Dealflow into Second Brains — Prepping June 24, and Keeping the Record Honest

Why Care?

The Agentic VC Dojo runs on a loop: each monthly all-hands feeds the next. What the room tells us in a poll becomes the framing, the demos, and the breakouts of the session after. That loop only works if the signal is legible (you can actually see what people asked for) and the record is honest (the page says what really happened, not what we hoped would).

This shipment does both for the June 24 session — themed Dealflow into Second Brains. We took last month’s small-but-real poll, made it render as data instead of leaving it as two CSVs in a folder, built the deck that opens this week’s session, and — the unglamorous but important part — corrected two months of session pages to drop presenters who were scheduled but never actually presented. Plus a clean toolchain bump so the site keeps building on current Astro.

What’s New?

• June 24 session — “Dealflow into Second Brains.” New session post (/sessions/2026-06-24_dealflow-into-second-brains) with three presenters in running order: Marcus Brotman (intake forms + OpenClaw → Notion), Toby Rush (OpenClaw → Obsidian), and Michael Staton closing with an “Obsidian & Markdown Notebooks for Dummies” primer. Zoom RSVP wired in (kf.events/3ReV0eh).
• A full ported + revised slide deck at /slides/2026-06-24_monthly-all-hands — cover, theme, pre-session signals, network, agenda, three demo slides, town hall, close. The /slides “Today” highlight now points here.
• May 27’s poll became rendered data. The post-session reflection survey (insightful 9.6/10, NPS +100) and the open poll (Setupathon asks + curiosity asks) are now a single session-keyed JSON that the session page composes — mirroring the April 29 shape.
• An April → May satisfaction trajectory on the deck: insightful 9.1 → 9.6, NPS +75 → +100, every measure up — built as deck-local markup so no shared component changed.
• Jules Miller (Prose Ventures, Kauffman Class 22) added to the participant roster with a local headshot and Boardy in her stack.
• The record corrected: Marcus Brotman didn’t present at April 29 and Toby Rush didn’t present at May 27 — both are presenting June 24 instead. Removed from both session posts and from the May 27 deck (cover, metadata, and the OpenClaw + Obsidian demo slide), with prose counts kept consistent.
• Toolchain bump: Astro 6.3.1 → 6.4.8, Tailwind 4.2 → 4.3.1, Svelte 5.55 → 5.56, plus @astrojs/db, sitemap, svelte, vercel, jose patches. Verified by a clean full build.
• Housekeeping: untracked a registrant CSV (real emails) that predated the context-v/extra/ ignore rule, and added db.timestamp-*.mjs (Astro DB bundler temp files) to .gitignore.

The Story

It started with a filing quirk. The poll exports landed in a folder named 2026-05-28 — but the session actually ran on the 27th (the poll submissions are timestamped 5/27; the 28th was just the download date). So the first job was de-confusing dates: the data, the digest, and the rendered JSON all belong to the May 27 all-hands, and the raw CSVs stay local-only because they carry real attendee emails.

Then the question of what to do with seven-ish responses. Not enough for the April-style analytics charts, but more than enough to be the connective tissue for June. The May 27 survey had a clean story — a perfect +100 NPS, 9.6/10 insightfulness, and one honest piece of feedback (“some of it was over my head”) — and the open poll named concrete asks: wire Claude into Affinity/Notion/Drive, a nanoclaw install guide, “where do I even start.” Those curiosity asks line up almost exactly with this month’s theme, which made the deck write itself: the demos are the answers people asked for.

The session page only knew how to render the rich April shape, though — it assumed survey.totals.surveyed exists and would have crashed on the lighter May data. So we taught it to render what it has: guard each block, and pipe the open-poll asks through the existing Voices component. April renders identically; May renders its reflection + asks; neither knows about the other.

The part that felt most like “keeping the lights honest” was the presenter cleanup. Marcus and Toby had been on the April and May lineups respectively but didn’t end up presenting — and they’re the headliners for June. Leaving them as past presenters would have quietly overstated two sessions. So they came off the April 29 and May 27 posts (and Toby off the May 27 deck), counts and FOMO lines adjusted to match.

Last, a “quick dependency upgrade” that turned up something worth knowing: @astrojs/db is now deprecated upstream (“use a database client like Drizzle directly”). It still works and the build is clean, but the poll/session/stack layer leans on it heavily — so that’s a future migration we’ve flagged, not tackled. The bump itself (Astro 6.4.8 et al.) went in standalone mode to match how Vercel builds this repo, and a full local build confirmed every route still renders.

Under the Hood

The survey JSON is one file per session id. src/data/webinar-survey/2026-05-27_monthly-all-hands.json resolves to the session page via surveyModules[\…/${entry.id}.json`]. It combines three things the way April 29 did: the cross-session firm network (56 firms), the reflection scores, and the open-poll asks. Personas are anonymized in the public arrays; a private _candidates` block keeps the attributed source.

Rendering guards, not a new component. src/pages/sessions/[id].astro now wraps each survey block in an existence check (survey.totals && …, survey.firms?.length && …) and maps poll.setupathonAsks / poll.curiosityAsks into the existing Section__WebinarSurveyVoices. Lighter data shape, zero shared-component edits — important because we want to manage these sections by date going forward without forking the components.

The deck is a copy-and-revise, not an abstraction. /slides/2026-06-24_monthly-all-hands is its own index.astro next to the May 27 one. The “Today” highlight on /slides is just decks.find(d => d.featured) over a date-descending sort — so moving the highlight forward is one flag off (May 27) and one on (June 24). The trajectory cards read both 2026-04-29 and 2026-05-27 reflection blocks and render inline.

The dependency bump ran standalone. This site has its own pnpm-lock.yaml and deploys from its own repo, but its .npmrc ignore-workspace=true isn’t honored by pnpm 10.15 — the CLI --ignore-workspace flag is. So pnpm update --latest --ignore-workspace <list> resolved cleanly against the site-local lockfile, matching Vercel’s build context. @types/node was held at 25 (26 is a major). A full local libSQL build (ASTRO_DATABASE_FILE=… astro build) completed at exit 0 — all routes prerendered, Vercel function bundled — so the upgrade is confirmed, not just installed.

Flagged for later: @astrojs/db deprecation. A Drizzle / @libsql/client-direct migration of the poll, session, and stack layer is the documented next step before the Astro major that removes the integration.