Person / Founder / Creator
Dan Shipper
He builds the software, then writes the story of building it. At Every, the loop is the whole point.
Dan Shipper - the founder who never stopped shipping, in New York.
He builds the software, then writes the story of building it. At Every, the loop is the whole point.
Dan Shipper - the founder who never stopped shipping, in New York.
Every is hard to file under one heading, and that is exactly how Dan Shipper likes it. From an office in New York, his company publishes a daily newsletter that more than 130,000 builders read with their coffee. It also ships software - real apps with users and revenue. Shipper calls Every an applied AI lab exploring the future of work, which is a tidy phrase for a messy, ambitious idea: that the people who write about technology and the people who build it are about to become the same person.
He has spent fifteen years collapsing that distinction in public. Since 2010 he has published online almost compulsively, documenting whatever he was making at the time. The habit started as a way to think out loud and turned into an audience, then a business. Today he writes Chain of Thought, a weekly column read by more than 130,000 people, and hosts AI & I, a podcast where he asks unusually smart people a deceptively simple question: how do you actually use this stuff?
The thesis underneath all of it is that writing is thinking. Not a slogan stitched on a pillow, but an operating principle for the company. Shipper argues that you do not write down ideas you already had so much as discover them in the act of writing. Pushed to its logical end, that belief produces a strange organization where the essay and the product are two outputs of the same process - and where shipping a feature and publishing a column are the same kind of work.
Writing doesn't just tell you what you already think; it actively helps you generate new and better ideas as you do it.
- Dan Shipper, Chain of ThoughtShipper grew up in New Jersey wanting to be a scientist. There is a specific, almost cinematic version of the dream he has described - inventing a technology that would let divers breathe oxygen underwater. Then a Bill Gates biography rerouted the ambition. The lesson he took was about timing: when a new platform arrives - the personal computer, the smartphone, AI - a vast amount of new things suddenly needs to be built. As a kid he sketched out Megasoft, his imagined Microsoft alternative. He remembers, with near-photographic clarity, the thrill of typing on a clunky Alphasmart keyboard.
The toy ambitions turned practical fast. As a teenager he built and sold BlackBerry apps - one that located your friends, another that changed an LED's color based on the weather. He funded college selling iPhone apps, drawn to software for a reason any founder will recognize: you make it once and keep selling it. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied philosophy, and his explanation is pure Shipper - he wanted to know how to live a good life, and figured that was the only major that promised to tell him.
He did not wait for graduation to start. In college he co-founded Firefly, a co-browsing customer-support tool, and in 2014 sold it to Pegasystems. The detail that says everything about his metabolism: he flew straight from his college graduation to Boston to negotiate the deal. The diploma and the exit arrived in the same week.
In 2019 and 2020, Shipper teamed up with Nathan Baschez to launch Every as a bundle of business-focused newsletters - a way to give independent writers the back office of a real media company while keeping their own voices. That alone would have been a respectable startup. But as large language models matured, Shipper saw the same platform shift that the Gates biography had taught him to watch for, and Every grew a second body.
It became a software studio. The company now ships a suite of AI tools built, increasingly, with AI: Cora to tame email, Sparkle to organize the chaos of desktop files, Spiral to automate repetitive writing, Monologue for voice dictation, plus Proof and Plus One. By 2025 the company reported roughly $1M in ARR and a small team punching well above its weight - the headline being that the code is written almost entirely by AI. In May 2025 Every closed a round of about $2 million led by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Shipper is candid that the experiment is the product. Every is a working model of his bet that small teams armed with AI can write, build, and ship at a scale that used to require a department for each. He is, in effect, running the future of work on himself and his colleagues, then publishing the results before the ink is dry.
The line between writer and builder is blurring. The line between writing and software is blurring.
- Dan ShipperBefore founders, he wanted to be the scientist who invented a way for divers to breathe oxygen underwater.
As a kid he designed Megasoft, his own imagined alternative to Microsoft, after reading a Bill Gates biography.
He built BlackBerry apps as a teenager - including one that changed an LED's color based on the weather.
He flew directly from his college graduation to Boston to negotiate the sale of his first company.
He chose philosophy because it was, in his words, the only major that promised to teach him how to live a good life.
His own publication once profiled him as "The Sultan of Superorganizers."
Tames your inbox and sorts through email.
Cleans up the chaos of desktop files.
Automates repetitive writing tasks.
Voice dictation that keeps up with you.
Collaborative editing, refined.
An AI agent that lives in Slack.
Ask Shipper what he is really building and the answer is less about apps than about an idea. He wants Every to become an institution that teaches people how to live and work better with new technology - and he is open about loving the tension between the seriousness of an institution and the carefree playfulness of a playground. It is a generalist's ambition, which fits a man who has always refused to pick a single lane.
He treats AI as a kind of second brain, a mirror that holds his written work and reflects it back. That framing - technology as a mirror for the human psyche - runs through his TED appearance, his essays, and the AI & I interviews. Where most AI commentary fixates on capability, Shipper keeps circling back to the human using it: what it reveals about how we think, write, and want.
The bet may be wrong. Plenty of media companies have tried to become software companies and plenty of software companies have tried to become media. Few have tried to be both at once, on purpose, with the contradiction as the strategy. Whether it works or not, Shipper will do the most Shipper thing possible about it. He will write it all down.