Alex Rattray - Stainless | LinkedIn

University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

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Anthropic acquires Stainless

I'm thrilled to share that Stainless has been acquired by Anthropic! APIs are the dendrites of internet. The more & better connections you have, the smarter you are. The same is true for software. I like to think we've made a few myelin sheathes a little more robust & polished these last few years – and I can't wait to help developers everywhere build a bigger, smarter brain with Claude. I can't say how humbled and grateful I've been to work with our incredible customers, our exceptional team, and our amazing investors, including Jennifer Li at Andreessen Horowitz, Lauren Reeder at Sequoia Capital, Anthony Kline at The General Partnership, Tobi Coker at Felicis, Calvin French-Owen who joined us on our board, and so many more. Thank you all, very much. Read more: - Stainless blog: https://lnkd.in/dMWiCHYa - Anthropic blog: https://lnkd.in/dxCkFXuB

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

4mo

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For years, colleagues at Stainless would say "we should win Google as a customer." I'd always brush it off: "that's impossible, they have like a hundred people working on SDKs there!" Then, one day, we saw a signup from an @google.com address that… didn't seem fake. And it wasn’t. Over the next several months, we had the privilege of working with the team at Google DeepMind on their next-generation API. Google has contributed so many foundational technologies to the Internet, from Go and gRPC to Chromium and PWAs. It's humbling to provide API infrastructure for another: Gemini.

5mo

We're excited to welcome Google as a Stainless customer. Google DeepMind’s new Interactions API "introduces a native interface specifically designed to handle complex context management when building agentic applications with interleaved messages, thoughts, tool calls and their state." We partnered with them on the TypeScript and Python SDKs to support the launch. Learn more about the Interactions API: https://lnkd.in/gYAziXhg

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

4mo

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Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

I never had the chance to attend myself, but I'd recommend Recurse Center emphatically to any software engineer between jobs who's looking to reconnect a love of coding, hacking, making, and tinkering. We have many Recursers at Stainless, and basically every part of our culture at Stainless that I'm most proud of – thoughtfulness, collaboration, a spirit of craft and curiosity, a self-directed zeal to make something awesome – is what makes them say "working here reminds me of Recurse," which always warms my heart. I've been reading more about the early days of Pixar lately, and the garage-lab days of NYIT, the University of Utah, and other incredible environments make me think of the moments I walk in the door of their awesome post-industrial Brooklyn space. The times that I've had downtime between roles, I often have amazing self-directed periods building side projects (shoutout lightscript, a small programming language I made before Stripe). But, it can be hard to keep up steam without peers around to challenge and encourage you. If you love to code (or used to love it!), and are making a fresh start in the new year – go check them out!

5mo

Many people don’t realize that when you leave a job, you lose more than a salary and benefits. Some of that loss is liberating. The boss you couldn’t stand? Gone. The looming deadline? Doesn't matter. But for many of us, work is also a major source of structure, camaraderie, and purpose. (You can debate whether that’s good or healthy, but it’s undeniably true.) When you leave a job, all of that disappears. The place you went every day, the people you saw there, and the shared thing you were working toward. This is true whether you were fired, laid off, or chose to leave. If you don’t need another job right away, not working can feel incredibly freeing. You have total control over your time! No meetings, no calendar, no OKRs. Wouldn't it be nice if you could keep the good parts of a job? You can. Many programmers have told us that the Recurse Center recreates some of the best parts of a good job, without any of the bad ones: curious, kind, and motivated peers to learn and work alongside; a beautiful and energizing space to go every day; and a shared context in which to pursue your own goals. Even some of the small, intangible things RC provides, like a rhythm for your week and a proper start and end to your "work" day, can have a big impact on your mindset and how much you get from your time off of work.

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

5mo

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Congrats to Danny Sheridan, Deep Singhvi, Zach Kirsch, and the rest of the Fern team on joining our partners at Postman! I've gotten to know them, and many other great members of the Fern team, over the years and have really appreciated their hustle and devotion to customers. Stainless, Fern, and even liblab (who also recently joined Postman) all started working on SDK generation around the same time ~4 years ago. It's been incredible to see how far things have come since then, and the Fern team deserves real credit for helping drive this tidal wave. It's more important than ever for every company to become an API company, and expose their capabilities through robust programmable interfaces. We're striving to build a comprehensive API toolkit at Stainless, but everyone needs something different, and we love to see a thousand flowers bloom. It's exciting to see how things are heating up!

Danny Sheridan

5mo

I’m excited to share that Fern has joined Postman. Four years ago, Deep Singhvi, Zach Kirsch, and I left our roles at Palantir and Amazon to start a company together. Since then, we’ve grown Fern into a team of 25, partnered with more than 200 customers, and built a business generating millions in annual revenue. Abhinav Asthana, the co-founder and CEO of Postman, was one of our very first angel investors, backing us during our time in Y Combinator in 2022. Over the past three years, that early belief turned into a strong relationship, and ultimately, Postman’s decision to acquire Fern. The entire Fern team is joining Postman to keep building Fern. Customers can expect the same product and experience, now supported by Postman’s scale, reach, and resources—allowing us to move faster and tackle even bigger problems for API developers. Thank you to our customers, investors, and families for being a part of this journey. We’re continuing to grow the team and are hiring: buildwithfern.com/careers Read more on our blog: https://lnkd.in/e6yty7bc

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

7mo

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This is a big full-circle moment for me. Back in 2019, I was a couple years into my time at Stripe, and had spent over nine months grinding away at a full redesign and rebuild of the famous Stripe API Docs. As someone who never took a computer science class, it was singularly humbling to drive an overhaul of one of the most visible properties in the developer web – and to get kudos from Patrick Collison on the launch (see treasured screenshot below). During the project, I conducted user research with developers using the API docs. I learned a ton about what devs really care about. The biggest thing that stuck with me was that while internally we talked about POST /v1/charges, it turned out users pretty much always referred to stripe.charges.create(). To our users, the SDKs were the API. Developers wanted to use the SDKs as the API docs, too. They wanted the descriptions of every method and API endpoint right there in VS Code, rather than just in “some old html page” (as I liked to joke). This realization led to my work creating Stripe’s SDK code generation system, TypeScript types for the Stripe Node.js SDK, and later the Stainless SDK Generator that I’m proud to say now powers OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Cloudflare, and even Stripe brands like Privy. But I never felt my work was complete with that. Even back on the dev-platform team at Stripe, we always kvetched about how there weren’t proper reference docs for the libraries themselves. You just kind of had to triangulate between the SDK’s README, the HTTP API docs, and docstrings in the code itself. We wanted reference docs for the library itself, not HTTP. Why should a Go developers have to map customer_id: optional map of integers to the corresponding Go code in their head, when they could just see docs with CustomerID param.Field[map[string]int] directly? I kept saying we’d fix this by making “SDK references, like godoc or cargo-doc and the Stripe API ref had a baby”. That’s how it started. Then, we added superstars like Alex Arena (former founder of devtool Interval) and Ryan Paul (creator of Markdoc, Stripe’s open-source markdown derivative) to the mix, alongside powerhouses Brent Riddell, Max Freundlich, Luke Taylor, and the inimitable Em. They saw that great SDK reference docs need to live alongside the REST reference and the long-form guides, with an easy authorship model, an open-the-hood-and-do-whatever customization story, and a rock-solid deploy system. I’m beyond proud of what they’ve built, and the praise from current and prospective users has been heartwarming to say the least. See the screenshot from Steve Krouse (friend & founder of Val Town), attached. The Stainless Docs Platform is still waitlist-only, so if you’re curious to see it in action, sign up to be notified when it’s GA or apply for early access: https://lnkd.in/ecdMqmWW

7mo

Today, we announce our second product: the Stainless Docs Platform. Since the beginning of Stainless, customers have asked us to develop a documentation product that offers high reliability, unlimited extensibility, and tight integration with our SDKs. The Stainless Docs Platform is our solution to these problems. Here's what you can expect: 🦾 Robust static-site deploys on Stainless infrastructure (backed by Cloudflare) or your own 🪄 Open-source at the core, with authoring in Markdown, MDX, or Markdoc, flexible CSS theming, and extensibility with code 🧑‍💻 SDK-native docs with method signatures, types, and code snippets in your user's preferred programming language Teams at Cloudflare, Beeper, DigitalOcean, Val Town, and Sendblue are already running their live developer docs on Stainless. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/e8S-QeJR

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

9mo

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I often hear people say they're excited to work on applying AI to real-world problems, but have a hard time finding applications that actually help real people in real ways. I've lived with a few people in the medical field over the years, and heard a lot of complaints about "medication nonadherence" – patients not taking their meds. Doctors and their teams work hard to find the right diagnosis, pick the right medication for the situation, and support the patient through the care process – but sometimes the requisite hours on the phone with insurance companies, similar barriers, leaves it for naught. I'm so proud that my dear friend Stedman Hood and his dear friend Harry Bleyan are seeing such success in tackling this problem – they're both incredible people. I'd love to help facilitate an intro for anyone who's been wanting to improve healthcare with AI to join a warm, energetic team.

Stedman Hood

9mo

Exclusive: Neon Health raises $6M for AI to help patients access specialty drugs

50%+ of specialty medication prescriptions are abandoned by patients. These are critical drugs like chemo and gene therapy. Why? In short: high costs & insurance hurdles. At Neon Health, we build AI agents that jump over these hurdles to care: helping patients access specialty medications cheaper and faster. 𝗪𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱, 𝘄𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗚𝗧𝗠, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. Join us if you want to apply bleeding edge AI systems to save lives, literally. https://lnkd.in/gnz7yg5n

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

12mo

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This was special. At Stainless we’re privileged to work closely with the API teams at both OpenAI and Anthropic every day, but it’s a rare treat to bring everyone in the same room to swap ideas and perspectives on a topic I’m always thinking about: what is the future of API’s in an agentic world? What a treat to have my good friend Dan Shipper (Every Inc.) moderate a vigorous discussion with several of my favorite collaborators. Shashank Goyal (OpenRouter) shared thoughts on what’s blocking truly autonomous agents; Tom Hacohen (Svix) got into making APIs more legible for LLMs; Michael Cohen (Anthropic) waxed philosophical on the unfolding possibilities for developers; Ilan Bigio (OpenAI) shared what’s working and what’s exiting with teams building agents; and I even got to drop a favorite conspiracy theory of my own. Thanks to Min S Kim, Alyson Kurtz, Jacob, and many other Steels for putting this together, and Jennifer Li and everyone at Andreessen Horowitz for NY Tech Week! We’re putting on another one with friends from Stripe, Cloudflare, Vantage, Knock, and others soon – hope to see you there!

12mo

Last week, we hosted a panel discussion on "MCP and the future of AI x API" – and 150+ engineers, founders, and product leaders packed our space to explore the future of agents & APIs. Dan Shipper, founder of Every Inc. moderated the panel: ✱ Michael Cohen – Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic ✱ Ilan Bigio – Applied AI Engineer, OpenAI ✱ Shashank Goyal – Founding Engineer, OpenRouter ✱ Tom Hacohen – Founder/CEO, Svix ✱ Alex Rattray – Founder/CEO, Stainless Full recording: https://lnkd.in/eNXV7JVE Our next MCP panel is on June 25th featuring engineering and product leaders from Cloudflare, Stripe, Vantage, and Knock. This time, we’re shifting the focus from the infra providers to teams building MCP servers and solving real-world problems for their users. What questions should we cover?

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

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Proud to see Chris and the Knock team ship their 1.0 SDKs with Stainless! Knock's clean, well-designed API is the door to powerful notifications infrastructure for companies like Vercel, Webflow, and Amplitude. They'd long hand-maintained SDKs in TypeScript, Go, Python, and Ruby—all of which are now fully-typed and generated straight from their OpenAPI spec, which flows from their Elixir backend. Now they can spend those polish points on all the other great stuff that's launching this week!

Chris Bell

It's day 4 of Knock launch week. Today we're releasing our redesigned Docs and new 1.0 SDKs for Node, Python, Ruby, and Go. Our docs just got a huge level up. We refreshed the design, reorganized the content, and shipped new generated API references. We've always thought that the docs were an extension of our product, and with today's release we are once again making good on that vision. For our new SDKs, we partnered with Stainless to get a best in class experience. Our 1.0 release of our SDKs for Node, Go, Python, and Ruby are now fully-typed from our OpenAPI spec, include retries, customizable logging, auto-pagination, and more. They are a massive improvement on our past version and deliver on our vision of shipping an exceptional developer experience. All bangers, no filler in our launch week!

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Alex Rattray

Alex Rattray

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Towards the API platform we always wanted: why we raised our $25M Series A

🚀 Big news from Stainless: we've raised $25M to build the API platform developers deserve! I’m excited to share that Stainless has closed our $25M Series A, led by Jennifer Li at Andreessen Horowitz, along with Sequoia Capital, The General Partnership, Felicis, Zapier, MongoDB Ventures, and incredible operators like Claire Hughes Johnson (former Stripe COO) and Amit Agarwal (Datadog President). Since launching our first product, the Stainless SDK generator, we’ve been amazed by its adoption. Whether it’s powering SDKs for top AI model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta (Llama Stack) or enabling fast-growing fintech companies like Metronome and Modern Treasury, or even developer-first platform likes Cloudflare or Mux, Stainless is helping companies deliver world-class API developer experiences without the overhead. 💡 Why Stainless? APIs are everywhere. They power your favorite apps, enable breakthrough AI experiences, and facilitate secure financial transactions. But for developers, the experience of integrating with APIs hasn’t kept up with their importance. At Stainless, we’re solving this with SDKs that feel handcrafted but are automatically generated, maintained, and updated. For our customers, that means less time spent on SDK maintenance and more time focused on building great APIs. 📣 Join us! We’re growing our team (we all still fit on a single floor in NYC!) and we’re hiring across technical and business roles. If our vision resonates with you, we’d love to have you on board. To our customers, partners, and the developer community: thank you for your trust. We’re excited to build the API platform we’ve always wanted, together! More details: https://lnkd.in/eMNTmbpc

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Alex Rattray commented on a post 2w

Thank you James 🙂

Alex Rattray commented on a post 3w

Thank you Russell Coleman. As our first experienced sales hire, you taught me so much about selling -- a key skill and intricate discipline so many technical founders underappreciate at first. Your technical depth, deep experience, and authentic relationships with engineers and engineering leaders were such a breath of fresh air compared to what I often see out there, and I'm so proud to have had you on our team and landing & managing some of our biggest logos. 🙏

Alex Rattray commented on a post 3w

Couldn't agree more -- thanks for being such a core partner, believer, and coach all the way through. Helped build our team, our company, and myself in ways not every VC would or even could!

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Gunderson Dettmer

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Congratulations to our client Stainless on its acquisition by Anthropic! By bringing the Stainless and Anthropic teams together, the acquisition will help expand how developers and agents connect with external systems and enable Anthropic’s Claude platform to continue to push the frontier of developer experience and agent capabilities. The Gunderson deal team was led by Jared Grauer and included Matthew Martinez, Chase Beckstead, Marissa Boykin, Esalyna Liang, Derek Shao, Aaron Fiske, Killian McDonald, Gregory Logan, PhD, JD, James Yang, Anna Westfelt, Frida Alim, Michael Richman, Erik Ward, Sofia Siegel, Mark Foster, Tina Xu, Jordan Simon, and Maggie Vogel. Read more: https://bit.ly/4vgfx0M

Jared Grauer

Proud of the Gunderson team for our work representing Stainless in its acquisition by Anthropic. Great client, great outcome.

Gunderson Dettmer

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Megan Reynolds

20h

Anthropic acquires Stainless

Huge congrats to Alex Rattray and the Stainless team! Alex attended one of the earliest infra.nyc events 3 years ago and has been a part of the community ever since 🤝 Some of our favourite meet-ups have been hosted at Stainless HQ in SoHo. Big win for Alex and the team - and an incredible get for Anthropic 🚀

Paul Tarjan

As a Developer Productivity engineer, I very seldomly have my company publish grandiose blog posts about my project. But Anthropic is a different place :) Want to come Close the Loop with me? https://lnkd.in/gXFjKRas

When AI builds itself

295 12 Comments

Michelle Lim

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What a $300M founder taught me about managing ADHD as a CEO My friend Alex Rattray just sold his company to Anthropic. Over the weekend we went bouldering. I asked him how he actually gets things done. He has ADHD. I wanted to know how he managed since I've been struggling to stay focused as well. 1. A dedicated focus device He keeps an iPad with only Notes on it. No Google login. No 1Password. Nothing you can fall into. He pairs it with one physical spot: a corner of his office, or a specific café. That place becomes the work place. 2. A body double It's hard to focus on writing. The first paragraph of anything is the hardest as you'd tend to obsess over it. Alex asks someone to sit with him to give him the assurance the paragraph is fine. Two paragraphs in, he's moving. He recommends picking someone who’s most functional to what he's writing. 3. Live reviews It's easy to miss and focus on review work after a long day. When someone sends him work, he pulls them into a room and reads it with them there. Feedback happens in the moment. Nothing sits in a queue. 4. 3 priorities Every morning he writes down three things that must happen that day. Works on those first. Everything else is extra. His point: ADHD makes every new thing feel urgent. The list decides before the day has a chance to. I'm starting all four this week. I used to think good executive function was enough. Founding broke my executive function due to the large amounts of context switching it involves. The system matters more than the willpower.

142 16 Comments

Jordan Scales