The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
The business you're building, the team you're building, the way you're operating is the very bleeding edge of how companies are trying to operate in this AI era.

**Dan Shipper** (0:07)
We have a head of AI operations. She's just constantly building prompts and building workflows so that I and everyone else on the team are just automating as much as possible.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:16)
What are some things that you believe about AI that most people don't?

**Dan Shipper** (0:19)
I hate the headlines that are like, entry-level jobs are taken away by AI. Whenever I see a kid with ChatGPT, I'm like, holy shit, they're gonna go so much faster than any other person that I've worked with. We have this guy, he made a year's worth of progress in two months because every time I sat down with him and told him, okay, here's how you tell a story, here's how you think about a headline, he recorded all of it, put it into a prompt, and he never made the same mistake twice.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:40)
There's this sense, we're getting to a place where you don't have to write any code, like you have a product team not writing code at all.

**Dan Shipper** (0:46)
No one is manually coding anymore. Organizations like ours, people who are playing at the edge, we're doing things that in three years, everybody else is gonna be doing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
Today, my guest is Dan Shipper. Dan is the co-founder and CEO of Avery, which is a company that is at the very bleeding edge of what is possible with AI. Their team of just 15 employees has built and shipped four different products, they publish a daily newsletter, and they have a consulting arm that helps companies adopt the latest AI best practices. On their product team, their engineers don't handwrite a single line of code and instead use an arsenal of agents who help them craft requirements and build their products. Their editorial arm uses AI to publish better work faster, and they even have a person whose entire job is to help every employee at the company become more efficient using the latest AI workflows. In our conversation, Dan shares a bunch of tactics that they use internally to increase the leverage of their own employees, his personal AI tool stack, the one predictor that he's found for whether a company will successfully find huge productivity gains through AI, how he's building his company in a really unique way, a bunch of predictions for where AI is going, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a bunch of amazing products for free for one year, including Superhuman, Linear, Notion, Perplexity, Bolt, Granola, and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Dan Shipper. This episode is brought to you by CodeRabbit, the AI code review platform transforming how engineering teams ship faster with AI without sacrificing code quality. Code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI copilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request. Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one-click fix suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST grep patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss. CodeRabbit also provides free AI code reviews directly in the IDE. It's available in VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 10 million PRs, installed on 1 million repositories, and is used by over 70,000 open-source projects. Get CodeRabbit for free for an entire year at coderabbit.ai, using code Lenny. That's coderabbit.ai. Today's episode is brought to you by DX. If you're an engineering leader or on a platform team, at some point your CEO will inevitably ask you for productivity metrics. But measuring engineering organizations is hard, and we can all agree that simple metrics like the number of PRs or commits doesn't tell the full story. That's where DX comes in. DX is an engineering intelligence solution designed by leading researchers, including those behind the Dora and Space frameworks. It combines quantitative data from developer tools with qualitative feedback from developers, to give you a complete view of engineering productivity and the factors affecting it. Learn why some of the world's most iconic companies like Etsy, Dropbox, Twilio, Versel, and Webflow rely on DX. Visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny.
Dan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Dan Shipper** (4:10)
Thank you for having me. I've obviously been a huge fan for a long time and so it's an honor to be here.