A weekly newsletter on AI founders

One founder. One company. One deep dive.

Every Sunday we open one file on a founder building an AI company: who they are, what they’ve built, who has funded it and how it makes money. Told in full, with every source listed.

See a sample issue

The weekly file

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  • Weekly. One email, every Sunday.
  • Sourced. Every figure is traced to a source, listed at the end.
  • Independent. Coverage is never paid for. Our policy

Files so far: Sam Altman · Dario and Daniela Amodei · Winston Weinberg · Maarten (surname withheld)

How it works

  1. 01

    We pick one founder

    One AI founder and one company a week. Not a roundup, not a press release.

  2. 02

    We open the file

    The founder, the product, the funding and the business model, checked against sources.

  3. 03

    It lands on Sunday

    In your inbox as a PDF you can read, save or forward, and on this site.

Founder File #004 · Latest file

The man who laminated every card at his kitchen table

A Dutch founder with a day job, a mortgage and two kids ran his business on Google Forms for five years. Then he rebuilt it with Claude Code, took a month on a boat, and says the hard part was understanding the process first.

Read the file

The File

Founder
Maarten (surname withheld)
Company
Withheld at his request
Founded
2020
HQ
Netherlands
Sector
Road-traffic exemption admin for infrastructure repair firms
Funding
Undisclosed (started as an evenings-and-weekends side business)

See what you get

Every Sunday, one file. Here’s the first.

Each week we send one Founder File as a branded PDF you can read, save or forward. Founder File #001, on Sam Altman and OpenAI, runs to 7 pages: a fact box up front, the whole story in plain English, and every source listed at the end.

What’s inside

  1. The short version
  2. The founder
  3. The problem
  4. The product
  5. Five days in November
  6. The funding
  7. The business model
  8. What could go wrong
  9. What to watch
  10. Sources
Download the sample PDFRead it on the site

PDF · 7 pages · 84 KB

First page of Founder File #001 as a PDF: the headline “Sam Altman and the company he doesn't own”, “The File” fact box and the opening paragraphs. Opens the PDF in a new tab.

Previous files

All files

  • File #003 ·

    Winston Weinberg and the associate who cold-emailed Sam Altman

    A first-year lawyer and his roommate tested GPT-3 on a hundred Reddit questions and emailed the results to OpenAI. Four years later Harvey is valued at $15.5 billion, and the roommates still share the flat.

    Legal AIWinston Weinberg · Harvey

  • File #002 ·

    The Amodei siblings and the lab built on saying no

    A physicist and a literature graduate left OpenAI to build Anthropic. Five years on it is valued at $965 billion, locked in a fight with the Pentagon, and heading for a stock-market listing that could be the largest ever.

    Frontier AIDario and Daniela Amodei · Anthropic

  • File #001 ·

    Sam Altman and the company he doesn't own

    He runs the company behind ChatGPT on a salary of roughly $65,000 to $76,000, and holds no direct stake in a business last valued at $852 billion. This is how Sam Altman got there, and what could still go wrong.

    Frontier AISam Altman · OpenAI

The weekly file

One founder. One company. One deep dive.

Every week we open one file: the founder, the product, the funding and the business model behind a new AI company, told in full. Get it in your inbox.