AI & I

Most consumer AI so far has been single-player: you and a chatbot, alone.
Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel, one of Pinterest's first 30 employees, is betting that's about to change. She's looking for a product genius who can build an AI product with social DNA: status, network effects, and multiplayer dynamics. That'll enable users of ChatGPT and other models to learn from how others use AI and level up.
On this week’s AI & I, Dan Shipper revisits his conversation with Sarah. They talk about why technical founders dominate the early days of a platform shift while product-minded founders win later, what ChatGPT is still missing, and what separates a founder's real network effect from a slide with a flywheel diagram.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Timestamps for YouTube:
0:00 Start
1:10 Introduction
2:26 Why the future of consumer AI belongs to founders with product intuition
11:09 What Sarah sees as ChatGPT's biggest weakness
18:45 How Sarah would design a consumer AI app with social DNA
24:10 The kind of founders Sarah invests in
28:33 How to know if your startup's network effects are real
35:40 What's catching Sarah's eye beyond AI
40:41 How AI will change the way top venture capitalists invest

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Sarah Tavel on X: https://x.com/sarahtavel
Benchmark: https://benchmark.com
Agentio (marketplace for YouTube creators and brands): https://agentio.com/ 
Chainalysis: https://chainalysis.com
The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007BZBRB8
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBBW23PM

Kevin Kelly has spent over 30 years experiencing the edge of new technology: from the earliest days of the internet to the first years of Burning Man. But he’s always treated the frontier as a place to visit, not somewhere to live. It’s partially how he’s been able to stay grounded through tech’s various hype cycles.
As founding executive editor of Wired and author of The Inevitable, Kelly spends as much time analyzing the latest in AI as he does reading about significant moments in history. It’s a discipline he traces back to his work with the Long Now Foundation, which he cofounded to encourage long-term thinking, reaching from the last 10,000 years to the next. 
On this week’s AI & I, Dan Shipper revisits his conversation with Kelly. They get into why historians can be the best futurists, and how our bid to understand what intelligence is has parallels with early scientists' attempts to figure out electricity. 
Kelly also describes the joy he found in creating an AI-generated saga featuring Leonardo Da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, and Martin Luther—one that will only ever be read and enjoyed by him.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps for YouTube:
0:00 Start 
0:50 Introduction 
1:10 Why Dan and Kelly love Annie Dillard 
12:52 How to predict the future like Kelly
16:10 What the history of electricity can teach us about AI 
20:13 How Kelly thinks about the nature of intelligence 
25:44 Kelly's advice on discovering your competitive advantage 
29:33 How Kelly assembled a bench of star writers for Wired 
34:43 How Kelly used ChatGPT to co-create a book 
39:12 Using AI as a mirror for your mind 
43:43 What Kelly learned from betting on VR in the 1980s
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Kevin Kelly on X: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly: https://www.amazon.com/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0525428089
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323
1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly: https://www.amazon.com/1000-True-Fans-Kellys-Simple-ebook/dp/B01N9P9O4G
Full episode transcript: https://every.to/podcast/transcript-be243312-ea22-4193-8c56-b9cd45a79a87

Yash Poojary, a growth engineer at Every, dropped an idea for a campaign in Slack at 7 p.m. Instead of building it himself, Every’s head of growth Austin Tedesco took a screenshot of the Slack thread, dropped it into Codex, typed "Can you do this?", and went to the gym.

By the time he got back, Codex had built four audience segments, drafted emails for each one, and pulled a social image that had worked before. It took Austin 10 minutes to make some tweaks and schedule the whole thing to send the next morning. Within a few hours, it generated more than $25,000 in revenue. 

That story came out of the launch week for All Access, Every’s new $625-a-year membership built around the Builder Pack. It includes $7,000 in credits and free usage from ten of the AI products Every uses every day, including Claude Max, Codex, Cursor Pro+, PostHog, Notion, Framer, Render, and Flora.

On this episode of AI & I, four of Every's own builders—COO Brandon Gell, head of marketing Douglas Brundage, as well as Yash and Austin—sit down to show how they use AI, breaking down their personal stacks and giving insight into their own strategies and mindset for building.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Timestamps for YouTube:
0:00 Intro 
0:35 All Access Explained 
3:01 Yash's Tech Stack and How He's Automating Testing Pipelines 
8:02 The Idea to Execution Loop 
10:25 How an Agent Turned an Idea into $25K 
17:50 The AI Sandwich Workflow 
22:03 Making AI Tools Accessible to Solo Builders 
28:50 Douglas on Brand and Design
34:51 Tips on What to Build First 
43:46 What's Next for All Access

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Brandon Gell on X: https://x.com/bran_don_gell
Yash Poojary on X: https://x.com/poojary_yash
Austin Tedesco on X: https://x.com/tedescau?lang=en
Douglas Brundage on X: https://x.com/DABrundage
Introducing Every All Access: https://every.to/on-every/introducing-every-all-access
Get the Builder Pack: every.to/builder-pack 

Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year.

“Running a startup is a knife fight whether things are going well or not,” says Chris Pedregal, cofounder and CEO of Granola. Granola recently raised a $125 million series C round at a $1.5 billion valuation on the strength of its AI meeting notetaker.
That valuation hasn’t made Pedregal complacent. Granola built its name as the first to make good AI meeting notes, but Notion, OpenAI, and Zoom have all since released their own versions. Pedregal isn’t rattled—he never thought meeting notes were the real prize. The bigger fight, he says, is over “what interface we use for work, and what work looks like in an AI-native world.”
That’s why Granola is betting on owning the entire meeting workflow: preparing people for a call, helping them act on it afterward, and making that context available to whatever agent—Claude, Codex, or anything else—people bring to the table. Over the next few months, the company plans to push hard on its API and MCP to make that possible.
Dan Shipper talked with Pedregal for AI & I about why Granola pre-generates millions of meeting briefs, most of which go unopened, what “bring your own agent” software could look like, and why Pedregal still thinks “easy come, easy go” about Granola’s own success.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
More from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
00:00:59 Introduction
00:01:57 Why starting a company feels like a knife fight
00:04:33 Granola's counterintuitive view on competition
00:10:44 Dan's "pirate and architect" framework for structuring early-stage product teams
00:13:09 How Granola's "shaping" and "validation" phases work for building new features
00:18:17 Why Dan lives almost entirely inside Codex
00:24:40 The case for "Codex-native apps"
00:35:37 Granola's "handrail" philosophy
00:38:12 Why Granola is betting on owning meeting-adjacent context instead of competing as a general agent
00:44:19 What a transcript alone can never capture
Episode resources:
Chris Pedregal on X: https://twitter.com/cjpedregal
Granola on X: https://twitter.com/meetgranola
Granola: https://granola.ai
Granola hits $1.5B valuation (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/25/granola-raises-125m-hits-1-5b-valuation-as-it-expands-from-meeting-notetaker-to-enterprise-ai-app/

Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year.

Craig Mod used to pay Campaign Monitor roughly $7,000 a year to send his newsletters. After rebuilding the tool himself with AI, his bill is closer to $150. It’s the kind of thing that convinces him we’re about to enter a “golden age of tool building”—one where anyone can build tools specifically suited to their needs, instead of settling for software from incumbents that are slow to innovate.
Mod is the writer and photographer behind the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and books like Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa—as well as a lifelong technologist. He’s rebuilt the tax software Quicken, created a private alternative for Twitter for his members which he calls The Good Place, and used AI to build an archive for his pop-up newsletters. But while Mod is an advocate of using AI to build, he draws the line at using it to write.
Mod talks to Dan Shipper about using AI as a research assistant, why he keeps a tech-free zone in the mornings for deep thinking, and why he’s resisting the pull of the “mainlining” AI era.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:51 Rebuilding Quicken and Campaign Monitor with AI
6:24 Building The Good Place, a private Twitter alternative for Craig’s members
10:39 Why we’re entering a “golden age of tool building”
12:17 Why AI could help writers build audiences
17:35 Using AI to build a newsletter archive and a searchable board-meeting Q&A library
27:58 Creating a technology-free buffer to protect deep thinking
30:31 Why Craig is resisting the temptation to “mainline” AI for ten hours a day
39:44 Why anthropomorphizing AI is “psychotic,” and why Apple got Siri right
47:42 Being adopted, and making peace with humanity’s fragile place in an AI future

Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year.

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Craig Mod’s website: https://craigmod.com
Roden (Craig’s monthly newsletter): https://craigmod.com/roden/