I Have No 10-Year Plan.

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The other day I went to a female founders’ brunch hosted by Anthropic. It was a brilliant, inspiring collection of women, and at the end of it they handed out some company swag.

Most of it was simple but well done–the usual canvas tote, a nice coffee thermos, and a keychain. Everything sort of found its way usefully into my daily routine, except the keychain. It sat on our counter as I came and went to get my thrice-daily Spindrifts, and every time I looked at it, I read the motto: “Do the simple thing that works.”

Do the simple thing that works.

As it turns out, that’s one of Anthropic’s corporate values. And the more I stared at it, the more I was inspired.

Every time I ever interviewed a prospective employee for SheFi, I was asked: “What’s the 10 year plan for SheFi?” Too sheepish to tell anyone the real answer–there is no plan, I’m making it up day to day, I love you though–I would instead say something like “Onboard 4 billion women to frontier technology.”

Don’t get me wrong–that’s the mission–but it’s not the plan.

The plan is something closer to the Anthropic keychain: do the simple thing that works.

The reality is that everything makes sense in retrospect. You can connect all the dots from now going backward, but not going forward. Life is a bit like a branching tree where over time, the branches get shorn until you end up on a single path. The path you were always “supposed” to be on.

Tim Urban from Wait But Why has a fantastic visual showing this effect:

All futures are open to you. Until, well, they’re not.

So now you know the secret: there is no 10 year plan.

But I know what things get me closer to a future I’m excited about: testing new workshop formats, emailing potential partners with offers, experimenting on social media, reaching out to people for coffee, and building 2027 Inner Circle programming.

Through doing, I build momentum. To me, a plan is not clarity–momentum is.

So do the simple thing that works.

If your “simple thing that works” this week is finally getting set up with AI at work, join 270+ people at my free live AI workshop this Thursday, October 29–save your free spot here.

Frontier Tech Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

• Anthropic officially filed to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and the filing tells Wall Street that safety comes before short-term profits. Last week we covered the leaked numbers from Anthropic’s draft prospectus, including $16.3 billion in first-half revenue. Now the official S-1 filing is public, and the governance details are fascinating. Anthropic’s seven co-founders will keep 50.1% of the voting power through a special founder structure. The filing also explicitly warns investors that the company may slow down AI development on purpose for safety, even at a financial cost. Share pricing and an exact listing date haven’t been set yet.

• OpenAI and Anthropic say their latest AI models solved major open problems in math, computer science, and physics. On October 26, OpenAI shared three breakthroughs generated by its models across harmonic analysis, theoretical computer science, and quantum field theory. Anthropic also reported that one of its internal models independently reached the same computer science result ten days earlier. OpenAI handed the proofs over to outside professors to check the work and says it isn’t asking for academic credit. Independent mathematicians are still reviewing the proofs, and the computer science result is about theoretical limits rather than an everyday speedup. Still, watching AI move from summarizing existing knowledge to generating new math is a big shift.

• Major U.S. banks are blocking third-party AI agents after finding them acting inside customer bank accounts. Axios reports that JPMorgan, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have started restricting unvetted AI tools. In some cases, customers handed over their banking logins so an agent could help them, and the agent ended up taking actions the customer didn’t ask for. Chase now allows only approved, read-only access for outside tools. Posts on X warned about rogue agent swarms draining accounts, though the actual reporting describes unauthorized access rather than mass theft. The takeaway for all of us is simple: do not hand your raw bank login to an AI agent.

• Walmart is letting your AI agent shop for you with a spending limit, while Amazon is blocking outside agents altogether. Walmart launched Agent Profiles, which gives each AI assistant you authorize its own profile inside your Walmart account. You can see what the agent bought, set a budget cap, require your approval before checkout, and turn off its access whenever you want. The developer tools for connecting outside agents are still in an invite-only beta. I love seeing this right alongside the banking story, because it shows the right way to design for AI agents. Instead of handing over your main password, you give the agent a profile with clear guardrails.

• A wave of hacks hit Quest Diagnostics and thousands of websites, prompting Andrej Karpathy to share a personal digital hygiene checklist. Quest Diagnostics confirmed that hackers accessed personal and health data in the portal that half a million doctors use to order lab tests and check results. Quest restored the system on October 26, though it hasn’t said how many patients were affected. In the middle of a rough week for cybersecurity, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy published a practical guide to locking down your digital life. He recommends using a password manager, putting hardware security keys on your main accounts, freezing your credit, and removing your info from data brokers. If you’ve been putting off basic security updates, take this as your nudge.

• The Pentagon is requiring U.S. military bases to be able to run for 90 days without the civilian power grid. Under a readiness program called FORTRESS, domestic bases are running unannounced blackout drills and testing microgrids, battery storage, and small nuclear reactors. The military wants to make sure bases can keep operating if the commercial grid is hit by a cyberattack or strained by surging power demand from AI data centers. This 90-day rule is a military continuity requirement, not a prediction of an imminent civilian blackout. Still, it shows how seriously defense planners are taking the strain on our power grid.

• Ferring Pharmaceuticals agreed to buy women’s health biotech Gameto for up to $1.38 billion to make IVF faster and easier on the body. Gameto was co-founded by CEO Dina Turner, and its lead product, Fertilo, matures eggs outside the body using engineered ovarian support cells. That can cut hormone injections for IVF and egg freezing from about two weeks down to just a few days. The first baby conceived with Fertilo was born in December 2024, and this deal is one of the biggest femtech acquisitions ever. The $1.38 billion figure includes future milestones, and Fertilo is still in a Phase 3 U.S. trial expected to finish in 2027. I love seeing a massive exit for a female founder solving a real problem for women.

• For the first time, a patient received AI-designed viruses built to kill an antibiotic-resistant superbug. Researchers at Radical Numerics used their AI model to design custom phages, which are viruses that infect and destroy bacteria, for a patient with a dangerous E. coli infection. After the AI-designed viruses killed the bacteria in the lab, doctors gave them to the patient under compassionate-use rules when standard antibiotics failed. This is a single case, and the company hasn’t shared the patient’s outcome or peer-reviewed data yet. Even so, it’s a glimpse of how AI could help design targeted treatments when existing drugs stop working.

• Mastercard opened early access to a tool that lets AI agents pay for digital services using crypto’s x402 protocol. With Agent Pay for Machines, a business can give an AI agent a task and a budget. When the agent hits a paid service, it signs a payment voucher using x402, an open web payment standard started by Coinbase, and settles the bill over cards, bank rails, or stablecoins on Base. In Mastercard’s demo, an agent made nine payments to two vendors without needing accounts, API keys, or invoices. It’s still an early pilot, and most x402 transactions right now are tiny micropayments under a cent. I like this story because it’s crypto infrastructure doing something quiet and genuinely useful for the agent economy.

SheFi Global Events + Opportunities 🌎

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.

10/29 Virtual: AI Will Survive: Get Up to Speed and Ready to Start Using AI at Work

for a free, beginner-friendly, 90-minute live class to help you understand the tools available and get your workspace ready.

​What we'll cover:

• ​AI + LLMs: what they are and how they work

• ​The AI landscape: understanding the main tools and what they're useful for

• ​Setting up your workspace

• ​Context, instructions, and prompts: how to give AI what it needs to help you

• ​Getting connected: connecting AI to the apps you already use

• ​Maggie’s AI stack: the tools she uses in her own work

• ​Your first simple workflow: a live walkthrough of a beginner-friendly example

Register here: https://luma.com/9jo7q59f

Events 🌎

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

• 11/11 London: AWIC x DAS London Panel "Phantom Assets: Counterfeit Tokens, Collateral Risk and Digital Asset Resilience": RSVP here

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

• Volunteer x Web3Privacy Now: Sign up here

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