TheGP, where he helps founders turn potential into cohesive teams. He’s spent two decades building high-functioning orgs from scratch, both as an operator and within VC. He's worked hands-on with founders at companies like Stripe, Confluent, Retool, and DoorDash to establish core talent processes from scratch. Before TheGP, he ran early-stage Talent at Sequoia Capital and helped build the core team at Mozilla (employee #35). He's especially proud to have played a part in constructing the early RUST team.

Portfolio companies

Previous experience

Firsthand lessons from the open web.

At Mozilla, Bret joined when Firefox had 35 people and a mission to make the internet better. That experience taught him that great teams form when people care deeply about the mission and each other, a principle he still brings to every company he supports.

Track record of early-stage scale.

At Sequoia, Bret helped companies like Stripe, Retool and DoorDash grow their early teams. He’s worked across engineering and leadership, helping place the critical first hires that become core culture carriers and future leaders.

Deep in the work.

Bret doesn’t just advise on org design, but builds them from zero. From scoping roles to refining messaging and coaching teams to making the final close, he’s in the loop with founders every step of the way. His goal is to make hiring a structured, repeatable, founder-led advantage.

Highlights

Serendipity meets precision.

Bret has spent 20 years building deep, trusted relationships across technical and startup networks. He’s known for making connections across networks that allow serendipity to happen. More good people knowing each other is good for the world, and Bret loves playing matchmaker for roles, interests and funding.

Passion-first talent evaluation.

Whether someone’s obsessed with infrastructure or Pokémon cards, Bret looks for people who go deep on things they care about. He believes that the depth of just about any passion is often the best predictor of early-stage impact.

Honest feedback for fast cycles.

One of Bret’s most valued tools is candor. He gives clear, kind feedback to founders and candidates alike, and believes most hiring failures come from a lack of shared clarity up front, not with the fabled "top of funnel". His goal is to help teams avoid wasted cycles and move faster with confidence.

Dan
Pupius

Chief Technology Officer

As CTO at TheGP, Dan brings clarity to complex products, codebases, and organizations.

Dan is an experienced engineering leader who has built and led high-performing teams at Google, Medium, and multiple startups, combining strong technical foundations with a focus on organizational health and execution.

Portfolio companies

Previous experience

Google

Dan joined Google shortly after Gmail launched and helped rebuild the product as it began its path to more than one billion users.

Medium

As Head of Engineering at Medium, Dan helped grow the publishing platform to more than 60 million monthly readers.

Range and fractional CTO work

Dan founded Range, where he built collaboration tools that helped hundreds of teams become more productive and connected. He later served as a fractional CTO to startups across healthtech, fintech, government, and developer tools, including TheGP's portfolio company Graphite, which was acquired by Cursor. Across both roles, he helped founders navigate product definition, technical architecture, hiring, and the evolution of their engineering organizations.

Highlights

Systems & clarity

Dan brings structure to chaos. He can take a messy product, codebase, or organization and quickly surface what matters, what to fix, what to ignore, and how to build momentum again. He designs systems (technical and human) that scale without slowing teams down.

Builder-coach

Dan operates comfortably between writing code and shaping culture. He's helped founders turn vague ideas into shippable products, while mentoring early engineers and establishing healthy engineering practices that stick as the company grows.

Strategy & execution

Dan's superpower is bridging vision and execution. He translates big strategic goals into pragmatic, testable steps to help teams ship faster, learn sooner, and build confidence in their direction.

Rifki
Zable

Chief Financial Officer

Rifki brings over a dozen years of experience in fund finance and operations.

Rifki brings a dozen years of experience in fund finance and operations. She likes putting order into the chaos and sees each new fundraise at TheGP as an opportunity and challenge for the finance and ops teams to do exceptional work.

Highlights

Organization first

Rifki enjoys being organized, both in terms of projects and also in thinking about data. She's a checklist-and-spreadsheet kind of person.

Thrives in the details

Rifki likes being able to dig down into the numbers to understand what could be most useful for our limited partners and team.

Curious always

Rifki's capacity to listen and understand the "why?" ultimately helps us all understand stakeholder needs and better problem solve.

Alec
Flett

ENGINEERING

He built Google's Knowledge Graph, and likes to bridge the gap between how people and computers think.

Alec built his entire career around mapping the messy, real, and human world into software. He’s fascinated by the contrast between how people think about the world and the way that computers try to model it.

Portfolio companies

Previous experience

Metaweb

As an Architect at Metaweb,Alec helped build a graph-based query language and then a dynamic, introspective UI on top of it. That’s where he got hooked on using data to create user-friendly interfaces.

Google

Alec’s work at Metaweb was eventually rolled into Google, where it lives on today in the Google Knowledge Graph. While there, Alec eventually ended up on the Google Consumer Surveys team, where he was again taking structured data and creating accessible visualizations for large sets of users.

UrbanFootprint

Alec joined UrbanFootprint, an urban planning startup, as the Founding Lead Engineer, where his focus was on front-end development. During his time there, he built out a rich geospatial application to help users figure out how to adapt cities for growth.

For Alec, the work he enjoys most as a builder is when he gets to take on the challenge of implementing a user interface that matches a person’s mental model, rather than just reflecting backend infrastructure.

Highlights

Making raw technology more human

Our human mental model of the world is structured differently than the way computers represent it, so Alec likes to work through all the weird, anomalous, and real-world ways humans think when he’s building software.

Giving founders hope that hard things can be done

When Alec started working with our portfolio company, The Public Health Company, he built a lightweight platform that could track patients and their relationships and spread of disease. It helped the company narrow down what their product was going to be (and not be) since they were able to quickly experiment with a lightweight app.

Navigating new product areas

Alec has dug into several different industries at TheGP, where he likes to learn the “weird things he should worry about” in each industry. Then, he figures out how to solve those problems through technical abstractions.

Allison
Light

GTM

As a marketing and brand leader, Allison is an expert at helping founders tell their stories to unlock

Allison believes in the adage that you can’t connect the dots going forward, having followed a winding path. All of her experiences have contributed to a feeling of being in the right place at the right time: helping venture-backed companies tell their stories.

Portfolio companies

Previous experience

A view from the epicenter of the Great Recession

Allison began her career on an asset-based securities trading desk at Goldman Sachs, having earned her securities licenses while still an undergraduate studying cultural anthropology. She cites this as the inception of a career-long love for economics, finance and fintech.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems in SEA

Following an urge to immerse herself in a new cultural context, Allison spent several years in Malaysia as a fellow at the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, reporting directly to the Country Advisor to the Prime Minister. Her focus was on understanding how entrepreneurial hot spots like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv form and designing initiatives that might kickstart activity in Kuala Lumpur.

Heading back West

With skills in production, writing, and strategy, Allison found her way back to the Bay Area and joined West Ventures, a creative agency built to work with venture-backed companies like Twitter, Impossible Foods, Prelude Fertility, Chegg, GetSetUp and Newfront Insurance. She then struck out solo and opened Lightweight, a consultancy for startups and venture funds, before joining TheGP.

Allison has a unique ability to recast a founder’s vision and read it back to them, making them feel seen. She lives for the moment when their eyes light up, and they say, Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to say!

Highlights

Framing and reframing

Allison helps founders examine their positioning from the outside—investors, buyers, potential hires, new audiences, and the culture more broadly.

Cultural consumption, turbo-mode

Mainlining podcasts at 3x speed, keeping up on internet culture, speed reading and even consuming stacks of print magazines across sectors and domains is instrumental to understanding and communicating on behalf of technical founders, making sure their message resonates.

Finding simplicity

Whether it's positioning, messaging, or visual language, Allison can cut to the core of what matters, arming teams with the cleanest possible language to make their story click.

Doing a lot with a little

Working with startups requires budgetary discipline and an investor mindset. Allison helps orchestrate in-market programs that move the needle efficiently to unlock nonlinear growth.

Ben
Cmejla

INVESTMENTS

As a Partner at TheGP, Ben’s mission is to help founders and companies from getting stuck in ruts.

Ben loves to discover how and why things work the way they do — whether he’s learning about a new startup, unpacking a complex market, or trying to fix his car’s A/C from YouTube videos. He brings this curiosity to his work everyday and is always on the lookout for opportunities to nudge forward the systems, incentives, and norms that drive how startups receive capital and support from their investors.

Previous experience

Asia Pacific Land

Ben started his career publishing research for the U.S. Congress and the National Science Foundation. Shortly after, he joined Hong Kong-based real estate private equity firm Asia Pacific Land. While there, he worked on investments across the region, including the $1.2B acquisition of Tokyo’s Shiba Park Building, at the time one of the largest single-asset transactions in Japan since the GFC.

First Round

As a VP at First Round, Ben built new approaches to discovering startups and cultivating investor communities. Equal parts builder, investor and team leader, he started and ran programs like Angel Track, Co-ops and First Round’s associates team, which led to over 20 new additions to the First Round community.

Ben’s mission is to help people, companies, and industries from getting stuck in ruts. The work he enjoys most is when he’s helping people or companies change course.

Highlights

Creating structure out of chaos

Ben loves to build the systems and scaffolding that unlock new ways for people to collaborate and bring their best work forward. This includes anything from creative fund frameworks to cohort-based programs for angel investors.

Taking baby steps

Ben brings patience, persistence, and a measurement attitude to anything he’s building. His biggest successes have involved many small steps over long periods of time.

Breanna
Manore

Operations

A true operator's operator. Breanna is a pro at making the puzzle pieces fit together at TheGP.

As someone who studies communication efficiency and its congruent relationship between company culture and outcomes, Breanna has always been fascinated by the operating side of businesses.

Previous experience

First Round

Breanna worked at First Round Capital for over 4 years. While there, her mission was to amplify other people’s strengths and help others succeed. While at First Round, Breanna learned the importance of culture as a key motivator for people to produce their best work.

For Breanna, the work that inspires her most is when she’s working on several different projects, meeting a variety of founders, and learning about new industries.

Highlights

Being hyper-organized

Breanna loved Tetris as a kid. That’s probably why she loves an organized calendar so much today. Breanna is an expert at making puzzle pieces fit together at TheGP—whether that’s organizing deal flow, a schedule, or an LP pipeline.

Embracing a fast pace

Breanna loves an “all hands on deck” mentality in a professional environment. When plans change unexpectedly, she embraces the challenge and makes sure the team adapts accordingly. If startups were a theater, she thinks she would be a part of the technical crew, always making sure the show goes on and runs smoothly.

Danny
Oliveri

GTM

Danny teaches founders “how to fish."

Danny brings over 20 years of sales and sales management experience, specializing in driving early-stage companies through periods of hyper-growth.

Portfolio companies

Previous experience

Oracle

Danny joined The General Partnership from Oracle, where he most recently led the North America sales team for monetization solutions.

SilverTail Systems

Danny drove global sales at SilverTalk Systems, and his team delivered more than 10X annual sales growth year-over-year, establishing the company as the leading provider of predictive analytics for Internet fraud detection and prevention.

The acquisitions

Danny has held sales management positions for companies through six acquisitions, where he put products on the map by assisting organizations as they scaled their go-to-market efforts.

For Danny, the work he enjoys doing most is when he’s teaching founders “how to fish.” This means rolling up his sleeves when it comes to sales methodology and showing founders how to run their company from start to finish.

Highlights

The GTM education

At TheGP, Danny advises on go-to-market and gives founders the best education when it comes to the art and science of GTM strategies. His specialty is helping founders actually move the needle in terms of revenue, product-market-fit, structuring deals, and negotiating terms.

Teaching founders how to overcome the impossible

Startups usually fail, but Danny helps founders take accountability for the growth of their company. Danny excels at coaching startup founders to act in ways that drive successful conversations, make deals count, elongate their shelf life as leaders, and retain control over their business.

David
Watson

ENGINEERING

David is a master generalist who joined Google before it was household name.

David is a big systems thinker dedicated to high-potential products that touch real lives.

Portfolio companies

Previous experience

Google

David joined Google before it was a household name. He worked with the company during its hyper-growth stage, where it went from about 50 to 10,000 people. While at Google, he developed for core Search and led the creation of enterprise hardware solutions.

Autonomous vehicles

At Voyage, David worked on building robo-taxis for seniors. During his time at Aurora, he worked to commercialize self-driving vehicles. As Chief Architect at Embark, he wrote robotics software, designed safety-critical architecture, and led complex multi-team integrations in order to put self-driving trucks on interstate highways.

For David, the work he enjoys most as a builder is when he can quickly get his head in the game, and then do whatever it takes to breathe life into a product.

Highlights

Mastering new product domains

David is intrinsically motivated by things that are new to him—he works best when he’s diving into unfamiliar industries and getting in over his head. For him, that’s where maximum growth comes from—the thrill of pulling it off in new territory.

Understanding the problem

David’s consistent approach is to roll up his sleeves in order to figure out the problem that needs solving. His specialty is architecting products, engineering cultures, and processes, but he can handle anything that’s thrown at him—both on the technical side and the leadership side of startups.

Doug
Hanna

GTM

Doug is an entrepreneurial revenue executive who thrives in settings where he can connect the dots

Doug is an entrepreneurial revenue executive who thrives in settings where he can connect the dots between different parts of the company. How does pre-sales best work with post-sales? How does goal setting affect the company’s operational cadence? These questions are important to get right as a company scales.

Portfolio companies

Highlights

Navigating GTM inflection points

Companies hit many inflection points as they grow (multi-product, international, moving upmarket, accelerating PLG, etc.) and Doug loves helping founders and teams navigate them with (relative) ease.

Building GTM teams

Doug has built GTM teams across multiple companies at multiple stages of growth and is happy to share learnings and experiences with founders as they work to do the same. And don’t hesitate to ask him to interview someone.

Figuring out the now, next, and later

Doug enjoys partnering with founders to determine what they need to solve now, what can wait a few months, and what they have to start working on now so that it will fall into place later. This framework applies across stages.

Graham
Carney

INVESTMENTS

Graham excels at identifying and guiding outlier founders at the earliest stages of their startup journey

As an investor at TheGP, Graham is focused on enterprise software from seed to growth.

Previous experience

Dataminr

Graham was an early employee at Dataminr, joining the company when it was a few dozen people. Working out of the company’s first office, a defunct modeling agency in NYC, he played a pivotal role in scaling the operations and turning early-stage ideas into a market-ready product. It was here that Graham developed a deep appreciation for the unique challenges faced by founders building something from the ground up.

GGV Capital

As a multi-stage VC investor at GGV Capital, Graham spent four years identifying and backing high-potential enterprise software companies from seed through growth. He quickly learned the value of identifying promising potential founders from the inception stage and supporting them through various growth stages, from early product-market fit to scaling into industry leaders. Graham built meaningful relationships with founders, helping them navigate critical inflection points and accelerate their growth.

Highlights

Discovering outlier founders early

Graham excels at identifying and guiding outlier founders very early in their startup journeys, often years before they have left their previous roles. He meets people where they are by pressure testing ideas, demystifying VC for prospective founders, and making helpful introductions along the way.

Servant leadership

Graham believes that experienced builders should play a central role in startup investing, which inspired him to create Angel Circle, a program where he teaches operators from top companies like Figma, Robinhood, and Pinterest how to leverage their networks and domain expertise to identify, diligence, and invest in early-stage startups.