Back in 2023, right before we launched the fourth cohort of SheFi, I sat on my couch on a Sunday morning with a spreadsheet open. Four hundred names. Four hundred email addresses.

I copied the first name. Pasted it into an email. I copied the email address. Pasted it into the to box. Wrote the message. Hit send.

I did this 400 times in a row. It took me six hours. I did it again the next weekend, and the weekend after that, for an entire month. My logic was manual and stubborn: if I sent every single invite by hand from my personal account, we would bypass the promotions tab. We would land in their real inboxes.

Jon looked at me like I had completely lost my mind. "You're crazy," he said. "Why aren't you automating this?"

Because I am crazy.

But also because I wanted them to see the email. I wanted them to join SheFi. And I wanted them to know I, the founder, cared that they did.

Paul Graham has a famous essay called Do Things That Don't Scale. I love it because it names what founders know in their bones: at the beginning, the thing takes off one human at a time.

Airbnb's founders went door-to-door photographing apartments. Stripe's founders manually installed software on customers' laptops. Because the hand-built part was how they learned what mattered.

Fast forward to today. SheFi gets over 4,000 applications a cohort. I am the first person to tell the women in our community to experiment with AI, to find leverage, to push the boundaries of tech. I love automation. We use systems now because volume demands it.

But there's a line. You don't automate to disappear from your community. You automate the administrative noise so you have the energy to show up for the humans inside it. I will happily automate the sending infrastructure. I will never automate the soul.

There's a version of scaling where the founder gets further and further away from the people she started building for.

That may work for some things. It does not work for what I'm trying to build.

This is exactly how I'm approaching the launch of the Inner Circle.

We are starting with a curated group of 200 founding members. The foundation has to be laid by hand.

Every founding member in this first wave is going to get an email from me. From my inbox, not a marketing blast. What we're building is a room — the kind where someone can ask for legal help for her startup and a lawyer in the community says, "I'll DM you.

I'm going to be in it. Giving referrals, joining conversations, sharing what I'm learning in real time. The only way to set the culture for where this is going next is for me to touch the fabric myself on day one.

Automate what doesn't need you. But the part that does. Build that one by hand.

Personal is the point.

→ Apply to the Inner Circle

My Favorite AI Tool This Week 💡

Have you ever felt like during a long conversation with Claude, he forgets what you've been talking about, or the output just deteriorates the longer you go?

It's called compression. Claude does it to save space in your chat. The problem is he doesn't tell you what he's keeping and what he's throwing out, so the important thing you said twenty messages ago can quietly disappear and you'd never know.

Here's the move almost nobody makes. Just ask:

Once you know that, you work differently. You start a fresh chat for a new topic instead of letting one run forever. You restate what matters as the conversation gets long. You stop blaming yourself when the answers slip.

Zero setup. Just ask the question.

Crypto + AI Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

Crypto Roundup.

• Tokenized equities volume hit $3.57B on Monday — a new all-time high. Most trading happens on Binance and Hyperliquid. The SEC is working on an innovation exemption allowing traditional institutions to experiment with blockchain without full registration. The DTCC and NYSE are already building infrastructure for onchain equities.

• Polymarket launched prediction markets on private company valuations in partnership with Nasdaq Private Market. Early markets on OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks, Anduril, Neuralink, and SpaceX. Traders assigned 76% odds to OpenAI hitting $900B valuation by Dec 31, 2026 and 90% odds to Anthropic hitting $1T by the same date.

• Hyperliquid's HYPE token rallied 7% as Trade.xyz launched the first pre-IPO perpetual market for SpaceX on the DEX, valuing the company at $1.78T. The pre-IPO perp lets traders take long or short positions on SpaceX before any potential IPO.

AI Roundup.

• Martha Stewart co-founded Hint, an AI home-management app that raised $10M seed funding led by Slow Ventures. The app spots maintenance risks and calendars routine care before issues turn expensive. Launched after Easter brunch on her farm where she met her neighbor Kyle Rush, an AI engineer. Desktop and iOS launch this summer.

• Google launched Gemini Spark at I/O 2026 — a 24/7 AI agent that runs on cloud VMs and manages email, calendars, and workflows even when your devices are off. Users get a dedicated Gmail address to email Spark tasks. It executes across Gmail, Docs, Slides, and integrates with Canva, OpenTable, Instacart. Beta launches next week for Google AI Ultra subscribers. Gemini app now has 900M monthly users.

• Claude Mythos broke Apple's M5 security in 5 days for ~$35K in API costs. The same exploit class costs $5-10M on grey market. Palo Alto security firm Calif used Mythos Preview to build the first public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on M5, bypassing Memory Integrity Enforcement — Apple's $2B+ defense that took 5 years to build. Researchers delivered a 55-page report to Apple HQ in person. MIE worked as intended; Mythos discovered a new way to sidestep it by poisoning data the M5 chip ingested. Anthropic red team confirmed: this is not a compute resource issue. It's national defense.

The SheFi takeaway: You can now bet on private companies before they IPO, trade tokenized Apple stock 24/7 on a DEX, and short SpaceX on Hyperliquid. Martha Stewart's neighbor pitched her an AI home assistant at Easter brunch and raised $10M. Google wants you to email your AI like it's your assistant. And Mythos just proved a $35K AI can break what took Apple $2B and five years to build. The financial markets are tokenizing, the AI agents are shipping, and the billion-dollar defenses don't hold. Everything that was gated is now tradable, accessible, or breakable.

Exponential Episode 31: Growing SheFi 🎙️

I did a podcast to talk about trends in crypto, including institutional and privacy use cases as well as my big prediction for 10 years out.

🎧 Watch the full episode here.

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.

05/20 Virtual: SheFi Brasil: Tecnologia, Educação e Impacto Social: RSVP here
SheFi Brasil is thrilled to be hosting an online meetup in partnership with TokenNation 2026. Women who attend will have the chance to receive free tickets to TokenNation in São Paulo on June 1-2.

Crypto Events 🌎

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

• 05/20 Lisbon: Cursor Lisbon: Demo Meetup: RSVP here

• 05/21 Lisbon: Lisbon Ethereum Community Hub Launch: RSVP here

• 05/22 Los Banos: Bitcoin Pizza Day: POOL PARTY: RSVP here

• 05/27 NYC: Light x Lovable x McKinsey QB Finance Hackathon: RSVP here

• 05/28 Boston: InTheRoom: Founders, Builders & Connectors - #BosTechWeek: RSVP here

• 06/04 NYC: InTheRoom: From Match to Meeting- #NYTechWeek: RSVP here

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

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