YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Shipper

lines on the record: 120
first: 2025-07-17
most recent: 2025-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say tweet me if you subscribe to every, you can also reply to those emails and they eventually get forwarded to me. So he 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you can find us at every.to. I'm also on Twitter at Dan Schipper. You can go there to check out our products, our newsletter. If you want to stay on top of AI, all that kind of stuff. I also have a podcast. It's called AI and I. You can find it on YouTube and on 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 like actually helps make their lives better. So like just go do that and tell me about it. And I think that'll be great. What's the best way to?”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there's a huge tax to doing something every day that you're not quite, you don't quite like that much, or 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. And that's always going to be a somewhat unique shape from other businesses that have been built. It's always going to rhyme with other things. But I think finding that unique shape instead of just kind of cargo culting like what you think a company should look like is definitely a much better way to be successful. And it's also much better way to live.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just not typical Silicon Valley patterns. And 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. 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 they would be like you're nuts like everyone wants to do that of course every founder wants to do that but like you have to focus you have to like you can't write like whatever but every time i've kind of just leaned into um something that feels like the most the ultimate luxury of like my my hidden secret desire it's actually worked a lot better and um i think you end up what what it really”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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. And what's really interesting is like three years into the business, like 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 ChatGPT, I was like, are there any examples of writers that have built businesses? And it was like, yeah, Joel Spolsky, who built Trello and Stack Overflow. There's Jason Fried, who I've known for a long time and I've always looked at you, but 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. So I'll just Spotify ever 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 fit before, you lose it. And maybe you hire people that are good writers, but that's hard. It'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. And so that's what I did. And I also really struggled with, okay, what are the implications for that and for my career?”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think generally when you're building a company, even if you do it the way that I do it or did it, which is you don't raise a lot of money and you try to, you try to stay in control, there 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. 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 we were, it was growing really well because I was writing a lot and Nathan was writing a lot. And when I stopped writing, the business didn't work as well because.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is interesting. So it didn't give me the answer, but inspired the answer. And I think that's actually how I use it.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically, I use ChatGPT all the time and has memory. So I was like, you know, I'm going on Lenny's podcast with my life motto be. And it said, your life motto is a witness deeply build bravely. You prize slow, attentive seeing, whether it's reading Tolstoy, tracking meditation themes, or X-raying a David Milch paragraph. So like it's hitting all the stuff I just mentioned, which is really funny. And then Bill bravely, you turn those insights into concrete things like Every in Quora 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 Pliny the Younger said, do things worth writing about and write things worth reading seems like a pretty good summation.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Months This is not a paid promotion by me. I just, you know, that's just how I feel. So I'm glad it's part of the bundle.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a good answer for that because I just spent a lot of time using our internal products, but my stock answer is granola. So I do really love granola. My one gripe with them, and I hope they listen to this podcast is I really want to export all my notes. I want to API. But other than that, I think it's a fantastic product.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, David Melch is incredible, national treasure, incredible writer. But what I really think, what I really love about, and I only recently watched it, is, um, He talks about Deadwood being about how order forms out of chaos. So it's this frontier town. People are going to it, and like there's no law, there's no rules. And by season three, there's like a mayor and all the industry has come in and it's like a real proper town. And I just love that. And I think there's a lot of. 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, what would it be like instead of being a nobleman who's like trying to make farms way more efficient? I was just like with my scythe. That was like really happy. Anyway, so they're dealing with a lot of similar stuff to, I think, AI. The master and 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, yeah, I think those are my three or four. Yeah.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I already recommended one, which is Warren Peace. Definitely got to read that. If you want a Tulsa primer, I would read the death of Ivan Ilyich. 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. And in particular, I really like the Russians because a lot of the Russian novelists are dealing with the effects of technology on 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 progressive, we're making progress. And that's one of the things you'll find in Anna Kareno. And God, what's the guys, what Levin is out in the field with the peasants, like doing the scythe thing? Like that's Tolstoy kind of like.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you might have had to spend like 10 years getting good at learning about this particular species of cicada. So you know exactly how they like, you know, 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. And you can get more done as, for example, like a founder where 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 like one little button turning, you have many more smaller organizations with more generalists.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That changed though because Athens became an empire. And 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 kind of 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 civilization, but it's also In a lot of ways, like 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. It'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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can, like one of my favorite examples of this is back to ancient Greece, ancient Athens. Athens was a civilization of generalists, at least for citizens. They have some bad history with women and people who are slaves. But like, let's just put that to the side for a second. If you were a citizen, Generalists, you could be expected to be a fighter, a judge, a juror, maybe a general. You could expect it to have many different roles inside of your society in your lifetime.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I find, I mean, maybe it's because I'm a generalist, so you should take this with a grain of salt. But I think that's one of the things that has made AI so awesome for me is I love to dabble in 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 ChatGPT is right there with me. 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 like the Adam Smith. There's a pin factory and someone's making a pin or whatever his thing is specialization in gains from trade. There have been a lot of really good impacts of that.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a big complaint that it's like, well, how can I have AI do this? Like, I 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? And when can I delegate and how can I trust it? And how do I divide up the task and all that kind of stuff? And so I think there's a lot of overlap in those skills. And it 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I gather the right information for the problem? How 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, okay, this model does this, this model does this based on what I know to be what's good and what's bad. How do I give them feedback? How do I have like 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is based on our article I wrote like two and a half years ago. So, this is back before, like. Agents were even like thought of as viable. And 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'll be the case for a lot of other people. And I think that's the kind of 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. What I noticed using at the time, like GBT3 or maybe GBT4. Was that I was spending a lot of time, for example, thinking about how do I communicate the problem?”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 use one of these customer service platforms. They're still not totally automatic. I think that Klarna CEO thing, that was bullshit. But yeah, you can have a couple people in the US that maybe you pay a little bit less to than you would for like 100 people somewhere else. And obviously, you know, those are that's a calculus that everyone has to make for themselves. But I've definitely seen that happen. I think that's the get more done with the same amount of people”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I actually don't see, you know, I don't see a lot of people being like, cool, we're going to like fire a bunch of people. Also, I don't really want to do consulting like that. Like 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 kind of the first point I made about reshoring American jobs.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, those 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 figuring out what works. And then all you have to do is 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You gotta like lead from the front in that way, and then what he does, and I think what a lot of other really cool companies do is they're doing weekly meetings where people share prompts and share use cases. They're doing, they do a weekly email to their entire company being like, okay, here's our usage stats for ChatGPT. Here are the people that like.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 both drive the excitement and set reasonable expectations for what can be achieved. And so those things end up working really well. And 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, a gigantic $10 billion hedge fund. Like 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies really like it. I think we work with a lot of like big hedge funds and PE firms and big companies, all that kind of stuff. To your other 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 chat GTP? Or insert your own chatbot. If the CEO is in it all the time being like, this is the coolest thing, everybody else is going to 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, 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him. 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 are the exact prompts you're going to use. And here's the exact situations you're going to use them. And that really, I think, helps drive the adoption. We spent four weeks with 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, basically, people were like, can you come help us learn how to do this? So, what we do is we spend some time going and researching 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 here's everything that we found. Here'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. We have a whole dashboard where it shows you like, here's the teams that are really into this. Here are the teams that are not. Here's like how much leverage you might be able to get on different teams based on the interviews and based on the AI analysis is pretty cool. And this is like, that's an app that I like vibe-coded over a weekend with Devin, like a year ago. And then Alex runs part of the consulting has helped upgrade it. Then what we do is we have a training curriculum.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this question, and I have a very specific opinion about this. So, one, yeah, the consulting arm basically like we spend 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 pretty nascent. It's probably been over the last six to nine months, but a pretty big business now like it's our, it's probably double this year. Like last year, we did about a million. Maybe it'll be maybe it'll be more this year. We'll see. It depends on a couple. We have a couple big contracts out. So it might be way more than that.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's that we need less money. And I don't think And I think there are other companies that are doing, there's like a term called like seed strapping. 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. We have a specific incubation model, which is a bit different from a VC model. And I think. 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. Shape that works for me, and that's different from other people. And we'll see how this goes.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to see that in her account. That's another thing. And 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. Cora, I think all in to build Quora. We've spent Maybe 300k, maybe. That's crazy because This product includes salaries, yeah. This product was not even technically possible, even if you had billions of dollars like three years ago. Not possible because you can't do email summarizing and like 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, like we can get. The amount done that would have taken a team of like 20 people.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think he cares what size of business this is. 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. And I think that's what stories do. And you don't necessarily, sometimes you do that by building a 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 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. If we go to zero on the bank account, I can get more money. Great. I don't have to think about it. But what's also really helpful is I'm not in the rest of the team is not staring at a gigantic number in the bank account being like, cool, like we can burn this. Let's burn it. And also for our investors like. I think Reed very much wants us to succeed, but like.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We sent an email to everyone being like, this is probably not a venture business. 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. Maybe 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 2 million from Reid Hoffman and starting line VC. And we did it as what I've been calling a SIF seed round, which is”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know I have the control to do what I want more 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, you know, I think there's also just that's kind of what I want. And so when we started every, we raised like a very small 700K precede round. And this is at the height of the creator economy. So we both started our newsletters. You and I started our newsletters around the same time. It was like the hypiest, craziest thing people were throwing money around. It was like wild. 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. And we like sent an email to all of our investors being like, and you're one of our investors. So you probably got this email.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think having that tension is like really valuable. And so I've always been sort of hesitant to raise a lot of money because I think it locks you into having to be that serious thing that's like totally going for it. And there's lots of companies that figure out that balance. But just for me, like personally as a founder, I'm like, I want to keep the optionality alive and I want to keep the kind of playful feeling alive. And I think part of that comes from.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 teaches them how to do it with writing and the content we make and then builds tools for them to do that. And I think fundamental to building an institution is, at least for me, the way I would like to do it is I want internally it to feel like this creative playground where we have the opportunity to like take risk 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. And so I think I'm always playing with that dynamic tension between institutions serious. We want this to be like lasting and important. And it should just be fun. Let's play around.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're thinking about, like, 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, were doing things that in like three years everybody else is going to be doing. So it may be kind of niche for now, but it will be a big deal in three years when everyone else has the same needs that we do.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's really cool is you can be like, cool, I'm using ChatGPG for this. It's really useful for me. And you might be like one of the first people to like really notice that. And then because everybody that works at Every is AI first and came to us because they reads every, they read every. So they all have the, we all have the same vibe. 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, the app that I was talking to you about, like everyone just started using it. We were like, okay, we've got something here. And what's really interesting then is if everyone inside of every uses 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The entire game board has been like totally reset in terms of things you can build where five years ago it was like you're going to build another notes app like we've been building notes app for forever like another b2b SaaS app like it's all the same stuff in like slightly different packaging and now it's like totally new territory no one knows what's going on like everyone's inventing it as as as it happens right 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 unbundled into B2B SaaS. Same thing for ChatGPT and Cloud.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we noticed that. We start to then use ChatGPT and Claude first, these general purpose tools to try it and see, is this useful? Does this actually work? All that kind of stuff. And then if it does, we will unbundle it into its own separate thing that becomes an app And I think what's really special about this time is.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so basically, like when you're running, like we are sort of this AI first company. Running into these little things where you're like, I wish I had a ghostwriter right now. But ghostwriters are really expensive or I wish I had a lawyer, but it wouldn't cost me like $25,000. Lawyers 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 ChatGPT for that. And so you're able to use the demand that you have that like we can afford a lawyer. We have ghostwriters, but like 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 writers, but we just do a lot more of that stuff.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 or big companies could buy. So 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 computer is another example, someone to ghost right for you that are becoming orders of magnitude cheaper. That everyone can use them, even if you're at a small startup.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would love to talk about our like how we think about building products, like what products to build, like what do we end up building? Because I think there's something.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I will definitely maintain that we're not anywhere close to anybody being able to like build a conventional SaaS app with zero programming knowledge, aside from just like 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 of 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. I mean, it's already kind of happening. It's 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.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very far, like not even sight. 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 browser from 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. You can prompt them and they run on the web page and do work for you. A non-technical person can build that. Same thing for custom GPTs from ChatGPT. Non-technical person can definitely build that. So I think.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And English is just like a layer on top of scripting languages. So 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's sometimes when even if you're a JavaScript or Python programmer, it's useful to know how all that, how that stuff works, how it's written and see how it's implemented. 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. It will sort of start to get less important over time, but we're not close to that yet.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. This has been a progression that is not a new progression. So, for example, When I was in middle school learning to code, the new hot thing was scripting languages, which is like Python and JavaScript. And if you were a real programmer, you would understand the language underlying Python and JavaScript, which was written in C. And scripting language weren't totally real. And in order to really do anything interesting, you have to be able to learn both parts of the stack. Same thing for C programmers. I guess in the 70s C was invented. It was like, you got to learn, you got to be able to write assembly.”
2025-07-17 · Lenny's Podcast · The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source