In late January 2024, Tim Smith and Alejandra Vergara launched a five-week course for our founders. No branding budget, no production crew: just two smart people who saw that generative AI was about to be the kind of inflection point founders couldn’t afford to slip by, and who chose to build something to help.
We called it GenAI 101.
The course ran across five weeks: an intro post on January 23, then Day 1 through Day 5, one lesson per week through late February. Tim built the technical curriculum. Alejandra drove the application layer: how these tools show up at the product and operations level for early-stage companies. The Notion-based course material lives on, accessible through the Day 1 post.
Thousands of people took the class. Thousands.
Why we built it
The intro post asked a question directly: is the hype real this time?
The honest answer in January 2024 was: yes, almost certainly. But for many founders, the gap between “this seems important” and “I know what to do with it” was wide. The course existed to close that gap.
What worked: it met founders where they were. Not a conference talk. Not a white paper. A structured weekly commitment, with practical setup, key concepts, development environment, chaining commands and vector databases, and finally multi-model access and fine-tuning. Founders who had been circling the technology found something to grab onto.
In the cohort we kept hearing some version of the same thing: “I finally understand where to start.”
That was the job. And for a window in early 2024, GenAI 101 did it well.
Then, the market caught up.
That’s not a complaint. It’s the best possible outcome for the original thesis: the hype was real, the technology mattered, and the ecosystem responded. Within months, every major foundation-model builder had published detailed tutorials, quickstart guides, and documentation written for exactly the technical founders we were trying to reach. YouTube now has countless hours of high-quality instruction at every depth level. Newsletters, developer communities, and open-source tooling have built an explanatory infrastructure that dwarfs what any single VC firm can produce or keep current.
Competing with that infrastructure would mean racing the people who build the models to explain the models. That race doesn’t make any sense for Bee Partners.
What it was
There’s a word we use at Bee for moments like this: liminal. The in-between. The crossing of a threshold. GenAI 101 was built for a liminal moment in the technology’s adoption: after the capability arrived, before the ecosystem had fully caught up to it.
Bee’s job in that window wasn’t to predict the future. It was to recognize the moment and serve. Tim and Alejandra built the course. Thousands of founders used it. The window closed because the technology succeeded.
We’re retiring GenAI 101 because it did its job. The founders who took it are well past where the course can take them; so is the firm.
Where we are now
The question the intro post asked in January 2024, “is the hype real this time?”, has an answer now. Definitively YES! The bet is no longer contrarian; it’s consensus. What we believe at Bee has only sharpened: the interesting question now isn’t whether machines have changed the game. It’s which founders are building what’s next, and what that future actually looks like.
That’s the territory we invest in. The futures we believe in. If that’s the work you’re doing, we want to hear from you.