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Story's Mission and CEO's Journey from Byline to Radish
The CEO introduces Story as the world's IP blockchain with a programmable IP layer, and describes the team and funding. He recounts his earlier startups, Byline and Radish, which was acquired by Kakao.
- •Story is building a programmable intellectual property layer, with every round led by Andreessen Horowitz
- •Hundreds of teams are building on Story
- •Byline was a crowdfunded journalism platform, described as a pre-Substack
- •Radish, a mobile serialized fiction platform, was sold to Kakao for almost half a billion dollars
- •He sold because he was one small fish fighting zero-sum attention wars with bigger platforms
Why Start Story: The Founder's Prime Time
The CEO explains why he started Story a year after the Radish exit. An advisor told him that disruptive companies are started in your 20s or early 30s at the latest, so time was running out.
- •Radish was a good outcome but not the transformative company he wanted to build
- •He wanted to tackle a bigger problem at the intersection of content and technology
- •An advisor compared founding to being an athlete, citing Apple, Google, Nvidia and Meta founders' ages
- •He started Story one year after Radish was acquired
Quitting DeepMind for Blockchain and IP
Jason Zhao, 25, describes his path from Stanford AI research to being the youngest PM at DeepMind. He explains why he found the job unbearable and quit to work on blockchain, convinced that provable scarcity is the answer to AI's infinite content abundance.
- •He translated research like AlphaGo and AlphaZero into products at DeepMind
- •Blockchain research is open and egalitarian, while AI research needs concentrated compute, data and capital
- •The biggest businesses are consumer media and culture companies, not finance
- •AI creates infinite abundance, and only blockchain's provable scarcity can build incentives around content
- •He quit without knowing what Story would look like
How the Co-Founders Met and the Programmable IP Thesis
Both founders describe meeting in an accelerator and finding complementary skills. Their white paper set out the thesis that blockchains made money programmable and Story will make IP programmable.
- •Best Web3 founders are first philosophers and second technical visionaries
- •They met in the same accelerator and got coffee the next day
- •A 10-11 page white paper came out of three to four weeks of working together
- •Every piece of content would be registered on Story with an API for rights
- •The aim is a more vibrant, bottoms-up culture owned by creators and communities
IP Legos: The Investor's View on Composable Creativity
An investor who led three rounds explains the vision of data and IP as Lego bricks. Creators set licensing terms, others remix, and a blockchain tracks it all.
- •Creators control the economics and terms of use of their IP
- •Characters, stories, games and data can be recombined and forked like software
- •Blockchains track this immutably, and copyright law enforces the terms
- •In an AI world, creators lose their economic model as models train on their data without payment
Code Is Law: Embedding Licensing into IP and Making It Simple
The CEO argues that creators must assert ownership of their data by embedding licensing and royalty terms into the IP itself. This replaces hundreds of pages of legal docs with a few parameters. The goal is to hide the complexity, as Stripe does for payments.
- •Users and creators should declare ownership of their data
- •Terms like revenue share, geography and commercial use become simple parameters
- •Licensing happens permissionlessly, without intermediaries
- •Users shouldn't need to understand blockchain, law or even IP
- •Story takes inspiration from Stripe's abstraction of payments complexity
Product Demo: Creating and Licensing a Story
A demo shows a story-creation app built on Story Protocol. Users choose worlds such as Azuki, Bored Apes or Pudgy Penguins, import or AI-generate characters and locations, and add AI or uploaded voices. Everything is minted as an IP asset with licensing terms.
- •Users can pick worlds and import characters from them
- •AI can generate characters, locations and dialogue voices
- •Everything is minted as a Story Protocol IP asset
- •Creators can set terms, such as earning 50% commission on reuse
Builders on Story: Sekai and Mahojin
The team describes meeting Kaiser at its first hackathon. His app Sekai let people license IP for comics, and he went on to win the grand prize at ETHDenver. Mahojin is introduced as a remix AI layer that lets third-party apps give users easy gen AI image creation.
- •Kaiser met the team at the first hackathon and later won the grand prize at ETHDenver
- •Sekai is the tool he wished he had as a kid, built with AI, blockchain and Story
- •Mahojin is a remix AI layer for third-party app creators
- •A better dataset leads to better models and outputs, creating a flywheel
- •Web3 makes contracts among many stakeholders on one value chain possible
Magma and Story's Developer-Focused Go-to-Market
Magma's COO explains why the creative platform partnered with Story. Remixing with attribution and a visible IP graph benefit users. The team says its go-to-market is to solve problems builders couldn't otherwise solve and help them succeed.
- •Magma has over 2 million users and nearly 100,000 daily active users
- •Story gives original creators attribution and traces how ideas evolve in a graph
- •Story solves problems builders couldn't solve without it
- •Kaiser got office access, investor introductions and a seed round led by a16z
- •Strategy is developer- and entrepreneur-focused, not direct to creators
Lessons from Video Games: The Attention Monetization Dilemma
An investor explains that the internet likes to copy while traditional media restricts access. Video games resolved this by going free-to-play and selling virtual goods, and he argues that other media should adopt these concepts, which Story's tools enable.
- •The attention monetization dilemma: you want many viewers but must restrict access to earn
- •Games like Fortnite and League of Legends are free and upsell virtual goods
- •Games grew to about $180B while music stayed flat at about $25B
- •Modding communities show a long tradition of remixing
- •Story gives musicians, writers and artists the tools games pioneered
Stability AI's View and the Vision of an IP Legoland
Stability AI's VP of Biz Development describes the company's open source models and its ties to crypto, saying a decentralized protocol for creators will matter more. The CEO outlines a defensive and offensive vision of protecting IP while using generative AI to spark a digital renaissance.
- •Stability AI's Stable Diffusion is used by 5 million plus creators
- •Open source models are the company's core philosophy
- •Story's vision is defensive, protecting creators' IP and compensation, and also offensive, using generative AI
- •An IP Legoland combines creator IP with generative AI for an explosion of creativity
Founder Reflections: Gratitude and Urgency
The CEO reflects on past struggles with cash crunches and team issues. He feels grateful to work with top investors and a strong team, and says AI has made the problem more urgent and worth solving.
- •He struggled with cash crunches and team issues in his last startup
- •He is grateful to partner with a top team and investors like Andreessen Horowitz
- •AI makes the vision more relevant and urgent
- •He feels he has waited over a decade for this chance
