Transcript: ‘How We Incubate and Launch New Products With AI’

‘AI & I’ with Danny Aziz and Brandon Gell

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The transcript of AI & I with Danny Aziz and Brandon Gell is below.

Timestamps

  1. Introduction: 00:01:08
  2. All about Spiral, the tool we recently launched: 00:02:15
  3. Why Danny left a $200,000 salary to work at a bootstrapped media company: 00:04:06
  4. How we do a lot of things well at Every: 00:10:33
  5. What makes Every’s flywheel turn: 00:14:44
  6. The kind of people who fit right in at Every: 00:17:11
  7. How Every is differentiated from a standard VC-backed startup: 00:23:25
  8. How Danny found his way into the world of startups: 00:36:11
  9. The tech industry’s affinity for potential over experience: 00:46:43 
  10. Where each of us sees ourselves in the next one year: 00:52:38

Transcript

Dan Shipper (00:01:00)

Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Aziz (00:01:01)

Thanks for having me.

Dan Shipper (00:01:02)

And Brandon, welcome back to the show. 

Brandon Gell (00:01:04)

Thank you.

Dan Shipper (00:01:05)

So we are doing a little bit of a different episode today. For people who don't know, Danny Aziz, you are running Spiral, which is an Every product. We just launched an entirely new version of Spiral. And Brandon you run our studio, which produced or created Spiral. And we wanted to all come together and just talk a little about what we're doing, because I think we have a little bit of a different model that we're trying to figure out for media, which is having a core underlying media business— So we have a newsletter, we've got this YouTube channel, we do podcasts, all that kind of stuff, and then build software out of the experiences and out of the ideas that we have running the media business. And so Danny, you're one of the first people to come in and help us do that. So you're a little bit of a little bit of a guinea pig for us.

Sponsored by: Every

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Danny Aziz (00:01:58)

Yeah, definitely a guinea pig.

Dan Shipper (00:02:02)

And we're trying to share a little bit about what we're learning and what that's like. So maybe start by telling us what's new with Spiral and maybe give us a little bit of background into what it is and what we just launched.

Danny Aziz (00:02:14)

So Spiral allows you to automate 80 percent of the writing that you have—the repetitive writing. You can give it how you tweet, how you write newsletters, and then it learns your tone, the voice, the structure that you want. And then you can give it your rough drafts, or maybe you've done a podcast and you want to turn that into a tweet. And it just gives you the content from the content that you already have that sounds just like you. What we've just launched is a brand new design. It looks completely different, far more organized. And then the biggest piece I think we're the most excited about is 250-plus public Spirals. So we've gone through, we've handcrafted—plus, obviously, with the help of AI—all of these Spirals that will turn one form of content into another. And we've spent a lot of time just making sure that we're happy with it so that everyone else will be happy with it. And then people can take them, they can clone them, they can change it so it sounds like them, and they can continue using it.

Dan Shipper (00:03:06)

That was really good. I love listening to you talk.

Brandon Gell (00:03:09)

Yeah, you are very good. I really struggle to pitch Spiral to people because I'm like, you could turn a thing into another thing. And they're like, what things? But that was actually— That was good.

Dan Shipper (00:03:23)

I think you nailed all the beats of— When i'm when i'm pitching it— You nailed all that stuff, but your voice and your inflection, everything is just so much better.

Danny Aziz (00:02:34)

I mean I was born with this voice so I can't take credit for it.

Brandon Gell (00:02:37)

It kind of reminds me when we first met Danny I was like, is he 45 and just super mature and this is his voice, or is he like 22? I kind of can't tell.

Danny Aziz (00:02:45)

Somewhere right in the middle.

Dan Shipper (00:02:48)

How old are you actually?

Danny Aziz (00:02:45)

I'm 27.

Dan Shipper (00:02:52)

Okay. Yeah, so that’s what Spiral is. That's kind of what we're launching. Why are you doing this with us? Obviously, you're super talented. You've got a long history of working at different startups. How did you end up doing this?

Danny Aziz (00:04:10)

I've been following Every for a while. I've been following the content you've been putting out for a very long time. And, to be fair, I hadn't actually seen any of the products that Every had put out. It was always just the content. I have actually just like a bunch of bookmarks of things that you've written, Dan, and other people have written. And when I saw that you guys were looking for EIRs—entrepreneurs in residence—I was like, this makes so much sense. I think a lot of what I've been feeling, working at startups— Every startup that I've worked at has raised money. And I've always felt this tension between what felt right for our customers and the business right now vs. the grandiose vision that we think we're going to go do. And then when I first met Brandon and Brandon was kind of explaining to me like, we have this media business and then we have all this consulting and we're trying to chart our own destiny, it all just resonated really well with how I was feeling.

Dan Shipper (00:05:09)

I love that.

Brandon Gell (00:05:10)

I want to do a callback to your introduction of what we're trying to build here, which is a media business as a foundation and a number of things that are layered on top of that, and one thing kind of helps the other succeed. But there's another thing that you just said, which is a lot harder to put your finger on and a lot harder to figure out if we're actually doing well, which is charting our own path and doing it in a way that feels really right for all of us as individuals. And I feel like when we first had the idea, which you've been thinking about for many years, but then we sort of came together and we're like, let's do this thing. We were like, we're pretty sure this is going to work. We just need to do it. And then there's this other piece, which is like, but are we still going to be happy that we're currently figuring out. And I think that was a part of working with you. I think that Danny feels what we're trying to do. I think that he's trying to do that too.

Dan Shipper (00:06:14)

Yeah, how has that been for both of you? I think there's that thing that we're sort of aspiring to. A word that we often use internally is building a little bit of a creative playground. And then there's also the sort of reality of, it's really fucking hard to run a business and it's hard to run three businesses all at once. So, yeah, how has that been for you, Danny, and then, I’m curious, Brandon?

Danny Aziz (00:06:45)

It’s a little bit difficult for me to answer that question for everyone, because I'm 95 percent of the time focused on Spiral. And obviously, it came out of Every, and I've spent the last couple of weeks just talking to the people who are using it a lot and 80 percent of the people that I've spoken to are using Spiral because of Every. I actually spoke to somebody the other day and she literally said, whatever Every tells me to do, I'm gonna go do.

Brandon Gell (00:07:09)

That's incredible.

Dan Shipper (00:07:10)

Don’t do everything we say, but it's nice. I like to hear that.

Brandon Gell (00:07:19)

Do as we say, not as we do.

Danny Aziz (00:07:21)

I feel like I get to focus a lot and so I haven't felt that tension. And because the media business is doing well enough that it can support something like this, I don't feel this tension of, oh, I have 18 months until I have to raise another round. And I think we have a team of people where everything we need to do, we can do. And then we just know people who can help us with the other things. So I haven't felt this pull of anything other than I get to focus.

Dan Shipper (00:07:49)

That's cool. What do you think?

Brandon Gell (00:07:51)

I go through phases of feeling that freedom that I was searching for for so many years while running Clyde. I go through phases here. A really good example is this morning when we needed to make all these changes to Sparkle. So, Sparkle is our AI file organizer, so it helps you organize your computer using AI. It's a really amazing little product. We put it out a number of months ago—

Dan Shipper (00:08:18)

May or June or July, something like that.

Brandon Gell (00:08:20)

Yeah. It works really well. It's pretty basic. Gets 50 new customers per day and we're just sort of trying to see what happens to it right now without us needing to invest a ton, but we're also realizing that we need to continue to invest in it. And this morning we were doing a bunch of annoying stuff to save ourselves from a tax situation in the future, basically. And I was just kind of flustered because I didn't really like my morning routine and because I just went straight into solving this problem. And I turned to my wife Lydia and I was just like, this sucks. I hate it. And she looked at me and she was like, this is the work part of your job. And I was like, you're right. And I rarely feel this way. So this is a good thing. I love that. So that's how it's going.

Dan Shipper (00:09:16)

That's really great. I feel similarly—the sort of ups and downs. But having run Every for five years, this is without a doubt my favorite era of the business. And I'm someone who, I feel— I think you really like to focus on one specific thing. And I'm just like, I want to do 50 things all at once. I love that. And so my day is very much— I'll often start in the morning and I like writing for a couple of hours and going back and forth in case there are fires or, we always publish in the morning, so I'm usually involved in that in some way and then the rest of the day is talking to various people about the different businesses we have going on and looking at Spirals with you today or we have a couple of alpha products that we're working on. So trying to figure that stuff out and or some of the consulting that we do. And I love, love, love the variety. And I do feel like it's sort of this playground, which is very special. Because all the stuff we do is stuff I'm deeply interested in, which is cool, but it’s a lot.

Brandon Gell (00:10:20)

I think this is an interesting transition to, how do we do this well? Because I really like doing a lot of things. Every does a lot of things, and you do one thing at Every, but you do a lot of things within that one thing. And, so far you've kind of only done one thing, which is get us to this V2. And I'm curious how you feel about, we're starting a new journey where you're going to be transitioning to doing other things besides what you've done for the past many years, meaning marketing and growth and all of these things.

Danny Aziz (00:11:00)

Yeah. I mean, I think that's the thing that I'm most excited about is throwing myself kind of in the deep end. And it's also why I love the idea personally for me to continue answering your question then of why am I working on Spiral. I think I've spent most of my career having ideas of how I think all these other things should work and I've never been in the environment to actually go test those ideas because it didn't make sense if you've raised around and you have 18 months, you're not going to let the engineer go do X, Y, and Z. You're going to go hire someone who actually knows how to do X, Y, and Z. So, nervously excited is how I'm feeling. But I think it's going to be like, we had this product that people love. And really it's just about figuring out what's missing for them and then who else is just like them and how do we go get them? Not to make it sound too easy. I think it's going to be pretty difficult, but yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:11:53)

Did that answer your question?

Brandon Gell (00:11:54)

I think so. Yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:11:57)

How do you feel about it?

Brandon Gell (00:11:59)

I mean, I think my genuine question is like, does it work? Does the model work? For many, many years, there's been this whole thing of go raise a bunch of money, go hire all the people you need to do all the different jobs, and our model is the complete opposite of that. Don't raise any money and don't hire anybody. Do it all yourself and we're going to support you with ideas and resources. And I think that's my biggest question is, does it work? I think it'll work, but yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:12:25)

And it's definitely really hard. I think one of the other parts of your question we haven't touched on is it's really hard to run multiple businesses. And for example, putting out a daily newsletter that's really high quality and a podcast and doing courses and doing training. All of that is a lot. And then layering on other software businesses is a lot. And usually I think people have a hard time balancing those things.

And, I think, part of the reason it's worked so far is it took us a long time to get there. I guess this is almost exactly five years since I started Every. It was Thanksgiving of 2019, which is crazy. I actually hadn't even thought about that.

Danny Aziz (00:13:17)

Congratulations.

Dan Shipper (00:13:19)

Yeah, and there's been a lot of a lot of different eras and we've tried a lot of different things, but I think this latest spurt in growth and things that we're doing, it all basically started when you joined. And I think one reason for that is, obviously you're just super talented and super hardworking and you brought so much to what we do. And another reason is there was a foundation there that we could bring you in and there was a lot of potential energy to be unlocked. And I think that's really hard to do that if, like what you've been talking about, if you've raised a big round and you have 18 months. We raised a little bit of money in 2020, but we never spent it. We have basically the same amount of money that we raised. And I think that afforded us the time to let this thing bake a little bit so that when we hit the right moment, we could let it rip a little bit more.

Brandon Gell (00:14:18)

Fuck yeah. Let it rip. We are letting it rip right now, I’d say.

Danny Aziz (00:14:21)

Time will tell if it will work, I’d say.

Brandon Gell (00:14:23)

Yeah, well, I think it will. It's working. It's working. Something is working. We just don't exactly know what it is and how big it will go.

Dan Shipper (00:14:19)

I think one question on my mind is: This model feels like it should not work. If you asked someone a year ago or two years ago or three years ago, I want to do this with this newsletter. We're going to have the newsletter and then we're going to make products. And we're going to bring people on to help us run the products and build more of them. And they would say like, it's not going to work for five different reasons. And I can list those out, but it is kind of working. And one of the questions in my mind is why is it working now? And I think it is working uniquely now in a way that it may not have been able to four or five years ago. And that a big reason is AI stuff. It is just so much cheaper and faster to make products. And I'm curious how that has been for you, or how using AI tools has life changed your workflow or your productivity level or what you're able to do.

Danny Aziz (00:15:30)

Before I answer the question, I think AI has also made it super easy to do the media part of stuff. I was shocked to see that the images that we have is a custom ChatGPT that spits out images and then we do a little bit of tweaking.

Dan Shipper (00:15:45)

And by the way, this whole podcast—AI-generated.

Danny Aziz (00:15:49)

We're not really here. 

Brandon Gell (00:15:50)

You’re not supposed to tell anybody that.

Danny Aziz (00:15:51)

But to answer your question, I think the obvious answer is it just allows me to move so much quicker, but it also allows me to do the mundane things a lot quicker. I'm able to build tools for myself in a way that I was never able to do. And I think if we think 10–15 years ago, if you wanted to kind of do that, you'd have to probably get resources in a budget and, okay, I want to get three engineers because we're going to build this internal tool. And now I could just ask Claude or Cursor or Windsurf, hey, build this internal tool and it's 80 percent get there and then I can finish it off.

Brandon Gell (00:16:23)

Didn't you just do that?

Danny Aziz (00:16:24)

I did just that. So some of the Spirals that we have, we’ve built out the data set of examples really well, and it turns something into something. So for example, it turns transcripts into tweets. We can also use that exact same data set for turning an article into a tweet. And we don't need to build a whole new Spiral. So I just built a really quick tool that allows me to take a bunch of Spirals that could easily be twisted into something else, and I can just be like, hey, this can also twist into that. And the way that I would have done that otherwise would have been to make them from scratch, which would have taken forever. Do it inside the database viewer, which would have taken forever?

Brandon Gell (00:16:58)

Okay, so this is exactly why, like you're saying, it shouldn't work, and there's all these reasons why, yes AI. And then the other thing, which is the hardest part of this business, is just choosing the right people to work with. And we were talking a little bit yesterday about— We weren't really talking about this explicitly, but essentially this is why you are the right person for this. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit. I feel like there's a certain amount of curiosity that you have that is not normal or it sort of feels normal for a lot of Every people, honestly, but it's what I think makes Every in the playground special.

Dan Shipper (00:17:38)

What was your perception of him and why did you want—?

Brandon Gell (00:17:43)

I just had this sense, very, very quickly that he was going to be really into doing all of the things that aren't just engineering—

Dan Shipper (00:17:50)

While also being technical.

Brandon Gell (00:17:52)

While also being technical, which is so important for us. I just got the sense that you were really technical, you had great taste, and actually, the second we met, I was like, this guy's got great clothing. His hair looks great. He has a bunch of plants behind him. He's very suave. I was like, this is not normal for an incredible engineer and at least in my experience, I was like, this is a good start. But I think it's having high IQ being technical, but then most importantly having high EQ. It's a very good test for us.

Dan Shipper (00:18:28)

That's what I was going to say. I remember the first time we talked, Brandon was like, okay, you're going to talk to this guy. He really wants to build therapy software. And I was like, yes! We're going to have a great conversation.

Brandon Gell (00:18:41)

Well, yeah, most of the time when I speak to somebody and they're like, I want to be an EIR, I know there'll be a good fit if the conversation just goes from them talking about their background and their work experience to just riffing on an idea. And that's immediately what we started doing.

Danny Aziz (00:18:56)

Yeah. I mean, I remember we jumped on the Zoom. It was in the morning and you're like, that's a lot of greenery. And I remember that vividly. I'd like to call out all the greenery because of my wife. It's not because of me. You've got to put that in there or she'll kill me.

Brandon Gell (00:19:09)

Good taste. You have good taste. 

Danny Aziz (00:19:11)

Yeah. That's all me. It's got nothing to do with that. Even though I really love doing one thing and focusing, I love getting my fingers in everything. And yeah, I love just riffing on ideas and taking them a little bit further. The therapy one was really interesting to me for a while—until it wasn't.

Brandon Gell (00:19:31)

And ironically now we have a bunch of therapists that are using Spiral and they love it and it's far better than any of the therapy-specific tools that they're using. And I think that actually is just worth noting that I think one of the reasons that Spiral is going to be so successful is it's so simple. And there's something really beautiful about that. And that's something that we should keep in mind as we build it. It's just like, how do we always have that feeling even while we pack it with a lot of interesting functionality?

Dan Shipper (00:20:03)

And I think the reason it's simple, at least to start, it came out of something that I was just doing myself. So, I was prompting Claude to just make tweets for me. And because it had to be useful, it had to be simple. And so I think one of the special things about what we have is everybody is using the stuff we build every day. We're not building for people who are different from ourselves, at least not yet. And I think that that feedback loop helps keep things simple. Because we have a better idea of what's necessary and what's not. And a better idea of is it being overbuilt or is it too complicated now? I really like that. I'm kind of curious, Brandon, your last business. You raised $50 million for— And just going back to the, why is this working when it kind of shouldn't, I guess. In your view, what's different now about this era and about what we're doing and everything, than the constraints or what was possible when you were running your last business. What have you noticed?

Brandon Gell (00:21:15)

Well, they're very different businesses, I think. I decided to build— I cannot imagine a more complicated business. For my last company, it was, so it was an insurtech business that helped any brand launch their own version of Apple Care. So I was 22. I'd never built an insurance company before, and I was essentially building an insurance company that also had this whole tech side of it. And it was just an insanely complicated technical fear, financial fear. Then we had to fix people’s shit, which I didn't realize when we launched it initially. And it was just really complicated. So I think that the— If I had to boil it all down to one thing, it's just the simplicity of the second we tried to go build Clyde at Every, it would consume all of our time. 

Dan Shipper (00:21:08)

Because of the regulations and the complexity of just insurance or—?

Brandon Gell (00:22:12)

I think just the size. It was a huge product that we built. And it kind of had to be because it was B2B2C. So we had to build a business for end consumers. We had to build a business for the businesses that we were selling to. And then we had to build a product for the insurance companies that we partnered with. So we kind of had to build three products and they all needed to work really well together. And then also e-commerce just sucks to build for. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. And e-commerce merchants are really hard. So I think the simplicity side of the business of the products that we're making is why we'll be successful and because I think we're focusing almost inadvertently on prosumery-type products where we can just convince you as an individual that this is a good thing for you. And if we do our job, you're likely to share it with your coworkers.

Dan Shipper (00:23:10)

That makes sense. What about abstracting out from your specific client experience and, I think we have a bit of a different ethos for how we're building stuff. It's attached to a media business. We're not really raising that much money—all that kind of stuff—vs. the more standard venture back startup path for the last 10 or 15 years. What have you noticed that is different? Either good or bad?

Brandon Gell (00:23:35)

I mean, personally, I think it's just all good. I guess the only bad thing is, I feel like we maybe have a bit of a ceiling where we're not going to go from $0 to $30 million. I mean, we could, but it would just, again, consume us. And that wouldn't be a bad thing. Danny, if you want to do that, we won't be mad. So maybe the ceiling is kind of a bad thing, but not really for all the good things I'm about to say. I think the biggest differentiator is when you raise $50 million, I kind of felt like I personally and the business was always sprinting to make sure that we didn't like to topple over ourselves. We didn't fall forward, I was always running to keep my feet under me and I felt that personally and I felt like the business felt like that. And I think here because we keep things simple because the types of things that we're choosing to invest in and because we're not raising money, so we don't owe it to anybody except ourselves. By the time people listen to this, we will have just sort of put ourselves in a position where we were leaning a little bit far ahead of ourselves. We were taking a risk, but then we'll take a couple of weeks to get our feet under us again. And I think just when you raise money, it's hard to do that.

Dan Shipper (00:25:04)

I think you've just put your finger on something that has been really important for me. For me, the reason we didn't raise a lot of money in the last four or five years is not because I don't want to work hard or be stressed. There's a very big difference between stress that you put on yourself and you to choose when it's right vs. stress about other people and other people's expectations. I think for me as a person, I'm just already so sensitive to other people that a business that felt like it was I could, we could choose when to be stressed, felt like what I wanted, whereas I think some, for other people that are less sensitive to that, it doesn't necessarily change the character of the business quite as much, or they're maybe not as afraid of it as I was. And I just really like that, that freedom to choose to be stressed or not.

Brandon Gell (00:26:06)

Yeah. Have you felt this much as a founding engineer?

Danny Aziz (00:26:10)

The stress more comes from not agreeing with the milestones that we're trying to reach. Because they feel very short-sighted. The thing that's been very apparent to me in just three, four weeks is not the lack of money, but the lack of just that we can burn this because we're going to go race some more, has forced me to be a little bit more creative, which I've really enjoyed. I thought before it was like, oh, cool, I'm going to buy five seats for this thing. Cool, whatever. Now I'm like, okay, looking at the price. Do I really need this? Can we be a bit more creative about this? Is there a way that we can get this cheaper? I think in some places money is definitely meant to be spent on the right things. But I definitely found that before having venture-backed money, it was like, well, we have money, we should spend it. I was just not being as creative as I could have been. And so that's actually been really useful in this sort of expectations place, I think right now I've been feeling a lot of my own expectations, which have been very— The fuel from that feels a lot more longer-lasting than other people's expectations. That feels like just thinking about my own emotional journey, that Spiral happens, no pun intended, happens a lot quicker. Whereas right now this arc feels like it's going to go a lot further.

Brandon Gell (00:27:41)

Wait, sorry. I want to make sure I fully understand this. So you're saying when other people are putting expectations on you, that cycle of feeling stressed about those expectations is a quicker cycle.

Danny Aziz (00:27:50)

And then the fuel runs out a lot quicker. I'm in a pressure cooker and that can, and I get a lot of stuff done in a pressure cooker and he just, that's it. It kind of fizzles out for a couple of weeks and then it takes a lot of getting back into it. Whereas right now it's my own expectations. And I kind of feel at least right now I'll spend a couple weeks, but it feels like it's going to take me very far.

Brandon Gell (00:28:12)

Well, one and I don't know how much equity you owned in previous companies that you were part of, but one thing that I found during Clyde was I could beat the shit out of myself but kind of only because I felt I owned it and you now own a very significant part of Spiral. And I wonder if that plays a part of it at all, you're literally an owner? That's what's tough about being an equity owner in a business—being an employee that has equity—is really not that much. So the second you feel that pain, you're sort of like, eh, it's not a rocketship already, so it's really not going to be worth that much, which is what's tough about equity as an employee. That's not really the case for you. And I wonder if that comes into it at all.

Danny Aziz (00:28:58)

The counterexample of my options at other companies has definitely been conscious for me before in that I've never really exercised my options before. Because it's never made any sense to, and it's never been motivating enough, but I couldn't speak to, is that a reason why I'm super motivated right now? It definitely is playing a part in it for sure.

Brandon Gell (00:29:22)

Right answer.

Dan Shipper (00:29:22)

We knew we'd picked right. You did say the weight of your own expectations is sort of what's pushing you forward. And it made me think, what are your expectations for yourself?

Danny Aziz (00:29:37)

I think I've been telling myself this narrative for a very long time because I find all these other things interesting and my opinion might mean something in these other places. For me, I'm seeing this as an experiment, a big part of this experiment of running Spiral is, are those opinions worth anything? Probably not. And then it's like, okay, well, when reality tells me they're not, how do I react to that? How do I shift and figure out what actually makes sense? Will I figure out what actually makes sense? so it's in the, I'm being a guinea pig for Every in the studio. Everyone in the studio is also being a bit of a guinea pig to me. And so Spiral is kind of this symbiotic relationship.

Dan Shipper (00:30:19)

I think that that's such a common founder thing is this subtle sense of, I think I could do this a lot better than no matter what it is and then, but also kind of wanting to find out rather than just sort of— There's another personality type that's a little bit more like, I think, I could do this a lot better, but I'm not going to try.

Brandon Gell (00:30:46)

Or I think I could do this a lot better, but I'm not going to because I don't get value from it. You sort of need to be somebody who's like, of course, I'm going to do an amazing job no matter what. I just love it for the love of the game. And this is what makes me feel good.

Dan Shipper (00:31:01)

And often you just kind of get smacked in the face when you try, but then you just sort of keep doing it.

Brandon Gell (00:31:08)

Well, yeah. I mean, the way that I described my time running Clyde as it was every day was being able to get punched in the face with a smile on my face and being able to wake up the next day and do it again. And that's what, that's what it was not for all seven years, but maybe five. But I think that's true of a lot of people that raise money, especially when it's not going incredible.

Dan Shipper (00:31:32)

I mean, there are definitely times where this business has felt like that for me, but not recently, which is great. You know those boards where it's like, days since I was punched in the face.

Danny Aziz (00:31:48)

Days since nuclear disaster.

Dan Shipper (00:31:51)

I love that sweater.

Danny Aziz (00:31:52)

Thank you.

Brandon Gell (00:31:54)

Is that Greek?

Danny Aziz (00:31:55)

I did get this in Greece.

Dan Shipper (00:32:02)

What else should we talk about?

Brandon Gell (00:32:03)

I want to talk about—

Danny Aziz (00:32:05)

—how I can code with my rings now.

Brandon Gell (00:32:07)

Yeah, how you code with so many rings on.

Danny Aziz (00:32:10)

It really doesn't get in the way.

Dan Shipper (00:32:11)

Wait, you gotta hold the rings up to the camera. 

Danny Aziz (00:32:12)

I have four rings.

Dan Shipper (00:32:14)

That’s a lot.

Danny Aziz (00:32:15)

This was a couple of weeks ago and I bumped into this guy that I met once at a party. And we kind of saw each other and we recognized each other. And then he's like, that's a lot of rings. It wasn’t like, oh we met each other at that guy's party. It was just like, that's a lot of rings. I was like, yeah. He’s like, you're not running out of fingers anytime soon. And I'm like, okay. And then that was it. Yeah, and then I met him again, he was a great guy.I tell that story all the time.

Dan Shipper (00:32:40)

That’s wild. At what point did you realize that you wanted to start working on your ring game?

Danny Aziz (00:32:43)

So, I bought the Oura Ring first because I was really into tracking my sleep or whatever.

Dan Shipper (00:32:48)

The gateway drug.

Danny Aziz (00:32:49)

The gateway drug. And then I was like, oh shit, this looks really good.

Brandon Gell (00:32:56)

And then you said, oh shit looks really good?

Danny Aziz (00:32:58)

Yeah, I was like, oh, I actually really like how it looks on my hand.

Brandon Gell (00:33:00)

No, you can really pull them off. Yeah, you can rock it.

Danny Aziz (00:33:02)

And then I got this one, and then I got this one, and then I got this one.

Dan Shipper (00:33:05)

Is there any special significance?

Danny Aziz (00:33:06)

Not at all.

Brandon Gell (00:33:09)

Do you have any tattoos?

Danny Aziz (00:33:10)

I don't have any tattoos.

Dan Shipper (00:33:11)

Do you?

Brandon Gell (00:33:12)

I have one tattoo.

Dan Shipper (00:33:13)

Really?

Brandon Gell (00:33:14)

Yeah. 

Dan Shipper (00:33:15)

Where?

Brandon Gell (00:33:16)

Right here.

Dan Shipper (00:33:17)

Oh, wow.

Danny Aziz (00:33:18)

What is it?

Brandon Gell (00:33:19)

It's a house. It’s five lines of a house. I got it when I was studying architecture—Copenhagen. Callback to architecture. And then also my grandma passed away and sort of all connected to that. I was 18. Abroad. You do these things when you're abroad and you're 18. I don't even see it now though. I literally don't see it on my body.

Dan Shipper (00:33:43)

Did it ever bother you that you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery now?

Brandon Gell (00:33:44)

Um, no. Not at all.

Dan Shipper (00:33:45)

That's good.

Brandon Gell (00:33:49)

Is that— I don’t think that’s— I don't want to be buried anyway. 

Dan Shipper (00:33:50)

It depends on how serious they are. Oh, you're going to do the Bryan Johnson don't die thing?

Brandon Gell (00:33:59)

Oh no, definitely not. I definitely want to die. Please kill me. No, I definitely want to die one day. I think I just want to be, well, I do want to be buried, but I want to be buried without a casket. I want to decompose as quickly as possible.

Dan Shipper (00:34:17)

You want ashes scattered to the wind.

Brandon Gell (00:34:20)

Well, I'm a little bit worried about the ashes thing because, does that sort of negate your ability to, Absorb back into— I don't know.

Dan Shipper (00:34:28)

So you want to just be open air.

Brandon Gell (00:34:32)

No, not open air. I just want to be buried with a ton of worms in the woods or something—a kind of moist woods, fertile grounds. Damp.

Dan Shipper (00:34:33)

Okay. Interesting. Well, I mean, my family business is cemeteries and tombs, so I can look that up for you if you want.

Brandon Gell (00:34:48)

That's actually— I mean, did you know that?

Danny Aziz (00:34:50)

I did know that, yeah.

Brandon Gell (00:34:51)

That's such a fascinating thing, and also your name is W.

Dan Shipper (00:34:54)

 It is W. What does that have to do with anything?

Brandon Gell (00:34:57)

Just two fascinating things about you.

Dan Shipper (00:34:59)

Those are my two fun facts.

Brandon Gell (00:35:01)

Those are the two fun facts, yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:35:02)

That is actually my number one fun fact—my name is W. My other one—I just got a new fun fact, which is that I drank a wine that was over 100 years old this weekend.

Brandon Gell (00:35:14)

Wow. Was it good?

Dan Shipper (00:35:15)

I've been storing that one up for the next icebreaker and this is the next icebreaker. No, it tasted like— Have you ever had a very dense balsamic vinegar reduction? It was like that. It was a sherry, which was cool. 1918 or something like that.

Brandon Gell (00:35:37)

I feel like you have a lot of interesting things that we don't really know that much about you.

Danny Aziz (00:35:41)

I don't have—. I was literally just now trying to think of fun facts about myself. If we were talking about things, it would come up but I really struggle to get them from the depth of my head.

Brandon Gell (00:35:49)

Yeah, it's hard when you're on the spot. But I just feel like you're an interesting guy generally. We learned yesterday that you used to fix your mom's car. Oh, you ride a motorcycle.

Dan Shipper (00:35:57)

And you didn't go to college, right?

Danny Aziz (00:35:58)

I didn't go to college, no.

Dan Shipper (00:35:59)

Yeah, you got a lot of interesting stuff. Yeah, which one of those do you want to dig into?

Danny Aziz (00:36:03)

We could pick out why I didn't go to college. Because I think that's a story that I've told a million times. I grew up in London. I grew up kind of near Wimbledon. Wimbledon was a stone's throw away. My high school was one of the schools that they select ball boys from. I was never a ball boy. And when I was 15, this kid who went to the next school built this summarizer app. You could give it an article, and it would summarize it in 400 words or 200 words. And he was a couple years older than me. And he sold it to Yahoo for some particular amount of money. The app was called Summly and his name was—

Dan Shipper (00:36:44)

I remember that. I remember Summly.

Danny Aziz (00:36:46)

Yeah. Nick something. I don't remember.

Dan Shipper (00:36:48)

Oh my god. I remember seeing interviews with him and stuff and being like, that guy's cool.

Danny Aziz (00:36:52)

And he was just some kid a couple of years older than me who went to a school that was 10 minutes away. And that I saw that and that was this big, what the fuck? What?

Brandon Gell (00:37:01)

You can do this?

Danny Aziz (00:37:02)

Yeah, people could do this? And it was a time in my life where I had a lot of conversations at school and with people in general. What am I going to do with my life? And I did not have an answer for that.

Brandon Gell (00:37:12)

Is that a conversation in England? When do you need to decide that? Do they have liberal arts colleges in the UK?

Danny Aziz (00:37:21)

No, I don't really know what a liberal arts college is to be honest.

Brandon Gell (00:37:24)

Okay. We can talk about that later.

Dan Shipper (00:37:26)

Denied. 

Brandon Gell (00:37:27)

Nevermind, they're stupid.

Danny Aziz (00:37:29)

Okay. I wouldn't say that. At least for me, this was a subtle conversation that was happening because we were in this moment where you were going to pick subjects that you were going to do for the next couple of years. And those subjects that you do then kind of dictate what you're going to do at university. If you're picking maths and the sciences, you're going to go do something kind of related to that.

Dan Shipper (00:37:49)

And that dictates your career too. You pick pretty early and then you're set, basically.

Danny Aziz (00:37:53)

Basically, you're set pretty early on.

Dan Shipper (00:37:55)

So you just didn't pick. That was strategic.

Danny Aziz (00:37:57)

Well, at that moment in time, I knew that I was really into computers. When I was a teenager, I was fucking around with After Effects. I was really into CGI and recording little videos and pretending I had a lightsaber and making it look like I had a lightsaber. And I think from that, and all of that was me downloading torrented versions of Adobe After Effects. And so I was kind of I had my toe in this interesting world, and was just slowly going deeper and deeper into it and what can you do with technology?

Brandon Gell (00:38:30)

That's so interesting because I was huge on After Effects too, probably around the same time. I'm a little older than you, but at the same age. And, I wonder if that's kind of a gateway drug to this. Legos and After Effects.

Dan Shipper (00:38:41)

Did you like lightsabers because I was also really into lightsabers?

Brandon Gell (00:38:46)

I actually was not into Star Wars at all, but I think that was, my parents just didn't— I would have. I love it now.

Dan Shipper (00:38:52)

Yeah. I was so into lightsabers that— You know those plasma balls where it’s like a glass ball and you could touch it? So I had one of those in my room and I really, really wanted to make a lightsaber. I spent so much time on the internet, trying to figure out if there are any ways to make a lightsaber and somehow— I just spent a lot of time in my room as a kid. I figured out that if you took Fart Putty— You didn't think it was going there. If you take Fart Putty— It's sort or when you make an air bubble and then you it's sort of Play-Doh material, but it's but it's a little bit more plastic-y. And it comes in a little can and you can like, push it down and then it makes a fart noise. So if I took Fart Putty and put it on the plasma ball, and then I got the graphite—the pencils lead for mechanical pencils—and then if I put a piece of graphite, if I hold a piece of graphite and put it next to the Fart Putty, I would get this shooting spark. And I was like, it's a lightsaber. So then I would hold it and then I would put sheets of paper through and cut it. And I'd be like, I am Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Brandon Gell (00:40:06)

I am just loving this image of you doing this. That’s awesome.

Dan Shipper (00:40:09)

I almost burned down my house multiple times. But yeah, it was cool.

Brandon Gell (00:40:14)

I hope I have a kid like you. Really.

Dan Shipper (00:40:19)

Wow. That's very nice. 

Brandon Gell (00:40:20)

Yeah, I hope I have a kid that's just like— Because I wasn't doing digital After Effects. I did A ridiculous amount of film when I was younger and edited footage, but I never really did anything. I pretended to take calculators apart and then with the intention of putting them back together. And then I'd be like, I don't fucking know how to put this— Now, It's just a bunch of parts. But you were actually putting them back together.

Dan Shipper (00:40:48)

You might be giving me a little too much credit. I don't know if I was putting the calculators exactly back together, but I definitely was, I loved it.

Brandon Gell (00:40:52)

Danny was putting them back together.

Danny Aziz (00:40:56)

I definitely wasn't—at least at that age.

Brandon Gell (00:40:57)

Well, what about that time that you broke your mom's car?

Danny Aziz (00:41:01)

So my mom was gonna get her car serviced and I was like, I want to go do it.

Dan Shipper (00:41:08)

You’re like, I can do it better.

Brandon Gell (00:41:09)

I'm 12.

Danny Aziz (00:41:10)

I think I was like 16 at the time or maybe 15. And I had just gone down this rabbit hole of YouTube videos. And I was like, I could do this. and there's this one company that makes manuals for every single car. It's the Haynes manual. And their entire business is building this manual on how to take apart the car and repair it. I really love that business. It's really interesting. So I bought the Haynes manual for the car that we had, devoured it, and then convinced my mom somehow that she should let her teenage son do her car. And she agreed.

Dan Shipper (00:41:46)

That was a little bit on her to be honest.

Danny Aziz (00:41:48)

Yeah, I mean all credits to my mom. She really did let me—

Brandon Gell (00:41:52)

If you had a voice like this at 16. I'd let you do whatever you wanted to do.

Danny Aziz (00:41:58)

Imagine this but a lot more high-pitched. Most of the way got through, totally fine, and then cracked a spark plug in half inside the engine block and then I spent weeks figuring out how to get it out. And long story short was using some penetrating oil that I could only get from America and slowly drilling it out and then forcing it out to go around the threads the other way around. And then I realized that all the other three spark plugs are gonna be really stuck in there. So I just soaked the shit out of them in WD-40. And then they came up. And since then I've kind of worked on my own cars. When I moved here, there was this motorcycle repair class that was happening in Bushwick that I took and that was a lot of fun.

Dan Shipper (00:42:45)

And you have this principle that you apply to your life from then on, which is?

Danny Aziz (00:42:51)

Fuck around and find out?

Dan Shipper (00:42:45)

I thought you were gonna say measure twice—

Brandon Gell (00:42:56)

We talked about this, Danny.

Dan Shipper (00:42:58)

I was setting you up, man.

Danny Aziz (00:43:00)

I actually didn't know—

Brandon Gell (00:43:02)

I like fuck around and find out better. That’s kind of what we’re doing here. A little bit.

Dan Shipper (00:43:07)

Yeah, it’s like, measure twice, cut once in the front, and then fuck around and find out in the back.

Danny Aziz (00:43:13)

Yeah, I've definitely figured out that otherwise you get stuck in situations. It's funny. I don't think I've learned that life constantly teaches me that lesson over and over and over again. And hopefully one day I learned that lesson properly.

Brandon Gell (00:43:29)

Or not. I think that maybe the reason why maybe the three of us have built businesses, which is arguably the stupidest thing that you can do if your goal is to make money or be happy—

Dan Shipper (00:43:41)

Or start a newsletter.

Brandon Gell (00:43:45)

Or start a newsletter. Definitely start a newsletter. It's sort of measured once, cut twice.

Dan Shipper (00:43:47)

Ready. Fire. Aim.

Brandon Gell (00:43:51)

Exactly. Yeah, I'm curious about this and I'm going to go for it now. Miss Fernandez, my third grade teacher always— I remember this very well. What's that word when you do things without thinking? Impulsive. She wrote that in my report card. It was a bad thing, but I was thinking that's not that doesn't sound so bad to me.

Dan Shipper (00:44:27)

I had the same thing. My fourth grade teacher Mrs. Pfeiffer said I was a nutty professor.

Brandon Gell (00:44:39)

Oh my god, that's perfect. That's like when I called you the drunk uncle.

Dan Shipper (00:44:43)

Nutty professor, drunk uncle— She was just like you're always thinking about stuff, but you're not always grounded or whatever. And I thought that was great. And my mom was like, that's terrible. You cannot be like that.

Danny Aziz (00:44:59)

don't have any quotes that I can remember, but my entire time spent at school was thinking, I'm too clever for this and this is fucking boring. And there's more interesting things for me to do.

Brandon Gell (00:45:09)

So what did you do after—? So is it 18 when you go to college in the UK?

Danny Aziz (00:45:12)

I was 17 when I left school.

Brandon Gell (00:45:16)

You graduated high school.

Danny Aziz (00:45:17)

I graduated high school, and then before we go to university in the UK, there's like these two years that you do, where you have to go get your A-levels. And I decided that I wasn't going to go to university. I was either going to do computer science or economics. And, I didn't have the grades to do economics. And then I went around to all the different universities talking to the kids who were doing computer science. And it's not that I felt that I already knew what they were talking about. It's that they weren't talking about anything interesting. The things they were working on, they weren't building anything cool. It seemed kind of stuffy and not what I wanted to do. At the same time, me and a friend of mine were getting really hooked into this idea of startups. We were reading and watching YouTube videos of all this stuff that was happening in San Francisco. And all of that was really exciting. That was far more exciting than school. It was far more exciting than going to university for computer science. Then we realized that there were people in London doing the exact same thing. And we just decided to turn up to an event that someone was hosting. I don't remember what it was, who it was, but it was the first time in my life—and I was like 16 or 17 at the time—when adults treated me like an adult. It might be because I had a beard at the time—probably was—but it was like the first time that I really felt like I was being listened to and heard and people actually cared to hear my opinion. And it was about this kind of stuff. And it was from that moment on that I was hooked.

Dan Shipper (00:45:38)

I do think that's a very different thing about the tech industry, which is that it's 95 percent amazing. And there's 5 percent of it that’s a little bit weird. But it's the only industry where you're taken seriously based on what you can do rather than your credentials. And as a result, it's the only industry where young people are taken really seriously from the very beginning. And I always felt that too, there are so many times in my career where I can just remember as an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old or 22-year-old saying stuff and talking to people who are in their 30s or 40s or 50s and they actually listened. And now, talking to 20-year-olds, I'm like, wow, you know nothing. And I try to pay that forward because like them, they were really nice to me.

Brandon Gell (00:47:30)

I feel like in the tech industry, the impact or having potential is just as important as having experience. And I think that's also kind of where VC kind of goes in a bad direction. A good example is giving me, a 22-year-old, $50 million. We're having a correction—literally right now we're experiencing that. But It is a special place where potential is just as important as experience.

Dan Shipper (00:48:08)

Yeah. I think that the 5 percent bad is sort of sometimes when you give a 22-year-old $50 million, it turns out really well. And then I just have a lot of friends for him. It was a very scary experience that they didn't really like to know what they were getting into. And all the adults around them were kind of like, you should go do this. This is your time or whatever. And I think that's the sort of difficulty of it, you know? 

Brandon Gell (00:48:35)

And I think that's because running a business— Yesterday, we were going through a lot of PNLs and figuring out how we manage taxes for all of these different LLCs. And that's not fun and you really need to pay attention and do it right. And when you're 22, you're sort of like, none of this matters. I can do whatever I want, but that can come to bite you. Not that that was my situation, but it very well could have been.

Dan Shipper (00:49:08)

But then it's also a lot of weight that is on you that you don't even realize how it's going to feel until you're in that position. You're thinking of yourself, cool, I'll be the CEO of this company. It'll be amazing and I’ll have all these people working for me. I'll have all this money and it seems awesome. And then it is awesome until things start going wrong. And then it can just be really hard to handle.

Danny Aziz (00:49:29)

Yeah, I think about the things that one has to do and running a business and, if I was 22 and I had to hire people fire people, I don't know if I would have done that well.

Dan Shipper (00:49:40)

It’s a school of hard knocks for sure.

Brandon Gell (00:49:41)

But, I mean, I feel like we're I don't know if we're shitting on it. But it is also an incredible thing where you just learn so much and you mature. I feel like it enables you to mature really quickly, both professionally and personally, but you're still kind of controlling your own destiny a little bit. So you get to mature in a sense that in a way that also feels like I can own my life vs. I'm going to just dedicate the next 50 years working—just doing a job. I definitely feel like that's probably the case for all of us. We're all around 30 and it's odd to be around 30 and sort of feel like I'm going to live my life exactly the way that I want it. And I can. I do.

Dan Shipper (00:50:31)

I really, really love that. And yeah, I definitely don't mean to say 22-year-olds shouldn't run businesses or raise money. It's just pretty situational. And I think sometimes they get pushed into things that they wouldn't ordinarily do by people who are older and know better than them. And I think that kind of sucks.

Brandon Gell (00:50:51)

So Ezra Galston, who is one of my investors and I think is one of the best investors I've ever worked with, runs a VC called Starting Line. He explained it to me as multiple different types of founders. You can have a freshman founder, which is like, you're super naive. And you don't know how hard something is going to be and you can have a sophomore and a junior founder, which I forget how we define those, but imagine it somewhere between freshman and senior, which is, I've done this before. I know how hard it is. I'm going to take on only the amount of money that I need. And he basically was like, you only really want to invest in senior founders and freshman founders because the ones in the middle are kind of like maybe a little stuck up. They didn't learn their lesson hard enough one way or the other. I don't know what you are yet. I feel like I don't know. Maybe you also exist outside of this because we're not we're not investing—

Dan Shipper (00:51:46)

You’re off the charts.

Brandon Gell (00:51:47)

Yeah, you’re off the charts. You never went to college.

Danny Aziz (00:51:51)

I mean, I think if I was to define myself in that constraint I would say I'm much more on the earlier side. But yeah, I feel like that constraint doesn't necessarily fit.

Dan Shipper (00:52:04)

One thing on my mind, because we're sort of, we're getting close to the end, and just to sort of like bring it back to Spiral stuff, because I love the idea— And we've done this a bit in other parts of the Every journey, but I love the idea of having these conversations as like little time capsules, and so this is sort of a time capsule of the very start of your Spiral journey, your Every journey, and I'm kind of curious for you if we— And there's no right answer to this, but like when we come back in a year and we're on the pod and we're, we're doing the like one-year review.

Brandon Gell (00:52:39)

V3.

Dan Shipper (00:52:40)

Hopefully, V6. And GPT-7 is out. Where do you hope to be? What does success look like for you?

Danny Aziz (00:52:54)

Where I want Spiral to go in the next year, beyond being used by a bunch of businesses and stuff. The product, I want it to stay simple, but simple doesn't mean stupid. I think it has this opportunity to be really clever and automate things for people in a way that they didn't really realize that it could be automated. I think the thing that I think about a lot about AI in general is that I think most people have tried AI. They've asked ChatGPT for a joke or whatever, and they've never tried it again. I think there's this world of businesses and individuals who are not really utilizing the tools that we have right now. I think Spiral is simple enough that it's simple and powerful enough that it can be really easy to use and be impactful enough to their day-to-day lives. I think getting it in the hands of more people with a lot of the advancements that we want to work on making it easy to share, making it a little bit more powerful. So it's doing even more for you. I think it would be exactly where I want Spiral to be in a year.

Dan Shipper (00:53:57)

I love that. And I hope you also learn kind of like the things that you seem like you're, you, you want to learn, which is like, do I know better? Can I do all the other stuff in addition to the engineering stuff? And yeah, I also think. I love those things you mentioned. I love Spiral as this kind of like, for me, it operates as this inspiration machine. If I'm doing a task, I have to write a tweet or, I have to do a YouTube description or whatever, I can just throw some input into Spiral and it just gives me so many different options. I would love it if we were just going through a bunch of a bunch of the Every-created Spirals today and you surfaced for me so many Spirals that are there that I didn't even know. And I would love for it to be 10x its ability to act as that sort of machine where I can just see tons and tons of different possibilities and get through them as quickly as possible to find the thing that has that little spark. I think there's so much opportunity to do that. And I feel like, I feel like we're going in that direction and yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be really cool in a year.

Danny Aziz (00:55:09)

Yeah. I think it's gonna be really cool. I mean, what we're shipping now is really cool. And I think it's just going to get better from that.

Dan Shipper (00:55:14)

What about you? What are you hoping for? Where would you like to be if we go one level up from Spiral to studio in a year?

Brandon Gell (00:55:27)

So we have three products that are all in a sort of similar place. We've got Sparkle, Spiral, and Cora, which is the product that we haven't announced yet. And I would love a year from now for all of those to feel stable, not technically stable, because they're all technically stable, but more we have some understanding of the levers that make them work and we're able to pull on those levers however we want. So I would like that for all of those three products. And I think my hope for the rest of the studio is that one, we're able to offer resources to Danny, Kieran, all the other EIRs that allow them to do their best work and things that they're maybe not great at or don't have the skill sets for, we can supplement them with like the best people. A really good example is performance marketing, kind of really hard to do. And you should know all of our EIRs and anybody who's running a business at Every I think should know how to do it, but maybe you don't need to because we have somebody who's actually 10x better than you. so I'd like to be able to supply a lot of those resources. And I hope we can increase the experimentation level. I think that we're moving ridiculously fast compared to other studios and other people. I think we build a lot, but I think we can also do more. It's been playful, but I think it can be even more playful. And I think that what will enable that is like having these three businesses functioning in a way that we are like, okay, we know how to do it, so let's just have fun. And then if any of these land, we know how to do it.

Dan Shipper (00:57:31)

Yeah. I think I like figuring out the model, because now we've got three of them and I think we can step back and look at what's worked and what hasn't and kind of zoom in more on what's worked. I think for me, I would love it. I think this studio and then Spiral and all these other products are big bets. And I would love to be in a place in a year where we've really figured out how to make the media side and the product side really work together well and feel like the media stuff is adding to the products and the products are adding to the media. I think there's this really special core thing that's happening right now where I go into Discord every day and there's smart, creative people, all talking to each other. And there's founders, there's writers, there's designers, there's all these people. And I think that that's so different. Usually people are in their own little silos and stuff. And I want to keep that going. Because I think it'll grow into something really beautiful and special. And so that's where I'd love to be in a year.

Brandon Gell (00:58:34)

Yeah, I think the hardest thing for us honestly is going to be looking at the data and being like, this feels like the right data. I feel like we're constantly going to look at the data and be like it's just going to be hard to figure out exactly what you're saying, which is are they playing nicely together? We’re going to be able to figure out a little bit, but it's also just going to be this sort of amorphous—it's just hard. It's going to be hard to do that.

Dan Shipper (00:58:59)

I don't think that I'm necessarily saying, I think that there will be a really clear number where it's going to be a vibes thing. And I think we have the vibes now and I want the vibes to continue and get better. And that's the most important thing to me. I feel like there's a lot of metaphors of business building that are sort of going to war and I feel like Every for me is more like growing a garden or something and you got to make the conditions right for things to flourish. And that's a very vibrant type of thing. So may the vibes continue.

Brandon Gell (00:59:38)

May the vibes continue.

Dan Shipper (00:59:40)

This is great. Thanks, Danny, for joining. 

Danny Aziz (00:59:46)

Thanks for having me.

Dan Shipper (00:59:47)

Brandon, thanks for joining. 

Brandon Gell (00:59:48)

Thanks, Dan.

Dan Shipper (00:59:48)

This is great.


Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

We also build AI tools for readers like you. Automate repeat writing with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Write something great with Lex.

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