Todd thought you and Jesse Witkowski should meet.
This is two and a half minutes, made before the introduction rather than after it. Jesse didn’t make it, which is most of the point.
2:33 · every spoken line is also on the screen, so it reads with the sound off · download · captions
What it is
Jesse Witkowski runs DFX Intelligence. The thing in the film is called the General, and the short version of what it does is in the film, so this page won’t repeat it.
What this page is for is the part a film can’t carry: the sources, and one thought that seemed worth putting in writing rather than in a voiceover.
Everything it quoted, and where from
Every line attributed to you in the film is one you said or wrote in public. Nothing was paraphrased into quotation marks. In order of appearance:
- “Why can’t we get this done in 2 months?”, and your own account of why the answer was six months Tameem Hourani, “Who Broke It?”, rapdev.io, 20 August 2020
- Bootstrapped, 25% employee owned, a $200,000 first deal that was five months of payroll Pulse 2.0 interview, Feb 2025 · The Founders’ Journey S2E4, 1 April 2025
- Five-time Datadog Partner of the Year; first ServiceNow partner to open source its internal projects rapdev.io
- “Automate, automate, automate. Remove all the friction.” The Founders’ Journey S2E4, 43:28
- The bar, the order, and the people in the middle who repeat the message The Founders’ Journey S2E4, 32:37. You were retelling a new hire’s Slack message from memory and said so; the film sets your retelling, tightened, and the frame credits it to the new hire rather than to you
- Three quarters of negative EBITDA, six to come out of it, and the allergic reaction to hires who weren’t billable The Founders’ Journey S2E4, 21:24
- “Toil is work with unnecessary overhead to accomplish a task.” The Founders’ Journey S2E4, 48:11
- “The fix is usually the smallest slice.” “How to Roadmap Autonomous Operations, Part 1”, rapdev.io, 12 August 2026
- Autonomy is a curve, not a switch: Assisted, Supervised, Autonomous same post
- “Velocity is going fast in the same direction.” The Founders’ Journey S2E4, 39:19
That interview has no published transcript. To quote it accurately the system pulled the audio, transcribed all 59 minutes and 49 seconds of it, and read the result. Most of what makes the film specific is in there and in no press summary anywhere.
The numbers
The six counts at 1:41 and the 474 at 1:46 are exact table counts against the production database on 19 August 2026, not estimates and not annualised. The empty autonomy grant table at 2:02 is real: nothing in the system has ever been given standing permission to act without a person.
One observation, since a film is a bad place to put an argument
You said two things fourteen months apart that your own company then joined together without saying so.
They’ve got all this toil, all this offshore, nearshore, seven dollars a ticket. I really think that’s all gonna be gone in two years. you, April 2025
The fix is usually the smallest slice. RapDev, August 2026
If the seven dollar ticket goes, the thing that erodes is the system of work, priced per seat and per ticket. What does not erode, and gets materially more valuable, is the system of record: who was allowed to do what, on what authority, with what evidence. Agentic operations doesn’t take the CMDB or the change record off the table. It puts far more weight on them, because every action now has a non-human actor behind it and a bank has to be able to prove the actor was entitled to act.
Which means the scarce thing in two years is not an agent. It is the certification layer: the instrument that decides when a given scenario is allowed to move from Assisted to Supervised to Autonomous, holds the evidence for that decision, and reverts it when the evidence turns. Your team has already written the ladder down. As far as we can find, nobody has built the instrument that measures a scenario’s position on it, and nobody is selling it to a regulated buyer who will not be permitted to let anything act without one.
Your own post goes as far as specifying the governance: a weekly thirty minute certification body that promotes scenarios which clear the bar and sends back the ones that don’t. It specifies the committee and not the instrument. Nothing measures where a scenario currently sits, nothing holds the evidence for the last promotion, and nothing demotes automatically when the success rate turns.
That is a product rather than an engagement, it is the highest margin thing available to a services firm that has just landed inside a bank-focused practice, and it is defensible for the unglamorous reason that the evidence accumulates and cannot be bought in.
The General is on the first rung of exactly that ladder, and the only interesting thing it has built so far is the meter: a per-workspace, per-action-class record of what a human approved, rejected and edited. 474 rejections is not a failure statistic. It is the first column of the evidence a regulated customer will one day be asked for.
That is either a real observation or it is wrong, and you are one of about fifty people alive who can tell in under a minute which one it is. Both answers are worth the meeting.
How it was made
Research, thesis, three concepts, script, the design system, every moving picture in it, the score, the render and the checks at the end. There is no stock footage, no licensed image and no generated imagery anywhere in the film. Nobody’s voice was cloned and nobody is depicted.
A human did two things. Jesse wrote the brief. And about twenty minutes in, the disk filled up, and on a full disk every tool dies at once, including the ones that would tell you why, so he ran one rm -rf over some build output and it carried on. That is the whole human contribution and the second half of it is the more honest advertisement.