July 29, 2026 · Meghan Tishy
For a decade, I watched from behind the scenes. Now I'm stepping out front.
About ten years ago, I watched my now-husband start his marketing and advertising agency.
I watched the late nights. The clients who refused to pay on time. The stress. And underneath all of it, the busywork — the follow-ups, the contracts, the copying and pasting, the same handful of tasks over and over that somehow swallowed entire days.
I helped where I could. But it always felt like a game we couldn't win. No matter how hard we worked, the busywork stayed a half-step ahead of us.
So after almost ten years of long nights and more lessons than I can count, we made a hard decision. We shut the agency down to get singularly focused on one thing: devouring busywork.
The moment it truly clicked for me wasn't in a meeting. It was at a friend's dinner table.
We were having dinner with KC and Melissa, who run a greenhouse company. Melissa mentioned that every time a new client sent over a request, it took her 15 to 40 hours just to review the contract. Fifteen to forty hours — before a single piece of real work even began.
I remember thinking: if this is happening to KC and Melissa, two of the most capable people I know, it's happening to businesses everywhere.
That's why we built Shiver.
We build custom AI agents that work like an extension of your team: think of a pack that runs around the clock, absorbs the repetitive work, and frees your people to do what they're actually there to do. No new hires. No new payroll. Your first agent live in 14 days.
We named it Shiver because a group of sharks is called a shiver, and with the technology we have today, there's no reason a business should be drowning in work a machine could be doing. We devour the busywork so you can get back to the thinking, the growing, and the reasons you started in the first place.
There's a second reason the name matters to me. Since I was a little girl, I've loved the ocean and dreamed of becoming a marine biologist who studied sharks. For whatever reason, they've always had a special place in my heart. So if I was going to build something, I wanted it to carry a reason bigger than myself... a way to keep the business world giving back to the waters I've loved my whole life.
A share of every engagement we take on goes toward protecting the ocean. We partner with conservation organizations because I believe advancing AI and protecting the planet can move in the same current.
Now, I know what a few of you are already thinking: You love the ocean, but you're building a company that runs on AI. Doesn't AI guzzle water?
It's a fair question, and because I actually care about the answer, I went and looked at the real numbers instead of the headlines.
It takes roughly a gallon of water to grow a single almond. A single avocado can take dozens of gallons. One hamburger? More than 400 gallons. A cotton t-shirt, around 700. We eat, wear, and buy these things every day without a second thought.
An individual AI prompt, by even the least generous estimate, is a tiny sliver of that... closer to a mouthful than a bathtub. The honest concern with AI and water was never the sip each of us takes; it's the scale of it, and where those data centers get built, especially in regions already stretched thin on water.
Which is exactly why giving back is built into how we operate, not bolted on after the fact. If we're going to lean on a shared resource, we're going to help protect it.
If I can be honest and a bit vulnerable with you, I've never run a company before.
For ten years, my work happened quietly and in the background. Stepping into the CEO seat at Shiver is the scariest and most exciting thing I've ever done, and I'm doing it with my eyes wide open about exactly how hard building something is, because I watched it up close for a decade.
If your team is drowning in busywork, I'd love to show you what it feels like to hand it off. Let's find the hours worth getting back.
— Meghan Tishy, CEO, Shiver