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

“It is really wild. I think it's really wild, in particular, just like having a small group of people that have, everyone's multidimensional and everyone like 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. And I think that's what makes the right, like that, that's why I like doing that is because the writing that we do from that, I think, is 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.”
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
“Know he spent a couple of days digging into the internals of some third party library that we were interested in just because it's like it's helpful to know. It's helpful to like understand those things. But then he's not actually like writing. And I think that's really important.”
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 definitely are looking at code. So you're doing a code review before you read 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.”
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
“Kids, 20 year olds, whatever I seize 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. 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.”
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 effectively learning how to be one level above. The entry level from the beginning. And you have to, 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 they're 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. And so that's the thing 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 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 org. So Nesh is another good example. And so I think generally people are going to figure out that like some 20-year-old with ChatGPT subscription is like super powerful if you just mentor them. And I think that's great.”
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
“Person that I've worked with, like we have this guy, Alex Duffy, who works with us, he writes for context window and he just launched, we taught AIs how to play diplomacy with each other, which is really cool. And he did that whole thing. And I think he's 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 like over and over every, which is you have great ideas, but you're not a good writer yet. And it's really hard for me to do anything with you until you're good enough at it. So I have to give you like 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's worth of 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.”
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, there wasn't Tag Overflow. There was like weird BBNet forums and stuff that I was like 12 and I probably shouldn't have been on there or whatever. So 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. I think there's this huge question about what happens when kids like entry-level jobs are taken away by AI. My take is like that's worth thinking about. And it's possible that that might be a problem at some point, but my take is whenever I see a kid with ChatGPT, I'm like, holy shit, they're going to go so much faster than any other.”
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 generally, I think that kind of multidimensional type of talent is the kind of person that I love having at every. Like, because we're all generalists, we all want to use AI for all these 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. So that's Kieran's background. Natasha's background is I'm jealous because he only started learning to code when ChatGPT came out. He had wanted to learn to code forever and he's only known how to code in an AI era. And I keep telling him, dude, like I learned to program in middle school from books. 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, why this function wasn't working overflowing.”
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
“Both engineers. Kieran's got this crazy background where They both have really interesting backgrounds. Karen's got this crazy background where he was previously like VP Eng 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 like a composer, like a professional composer. And before that, he was a baker. So we did like a team retreat in France last year and he taught us all how to make croissants. My croissant was horrible. His was like beautiful.”
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 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.”
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 did like a S tier through F tier of AI agents, which I think is so funny, and one of the things I really like about Charlie is that it lives in GitHub. So 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 maybe slightly different perspectives. It's like different people, you know, that have different perspectives and have different taste. Kieran is, he's like one of those serious Rails files who are just, they 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, ChatGPT, for example, it's very.”
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 another one called Charlie that they really love. And 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'll point 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
“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.”
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
“What they're using a lot of is quad code. So you can do commands in cloud code, which are like repeated prompts that you're doing.”
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 sort of platonic ideal of a PRD. And what I'm going to 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 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 Kieran and Natesh and, you know, Cora has, it just came out of, it just became public. It was in private beta. It has 2,500 active users. And 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.”
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
“One of the things that we do that I think is really cool, and they basically invented this like I had nothing to do with 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 like write PRDs. And so each successive PRD, it's the same amount of work. Or you could spend a little bit of time being 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
“So, the Cora team, which is Kieran and Nitesh, basically. The team Well, it's Cora, Natesh, and 15 Claude code instances. So it's more powerful than you 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
“I use granola, so I used to use Super Whisper and Whisperflow, which I think are fantastic. We have an internal version of that called Monolog that we'll be shipping in like a month or 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. We use Notion all the time and I specifically use their meeting recording. I think that's mostly the stack.”
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 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 judge whether I think these are any good. And then it can improve before it comes back to you. And that's just like a huge, huge unlock that we were struggling for three months to build this like crazy system to like try to get it to judge writing and then Opus 4 just like one-shotted it and we're like, great, this product works. Let's like, let's start shipping it. So yeah, I love it for 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 various methods that you can use to prompt engineer around this. Give it a template or whatever. And they sort of worked, but it just still doesn't have that thing where it's like, can it tell if writing is interesting or any good? Does it have that gut sense? And Opus4 has it. It's really wild. And 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. And we're doing essentially clawed code but for content style product where you say I wanted to write a tweet, you give it all the documents, it has bunch memories, it creates a to-do list for itself, and then it goes and writes.”
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, no other model can do this, which is. Earlier versions of Claude, and I think generally versions of other models, when you ask them, is this piece of writing any good? For example, would always give it a B. 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 give it another turn, it would go to like A. So it 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.”
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 that's the model that we use most for the apps that we build, like inside the apps. It's incredibly powerful and it's incredibly cheap, which is great. So I want to 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 a one-off self-contained, like, I want to pick off this little feature. What else do I use? Going back to Claude, Claude Opus 4 can do something that no other model except one other model that I can't talk about”
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've spent so much time yelling at ChatGPT about like I need my writing to be punchy and concise and it just knows that now so I think when I ask it to write something for me it's like actually better than yours or maybe not yours but like your average your average ChatGPT user And I also find like I use it a lot for self-reflection and personal growth type stuff. So it knows me. So when I send it a meeting transcript 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, I think that's really great. So day to day, O3, that's my go-to. I think Claude 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”
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 do love Claude. I would say I'm generally My first thing that I open is 03. I'm like a chat GPT boy. And I think 03 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 Claude is it has memory. And I just love 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
“At the pull request and being 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.”
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 it's really important and it just bleeds out into every other part of the org. So, like, we're doing this inside of the editorial org, but there's a lot of copy that goes out on Cora. And by the way, Quora is spelled C-O-R-A. So it's different from Q-U-O-O-R-A. Slightly confusing. There's a lot of copy that goes down to Quora or Spiral or Sparkle that we want to have that same every quality bar for. And so we have engineers sending Kate like, here's the Figma file. Can you go and do copy edits? And that sucks for everybody. And Kate is one person and it's just really hard to do that. So one thing that we did, Natesh, who's one of the programmers on Cora, 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 the Kate. So she's just like look.”
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 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, I think it's becoming a thing. And I think it's.”
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
“Ghostwriting, we should add this to your plate, and it's been really fantastic. So I think that's at minimum, you really just want someone who's just like, I want to tinker, I want to build stuff. There's also people who have a little bit more of that process orientation. I 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.”
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
“Her name is Katie Parrot. She does a lot. She actually does a lot of ghostwriting for us. So she also, when people inside of Every who are builders, often they just write themselves, but like sometimes they want help and she'll help them write about whatever they're working on. So that's how she started with us. She still does that, but she also spends a lot of time doing the AI 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. And 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 great writer. And she's also just incredibly excited by AI. She just like wants to tinker and wants to use it. And that was a thing that got me to be like, okay, you should just come and do that instead of just.”
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 trick is it's not just building that. You also have to get Kate to be like, did you put this through the prompt yet? Anytime someone gives her something. So there's a little bit of like behavioral update too that has to happen, which I think is a really interesting organizational challenge. 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.”
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 or our editor in chief Kate, like Kate is constantly doing like little small copy edits to make sure everything is in every style. And it takes like 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. Go through anything you're writing and copy edit it, which is amazing.”
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
“She helps everyone basically. Everyone. Okay. Where we're starting right now is with the editorial operation. So there's so much stuff in the editorial operation where”
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 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 an 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. There's always a trick with that where it's like you have to make sure it gets used. So it's basically you're developing little applications internally. But if you're good at making applications people use, it's great. Highly recommend having an AI operations lead.”
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
“Okay, so a couple things. One, and I think everyone should do this we have a 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.”
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 have consulting. We also do that. And that is another, that's like the third leg of the stool in the business. It doesn't fit quite as nicely into my ideas and apps framing, but we spend a lot of time with big companies where we teach them basically how to be AI first. We train all the people on how to use AI. And it's very cool. It's really fun and a very important part of what 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
“Thank you. You can think of it like a chief of staff, an AI chief of staff, your email. It helps you manage your email with AI. It's very cool. We can go into more of it 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-founder, Nathan runs that. And 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 what kinds of things that we like to incubate and how do we like to incubate it because I think there's a lot of, there's some really interesting special things in there, but I've been blatting for a while, so I'll stop there.”
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
“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. And 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 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 people who are building those apps are also writers and they're contributing to things like vibe checks. So you get a really inside look into how is this stuff being built from people who are actually using every day. And the suite of apps that we have, one's called Cora.”
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, we call them vibe 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?”
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 can actually see other companies that have this shape from earlier eras, but it's a little bit 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 Evere 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 100,000 subscribers. All the people from the top AI labs read us. Anyone 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 OpenAI or Anthropic Drop a new model, like we get our hands on it early and then we get to play with it and write about it, which is, it's like my ideal job. I love it. It's the best.”
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'm spending a lot of time like giving feedback on headlines or giving feedback on how do you write an intro or is this idea any good? Like that kind of stuff. And we've started to codify all that into prompts that basically it's not the same as mimicking me. It can't exactly say exactly what I'm going to say in a meeting, but it pushes my taste out to the edge so that Who are not able to talk to me by the time I see it, they've already talked to like some simulation of a simulation of me. And that's incredibly powerful.”
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
“Make decisions, definitely. And I mean, we do this a little bit. It's not the same as. It's not the same as having being able to predict exactly what I'm going to say in a meeting. But I think if you're a CEO or founder or manager, it's really stunning how much of your job is just repeating yourself And that is one of the best things about this AI particular AI revolution is that you don't have to repeat yourself. And so we had it like last quarter. I tend to set like one or two quarterly goals. And like one of my big goals for us last quarter was don't repeat yourself. So I don't want to ever say the same thing in a meeting twice if I can help it. So for us at every like one of the big parts of Every is we have a daily newsletter.”
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 like getting the context to the model, the right context at the right time is at least half the performance. And I think that's 100% true. It's something that I've been writing about for like three years. At the time, I called it knowledge orchestration. I think context engineering is a better, probably a better term. But it's totally true. And that's a very, very hard problem to solve. It's not just like a one-shot problem where it's like, you know, gigantic context bundle and we're done. I think it's going to get better over time. But the minute it gets good at predicting what's going to, what I'm going to say next in a meeting, I'm just going to use it as a tool. And that's going to change the entire dynamic of what I say next in a meeting. So it's not as easy as it seems.”
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
“Like, let's benchmark. It's the CEO benchmark. And the reason I did that is because OpenAI is the gold standard for OpenAI for testing how powerful a model is, is they test it on their internal code base. So they say, how good is this? A really good benchmark for that. And so I was like, well, my meaning transcripts aren't anywhere on the internet. A lot of what I say is on the internet. And some of the, there's some overlap, but be kind of interesting. And so I ran a bunch of the frontier models on this on just like my granola transcripts. And they're pretty bad. They are pretty bad. And it's not because they're not smart. There's a real push now, Toby from Spotify coined this term called context engineering”
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
“Credit cards have been around for a long time. So it takes a long time for technology like this to be adopted even in the best case. And I think it's really easy to underestimate how complex specific contexts are that humans know how to deal with. And just because you can get a really good score on a test, it's incredible. I love AI. It's so incredible, but it doesn't actually give you an intuition for how difficult it is to actually be replacing specific parts of work or activities that you do. I think a really good thing to give you a Maybe like a little bit of an intuition for it is I built this thing over a weekend like a month ago that was. Ken O3.”
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 people always, especially at the beginning of the tech hype cycle or revolution paradigm shift, it's always easy to underestimate how quickly things are going to change. And the example I always use is I live in Brooklyn and the tailor down the road down the street from me doesn't accept credit cards.”
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 it's really important to understand that in the history of technology, it has always been the case that you give up certain skills in order to get other ones. So, for example, Plato is famously very skeptical of writing because he thought it would harm your memory. And it did. We don't remember things quite as well as they did back in the day because they had to remember long epic poems to entertain each other. But I think writing is a worthwhile trade for having a slightly worse memory. And I think something similar is going on with AI where, yeah, you may be slightly less engaged in certain tasks, but if you use it right, you're going to be way more engaged in other tasks where you have much more power. And so you can construct a study that says brain connectivity goes down when you use AI in the same way that you could construct a study that says people's memory are worse when they have writing skills.”
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, you could probably create a situation such that it's better to just use an AI. And sometimes it is going to be better. But there's a lot, there's so many contexts that doctors need to make decisions and do things that it's really hard to take one study and make any sort of conclusion about that. And it's especially hard when you're dealing with a technology that's developing so rapidly that doctors can't really be like expected to be experts at it yet. But I would guess in five or ten years that would be totally and completely different. For the student example or like the AI turns your brain off 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
“I mean, I have plenty of them. I think I'm generally, like, I hate the headlines that are like, it's going to replace jobs or like it's going to unemploy like two-thirds of the workforce. I don't think that's true. I hate headlines that are like, you don't use your brain when you use ChatGPT or like another good headline is like doctors alone, doctors plus AI or just AI, like which one is better? AI is better. Therefore, like doctors are going to be outmoded. Like all that stuff is, I think, pretty dumb. So for the doctors plus AI example. I think it's important to recognize that using AI is a skill. And so if you study doctors in a vacuum that don't really have a lot of experience with AI,”
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
“More widespread adoption of agents that work all the time. And I like the profitable thing because if it costs a little bit of money and the bar is profitability, then there's like a, it has to actually be doing something useful for you to keep it on.”
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