How This College Dropout Is Monetizing The AI Wave With Education Startup The Rundown

Forbes

At the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Rowan Cheung sat through hours of lectures but say  he retained nothing. He dropped out and turned to YouTube to learn technical skills like coding, design and marketing. When the AI boom hit, Cheung saw an opportunity to teach otHers who, like him, preferred learning outside the traditional classroom. In 2023, he founded The Rundown AI, a Vancouver-based media company that now has 2 million newsletter subscribers, 1.5 million followers across social media (including Cheung’s own accounts) and podcast interviews with tech titans including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. “Our goal was to take all this complex information and simplify it for the everyday person in five minutes,” he says. He has since expanded to online education, offering AI workshops via The Rundown University, which (for $1,000 a year) offers courses on topics such as “AI for Design” and “Agentic Development.” The bootstrapped startup booked $3 million in 2024 revenue and projects $7 million in 2025, coming from a diverse stream of subscriptions, AI workshops and deep-pocketed advertisers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon.  Read the full story on Forbes:   Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Things will increasingly get more complex,

00:03but striving for simple and doing that simple thing

00:05extremely well, it's something I advise everyone on.

00:17Rowan, thanks for joining us.

00:19Thank you, it's really, it's an honor.

00:20Can you tell me what The Rundown is focusing on now?

00:23Give me the rundown on The Rundown.

00:26Yeah, so we are an AI newsletter

00:28and across all of our newsletter properties,

00:31we have over two million subscribers

00:32at nearly 50% open rate into the future.

00:37And where we're really expanding now is edtech.

00:39So not just giving the news,

00:41but how do you keep up with AI

00:43and implement your business or work in five minutes a day?

00:46Love it, what is the mission in The Rundown right now?

00:49The mission is, well, it's funny, when we started,

00:52the mission was just make AI accessible,

00:54understandable for everyone

00:55because the speed was just too fast for people.

00:58So our goal was like, how can we take all this complex information

01:02and simplify it for the everyday person in five minutes?

01:05But it's kind of expanded now

01:06where we're doing a lot more education.

01:08So instead of just keeping people up to the news,

01:11it's like, hey, here's how do you keep up with AI,

01:13plus start using it in your business or work or whatever

01:17you find it useful for.

01:18How did you come up with the idea of The Rundown?

01:20Tell me about the evolution.

01:21Do you have a tech background?

01:23Do you have a media background?

01:24Maybe somewhere totally different?

01:26Yeah, it's been a long journey.

01:28It's totally different.

01:29So about three years ago, I was in school

01:33and I was in a lecture

01:36and a friend turned to me and asked a question.

01:38And I realized I don't remember anything from lectures.

01:41I could not kidding.

01:42I could go to lectures seven times and not remember a thing.

01:45So, yeah, I dropped out

01:47and decided to teach myself everything off YouTube.

01:49So I'm basically fully self-taught.

01:51I spent a year of YouTube University, YouTube University.

01:55I spent the year just jamming out like I when I learn,

01:59I like I go super obsessively into these rabbit holes.

02:02So I went all in on code for like four months and like built my own projects

02:06and actually got super hands on with it.

02:08Then I went to design, started learning Photoshop and the basic things.

02:12Never not an expert, but learn the basics of everything

02:15and then moved on to like marketing and content creation.

02:17And then when I went to content creation,

02:20that's actually the same time I stumbled across AI.

02:22So I stumbled across early AI tools before Chat2B existed.

02:26Dolly2 is one of them.

02:27So same time I was learning graphic design.

02:29I'm like, wait, genre of AI, this thing called genre of AI is insane.

02:33And it's like this exponential curve.

02:35So if I learn the basics of any skill through YouTube,

02:38then I can use AI to amplify all those skills in the next few years

02:42and I wouldn't be behind anymore because I was like a dropout.

02:44Right.

02:45So, yeah, I decided to do that.

02:47And when I was doing content creation, I just took my learnings from AI

02:53and decided, hey, let's just write about this.

02:55And I was like an anonymous Twitter profile at the time.

02:58It wasn't even my name.

02:59And they do good.

03:02I had like a thousand followers, you know, for a thousand followers.

03:05I think they got, you know, a few likes.

03:08And then, yeah, then the Chat2B moment happened.

03:11So it was really right time, right place.

03:12And then the first kind of post I wrote after the Chat2B moment went super viral.

03:18And it wasn't even Chat2B related.

03:20I was writing about a story that I found on how Korea is using AI to help with the elderly, like loneliness problem.

03:26Okay. Yeah.

03:27And it went super viral.

03:28I'm like, okay, this is cool.

03:30The Chat2B moment definitely helped with that.

03:32And that's when I decided, let's just do one every single day.

03:36And it's going to teach, the worst case scenario, it's going to teach me the skills of content.

03:40And it's going to help me, like force me to learn AI.

03:42And yeah, it really, instead of like dying down, it just ramped up.

03:48So it just started going like viral, viral, viral, viral.

03:50And it just like kept going more viral.

03:51Where were you posting?

03:52It was just random stories I was finding.

03:54Where were you?

03:55What platform?

03:56Twitter.

03:57Twitter.

03:58Okay.

03:59It's mostly Twitter.

04:00And then I tried posting across like Twitter, LinkedIn, and yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn.

04:02Threads didn't exist at the time.

04:04Okay.

04:05So where were you in school originally?

04:07I was in school at University of Victoria.

04:08It's like a small school in Canada.

04:11Okay.

04:12And then when you kind of quit to like teach yourself on YouTube, what were your friends and family

04:14saying with that move?

04:16To be honest, they're like pretty supportive.

04:20Okay.

04:21I think they all saw I wasn't passionate at all about school.

04:26I think when I go all in on a topic, I learn way better and I get super hands on with it

04:32and actually build things instead of just listening to a boring lecture I don't really care about.

04:36Yeah.

04:37When you were doing the posting early on with like a thousand followers, did you have another

04:41job or were you kind of like, I'm going to go all in on this and maybe a business or

04:45revenue would come from it or were you kind of lighting and doing something else?

04:49Yeah.

04:50So I was trying to become a professional swimmer.

04:52Okay.

04:53It's kind of random.

04:54No money there.

04:55But in college, I was also a computer swimmer.

04:57Okay.

04:58And I was working with a coach, but that's not a full-time job.

05:00There's no money.

05:01It's literally just a passion project.

05:02But yeah, I was living out of my mom's room.

05:06Okay.

05:07At the time.

05:08And yeah.

05:09Wow.

05:10Tell me the moment when the rundown went from like, okay, I'm just going to post what's

05:15interesting way to teach myself and learn the craft of marketing and content creation.

05:21When did it become a business?

05:22When I started it, it was just me and it was just a weekly newsletter.

05:28And at the end of my viral Twitter threads, I would just plug it in and be like, hey,

05:33read the more stories that I write about in the newsletter.

05:36And it was really bad.

05:37Like I go back to those posts and it's super cringe.

05:41But I started writing those stories every week and I used to take those posts and then

05:44turn them back into tweets.

05:45It was like this small flywheel I got started with really early on.

05:49And then I was lucky because it grew to like 250,000 subscribers organically.

05:55And that's off that Twitter viral organic growth.

05:59And then that basically allowed me to get some sponsors in at the time of undercharging

06:04like crazy.

06:05I didn't know how to charge, right?

06:06I would use, I didn't have a partnership team.

06:08So I'd use a Calendly link as a, as a, as a booking for someone to book a sponsorship,

06:13even though it wasn't like a meeting.

06:14It was really like hacky because I didn't even have time to like respond to emails.

06:19So that's how we got started, made a little bit of revenue, hired two people.

06:25So my head of partnerships and then also our lead writer, they're both still with us today.

06:32And yeah, I guess that's the moment where it turned into business.

06:35And then there's some other lucky moments along the way that allowed us to be pretty

06:40profitable right off the start.

06:41And then, yeah, we just took all that profit, pushed it back into growth and then just built

06:46out the flywheel of the newsletter that year.

06:47Wow.

06:48How big is your team now?

06:49What's the operation like?

06:50We're at 15.

06:5115.

06:52Okay.

06:5315 now.

06:54Yeah.

06:55So you went from like, you said a hacky Calendly invite to 15 people.

06:57That's wild.

06:58Yeah.

06:59At the time I thought I was a genius.

07:01Like the Calendly link, no one was really doing it.

07:04And it allowed me to actually create more content and it worked out well.

07:12But when we actually got a team going, it was like, okay, now I actually have a business.

07:16And it allowed me to really focus on the growth and the content side.

07:20And yeah, that was definitely an inflection point moment for us.

07:25And the team is 15 now because the newsletter team is actually like only like seven.

07:29Okay.

07:30The education side, it takes a lot more effort because we do live workshops, we do community

07:35stuff.

07:36We do content every day on the platform.

07:38We have developers building out our own custom platform or app eventually as well.

07:42So the education side of it is like almost like a new company because it's like two separate

07:47slack chats really.

07:49Let's talk about the education part.

07:50Okay.

07:51What you're kind of expanding into this.

07:54What is the goal of the education and what is the product right now?

07:59Yeah.

08:00So our mission is to upscale a billion people to help the world accelerate productivity and

08:06just boost global GDP.

08:07The way we think about it is our newsletter, our media team, we've gotten over a billion

08:11views already.

08:13And imagine we could help them work at least 10% faster with these AI tools.

08:17And I think 10% is like the low bar.

08:20But even if we help a billion people work 10% faster, what does that do for like global

08:24GDP?

08:25Like we can actually make a dent in this world by doing that.

08:28So that's like the high level vision.

08:32But currently the product is we do daily guides.

08:37So we think traditional courses right now aren't teaching AI properly.

08:42And the reason why is because the space just moves too fast.

08:45We've never seen any kind of technologically advanced technology ever move this fast.

08:51So what we do is we do these daily guides.

08:54So say GPT-5 launches today, tomorrow we'll have content on it.

09:01And the content will be sourced from our community.

09:04So we actually ask the community, how are people using these tools in their actual work?

09:08So we're getting real practical use cases.

09:11And then we reverse engineer it and we create a full guide, we add a video to it, we add

09:15GIFs.

09:16So it's super simple.

09:17And you could go into that guide and you could see how you use AI for writing or how

09:21you use GPT-5 for writing specifically.

09:24And it could be something really cool that helps you with your content that you never knew

09:27about.

09:28So we do those daily guides.

09:29And then every single week we also have a live workshop with our expert educators.

09:33We can go in, ask live hands-on workshops.

09:35So it's not like a course where you have no teacher.

09:38You actually have a teacher every single week.

09:40And then we also have this community where you can engage with other people who are actually

09:46building the tools, using the tools for their work, that sort of stuff.

09:49Build partnerships with them even.

09:51And then the last main aspect of it is perks.

09:54So we have a lot of partnerships through the newsletter with pretty much any big AI lab,

09:59big company you can think of.

10:00And now we're starting to bring big yearly perks to our members.

10:04So for example, if you wanted like Bolt or WindSurf, these are two big AI coding platforms.

10:11You can get a year free almost from just being a member for our platform.

10:16So that's where we're currently at.

10:17Cool.

10:18The vision is to bring this into an app.

10:20So we want to be on everyone's phone and we want it to be like five-minute daily AI

10:25skills, really.

10:26Because we think every single knowledge worker needs to learn these skills in one way,

10:28shape, or form.

10:29Some maybe more than others.

10:31But our goal is to basically get rid of that fear and complexity out of it and make it simple

10:36for everyone to understand.

10:38I love that crowdsourcing idea because I was going to ask, like we were talking, one of

10:42my colleagues was talking to a big AI person and the person's quote was basically, if anyone

10:47tells you they know what's happening in AI or like where it's going, they're just lying

10:51to you because they're just changing so fast.

10:53And I was going to ask, like, if you're doing education, how do you stay up?

10:56I don't want to stay up on the forefront of it all.

10:58But it sounds like you're in the trenches and you're crowdsourcing from folks who are

11:02doing it right now.

11:03Correct?

11:04Correct.

11:05The moat for us is really speed.

11:08The big course platforms, they're great.

11:10And they've been great for years.

11:13But I think for AI specifically, it just doesn't really work.

11:16It moves too fast.

11:17So a lot of these courses, they take three to six months for production.

11:20By the time they're out, there's new models, there's new tools, and they kind of need to

11:26update that course already and they can't.

11:28So they're essentially teaching this outdated information or they're stuck with teaching

11:31like this technical, non-practical stuff, which isn't really that useful to the everyday

11:36like knowledge worker.

11:37They don't need to learn the technical aspects of AI.

11:39They just want to know how can I actually use this in my work?

11:42And the tools are actually really simple to use.

11:44They're not that hard.

11:45It's just, they need to know what's possible.

11:47So that's really what we do.

11:48We try to inspire them with that.

11:49On the education side, when a new feature comes out and then like, boom, the next day

11:53you have a course on it, or at least not a course, but yeah, a rundown of it all.

11:57How does your team educate themselves on it quickly and become expert enough in a few

12:01hours to go out there and share it with the world?

12:04Yeah.

12:05I mean, my team is just, that's what they do full time.

12:08They love it.

12:09They're fully focused on getting the information out.

12:12So we've really developed a good workflow where as some of it, we are building ourselves.

12:17Some of it, we're actually taking for the community.

12:19And then we reverse engineer that and build out these guides that are really short to

12:25the point.

12:26It's like the rundown style where we don't add any filler, right?

12:29It's very practical.

12:30You can test it today.

12:32We'll actually even add templates that you can copy and paste, you know, not all tools have

12:36templates, but like, or like through ChatTubeT, we'll give you like the prompts that we actually

12:40use.

12:41You can copy and paste it.

12:42And yeah, we try to make it as simple as possible for the everyday user.

12:45When you say, when you, give me an example of when you reach out to the community for

12:49ideas and lessons, how does that function work?

12:53Yeah.

12:54Well, the most basic one is...

12:56And where's the community live?

12:57Are they just subscribers to you?

12:58There's two communities.

12:59Okay.

13:00So there's the one big community is obviously the newsletter.

13:05Okay.

13:06The AI newsletter itself has 1.4 million subscribers across all of our platforms.

13:10We have 2 million, but the AI specifically, and at the bottom of that newsletter is like,

13:15how are you using AI in your work or life?

13:17Submit here.

13:18We'll feature you.

13:20And a lot of our readers actually self-submit how they're using it constantly.

13:24And then when there's a big launch, our newsletter is very up to date.

13:27It's speed is really what we do as well.

13:30And we'll add at the top where like, Hey, this is a new tool.

13:33How are you using it?

13:34So we do it for new tools.

13:35And then we also have it every day for like, you know, everyday things.

13:39So that's one side of it.

13:40We're sourcing a lot there.

13:41The other side is from the actual university.

13:44And we have basically a live chat there.

13:45It's almost like a Slack chat, but it's built natively into our web app.

13:49And yeah, we'll get a lot of people talking in there.

13:51We'll get a lot of requests through there as well of like what people want content on specifically.

13:56Uh, and then, yeah, those are the, those are the two main things.

14:00And then the other thing is, um, knowing what tools people actually want to learn, because

14:07I think we get like stuck in this like tech nerd bubble.

14:10Like even my team, it's like we have subscriptions to every tool, but the average person does not.

14:17And they don't want to.

14:18Um, so when people join, we have these really complex onboarding surveys where we learn what

14:25tool they actually use and what they want to learn on.

14:28And based on that, we can reverse engineer it.

14:30And you know, there's some days where it's a little bit slower in the news.

14:33So then we take those answers and we're like, okay, where do people actually have subscriptions

14:37to?

14:38And where can we create more content on for them?

14:41How does the rundown make money both on the media side and on the education side?

14:45Yeah.

14:46So there's two core pillars.

14:47Um, the media side is through sponsorships in our daily newsletter.

14:50We work with pretty much any, any big brand you can think of like Microsoft, Meta, Google, pretty much everyone.

14:55Uh, and that works well.

14:57You can see in the newsletter, it's a, it's a daily sponsorship.

15:01And we've actually had lots of feedback from readers that they like, uh, the sponsorships

15:05because we try to keep the news based, try to keep the resource based.

15:08So you're grabbing some kind of resource from them.

15:10So that's the newsletter side of it.

15:12And the other side is the education.

15:14And that's just yearly annual memberships.

15:16Okay.

15:17Yeah.

15:18How much does that cost?

15:19Uh, right now it's $9.99 a year, but we're actively figuring out ways to make that-

15:22$9.99 a year?

15:23A thousand a year.

15:24A thousand a year.

15:25Okay.

15:26Yeah.

15:27Uh, so we're actively finding ways to create cheaper plans for, for more accessible people.

15:30Uh, and that's going to come with the mobile app, uh, as we do roll that out.

15:34Wow.

15:35As living in this AI world, tell me about the AI tools and AI tricks that you and your team

15:42use because you're putting out a ton of content, educationally, media wise in like a world where

15:49every six hours is something new.

15:50Like what are your favorite AI tools?

15:52Oh man, this is such a tough question because I don't know where to start.

15:55It's like, there's so many.

15:56Give me the one, the one, like if it went away tomorrow, you'd be like, I'm crushed.

16:01Well, I think our team, um, and I'm not a developer.

16:04Like I just said, I'm a, I'm a dropout who, uh, it's generalists and everything.

16:10Our team uses AI probably the most in coding, just building our platforms.

16:13But, uh, for me, myself personally, I give you one cool one that we've been exploring and

16:20it actually just started off as an experiment.

16:22Um, because I'm a writer like you, uh, I write a lot of content and all of the readers were

16:28like, I need to find a way to do video.

16:33And so I'm writing this content and doing interviews and I'm also, um, running this

16:39business.

16:39Yeah.

16:40So let's see, yo, so it's like, I'm working over 80 hours a week.

16:42There's no way I'm getting from a camera and like doing my makeup, doing my hair and

16:47doing the script every day, that sort of thing.

16:49So we're like, what if we are super open about this and we test an experiment of an AI avatar

16:55cloned to my face and voice?

16:57It's still my natural writing.

16:58We still have to do a lot of editing in between to make it really polished, right?

17:02Cause there's a difference between AI slop and really polished, well done, edited.

17:07Yeah.

17:07Like the content that's useful to people.

17:09Um, so we experimented with this and yeah, the, the Instagram accounts over 150,000 followers

17:14now, and it allows me to scale back and not record anything and allows my editor to basically

17:21take my writing, push that into the avatar, push that into another AI video or AI audio generation tool,

17:29push it together, add B-roll, create editing, um, engage with the community.

17:35That sort of stuff is really important to content.

17:38It's an AI avatar of you.

17:39It's an AI avatar of me.

17:40Does it look like you?

17:41Is it like, is it cartoony?

17:42It looks exactly like me.

17:42Wow.

17:43Okay.

17:43Yeah.

17:44So this is a way of like, you're literally being two places at once.

17:46It does.

17:46So as I'm here doing this interview, my, my Instagram account is still posting content.

17:53Wait, are you real?

17:53While I'm chatting.

17:54Are you real?

17:54I feel like I'm a, are you a hologram?

17:56I gotta make sure that-

17:57This version of me is real.

17:57Yes.

17:58Okay, cool.

17:58That is wild.

17:59Yeah.

18:01That's really a way to like scale your time.

18:03Yeah.

18:03Well, we, we didn't do short form video, right?

18:05And the readers were begging for it.

18:07And I'm like, I can't do this.

18:08I don't have time.

18:09And this is a way that allows us to do it.

18:12And it scales as I'm traveling because I travel so much.

18:17And it's good content.

18:18Good content is good content.

18:19And I, I want to be clear.

18:21It's not click to generate.

18:23I think there's a lot of slop and we're anti slop at the rundown.

18:27But these are high quality videos that take four hours to edit, right?

18:32We're using these tools.

18:33In fact, my editor actually said, if you were recording the video, it would be easier.

18:37Because he has to regenerate it multiple times to make it look right, to make it look natural,

18:41to get the voice hitting the right words with emphasis.

18:45Yes.

18:46Right.

18:46And it's, it takes a lot of clipping and stitching together right now.

18:50So it's, it's nowhere near click to generate.

18:52But it is a way that allows me to grow my other media properties while being on the road,

19:00while writing good content, while sourcing better stories, that sort of stuff.

19:03That's wild.

19:04What besides, you know, using your services for someone who needs, wants to be up to date on AI,

19:09what's the best way to kind of stay in the, in the now?

19:12Yeah.

19:12The best way outside of our services is, it sucks to say it, but Twitter and X really is,

19:19you got to be like permanently on Twitter and X.

19:20Okay.

19:21And that was part of our pull to the newsletter as well.

19:23Because being on Twitter or X for two hours a day, just like refreshing and being constantly

19:30updated with these like research breakthroughs.

19:32It's a lot, right?

19:34And a lot of people don't want to do that.

19:36So five minutes a day, you read your email and we do that for you.

19:39That was like the original pitch and the original value prop for the newsletter.

19:43So yeah, X is by far the best source because there's even sometimes

19:48breakthroughs or research papers that get launched on X and they don't get launched anywhere else.

19:52So X is the only place you'll see all of it.

19:54Oh, very cool.

19:55Is there a business philosophy that you follow that has helped you build and run your company?

20:00Hmm.

20:02One that I really love that changed my life and I didn't always run it this way,

20:07but one that's really changed the game as I, as I scale from like five to 15 employees,

20:12again, still very small, but making that jump was hard is striving for simple.

20:18I think with anything in life, but especially business, things will increasingly get more complex

20:25and just really trying to strive for the simplicity,

20:29whether that's in contracts, whether that's incentives for your employees,

20:34whether that's in your content or where, where else you're expanding your business is,

20:38there's so much you can do.

20:40But striving for simple and doing that simple thing extremely well has served me well.

20:45And I, I think it's, it's something I advise everyone on to do.

20:49Yeah.

20:50I love it.

20:50We'll keep it simple here.

20:51Rowan, thanks so much for joining us.

20:53This is great.

20:53Thanks, man.

20:54We'll see you next time.

21:21Bye-bye.

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