I Left My Job to Run an AI Wrapper at Every

Today we launched v2 of Spiral, our tool to help you automate your repetitive creative work. In this edition of Source Code, our column about the inner workings of Every Studio, Spiral general manager Danny Aziz recounts his entrepreneurship journey from a childhood tinkering with technology in the UK to an established engineering career in New York—and then to taking the leap to Every.—Brandon Gell

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Two months ago, I chose chaos over comfort: I left behind a $200,000-plus salary at a well-regarded startup, and a decade's worth of hard-won professional pride, to build an AI wrapper at a bootstrapped media company.

The decision to build an AI wrapper might seem counterintuitive. After all, aren't there already countless AI tools flooding the market? But that's exactly what makes it compelling. Despite the AI hype cycle, real adoption is still in its infancy. Most people have only scratched the surface, maybe asking ChatGPT for a joke or two. The opportunity to help people actually integrate AI into their daily workflows, to solve real inefficiencies in their writing process, feels wide open. It’s an opportunity that, one way or another, I’ve been looking for for a long time.

I had a feeling about the kind of feedback I’d get from my family when I told them the news:

“You're going to struggle to find a job.” 

“You're going to struggle to find a wife.” 

These were the concerns I'd first heard from my family at age 17, when I chose not to go to university (aka college). My mum was the first in her family to pursue higher education, and my family were immigrants to the UK, with a typical immigrant’s respect for the value of security. All they wanted was what any family wants—for me to live a secure and happy life. 

I had already felt that I had disappointed them once when I didn't go to college. Ten years later, I was doubling down, once again choosing the road less traveled—and this time the stakes felt higher. I’d built a comfortable life. As a founding engineer at an exciting startup, I had everything I thought I wanted: a generous salary, the freedom to travel the world, and a home in what I consider to be the greatest city on Earth. The questions keeping me up at night weren't about finding a job, but about leaving one. Could I afford to start over? To be a beginner again? 

This decision felt different than deciding not to go to college. It wasn’t a rejection of what I’d built—it was a bet on what I could create next.

Every builder has their origin story—a moment when they chose uncertainty over stability, creation over preservation. Mine began with a gnawing sense that the paths I had been following, while lucrative and respectable, were no longer fulfilling. I wasn’t chasing a paycheck anymore; I was chasing purpose.

The seeds of curiosity 

I’ve always been a tinkerer. When I was a teenager, I spent my afternoons jailbreaking iPods for my classmates for £20 a pop. What started as a way to explore the limits of technology turned into my first taste of entrepreneurship. I wasn’t just playing around; I was solving problems and finding ways to make things better—or at least more interesting.

That curiosity followed me into programming. I wanted to learn how things worked and, eventually, how to create things myself. By 16, I was building websites for local businesses, and I learned about a lot more than just code—like how to navigate client expectations, decode vague requests like "make it good," and handle the delicate art of pricing my work. As a teenager dealing with business owners for the first time, I had to quickly master the subtle language of professional relationships. These weren't just technical projects; they were crash courses in entrepreneurship.

Around that time, I learned that a student from a neighboring school had sold his startup to Yahoo for $30 million. It was an eye-opening piece of news: There was this whole world of startups and tech entrepreneurship that I'd never known about. The fact that someone my age, just five minutes away, could build and sell a company showed me what was possible.

That possibility was enough for me to skip the traditional university route. At 17, a friend and I dove headfirst into building products, though reality quickly proved humbling. Our teenage attempts at startups—a booking app for barber shops, a search engine for clips inside YouTube, multiple Chrome extensions for making browsing Twitter easier—were exactly what you'd expect: ambitious, messy, and ultimately educational failures. 

Realizing we needed more than just enthusiasm, I spent the next decade honing my craft. Through a mix of full-time jobs, freelance work, and countless side projects, I built up the technical and business knowledge I'd missed by bypassing formal education, eventually leading engineering teams that spanned continents.

Over time, I developed a knack for automating the boring stuff. At one startup, I built so many dashboards and automations that my coworkers nicknamed me "Dashboard Danny." I was shocked by how inefficient internal processes could be and loved creating tools to streamline workflows. 

But despite a decade of honing my technical craft, that entrepreneurial itch never went away. I was spending so much time and effort building other people’s visions that I’d never found the space to fully test my own ideas.

Escaping the golden handcuffs

The excuses were easy to find: My life had all the trappings of success I'd dreamed of as a teenager. My work funded adventures around the world, fancy dinners in cities I'd only seen in movies, and—as a child of an immigrant—the financial security I had never experienced growing up. Walking away from that felt like madness.

The stakes got even higher when I moved to New York (where I met my wife). My visa tied me to a single employer, adding a golden handcuff to my collection of comfortable constraints. One wrong move could unravel not just my lifestyle, but my entire life in the U.S.

But beneath these external barriers lay a deeper, more personal fear: Was I enough? Despite a decade of proving myself in tech, that nagging voice persisted. Without the traditional credentials—no computer science degree or Ivy League network—would I be taken seriously as a founder? I'd spent years building a reputation that helped others look past my unconventional background. Starting over meant putting that hard-won credibility on the line, exposing myself to the same doubts I'd worked so hard to silence.

Success had become its own kind of trap. The higher I climbed, the more I felt myself being squeezed into an increasingly narrow box. I was transitioning into management, or else being brought in for specific projects that needed the skills I had spent a decade building. Either way, my time was deemed "too valuable" to spend on user research, marketing, or growth—yet it was precisely these uncharted territories that energized me most. I had this deep-seated conviction, perhaps foolish, that I could do these things not just well, but better than others. Instead, I found myself standing on someone else's ladder, climbing toward a summit I wasn't sure I wanted to reach.

The final push came from an unexpected source: my own words. Looking back through a decade of journal entries, I saw a pattern: 

“I feel this inner resistance.”

“I'm afraid that in the end I'll look back and realise [sic] that I haven't achieved what I originally set out to do.”

“I want to take a bet on myself. If not now, when?” 

Despite all the external markers of success, that same burning desire to build something of my own had never dimmed. It had only grown stronger.

The promise of Spiral

All of this led me to Every, and to running Spiral. Joining a bootstrapped media company might sound like an unusual pivot for someone in tech, but it made perfect sense to me. Every wasn't just another media startup—it was a trusted brand with a passionate community of forward-thinking readers. Its reputation for thoughtful exploration of work, creativity, and technology created a unique advantage: users were eager to try new products from Every, viewing them as extensions of the insights they already valued.

"I try everything Every tells me to try," one Spiral user told me recently—a testament to the power of building within an established brand that people trust. Beyond brand equity, Every offered something even more valuable: immediate access to engaged users. In a world where most products struggle to find their first users, Every's built-in distribution meant I could experiment and receive real feedback quickly. This tight feedback loop is priceless, especially in the early stages of building a product.

In addition to the business model, there’s the product: Spiral is about reclaiming focus. It’s simple by design—a tool that helps people automate 80 percent of their repetitive writing tasks. For many users, it's a way to cut through the clutter and tackle the important but sometimes neglected tasks at work.

The product feels like the natural evolution of what I’ve always done, going back to my days as “Dashboard Danny”: streamlining processes, solving inefficiencies, and building tools that make life easier. But there’s something more here. Spiral isn’t just about automating tasks—it’s about empowering people to do the work that matters most to them, helping them unlock their potential in the same way I’ve been trying to unlock mine.

Beyond that, Spiral presents me with an opportunity I’ve been chasing for years: the freedom to mess around, follow my curiosity, and see what happens. It’s been an exercise in "fuck around and find out," but in the best way. What happens when we strip away the clutter and focus on the essentials? What does a product look like when it’s built not to impress investors but to genuinely help users? These are the kinds of questions that get me out of bed in the morning, and Spiral gives me the space to answer them.

The leap of faith

The questions still haunt me sometimes: What if Spiral doesn't take off? What if Every folds? What if I end up crawling back to a tech job, tail between my legs, confirming every fear I ever had?

But I knew that staying on my comfortable path would cost me something greater: the chance to build something I could truly call my own.

Of course, freedom has its price. A month into my time working on Spiral, the steady rhythm of VC-backed paychecks has been replaced with the unpredictability of bootstrapped startup life. My focus has expanded far beyond engineering—now I think about everything from finances to customer research to product strategy. That little voice that used to nag at me? Now it's my job to listen to it and follow where it leads.

Yet, amid the chaos, there's something else: joy. The joy of building, of talking to our users and learning why they love Spiral, of thinking about how to make it better for them and get it into more hands. I'm learning to embrace the uncertainty, not as a threat but as a blank canvas. With each challenge, I get to paint it my way.

Every builder has their origin story, but what comes after is the real test. For me, that story is still unfolding. Spiral isn't a success—yet. Every isn't a household name—yet. But I'm no longer trying to prove anything to anyone. The validation I once got through salaries and technical achievements has given way to simpler, more personal measures of success: Am I building something meaningful? Are we solving real problems for our users? Do I wake up excited to tackle the challenges ahead?

Every step of this journey—from jailbreaking iPods to leading engineering teams to launching Spiral—has been about curiosity and creation. I've learned that the leap into entrepreneurship isn't about knowing all the answers. It's about asking the right questions and having the courage to follow where they lead.

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Thanks to Katie Parrott for editorial support.

Danny Aziz is the general manager of Spiral. He has led engineering teams at startups across the U.S. and Europe and previously was the founding engineer of workplace app General Collaboration.

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