Meet Dan Pupius, TheGP’s CTO

TheGP has always believed that the best way to support technical founders is to build with them. That has meant being the first “hands-on-keyboard” for companies like Sardine, Scribe, and TurbineOne, embedding our engineers directly in each company to help founders expand capacity and maintain momentum at important inflection points. 

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re shaping our firm for the next era of company building, with Dan Pupius taking on a broader leadership role as TheGP’s first CTO. 

We believe the CTO role is required to meet this moment in engineering and that Dan is the ideal person to take on this responsibility. AI has made small teams far more capable, but it has also made the early choices more consequential. Founders are deciding what to build while the tooling is constantly in flux. They are hiring into roles that may look very different six months from now. The challenge is preserving speed without making permanent strategy decisions too early. 

We also know that the best technical founders rarely need generic “engineering help.” More often, they’re working through specific, recurring structural challenges. Things like: Should I hire the first two engineers now, or wait to add more capacity until the product shape is clearer? Should the founding CTO stay close to product and architecture or focus on establishing the operating rhythm around the team? Should hiring slow the roadmap, or can my company keep shipping while also focusing on recruiting the team?

The right answers to these questions require senior judgment in moments when a decision can change a company’s trajectory. And these are the type of moments Dan will help us design around.

As CTO, Dan will define the next phase of TheGP’s engineering work, which includes the way we embed engineers into portfolio companies. For some companies, that will mean formation work—giving founders access to a small senior team so they can have instant capacity to build the right product. For others, it will mean transition work—keeping product velocity high while allocating cycles to hire deliberately. In other cases, it will mean leadership support for founder-CTOs as the role inevitably changes underneath them. 

It also marks a shift in how we’re thinking about our own engineering model. For most of TheGP’s history, the right unit was often a single embedded engineer—one person the founder could trust to weigh in on technical direction and ship code alongside the team. That still matters, but of course, AI is changing the amount of leverage a small team can create. Increasingly, the highest-impact work looks more collaborative: a small group of our forward-deployed engineers working with a founding team during a compressed, high-stakes window.

Dan has spent his career building products from zero to one, and then scaling those products to millions. 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 become more productive and connected. Over the last few years, Dan has served as a fractional CTO across startups in healthtech, fintech, government, and dev tools, including working with our portfolio company Graphite, which was acquired by Cursor. 

Dan likes to say he earned a bachelor's degree in AI 25 years ago and is "finally able to work in it." In practice, that means he brings both deep foundations and genuine curiosity to the job. 

We're thrilled to have him leading this work.