Why Hand-Typing Code Will End Your Career in 2026

You're going to kind of throw out a lot of your code every 6 months, because some of the things that you spent a lot of time building— Now anyone can just, like, one-shot with, like, a single prompt. If you're hand-typing code at this point, that's, like, extremely weird.

When things move really fast, which is what's happeningright now, everything breaks and everyone is afraid. My personal workflow is so different than it was even a month ago. But I think a really big thing is—

Dan Shipper is the AI writer and founder building an AI-native company from the ground up, and now he's revealing how AI agents are reshaping the future of work.

And why overhiring might actually be your downfall.

The kind of business that we can run today is so different from the one it was 4 years ago. And the interesting thing is everyone's got a claw. 24/7, always-on agent that you run that can self-improve. It's just, sort of, life-changing.

Everybody inside of Every, the company that I run, has one too. So that changes a lot of things.

Is there a small, dangerous part of this?

Yeah, definitely. I think, like, don't be stupid. We can do so much more now with the same team size than we could before, and you're forced to reinvent yourself all the time because the landscape is changing. Every single one of your internal processes should be done with AI, and everything that you build should be built both for humans and for agents.

You don't need hundreds of people,right? When you see companies hiring hundreds and hundreds of people super early.

That's crazy. Sometimes it ends well. Most of the time it doesn't. The reason why people raise the stakes on themselves is because they feel like they need the legitimacy of having a venture fund. You actually don't need that if you're a creator.

And until you really hit product-market fit, like, one or two people is way more than you need. The reason why it's good is—

Dan, I've been a huge fan of you for so long, and it's almost come full circle. So welcome to the show I'm so excited for today's chat.

Oh my God, I'm— I'm honored to be here. Thank you for having me.

So I thought it'd be fun to start with some hot trends. This whole crazy world of AI, I didn't know about you, but it's so hard to keep up because it keeps damn changing every single day.

Yeah. Um, I mean, I— I think probably no surprise to anyone, the hot trend is Claude.

I think the interesting thing is not just that everyone's got a claw. And I don't know, you know, at what level your audience is, so I'm happy to go into what a claw is, but 24/7, always-on agent that you run that connects to your, you know, your Discord, your messaging channel of choice that can self-improve.

Obviously, I think that's the hot thing, but the interesting thing is what happens when everyone has one. Because it changes your personal workflow. Like, my personal workflow is so different than it was even a month ago, honestly. And then every— everybody inside of Every, the company that I run, everybody has one too, or almost everybody.

And so that changes a lot of things too. Because now my claw can talk to your claw, and there's a bunch of claws talking in a— in a Slack channel, basically, trying to figure out how to operate together.

And that's— I don't know, I think that's really, really cool, and it feels like we're just starting to see this sociology of AIs start to get built, and it's exciting. It's exciting to just be part of it.

This OpenClaw project as well is so new. It only launched in November '25, and the founder, Peter, is— is so cool and obviously now part of OpenAI.

Yeah. Something like that. It's incredibly new, and it's just one of those things where if you hit— if you hit theright thing at theright time, it can just spread so fast. And I think that's only going to get faster.

The variety was insane. But also, part of me thinks that as soon as you start building these personal AI agents and you start talking to other agents, especially, like, from a financial point of view, it starts, you know, analyzing your finances or doing transactions on your behalf.

Is there a small, dangerous part of this, or is it— do you think it's going to be okay long term?

Oh, it'll be okay long term. Yeah, definitely. I think, like, don't— don't be stupid. If you give it— if you give it access to any sort of financial information, make sure that it doesn't— no one else can access your claw.

If you give it access to, like, a debit card or something, make sure it's— the amount that it has access to is pretty small so that if it makes a mistake, you're good. But there's a— if you're willing to take a little bit of that risk, and you also are smart about the security stance for it, I think it's just, sort of, life-changing.

Awesome. Okay, so we have OpenClaw. What are some of the other hot trends you're really excited aboutright now?

What are the other hot trends I'm really excited about? Well, this is— this is probably related to OpenClaw, but I think a really big thing is

the emergence of coding agents as general-purpose agents, and us going from, okay, we have Claude code, it's starting to, like, automate developer work, or make it easy to just send off an agent and, like, have it run for 20 minutes and come back with, like, pretty good code.

And that has actually turned into not just it can help me write an app, it's like any kind of work that I might have to do on my computer, a coding agent is good for. And so that's why— I think that's why Claude code has blown up so much.

But I think you're starting to see the resurgence or first surgence of codecs. I think with their new app, they're, like, starting to, like, get somewhere where it's— it's probably the app that I use the most for coding, and I'm using it a bit for knowledge work now.

I still use Claude more for knowledge work, and I use my Claude the most for knowledge work. Yeah, that— I think that's— that's a really, really big one. I also think GUIs are back. So for a little bit, terminals— GUIs are out, terminals are in.

I think GUIs are back. I think we're— we're through the terminal era, yeah.

Why do you think they're back?

I just don't really use the terminal that much anymore for coding. I use the Claude— both the codecs and Claude apps now because they're much better.

It's— I'll send this a little bit. I mean, ChatGPT now is only, what, 12, 13, 100 days old, and all of these new waves are stalled. Obviously, it just keeps changing so much. But it's really difficult to also decide the type of projects and the type of tools to— to actually go with,right?

When you're looking at all of these new startups and new AI models and opportunities out there, how do you decide which tool to use? Because there are so many of them.

I mean, part of my job and our job at Every is just to, like, try as much stuff as we can so that we can basically find good stuff. I think that ends up being— a lot of the really good stuff is, like, from the players that you expect.

You know, like, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing great stuff. There are lots of other people doing amazing things, but

it's— it's hard to go wrong with the kind of, like, baseline of the top model companies and their, you know, first-party consumer apps. I think—

I think that the reason this is an interesting question is it feels so overwhelming, and there's a question about what to do with that overwhelm. And usually, I think that question comes from a— it's like a fear place.

It's like a FOMO place. Like, what if I— what if, like, the perfect tool or the perfect model was, like, just one more scroll on X away? And usually that's not what it is. And so I try to just make sure that I'm— when I'm trying new things, it's because I, like, I'm genuinely curious about them, and I'm not just like, oh my God, like, if I don't try this new thing, I might, like, fall behind and not never have a job again, you know?

I don't think that's particularly useful. And I find that if I'm guided by just a sense of curiosity, or, like, there's a genuine problem I want to solve, great. Otherwise, if it wasn't my job, I wouldn't feel a lot of pressure to try new things.

I kind of get that FOMO as well, you know? When you're looking on X every morning and this new company just raised $2,000,000,000, never heard of the app before. There's almost that fear that everyone's kind of cropping onto it, they're checking it out, and you're kind of missing out.

And it's just like, we both cover AI,right? And there's just so many opportunities. I think one of the biggest challenges I personally face is, yes, there's a bit of that FOMO, but there are just so many opportunities out there,right?

Focusing on just a few things is really hard when we're building this kind of multimodal media type of company.

Totally.

It's super hard. But I'd love to go into the Every story. So this has almost come full circle,right? So interesting story for our audience. I actually remember when Every first started because a friend of mine and your co-founder, Nathan, ran a podcast show called Means of Creation during COVID, and— and this is how I first came across Every.

And I think with Li— exactly, with Li Jin, who I've known for a while. And the— I think back then it was almost like there was a whole bunch of writers coming together to share stories,right? Let's talk about the Every story.

How did it all begin? Because I remember this time, and not going to lie, I was getting FOMO as well as all my friends were joining, so I'd love to hear how it started.

It was a very— yeah, very, very different— very different time. There's a lot of different places that you can, like, start the founding story for Every. The very earliest seeds of it were in late 2019, very early 2020, more along the lines of late 2019.

I had been— been 3 or 4 years since I sold my last company, maybe 4 years since I sold my last company, and I was like, I really want to start another company. And I was really interested in tools for thought.

So, like, Roam, Notion, like, those kinds of things. Any kind of software that helps you think better. And

I had ideas for a product for, like, products that I wanted to build, but I wanted to do really good customer interviews to try to understand how do the smartest people in the world use their note-taking systems, their email, their to-do lists, all that kind of stuff, so I could use that to help me think about, okay, what is the product I want to build?

But I needed a way to get really smart people to get on the phone with me and tell me about that stuff. So I was like, well, what if I started a newsletter? And I told them I was going to interview them for the newsletter.

And I really wrote the newsletter because I love writing, but I would use what I learned to build a product, and then I would sell the product to the audience. And that newsletter was called Super Organizers. I started it in, I would say, like, maybe August of 2019, and ran it for a bit, and it just started, like, taking off.

And I was like, wow, this is really cool. And I— it was sort of the beginning of the Substack wave. It was a little bit before COVID, and I didn't know it at the time, but it was like, that was going to be the moment for the creator economy, and I just, like, happened to be there too.

And so I started talking to Nathan, who's a, like, close friend of mine, who was the first

employee at Substack. And we were— the original concept of Every was a bundle of newsletters where you pay one price, you get access to all these different newsletters that were all really high quality, all focused on business and technology.

And we sort of, like, had this, like, glint in our eyes, like, yeah, like, we'll probably sell software maybe at some point. And we did, like, even back then in 2020, we were selling this app that I built that we still sell called Sparkle, which is a file organizer, and now it's AI-powered, but before it was not.

And yeah, that was the original— that was the original idea for it. Raised a tiny bit of money for it in 2020. 2020 was awesome. It was just, like, up and to theright, like, really crazy. The craziest growth I'd ever experienced until now.

And then the next, like, 4 years were, like, awful. Like, fairly flat for 4 years. Or even, like, there was— there was some ups and downs. A lot of ups and downs where it was, like, false wiggles of hope or whatever that thing from the Paul Graham graph is, and now we're— now we're back up and to theright, which is really fun.

So it's— it's— it's worth sticking it out.

It takes a long time, but even, like, back in 2021, this was, like, the hype of the creator economy,right? And we saw a whole wave of these new startups, and the creator economy trends just changed every year. Now it's creator economy, AI.

I don't even really know what it is anymore. It's kind of like all bundled together.

Do people talk about the creator economy anymore? I feel like that's, like, I don't know, I haven't heard that word in so long.

So it's interesting. Like, we actually still cover a lot around the creator economy, and I just spoke at this conference in Dubai. It's called the 1 Billion Followers Summit, the biggest creator economy conference globally, and there's still a big trend around it.

But I think there are two different sides. From the creator's point of view, it's still a massive thing. From a founder point of view, from a startup's, I don't think there are as many companies that are building this space anymore.

Which is probably, honestly, better. Like, it was way overfunded and way overbuilt.

I agree. I think we met all the startups, like, building in '21, and, you know, we do these big market maps. If you look at all the companies looking back now, there are not that many,right? Substack, Spotter, maybe a bunch of others.

Not really many became that kind of unicorn status, which is kind of a shame.

It's kind of a shame, but also it's like, you know, YouTube and X and, you know, Instagram. Like, there's the big platforms, and then there's— there's probably a second layer of tools that can support the big creators on those platforms.

But there just aren't enough big creators to really support, like, many unicorns. But there's a lot of good businesses to be built, probably.

I agree. I think one of the great things about being a creator and being a writer, once you have that distribution,right, there are so many different opportunities that that leads you to. So when you— when you started seeing, okay, maybe the first initial product is not going to go in the direction you had hoped, you obviously had to change.

When did you start to decide, okay, we're going to build distribution, almost this multimodal media type of company, distribution, writing, and you have these cool bunch of products on the side?

Basically in 2022-ish, I think. This is a little bit before ChatGPT came out. My original Every co-founder, Nathan, got really interested in building a word processor. And he was interested because we just spent so much time— he spent— we spent so much time in Google Docs, like, building a media company, and he was like, Google Docs sucks, I could build a better one.

Which was true. And— and, you know, it was sort of like a side project, but it was also, you know, for the whole of the business, we were always, like, building, like, little things and launching them. And it turns out, like, software has always been a good way to monetize media.

It's just that software has only recently become cheap enough to make that it's, like, a viable media business strategy unless you're, like, somehow super technical but also running a media company, which we were at the time crazy enough to do, but very few people are.

And anyway, so he built this Google Docs thing, and at the time I was also looking at people— friends of mine tweeting about GPT-3 on Twitter, and I was like, it would be kind of cool if you, like, threw the— this GPT-3 thing into Google Docs, into this Google Docs thing that at the time he was calling Lex, which is still called Lex.

And he did it, and the immediate thing was like, whoa, this is, like, really cool. It was just one of those moments where you're like, holy fucking shit, I can't believe this is a thing. I can't believe computers are writing text now.

So we launched it, it went super viral. And I think for me, the immediate lesson— because it just went so viral— A, I just saw the resonance of this thing. Like, how does this— people, like, when you see it, it's crazy.

And so— and at the time it was still pretty bad. But I just— I'd been through enough of these waves. Like, I was building mobile apps before the iPhone came out. I was building BlackBerry apps, and then I started building iPhone apps.

And, like, I was really into, like, B2B SaaS, like, towards the end of the social craze in, like, the 20— like, 2010, 2011 era. And I ended up doing a creator economy thing, like,right around the time of, you know, the creator economy was, like, really blowing up.

So I've seen— I've seen a few of these waves, and I was just like, this is— this is it. Like, this is real, and it's coming. And I think my lesson from earlier waves was I did not lean hard enough into it at the time.

And I was like, I'm going to make the opposite mistake this time. I'm just going to, like, go all in. And

the first article I wrote about AI was, "Welcome to—" it was something like "AI in the Age of the Individual," and it was basically a— it had a graphic of someone with, like, 14 hands typing on 14 different laptops, like, one person.

And I actually think that that was, like, pretty good. That was, like, a pretty good call.

I remember this.

Yeah.

This went super viral.

Yeah, it went viral, yeah. And I— I haven't not read that article in a while. I'm kind of curious to go back to it, but that was in— that was before ChatGPT came out, and I think that actually ended up being essentially how I operate my computer now is sort of like that.

And so I started, like, pushing the whole company, like, and for myself, I was just like, I'm only talking— I'm only writing about ChatGPT. When ChatGPT launched, I was like, I'm only writing about ChatGPT. And— and the whole company started to kind of, like, coalesce around this.

We still covered other things, but it was, like, kind of, we're going into this. This is our thing. And yeah, we've just, like, not— we haven't stopped since then. And it's been— basically, from there, I think we spent probably a year and a half or so just doing, like, hopefully, like, really good coverage on AI and doing a little bit of product stuff, but it wasn't a huge focus.

And then

probably around 2 years ago now, maybe, like, 2— maybe a year and a half, between a year and a half and 2 years ago, Brandon Gell, who's now our COO, joined, and he was our first entrepreneur in residence.

And Brandon is just an incredible guy. Like, so talented. Such a high-throughput guy. He previously started a company that had— he had, like, 50 employees, and he raised $100 million. And he's like, he's crazy. In, like, a good way.

And

he— he joined, and because he emailed me, and he was like, "Hey, I think Every should, like, incubate products." And I was like, funny you should say that, because I've been wanting to do that. And, like, we've done a little bit of it here and there.

We had done Lex, and I was, at the time, working on Sparkle, and, like, there were a couple other little things that we had done. But he saw it too, and so he joined, and then we started, like, releasing products.

And as that has started to happen, both, I think, our profile has gotten bigger and our audience has gotten bigger, and the level of ambition that we can apply to our products has gotten a lot bigger, because we can do so much more now with the same team size than we could before, and our team is now much bigger.

So we're, like, really multiplying on a lot of different fronts, and the kind of business that we can run today is so different from the one it was 4 years ago, and it's honestly a lot different from the business it was 6 months ago.

Like, truly different.

There's so much to unpack here. I love all of that so much. And the way companies operate today, you don't need hundreds of people,right? I think Every is— it's 15 people when I last checked. Maybe it's a bit more now.

We're 20 now. I think we'll be, like, 25-ish soon, which is crazy to me, but yeah. And this is full-time people. We have a bunch of contractors too.

Yeah. And is itright that you don't write a single line of code, the company? You just use all of these AI models?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, no one— yeah. If you're hand-typing code at this point, that's, like, extremely weird.

Yeah, I agree. It's changing so much. And, you know, back to— you were talking about the creator economy. 2 or 3 years ago, you say you got a newsletter, you got a podcast show. That's kind of interesting. You're just another creator,right?

But I really do think now the way companies are operating is they're going to have a distribution channel, they're going to have a media company, and they're going to have all of these cool products alongside. There's this really cool company called Bending Spoons in— it's a Italian company.

I think what they're doing is super interesting, and more companies are going to be doing this,right? But it's not that simple,right? So you have this distribution channel. How do you think about launching new products? And maybe talk about some of the products you guys have.

So we have 4 productsright now, and we'll have at least a couple more in the next month or two. One's called Quora. It's an AI assistant for your email. So it helps you draft emails, it summarizes your emails twice a day, just sits in your— sits in your email, in your inbox, and makes everything calmer and makes it easier for you to get through your email every day.

We also have Spiral, which is an agentic ghostwriter. So we've taken everything that we know about great writing at Every and turned it into a product that, like, helps you write better for anything short-form to long-form content. Then we have a product called Sparkle, which is the one that I've been mentioning a few times already, that I originally built the first version in 2020.

We're launching a new version of it in, like, maybe a week or two. Yosh is the GM of that product, and he's also fantastic and has been working super hard on it. I'm very excited for this new launch.

But it organizes your files. And then we have Monologue, which is a speech-to-text app, like a smart dictation app. It's sort of like WhisperFlow or Super Whisper. So you talk to your computer, talk to your phone, and it transcribes it in a really nice way for whatever context you're in.

And we bundle it together, so you pay one price, you get access to all of our content and all of our apps. And we build the apps that we want, in the sense that we— you know, the way that I— we talk about this, and I think the way that everyone in the company feels is we're making a future together.

We're making a future that we're living in.

Sparkle?

When you write about it, it helps you see the future clear— this future that we're living in more clearly. Like, articulating something, like, brings it to life in this new way that you can all talk about. And it's very clear to us then what's missing, and we just build that for ourselves.

And we build it for ourselves, and if we like it and it spreads internally, then there's a good chance that other people are going to like it, and so we launch it to our audience, and then hopefully it spreads even beyond that.

And so there's a very natural loop from just us all living in the future together to, like, oh, there's a kind of interesting idea. Like, I'm going to just spend a weekend and, like, make something, and then seeing if people internally like it, and then launching it.

Yeah. So it's— it's fairly organic so far.

And you just use your distribution channels to kind of acquire those first users?

Yeah.

That's typical. That's typical. I'm jealous. I think it's— I think it's so cool,right? And— but also, there are so many different products you can go build. Not all of them are going to go and work,right? Are there some products which just haven't worked?

What are some of the learnings?

Yeah. Well, one of the cool things about having a media company is the products that don't work are just content. So we always release things as experiments. And so if no one likes it, it's just like a blog post about this thing that I built and what I learned from what I built.

And maybe even the app itself is sort of a form of content. Like, software is cheap enough that you can think of it like content. And so in a normal software company, a failed product is a gigantic R&D expense.

In a media company, it's just— it's just audience. It's more distribution. It's more content that could spread more. So

it— it— the more experimentation we do, honestly, the better.

Is there that part of me thinks, and some founders I've spoken to have done similar things. They failed, like, 2, 3 times, and they write about it. But if it's more failure than success, isn't there, like, a risk that, oh, my product just aren't working?

Yeah. It's definitely not a, like— we're not necessarily writing, like, oh, like, this thing failed all the time. It's like, okay, so an example. I'm working on this little— this little Markdown editor called Proof that, you know, if you're using agents all the time, you know that agents love writing and reading Markdown.

And I just wanted a really simple thing where if, like, my agent was working on something, it could write a Markdown document that I could collaborate with it on. So it's— we're both in the document together, and then I could share that document with anybody else on the team, and then they can also have their agents work on it.

And it spread really quickly inside the org.

And I start— we launched it as, like, a small experiment to our— to some of our paid subscribers,right? And so we're starting to see that. But I'm not necessarily just writing, like, I built this thing Proof and, like, here's how it's working type posts.

Actually, Proof has informed a lot of the other things that I write. So— and a really good example is I wrote a piece, like, 2 weeks ago, called The Two-Slice Team. And it's— it's about— Jeff Bezos has this idea of the Two-Pie Team, which is if your team is bigger than two— what— if your team is too big for two pizza pies to feed it, then it's too big.

We want to keep it within two pies. And internally, we run each of our products with one person. And I just built this product, Proof, myself, in between all the other stuff I have going on over, like, 2 weeks.

And it's good. Like, it's good enough for people to use, and I'm constantly improving it. And so that becomes input for me to be able to write a piece like The Two-Slice Team and know what I'm talking about.

So even if it's not content specifically about the, like, product or experiment that you build, it, like, creates all this other exhaust that you can turn into ideas for stuff that you can write about in other ways too.

I love that so much. And, you know, we're seeing— we're seeing so many new media companies now crop up who are being a type multimodal type of ecosystem,right? Why do you think now is such an interesting time to build a media company?

Because when I speak to some friends who are, like, in the venture world, last year, a few years ago, I said, I'm going to go and launch a media company, and they're like, what? You guys are crazy. But, like, now is, like, media is the biggest distribution channel,right?

They don't know anything.

Exactly. They don't know anything,right?

I'm very— I'm very negative on most venture capitalists. Mostly because my experience of running this company is if you look at the pitch deck that I did 6 years ago, 6 and a half years ago or whatever, and look at the company that it is today, it's, like, so different.

And I could have spent so much time debating with different VCs about, like, whether or not that original pitch deck was a good idea, and it would not have gotten me to this. And it also would not have dissuaded me from doing the other thing.

So I think VC is much more of, like, a person game and, like, a knowing vibes kind of thing. And— but most VCs spend a lot of time being like, well, the media— media businesses don't work or whatever.

And it's like, you'reright, but you're also kind ofright about the last vintage of media companies, and things change pretty quick. So it's— yeah, it's an interesting one. I think the reason why it's good is if software becomes free, then free to make, then the bottleneck— then you can sort of, like, flood the supply of software, and so the bottleneck becomes, like, distribution and brand and trust and all that kind of stuff.

And so suddenly it's a cool thing to have a media company. Also, I think

being a builder and being a writer are starting to merge a little bit, and because you can now code with English, and English is what you use to write. So

it turns into a better mon— like, media has a better built-in monetization channel than it used to. And I think a lot of the— a lot of the negativity around media is actually about

gigantic media companies that used to be the dominant mass media form slowly dying. So big newspapers and gigantic cable television networks and stuff, like, slowly dying and being replaced by other mass media, like YouTube and.

Us.

Yeah, us. And— and so— so that's one reason why it looks so bad is because they're just slowly dying, so they're just always laying people off, and their whole business cost structure is built in a way that is built for a world that is slowly no longer existing, but there's no way for them to change, really.

So that's bad. And then there's also a crop of media startups in the, like, late 2000s, early 2010s that, like, the vices and buzzfeeds of the world that

for a while were— it was— they thought that they could make a venture-scale media company that had venture-type returns by

generating insane amounts of viral traffic from these new social platforms. And there was almost a little bit, like, competing, but also a little bit friends with these social platforms. And they pretty much all just didn't work. It's actually just really, really hard to build— build an audience at that— at that competes with social scale, and therefore to monetize in that same way.

And therefore a lot of those businesses didn't work, but there's a whole range of really, really great businesses that

work with different cost structures because you can now start a podcast and a newsletter by yourself, and also you can VibeCode your own app for your audience. And, you know, there's— there's a lot of people that can make a lot of money doing that.

I think whether or not media companies can now generate venture returns, unclear. And I probably still wouldn't raise, like, gigantic amounts of venture money, and haven't for this business. But I think venture people have this, like, weird value judgment about, well, if it's not going to be that big, like, why would you do it?

And I'm just like, well, I love this. It's really fun. Why do you do it?

I agree. Yeah. I agree. I agree. You know, when I— I mentioned earlier this conference I spoke at, the 1 billion followers summit, and my talk was around this year's year for software creators or creators becoming software founders.

And I don't know what you think. When you register for an event or you describe someone what you do, there's always the option, are you a founder or creator? Where do you spend that bucket? Because I— I kind of get confused as well.

I'm kind of, like, in between.

I always say founder.

Yeah.

I think, like, I— that is weirdly important to me. Just before this, I was a founder, and we are— like, we have, like, 20 people. It's like a— but I do— I do see that tension. And I think actually, for what I do, it's very helpful to be a founder because it gets me into rooms that if they thought I was, like, a creator or even worse, like, from the media, I wouldn't be able to be there, you know?

You just get put into a different bucket. And so it's sort of helpful to be like, yeah, we're building stuff. And that's actually why our coverage— I think our coverage is really good is because, like, we get— we come from that perspective of, like, we're building stuff, and that's what people who are also building stuff want to read.

I agree. And, you know, the great thing about being a founder and creating this kind of media ecosystem is you actually don't need that much capital to get going. And.

You do not.

You know, which is so good.

You need almost nothing. Yeah.

You need nothing,right? One of your super early supporters was the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. What's been the greatest lesson you've learned from him as one of your early backers?

That's really interesting. So Reid also— Reid came in— he invested in May of last year. So I think Reid is just extremely thoughtful and extremely good at breaking situations down into their component parts and analyzing how

different networks and different players will interact and sort of, like, how power works, but in a

practical, pragmatic, and, like, good-hearted way in my experience with him. And. He's just fun to talk to about that stuff. We just talk about— basically, we'll talk about ideas and AI all the time. And, yeah, I think that's— that's one of the things that I've taken away from him.

Yeah.

I've had a few friends who've also met him, and the biggest takeaway, actually, he's just a really nice, genuine person.

He is. Yeah.

And just a bit of a super nerdy, which we love.

Yeah. He is. He's just a big nerd.

We love that. So looking forward, you know, the next type of companies which are going to be emerging are going to be AI native first. And this category, like I said earlier, is just changing so quickly,right? If a company wants to be AI native first, who are launching tomorrow, what do you think are some of the things they should be taking towards that first step?

You should— every single one of your internal processes should be done with AI. And everything that you build should be built both for humans and for agents.

How would you do that if you were starting again tomorrow?

I would get super psyched about AI and just start, like, VibeCoding stuff with all my free time as much as I possibly could. I'd probably read Every.

Obviously.

And, yeah, I can't— I can't— you can't get away without me saying that. And I'm trying to think about, like, something that could be useful other than, like, go do some shit. But that's, like, essentially how my whole brain works is, like, I just go do stuff, and then I learn a lot from it, and then I do more of it, you know?

And I think that's really good, and it's also— it can be annoying for people that I work with because they're like, but why are we doing this? And I'm like, it's fun.

And as we've gotten bigger, I've had to do a little bit more, like, this is what we're doing and whatever, which is also good. But, yeah, I just think it's— the coolest thing about it is you actually don't need anyone to teach you how to do it.

You can just, like, you have this powerful superintelligence to build stuff that can also teach you how to use it. So I would just talk to Claude about it.

And maybe to extend some ideas, I would just go and build. So many founders, like, have these ideas, and they keep, like, ideating or delaying it,right? Just got to just go and build and just get it out there,right?

And if no one— no one reads it, one of the biggest things I always tell founders is if no one uses it and no one saw it on social media, it actually doesn't matter. No one saw it. No one cares,right?

So just, like, get it out there. No one cares. Just get it out there.

That's true. You got to get out of your head.

Exactly,right? I think partnering with creators helps, or, you know, partner with someone who's got a big distribution channel. And I think the third is also just don't over-hire. I love how you guys have kept your team super lean for a few years.

When you see companies raising money, hiring hundreds and hundreds of people super early, part of me thinks it's not going to end well for some of them.

That's crazy. It just sounds really stressful. Sometimes it ends well. Most of the time it doesn't, but it's very, very stressful. It's stressful already anyway running a company. But I think for me it's just, why raise the stakes on yourself?

The reason why people raise the stakes on themselves is because they feel like they need the legitimacy of having a venture fund to, you know, get customers and hire people and whatever. You actually don't need that if you're a creator because people like you.

You have your own legitimacy. You bestow it upon yourself. And I don't think it's worth the trade until you know what your business is going to be like, what your business— how your business is shaped. And for my example, like, I'm still figuring that out.

We're six years in. And I think that we can be plenty ambitious, and we are with the amount of money we've raised, which is almost nothing.

And the door is not closed on that. Like, we might raise more later, but for now, I actually— it was only recently that I felt like I knew what I would do with more money. Like, really. Actually, only in the last, like, six months or so that I was like, oh, I know where I would spend more money.

Would that be on you spending on people first or just building new products?

It's always— I mean, that's always the kind of, like, your biggest expense. People and tokens now is another big one. But I mean, in the sense that, like, I could have always hired more people, but the question is, do I see a path that feels real to me where if I hired one or two more peopleright now, we would actually, like, be able to grow the business more?

And until you really hit product-market fit,

like, one or two people or maybe three people is way more than you need. And we tend to just hire people when we feel like we really need someone new. And, like, you can feel it because it's, like, stuff's breaking.

It's like this task that used to take up, like, only a small— like, only, like, 10 minutes of your day has now become an entire function because that's how big the business is now, you know? And, yeah.

What keeps you up at night, you know, when I speak to founders like us, it's, I still stress about running a company, but it's not as stressful before AI,right? Because you had all of these problems which just kept breaking.

Are there still, like, multiple things that just keep you up at night or?

Well, I've been going to therapy for many years, and I'm well medicated, so I sleep pretty well. But

I think it just— it changes. You know, when you're at this size now of, like, between 20, 25 people, it's like, there's often something going wrong that is a little bit stressful, you know? People are getting moods and, like, have— and quit or, like, you know, have a problem with someone else.

And so all that stuff can be stressful, and that is— that is stressful for me. I think, like, what I've recently had to learn is the amount of cash that you need to run a business of our size and our, like, payroll size, basically, is just higher than it used to be.

Not because we can't afford to pay people salaries every month, but because if you have a bigger nut that you have to pay every month, any variation— like, the margin gets slimmer if you don't have— if you don't increase the total amount that you have.

And if you've been running your business break-even for many years and haven't raised a lot of money, it gets a little tighter, and you're like, oh, shit, I guess I have to, like, get more money, which we did.

And so it's just, you know, little things like that where I think you just go through little periods where you're like, okay, yeah, the company, all of it just broke. I have to, like, relearn how to run it, which basically just happened, and I think we're kind of in the middle of that.

That could be a little bit stressful, but other than that, I sleep pretty well.

Some founders who I speak to, I spoke to this amazing founder recently who gave some really good advice, and she reinvents herself every quarter. Her channel is massive, one of the biggest in tech. And I feel that's a really interesting perspective.

How does every thinking about keeping up, being in front of people's minds, but also reinventing yourself from— it could be from a product point of view, an image point of view— basically can also just go stale pretty quickly,right?

I actually don't find that because we're just in this, like, this shit moves so fast, and it's really fun to have both a product and a media company and a consulting arm because when things move really fast, which is what's happeningright now, everything breaks and everyone is afraid.

And the first thing they want to do is read stuff. And so the media arm and the consulting arm do really well in an environment like this where everyone's like, I've got an OpenClaw now. Like, what do I do?

I don't understand how is this going to affect jobs, you know? And it's kind of shitty for the product side because you're like, yeah, we got to go reinvent the whole product, but the media stuff's ripping, so that's great.

And then after a couple months, it'll settle down, and we'll have reinvented our products, and I think we sort of expect to do that. And that's how— that's sort of how

a lot of companies in AI work now, especially if you look at the top, like, frontier labs, is you're going to kind of throw out a lot of your code every six months as the models change, and that's just, like, a reality.

And when you're throwing out a lot of your code, you're probably going to have to rethink some of your product strategy because some of the things that you spent a lot of time building now, anyone can just, like, one-shot with, like, a single prompt.

So, yeah, it's just you're forced to reinvent yourself all the time because the landscape keeps changing.

It keeps changing, but also I think, you know, from the founders' POV, I think it's really important to take time off. And we try and raise this question on most of the episodes we do, and just figuring out, you know, how do founders switch off?

What do they do in their spare time? Do they take one day off a week? Does that— what does that look like for you?

I definitely work every day, but I do find that I need at least one day where I'm, like, mostly not working. It's hardright now just because work feels like a video game, so it's, like, hard to kind of tear myself away.

Usually, my schedule is I don't do meetings until noon, and I try to spend the early part of the day, like, reading and writing. That has not been the case recently because things are moving really fast, and, like, we need to reinvent a lot of the company strategy.

And so I'm just, like, in there, like, VibeCoding every day all day, and it's, like, great. I love it, but also I know that I don't want to do this forever. But I need to, like, do— I just need to do the job for a little bit, and then I'll, like, abstract myself away.

So I do try to keep my days kind of segmented like that. And I have a very well, you know, trodden meditation practice. I've been on a bunch of retreats. I do that definitely every day without really having to think about it.

I work out three times a week.

I try to, you know, I really love, like, bath— like, bathhouses, like, spas and stuff where you're, like, cold plunges and, you know, saunas and stuff like that. Like, so I do that every couple weeks with friends and spend time with my family, spend time with my girlfriend.

I'm not, like, the poster boy for balanceright now, though, I'll say.

I think if we can do one day a week off, that's pretty good. That's what I try and do as well. Every Saturday.

I do. I will say one thing that's really important to me is I care a lot about my day-to-day feelings

and whether I'm actually doing stuff I want to do. I care a lot about that. And if I'm in a position where I'm doing stuff that I don't want to do for too long, I change something.

Both because it sucks and because

generally I do my best work when I'm, like, pretty happy, and so it's better for everyone. Like, this was a thing for me for a long time where I was like, am I a writer or am I a founder?

And I was like, well, I can't write if I'm going to be a founder. And turns out I'm miserable when I don't write, and the business doesn't work as well. So I've started to do that over the last couple years, and that's been really good for the business.

So, yeah, it's just stuff like that. Obviously important to take breaks. Obviously important to know yourself, but the most important thing seems to me to be, like, just doing stuff I like and making sure I'm doing stuff I want to do, you know?

And finance feelings.

As much as I can.

Yeah, I love that.

And I think it's, like, one thing that's important is it's usually actually hard to admit what you really want to do. And you're often, like, kind of embarrassed about it, and it feels kind of shameful, and, like, maybe you shouldn't want that.

And, like, yeah, if I pitched— I was in a meeting with an investor today, and I was like, look, if I pitched you this business without having built it, you'd be like, that would never work. And

it would be crazy to be like, yeah, well, I want to have a newsletter, and we'll have a bunch of products, and we'll do a consulting arm, and it'll be, like, 20 people. We won't raise any money. And I definitely wanted to do something like this before I started it.

I just, like, couldn't really say that. And I definitely wanted to do that while being able to write a lot, and I was like, that feels, like, way too much. You can't do that. And I think you can.

But it starts with sort of admitting to yourself what you want to do.

I love that. I love the transparency and honesty. I think it's really important for founders, and not enough founders talk about that,right? Sleep, meditation, just do whatever you like, and try and take one day off a week or something.

Okay, so maybe to finish off, ChatGPT is 1,200, 1,500 days old. We didn't see this massive explosion, I don't think, of AI if we were to go back three years. Looking at the next 1,000 days, where do you think AI is going to go next?

Wow, interesting. What I'm seeing already is just, yeah, everyone's got the 24/7 always-on agent. All the agents are talking to each other. Agents,

as you use your agent, it becomes a little bit of, like, an extension and mirror of you. Like, one of the things that we see internally is, like, when an agent is from a writer, it has a little bit of her voice and personality in it and a little bit of her worldview and is noticing similar things to what she would notice.

And if it's from a GM, like, same thing. So that's really interesting. And then the corollary of that is these agents then end up getting used and trusted for things that they're human are used and trusted for inside of the organization.

And so you transfer your trust to an agent that you use all the time, and then your team members start using that agent for that. And that's how agents sort of, like, get promoted, and you have these, like— then you develop agents that are specialized, which is weird.

You wouldn't necessarily expect that because you'd be like, well, it's a superintelligence, so it can do anything. So why would you even have more than one? There should just be one agent in the world that everyone uses. And it's like, not really.

It's actually helpful to have these little specialized things that know their little corner of the world, even if all of them are smarter than any given human. And then there's a lot of, like, really interesting questions around how do you— how do they talk to each other, and how do you network them, and what are the, like, ways that they— what are the best ways for them to organize with each other and share knowledge with each other and then with their humans?

And so I expect all of that to— that's already happening for us internally, and I expect that to be just very broadly distributed in three years. And I don't think that that's, like— I'm not making a prediction. I'm just saying I think what I'm already seeing is just going to be more than it is now.

I agree. And it's changing so quickly. And for the audience who aren't subscribed yet to Every, go and check it out. We'll put their links in the description, and it's one of the best AI newsletters out there. And your podcast as well.

So go and check it out.

I appreciate it. Every.to.

There you go. Dan, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.