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.

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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-labs

Then 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.

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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

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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

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🎙 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.json with guest / company / topics / key_insights metadata
  • Categories: SaaS (172), Enterprise (130), AI/ML (117), Consumer (96), Fintech (68), and more

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Generated 2026-05-24.