Kate Lee on Taste, Hiring, and Running Editorial at Every

Kate Lee has spent her career working with words—first as a literary agent, then in roles at Medium, WeWork, and Stripe. As Every’s editor in chief, she’s been the quiet force behind the newsletter for more than three years.

Lately, something has shifted in Kate’s work. After years of watching her colleague Dan Shipper evangelize AI from the front lines, Katie has started rewiring how she works and is integrating more and more AI tools into her workflow.

We had Kate on to talk about her career path from book deals to tech startups, what it really means to run a newsletter as a small team in the age of AI, and what she thinks the bottleneck to automating copyediting is. Plus: the story of pulling off reviews of two major model releases in 24 hours, and how she’s using her AI-powered browser to help her hire.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Timestamps
0:01 – Introduction and Kate's early career as a literary agent
4:45 – From book publishing to tech: Medium, WeWork, and Stripe Press
12:00 – How Kate joined Every and what made the role click
27:00 – What it's like to be a knowledge worker at the frontier of AI
31:00 – The “aha” moment: using AI to manage hundreds of applicants
36:24 – How Every's editorial team uses AI to enforce standards and train taste
45:06 – Publishing two reviews of major model releases on the same day
51:39 – What automating copy editing requires

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Proof: https://www.proofeditor.ai/