NEWS:

The Rundown just took its first strategic investment from Electrify (behind brands like Veritasium, Fireship, and more)!

Through this partnership, we can scale significantly faster toward our mission of educating 1B people on AI.

The story below:

It's a huge honor to translate the fastest-moving industry of our time for millions of people every day. My job is awesome.

Our mission is to turn AI into a practical skill for 1 billion people.

This partnership is how we get there faster, and we're just getting started 🫡

Three years ago, I started by posting Twitter threads into the void (back when it was called Twitter)

I had no following, no co-founder, no investors, and was working 12+ hours a day making content, writing a daily newsletter, AND testing every new AI tool.

Sign up at http://therundown.ai and read more about the partnership here: https://www.electrify.video/news/electrify-partners-with-the-rundown

But I got VERY lucky early on in two ways:

1) My content took off, which fed organic growth into the newsletter

2) I brought on two amazing people: @joeycyliu to run partnerships and @Ghost_Z12 to write the daily newsletter

@rowancheung Congratulations, you deserve all your success. Extremely dependable and reliable news over the last few years.

Once the newsletter model worked, we expanded fast.

At the time, there were hundreds of other AI newsletters, so we focused on giving readers more value:

-More newsletters (Robotics and Tech) -YouTube interviews with A-list guests -A custom edTech platform for AI upskilling

@rowancheung congrats been following u since couple of yrs n u r truly an inspiration for many of us

@rowancheung 260K→2.6M in 3 yrs with 50%+ open rates—that's rare in media. The real differentiator isn't the A-list guests but the AI training vertical. That's where newsletters are heading: content as gateway, services as moat.

@rowancheung Content-as-a-service. Most creators stay at product level; you're already at platform. That's where the real SaaS multiples come from.

Three years later, the newsletter turned into a full ecosystem:

-2.6M active subscribers (50%+ open rates) -A-list interviews with guests like Zuck, Sama, and Satya -A social audience in the multi-millions -AI training for 63k+ professionals and companies

Crazy to think a simple daily email turned into a real business, now with real investors.

Incredibly grateful to my team for turning this vision into reality, to the millions of readers who trust us as their AI news and education source, and to our partners who support us!

@rowancheung Congrats brother!

@rowancheung The hybrid model is the future—creator autonomy paired with enterprise infrastructure. More media founders will seek this balance: independence + operational scale.

@rowancheung Congratulations, Rowan!

Incredible what you've done in such a short time.

@AndrewCurran_ Thanks Andrew, likewise. Pumped to be able to keep pushing the space forward

@JeremyNguyenPhD Thanks, Jeremy!

@rowancheung From zero to 591K followers in 3 years—that's why AI SaaS tools for creators are exploding. The workflow revolution is real.

@rowancheung AI education at scale is the right frontier — corporate training spend on AI skills grew 300% last year. The timing for this mission couldn't be better 🌍

@altryne Thanks Alex!