The CTO Circle Newsletter · August 12, 2026
This is Marco from CTO Circle. My goal is to deliver the most value in the fewest words.
Let me know how to improve. I respond to every reply.
One quick heads-up. From now on this newsletter will come from marco@joinctocircle.com instead of marco@pullpo.io. Same person, same newsletter, just the right domain for it.
In this issue
Our next CTO dinner in San Francisco, what ten days in the Bay Area changed my mind about, the news and launches that matter, our new YouTube channel, and open engineering leadership roles.
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Next community events
San Francisco · Tuesday, September 15 · 5:30 PM
AI Engineering Leaders Dinner in San Francisco
A private gathering for 40+ engineering leaders and CTOs from Bay Area companies. Dinner, drinks, a couple of short talks, and open discussion on the topics that actually matter to engineering teams right now. Casual but curated, with people from companies like Salesforce, GitHub, Stripe and Google in the room. No sales, no pitches.
Request your seat. Attendance is free but subject to approval, and capacity is limited to keep the room relevant.
We still have one sponsor slot open for this gathering. If your company is interested, reply to this email.
Short opinionated trend
Being in the right place
Three weeks ago I spent ten days in San Francisco. I went to run our CTO Circle gathering, but I also got to spend time with Exponential, thanks to Guli, and with SOTI, thanks to Marcos.
It was one of the most intense stretches I have lived. Something came up in almost every conversation: “It is just easier in SF.” I used to push back on that. The market is global, you can build from anywhere, and talent is distributed. All of that is still true.
However, ten days in San Francisco opened more doors for me than a year in Barcelona. Through Exponential alone I got to meet Adeyemi Ajao from Base10, Mar Hershenson from Pear, Martin Casado from a16z, Anna Piñol from NFX, Gadi Borovich from Antigravity, the founders of Krea and HappyRobot, and founders from about twenty other companies. That is not a normal month for me.
1. The flywheel between capital and companies. The best funds in the world are there, so the most ambitious, fastest-growing and craziest companies tend to be there too, and each one keeps pulling the other.
2. Mindset. Selling is easier: people do not haggle, they have far less price aversion, and they tell you what is actually blocking them. Crazy is allowed: you can say the most ambitious version of your idea out loud. The ambition operates on another scale.
3. Density. Almost everyone is a founder, an investor, or one degree from both. Whatever you are looking for, someone in the room already has it.
Mar from Pear VC put it best: if you want to work at the frontier of something, you move to where that something is happening. Nobody finds it strange when an athlete moves to a high-performance centre. Right now, for building an AI/SaaS company, San Francisco is that centre.
I hope we build that same ecosystem in Spain. It has improved a lot, especially in Madrid and Barcelona, but it is still not comparable. That is why I like Exponential’s mission: take top Spanish technical talent to SF so they can copy everything, then bring that culture, ambition and capital back to Spain.
News, reads & launches
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6-Cyber and paused Astra in the same week. GPT-5.6-Cyber completes 95% of high-risk security requests versus 1.5% for the general model, gated behind a vetted Daybreak Red tier.
Agentic code quality. Addy Osmani's point is that software quality now depends on the constraints you set around the agents writing the code.
Interviewing engineers in the AI era. Coinbase rebuilt its whole interview loop to test how candidates direct AI, evaluate its output, and apply judgment where the model falls short.
Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30B open model built for agents, optimised for always-on local agent workflows and small enough to run on a single consumer GPU.
Nvidia shipped Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30B open MoE for long-running agents with faster output and agentic task completion.
Cloudflare launched Kitesurf, a browser built only for AI agents that strips out everything a human needs to cut CPU, memory and token costs.
Gemini crossed 1 billion monthly active users. Whatever you build on top of an assistant, your users are already trained by one of these.
Claude took a run at the Riemann hypothesis and pushed a real lower bound from 41.6% to 67.2%.
From the community
On July 23 we ran our last San Francisco gathering at Pebblebed. It was heavily oversubscribed, we had to turn people away, and one attendee flew in from the UAE. Thank you to everyone who came, and to Tinybird for sponsoring it.
We also launched a YouTube channel with the talks from our events. The sound on the first ones is rough, so fair warning. We are fixing that for the next round of talks.
New here? Join the Slack community and introduce yourself.
Open engineering leadership roles
That's it for today. Let me know whether this issue gave you enough value, reply and tell me what to cut or add.
Best,
Marco