The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every)

26:19Everyone asks that because it's a very weird shape of a company that you can actually see other companies that have this shape from earlier eras, but it's less common. It doesn't make as much sense. And I think it's newly enabled by AI. And we can talk about why. But the way that I typically talk about every is, we do ideas and apps at the edge of AI. So the core of the business is we have a daily newsletter. We've been doing it for about five years. We have about a hundred thousand subscribers all the people from the top AI labs read us Anyone who's who's basically interested in or working in AI at the frontier and wants to know what's going on reads us we do a lot of like for example whenever Whenever open AI or or anthropic drop -in -a -model like we get our hands on early and then we get to play with it and Write about it, which is it's like my ideal job.

27:11I love it. It's the best I know I'm a curse on this podcast Perfect. Excellent use. And you call those vibe checks. Is that the? Yeah, we call them vibe checks. Vib checks. Which I think is really important because, and this gets to the next part, the apps part of what we do, I think it's really important to do vibe checks and to call them vibe checks because they're about, how does it feel to use this thing? And how does it feel to use it for work, for things that you would normally use it for, like in your job or in your life? Because I think that captures something that standard benchmarks just don't capture and really can't.

27:50And the best people to tell you to write a vibe check are people that are actually at the edge using it for stuff. And so what we've found over time is we have, we love, we think the best writing and content about technology is from people that are actually using it and building with it. And so we've always had this sort of function where we're always building little experiments in addition to our writing and that helps us write great stuff. And that has turned into a suite of apps that we run internally and the people who are building those apps are also writers and they're contributing to things like five checks.

28:26So you get a really inside look into how is this stuff being built for people who are actually using it every day. And this we have apps that we have, one's called Cora, we just launch Cora publicly on the day that we're recording this, which is really awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. You can think of it like a chief of staff, an AI chief of staff for your email, helps manage your email with AI. It's very cool. We can go into more later. We have another one called Sparkle, which is an AI file cleaner. We have another one called Spiral that does content automation with AI. we originally incubated Lex, which is an AI document writer, which we spun out into its own company and my every co -fundor, Nathan runs that.

29:05And basically we bundle everything together. So you pay one price and you get access to all of the software that we make and we're constantly putting new stuff in the bundle. And I can tell you more about like, what kinds of things do we like to incubate and how do we like to incubate it? Because there's a lot of, there's some really interesting special things in there, but I've been bladding for a while, so I'll stop there. There's also consulting for much more on talk about, We have a lot of things to talk about. We have consultancy. We also do that. And that is another, that's like the third leg of the stool in the business.

29:30It doesn't fit quite as nice into my ideas and apps framing. But we spend a lot of time with big companies where we teach them how to basically how to be a actress. We train all the people on how to use AI. And it's very cool. It's really fun and a very, a very important part of what we do. That feels like a billion dollar business right there. I want to come back to it. I can't stop. Because everybody wants to learn this. Okay, so share a few ways that you guys operate. You mentioned that your team doesn't write any code. What are just some ways that allow you to operate this efficiently? I know your team's really small.

30:05You have a daily newsletter, you have three, four products, you have a consulting arm. How big is the team ever? We have 15 people. 15 people. So just give us insight into some of the ways you operate that are kind of at the bleeding edge. Okay, so a couple of things. One, and I think everyone should do this, is we have an head of AI operations. I sit with her once a week, and every time I'm doing something repetitively, I'm like, we put it in a to -do list, and she's just constantly building prompts, and building workflows, and stuff like that, so that I and everyone else on the team are just automating as much as possible.

30:39And I think that has been a big unlock, because it's really hard to, if you're working in a job all day, you're fighting fires, and like you're like, okay, am I going to do this in the way that I know how, or am I going to do it in the new way that might not work? Like I'm going to spend a bunch of time in Zapier like building some no code automation, I don't want to do that. And having AI operations lead lets you basically identify those things and have them solved without people who are doing the work actually getting, like having to take time to do it, which I think makes it much more likely it happens.

31:10There's always a trick with that where it's like, you have to make sure it gets used. So it's basically your, but don't have any little applications internally. But if you're good at making applications you will use, it's great. Highly recommend having an AI operations lead. Imagine you saw the CEO of Cora tweeted about this wanting to hire exactly this sort of person. Yeah. So clearly this is a trend. So the idea is that your point that this needs to be somebody who's outside of the day -to -day work of the company and is specifically focused on helping the team be more efficient with AI. Yeah.

31:43And then is this person mostly just you automating you or can they help other people? No, she helps everyone basically. Okay, where we're starting right now is with the editorial operation. So there's so much stuff in the editorial operation where I or our editor -in -chief Kate like Kate is constantly doing like little small copy edits to make sure everything is like in every style and it takes like hours of hours a day. And so now Opus is at a point where you can give it a style guide and a prompt and it will go through anything you're writing and copy edit it, which is amazing. The trick is, it's not just building that.

32:27You also have to get Kate to be like, did you put the suit the prompt yet? Anytime someone gives or something? So there's a little bit of behavioral update, too, that has to happen, which I think is a really interesting organizational challenge. And And I think for us, it's a little easier because everybody inside the org is like very AI first and just wants to go do it. We don't have anyone really who's like, I don't know, I don't really want to do this. And that's a whole different challenge, which I think a lot of organizations face. But there's always a problem of getting people to use it.

32:55That is a super cool. What is the background of this AI operations person? Her name is Katie Parrott. She does a lot, she actually does a lot of ghost writing for us. So she also, when people inside of every who are builders, often they just write themselves, but sometimes they want help, and she'll help them write about whatever they're working on. So that's how she started with it. She still does that, but she also spends a lot of time doing the A -A operation stuff. And then before that, she worked at Animals, which is a content marketing agency, like one of the top content marketing agencies, and they're very process -oriented.

33:30And I think the reason Katie is so good is because she's incredibly good at that kind of process stuff or like thinking about that. But she's also a great writer and she's also just incredibly excited by AI. She just wants to tinker and wants to use it and like that was the thing that got me to be like, okay, you should just come and do that instead of just ghost writing, we should add this to your plate and it's been really fantastic. So I think that's a at minimum, you really just want someone who's just like, I want to take care, I want to build stuff. There's also people who have a little bit more of that process orientation.

34:06I think that is important. And to the extent they understand the craft of the thing that they're trying to build for, that also helps a lot. This is an amazing tip. I feel like everyone's gonna start hiring these people. I think so. There's a couple other people who talk about this. I heard Rachel Woods, who's another, sort of she thinks a lot about AI stuff. She's talking about it. I think it's becoming like, it's becoming a thing. And I think it's really important. and it just like bleeds out into every other part of the work. So like we're doing this inside of the editorial work, but there's a lot of copy that goes out on Cora.

34:40And by the way, Cora is spelled C -O -R -A. So it's different from Q -U -O -R -A. It's slightly confusing. There's a lot of copy that goes out on Cora or Spiral or Sparkle that we want to have that same every quality bar for. And so we have, you know, engineers sending Kate like, here's the Figma file, can you go in like, do copy edits? and that sucks for everybody in K is one person and it's just really hard to do that. So one thing that we did, Natasha, she's one of the programmers, engineers on NKORA, built a Cloud Code command that just uses that prompt and checks through the entire code base for all the copy edits and then creates a pull request on GitHub and then sends the pull request to K.

35:23So she's just like looking at the pull request, doesn't mean like does this make sense? And so you can translate that prompt into, for example, a format that engineers can use. And suddenly your engineering team is writing marketing copy in the style you want. I think that's so cool. That is extremely cool. I'm going to take a little tangent. You keep mentioning Claude. And I'm curious just what is kind of in the stack of tools that you find yourself using, your team ends up using. This seems like Claude is a core part of it. I do love Claude. I would say I'm generally my first, thing that I open is O3.

35:56I'm like a Chatchee VT boy. And I think O3 is super high quality. I think it's great for writing, it's great for coding, it's great for all that stuff. And what it has that really makes a difference still from from Claude is it has memory. And I just love that. Like I've spent so much time yelling at Chatchee VT about like, I need my writing to be punchy and concise, you know, and it just knows that now. So I think when I ask it to write something for me, it's actually better than yours, or maybe not yours, but your average, your average Chatchuby T user. And I also find I use it a lot for self -reflection and personal growth type stuff.

36:34So it knows me. So when I send it a meeting chance to get them and I'm like, how did I do? It's like, well, you did that thing that you normally do, but you're way better on this other thing. And I like that. I think that's really great. So day to day, O3, that's my go -to. I think Cloud Opus is, first of all, Cloud Code. Everyone inside every, that's basically what we use. If you're building something, you're using Cloud Code. It's crazy, it's so good. Gemini just came out with something, so I'm very excited to try that because I think that's the model that we use most for the apps that we build, like inside the apps.

37:12It's incredibly powerful and it's incredibly cheap, which is great. So I wanna try the CLI tool they came out with. We also use codex a bit, which is OpenAI's coding tool, and that's for like, I want to one off self -contained, like, I want to pick off this little feature. What else I use? Going back to Cloud. Cloud Opus4 can do something that no other model, except one other model that I can't talk about, can do something that no other model can do. We won't go there. We don't want to get to in trouble. Okay, good. But yeah, no other model can do this, which is earlier versions of Cloud, and I think generally versions of other models when you ask them, is this piece of writing any good?

37:55Cloud, for example, would always give it a B plus, and then if you did another turn of the same conversation, you're like, I updated this, it would always go to A minus. And then if you get another chair and it would go to like a you know, so it like doesn't have the same kind of gut It's like it's sort of thinking about what you probably want to hear too much And there's various methods that you can use to like prominent prominent engineer around this like give it a template or like whatever And they sort of worked, but it just still doesn't doesn't have that thing where it's like can it tell if writing is interesting or any good?

38:27Does it have that gut sense and opus 4 has it? It's really wild. I think that's super important because it opens up all these use cases where you might want to use a language model as a judge. So for us, for example, we're working on a new version of our product spiral, which does content automations. You've used that in the past. We're doing a essentially clawed code, but for content style product where you say, I want to write a tweet. you give it all the documents, it has much memories, it creates a two -lis for itself, and then it goes in rights. And one of the things that is so interesting is now because it can judge things, part of its to -do list is, okay, I wrote three tweets, I'm going to like judge whether I think these are any good, and then it can improve before it comes back to you.

39:21And that's just like a huge, huge unlock that we were struggling for like three months like build this like crazy system to like try to get it to judge writing and then opus for just like one shot at it and we're like great this product works let's like let's start shipping it. So yeah I love it for that. Are there any other AI tools that you just use regularly mentioned granola even outside of the bottles so what are some that you think maybe people are sleeping on? I use granola so I used to use super whisper and whisper flow which I think are fantastic. We have an internal version of that called monologue that will be shipping in like a month they're so that I use now, but you can think of them as roughly equivalent and I think like generally speech to text interfaces are the future and more people should be using them and more people should be building them as affordances.

40:10I use, we use a notion all the time and I specifically use their meeting recording. I think that's mostly the stack. Okay, that was really helpful and super interesting. This episode is brought to you by Post -Hog, the product platform your engineers players actually want to use. Post -Hog has all the tools that founders, developers, and product teams need, like product analytics, web analytics, session replays, heat maps, experimentation, surveys, LLM observability, air tracking, and more. Everything Post -Hog offers comes with a generous free tier that resets every month. More than 90 % of customers use Post -Hog for free.

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41:21And make sure to tell them Lenny sent you That's posthog .com slash Lenny. Let's go back to ways that your team operates. You mentioned having Kate with that her name. Yeah. Okay. What else do you do that you think other companies should be doing? Or will eventually start doing? So the Cora team, which is Karen and Natasha. This is the infant team. That's the team. Well, it's Cora. It's Karen, Natasha, and 15 Claude code instances. So it's, you know, it's more powerful than you think. I love that this is just again, it glimpses into the future. One of the things that we do that I think is really cool, and they basically invented this.

42:03Like I know, like to do it this is they invented the idea of compounding engineering. So basically for every unit of work, you should make the next unit of work easier to do. So an example is in a Claude code world where you're not coding a lot. You end up spending a lot of time essentially typing PRDs. Like here's a document with exactly the stuff that I need to do, right? And so you could just be like, okay, cool, that's my job now. I'm going to just write PRDs. And so each success of PRD, it's the same amount of work. Or you could spend a little bit of time being like, there's a sort of platonic ideal of a PRD.

42:52And what I'm gonna do is write a prompt that can take my rambling thoughts and then turn that into a PRD. And so you spend a little bit of work to make all of the next like PRDs that you're doing easier to write because you're writing less of them. And so finding those little speed ups where every time you're building something, you're making it easier to do that same thing next time, I think gets you a lot more leverage in your engineering team. And so like, yeah, we have Karen and Natasha. And you know, Kora just came out of, just became probably wasn't probably able to have 2 ,500 active users.

43:29And like, there's like millions of emails going through it. And like, that's one of the products that we do as a 15 person company. It's kind of crazy. Maybe it is crazy. How do you do this speed up thing? Is it prompts that they continue to refine? A lot of it is prompts and automations and stuff like that. Got it. For automations, what's the tool? What's the tool used for automating automations? What they're using a lot of is quad code. So you can do slash commands in quad code, which are repeated prompts that you're doing. Got it. Okay. So basically they're building a library of prompts that make the process of, here's what I want to build to a good solid PRD that you can feed into Cloud Code.

44:11Yeah. More correct and more efficient. Exactly. Super interesting. And they just keep like a file where they put this into a project. Is that how they start? It's a GitHub. It's like a GitHub. It's like a GitHub where they can like share it with each other. Another thing that they do, which I think is very cool, is they use a bunch of clouds at once. But then they're also using like three other agents. So they love there's an agent called Friday that they love. That's like a, that's an AI Asian product called Friday. Yeah, yeah. And heard of that. Okay. There's another one called Charlie that they really love.

44:42And in particular, I think the thing they like about Charlie, we have a whole video about this, which I can send to you. Yeah, I like to. They did like a, you know, S tier through F tier of AI agents, which I think is so funny. And one of the things they really like about Charlie is that it lives in GitHub. So you can, when you get a, when you get a pull request, you can just be like at Charlie, like, can you, can you check this out? And that seems to work really well to have different agents that have slightly different perspectives. It's like different people that have different perspectives and have different taste.

45:14You can, I think, Kieran is one of those serious Rails files who just love Rails and they love the way that Rails feels. And so I think he has a real sensitivity to, okay, this agent, you know, try to do for example. It feels very, it feels very, it's very personal and it has a particular kind of style that maybe he likes versus, I don't know, Claude is a slightly different style. And I think all of that is so interesting that these things have personalities and that changes what you might want to use it for, why you might want to use three of them at once. That is so fascinating. It makes me think about Peter Deng's conversation again, where he talks about his hiring strategy and one of his key lessons.

45:58and he ended up hiring like the current head of product for JGPT, the current head of marketing at JGPT, the current head of engineering, like because he is incredible people and his philosophies to hire a team of Avengers where everyone is strong at certain things and to gather there, the perfect team versus everyone versus like the best at everything. And it's interesting that you can always do that with different product, different agents from different companies, you definitely can. And it makes me feel like there's a bigger market than people think, potentially where people will want different companies agents, not just all devins or not all codecs.

46:30I think there really is. It's definitely not like one one agent rule them all. That's interesting. Yeah. Oh my god. The two people on the core of team are what's their background? They both engineers or what are they? They're both engineers. Okay. Purens got this like crazy background where they both have really interesting backgrounds. Purens got this crazy background where he was previously like VP and at a startup. So like was effectively the CTO of a startup or maybe two startups and was one of the founders. And then before that, he was a composer, like a professional composer, and before that, he was a baker.

47:06So we did a team retreat in France last year, and he taught us all how to make croissants. My croissant was horrible. His was beautiful. That's the same. And generally, I think that kind of multi -dimensional type of talent is the kind of person that I love having it every. like because we're all generalists, we all want to use AI for all this like weird awesome creative things. And someone who has that background is going to have a good taste for not only agents, but what should the landing page look like or whatever, which I think is increasingly important, where you're trying to scale a team of generalists of 15 people to like five products.

47:41So that's Karen's background. Natasha's background is, I'm jealous because he only started learning to code when Chetjevite came out. He wanted to learn to code forever. And he's only I mean, no one had a code in an AI era. And I keep telling him, dude, like I learned a program in middle school from books. Like I had to go to Barnes & Noble and like buy a book. And there was nothing, I couldn't Google anything about like how this, how this, why this function wasn't working. I was just like, I was just like, yeah, there wasn't that go over, there was like weird beatie net forums and stuff that like I was like 12 and I probably shouldn't have been on there or whatever.

48:17So it's, he has gone so much faster than any other engineer, I think, like in a pre -AI era. And I see the same thing in the rest of the company. Like, I think there's this huge question about what happens when kids, like entry -level jobs are taken away by AI. And my take is like, that's worth thinking about. It's possible that that might be a problem at some point. But my take is whenever I see a kid with chat GBT, I'm like holy shit, they're gonna go so so much faster than any other Person that I've worked with like we have this guy Alex Duffy who works with us He writes for context window and he he just launched We taught AI's had a had a play diplomacy with each other Which is really cool and he did that whole thing and he's I think he's really really really really talented And when he came to us like I guess almost a year ago now It was one of those classic cases which I've seen over and over at every, which is you have great ideas, but you're not a good writer yet.

49:23And it's really hard for me to do anything with you until you're good enough at it. So I have to give you small little things until you get better and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And what I noticed with him is he was just making a year, like he made like a year is worth a progress in like two months because every time I sat down with him and told him, okay, here's how you tell a story. Here's how you think about a headline. like he recorded all of it, put it into a prompt, and like he never made the same mistake twice. And I think he's so much accelerated from where he would have been because of this stuff, and I see that in lots of other parts of the work.

49:58So Nishash is another good example. And so I think generally people are gonna figure out that like some 20 -year -old with Cheshire's subscription is like super powerful if you just like, mentor them. And I think that's great. Man, there's so many threads I could follow here. There's all this fear of entry level people will never, like the roles are disappearing for entry level people, and so how will we ever have senior people if these people can't learn to do things as an entry level person? And what you're saying is, chat GPT in these tools help you accelerate really quickly. So you don't really need to be at the bottom wrong for a long time.

50:33Yeah, you're effectively learning how to be one level above the entry level from the beginning. and this is sort of my whole allocation economy thesis where when you look at what skills are going to be valuable in the AI era, one big group of skills are the skills of managers. Today, their human managers tomorrow, everyone's a model manager. Right now, AI is not, like right now management skills are not broadly distributed because it's very expensive, another expensive thing that, so 8 % of the workforce is managers. it's now going to be much cheaper to manage. So more people are going to have to do it.

51:13And so that's the thing that kids, 20 year olds, whatever I see now are going to start to have to learn. In addition to, you know, it's not like you can just say, like, okay, go do it and then come back. Or you have to be able to go into the work that's being done and help make it better. But they're learning both at the same time. They're learning how to manage and how to do the actual work. So that they're good at it. And the managing here is managing agents, right? Yeah, or the AI. And so this is a good coming back to your point about how this core team, and I guess you said everyone, every doesn't write code, zero code written.

51:51Now it's just managing agents that are writing code for you. Yeah. Okay. I've never heard of a company at this stage. So this is extremely cool. So the workflow is they give it, Here's what I want. We're fine at using this cool prompt library that they've that they build on and agents build code, write the code. Then basically the time is spent reviewing code and then reviewing the output. What does it look like? It does it feel like and then continuing to refine. Wow. So you guys are at where Michael from cursor said we will be. So I chatted with him a few months ago. He said in a year, this is where he thinks thing will be where we're not looking at code anymore.

52:28You guys are already there. Although you're looking at code. You're still looking at code. I think they definitely are looking at code. So you're doing a code review before you can write anything. And I do think like Danny who runs Spiral, which is the cloud code for content tool I was talking about that we're building, he spent a couple of days digging into the internals of some third party library that we were interested in just because it's helpful to know. It's helpful to understand those things. But then he's not actually writing any code once you understand that he's just like off -telling cloud code what to do and I think that's I think that's really that's really important.

53:08This is an insane milestone. We're hitting here like there's this you know sense We're getting to a place where you don't need to really understand code You don't have to write any code like we'll get there and that like you guys are there I think this is like so easy to overlook how wild this is You have a product team not writing code at all. It is really wild I think it's really wild in particular, just like having a small group of people that have... Everyone's multi -dimensional, everyone has all these different skills, everyone's a generalist, everyone's AI forward. So what you can do in an environment like that with just still a small team is crazy and you're kind of inventing all these new principles for like how do we work together, how do we do engineering, all that kind of stuff.

53:47And I think that's what makes the right... That's why I like doing that is because they're writing that we do from that. I think it's really good because we can talk about it from a sort of position of experience. But I do want to say something else, which is, we're not at a point yet where the people that work at every could do what they do if they didn't know how to code. Yeah, this is what I'm going to ask. Which is a different bar. And I think for a long time, it's going to be valuable to know how to code for a long time. But this has been, this is like a progression that is not a new progression.

54:24So for example, when I was in middle school learning to code, the new hot thing was scripting languages, which is like Python and JavaScript. But if you were a real programmer, you would understand the language underlying Python and JavaScript, which was written in C. And scripting languages were like, we're not totally real. In order to really do anything interesting, you have to be able to learn both parts of the stack. Same thing for C programmers. when I guess in the 70s he was invented, it was like you got to learn, you got to be able to write assembly. And English is just like a layer on top of scripting languages.

55:03So I think all of those things were right in the sense that there's especially during transitions, there's a lot of reasons why it's important to be able to go down a layer in the stack and it gets less and less frequent over time, but that still takes a long time. And there are sometimes when even if you're a JavaScript or Python programmer, it's useful to know like how all that how that stuff works, how it's written and see how it's how it's implemented. It's today it's much less important than it used to be, but that took like 10 or 20 years, and I think that's the same thing is going to be true for programming, like having that skill is super important and will accelerate you significantly.

55:39It will sort of start to get less important over time, but we're not close to that yet. Okay, that's a really important point. I'm glad you went there. So, do you have a sense of how far we might be from you hiring someone to build another product that isn't an engineer? Like a real SaaS product? Yeah, so like, hey, we have this idea. We want to bring someone on to actually lead it very far like not even Not within site, but there's a lot of things that could be products that are A layer a level down from that that I think that you could do almost now. So like an example We were talking about DIA the new AI browser from the browser company, DIA has these things called skills, which are effectively like little AI apps that you can run in the browser.

56:25You can prompt them and they run on the webpage and do work for you. A non -technical person can build that. Same thing for custom GBT's from Tatch -BT. A non -technical person can definitely build that. So I think while I will definitely maintain that we're not anywhere close to anybody being able to build a conventional SAS app with zero programming knowledge aside from just a demo. There are going to be other forms of software. One of my things like software is becoming content. There's going to be other forms of software that don't look like the software today, but you can run, start and run as a business as a non -technical person, even if you don't know how to code, and that'll happen very soon.

57:07And it's already kind of happening. It just, it doesn't look like the thing that you're asking about. It's like, it's sort of like the difference between a Hollywood movie and like a YouTube video. Okay. I think that's really reassuring to a lot of people. Basically, what you're seeing is, AI just supercharges people who have a skill and allows them to do a lot more. Yeah. Okay. Is there any other way that you guys operate that is really interesting that might be worth sharing that helps you operate really quickly, helps you do more with less. I mean, I would love to talk about our, like, how we think about building products.

57:42Like, what products to build? Like, what do we end up building? Because I think that there's something sort of special about it that probably there's a playbook that is useful for people. So when I think about, this is only sort of snapped into focus recently. So a lot of this was just like doing it intuitively without really a thought for it. But when I think about the kind of things that we have ended up incubating, it's basically goes back to something I said at the beginning, which is there are these things that were historically really expensive. That only rich people are big companies could buy.

58:13So a chief of staff for your email, I think a therapist or like a lawyer is another interesting example. Someone to like organize your closet organize your organize your computer is another example. someone to go straight for you that are becoming orders of magnitude cheaper so that everyone can use them even if you're at a small startup. And so basically like when you're running, like we are sort of this AI first company, you're running into these all these little things where you're like, I wish I had a ghostwriter right now, but ghost writers are really expensive or I wish I had a lawyer but it wouldn't cost me like $25 ,000.

58:55Glowers are really expensive. And there's a lot more demand for those services than can be fulfilled because they're so expensive. And what AI does is it allows you to be like, oh, I could just use cloud for that. I can use Chetupetee for that. And so you're able to use the demand that you have that we can afford a lawyer. We have ghost writers, but there's a lot more that we can't do because we can't afford it. So we still have our lawyer and we still have our Ghost Riders, but we just do a lot more of that stuff. And so we noticed that, we start to then use like ChatRT and Cloud First, these general purpose tools to try it and see is this useful?

59:37Does this actually work all that kind of stuff? And then if it does, we will like unbundle it into its own separate thing that becomes an app. And I think what's really special about this time is the entire game board has been totally reset in terms of things you can build. Where five years ago, you're gonna build another Note Zap, we've been building Note Zap forever, another B2B SaaS app, it's all the same stuff, it's in slightly different packaging. And now it's totally new territory. No one knows what's going on, like everyone's inventing it as it happens, all these new workflows are being created in a very similar way to, I don't know, for example, when spreadsheets were first a thing on computers, like we were figuring out all these new workflows on spreadsheets, they got on bundle and to B2B SAS, same thing for ChatGbT and Cloud.

1:00:30And what's really cool is you can be like, cool, I'm using ChatGbT for this, it's really useful for me. And you might be like one of the first people to really notice that. And then because everybody that works at every is AI first and came to us because they read every, they read every. So they all have the same vibe where we're all kind of doing similar stuff. They become our first users. So we measure the success of the product by like, is it a banger inside of every? Like monologue that the app that I was talking to you about, like everyone just started using it. We're like, okay, we've got something here.

1:01:05And what's really interesting then is if everyone's side of every is it and people read every, they have a similar vibe to us too. So they become the next set of users. And that's a really, I think, interesting pipeline for building applications or building apps. It's a totally new green field so that all the stuff you're thinking about, it's probably new, which is really cool. And over time, what I think is organizations like ours, people who are playing at the edge, we're doing things that in three years, everybody else is going to be doing. So it may be niche for now, but it will be a big deal in three years when everyone else is the same needs that we do.

1:01:45That is really cool. When I'm hearing is GPT rappers are good idea and are building. I 100 % think GPT rappers are amazing and they've been much maligned for absolutely no reason and people don't understand how absolutely valuable they are. I think there's also just you guys are you raised a sip seat round. Oh, and this is a good time to maybe talk about that just like these products don't have to become some mega billion dollar hits. You kind of have this portfolio of companies, you have the content business. So I think there's a really interesting approach to that. How big these need to get to be successful.

1:02:23Maybe we just talk about that. Yeah. I really want every to be an institution that teaches people how to live a better, more human life with technology, particularly with AI. And both like teaches them how to do it with writing and the content we make and then builds tools for them to do that. But I think fundamental to building an institution is at least for me the way I would like to do it is I want internally to feel like this creative playground where we have the opportunity to take risks and do stuff and do weird stuff that just doesn't make any sense we can't justify anyone but we just feel like it would be fun.

1:03:01And so I think I'm always playing with that dynamic tension between institution serious we want this to be like lasting and important and it should just be fun. Like, let's play around. And I think having that tension is really valuable. And so I've always been hesitant to raise a lot of money because I think it locks you into having to be that serious thing that's totally going for it. And there's lots of companies that figure out that balance, but just for me, personally, as a founder, I'm like, I want to keep the optionality alive and I want to keep the playful feeling alive. And I think part of that comes from, I know, I have the control to do what I want.

1:03:40More or less. There's probably also some deeper psychological things going on there, which I'm happy to talk about if you want to get into it. But I think there's also just that's kind of what I want. And so when we started every, we raised a very small 700K precede round, and this is at the height of the creator economy. So we both started our newsletter as uniceater, and we started around the same time. It was the hypeiest, craziest thing. People were throwing money around. It was wild. So, but we raised 700K because it was like, I want to raise enough for us to be able to experiment, have a little cash cushion, but not so much that it locks us into anything.

1:04:15And we like send an email to all of our investors being like, and you're one of our investors. So, you've probably got this email with you. I mean, it's a tiny investor, but I'm in there. We send an email to everyone being like, this is probably not a venture business. So, you should not expect us to raise again. And we even raised on this slightly modified safe that gave everyone the option to convert to equity in three years, even if we didn't raise more money. So we did it in a way that allowed us the option to get really big and do the traditional thing and also the option to do it the way we want to do it.

1:04:48Maybe it's not a huge business, but we love it. That's great. And we did the same thing for this recent round where we raised up to two million from Weed Hoffman and starting line DC and we did it as what I've been calling a SIPC round which is basically they've committed $2 million but we can pull it down whenever we want and we just do it on a safe, at a set cap. And for me, that's really helpful because it allows me psychologically to take a lot more risk. Like, I don't, if we go to zero on bank account, I can get my money. Great. I don't have to think about it. But what's also really helpful is I'm not, and the rest of the team is not, staring at a gigantic number in the bank account, being like, cool, we can burn this, let's burn it.

1:05:33And also for our investors, I think Reed very much wants us to succeed, but I don't think he cares, like what size of businesses is? Like I think he's more philosophically aligned with the thing that we're trying to do. And if it becomes a huge business, he's psyched for it. And I think that kind of alignment is what I was looking for because I think there's this core creative spirit to the thing that I want to maintain. And I really care about having a big impact, but I think there's a lot of ways to have an impact. And one of them is building a $10 billion business. I think another way is like really changing how people see the world, see themselves in the world.

1:06:13And I think that's what stories do. and you don't necessarily, sometimes you do that by building a gigantic, gigantic company, but you don't necessarily always have to do that. Like a lot of the stories that we care about most are from people who maybe, maybe they weren't rich at all. And so I really like creating this place where we can make a really good business and I care a lot about that, but also the core of the soul of it is changing about, changing how people see themselves in the world. I love that you've kind of innovated a new like a middle ground way of fundraising not bootstrap and not just regular VC It's a sick seed and I love that there's two mill like you know if I raise 50 million and be like okay I get it.

1:06:53Let's not put 50 million in her bank account. We do have a two million It's too much for us. We can't yeah, I want to see that in her account That's another thing and you know We'll see how this ages like I might be back here in two years crying the blues because we didn't raise enough money or whatever Who knows? But that's the other thing is I do think we can get so much further with very small amounts of money. Like, Kora, I think all in to build Kora, we've spent maybe 300K, maybe. That's crazy because this product includes hours, yeah. This product was not even technically possible, even if you had billions of dollars like three years ago, not possible.

1:07:35Because you can't do email summarizing in automatic responses and all that kind of stuff without GBT. So not only was it totally impossible, but now we can get with two engineers, we can get the amount done that would have taken a team of 20 people. And I think that means that we need less money. And I don't think that VC has really caught up to that yet. And I think there are other companies that are doing, there's like a term called like seeds trapping. So there are other companies that are like kind of starting to wake up to this too. And I'm curious about how it changes the VC model. For sure for us, like we have a specific incubation model, which is a bit different from the VC model.

1:08:21And I think there's some differentiation in the stuff that we can do with founders, which is kind of cool. but yeah, I'm just trying to figure out like a shape that works for me and that's different from other people and we'll see how this goes. We'll revisit in a couple of years. Seems like it's going great from the outside. I'm gonna ask about a couple other things before we wrap up. When is around this consulting arm that you have? I think it's really interesting because, like I said, I feel like this could be a billion dollar business. I feel like every company right now is trying to figure out what the hell, what the hell is everyone else figured out that we're not doing?

1:09:02I've had so many emails from chief product officers at companies and be like, can you introduce me to some chief product officers that have done cool things with AI that we should learn from? Like so many people, and I just introduce them to each other. And it's cool because you guys are basically solving that problem for a lot of companies. So one is just maybe share a bit about what that side of the business for folks. And then too, I feel like you, I imagine you've seen companies that have done this really well, have adopted AI things that worked really well They found really proper good productivity gains and then you found companies that don't what do you find is the difference between those two?

1:09:35I love this question and I have a very specific opinion about this So one yeah, the consulting arm basically like we spent all of our time Playing around with new models writing about them and building stuff with them and we have a big audience So naturally, like we've gotten companies over time being like, can you just come and teach us how to do this? And so we started to do that. This is, you know, pretty nascent. It's probably been over the last like six to nine months, but like it's a pretty big business now. Like it's our it's it'll probably double this year like last year we did about a million.

1:10:07Maybe it'll be maybe it'll be more this year. We'll see. It depends on a couple we'll call a big contract out. So it might be way more than that. Billion, I predict a billion dollars a few years. But yeah, basically people are like, can you come help us learn how to do this? So what we do is we spend some time going and researching in your organization. So we go in and try to understand like, what are all the different teams doing? What are the repetitive tasks, some of the stuff we were talking about earlier? And then what we will do is first we present a little report tells you like, here's everything that we found.

1:10:40Here's not only that, but you have a chat bot where you can chat with all the interviews that we did, and you can pull out your own insights. You have a whole dashboard where it shows you, like, here are the teams that are really into this, here are the teams that are not. Here's how much leverage you might be able to get on different teams based on the interviews, and based on the AI analysis. It's pretty cool. And this is like, that's an app that I like, VideCoded, over weekend with Devon a year ago, and then Alex runs the part of the consulting, and has helped upgrade it. Then what we do is we have a training curriculum, So we go in and train each team and we customize it based on The interviews that we do because one of the interesting things about AI is it's such a general purpose technology And I think people who work inside companies 10 % of them are like I'm super curious about this 10 % are like I will never touch this and 80 % are like if you tell me how to do it for my job I'll do it and so we customize the training to be like here the exact prompts you're gonna use And here are the exact situations you're going to use them.

1:11:38And that really, I think, helps drive the adoption. We spend four weeks for each team, an hour a week, that kind of thing. It seems to be really cool. And then we'll often also, after this, go and build automations and do some of the AI operations stuff we were talking about earlier. Companies really like it. I think we work at a lot of big hedge funds and PE firms and big companies all kind of stuff. to your second question, which is like, what separates the good companies from the bad, or the companies that end up adopting this? I think the number one predictor is, does the CEO use Chatchee PT?

1:12:17Or insert your own chatbot. If the CEO is in it all the time being like, this is the coolest thing, everybody else is gonna start doing it. If the CEO is like, I don't know, this is for someone else, like no one else is going to be able to lead that charge and they're either going to have, if either they're going to be negative on it and so definitely no one's going to do it, or they're going to have way unrealistic expectations because they have no intuition for what's possible and they're just going to get really disappointed. But the CEOs that are using it all the time are able to like both drive the excitement and set reasonable expectations for what can be achieved and so those things end up working really well.

1:12:56And the people that do this really well, So for example, we work with a hedge fund called Walleye, which I had the founder on my podcast AI and I a few weeks ago, they're a gigantic $10 billion hedge fund. One of the things that they do, which I think is, I think they're basically the model for how to do this. First thing he did, which a lot of CEOs are doing, is send the, we're an AI first company email. Everyone's got the memo. You just got to really do it. And one of the things he said in his memo, which I love, is, I wrote this email at ChatGPT, and you should do. So like, you got to like in the map map.

1:13:31You got to like read from the front in that way. And then what he does, and I think what a lot of other like really cool companies do is they're doing like weekly meetings where people share prompts and share use cases. They're doing, they do like a weekly email to their entire company being like, okay, here's our usage, here are our usage stats for Chattabee T. Here are the people that like you're the people that came up with a new prompt and contributed to it. Like create this sort of like awareness and momentum because what's going back to the point I made earlier about you know 10 % of people are early adopters.

1:14:11Those are the people inside of a company that you need to find and highlight because they're going to just go spend all this time like figuring out what works and then all you have to do is like translate what they learn into the rest of the organization. And so if you create forums for them to be rewarded, you're going to automatically transfer a lot of their learnings to everybody else and encourage more of it. And I think that's kind of the secret. That is awesome. I love this advice. So just to reflect back what you just shared, a few kind of tactics you find that you encourage within companies.

1:14:40One is just send send as memo the Toby memo. I don't know if that's the right way to describe it. Who I think was first along these lines just where AI first it's going to be part of your performance review. It's going to be asking, can you do it in AI before you could, you know, I talked to anyone else. All these things and I'm just note, I wrote this using chatGPTs. It's a great idea. This idea of a weekly meeting. So it's like a live or zoom meeting where people share. Here's the thing I've learned about using AI. And then this weekly stats, an email of, here's how much we're using chatGPTs across the org.

1:15:10Here's some people that did some awesome work. Yeah. Amazing. And I especially love this very simple heuristic of, if your CEO uses chatGPTs or a cloud or whatever daily, it's going to work out. Yeah. That is super cool. I know it's early, but what kind of impact have you seen from a company kind of leaning into this and adopting AI widely? Anything you've seen either and ago to the year numbers wise? It's early. It's really hard to say other than, I think generally, people who do this well now feel like they can do way more work than they used to without having to hire more people. And so they're just going further faster at the same budget.

1:15:52I actually don't see a lot of people being like cool. We're going to fire a bunch of people. Also, I don't really want to do consulting where I'm like that. That sucks. But we've never had to say no. Mostly people are like cool. I'm just going to go further with the people that I have. I think also back to the first point I made about resharing American jobs. I have seen some companies, not the ones that we work with, but I have seen some companies of people that I'm friends with where they're like, we have a call center somewhere, but I think I can get the same amount done with like two employees in the US that have that use like one of these, you know, customer service platforms, like they're still not totally automatic.

1:16:33Like, I think that clarinous CEO thing, I was bullshit. But yeah, you can have a couple people in the US that maybe pay a little bit less to than you would for like 100 people somewhere else. And obviously, you know, that's a guy goes to everyone has to make for themselves, but I've definitely seen that happen. And yeah, I think that's the get more done with the same amount of people. Maybe to close out our conversation and only come back to this idea that you referenced, but I want to spend a little more time on this, which is this idea of the allocation economy. If I understand it correctly, we've been in this knowledge economy where people get paid to do a thing.

1:17:17And your thesis is that we're moving to this allocation economy where the manager skills become more important and we're going to be spending more time managing. And I think what's amazing about this is it also tells you which skills will matter more in the future, which is something I think a lot of people are thinking about. So, so maybe just answer that question and share whatever you think is important to share to give people sense of what you're thinking. Yeah, so this is based on our article I wrote like two to and a half years ago. So this is back before like agents were even like thought of as viable.

1:17:49And I was like really trying to think about how do I express what in my experience using this every day, like what skills are useful for me? Because I think that will be the case for a lot of other people. And I think that's the kind of the best method I think to do these sorts of predictions is you have to be doing it all the time yourself and then that informs your opinion about this stuff. So what I noticed using at the time like GBD3 or maybe GBD4 was that I was spending a lot of time, for example, thinking about how do I communicate the problem? How do I gather the right information for the problem?

1:18:34How do I put it in the right way so that the model that I'm working with gets it? How do I pick which model to give it to you? And how do I maybe divide up the task to be like, OK, this model does this, this model does this. Based on what I know to be like what's good and what's back. How do I give them feedback? How do I have a vision for what I want and a set of criteria for whether it's good? All that stuff is exactly how I found myself using these tools. And I was like, oh, that's just managing. And once that clicks for you, I think you'll start to see a lot of other things. So a really good example is there's a big complaint that it's like, well, how can I have a AI do this?

1:19:18I can't trust that they're going to do it well. So I just do it myself. And I'm just like, yeah, that's exactly what every first -time manager says. You always have this problem where you're like, okay, if I delegate it, it's not done in the way that I want it to be done. If I do it myself, I get no leverage. And so that's how a manager has to learn how to be a manager is like, When do I lean in and maybe micromanage a little bit? When can I delegate? How can I trust it and how do I divide out the task and all that kind of stuff? I think there's a lot of overlap in those skills. It's just those skills are not broadly distributed right now, but they will be in the future because it will be so much cheaper to be a manager.

1:19:58Specifically, I was looking at the article you wrote, the skills that you highlight will be more valuable is evaluating talent, vision, taste, and to your point, went to get into the details when it makes sense to dive in. Yeah. Awesome. And then there's also kind of a connected point you made that you reference, which is that generalists will become more and more valuable. And the future you mentioned that everyone at every is a generalist. Yeah. Share a little bit about that. Yeah. I find, I mean, maybe it's because I'm a generalist, so you should take this and take this with grain of salt. Same.

1:20:28But I think that's one of the things that has made AI so awesome for me is like, you know, I love to dab on different things, so it's like in one day I can be like coding an app and like making a video and like making images and writing and like all that kind of stuff and Chagy B .T. is right there with me. And I think what we've basically, what has happened as civilization has progressed from like ancient Greece to now is what we've discovered is the more that we specialize, the better we can coordinate across many different people. And so it's sort of, it's like the Adam Smith, you know, like there's a pin factory in someone's banging a pin or whatever his thing is, is specialization against retreat.

1:21:12And there have been a lot of really good impacts of that. And I think you can, like one of my favorite examples of this is back to like ancient Greece and ancient Athens. Athens was a civilization of generalists, at least for citizens. There's like, they have some, you know, a bad history with women and people who are slaves, but like, let's just put that to the side for a second. If you're a citizen, generalist, you could be expected to be a fighter, a judge, a juror, maybe a general. Like, you could expect it to have many different roles inside of your society in your lifetime. time. That changed, though, because Athens became an empire.

1:21:58And as it became an empire, if you're going to send a general off to go and invade Sicily or whatever, you want that person to be pretty skilled. And so it started to break the general thing into people start to have specific roles, and they coordinate with each other and all that kind of stuff. And I think that pattern has actually been really good for developing but it's also, in a lot of ways, it's not as fun. It's actually really cool to be a well -rounded person. And I think the interesting thing about AI is that it's a little bit like, you can think of it like having 10 ,000 PhDs in your pocket.

1:22:35It's like, it knows so much about every little branch of human knowledge and every art form and every way of making things or building things. And you just have access to that. So it's doing a lot of the, it's good for doing a lot of the specialized tasks that you might have had to spend like 10 years getting good at learning about this particular species of cicadas, you know exactly how they like reproduce. But now you've got this thing in your pocket that can tell you all about that in any given context at any given time. And so you're empowered to jump a lot more between all those different domains of skill.

1:23:13and you can get more done as, for example, like a founder where I think we can stay at 15 people much longer than we would be able to. So the people inside of every can stay generalists for much longer. And I think that that may sort of ripple out into the rest of the economy, where instead of gigantic massive corporations where each person is doing one little button turning, you have many more smaller organizations with more generalists. And I think that would actually be a really good thing. This reminds me I was talking to my personal trainer that I'm trying out for a little bit and she said that she's a very big vision kind of high level person and not good at executing, executing, like we're staying organized and chat TPP is such a godsend for her because she's just like, here's what I wanna do roughly, it's help me get it done.

1:24:01That's great. And so yeah, and it really made me think about just how much value all this stuff is gonna unlock. This was amazing. It was everything I wanted it to be. But with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Dan, are you ready? I'm ready. Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? Well, I already recommended one, which is a warm piece. Definitely got to read that. If you want like a tall -celled primer, I would read the death of Ivan Iliic. Another good one is a swim in a pond in the rain, which is by George Saunders, and that's a collection of Russian short stories that is also about writing.

1:24:41And in particular, I really like the Russians because a lot of the Russian novelists are dealing with the effects of technology on much traditional Russian way of life. And they're very kind of in this really interesting middle ground between a sort of romantic outlook on the world and a more rationalist like we're progress, we're making progress. And that's one of the things you'll find in Anticharena, and God, what's the guys? What live in is out in the fields with the peasants, like doing the siphon thing? That's Tolstoy, like kind of like thinking about, oh, what would it be like instead of being a nobleman who's like trying to make farms way more efficient?

1:25:19I was just like with my siphon. That was really happy. Anyway, so they're dealing with a lot of similar stuff to, I think, AI. The master in his emissary is another really good one and that's about basically how the different hemispheres of the brain view reality. It's really, really good and I think it relates to a lot of AI stuff too. I think those are my three or four. Yeah. Excellent list. I think nobody's mentioned most either any of these. That's always a good sign. You have a favorite movie or TV show you really enjoyed. Yes. I really love Deadwood. Have you seen it? I absolutely love it.

1:26:00I remember when they stopped it for some reason I think he had to go do something else at HBO. It was so sad. It was amazing. Yeah. David Mouch's incredible, national treasure, incredible writer. But what I really think, what I really love about it, and I only recently watched it, is He talks about deadwood being about how order forms out of chaos. So it's this frontier town, people are going to it, and there's no law, there's no rules. And by season three, there's a mayor and all the industry has come in and it's a real proper town. And I just love that. And I think there's a lot of parallels from the Western frontier to technology frontiers and so I think that show is like a really interesting study in that kind of dynamic.

1:26:50I love how everything connects to how tech works and how AI came to be. I love this. Thank you. The other favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? I don't have a good answer for that because I just spent a lot of time using our internal products, but like my stock answer is granola. So I do really love granola. I my one gripe with them, and I hope they listen to this podcast is I really want to export all my notes. I want an API, but other than that, I think it's a fantastic product. That is definitely the most mentioned product in this segment for the past couple of months.

1:27:22So, you could jump granola. I can't help but mention you get a year free of granola if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter. Well, what a freaking deal. And not just you, but your whole company gets free granola for a year. What a deal. This is not a paid promotion by me. I just, you know, that's just how I feel. So I'm glad I'm glad I'm glad it's part of the bundle. Yeah, incredible. Okay. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life? So basically like I use chat you pay all the time and it has memory so I was like, you know, I'm going on Lenny's podcast What would my life motto be?

1:27:52And it said your life motto is a witness deeply build bravely You you prize slow Attentive seeing whether it's reading tall story tracking meditation themes or extra hanging David Milge paragraphs So like we're it's hitting all the stuff. I just mentioned which is really funny and and then build bravely. You turn those insights into concrete things, like every in Korra and long form essays and all that kind of stuff. So I think there's something about that. Actually, this reminds me. This actually reminds me of the actual motto, which is, and I didn't come up with this. I think it's like plenty the younger said, do things worth writing about and write things worth reading?

1:28:28Seems like a pretty good summation. Do things worth writing about and read things worth reading? Write things worth reading. Write things worth reading. That's, that's tribute to the motto of both of our newsletters. That is really good. Okay. And by the way, I love that you asked Chatchy P .T. What's my life motto? And this is interesting. So it didn't give me the answer, but inspired the answer. Yeah. And I think that's actually like exactly how I use it. Wow. It's an extension of our brains already. Yeah. Last question. I was reading somewhere where you wrote that you stopped writing at one point.

1:29:05And you're just like, I need to do other things. I need to build this company. And then you'd realize I need to get back to writing because things started going sideways. And I feel like this is such an interesting corollary to a lot of this that you talked about of, do things that make you happy, stay close to joy. Just share what happened there because I didn't know that. This is definitely not a lightning round thing. So I'm, I will expound, but I'll try to do it as quickly as possible. Perfect. I think generally when you're building a company, even if you do it the way that I do it, which is, you know, you don't raise a lot of money and you try to, you try to stay in control.

1:29:40There is a big temptation to try to run the company in the way you think you should. And I have this weird thing where I'm like, I really love writing, but I also really love business. And there just was, there were not a lot of models for me of people who had successful businesses that were also writers. Turns out there are, but I didn't know about that for a while. And so, you know, early on at every, like, it was growing really well, because I was writing a lot, Nathan was writing a lot. And when I stopped writing, the business didn't work as well, because media businesses don't follow the same pattern as tech startups, because if you're a media business, and you are a founder who then hires people to make the product, which is right, if you have product market a fit before you lose it, and maybe you hire people with our good writers, but that's hard.

1:30:30It's a total opposite pattern for startups. You build the first version of the product and then you hire people to build the rest of it. That's what I did. I also really struggled with, okay, what are the implications for that in my career? I think it was hard for me to admit. I actually want to write because I just didn't have any examples of someone being the kind of writer that I wanted to be. What's really interesting is three years into the business, the business has been pretty flat. I was like pretty miserable because I was like not doing the thing that I really wanted to do. And I asked Chechi Patia, I was like, is there are any examples of writers that have built businesses?

1:31:07And it was like, yeah, Joel Spolstie, who built Trello in Stack Overflow. There's Jason Fried, who I've known for a long time and I've always always liked to have to put I forgot about in this context. There is Sam Harris, who's got a great podcast and he's got a gigantic meditation app. There is Bill Simmons, who's like an incredible podcaster and also built the ringer. It's all just a Spotify for a couple hundred million bucks. Like there's a lot of these people. And there are patterns that they use to build companies that are pretty well understood. They're just not typical Silicon Valley patterns.

1:31:43And so I was like, cool. Like, I just want to be a writer. I think it would be really fun. And so I sort of flipped. I still have the builder, entrepreneur, founder, part of my identity. but I sort of flipped it to be like writing is at the center and I'm like unapologetic about it. And that's actually good for the business. It's good for me and it's good for the business. And the more I've leaned into that, doing the thing that like if you told anyone that you're starting a business where it's like, well, we're going to be a newsletter and we're going to incubate all these apps and we're going to do consulting and whatever.

1:32:13They would be like your nuts. Like everyone wants to do that. Of course, every founder wants to do that. But like you have to focus, you have to, you can't write like whatever, but every time I've kind of just leaned into something that feels like the most the ultimate luxury of like my hidden secret desire, it's actually worked a lot better. And I think you end up what it really is is there's a huge tax to doing something every day that you're not quite, you don't quite like that much, you're not quite a fit for. And by sort of giving into that those secret desires, you end up finding a shape for the work that you do and the business that you build that is good for you.

1:32:50And that's always going to be a somewhat unique shape from other businesses that have been dealt. There's always going to rhyme with other things, but I think finding that unique shape instead of just kind of cargo -cold thing like what you think a company should look like is definitely a much better way to be successful. And it's also a much better way to live. I mean, this is going to hit hard with a lot of people who are listening or maybe founders or want to be founders. And this resonates with a lot of people that have been on this podcast during similar lessons. Dan, this was incredible.

1:33:19Through final questions, we're gonna focus, check out every, find you online, and how can listeners be useful to you? So, you can find us at every .to. I'm also on Twitter at Dan Shipper. You can go there to check out our products, our newsletter, if you want to stay on top of the AI, all that kind of stuff. I also have a podcast, it's called AI and I, you can find it on YouTube and Spotify, and how can people be useful? Honestly, I think the most useful thing for someone like me based on what I want to do is I want people to find interesting cool ways to use AI that actually helps start to make their lives better.

1:33:57So just go do that and tell me about it. And I think that'll be great. So the best way to tell you is it comments on your YouTube show, is it emailing you, DM you? I would say tweet me. If you subscribe to every, you can also reply to those emails in the end, they eventually get forwarded to me. So tweet me, reply to every, and if you want to comment on YouTube, great. I'm not in the YouTube comments as much as I should be. I don't do that, maybe do that. Okay, Dan, this was incredible. Thank you so much for sharing. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

1:34:34If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com. See you in the next episode!