Jonathan New

This week is my last at Stripe. I joined in 2018 to work on Developer Productivity, focused on helping Stripe’s engineers have the most productive time of their careers. That started with the inner loop, trying to make the developer experience as tightly integrated as possible. I truly believe that Stripe has some of the best developer tools in the industry. I’m incredibly proud of what we built, but much more grateful for the people I got to build it with. Stripe is genuinely full of people who care deeply about their work, hold themselves and each other to a high bar and are just great people to spend your days working alongside. I’ve learnt an enormous amount from them, especially my managers Aaron Spinks, Rahul Patil and Will Larson. Thank you to all the current and former Stripes who made the last eight years so memorable. I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent them here.

My last official day at Adobe. We’re off to Spain to see what the future holds. In the short term it means language classes to get back up to speed and doing restoration work on our really neat new/old house.

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After 8.5 years of working on Developer Productivity at Stripe (and hopefully making the developers more productive) I have decided that the next step for my personal development is to become deeply unproductive for a while. No plans in the short term but extremely excited to take a break before deciding what's next. A massive thank you to Scott MacVicar, Yvette Nameth and everyone else I had a chance to work with who made the time at Stripe as fun as it was!

Monday marked the death of my ambitious career at Stripe and Bridge. A ceremony was held, albeit small and intimate :') In the final hours of its life, I closed 50 Chrome tabs, fired off a few remaining bleary-eyed Slack messages, and held my breath as my account was deactivated. Then, I tucked my work laptop into a shipping box, sealed the flaps, and carried the little cardboard coffin to a FedEx store, where it would begin the long journey home to headquarters. As I slid the box across the counter, I offered a few parting words: 𝐻𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑆𝑎𝑏𝑟𝑎’𝑠 𝑎𝑚𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑟—𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟-𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑒, 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑥𝑡 𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦. 𝐼𝑛 𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑢 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠, 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠, 𝑤ℎ𝑜𝑚 𝑠ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑, 𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑦. Then, I drove home and collapsed into bed. Friends, let me tell you. I slept 𝑠𝑜 𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑦 that I woke up wondering whether I had ever actually slept before, or whether the previous 32 years of my life had merely been nights of “light dozing.” And when I finally woke, it was to a bittersweet knot of emotions. This is not the first time I've let my ambitious career die. But, this time feels different. I have enormous excitement for the boundlessness of possibility ahead of me, and real grief for everything I leave behind. I look back tenderly on the past decade. There was so much striving, and stumbling, and learning. So many versions of myself I met there—some I’m enormously proud of, and some that were deeply self-doubting. I needed to meet every version. 𝐶𝑜𝑟𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎 has it's flaws, no doubt about it. But I reject easy narratives that flatten all that there is to gain from working inside large, complex organizations. I was also surrounded by a uniquely brilliant set of humans. But now, I simply want to write. I simply want to create. I want to follow curiosities down pointless rabbit holes. I want to slowly enjoy every day on this peculiar planet. I want space for serendipity. And my longing for something new does not diminish anything that came before it. There is no villain in this ending. Maybe one day I'll resucictate my ambitious career. But for now, that day is far away. I have a memoir to finish publishing, and a grandmother to enjoy every final breathless giggle of life with. To all my friends at Stripe and Bridge: thank you for this tremendous trek we shared together. Thank you for every mile of this journey :)

Coming up at Tech Weekend September 2026 VC Office hours with: Ananya Kapoor, Investor at Flex Capital Investment Focus: Generalist (Pre-Seed & Seed) Preferred Stage: Pre-Seed, Seed (Comfortable with MVP/Beta, Traction, and Revenue) Check Size: $500K Scope: US-based teams only Business Model: B2B & B2C 📅 Friday | September 11, 2026 | 10:00 AM – 1:50 PM 📍 Location: 75 Arbor Rd, Menlo Park, CA Ananya Kapoor is an Investor at Flex Capital, a $200M pre-seed and seed fund run by current founders and operators. Flex has backed companies like Perplexity, Mercury, CodeRabbit, Vercel, and Tailscale — writing $500K checks, moving quickly, and not taking board seats. Think of Flex as a superangel with institutional infrastructure behind it. Ananya's founder-friendly approach and Flex's remarkable portfolio make her a wonderful partner for early-stage founders looking for a nimble, respected early check. What are VC Office Hours? VC Office hours are 20-minute, pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings between founders and investors at Tech Weekend, matched by sector, stage, and business model to ensure focused, high-signal conversations. What is Tech Weekend? A 48-hour fundraising sprint by Founders Village where pre-seed to Series B founders meet dozens of investors in back-to-back sessions to accelerate fundraising and decision-making. If you are a US-based founder building something ambitious at the pre-seed or seed stage, Ananya would be a wonderful investor to meet. Sign up for Tech Weekend: techweekend.org If you're an investor looking for deal flow and would like to discover high-quality startups, in person or virtually, please fill out the VC interest form on our website and we'll be in touch.

We just brought on our first Venture Partner. He co-founded the World Cube Association, roomed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at Caltech, and built and sold a venture-backed company. At 42, Tyson Mao has already lived enough careers for five people. Before joining MVP Ventures, he: > Spent four years in high-frequency trading focused on energy futures. > Built products at Kiwi, Inc., Zynga, and Google. > Built two restaurants in San Mateo, which he then sold for a 3x return. > Raised $21.8M for his open-source data transformation company Tobiko - a Fivetran company with his brother Toby. > Sold Tobiko to Fivetran in September 2025, then spent the following year inside the buyer working in corporate development and saw the acquisition from both sides. Tyson has seen a company from almost every seat around the table. He knows how capital feels to the person raising it, how product tradeoffs land on the team building it, and what an acquirer needs after the deal closes. That's what makes him perfect for this role. At MVP, we invest to become the most valuable partner per dollar on a founder's cap table. Tyson is a big part of how we deliver on that. He can sit with a founder at any stage, understand the real problem, and help them figure out the next move. We're lucky he's bringing all of that experience to MVP. Welcome to the team, Tyson ❤️

Wow today is my one-year anniversary at Palo Alto Forward, and what a year! On policy, we legalized hundreds of new homes in Palo Alto by organizing to faithfully implementing SB 79, advanced policies to promote accessory dwelling units, and won approval for the tallest residential building in Palo Alto's history (everything made possible by the city council's leadership). State laws lay the groundwork, but local organizing builds the political power necessary to build real homes On organization, we reached hundreds of new residents in Palo Alto, mobilizing to send letters, sign petitions, meet with council members supporting housing; kickstarted a new event series that has been getting awesome attendance; partnered with eight fellows from Stanford on a bunch of cool projects; and hired a new staff person (doubling our team)--shoutout Annie Koruga Everything PAF has achieved depends on teamwork. Our amazing board, led by Natalie Geise, PhD, sets the direction and has supported me every step of the way. There are more volunteers than I can name, but I want to especially shout out Sheryl Klein for her mentorship, Stephen Levy for his activism and institutional memory, Scott O'Neil for happily taking on the hardest fights, and former council member Cory Wolbach for giving me the lay of the land. Support from the San Francisco Foundation and Adam Briones at the SOBRATO FOUNDATION has made a huge difference for our ability to organize We have a lot of work to do in the next year: Implementing SB 79 long term, winning approval for affordable housing on city-owned parking lots, legalizing starter home ADUs, supporting the campaign to save public transit in the Bay Area, helping keep tenants and RV dwellers stably housed, promoting housing in Stanford's General Use Permit, rightsizing impact fees and other soft costs, streamlining Palo Alto's arduous approval process. No matter what, PAF will be on the front lines of creating affordable, accessible communities for all I'm honored to lead this organization and grateful to everyone who has been a part of the journey. Cheers to the next year and beyond! Photos: Affordable Housing Month tour of affordable teacher housing at 231 Grant with amazing architect (and former PAF board member) Elaine Uang and Mercy Housing; PAF holiday party ft. pro-housing Congressional champion Sam Liccardo; tabling for SB 79 at Palo Alto Pride (co-organized by PAF board member Jennifer DiBrienza); the Mollie Stone's development, a 14-story proposal right next to California Ave Caltrain; and one of the NINE legal SB 79 projects Palo Alto received (the city has since received two more after the deadline, and interest is growing now that there has been so much media coverage--proof of concept that our work to implement SB 79 next year could have extremely high return on investment)

Our team has become 3x more productive by building a software factory. What excites me most is that we can now go from customer feedback to a deployed fix within an hour. The old path would take 2-3 weeks: collect feedback and bug reports, synthesize and prioritize them, plan the work, then wait for it to be built. With Augment Cosmos, I now have agents automating every step of that process: - A customer agent answers questions, triages bug reports, and creates the ticket. - A builder agent starts with a spec, then pairs with an engineer to iterate on it. - A PR agent drafts the PR, subscribes to comments and test failures, and babysits it until it’s mergeable. The human is still in the loop for the spec and the judgment calls. But I barely spend time managing the tickets themselves. The real advantage is that every piece of feedback becomes shared memory, so the workflow gets smarter over time. I talk about our full ticket-to-PR loop in this video 👇 Comment with any questions!