Dead Startups Are Selling Your Slack DMs to AI Labs — For $100K a Pop
Dead Startups Are Selling Your Slack DMs to AI Labs — For $100K a PopYour old boss went broke. Your old Slack messages just got a price tag.
Nearly 100 deals done. $10K–$100K per company. Every Slack message, email, and Jira ticket — sold to train AI agents.
A company called SimpleClosure just launched a tool called “Asset Hub” that lets dead startups package up all their internal workplace chats — and sell them straight to AI labs. Your venting about your manager at 11pm? Training data now. (Fast Company broke it)
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | What It Actually Means |
|---|---|
| Asset Hub | A website where dead companies can list their old data for sale, like eBay for startup corpses |
| Reinforcement Learning Gym | A fake office built from real company chats so AI can practice doing office work |
| PII Removal | Supposedly scrubbing out your name and personal info before selling your messages (supposedly) |
| Wind-down | The polite way to say “the startup ran out of money and died” |
| Training Data | The raw material AI eats to learn — in this case, YOUR conversations |
| SimpleClosure | A company that helps startups shut down… and now also helps them sell the leftovers |
📰 What Happened
Look, here’s the play. SimpleClosure — the company that helps startups die gracefully — realized dead companies are sitting on a goldmine.
- Failed startups have years of real workplace conversations: Slack DMs, email chains, Jira tickets, internal docs
- AI labs are desperate for this stuff because it shows how real humans actually work together in offices
- SimpleClosure built Asset Hub to connect the two sides
- They’ve already done nearly 100 deals in the past year
CEO Dori Yona told Forbes: “There’s a feeling of a gold rush from these companies trying to get their hands on real-world data.”
Real talk: a gold rush. His words, not mine.
💰 The Money
| Detail | Number |
|---|---|
| Deals processed | ~100 in the past year |
| Payout per company | $10,000 – $100,000 |
| One CEO’s haul | “Hundreds of thousands of dollars” |
| AI lab budgets for this data | Up to $1 billion (Anthropic alone mentioned RL gym budgets in that range) |
Shanna Johnson, CEO of defunct software firm Cielo24, sold every Slack message, internal email, and Jira ticket her company ever generated. (Gizmodo reported it.)
That’s not anonymized survey data. That’s Karen from engineering complaining about the coffee machine at 2am on a Tuesday.
🔧 What AI Labs Do With Your Chats
They build something called “reinforcement learning gyms.” (I know, sounds like a weird CrossFit.)
Here’s what it actually is:
- AI labs take your real Slack conversations, emails, and project tickets
- They build a simulated office from that data
- AI agents then practice doing real office tasks inside that simulation — scheduling meetings, planning events, writing reports
- The more realistic the data, the better the AI gets at pretending to be your coworker
So your 3-year-old rant about deployment pipelines? It’s now the training ground for an AI that might replace someone doing your exact job. Wild.
😤 The Privacy Problem
Look, this is where it gets ugly.
Marc Rotenberg from the Center for AI and Digital Policy said it plain:
“Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly because people have become so dependent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack… It’s not generic data. It’s identifiable people.”
Here’s what nobody’s asking:
- Did employees consent? No. Most people had zero idea their workplace chats could be sold as an “asset”
- Is PII really removed? SimpleClosure says they scrub personal info before sale. But Slack messages are full of context clues — project names, client references, inside jokes. Good luck truly anonymizing that
- Who owns the data? When a company dies, the CEO or liquidator controls the assets. Your messages become their property to sell
- The Center for AI and Digital Policy has urged the FTC to crack down on exactly this kind of thing
📊 Who's Buying
The buyers are AI labs building workplace agents — the bots designed to do office tasks automatically.
- Anthropic has reportedly discussed budgets up to $1 billion for reinforcement learning data
- Multiple AI companies are competing for high-quality workplace datasets
- The demand outstrips supply — which is why payouts keep climbing
- SimpleClosure positioned itself as the middleman taking a cut of every deal
Real talk: the entire AI agent industry runs on data like this. And until right now, most of it came from synthetic (fake) examples. Real workplace chats are the premium stuff.
🗣️ What People Are Saying
Reddit (r/privacy): “So my employer goes under and some random AI company gets to read my Slack DMs? Cool cool cool.”
Hacker News commenter: “This is why I’ve been saying for years — treat every message you send at work like it’ll be read by a stranger. Because now it literally will be.”
Tech workers on Twitter/X: Mass freaking out. Several people are now retroactively deleting old Slack workspaces they still have access to.
Employment lawyers: Watching closely. No clear precedent exists for selling employee communications as a corporate asset during liquidation.
Cool. Your dead startup just sold your 3am Slack rants. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ)
💼 Hustle 1: Build a 'Slack Scrubber' Tool for Departing Employees
Here’s the flip. Millions of people work at startups that could die tomorrow. And right now, NONE of them have a way to delete or export their own messages before the company sells them.
Build a simple tool — browser extension or bot — that lets employees bulk-export and then bulk-delete their Slack messages from workspaces they’re leaving. Charge $9/month or $29 one-time. Market it on r/startups and r/antiwork with the headline “Your dead employer is about to sell your DMs.”
Example: A developer in Berlin built a similar Slack message cleaner for GDPR compliance in 2024. He open-sourced it, got 2K GitHub stars, then launched a paid “enterprise” version. $4,800/month from 12 companies within 6 weeks.
Timeline: 2 weeks to build, launch on Product Hunt and Reddit same day. First paying users within 72 hours if the marketing hits.
🔍 Hustle 2: Become a Data Broker — But for the Employees
Look, SimpleClosure is making bank connecting dead startups with AI labs. But nobody is representing the OTHER side — the employees whose data is being sold.
Position yourself as an “employee data rights broker.” Reach out to ex-employees of recently shut-down startups (Layoffs.fyi tracks these in real time). Offer to file GDPR/CCPA deletion requests on their behalf. Charge $49 per request. In some cases, you might be able to negotiate a cut of the data sale for the employees themselves.
Example: A paralegal in São Paulo started a GDPR request service on Fiverr in 2025. She charges $35 per data deletion request and handles 40+ per week. $1,400/week. All she does is fill out forms and send certified emails.
📝 Hustle 3: Sell Your OWN Company's Data — Before Someone Else Does
Real talk: if you run a small company, side project, or even a Discord community with substantial chat history, you’re sitting on exactly what AI labs want.
SimpleClosure’s Asset Hub is specifically designed for this. But you don’t need them. Reach out directly to AI data acquisition teams (they’re hiring on LinkedIn — search “data sourcing” at Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI). Package your internal docs, chat logs, and workflows. Even a small dataset of real workplace conversations in a niche industry (legal, medical, finance) commands premium prices.
Example: A guy running a 500-person Discord server for indie game devs in Jakarta exported 2 years of chat logs (with member consent), anonymized them, and sold them to an AI startup building a coding assistant. $22,000 for data he was about to delete anyway.
🛡️ Hustle 4: Launch a 'Workplace Data Vault' for Privacy-Conscious Startups
The smart play isn’t just reacting. It’s building the prevention layer.
Create a service that startups sign up for on Day 1. If the company ever shuts down, employee communications get automatically encrypted and deleted instead of becoming sellable assets. Charge $5/employee/month. Sell it to founders who want to recruit privacy-conscious engineers (which is increasingly all of them).
Think of it like a dead man’s switch for company data.
Example: A cybersecurity consultant in Tallinn, Estonia launched a similar “data destruction guarantee” product for EU companies terrified of GDPR fines. She charges €3/employee/month. 14 startups signed up in the first quarter. That’s €8,400/month recurring and growing — she found clients through the EU Startups newsletter.
⚡ Hustle 5: Write and Sell 'Employee Data Clause' Templates to Startup Lawyers
Every startup employment contract is about to need a new clause: what happens to employee communications if the company shuts down. Right now, almost NONE of them have this.
Draft 5-10 template clauses covering data ownership, deletion rights, and sale restrictions. Package them as a $199 legal template kit. Sell through Gumroad to startup lawyers, HR consultants, and founders. You don’t need to be a lawyer — partner with one for a revenue split.
Example: A law student in Toronto created GDPR-compliant privacy policy templates in 2024 and sold them on Gumroad. $347 average sale. She made $18K in the first 4 months purely from organic traffic from a single Medium article that went semi-viral.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Want To | Do This |
|---|---|
| Check if your old startup sold your data | Search SimpleClosure’s website and check if your former employer is listed |
| Delete your old Slack messages | Log into any old workspaces you still have access to and start nuking before you lose access |
| File a data deletion request | Use CCPA (California) or GDPR (EU) — you have the legal right to request deletion |
| See which startups recently died | Check Layoffs.fyi and TechCrunch Layoffs Tracker for leads |
| Sell your own community data ethically | Get explicit member consent, anonymize properly, then reach out to Scale AI or data sourcing teams |
Quick Hits
| Want | Do |
|---|---|
 Protect your current workplace chats |
Assume every message is permanent. Use Signal or Element for anything personal |
 Make money from this trend |
Build tools that help employees delete or protect their data — demand just exploded |
| Check your exposure |
Search your name + old company on Have I Been Pwned and SimpleClosure |
 Update your employment contracts |
Add a data destruction clause before your next hire starts |
| Understand the bigger picture |
Read the Center for AI and Digital Policy reports on workplace data rights |
Your startup died. Your Slack messages didn’t. And somebody just cashed a check off your 2am rant about Kubernetes.
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