Former OpenAI exec Kevin Weil is now on the board of Stoke Space
Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX. “It’s real simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he cofounded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’s winter batch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise.
- ▪Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX.
- ▪“It’s real simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he cofounded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’s winter batch.
- ▪“I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/08/former-openai-exec-kevin-weil-is-now-on-the-board-of-stoke-space/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-08T12:24:24.493Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-08T12:24:24.493Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 38h-lZ1cRIcz |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs and OpenAI, has joined the board of Stoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX. “It’s real simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he cofounded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’s winter batch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin [an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth, through their fund Scribble Ventures] comes with all of that background and was able to help me think about fundraising and getting the company off the ground.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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