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.
