Diana Tan: Building Brief, Building Freedom
Diana Tan, Founder of Brief
Diana Tan’s entrepreneurial path began with a middle-school book assignment. Her teacher challenged her to read all 1,100 pages of Atlas Shrugged for an Ayn Rand essay contest. While she didn’t win, the experience changed her life. It introduced her to libertarian philosophy, to the power of individual freedom, and to the discipline of responsibility. Those ideas still shape her approach as a founder.
For Diana, capitalism matters because it aligns freedom with accountability. As she explains, no one grants you permission to start a company. You test your idea in the market and customers give the verdict. If the product creates value, it survives. If not, you adapt or close. That process keeps entrepreneurs focused, efficient, and grounded. In her view, capitalism is not about theory but about action, discipline, and fairness.
Capitalism as Founder Mode
Diana views entrepreneurship as capitalism in practice. Value has to be earned and risk and reward sit squarely on the founder’s shoulders. She embraces that pressure because it forces resilience and humility. Even competition, she argues, is motivation. Every day, someone can build a better product. That keeps her close to customers and focused on solving problems. Diana considers capitalism the most honest framework for building and improving.
The Origin of Brief
Her current venture, Brief, began with a personal story. Diana’s father ran a small shop and often signed documents he did not fully understand. Those documents carried real financial risks. Inspired by that problem, Diana started Brief as a contract redlining tool. The concept resonated with customers, but the business model didn’t stick. Small businesses and consumers simply didn’t sign enough contracts to sustain growth.
Listening to users led to a discovery into a deeper problem. Across industries, employees were wasting hours hunting for documents. On average, it took 3 tries and 20 minutes to locate a single document, thus over a year, adding up to 150 hours of lost productivity. In order to solve this issue, Diana and her team pivoted Brief into an AI-powered platform that organizes information across tools, making it instantly findable, and eliminating bottlenecks of fragmented systems.
Why Brief Matters
Diana argues that knowledge is one of the most valuable assets a company owns, yet it’s often buried, locked, or slowed by bureaucracy. Brief restores control, enabling teams to act immediately with accurate data. In competitive markets, she says, that difference can define who wins.
Lessons from the Journey
If there’s one lesson Diana emphasizes, it’s the importance of people. The wrong hires stall progress but the right ones accelerate it. She takes pride in watching colleagues flourish, whether co-founders who stayed or interns who moved onto companies like Microsoft. For her, Brief’s legacy will be measured in the entrepreneurial journeys it inspires.
The Road Ahead
Diana’s vision is ambitious: she wants Brief to become the invisible backbone of organizational knowledge. Starting with real estate and construction, the platform integrates with existing tools and builds a trusted system of record. Over time, she sees Brief evolving into the operating system of work itself.
The goal is simple but demanding: to give organizations the freedom to act at the speed of thought.
Want more stories like this?
Subscribe to the Capitalists for Capitalism magazine to get fresh perspectives, bold ideas, and real stories from the builders, investors, and rebels shaping the future of freedom.
