Why Software is the New Content

Key Takeaways

AI has seated a whole new generation of entrepreneurs that are finding ways to reinvent old business models and also rethink how we use everyday applications. Dan Shipper is one of those entrepreneurs. His company, Every is part media company, part AI app company. I want to bring him on to talk more about the future of his business. Dan, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> Tell us about everything that every is because there's a lot going on over there. There is a lot going on. You can think about it in a very simple way. We think about every as the only subscription you need to stay at the edge of AI. And we have three main pillars of the business. One is ideas, two is apps, and three is training. On the ideas side, we have a daily newsletter about AI. We do vibe checks. So, you know, when a new model comes out, for example, we'll get our hands on that model before it comes out and we'll do a hands-on review of it the day it comes out. We have a lot of stuff like that in our newsletter. We have a podcast. That's that's the sort of idea side. Uh then we have an apps side of the business where we have four AI apps that we build and run internally. Each is run by a single engineer. Um one's called Kora. It helps you manage your email with AI. One's called Monologue. It's a smart dictation app. One's called Sparkle. It's a AI based file manager. And one's called Spiral. It's an agentic ghost writer. Um so that's the app side of the business. It's all tools that we build for ourselves to work better on the edge of AI. um that we also uh give to our subscribers. And the last part of the business is training. So for people who want to go deeper than just using our tools or reading our writing. Um we actually do hands-on trainings. We do uh what we call camps where we uh for subscribers they do we have live streams where they can see how we use cloud code for example or you know next week we're we're having the cursor team on to come talk about how to use cursor really well for for AI coding in an enterprise environment. All that kind of stuff. So we have camps and we have an enterprise offering where big companies we have an enterprise offering where big companies bring us in to um actually train their people and we bundle this all together in one subscription >> and with the apps I'm curious is the goal here to compete with and I'm thinking about email here because email is one where you've got these massive platforms is it literally competing with these with these AI email clients you know I'm thinking of uh you know the superhumans stuff like that or is it a more niche offering? >> Um I like eventually uh yes I think it'll it'll compete with you know when I think about the the giants it's like competing with Google or Gmail like that kind of thing. Um for now it works with Gmail it works with superhuman. Um and over time we're adding adding more and more functionality. I think the the the market that we're going after is really high taste AI early adopters who want to use features at the edge and those are people that um a company with a much bigger audience can't serve right now and it's actually quite a small market but I think it'll be the biggest market in the world in 10 years and we're really really focused on those people who want to use an agent like in their email for everything that they do. Um and uh and that that's where we're starting which I think is very different from a superhuman or a Gmail where they have to sort of split the difference between AI early adopters and everybody else. >> Now agents is kind of an interesting area right now because I I look at my own use of AI and I I certainly use it but I I don't know that I use as many agents as maybe I could be or should be. and you sit at this interesting uh junction of you know trying to convince people to use these agents and and embedding that into your apps. I wonder what reflections you've had from building in this space about how you can convince people to use agents because it's a bit of a behavioral leap and you know I I don't know how you think about incentivizing that. >> You know it's it's ultimately about trust. It's about having an experience where you use an agent for the first time and you're like, "Oh my god, I cannot believe that actually worked." And everybody has moments like that and and I think our job as people who make software and also people who write a lot is to help people get to that faster and um and make sure it's clear like what the value is. Like it's it's no it's not interesting to use an agent just to say, "Hey, I'm using an agent." I think in 2025 toward right towards the end of 2025 is when programmers really began to be like oh wow agents are completely changing my entire workflow. Um agents really started there. You know you can use cloud code for like 20 or it'll go off and code for 20 or 30 minutes or codeex can go off for hours. Um and that is really changing programming and I it has not quite gotten to that level for the rest of knowledge work but I think 2026 is when we're going to see that happen. And the reason for that is all of these coding agents that are built specifically for coding actually translate very well into general purpose agents. And so they're becoming the foundation for general purpose agents that nontechnical people are going to be using um in 2026 and 2027 and beyond. >> So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that the key to trust is having a product that that works extraordinarily well. And until now, we haven't really seen the models be good enough. But in 2026, you see them finally crossing that that mark. >> Yeah, you can think of um models is like having a having a leash. And I think you know when AI when GP3 for example, which is the first like real consumer application of LMS when CHBT came out. Um when we started using GP3, it was the leash was very short. It's like one prompt, one response, and the response comes really quick. Um, and over time that leash has gotten longer and longer, and it's the longest right now in um in coding applications. Um, and and the leash is only allowed to get longer when the AI is going to reliably do something valuable with that extra time. Uh, if it's not going to do something valuable, it's not worth the time. And I think what we're going to find over the next year or so is that leash for non-coding applications is going to get a lot longer because there's going to be a massive amount of value that you see um uh allowing it to go off and do something. And a specific example that I can give you that I experience all the time which maybe people who are watching this are not yet experiencing is I use an agentic browser. So I use chatgbt Atlas. is from OpenAI and anytime I have to change a setting on a website for example I don't have to deal with that and I get asked that I get asked for that all the time because I you know I run a company we have 20 people I'm always asked like can we invite someone to this or can you change this security se setting on this app and my browser just now does that for me so I never have to look at a settings panel ever anymore and that's one of those things where it's a it can be a light bulb moment for you to be like oh my god this is life-changing >> you also are running a media company which in the era of AI is kind of interesting and you do some some some great writing on your website. What have you learned about running a media company in this era that you might not have expected when you started out on this project? >> That's a great question. Um, yeah, I I I think of everything as being tightly integrated. It's ideas, apps, and training. And you know, if you want to teach people how to like really live at the edge of AI, you need to do three things. You need to spread the word, and that's the media part of what we do and the stories that we tell. you need to um give them tools to use and and we give them tools that we use ourselves and then you have to get hands-on with them to like teach them uh for people who want to go deeper and I think um obviously media is a critical part of that but also there's this really interesting thing happening where there's not a clear bifurcation between a media company and a software company anymore um because you can now program using English the line between writer and builder is starting to blur And so everybody internally at every is both a writer and a builder. >> So everyone who's writing an article is also contributing to building these these apps. >> Yeah. >> Because you can just vibe code, you know, your own product. >> Exactly. And vice versa. Um and so so that's a big deal. But also another big interesting part of this is that because software is so cheap to make now it actually has a lot of the same properties like building a new app has a lot of the same properties as writing an essay or making a video. Um you can think of software as a form of content now. And so the the that's that's another reason why the software part of things is not separate from the media part of things because for us if a new model comes out we can go vibe code a new app to display its capabilities and then launch the app and that's the equivalent of writing a really cool article about it because we're showing people hey we built this thing and it's not an app that we necessarily are going to support. It's just like a demonstration of what's possible now and I think that's really interesting. >> Great. Well Dan I want to thank you for coming on. That is Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of Every here on TIV.