She had no CS degree. She used AI to teach herself to build.
Anastasiia Shumilo had no computer science background when she decided to build software. She taught herself Flutter and Xcode using AI, founded Shumi Technologies, and is now developing Draw Flow — an AI-powered construction technology platform that automates drawing analysis, quantity takeoffs, and cost estimation for construction professionals.
This week
The most important act of a founder this decade will not be building. It will be deciding what not to build. Restraint is the unwritten chapter of every great company — and the next four years will reward it more than any cycle in memory.
The feed
Oura Pauses IPO: Market Shifts Demand Profit Over Growth Founders, Take Note
Oura, a profitable smart ring company, paused its IPO, highlighting a market shift where investors now demand immediate profitability and free cash flow over high growth multiples.
Anthropic IPO: Pioneering AI Existential Risk Disclosure A New Standard for AI Safety
Anthropic's IPO exploration pioneers formal disclosure of AI's existential risks, establishing a new standard for transparency and responsible scaling for the entire industry.
Bootstrapped Entrepreneur Startups That Said No to VC — and Won Anyway
Calendly, Mailchimp, Basecamp, and Spanx built billion-dollar businesses without a term sheet in sight. Here's the playbook they share — and the VC trap they all avoided.
How Top Entrepreneurs Got Their First 1,000 Customers — Playbooks That Actually Worked
Airbnb's Craigslist hack. Dropbox's waitlist video. Stripe's cold calls. The real, unglamorous tactics behind the launches you've only ever heard the sanitized version of.
AI Entrepreneurs Building Million-Dollar Businesses With No Employees in 2026
The new founder operates a team of agents, not a team of humans. Inside the companies pulling in seven and eight figures with headcount of one — and the five AI tools making it possible.
Founders desk
Plate 01Anastasiia Shumilo
Anastasiia Shumilo is a Ukrainian-born technology founder who started over in Canada and built her career in technology from the ground up. She founded Shumi Technologies, an international B2B softwar
Plate 02Cover · Issue 47Tony Loeb
The man who decided hospitality needed just ten minutes — co-founder of 10minutes.news, the quiet media engine now read by 220,000 hoteliers across Europe and North America.
Plate 03Kateryna Eisen
Founded Momploy to solve a problem she lived on both sides — as a small business owner who struggled to hire part-time, and as a mother who needed flexible work. Now building Toronto GTA's local trust layer for skilled parents and the businesses that need them.
Plate 04Dylan Field
Dropped out of UPenn on a Thiel Fellowship, spent six years building a design tool that ran in the browser, said no to Adobe's $20B all-cash offer when the regulators killed it, and IPO'd anyway.
By desk
Read with the people who build the next decade.
Wednesdays at 7am Pacific. One letter, four minutes, and the five stories that actually mattered — chosen by the desk, not by an algorithm.
- ✓ The week's five most important reads, briefly
- ✓ One short interview, often unpublished elsewhere
- ✓ A memo from the editor — three minutes, one idea
- ✓ No ads, no roundups, no growth tactics