Apple was the 15th smartphone maker Spotify was the 10th music platform Google was the 21st search engine to enter the market Facebook was the 10th social network Netflix was the 7th streaming provider Uber was the 4th ride sharing service TikTok was the 8th short-video app Zoom was the 11th video-calling app Being first doesn't mean winning

Hot take: We think AI is going to make the best human creators 10x more valuable. Not less. Our best influencers are getting paid Tens of thousands per engagement because of this. Creator ad spend hit $37B in the US last year, growing 4x faster than the broader media industry. And I think we’re still massively underestimating where this goes. AI can already replicate someone's face, voice, writing style, editing style and eventually almost everything about the content itself. But watch an AI influencer for 30 seconds and you can still feel that something is off. It’s the tiny things. - The pause before someone says something. - A facial expression. - The way they emphasize a word. - An inside joke their audience has heard 100 times. - The way they respond when something unexpected happens. - The years of context between a creator and the people watching them. There are thousands of these little signals happening in every piece of content. That relationship is extremely hard to manufacture. And the data is already pointing in this direction. 95% of advertisers say they have concerns about using AI in creator marketing. The #1 concern is losing human connection. I think the next decade of advertising will be dominated by the few places where people still genuinely care who is on the other side of the screen: Creators. Live sports. Live experiences. Personal brands. Communities. There will probably be more AI generated content than human generated content very soon. I think that makes having millions of real humans who actually give a shit what you say one of the most valuable assets on the internet. Long creators. Long content. Long personal brands.

The biggest hack I’ve learned after generating $500M+ in sales through influencer marketing: Direct transactional ads almost never work. The best advertising is secondary or tertiary. When we work with hair care brands, we’ll have the influencer film their morning routine and the product just happens to be what they use. For a stock trading company, we’ll do a day in the life. They check their portfolio at some point, or use the company’s card when they grab lunch. For a food delivery company, it might be a “what I eat in a day” where they order dinner through the app. For a travel company, the content is about the trip. The product comes in when they book something, pay for something, or solve a problem while traveling. For an AI company, we’ll have someone show how they run their business or get through their workday. The AI product is just one of the tools sitting in the workflow. You can take this pretty far. The less the creator has to stop what they’re doing to explain the product, the better. People are extremely good at recognizing when the content they wanted to watch has stopped and the advertisement has started. The goal is to never create that moment.

There is an art in hiring unique people Companies hiring average marketers or average engineers will never make it Everyone you bring on before $100M ARR has to have something about them that makes them unspeakably cracked

NEVER DO 200$ INFLUENCER UGC DEALS When people say do UGC they mean Canvas UGC, NOT regular UGC. CANVAS UGC = Hiring microcreators to start a new account (canvas) just posting content for your app. Very cheap. They are never large influencers, they are almost always poor college students who want to make a quick buck. PLEASE STOP wasting money on entitled influencers who ask 4k per video package bro 😭😭 I have gotten atleast 10 dms from indie app builders asking about whether they should do such deals and NEVER do this its trash. Thank me later

best-ever founder lesson: go to the gym Stressed? Gym Tired? Gym Overwhelmed? Gym Nothing going your way? At least you’re jacked ;)

spoke with a young founder trying to raise this morning who told me: “the biggest reason we’re doing this is because we don’t want to work the 9-5 corporate grind anymore. we want our freedom and time back.” brother i have some catastrophically bad news for you lol if you are just starting a company and think raising money is the point where your life gets easier, you work less, and suddenly get all your freedom back, i have a bridge in agartha to sell you

I think it’s safe to say the video editing niche might be “Saturated”

One of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people: Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing. Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.

We rebuilt Premiere Pro from scratch for AI agents. Not a toy that generates clips. A real editor that watches footage, understands what happened, and makes cuts professional editors actually respect. So we gave it to editors behind Key & Peele, Beast Games, and George Janko. Their reactions are in the video. Examples below 🧵