Inside Stainless: The Developer Tools Startup Anthropic Just Bought for $300 Million

Inside Stainless: The Developer Tools Startup Anthropic Just Bought for $300 Million

From AI and I by Dan Shipper

May 20, 2026 · 51 min

About this episode

Dan Shipper interviews Alex Rattray about the challenges and principles of building reliable MCP servers for AI development.

If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it's probably built wrong. You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can't have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don't know how to solve. That's why we interviewed Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the show to share what he knows. We get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet. [Disclosure: Dan is a small investor in Stainless.] If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Get started with Braintrust at https://www.braintrust.dev/ Timestamps: 00:01:15 - Introduction 00:05:09 - APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet 00:11:00 - Why MCP exists 00:17:15 - Why MCP servers are hard to get right 00:20:24 - Design principles for reliable MCP servers 00:25:06 - Using MCP for business ops at Stainless 00:40:57…

People in this episode

Host: Dan Shipper

Guest: Alex Rattray

Topics covered

  • developer tools
  • MCP servers
  • APIs
  • AI-native internet
  • software development

Keywords

  • MCP
  • APIs
  • developer tools
  • software communication
  • AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stainless, OpenAI, Anthropic

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