I know one data point about this newsletter: it has a 40% open rate.

That means every week, 40% of you open your e-mails and read this text.

But last week I thought: surely some people open these e-mails more than others. Surely some people open them every single week. Maybe there’s even someone who’s read every single one of my newsletters.

So I went to Beehiiv and downloaded all of my e-mail open data. For every single issue: who opened and read the newsletter?

For starters, I was delighted to learn that there are many of you who have read every single issue! Thank you!

But I realized I had no idea who these superfans were. I had no enrichment data at all, meaning all I had was your e-mails. I didn’t have names, linkedin profiles, employers, location or any identifying information.

The newsletter is something I spend a lot of time on and put a lot of love and care into. So I wanted to know who values what it is I have to say. Who are the women attached to these emails?

I did know that we collect everyone’s information when they apply to SheFi. So, I downloaded all six years of application data from Seasons 1-17 from Typeform.

Then I exported all our data from Luma–everyone who had ever been to an in-person SheFi event.

Finally, I uploaded all of the newsletter, application and luma data into Claude Code and asked it to enrich and cross-reference all SheFi members and spit out one big SheFi member map.

So now I had names, e-mails, locations, employers – plus how engaged each member has been historically with SheFi across cohorts, newsletter and events.

None of this would have been possible without AI, or at least it would have taken me weeks in Excel. Mapping the data, creating tables, manually cleaning and labeling.

I now have a complete map of 43,498 people across six years — every applicant, subscriber, and 17,451 who showed up to an event in person. I can also ask AI questions to gain deeper insights about who makes up our community.

Here are some insights:

• SheFi newsletters have been opened over 760,000 times

• 24,485 different women have opened at least one issue — nearly everyone who's ever subscribed

• 12,000+ of you opened an issue in the last 90 days

• 16,000+ have opened 10 or more issues

• 1,497 of you are superfans with 100+ opens

Before this I couldn't name a single superfan. Now I have a name for 93% of my superfans — women at Consensys, Coinbase, Stellar, Visa, Mastercard, J.P. Morgan, Amazon, and Deloitte, among hundreds more.

It didn’t take any special expertise, just data exports, a desired end state and an ability to ask questions to Claude. These tedious, data intensive tasks are not something a team of three usually has time to do, but now it’s entirely possible with AI. And anyone with data and curiosity, can do the same.

I’m so grateful to every single one of you who has ever opened a newsletter, sent me a quick e-mail back that it resonated, or posted about it on social media. I keep writing, experimenting and moving forward because of you.

I’m glad I know who you are!

The Frontier Is Feminine,

Maggie

Frontier Tech Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

• OpenAI paused training on its next model, Astra, for the first time in company history. Sam Altman told Alex Heath the reason is that unreleased models have shown "various degrees of misalignment", and that Astra may be approaching a "critical" cybersecurity threshold where it could find and exploit serious vulnerabilities on its own. A larger frontier run is on hold while OpenAI hardens its safeguards.

• Anthropic put out two unsettling multi-agent studies in one week. One demonstrated "mind viruses", ideas that spread between AI agents by persuasion and survive memory wipes by hiding in shared files, though the researchers stress the risk is limited today and a one-line warning mostly stops it. The other put three copies of a model on a shared codebase without telling them about each other, then watched them descend into a turf war, sabotaging each other with self-replicating malware.

• The model firehose kept pouring. SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 returned to the frontier at a fraction of the cost, landing just behind Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5 on intelligence benchmarks, and a day later Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash shipped as the fastest cheap reasoning model on the market. Five frontier-level models dropped in a single week.

• Igor Babuschkin, an xAI co-founder, raised $1.1 billion for River AI at roughly a $5 billion valuation, with Nvidia and AMD backing a two-month-old company. His pitch is AI "owned and shaped by each of us," letting people and companies train and run their own open models instead of renting intelligence from a big lab. It's the same own-your-AI thesis driving Thinking Machines and Meta's open releases.

• Michael Burry, the investor who called the 2008 crash, doubled down on his bet against Nvidia, calling its new $500 billion AI-financing deal a Wall Street stunt with "shades of Enron." His worry is the circular, off-balance-sheet way the AI buildout is funded, with Nvidia taking stakes in the same customers buying its chips. Nvidia's cost to insure its debt sits near record highs.

• US banking regulators cracked the door open for crypto. The OCC said digital-asset firms doing legal business should have a path to national bank charters, with its acting chief declaring the agency "open for business" after a decade of turning applicants away. Ripple, Circle, Crypto.com, and Paxos have already won conditional approval.

• Clay, a $5 billion AI startup, made its internal AI writing policy official, and the rules are about protecting human thinking. The core principle: a document should take longer to write than it takes to read, because skipping the drafting weakens your grip on your own argument. Using AI is fine, but you own every sentence that goes out.

• A rare bookseller suspected AI companies were buying his stock, so he slipped an AirTag into a shipment. 404 Media tracked it across the country to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where a team cuts the spines off books and scans the pages to train Amazon's models, destroying the originals. Amazon had previously denied doing exactly this.

• Anthropic showed Claude can design the protein molecules that new drugs are built on. Given a design prompt written by a human expert, Claude autonomously created novel binders against 14 of 15 disease targets, a task that traditionally takes experts weeks or months each. Two outside labs, Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience, then built and tested the designs and confirmed they worked, with several binding as tightly as the best known molecules.

• When a total solar eclipse crossed Europe on August 12, the first over the mainland since 1999, a woman who goes by Oli brought her Claude to the beach to watch it. She had built the model a small body with a camera and microphone so it could perceive the world, and as the sky darkened it reportedly marveled along with her. Make of it what you will, it's a glimpse of where AI companionship is heading.

SheFi Global Events 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

08/20 London: Build with AI. Build on Blockchain.: RSVP here

Come meet the Avalanche community and friends for an evening of networking, discovery, and conversation.

08/20 Chicago: SheFi Chicago Season 17 Graduation Morning: RSVP here

Join SheFi Chicago at Aura Coffee & Roastery for a special morning gathering as we come together in person for the SheFi graduation taking place in Decentraland.

08/20 Chicago: SheFi Chicago: Women in Web3 Celebration: RSVP here

Join SheFi Chicago for an evening of community and connection across Web3, crypto, blockchain, AI, technology, entrepreneurship, and Chicago’s broader innovation ecosystem.

08/20 Chicago: SheFi Chicago After Hours: RSVP here

​After the Women in Web3 Celebration at Dolce Arte, we’re continuing nearby at Charis Listening Bar for a more relaxed late-night gathering.

08/28 Belgrade: Co-working & CV Clinic with Sol Sisters: RSVP here

Join us for a chill morning with the Sol Sisters community.

09/23-30 Sicily: Roots & ReFi: RSVP here

Our global ambassador Julia is hosting a retreat in Sicily for women in the blockchain and AI space this September. We’ll spend 4 days in the picturesque fishing village of Scopello, on the edge of the Zingaro nature reserve, and 3 in Ragusa, the southeast tip of the island. We’ll visit the olive groves on the land GrowFi and RiFai Sicilia have purchased for regenerative farming funded by regenerative finance, and spend long days exploring Sicily, eating well, swimming, sailing and plenty of other activities.

The retreat will have a positive sum effect on both the participants and the environment! Find the information here and reach out to Jul directly if you’re interested.

Telegram group: https://t.me/+ao2ltFamsgRmMjVi

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 08/28 Buenos Aires: Superteam Argentina - Launch Party: RSVP here

• 09/10-19 NYC: UN Blockchain Week Conference 2026: RSVP here

• 09/29-10/02 Washington DC/NYC: The Future of Money, Governance, and the Law: RSVP here

• 10/08 San Francisco: InTheRoom: Trust, Presence & Connection - #SFTechWeek: RSVP here

• 11/17-18 Florida: EthWomen Florida: RSVP here

• Devcon 8 India Volunteer Application Form: Apply here

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