Subversive

Wealth building used to start at $0. For many young Americans, it now starts well below that, with the need to payoff significant student and/or credit card debt. Luis Andino saw this while working as a data scientist at LendingPoint, where he found that many Americans start their adult lives by taking out high interest personal loans to pay for college or buy their first car. In 2023, he left to build Ditch for what he calls the “-1 to 0” phase of wealth building. The first version of Ditch ...

“Sleep is a waste of time.” That was Leon Sasson’s mindset in college until he partnered with classmate Jeff Kahn to start researching sleep with Northwestern’s sports teams and saw what it did for performance. Other teams heard about the results, so Leon and Jeff cofounded Rise as a high-end business offering one-on-one sleep coaching to sports teams at thousands of dollars per athlete per year. After struggling to scale this model, Leon and Jeff pivoted Rise into a consumer app in 202...

“We weren’t giving the user a real reason to upgrade.” That’s how Ajay Mehta, cofounder and president of Tolan, describes the first version of the free tier for his company’s AI companion app. Freemium opened up the top of the funnel, but it resulted in an initial short-term hit to subscriber conversion and ARPU, which was particularly problematic given that every session a user spends with their Tolan results in non-trivial AI costs. So Ajay’s team spent a year running hundreds of A/B tests ...

DashPass has stayed at $9.99/month since its launch back in 2018, a choice the person who built it believes is exactly right: Jimmy Liu, the original creator of DashPass. He joined DoorDash in 2016 to run the San Francisco market, back when the company was losing $12 per delivery there, and spent his early months personally emailing every first-time customer to understand what wasn't working. Those conversations became the foundation for DashPass, and Jimmy used them to convince a skeptical l...

As AI-generated content floods the internet, how do you know what's still human? Weeks after ChatGPT's release, Edward Tian built the first version of GPTZero from a cafe in Toronto over New Year's, tweeted it out, and watched it go viral overnight. What started as his senior thesis project at Princeton became the first commercial AI detector, and three years later has grown into a full authenticity suite, covering AI detection, hallucination detection, and education tools used by milli...