He builds software for the week your world falls apart - the paperwork, the providers, the grief that arrives with a to-do list attached.
When someone dies, the people left behind do not get to grieve first. They get a checklist. Bank accounts to close, a funeral home to choose under pressure, attorneys, appraisers, a death certificate ordered in triplicate. Daniel Shaw watched this happen again and again in his own family, and noticed something specific - smart, capable people, springing into action in the most disorganized way possible.
That observation became Autumn, the New York company Shaw co-founded in January 2022 and runs as CEO. Autumn is an end-of-life marketplace. It connects bereaved families with the local providers who handle the legal, financial, emotional and logistical machinery of death, and it hands them free guides so they are not making the biggest decisions of their lives while blind. The pitch fits on a bumper sticker: "We make loss more livable."
The deeper claim is bigger than convenience. Shaw thinks we should all be able to manage death the same way we manage life - with information, choice, and a sense that we are driving rather than being driven.
I didn't understand why a trusted consumer brand that offered empathetic technology to manage loss didn't exist.Daniel Shaw, on the gap he set out to fill
Shaw did not arrive at deathcare by way of hospice or hospitals. He started toward medicine, then left it. What followed was roughly 15 years building digital products, experiences and campaigns for Fortune 500 brands - the glossy, fast-moving world of creative marketing. He ran the digital business at Wieden+Kennedy, the agency behind some of advertising's most decorated work, as Director of Digital Accounts.
It is an odd launchpad for a death-care founder, and that is exactly the point. Shaw spent his career learning how brands earn trust and move people to act. Then he aimed that toolkit at the one consumer experience nobody markets and everybody dreads.
There is a family detail that makes the rest click into place. Shaw is the son of two psychoanalysts, and has spent some 15 years in personal analysis himself. He credits that upbringing for a lasting interest in mental health and consumer psychology - useful instincts when your product has to meet people on the worst day of their lives.
Shaw has a favorite analogy, and it is a sharp one. The deathcare industry, he argues, is the diamond industry in a black suit. Both convinced an entire country there was only one acceptable, expensive way to do a deeply emotional thing - and both profit from the fact that you are too overwhelmed to shop around.
An ad campaign taught America that love means an expensive ring. One default. No questions. Maximum spend.
The same conditioning, applied to grief - one expensive script for how to bury, mourn and settle a life.
Autumn's answer is information. Aggregate the providers - funeral homes, attorneys, accountants, appraisers, grief specialists - put them in one place, and let families compare, choose, and act. Reduce the information asymmetry, and the monopoly on what a "good death" costs starts to crack.
80 years ago an advertising campaign for De Beers convinced America that the only way to show love was to buy an excessively expensive diamond ring.Daniel Shaw
We should all be able to manage death the same way we manage life.- Daniel Shaw, Autumn
When Shaw went looking online for help managing his own losses, he found the digital landscape thin and patronizing. The offerings were, in his words, pandering, unhelpfully verbose, and difficult to action. Sometimes there was simply nothing at all. For someone who had spent a career making complicated things feel effortless, that void was an itch he could not ignore.
So Autumn was built as the trusted brand he could not find. The product is two-sided. On one face, free guides and tools walk surviving families through what to do and in what order. On the other, a vetted directory connects them to local experts - the people who actually close the accounts, file the paperwork, and handle the rituals. Behind it sits a catalog of more than 500,000 providers across the country.
Shaw co-founded the company with Alex Nguyen, who serves as CTO. In July 2022 they took it public with a $600,000 pre-seed round. The investment firm Bullish led with $200,000, joined by Great Oaks Venture Capital and Marco Zappacosta, the CEO of Thumbtack - a fitting backer, given that Autumn is, in a sense, Thumbtack for the worst week of your life.
Shaw is not chasing a quick exit. The stated ambition is to build an enduring, trusted consumer brand that addresses bereaved people's needs whole, not in pieces - and in doing so, to shrink the information gap that lets the deathcare industry set the terms. He also believes founders in this space owe it to each other to work in the open. Progressive thought leaders, he says, need to share their ideas publicly and band together, because the taboo around death only loosens when more people are willing to talk about it out loud.
It is a strange thing to choose as a life's work - the bureaucracy of mourning, the spreadsheet hiding inside a funeral. But Shaw came to it honestly, through loss, and he is approaching it the way a good creative approaches any brand nobody trusts yet: with clarity, empathy, and a refusal to accept that this is just how it has to be.