Recommendations from Phin at The General Partnership
Phin's list of startups to take a look at
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To help you figure out what’s next, we asked Phin Barnes (former partner for 11 years at First Round and now co-founder of The General Partnership) for recommendations on companies he would recommend people think about joining. Below you’ll find his answers, as well as explanations as to what makes each company particularly special.
Phin’s recommendations:
Graphite is a fast, simple code review platform designer for engineering teams on GitHub who want to write and review smaller pull requests, stay unblocked, and ship faster with “stacking” (small atomic commits). The founding team previously held engineering and product roles at Meta, Airbnb, Pinterest and Oscar, so the DNA of the company revolves around building the most powerful developer tooling possible.
Cassidy is building AI-powered tools that automate business tasks like customer support, lead qualification, and RFP processing. When we first played with Cassidy, it reminded us of using Notion 2.0 back in 2018. Where Notion struck the perfect balance of structured and unstructured data inside a note-taking tool, Cassidy found a similar harmony between the declarative powers of LLMs and the explicit affordances of earlier no-code tools.
Thatch is building a healthcare benefits administration platform that leverages Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs) to offer more personalized healthcare options to companies and employees. The most impactful technology companies solve matching problems in large markets—matching riders with drivers, visitors with a place to stay, listeners with music, or vendors with payment sources. It’s been impressive to see the Thatch team develop a platform that matches every American with the best healthcare options available to them. The result is better care for patients, job flexibility without losing health benefits, reduced costs for employers, and a more efficient U.S. healthcare system.
While he was an engineer at Stripe, Stainless founder Alex Rattray was instrumental in shaping the API developer experience. He built Stripe's patented codegen system for API client libraries, designed the Typescript client, and led a redesign of the API docs. Through this work, Alex recognized the complexity of building high-quality SDKs across multiple languages, each with unique quirks. After leaving Stripe, developers approached him to bring Stripe-level SDKs to their APIs, so he founded Stainless. Stainless delivers premium SDKs for companies of any size, with an unwavering commitment to quality, informed by years spent refining some of the most eminent and extensively used API libraries in the world. That craftsmanship has already made it the SDK generator of choice for companies like Mux, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cloudflare.
Approximately 80% of Americans live in debt. Existing systems punish poor people who struggle with their debt, including shutting off their utilities, revoking their driver’s licenses, sky-high interest fees, and even incarceration. Promise is a powerhouse company tackling this head-on by building software that helps municipalities and utilities collect unpaid bills with zero-interest payment plans.