Max Stoiber built react-boilerplate and styled-components, watched Spectrum get acquired by GitHub and fold into GitHub Discussions, raised $30M for Stellate (a GraphQL CDN), saw it acquired in a dual deal by Shopify and The Guild, and is now building ChatGPT's plugin directory and app platform at OpenAI. That career arc is the throughline of this Changelog episode.
The conversation earns its runtime in three places: the honest accounting of dozens of open source projects nobody remembers alongside the ones that landed, the operational specifics of how a $30M startup ends up split between two acquirers, and Stoiber's direct argument that ChatGPT apps represent a genuinely new software surface, not just a wrapper around existing interfaces. The MCP angle connects all of it.
If you build developer tools, ship open source, or are trying to understand where the ChatGPT app platform is headed, the Stellate-to-OpenAI transition alone is worth the full listen. The failure inventory at the start is where the episode actually begins.
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