the business you're building, the team you're building, the way you're operating is the very bleeding edge of how companies are trying to operate in this AI era.
We have a head of AI operations.
She's just constantly like building prompts and building workflows so that I and everyone else on the team are just automating as much as possible.
What are some things that you believe about AI that most people don't?
I hate the headlines that are like entry -level jobs are taken away by AI.
Whenever I see a kid with Chachapiti, I'm like, holy shit, They're going to go so much faster than any other person that I've worked with.
We have this guy. 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 he never made the same mistake twice.
There's this sense we're getting to a place where you don't have to write any code.
Like you have a product team not writing code at all.
No one is manually coding anymore.
Organizations like ours, people who are playing at the edge, we're doing things that in like three years, everybody else is going to be doing.
today my guest is dan shipper dan is the co -founder and ceo of every which is a company that is at the very bleeding edge of what is possible with ai their team of just 15 employees has built and shipped four different products they publish a daily newsletter and they have a consulting arm that helps companies adopt the latest ai best practices on their product team their engineers don't handwrite a single line of code and instead use an arsenal of agents who help them craft requirements and build their products, their editorial arm uses AI to publish better work faster, and they even have a person whose entire
job is to help every employee at the company become more efficient using the latest AI workflows.
In our conversation, Dan shares a bunch of tactics that they use internally to increase the leverage of their own employees, his personal AI tool stack, the one predictor that he's found for whether a company will successfully find huge productivity gains through AI, how he's building his company in a really unique way, a bunch of predictions for where AI is going, and so much more.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
And also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a bunch of amazing products for free for one year, including Superhuman, Linear, Notion, Perplexity, Bolt, Granola, and more.
Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter dot com and click bundle.
With that, I bring you Dan Shipper.
This episode is brought to you by CodeRabbit.
the AI Code Review Platform transforming how engineering teams shift faster with AI without sacrificing code quality.
Code reviews are critical, but time -consuming.
CodeRabbit acts as your AI Copilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request. Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one -click fix suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST grep patterns catching hatching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss.
Coderabbit also provides free AI code reviews directly in the IDE.
It's available in VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.
Coderabbit has so far reviewed more than 10 million PRs, installed on 1 million repositories, and is used by over 70 ,000 open source projects.
Get Coderabbit for free for an entire year at Coderabbit .ai using code LENY.
That's Coderabbit .ai.
AI. Today's episode is brought to you by DX.
If you're an engineering leader or on a platform team, at some point your CEO will inevitably ask you for productivity metrics.
But measuring engineering organizations is hard, and we can all agree that simple metrics like the number of PRs or commits doesn't tell the full story.
That's where DX comes in.
DX is an engineering intelligence solution designed by leading researchers, including those behind the DORA and SPACE frameworks.
It combines quantitative data from developer tools with qualitative feedback from developers to give you a complete view of engineering productivity and the factors affecting it.
Learn why some of the world's most iconic companies like Etsy, Dropbox, Twilio, Vercel, and Webflow rely on DX.
Visit DX's website at getdx .com slash Lenny.
dan thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thank you for having me i've obviously been a huge fan for a long time and so it's an honor to be here it's my honor dan i feel like this is a podcast that was meant to be uh i'm so happy we're finally doing this there's so damn much that i want to talk about there's so damn much we can talk about i thought it'd be fun to start with just some hot takes and the reason i want to start here is i feel like you spend more more time thinking about AI, building with AI, using AI, evaluating AI than anyone else I know nearly.
And so I really respect your insights and your perspectives on where things are going.
So let me just ask you this kind of question and see where this goes.
What are some things that you believe about AI using AI tools that most people don't believe?
I'm going to go with my hottest take.
And this is the take that I have the least evidence for.
So let's just start with that.
I have other more well -reasoned takes to give you, but this is my hottest one, which is I think that AI may be a, one of the biggest force for reshoring American jobs.
And so I think everyone is worried about it, employing people and for sure it will change the skills needed to do the jobs that you're doing.
But I think it may actually actually reshore a lot of jobs.
And it'll do that in two ways.
One is there are a lot of expensive services that rich people and big companies pay for right now.
So like an in -house counsel or call center or whatever.
And what cheap intelligence does is it makes those kinds of things affordable for small companies and individuals, so it stimulates demand.
The other thing that it does is, it allows people who are in those jobs to serve more people cheaply.
It may not get rid of customer service, for example, but it may allow 10 people in the Midwest who would normally be working at a call center to serve hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
Maybe that's too much. But a lot more people than they would ordinarily if they were the ones on the phone all the time.
And so it becomes much more cost effective for American companies to hire people in the U .S. And I think the people in the U .S. are going to be better, in a lot of cases, at using these AI tools to do work.
So I think it may actually make it more effective to have those jobs in the U .S. run by people sitting in the U .S. who are using it to get work done.
And also the model companies are here too.
So there's a lot of American stuff happening and you can decide whether or not you think that's a good thing.
But I think it's quite lost in the conversation over whether AI will get rid of jobs.
I like optimistic takes about AI.
So this is great. And to your point, I want TBD if this is good for other countries, but good for the US.
What else you got? What other hot takes?
another another big hot take and this is this is less like contrarian and more just like i think people are truly sleeping on it i think people are truly sleeping on how good clod code is for non -coders and i'll extend this to not just clod code but google just came out with the gemini cli command line interface um so things like that and i'll tell you about um for people who are listening that don't know what clod code is clod code is just a command line interface so it's you those black terminals that programmers use um it's a command line interface that you can boot up uh it has access to your
file system it knows how to use any kind of terminal command and it knows how to like browse the web all that kind of stuff you can give it something to do and it will go off and it will run for like 20 or 30 minutes and complete a task like autonomously agentically it's a especially with cloud opus 4 that just came out it's like this gigantic leap forward in and AI's ability to work by itself.
And cloud code can even spawn multiple sub -agents that do a bunch of tasks in parallel.
And it's incredibly useful for programmers.
Like everybody inside of every, is using it all day, every day.
Like everyone's agent pilled.
They've got like 15 agents doing all this kind of stuff.
It's crazy, but non -programmers don't use it because it's intimidating to use the terminal, but you can like download, for example.
You can download all your meeting notes and put it in a folder.
folder and just be like, okay, I want you to read every single one of my meeting notes and tell me something that I do, for example, is tell me all the time that I subtly avoided conflict.
And it will, it writes a little to -do list for itself.
It can have like a little notebook.
It can like go and read each little thing and then like write into his notebook, go down its to -do list and give you a summarized answer over multiple turns.
So it's not just like stuffing everything into context, which is what you'd be doing with like a, you know, ChatGPT chat or a regular cloud chat.
at, it's like actually processing every single file that you give it.
And so I think it's incredibly powerful for any kind of task that involves processing a lot of text.
So it's a simple way to think about this.
You basically have an agent on your local computer that can read your local files and do your bidding.
Yes, exactly. And it can do that for long amounts of time without going off the rails.
Interesting. And so there's like a small hurdle that non -technical people have to overcome, which is using their terminal and giving commands.
But once they get it running, it's just you talk to it in English and ask it to do stuff.
Exactly. So the hot take here is just Cloud Code, which most people think is for engineers, is the most underrated tool for non -technical people.
Yeah, exactly. What are some other ways you imagine people seeing this?
This meeting node example is really cool.
And I could see people using this.
what else have you seen or taken on something that I've done a lot so I'm a writer for a lot of my job and um for example I love um and I know you're gonna ask me about books I love so I'm gonna give you a sneak peek which is I love War and Peace I just read it for the third time wow um that's a long book it's so it's so long but it's so good I think Tolstoy is a brilliant writer and one thing that I wanted to do is I was like I want to inflect some of my writing with some Tolstoy style.
And the way I did that is, I think he's incredible at these little subtle sentences where he shows you what a character is thinking and feeling just by how they behave, like how they move their face or like the mismatch between the intonation and their voice and the expression in their eyes, like all that kind of stuff.
He's just like an incredible student of human behavior and psychology.
And so I just downloaded War and Peace to my computer, which you can do because it's public domain and then I had Claude read like the first three chapters of War and Peace and pull out all of those descriptions and make then make a guide for itself for like how to do descript like character descriptions like Tolstoy and you could totally do this with like a regular like opus command but you couldn't put all of War and Peace into it it would take a lot more hand holding to get it to do this and I just sort of did this by itself like without my like really intervening it also ended up like downloading
I had to download a Russian version of war and peace and the English version and then start comparing different scenes that I love to like tell me about things that I might have missed in the translations so that you can get as deep and weird and nerdy for whatever subfield you care about as you want to.
Same thing for like if you've got tons of customer interviews or like tons of customer data you want to go through it's like incredibly powerful for for going and figuring stuff out stuff out from big data sets like that.
You actually inspired me to use this is not what you're describing but it's also something that's very cool.
That's gonna sound so nerdy I'm reading reading Anna Karenina right now.
Yes. Also Tolstoy. And this is a recommended by a previous podcast guest. And so I was like, all right, I got to read this.
Also very long on my Kindle.
I'm just like, all right, 13 % in.
I've been reading for months.
Hot take. I think Wormpeat is better than Anna Karenina, especially for like a tech person, but they're both good.
Okay, there we go. And there's my year.
I saw you tweet this use case that I love that I've been using, which is just while I'm reading, having Chat2BT voice sitting around and then just asking it questions because you don't actually have to feed it the book.
It knows the whole book.
And Anthropic just shared this.
I don't know if they shared it or someone found this in their legal briefings that they actually bought tons of books and scanned them themselves is how they did fair use.
And so it has all its context.
So just sitting there asking it like, what the heck is this thing in Russian society is super fun.
Okay. So this is awesome.
So the tip here is just coming back to your hot take.
uh the tip is uh you basically can have an agent using local files and doing all kinds of cool stuff on your computer versus having to upload it into into projects or into your prompts and things like that yeah super cool so the I guess the bet here is that people are going to discover this and start using this just day to day I think they absolutely will and I also think probably the model companies are going to start making this more accessible like I think one of the the things that will just come from cloud code and other things like it into the everything else you use, whether it's on the web
or wherever, is all of the original AI apps were pasting a chat box into an existing UI.
So you've got Copilot, it's got the autocomplete in the IDE, you've got Cursor, it's got a little sidebar with a little chat.
And the difference with cloud code is you you never look at the code it's not meant for coding it's not meant for coding by hand it's meant for you to say I want you to get something done and it goes and does it and I think we're just getting to a point where for pretty much all of these you know all the usual applications AI is going to be good enough that we can get rid of the interfaces more or less where you're like digging into all the things that it's actually doing and and it's you're you're sort of interleaved with its execution and you're more just like I'm delegating it's going to go
do it yeah I had a cursor co michael throwl on the podcast and this is his big vision is what comes after code and we don't need to be looking exactly exactly and i also just had the founder of base44 on the podcast who sold you know built this company sold 80 million bucks to wix and he shared that for the so he's been around for six months the company for the last three months he hasn't touched a single line of front -end code all base44 and or sorry all cursor and other tools he's using so this this is happening same thing for people inside of every like no one is manually coding anymore okay
definitely need to talk about that before we do uh any other hot takes that you want to throw out there i have one other hot take um which is i have a definition for agi and so agi is like famously hard to define like what it what does it mean for it to be our artificial artificial general intelligence the turing test was one but like we've pretty much blown past the turing test in a lot of ways so we have no good one um and so what i have noticed is that you can tell how much better ai is getting by how long uh a leash you can give it to do work so with co -pilot it was like a you can tab complete
and that was like the beginning um with chat gpt you ask it a question and it it returns response and that's like maybe slightly better than a tab complete and then now with with cloud opus 4 and gemini and all that kind of stuff like it can go off and work for also with deep research it can go off and work for like 20 or 30 minutes so that leash is getting longer where um where you have to intervene and i was thinking about this and it reminded me of winnicott who's a child psychologist he wrote this book called playing in reality and his conceptualization for what it means to become an adult
what it means to go from being an infant to a child to an adult is when you're first born, you're effectively fused with usually your mother, your caregiver.
There's no difference between you and her or you and whoever your caregiver is.
And growing up is this process of being gradually let down in certain moments where you can handle being let down.
So you learn that there's a separation between you and your caregiver so for infants it's like instead of being like fused at the hip for like every hour of every day you get left alone maybe it's like you get left left on to cry it out like who knows if that's like the right thing to do with infants a lot of consternation there but like that's teaching you that there's a separation between you and your mom or you and your dad like there's there's not going to always be someone to pick you up and raising a child is about knowing when when they're ready to be let down a little bit and have to stand up
on their own. So I think there's that same leash with human development.
It's like you get longer and longer periods of time where you can be on your own.
So we're still in that kind of like 20 to 30 minutes is like maybe, I don't know, I guess you probably can't leave a toddler alone for 20 or 30 minutes.
But like, you know, it's a little bit older than a toddler.
Maybe 20, 30 seconds.
You can, with a toddler, it's like you can be in the same room, but not interacting with them every single second for 20 minutes sometimes.
So it's around there.
And I think we have that similar leash with AGI.
And so I think a good definition of AGI is when does it become economically profitable for people to run agents indefinitely.
So it just never turns off.
It's a cloud code that's always running.
It's always doing something.
You just never turn it off and you don't need to.
Because you know that it's worthwhile to to keep it to keep it on it's never waiting for you to be like okay next thing it'll always respond to you when you're like okay next thing but it's off just essentially living its life like a teenager and that is profitable for you you'd rather have it do that than just wait for you to tell it what to do next and interesting i think that's a good definition of agi and the profitable piece is also just the cost of running that thing and having it it's it's partly the cost and partly the value um and obviously you can like game this a little bit and be like
cool oh, I'm just going to like tell Claude to like run in a loop forever.
But like I'm talking about more than that, like more widespread, 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.
It's interesting how that also is very, the metaphor of a senior employee and autonomy autonomy and essentially the more autonomous they are the less instruction you have to give the less reviews you have to do is also just directly correlated with how senior they are totally okay great uh anything else along these lines 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 um or like it's going to unemploy like two -thirds of the workforce like i don't think that's true i hate headlines that are You don't use your brain when you use
ChatGPT. Or another good headline is doctors alone.
Doctors plus AI or just AI.
Like which one is better?
AI is better. Therefore, doctors are going to be outmoded.
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 like don't really have a lot of experience with ai yeah you could probably create a situation such that like it's better to just to just use an AI and sometimes it is going to be better but there's a lot there's like 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 10 years, that will be totally and completely different.
For the student example, or like the, you know, AI turns your brain off example.
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.
But I don't think anyone would want to go back to a world where no one was literate.
That is super interesting.
There's all these studies that are are showing the benefits of AI to students with these studies in Nigeria and just how fast people progress.
So I think it's really important, this context you're sharing up that you will lose some things, but the gain, the hope is the gain is much higher.
And so far, it seems like it will be.
Yeah, I think people always, especially at the beginning of a tech hype cycle or a 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 down the street from me like doesn't accept credit cards.
Like 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 like deal with.
And just because you can get a really good score on on a test. It's incredible.
I love AI. It's so incredible, but it doesn't, it doesn't actually give you an intuition for, um, how difficult it is to actually be replacing specific parts of work or activities that you would do.
I think a really good thing to give you a, um, maybe like a little bit of an intuition for it, um, is I built this thing over a weekend, like a month ago that was, Because can O3, can it predict what I'm going to say in a meeting?
It's like, that's a 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 the new model at predicting what comes next in our internal code base?
because that's that's not anywhere out on the internet so it's a really good um it's a really good benchmark for that and so I was like well my meeting transcripts aren't anywhere on the internet a lot of what I say is on the internet 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 not smart.
Um, there's a real, there's this real push now.
Um, Toby from Spotify, uh, coined this term called context engineering, which is like getting the context to the model, uh, the right context at the right time, like is at least half the performance.
And I think that's a hundred percent true.
It's something that I've been writing about for like three years at the time.
I called it knowledge orchestration.
Um, I think context engineering is, 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 window and we're done.
I think it's going to get better over time, but the minute it gets good at predicting 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. Interesting.
I imagine you can build a GPT from that and then, instead of having a meeting with Dan, now just talk to this thing and he'll make decisions.
Yes, definitely. And I mean, we do this a little bit.
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, particularly AI 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.
And I'm spending a lot of time like giving feedback on headlines or giving feedback on how do you write an intro or like, how is this?
But is this idea any good, it 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 writers who are not able to talk to me like by the time I see it they've already talked to like some simulation of a simulation of me and that's incredibly powerful.
Let's follow this thread.
This is exactly where I wanted to go.
I feel like the business you're building, the team you're building, the way you're operating is the very bleeding edge of how companies will operate and are trying to operate in this AI era.
You guys are trying to be super AI first. And it's super aligned with just so much of your writing.
There's just so much reason to study what you guys are doing.
Thank you. Yes. And this is benefiting all of us so thank you so first of all just tell people what the heck every is and then share a few insights into just how you operate uh it's funny that you laugh everyone asks that because it's just it's like a it's a very it's just it's a very weird shape of a company that you can actually see other companies that have this shape from earlier eras but they're it's a little bit it's less common it doesn't make as much sense and i think it's newly enabled by AI and we can talk about why.
But the way, the way that I typically talk about Every is we do ideas and apps at the edge of AI.
So the core of the business is we have a daily newsletter.
We've been doing it for about five years.
We have about a hundred thousand subscribers.
All the people from the top AI labs read us.
Anyone who's, who's basically interested in or working in AI at the frontier and wants to know what's going on reads us.
We do a lot of like, 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. I don't know if I can curse on this podcast, but it's the fucking best. Perfect.
Excellent use. And you call those vibe checks?
Is that the - Yeah, we call them vibe checks.
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 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've found over time is we have we think the best writing and content about technology is from people that are actually
using it and building with it.
And so we've always had this sort of function where we're always building little experiments in addition to our writing.
And that helps us write great stuff.
And that has turned into a suite of apps that we run internally.
And the people who are building those apps are also writers and they're contributing to things like vibe checks.
So you get a really inside look into how is this stuff being built from people who are actually using it every day.
And the suite of apps that we have, one's called Quora.
We just launched Quora publicly on the day that we're recording this, which is really awesome.
Congratulations. Thank you.
You can think of it like a chief of staff, an AI chief of staff for your email.
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 like what kinds of things we like to incubate and how do we like to incubate it?
Cause I think there's a lot of, there's some really interesting special things in there, but I've been blabbing for a while, so I'll stop there.
There's also a consulting firm which I wanna talk about, but let's move off on that.
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 in app streaming, 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.
That feels like a billion dollar business right there.
I wanna come back to it.
I think so. Because everybody wants to learn this.
Okay. So share a few ways that you guys operate.
You mentioned that your team doesn't write any code.
What are just some ways that allow you to operate this efficiently?
I know your team is really small.
You have a daily newsletter.
You have three, four products.
You have a consulting arm.
How big is the team of every?
We have 15 people. 15 people.
Okay. So just give us insight into some of the ways you operate that are kind of at the bleeding edge.
Okay. So a couple of things.
Thanks. One, and I think everyone should do this, is we have a head of AI operations.
I sit with her once a week and every time I'm doing something repetitively, we put it in a to -do list and she's just constantly building prompts and building workflows and stuff like that so that I and everyone else on the team are just automating as much as possible.
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 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 like 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 in 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 um but if you're good at making applications people use it's great highly recommend having an ai operations lead i imagine you saw the ceo of quora tweeted about this wanting to hire exactly this sort of person yeah so clearly this is a trend so the idea is this like your point that this needs to be somebody who's who's outside of the day -to -day day work of the company and is specifically focused on helping the team be
more efficient with AI.
And then is this person mostly just you automating you or can they help other people?
She helps, she helps everyone basically where we're starting right now is with the editorial operation.
So there's so much stuff in the editorial operation where I or our editor in chief, Kate, like Kate is constantly doing like little small copy edits to make sure everything is like in every style and it takes like hours and hours a day um and so now opus is at a point where you can give it a style guide and a prompt and it'll go through uh go through anything you're writing and copy edit it which is amazing um 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 um 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 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.
That is super cool.
What is her background, this AI operations person?
Her name is Katie Parrott.
She actually does a lot of ghost writing for us.
So she also, So when people inside of Evrey who are builders, often they just write themselves, but sometimes they want help, and she'll help them write about whatever they're working on.
So that's how she started with 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, 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 thinking about that.
But she's also a great writer.
And she's also just incredibly excited about AI.
She just wants to tinker and wants to use it.
And that was the thing that got me to be like, okay, you should just come and do that.
Instead of just ghostwriting, we should add this to your plate.
And it's been really fantastic.
So I think that's a, at minimum, you really just want someone who's just like, I want to 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.
This is an amazing tip.
I feel like everyone's going to start hiring these people.
I think so. There's a couple other people who talk about this.
I heard Rachel Woods, who's another sort of, she thinks a lot about AI stuff she's talking about.
But I think it's becoming a thing.
And I think it's really important.
And it just bleeds out into every other part of the org.
So 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, Cora is spelled C -O -R -A.
So it's different from Q -U -O -R -A.
Slightly confusing.
There's a lot of copy that goes out on Cora or Spiral or Sparkle that we want to have that same every quality bar for.
And so we have 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.
that so one thing that we did um nitesh who's one of the programmers uh engineer engineers on cora built a cloud code command that just uses that prompt and checks through the entire code base um for for all the copy edits and then creates a pull request on github and then sends the pull request to kate so she's just like looking 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 And suddenly your engineering team is writing marketing copy in the style you want.
I think that's so cool.
That is extremely cool.
I'm going to take us on a little tangent.
You keep mentioning Claude, and I'm curious just what is kind of in the stack of tools that you find yourself using, your team ends up using.
This seems like Claude is a core part of it.
I do love Claude. I would say I'm generally, my first thing that I open is O3.
I'm like a Chachi -O -T boy.
um and i think o3 is super high quality i think um it's great for writing it's great for coding it's great for all that stuff and what it has that really makes a difference still from from claude is it has memory and i just love that like i've spent so much time yelling at chat about like i need my writing to be punchy and concise you know and it just knows that now so i think when i ask it to write something for me it's like actually better than yours or maybe not yours but like your average your average chat gpt 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 chance to get them out 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 i like that i think that's i think that's really great so day to day oh three that's my that's my go -to i think claude opus is first of all claude code, everyone inside every, that's basically what we use.
If you're building something, you're using cloud code.
It's crazy. It's so good.
Gemini just came out with something.
So I'm very excited to try that because I think that's the model that we use most for the apps that we build 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 to one -off self -contained like i want to pick off this little feature what else do i use uh going back to claude claude opus 4 can do something that no other model except one other model that i can't talk about um can do something that no other model can do we won't go there we want to get you in trouble okay go on but yeah no other model can do this which is Because earlier versions of Claude, and I think generally versions of other models, when you ask them, is this piece of writing any good?
Claude, 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 -.
And then if you give it another turn, it would go to A.
So it doesn't have the same kind of gut.
It's sort of thinking about what you probably want to hear too much. and there's various methods that you can use to like prompt engineer around this like give it a template or like whatever and they sort of worked but it just still doesn't doesn't have that thing where it's like can it tell if writing is interesting or any good does it have that gut sense and opus 4 has it it's really wild and i think that's 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 for example um 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 a essentially clod code but for content um style product where you know you say i want i wanted to write a tweet you give it all the documents it has much memories it creates a to -do list for itself and then it goes and writes and And one of the things that is so interesting is now because it can judge things, part of its to -do list is, OK, 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 a huge, huge unlock that we were struggling for three months to build this crazy system to try to get it to judge writing.
And then Opus 4 just one -shotted it.
And we were like, great, this product works.
Let's start shipping it.
Um, so yeah, I love it for that.
Are there any other AI tools that you just use regularly?
You mentioned granola, even outside of the bottles.
So what are some that you think maybe people are sleeping on?
I use granola. So I used to use Super Whisper and Whisperflow, which I think are fantastic.
We have an internal version of that called Monologue that will 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.
I use I use we use Notion all the time and I specifically use their meeting recording.
I think that's most I think that's mostly the stack.
Okay, that was really helpful and super interesting.
This episode is brought to you by PostHog, the product platform your engineers actually want to use.
PostHog has all the tools that founders, developers and product teams need like Product Analytics, Web Analytics, Session Replays, Heat Maps, Experimentation, Surveys, LLM Observability, Air Tracking, and more.
Everything PostHog offers comes with a generous free tier that resets every month.
More than 90 % of customers use PostHog for free.
You are gonna love working with a team this transparent and technical.
You'll see engineers landing pull requests for your issues, and their support team provides code -level assistance when things get tricky.
PostHog lets you have all your data in one place.
Beyond analytics events, their data warehouse enables you to sync data from your Postgres database, Stripe, HubSpot, S3, and many more sources.
Finally, their new AI product analyst, MaxAI, helps you get further, faster.
Get help building complex queries and setting up your account with an expert who's always standing by.
Sign up today for free at posthog .com slash lenny.
And make sure to tell them Lenny sent you.
That's posthog .com slash Lenny.
Let's go back to ways that your team operates.
You mentioned having Kate, was that her name?
Yeah. Okay. What else?
What else do you do that you think other companies should be doing or will eventually start doing?
So the Quora team, which is Kieran and Nitesh, basically...
That's the team. That's the team, yeah.
Well, it's Kira, Nitesh, and 15 Claude Code instances, so it's more powerful than you think.
I love that this is just, again, a glimpse into the future.
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.
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.
Here's a document with exactly the stuff that I need to, 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, 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 Kiran and Nitesh and Cora has, it just came out of, it just became public.
It wasn't probably private beta has 2 ,500 active users and like it's 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 it's kind of crazy maybe it's crazy how do you do this speed up thing is it um prompts that they continue to refine a lot of it is prompts and automations and stuff like that yeah got it for automations what's the tool what's the tool you use for automating automations what they're using a A lot of is, is cloud code.
So you can do slash commands and cloud code, which are like repeated prompts that you're, that you're doing.
Got it. Okay. So basically they're building a library of prompts that make the process of here's what I want to build to a good solid PRD that you can feed into cloud code.
Yeah. More correct and more efficient.
Exactly. Super interesting.
And, and they just keep like a file or they put this into a project.
Is that how they. It's a GitHub.
It's like a GitHub.
it's on their github where they can like share it with each other another thing that they do which i think is very cool is they they use a bunch of clouds at once but then they're also using like three other agents so they love there's there's an agent called friday that they love that's like a that's a that's an ai asian product called friday yeah yeah i hadn't heard of that okay um 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 um i can send to you yeah they did like a a, you know, S
tier through F tier of AI agents, which I think is so funny.
And one of the things I really like about about Charlie is that it lives in GitHub.
So you can when you get a when you get a pull request, you can just be like at Charlie, like, can you can you check this out.
And that seems to seems to work really well to have like different agents that have like, maybe slightly different perspectives.
It's like different people, you know, that have different perspectives and have different tastes like you can I think Kieran is he's like a one of those like right like 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 ChaiJupyT for example it's it feels very terse and minimal and professional and so and it has a particular kind of style that maybe he likes versus I don't know Claude is a slightly different style and I think that's I think all of that is so interesting that these things
have personalities and that those that that changes what you might want to use it for why you might want to use three of them at once that is so fascinating it makes me think about Peter Dane's conversation again where he talks about his hiring strategy and one of his key lessons and he ended up hiring like the current head of product for ChatGPT the current head of marketing at ChatGPT the current head of engineering like because he hires these incredible people and his philosophy is to hire a team of Avengers Where everyone is strong at certain things and together they're the perfect team versus
everyone versus like the best at everything.
And it's interesting that you can always do that with different product, different agents from different companies.
You definitely can.
And it makes me feel like there's a bigger market than people think potentially where people will want different companies, agents, not just all Devins or not all Kodak.
I think there really is.
It's definitely not like one one agent to rule them all.
So interesting. Yeah.
Oh, my God. Yeah. The two people on the Quora team are, what's their background?
Are they both engineers or what are they?
They're both engineers.
Kieran's got this like crazy background where, they both have really interesting backgrounds.
Kieran's got this crazy background where he was previously like VP Eng at a startup.
So like was effectively like 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 like taught us all how to make croissants my croissant was horrible his was like beautiful um and and generally i think like that kind of multi -dimensional type of talent is the kind of person that i love having it every like because we're all generalists we all want to use ai for all these like weird awesome creative things and someone who has that background is going to have a good taste for not only agents, but what should the landing
page look like, or whatever, which I think is increasingly important where you're trying to scale a team of generalists of 15 people to like five products.
So that's Kiran's background.
Nitesh's background is I'm jealous because he only started learning to code when ChatGPT came out.
He'd 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 I learned to program in middle school from books.
Like I had to go to Barnes and Noble and like buy a book and there was nothing.
I couldn't Google anything about like how this, how this, why this function wasn't working.
Stack Overflow even back then.
Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't Stack Overflow.
There was like weird BBNet forums and stuff that like, I was like 12 and I probably shouldn't have been on there or whatever.
So it's, he has gone so much faster than any other engineer, I think, like in a pre -AI era.
and i see the same thing in the rest of the company like i think there's this huge question about um what happens when kids uh like entry -level jobs are taken away by ai and my take is like that that's worth thinking about and it's it's possible that that might be a problem at some point but my take is whenever i see a kid with chachibt i'm like holy shit they're gonna go so so much faster than any other person that i've worked with like we have this guy alex duffy who works with us um he writes for context window and he he just launched um we taught ai's how to how to play diplomacy with each
other um which is really cool and he did that whole thing and he's 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 one of those classic cases which I've seen like over and over at 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 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 nitesh is another good example and so i think generally people are going to figure out that like some 20 year old with chetchy subscription is like super powerful if you just like mentor them and i think that's great man there's so many
threads i could follow here like there's all this fear of entry -level people will never like the roles are disappearing for entry -level people and so how will we ever have senior people if these people can't learn to do things as an entry -level person and what you're saying is chat gpt and these tools help you accelerate really quickly so you don't really need to be at the bottom rung for a long time yeah you're effectively like learning how to be one level above um the entry level from the 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, um, so 8 % of the workforce is managers.
It's now going to be much cheaper to manage.
Um, so more people are going to have to do it.
And so that's the thing that, um, kids, 20 year olds, whatever I see is now are going to start to have to learn in addition to, you know, there, it's not like you can just say like, okay, go do it and then come back.
Like you have to be able to go into the work that's being done and help make it better.
but they're learning both at the same time.
They're learning how to manage and how to do the actual work so that they're good at it.
And the managing here is managing agents, right?
Yeah, you're managing AI, yeah.
And so this is a good, coming back to your point about how this core team, and I guess you said everyone, every doesn't write code, zero code written.
Now it's just managing agents that are writing code for you.
Yeah. Okay, I've never heard of a company at this stage.
So this is extremely cool.
so the workflow is they give it here's what i want i refine it using this cool prompts library that they've that they build on and agents build code write the code then basically the time is spent reviewing code and then reviewing the output what does it look like what does it feel like and then continuing to refine wow so you guys are at where michael from cursor said we will be so which i chatted with him a few months ago he said in a year this is where he thinks thing will be where We're not looking at code anymore.
You guys are already there.
Although you were looking at code.
Okay. You're still looking at code?
I think they definitely are looking at code.
So, you know, you're doing a code review before you merge 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, you know, he spent a couple of days, like, 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 understand those things, but then he's not actually writing any code.
Once he understands it, he's just off telling Cloud Code what to do.
And I think that's really important.
This is an insane milestone we're hitting here.
There's this sense we're getting to a place where you don't need to really understand code.
You don't have to write any code.
We'll get there. You guys are there.
I think this is so easy to overlook how wild this is.
You have a product team not writing code at all.
it is really wild I think it's really wild in particular just like having a small group of people that have their everyone's multi -dimensional everyone like has all these different skills everyone's a generalist um everyone's AI forward so what you can do in an environment like that with us 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 um and I think that's what makes the right it 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 from a sort of position of experience um and but i do want to say something else which is we're not at a point yet where the people that work at every could do what they do if they didn't know how to code yeah this is what i was gonna ask which is a different bar and i think for a long time it's going to be valuable to know how to code for a long time um but this has been this is this is is like 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.
But if you were a real programmer, you would understand the language underlying Python and JavaScript, which was what's written in C.
And scripting languages weren't totally real.
And in order to really do anything interesting, you had to be able to learn both parts of stack.
Same thing for C programmers.
When I guess in the 70s, C was invented, it was like, you got to learn, you got to be able to write assembly.
And English is just like a layer on top of scripting languages.
So I think all of those, 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 still takes a long time.
And there's some times when even if you're a JavaScript or Python programmer, it's useful to know like how, how all that how that stuff works, how it's written and see how it's how it's implemented.
It's today, it's much less important than it used to be.
But that took like 10 or 20 years.
And I think that's the same thing is going to be true for programming, like having that skill is super important and will accelerate you significantly, it will sort of start to get less important over time, but we're not close to that yet.
Okay. That's a really important point.
I'm glad you went there.
So do you have a sense of how far we might be from you hiring someone to build another product that isn't an engineer?
Like a real SaaS product?
Yeah. So like, hey, we have this idea.
We want to bring someone on to actually lead it.
very far like not even not within 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 um we were talking about dia um the browser uh from the new ai browser from the browser company dia has these things called skills um which are effectively like little you know 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 could build that same thing for like um custom gpts from chat gpt um non -technical person can definitely
build that so i think while i will i will definitely maintain that we're not anywhere close to anybody being able to like build a conventional sas app with zero programming knowledge aside from just like a demo there are going to be other forms of software um one of my things like software is becoming content there's going to be other forms of software that don't look like the software today but you can run start and run as a business as a non -technical person even if you don't know how to code and that'll happen very soon if 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 okay i think that's really reassuring to a lot of people basically what What you're seeing is AI just supercharges people who have a skill and allows them to do a lot more.
Yeah. Okay. Is there any other way that you guys operate that is really interesting that might be worth sharing that helps you operate really quickly, helps you do more with less?
I mean, I would love to talk about how we think about building products, like what products to build.
like what do we end up building because i think there's something sort of special about it that probably there's a playbook that is useful for people so when i think about this 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 um that only rich people or big companies could buy so 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 or organize your computer is another example.
Someone to ghostwrite for you that are becoming orders of magnitude cheaper so that everyone can use them, even if you're at a small startup.
up um and so basically like when you're running like we are sort of this ai first company you're running into these all these little things where you're like i wish i had a ghostwriter right now but ghostwriters are really expensive or i wish i had a lawyer but it wouldn't cost me like twenty five thousand dollars lawyers are really expensive and 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 allows you to be like oh i could just use clod for that i can use chachi pt for that um and so you're uh you're able to you're
able to use the demand that you have that like we can we can afford a lawyer we have ghost writers 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 um and um so we notice that we start to then use like chachi pt and clod 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 like unbundle it into its own separate thing that becomes an app.
And I think what's really special about this time is the entire game board has been like totally reset in terms of things you can build.
Where, you know, five years ago, it was like you're gonna build another notes app, like we've been building notes out for forever, like another B2B SaaS app, like it's all the same stuff, didn't like slightly different packaging.
And now it's like totally new territory.
No one knows what's going on.
No, 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, the thing on computers, like we were figuring out all these new workflows on spreadsheets, they got unbundled into B2B SaaS.
Same thing for ChaiGBT and Clod.
And what's really cool is you can be like, cool, I'm using ChaiGBT 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 we all have the same vibe where we're all kind of doing similar stuff, they become our first users.
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 it and people read Every, they have a similar vibe to us too.
So they become the next set of users.
And that's a really, I think, interesting pipeline for building applications applications or building apps, it's a totally new green field so that all the stuff you're thinking about, it's probably new, which is really cool.
And over time, what I think is organizations like ours, people who are playing at the edge, were doing things that in 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.
you that is really cool uh what I'm hearing is gpt wrappers are a good idea and are building I I 100 % think gpt wrappers are amazing and they've been much maligned for absolutely no reason and um people don't understand how absolutely valuable they are I think there's also just uh you guys are you raised a sip seat round uh I want to so this is a good time to maybe Maybe talk about that.
These products don't have to become some mega billion dollar hits.
You kind of have this portfolio of companies.
You have the content business.
I think there's a really interesting approach to how big these need to get to be successful.
Maybe just talk about that.
I really want Evry 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 but I think fundamental to building an institution is at least for me, the way I would like to do it is I want internally it to feel like this creative playground where we have the opportunity to like take risk and do stuff and do weird stuff that like 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 institution series.
We want this to be like lasting and important and it should just be fun.
Let's play around. And I think having that tension is really valuable.
And so I've always been hesitant to raise a lot of money because I think it locks you into having to be that serious thing that's totally going for it.
And there's lots of companies that figure out that balance.
But just for me personally as a founder, I want to keep the optionality alive and I want to keep the playful feeling alive.
And I think part of that that comes from I know like I have the control to do what I want, more or less.
There's probably also some like 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, that's kind of what I want.
And so when we started every, we raised like a very small 700k pre seed round.
And this was at the height of the creator economy.
So we both, we both started our newsletters, you and I started around the same time, it was like the hype -iest, 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, send an email to all of our investors being like, and you're one of our investors.
So you've probably got this email.
Tiny investor, but yeah, I'm in there.
I'm in there. We send an email to everyone being like, this is probably not a venture business.
You should did 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 two million Wayne from Reid Hoffman and starting line VC.
And we did it as what I've been calling a sips seed round, which is basically they've committed $2 million, but we can pull it down whenever we want.
And it's, we just do it on a safe at a set cap.
And for me, that was, that's really helpful because it allows me psychologically to take a lot more risk.
Like I don't, if we go to zero on the bank account, I can get more money.
Great. I don't have to think about it.
But But what's also really helpful is I'm not and the rest of the team is not staring at a gigantic number in the bank account being like, cool, we can burn this.
Let's burn it. And also for our investors, I think Reid very much wants us to succeed.
But 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.
it. Um, and I think that kind of alignment is what I was looking for.
Cause I think there's this core creative spirit to the thing that I want to maintain and I really care about having, um, 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, um, 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, um, you, you don't necessarily, sometimes you do that by building a gigantic, into 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 maybe they weren't rich at all and so I really like creating this place where we can make a really good business and I care a lot about that but also the core of the soul of it is changing about changing how people see themselves in the world I love that you've kind of innovated a new like a middle ground way of fundraising raising not bootstrap and not just regular vc it's
a seed and i love that there's two million like you know if i raise 50 million it'd be like okay i get it let's not put 50 million in our bank account but you do have two million it's too much for us we can't yeah you don't want to see that in our account that's another thing and you know we'll see how this ages like i might be back here in two years crying the blues because like we didn't raise enough money or whatever who knows um but that's the other thing is i do think we can get so much further with with very small amounts of money like quora i think all in to build quora we've spent maybe
300k maybe that's crazy because this product includes salaries yeah wow this product um 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 gpt so not only was it totally impossible but now we can get with two engineers like we can get you know the amount done that would would have taken a team of like 20 people and i think that's you know that means that we need less money and i don't think that vc has really caught up to that yet um and i
think there are other companies that are doing there's like a 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 like we have a specific like incubation model which is a bit different from from VC model and I think there's some differentiation and the stuff that we can do with founders which is kind of cool but yeah we're I'm just trying to figure out like a shape that works for me and that's different from other people and we'll see how this goes.
We'll revisit in a couple years.
Seems like it's going great from the outside.
I want to ask about a couple other things before we wrap up.
One is around this consulting arm that you have. I think it's really interesting because like I said, I feel like this could be a billion dollar business.
I feel like every company right now is trying to figure out what the hell, what the hell's everyone else figured out that we're not doing.
I've had so many emails from chief product officers at companies being like, can you introduce me to just some chief product officers that have done cool things with AI that we should learn from, like so many people.
And I would just introduce them to each other.
And it's cool because you guys are basically solving that problem for a lot of companies.
So one is just maybe share a bit about what that side of the business for folks.
And then two, I feel like you, I imagine you've seen companies that have done this really well, have adopted AI.
Things have worked really well.
They found really good productivity gains.
And then you found companies that don't.
what do you find is the difference between those two i love this question um and i have a very specific opinion about this um 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 you know pretty nascent it's probably been over the last like six to nine months but like it's a pretty big business now um like it's our it's it'll probably
double this year like last year we did about a million um 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 um billion i predict a billion dollars in a few years but yeah basically people are like can you come help us learn how to do this so what we do is we spend some time going and researching your organization, so we go in and try to understand, what are all the different teams doing?
What are their repetitive tasks?
Like 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.
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, here are the teams that are really into this, here are the teams that or not here's like how much um uh how much leverage you might be able to get on different teams based on the interviews and based on the ai analysis it's pretty cool um and this is like that's an app that i like vibe coded like over a weekend with devon like a year ago and then um alex runs the part of the consulting like has helped upgrade it um uh then what we do is we have a training curriculum so we go in and train each team and we customize it based on um the interviews that we
do because one of the interesting things about ai is it's such a general purpose 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 um and here's the exact situations you're going to use them and that really i think helps drive the adoption we spend four weeks with each team an hour a week that kind of thing um it seems to be really cool and then
we'll often also after this go and build automations and do some of the ai operations stuff we were talking about earlier companies really like it um i think the we work with a lot of like big hedge funds and pe firms and um big companies all that kind of stuff um to your other to your your second question which is like what separates the good companies from the bad or the companies that end up adopting adopting this.
I think the, the number one predictor is does the CEO use chat GPT or insert your own chat bot.
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 to have, uh, either they're going to be negative on it.
And so definitely no one's going to do it, or they're going to have way unrealistic expectations because they have no intuition for what's possible and they're just going to get really disappointed.
But the CEOs that are using it all the time are able to like both drive the excitement and set reasonable expectations for what can be achieved.
And so those things end up working really well.
And the people that do this really well.
So for example, we, um, we work with a hedge fund called walleye, which I had the a founder on my podcast, AI and I, a few weeks ago, they're a gigantic $10 billion hedge fund.
One of the things that they do, which I think is, I think they're basically the model for how to do this.
First thing he did, which a lot of CEOs are doing, is send the, we're an AI first company email.
Everyone's got the memo.
You just got to really do it.
And one of the things he said in his memo, which I love is, I wrote this email with ChatGPT and you should too.
So you got to like - in the memo you gotta like lead from the front in that way and then what he does and i think what a lot of other like really cool companies do is they're doing like weekly uh meetings where people share prompts and share use cases they're doing um they do like a weekly email to their entire company being like okay here's our here's our usage here are usage stats for chat gpt here are the here are the people that like um uh here are the people that came up with a new prompt and contributed to it like create this this sort of like awareness and momentum because what's going back
to the point I made earlier about you know 10 percent 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 like figuring out what works and then all you have to do is like translate what they learn into the rest of the organization and so if you create forums for them to be rewarded you're going to automatically transfer a lot of their learnings to everybody else and encourage more of it.
And I think that's kind of the secret.
That is awesome. I love this advice.
So, just to reflect back what you just shared, a few kind of tactics you find that you encourage within companies.
One is just send this memo, the Toby memo.
I don't know if that's the right way to describe it.
Who I think was first along these lines.
Just wear AI first. It's going to be part of your performance review.
It's going to be asking, can you do it in AI before you talk to anyone else?
All these things and then just note, I wrote this using ChatGPTs.
It's a great idea. This idea of a weekly meeting.
So it's like a live or Zoom meeting where people share.
Here's the thing I've learned about using AI.
And then this weekly stats email of here's how much we're using ChatGPT across the org.
Here's some people that did some awesome work.
Yeah. Amazing. And I especially love this very simple heuristic of if your CEO uses ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever daily, it's going to work out.
Yeah. That is super cool.
I know it's early, but what kind of impact have you seen from a company kind of leaning into this?
and adopting AI widely any anything you've seen either anecdotally or numbers wise it's early it's really hard to say other than um 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 um and so they're they're just they're just going further faster um at the same budget I actually don't see you know I don't see a lot of people being like cool we're gonna like fire a bunch of people like also I I don't really want to do consulting like that.
Like that sucks. Um, but we've never had to say no. Um, mostly people are like, cool, I'm just going to go further with the, with the people that I, um, that I have. I think also back to kind of the first point I made about reshoring American jobs.
Um, I have seen some companies, not the ones that we work with, but I have seen some companies and people that I'm friends with where they're like, we have a call center somewhere.
Um, but I think I can get the same amount done with like two employees in the U S that i have that use like one of these you know customer service platforms like they're still not totally automatic like i think that clarina ceo thing that was bullshit um uh but yeah you can have a couple people in the u .s that maybe uh 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 and um yeah i think i think that's that's the get more done with the same
amount of people maybe to close out our conversation i want to come back to this idea that you referenced but i want to spend a little more time on this which is this idea of the allocation economy uh if i understand it correctly we've been in this knowledge economy where people get paid to do a thing and your thesis is that we're moving to this allocation economy where skills become the manager skills become more important and we're going to be spending more of our time managing and i think what's amazing about this is it also tells you which skills will matter more in the future which is something
i think a lot of people are thinking about so so maybe just answer that question and share whatever you think is important to share to give people a sense of what you're thinking yeah so this is uh based on an article i wrote like two two and a half years ago so this is back before like agents were even like thought of as viable um and i was like really trying to think about how do i express um what in my experience using this every day like what what skills are useful for me um because i think that'll be the case for for a lot of other people and i think that's that's the kind of the best method
i think to do these sorts of predictions is you have to be doing it all the time yourself and then that informs your opinion about this stuff so um what i noticed using at the time like gbd3 or maybe gbd4 um was that i was spending a lot of time uh for example thinking about how do i communicate the problem 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?
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 like 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 and once that like once that clicks for you i think you'll start to see a lot of other things so a really good example is there's a big complaint that it's like well how can i have ai do this like i can't trust that they're gonna do it well so i just 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 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 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.
And specifically, I was looking at the article you wrote the skills that you highlight will be more valuable is evaluating talent vision taste and to your point when to get into the details when it makes sense to dive in yeah awesome and then there's also kind of a connected point you made the reference which is that generalists will become more and more valuable in the future you mentioned that everyone and every is a generalist yeah uh share a little bit about that yeah i find i mean maybe it's because i'm a generalist so you should take this with a grain of salt same but i think that's one
of the things that has made ai so awesome for me is like i love to dabble in different things so 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 chad gbt is right there with me um and i think what we've basically what has happened as civilization has progressed from like ancient greece to now is uh what we've discovered is the more that we specialize, the better we can coordinate across many different people.
And so it's sort of, it's like the Adam Smith, you know, like there's a pin factory and someone's making a pin or whatever his thing is, is specialization in games from trade.
And there have been a lot of really good impacts of that.
And I think you can, One of my favorite examples of this is back to ancient Greece and ancient Athens.
Athens was a civilization of generalists, at least for citizens.
They have a bad history with women and people who are slaves, but let's just put that to the side for a second.
If you're a citizen generalist, you could be expected to be a fighter, a judge, a juror, maybe a general.
You could expect it to have many different roles inside of your society in your lifetime.
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 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, 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 So it's doing a lot of the it's good for doing a lot of the specialized tasks that you might have had to spend like 10 years getting good at, you know, learning about this particular species of cicadas, you know exactly how they like, you know, reproduce.
produce. 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 I think we can stay at 15 people much longer than we would be able to.
So the people inside of every can stay generalists for much longer and i think that that may like sort of ripple out to the rest of the economy where instead of like gigantic massive corporations where like each person is doing like one little like button turning you have many more smaller organizations with more generalists and i think that would actually be a really good thing this uh reminds me i was uh talking to my personal trainer that i'm trying out for a little bit and she said that she's a very big vision kind of high level person and not good at execution executing, like we're staying organized.
And chat GPT is such a godsend for her because she's just like, here's what I wanna do roughly, just help me get it done.
That's great. I love it.
Yeah, and it really made me think about just how much value all this stuff is gonna unlock.
This was amazing. It was everything I wanted it to be.
But with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round.
Dan, are you ready?
I'm ready. Here we go.
What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
well i already recommended one which is war and peace um definitely gotta read that uh if you want like a tall story primer i would read the death the death of ivan ilich um 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 um and i in particular i really like the russians because they're a lot of the russian novelists are dealing with the effects of technology on on traditional Russian way of life and they're very kind of in this really interesting um middle ground between a sort of romantic
outlook on the world and a more rationalist like we're we're progress we're making progress and that's one of the things you'll find in Anna Karenina when um god what's the guys what Levin is out in the fields with the peasants like doing the scythe thing like that's that's Tolstoy like kind of like thinking about oh what would it be like instead of of being a nobleman who's like trying to make, 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, um, uh, the master and his emissary is another really good one.
And that's about, um, basically how the different hemispheres of the brain, uh, view reality.
It's really, really good.
And I think it, um, I think it relates to a lot of AI stuff too.
I think, yeah, I think, I think those are my, those are my three or four.
Yeah. Yeah. Excellent list. I think nobody's mentioned most any of these.
So this is that's always a good sign.
Your favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
Yes. I really love Deadwood.
Have you seen it? I absolutely love it.
I remember when they stopped it for some reason.
I think you had to go do something else at HBO.
So sad. It's amazing.
Yeah. David Melch is incredible.
National treasure. Incredible writer.
But what I what I really think what I really love about it, and I only recently watched it is um he talks about deadwood being about how order forms out of chaos um so it's this like frontier town people are going to it and like there's no law there's no rules and by like season three there's like a mayor and like you know there 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 a really interesting study in that kind of dynamic.
I love how everything connects to how tech works and how AI came to be.
I love this. Thank you.
Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?
I don't have a good answer for that because I just spend 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 an API but other than that I think it's a fantastic product that is definitely the most mentioned product in this segment for the past couple months ketchup granola, I can't help but mention you get a year free of granola if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter what a freaking deal and not just you but your whole company gets free granola for a year what a deal feel?
This is not a paid promotion by me.
I just, you know, that's just how I feel.
So I'm glad, I'm glad it's part of the bundle.
Yeah. Incredible. Okay.
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?
So basically like I use Chachapi all the time and it has memory.
So I was like, you know, I'm going on Lenny's podcast. What would my life motto be?
And it said, your life motto is a witness, witness, deeply build bravely.
You, you prize slow, attentive seeing, whether it's reading Tolstoy, tracking meditation themes themes or extra David Milledge paragraph.
So like we're, we're, it's hitting all the stuff I just mentioned, which is really funny.
Um, and then Bill Bravely, you turn those insights into concrete things like every and Cora and long form essays and, and all that kinda stuff.
So I think there's, 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, um, uh, said, um, do things worth about and write things worth reading.
Seems like a pretty good summation do things worth writing about out and read things worth reading write things worth reading write things worth reading that's that should be the motto of both of our newsletters yeah that is really good okay and by the way i love that you asked chachapiti what's my life motto and wait this is interesting so it didn't give me the answer but inspired the answer yeah and i think that's actually like exactly how i use it wow it's an extension of our brains already yeah uh last question i was uh reading somewhere where you wrote that you stopped writing at one point
you're just like i need to do other things i need to build this company and then you realize i need to get back to writing because things started going sideways and i feel like this there's such an interesting corollary to a lot of the stuff you talked about of do things that make you happy stay close to joy uh just what happened there because because i didn't know that this is definitely not a lightning round thing so i'm i'm i will expound but i'll try to do it as quickly as possible perfect um 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 know you don't raise a lot of money and you try to you decide 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 business and there just was, there were not a lot of models for me, um, of people who had successful businesses that, that were also writers.
It turns out there are.
Um, 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 cause I was writing a lot.
Nathan was writing a lot.
Um, and when I stopped writing, uh, the business didn't work as well because media businesses don't follow the same pattern as 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, um, and maybe you hire people that are good writers, but that's hard. Um, it's 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, you know, so that's what I did.
Um, and I also really struggled with, okay, what are the implications for that?
And for my career? And, um, 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 three years into the business, the business has been pretty flat.
I was pretty miserable because I was 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 um there's uh jason freed uh who i've known for a long time and i've always always but i forgot about in this context there is um sam harris who's got a great podcast and he's got a gigantic meditation app um there is um bill simmons who's like incredible podcaster and also built the ringer sold to spotify for a couple hundred million bucks like there's a lot of these people and there are patterns that they use to build companies that are pretty well understood they're just not typical silken valley patterns and so i was like cool like i just want
to be a writer i think it'll 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 um and that's actually good for the business it's good for me and it's good for the business and the more i've leaned into that doing the thing that like if you told anyone that you're starting a business where it's like well we're going to be a newsletter and we're going to incubate all these apps and we're going to do consulting and whatever they would be like you're
nuts like everyone wants to do that of course every founder wants to do that but like you you have to focus you have to 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 is is there's 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 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 it'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 you think a company should look like is definitely a much better way to be successful.
And it's also a much better way to live.
I think this is going to hit hard with a lot of people who are listening who are maybe founders or want to be founders.
And this resonates with a lot of people that have been on this podcast during similar lessons.
Dan, this was incredible.
Two final questions.
Where can folks check out Every, find you online, and how can listeners be useful to you?
So you can find us at every .to.
I'm also on Twitter at Dan Schipper.
You can go there to check out our our uh 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 um and how can people be useful honestly i think the the most useful thing um for someone like me based on what i want to do is like i want people to find interesting cool ways to use ai that like actually helps them make their lives better so like just go do that and tell me about it um and And I think that'll be great.
What's the best way to tell you?
Is it comments on your YouTube show?
Is it emailing you, DMing you?
I would say tweet me.
If you subscribe to Evry, you can also reply to those emails and they eventually get forwarded to me.
So tweet me, reply to Evry.
And if you want to comment on YouTube, great.
I'm not in the YouTube comments as much as I should be, though.
Don't do that. Maybe don't do that.
Okay, well, Dan, this was incredible.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast .com.
See you in the next episode.
