Dan Shipper

He spent his childhood in New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry and was drawn early to science, technology and literature. He recalled in a 2025 podcast that as a young child he was obsessed with the Titanic and retyped a large book about it on his mother’s typewriter, and that he was fascinated by Stephen Hawking, Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry and Star WarsStar WarsStar Wars is a space-fantasy film and entertainment franchise created by George Lucas and now owned by Lucasfilm, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.Open the full entry; a 2025 MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry profile relates that the first time he typed on a clunky portable keyboard he felt “insanely excited.”⁠[1][2]

He recalled that after reading a Bill Gates biography in fifth grade he wanted to build an operating system to rival MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, “Megasoft,” and that his father bought him a programming book; in a 2011 interview he said that he began studying Java and C on weekends at about 10, in fifth grade, and that “I wanted to have my own business.” In a 2014 interview he said that his father is in the cemetery industry, buying and selling cemeteries and funeral homes, a third-generation family business that his great-grandfather was also in.⁠[2][1][3][4]

In high school he started his first real business, writing the anti-theft BlackBerry app FindIt, later GetItBack, which grew into a web control panel; he said that the US Army tested it and that he discussed selling the company to PocketMac. He also wrote Pearlcast, a BlackBerry app that changed the trackball’s colour to reflect the weather, during a school vacation in FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and built iPhone apps whose income paid for his gas and food.⁠[3][4][2]

He entered the University of Pennsylvania and studied philosophy; the Mercury profile quotes him: “I felt I wanted to know how to live a good life, and that was the only major that would tell me how to do it.” He made iOS apps to pay for college. As a freshman he found a security flaw in PennMatch and began working with its creator, Wesley Zhao.⁠[1][3]

With Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta he built WhereMyFriends.be, a site that mapped users’ Facebook friends, launched on February 21; the Daily Pennsylvanian article he reposted described the “College freshman” and gave 30,000 users mapping more than 3 million friends, with coverage by CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry and Mashable in February 2011. The user figures vary: in an August 2011 interview he said that the Mashable feature crashed the site and that it went on to pass 40,000 users and more than 5,000,000 mapped friends, and in 2014 he put it at about 50,000 users.⁠[5][6][3][4]

His website says that he has been writing online since 2010; the first post of his blog went up on February 26, 2011, and by February 29, 2012 he had published 83 posts, with 59,921 unique visitors in the year and Hacker News as by far the largest source of traffic. The archive of the old blog holds 109 posts from 2010–2016.⁠[7][8][9]

During his freshman year he applied to Y Combinator’s summer batch with Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta on the strength of WhereMyFriends.be; he wrote that Paul Graham replied that he liked the team but not the idea and asked whether they would come up with a new one, after which they were invited to interview in the summer of 2011. They built a new app, ReadStream, in two nights and got it onto TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry. At the interview Paul Graham led the questioning, with Harj, Paul Buchheit, Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry and other partners present, and the questions covered school, leaving college, timing and legal risk; that night they received the email saying they were not being funded and flew back to college. He wrote that the whole experience was “unbelievably stressful” but that he “wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.”⁠[6][10][3]

In August 2011 he built the website DomainPolish in about two days of coding, describing it as “an MTurk arbitrage” that gave companies on-demand feedback on their websites; in an August 2011 interview he said it launched through Hacker News and made almost $1,000 in about a week. In March 2012, by then a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, he wrote that DomainPolish had sold 140 plans for $2,355.90 in total and had been sold for $3,500 to a customer he met through the site’s chat widget, with a further $1,500 from licensing the code to another developer; in a 2014 interview he said that he sold it for roughly $4,000.⁠[11][3][4]

In January 2012 he announced Airtime for Email, which inserted a rotating product banner into the signature of every email a company’s employees sent and tracked clicks and impressions; he wrote that he had brought on Patrick Leahy as a co-founder the previous November and that it had 19 free users and one paying customer before launch. In a 2014 interview he said that he turned down a job offer, which would have meant leaving school, while he was working on Airtime, saying it “wasn’t right for what I wanted.”⁠[12][4]

That month he, Justin Meltzer and Patrick Leahy built the co-browsing tool Firefly at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennApps hackathon, where it won a prize. He recalled in 2014 that the idea came from his father’s wish to point out elements of a web page to customers over the phone; TechCrunch described Firefly as a way for any website to insert a snippet of JavaScript so that it can be “co-browsed” with someone else, like screen-sharing limited to the browser.⁠[13][14][15][4][16]

On December 4, 2012 the Dorm Room Fund, the student-run fund of First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry, announced a $20,000 investment in Firefly, its first investment; Technical.ly called him “a leader in the local tech scene,” and the team worked out of First Round Capital’s space. He said the team had long championed bootstrapping and took the money because it believed in the fund’s mission: “This is money on our own terms.” The Daily Pennsylvanian described him at the time as a junior in the College.⁠[17][14]

On March 26, 2013 Inc. included Firefly in its “Coolest College Startups 2013,” describing him as a junior philosophy major at the University of Pennsylvania, with co-founders Patrick Leahy, a senior studying entrepreneurship and Chinese, and Justin Meltzer, who already held a Penn degree in entrepreneurship and finance; Firefly charged $15 to $60 a month and had about 50 paying customers and a few hundred free ones, and he called the Dorm Room Fund’s $20,000 convertible note “enough money to experiment.” An interview from the same period also describes him as a philosophy major and Firefly co-founder.⁠[13][18]

On July 30, 2013 Firefly announced a partnership with the San Francisco live-chat tool Olark to offer co-browsing to its more than 5,000 paying customers; Technical.ly wrote that Firefly had launched in the fall of 2012, had a team of three based at First Round Capital’s University City headquarters, and was, in his words, “well into six-figures in revenue.” He wrote that September that Firefly had grown “well into the 6 figures in recurring revenue” in about 11 months, run by two people and fully bootstrapped apart from the Dorm Room Fund’s $20,000, while he, about to start his senior year, juggled classes, a social life and his blog.⁠[19][20]

In a Mixergy interview published on January 29, 2014 he said that Firefly was profitable with revenue in six figures; its first customer, Safe Food 360, came through a cold email, the Olark deal took about a year to close, and customers included Washington StateWashington (state)Washington is a state on the Pacific coast of the northwestern United States; its capital is Olympia and its largest city is Seattle. Washington was admitted to the Union on November 11, 1889, as the 42nd state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 7,705,281 residents.Open the full entry’s health benefit exchange (about 300 licences) and eMoney Advisor (a rollout to about 7,000 financial advisers), with pricing of $50 or $99 per rep per month and larger deals negotiated individually; one company had offered to buy Firefly but chose a partnership instead. He said in the interview that he had graduated about a week earlier.⁠[4]

On June 9, 2014 Pegasystems, a publicly traded software company in Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry with 2,700 employees, announced the acquisition of Firefly without disclosing the price; TechCrunch wrote that Pegasystems found Firefly while looking for a co-browsing solution and tried it out, that it would keep the product under a separate brand and build the technology into its flagship product, that he and Justin Meltzer would both join Pegasystems full-time, and that a few weeks earlier he had flown from his college graduation to close the deal. He said: “Co-browsing is becoming a much more important part of how large enterprises are thinking about doing customer support.”⁠[16]

A January 2015 First Round Review article gives his age as 23 and states that Firefly brought in $11,000 in its first 10 months, later moved to an API model and was sold to Pegasystems for “multiple millions” in the month he graduated; he says in it that “You figure out what your product is only after selling it.” The Mercury profile puts the price at “several million” and relates that he flew from his graduation to Boston to negotiate. His website gives his degree as a bachelor’s in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014; accounts of when he graduated differ: in January 2014 he said he had graduated a week earlier, while TechCrunch and First Round Review place his graduation around the time of the sale.⁠[21][1][15][4]

His website states that from 2014 to 2016 he was a principal at Pegasystems, where he ran the Firefly unit for two years. He recalled in a 2025 podcast that after the sale he began having panic attacks, his performance anxiety turning into existential dread, and that a long-term relationship ended in 2016; afterwards he took time off, travelled, wrote drafts of a novel, worked at an incubator and did angel investing.⁠[15][2]

His website states that on Inauguration Day in January 2017 he co-organized “Stand Up for Love,” a telethon on Facebook Live with more than 60 celebrities and 1.5 million viewers, which raised $200,000 for the ACLUAmerican Civil Liberties UnionThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan civil liberties organization headquartered in New York City, founded in 1920 by Roger Nash Baldwin and others.Open the full entry, Planned Parenthood and Earthjustice.⁠[15][22]

His website states that from 2018 to 2020 he was a partner at First Round Capital’s Product Co-Op, making pre-seed investments, and an entrepreneur in residence at Prehype.⁠[15]

In 2019 he started Superorganizers, a series that, the Mercury profile relates, interviewed people about their productivity tools from about 2019 to 2023 and later expanded into news analysis and psychology pieces; he said in a 2021 podcast that after selling Firefly he started this productivity newsletter and later moved toward business newsletters.⁠[15][1][23]

In April 2020 he and Nathan Baschez, who had been the first employee of Substack, combined their paid newsletters into a joint subscription, “the Everything Bundle,” launched on Substack. They said in a 2021 podcast that they first tested the two newsletters separately and then bundled them through a third Substack publication, that revenue doubled overnight, and that they had reached about $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue before incorporating.⁠[24][15][23]

In January 2021 AxiosAxiosAxios is a US digital news media company founded in 2016 by former Politico executives Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz and launched in January 2017. It is known for short news items and industry newsletters in the “Smart Brevity” style, especially for its Washington political coverage, and publishes local news newsletters in cities across the United States through Axios Local. Since 2022 it has been owned by Cox Enterprises.Open the full entry wrote that after 10 months on Substack the bundle was becoming an independent company, Every, with its own content and in-house newsletter software, and had raised $600,000 in seed funding led by Bedrock Capital; Every called itself a “writer collective” and paid writers about half the subscriber revenue of their newsletters, attributing revenue by the writer that subscribers named at sign-up. He said: “We want to measure who would leave with you if you left the bundle.” Every’s website gives its founding year as 2020 and its legal name as Every Media, Inc., and lists Bedrock, Reid HoffmanReid HoffmanReid Hoffman is an American entrepreneur, venture investor, author and podcast host, co-founder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI and Manas AI, and a partner at Greylock. A former PayPal executive, he has built and backed businesses in professional networking, artificial intelligence and drug discovery. His co-authored books include The Startup of You and Blitzscaling.Open the full entry and Starting Line as lead investors.⁠[24][25]

In July 2021 he and Nathan Baschez said on the Indie Hackers podcast that Every had about 2,400 paying and 35,000 to 36,000 free subscribers across 13 newsletters and about 20 writers and was profitable; the bundle cost $200 a year or $20 a month and single newsletters $15 a month or $150 a year, and writers kept their subscriber lists if they left. They said the money came from angel investors and Bedrock, which led the round, on a SAFE with a relatively low valuation cap, intending to keep the company near profitability and perhaps buy back investors’ stock later; he had bootstrapped his previous company while Baschez came from a venture background, so they had to reconcile the two approaches. The episode also relates that Tiago Forte’s paid newsletter joined the bundle on a six-month commitment as a test.⁠[23][22]

His website states that in 2022 he started the weekly column Chain of Thought, covering AI, tools for thought and the psychology of work, read by more than 130,000 people. His articles on Every include “GPT-4 Is a Reasoning Engine” of March 31, 2023 and “The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy.” of January 19, 2024, which his website sums up as the shift to an “allocation economy,” from being paid for what you know to being paid for how well you allocate intelligence.⁠[15][26][27]

In March 2023 TED released his talk “The unexpected key to boosting your productivity” (The Way We Work series, 6 minutes 48 seconds); TED’s speaker biography describes him as co-founder and chief executive of Every who previously co-founded the enterprise software company Firefly and sold it to Pegasystems.⁠[27][22]

His website states that the podcast he co-hosts with Natalia Quintero launched in November 2023 as “How Do You Use ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry?”, was renamed “AI & I” in May 2024 and later renamed “The Every Podcast”; Every calls it its flagship interview show about AI and work.⁠[15][28]

On July 19, 2024 he published “Every’s Master Plan,” describing Every as a creator-run business with writing and creative work at its core, building software and other products on that base; the essay states that the company had been operating for four years and had gone through a difficult stretch over the previous year, that Spiral passed 3,000 users that week, that Sparkle was in closed beta and that monthly recurring revenue had risen almost 8% over the previous 45 days. He wrote: “I feel like I’m doing the best writing of my life.” His website states that Every Studio, Every’s product incubator, launched in October 2024.⁠[29][15]

His website states that in May 2025 Every announced a $2 million seed round co-led by Reid Hoffman and StartingLine VC and that it crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025; the Mercury profile describes the round as led by Reid Hoffman, gives annual recurring revenue of $1 million as of June 2025, and puts the staff at 14 full-time and contract employees in mid-2025.⁠[15][1]

The description of a Lenny’s Podcast episode published on July 17, 2025 states that Every had 15 employees, published a daily AI newsletter, shipped multiple AI products and ran a million-dollar-a-year consulting arm, and that “AI agents write 100% of the code” at the company.⁠[30]

The Mercury profile of October 20, 2025 describes Every’s Brooklyn office, a converted house where shoes are swapped for slippers; it lists products including Sparkle, relaunched with entrepreneur in residence Brandon Gell and used by thousands as of April 2025, Cora, Spiral, which auto-generates headlines, social media content and copy from original texts, and Lex, and says his long-term goal is to build an institution that teaches people to work better with new technology. He said: “I think the line between writer and builder is blurring.”⁠[1]

He said in a 2025 podcast that the word processor Lex was built on the side by his co-founder Nathan Baschez and that Every later decided to spin it out.⁠[2]

Casey Newton of Platformer wrote on August 20, 2026 that Every had about 30 employees, up from about 15 a year earlier, and that it published journalism and built four products, Cora (an email assistant), Sparkle (a file organizer), Spiral (a writing tool) and Monologue (a dictation app), bundled with the journalism for $20 a month. The article relates that Every gathered about 30,000 historical edits by editor in chief Kate Lee to build a copy-editing agent, which he described as “not perfect, but much better than having her do everything”; he said that AI now writes nearly all of Every’s code while humans still mostly write the essays, and that he runs “vibe checks” in which staff test new frontier models before public release.⁠[31]

As of November 2026 his website states that he is co-founder and chief executive of Every, writes the column Chain of Thought and co-hosts “The Every Podcast,” and lives in New York City; it lists Every’s products Cora, Sparkle, Spiral, Monologue, Proof (a collaborative editor for humans and AI) and Plus One (an AI agent in SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry), says that Every trains executive leadership teams at the world’s top tech and financial-services companies to use AI at work, and gives the daily newsletter’s readership as more than 130,000. In May 2026 he published “After Automation,” an essay of about 8,000 words.⁠[7][15]

Founders SchoolFounders SchoolFounders School is an entrepreneurship high school program opened by the Alpha School network in Manhattan, New York, covering grades 9 through 12, which welcomed its first students in September 2026. Students complete their academics in the morning with AI learning software and spend the rest of the day running their own companies under the guidance of entrepreneurs; the school has drawn attention for its promise to refund tuition if a student’s business does not reach $1 million in profit and for its $150,000 annual tuition.Open the full entry, a school for grades 9 to 12 built on the Alpha SchoolAlpha SchoolAlpha School is a for-profit network of private schools founded in Austin, Texas, in 2014, covering pre-K through 12th grade and known for a model in which students spend only about two hours a day completing core academic subjects with AI tutoring software. It was founded by MacKenzie Price and others, with software entrepreneur Joe Liemandt funding its AI software; in recent years it has expanded to dozens of locations across the United States, and its claims about educational outcomes have been questioned by education researchers.Open the full entry platform, lists Dan Shipper among its mentors on its website, with the affiliation “Every.”⁠[32]

He said in a 2025 podcast that the mental health journey that began after the sale of Firefly had by then lasted about ten years; after three or four therapists he realized that he had obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he says is often misdiagnosed as anxiety; talk therapy alone made it worse, and exposure and response prevention was what helped first; he also did a 10-day Vipassana retreat; and he said that starting Zoloft “changed my life,” taking off far more of the lows than the highs and leaving his emotional range richer. The Mercury profile likewise relates that his mental health worsened in his late 20s, that he tried therapy, meditation, diets and retreats, and that he was diagnosed with OCD and takes medication.⁠[2][1]

In the same podcast he talked about his exploration of Jungian archetypes and the idea of living at the borders between perspectives, which he calls the “Twilight Zone”; the host, Jonny Miller, called him a friend and a “philosopher founder.” The Mercury profile relates that his first reading of Annie Dillard moved him and that he admired how she wrote about darkness and sadness.⁠[2][1]

The Books page of his website states that the list is created and maintained automatically by Claude and ChatGPT from the photos he takes of the books he is reading; as of November 10, 2026 it held 307 books from 2012–2026, with 2026 entries including Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and March 2024 listing Crypto Confidential by Nat EliasonNat EliasonNat Eliason (Nathaniel Eliason) is a writer and entrepreneur who founded the content marketing agency Growth Machine and wrote Crypto Confidential, Husk, and The Birth of Paradise. His work spans content marketing, crypto industry writing, science fiction, and AI-assisted software development, and in 2026 he took part in building Founders School, an entrepreneurship high school program under Alpha School in New York.Open the full entry (credited on the list as Nathaniel Eliason).⁠[33]

Personal website: https://danshipper.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/danshipper (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danshipper/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/dshipper (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Author page on Every: https://every.to/@danshipper (opens in a new window).⁠[7][26]

Every’s podcast “The Every Podcast” (co-hosted by him): https://every.to/podcast (opens in a new window).⁠[7][28]

TED speaker page: https://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_shipper (opens in a new window).⁠[27]

Every: Official website: https://every.to/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

Pegasystems: Official website: https://www.pega.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[34]

First Round Capital: Official website: https://firstround.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35]

Prehype: Official website: https://prehype.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

Founders School: Official website: https://founders.school/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]