Welcome Dan Pupius to TheGP

At TheGP, we believe the next decade of breakout companies will be built by engineering teams that look very different from the engineering teams of the last decade. The next wave of great startups won’t rely on massive engineering orgs, but on small, sharp teams that have the right people around the table at the right moment. That’s why we’re excited to welcome Dan Pupius to our engineering bench.

Dan has spent his career building products from zero to one. At Google, he helped rebuild Gmail just a year after launch and supported its path to more than a billion users. At Medium, he was Head of Engineering and helped grow the platform to 60M+ monthly readers. He then founded Range, where his collaboration tools helped hundreds of teams be more productive and connected. 

Over the last few years, Dan served as a fractional CTO across startups in healthtech, fintech, government, and dev tools, including working with our portfolio company Graphite. Across those projects, the same pattern kept showing up: founders don’t have months to hire and they don’t need a huge team in the early stages anymore. Instead, they need experienced engineers who can plug in immediately to set direction and build systems that give the whole team more leverage. Dan’s approach—zero-to-one building that unlocks 3-5x team output while helping founders adopt new capabilities—maps directly to what so many early-stage companies need right now. 0

At TheGP, Dan will partner directly with founders on early technical decisions, AI-native development practices, and the processes that compound as companies scale. He’ll also help us keep evolving our engineering model so portfolio companies can stay focused and bring in high-impact builders only when they need them most.

Dan likes to say he earned a bachelor’s degree in AI 25 years ago and is “finally able to work in AI.” But in practice, that means he brings both the foundations and the curiosity to go deep on the AI-native engineering patterns teams need today. 

Founders often tell us that having an embedded senior engineering partner helps them avoid early technical debt, make the right architectural calls, and simply get more done without sacrificing quality. We’re excited to have Dan on board to help us deliver that work.