Serial entrepreneur and investor T.A. McCann has started companies at the front edge of every major tech wave for three decades, from the web and cloud services to mobile and social apps.
Maybe it was inevitable that AI would pull him back in.
After eight years as managing director of Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, McCann is shifting focus to become CEO of Lev, a startup that bills itself as an “AI co-founder” for early-stage entrepreneurs — offering an automated version of the guidance and validation that McCann and his PSL colleagues have provided to founders for many years.
“I love doing what I do at PSL, but I can only do it for three or four people a year,” McCann said in an interview. “What would happen if I could do it for a million people a year?”
He’s about to find out as a startup CEO himself again. At the same time, McCann will remain at PSL, staying involved with the studio’s portfolio and working out of its office. PSL co-founder Greg Gottesman is on the board of Lev, which PSL is spinning out as a standalone company.
From internal tool to startup: Lev grew out of tools that McCann and his colleagues built inside PSL to bring more structure to the studio’s company-building process. It uses AI to walk founders through ideation, validation and company formation, generating assets like competitive analyses, customer outreach templates and product specs along the way.
PSL and its AI Studio Fund have invested more than $1 million in Lev, which was incorporated as a Delaware C Corp in late March. McCann is the sole full-time employee, supported by three development contractors, including one who functions as CTO. He said the team will stay small.
GeekWire first covered Lev in October, when it was still a project inside PSL. At the time, it was available on a waitlist with tiered pricing. McCann said it’s now free, with hundreds of people using the product, and plans to turn on a freemium subscription model soon.
What it does: Under the hood, Lev runs a set of specialized AI agents and workflows, leading a founder through competitive landscape, go-to-market strategy, branding, and other stages of company building.
McCann describes the product as having four pillars: a canvas that stores context about the venture, a chat interface built on PSL’s methodology, an evaluation framework that scores ideas using the same rubric PSL uses internally, and a task system that generates weekly priorities.
He is positioning Lev to connect external tools, such as Lovable for landing pages and Apollo for customer prospects, and others in the future, rather than trying to build everything itself.
How he got here: Lev is McCann’s sixth company as a founder.
He built websites in the mid-1990s, co-founded an early web-based Q&A startup called HelpShare, and spent three years at Microsoft working on Exchange and mobile services.
He was an entrepreneur in residence at Paul Allen’s Vulcan Labs, where he incubated what became Gist, a social address book that BlackBerry acquired in 2011. He co-founded Rival IQ, a social media analytics company acquired by NetBase in 2021, and had a hand in Senosis, a health-sensing startup that Google acquired.
At PSL, McCann has played a key role in making the process of creating startups more systematic — building evaluation rubrics, formalizing the steps from idea to company, and developing the internal tools that eventually became Lev.
What’s happening now: In a blog post announcing his new role, McCann wrote that he sees the same pattern playing out with AI that he experienced with earlier tech waves. Major technology shifts “don’t just change industries,” he wrote. “They change who gets to build.”
Now, as a startup leader again in 2026, McCann said he’s coding again. Using Cursor and Claude Code, he’s building features for Lev himself and shipping on weekly cycles.
“Earlier in my career, I was able to build a lot of things,” he said. “Mid-stage of my career, I was abstracted from the building, and now I can build again.”
The opportunity: Lev is aimed at what McCann calls “zero to one” founders — people trying to get from idea to funded company. He sees a growing market for the product, driven in part by waves of layoffs at major tech companies turning experienced workers into founders.
“They’re not going to get hired by the other tech company who just let go 10,000 people,” he said. “A lot of those people now have an opportunity to say, can I be a founder?”
McCann is also working with accelerator programs to help founders prepare applications and continue building if they’re rejected. Lev will also be part of Seattle Flow’s Startup Day on May 15 as part of a broader push to reach early-stage founders.
The landscape: Lev is entering a growing field of AI tools aimed at early-stage founders, from lightweight idea validators to more ambitious platforms positioning themselves as AI co-founders. McCann said he expects more competitors to emerge but sees an edge for Lev in the decade of real-world company-building experience from PSL that underpins the product.
“Very few people have done it as many times as we’ve done it at PSL,” he said.
McCann said his PSL colleagues ultimately encouraged him to take the leap, telling him there was nobody better suited to lead Lev. It’s his process, and what gets him fired up.
“This,” they told him, “is you in a box.”
Credit: Source link
