$2B Web3 Startup Building the Future of IP in the Age of AI | Team Story Documentary

1. 0:00 – 1:30

   Intro

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      So I'm 25, and after graduation, I was actually the youngest PM at DeepMind. It was a kind of a dream job, but almost unbearable, and I had to quit.

   2. SPSpeaker0:07

      Why would I pay an illustrator when I can just go to Midjourney and create an illustration? A lot of these creators will not have an economic model anymore.

   3. SPSpeaker0:14

      And it can only be solved by blockchain. I quit DeepMind because I just knew that I couldn't stay there anymore. This was the future, and that I couldn't wait.

   4. SPSpeaker0:20

      What needs to happen on a first principle level is for users and content creators to declare, "Don't fuck with my data." Hello, uh, this is SY. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Story. We're building the world's IP blockchain, and with the particular focus on building the programmable intellectual property layer. We're one of the fastest, uh, growing ecosystem IP media-related, uh, apps that actually leverage on generative AI. We were very fortunate enough to actually have raised great funding with a set of very, uh, supportive investors. The company got three rounds of funding, and every single round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. We have several hundreds of teams who are actually building on top of Story, with, uh, millions of total addressable users who are using the apps, uh, that are building on top of Story. That's been very exciting. What's been most encouraging is that we have an incredible team. I previously found a consumer app that sold to Kakao for half a billion dollars. We have Jason Zhao, who was the youngest PM at DeepMind. We have a very unique mix of talents between IP media content, AI, and Web3.

2. 1:30 – 10:22

   Two Young Founders

   1. SPSpeaker1:34

      I'm a serial entrepreneur that's been focused on solving problems at the intersection of technology and content for more than a decade. I went to Oxford, and I studied this degree called Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. And I thought the two biggest levers around kind of impacting society was one was actually going into politics. The second was actually going into, uh, media. So the first company that I built was a startup called Byline, which is a... Which was a crowdfunded journalism platform. The chief reason why I built the platform was that the advertising-driven model for news and journalism was getting collapsed, and all these independent journalists, content creators, were actually getting unemployed, and they cannot produce their quality journalism and investigative journalism to kind of report on, on the biggest issues of the time. And I wanted to create a platform where these journalists and reporters can directly pitch to readers about what they want to s- write about and, uh, match the demand of the readers and, uh, kind of the quality content. It was almost like a pre-Substack. And, you know, the company didn't scale in the way that I wanted to. Not many projects were getting funded. But I still kept my yearning and ambition for really fixing the business model around content, and I went kind of the opposite of journalism, which was a mobile serialized fiction platform. It was basically capitalizing on the fact that on the smartphone, people want snackable, bite-sized, episodic content with cliffhangers instead of reading a Kindle e-book. They want a serialized story that are gonna be released, uh, almost daily on your phone. It was not an easy journey. When I first started Byline, I was, like, 22, 23. And then when I started Radish, I was, like, 25. And I was lucky and fortunate enough to have actually found a inflection point in the business that's scaled up from 2018. And the startup ended up getting acquired by, um, Kakao for almost a half a billion dollars in 2020. And I left Kakao, and I, I started Story. The big reason why I ended up starting Story is I really felt that at the end of the day, I didn't tackle the mission that I really wanted to. For me, I had this massive ambition with Byline. The industry of journalism was getting collapsed, in- the industry of media was getting collapsed with all these big advertising revenue being taken away to big tech. I want to tackle this massive problem, and I kind of... I had to give up on it. So I had to focus on a mobile platform, mobile content platform, mobile fiction platform that's also focused on mobile romance, and it's, it's like, it's a serialized content. So I had to go very, very deep and narrow and to monopolize a niche and to actually work on that, you know, to, to take over that niche and try to expand down the line later, right? It was a good run, but one of the kind of chief reasons I ended up selling the company was that realizing the fact that I'm just kind of a, one of, one of many small fish in that content e- ecosystem. I was throwing bunch of money on marketing to big tech companies to get my content noticed and discovered. I was, uh, you know, spending a lot of money on content. I was kind of fighting this zero-sum war against other content platforms to get more attention. I, I just saw the, the business not scaling in a way that I wanted to, unless I kind of joined forces with other bigger companies that has a bigger content budget and marketing budget. It was, it was good success. All the shareholders won. It was a really good personal outcome, but I didn't build a transformative company and, like, game-changing company that I w- I've wanted to build. And what was really fortunate was that I had a good exit. I was still young. I have this now great network. Above all, I have this experience. While that fresh feeling was alive, I really want to tackle a bigger problem at the intersection of content technology. Uh, one of my advisors and investors said is that going from zero to one, especially making a very disruptive, transformative business, you wanna do that in your 20s or maybe at early 30s at the latest. It's almost like being an athlete. Apple, early 20. Google, early-mid-20s. You know, Nvidia, 30, 31. Meta, early 20s. So every single company that you think of that are trillion-dollar-plus with massive kind of market impact and a societal impact, they were being started by early mid-20-something, and at the latest, 30 or 31, right? When I sold my company, I was 30, and I felt like, "Okay, the time is running out." If you're gonna s- start a business anyway, maybe you should do it now because- That's your prime time. Yeah, so that's why I started Story one year after getting my last company Radish acquired by Kakao.

   2. SPSpeaker6:09

      So can I ask, how old are you?

   3. SPSpeaker6:12

      So I'm 25. When I was at Stanford, I actually spent almost all my time there in the AI department. I was doing AI research with PhDs, and after graduation I was actually, you know, the youngest PM at DeepMind. So I was just working there, and it was a kind of a dream job in many ways. So what I was doing was taking the abstract research that came out of projects like AlphaGo and AlphaZero, these game-playing reinforcement learning agents, and finding ways to translate this zero-to-one research into products that could actually commercialize, that could actually help people, rather than just being showcases. So I've always been obsessed with taking new knowledge and making it useful and, and being the, the sort of person that translates, you know, research into production, right? I, I'm not interested in just doing research because then it doesn't touch anyone. It was, it was a great role, but there was two reasons really that I, I found it, you know, almost unbearable and I had to quit, uh, even though it was initially my dream job. So number one was around 2020, '21, when I was at DeepMind, I started rereading the Bitcoin white paper, Ethereum white paper, and this was DeFi summer, started reading Uniswap white paper, Maker white paper, all these core DeFi protocols. And what struck me was that these are pieces of research published by anyone on the internet. It's not just five big companies that can do AI research. In, in blockchain it's very egalitarian. Anyone in the world can, can think about it because in AI you need economies of compute, of data, and of capital to do research, so only I at DeepMind or, you know, someone at OpenAI could do that. Whereas in blockchain, you have people all around the world publishing these white papers, and then within months they would implement them in smart contracts, and then months later there would be millions of dollars being transacted. People would try to fork it. They would try to build apps on top of it. They would even try to hack it, right? And so that's just a very open, evolutionary Darwinian ground where research was translating to production in a very, very fast and exciting way. So that was very exciting to me, and it was all happening in the public with this open source ethos. People were talking about DAOs. They were talking about experiments in governance. They were talking about, how can we redistribute token ownership more equally? How can we replace companies? How can we replace governments? There's a very different political philosophy there. You have libertarianism, you have socialism, you have capitalism, and many more philosophies interacting together. That was very exciting to me. But what was even more exciting was the fact that you look around and there's not many mainstream use cases, especially outside of finance. It's Bitcoin as an immutable store of value. It's stablecoins as instant global settlement with low fees. It's DeFi as a replacement to some of the centralized financial system. But blockchains can do so much more than money. That was my thesis. And to be honest, if you look at the biggest businesses in the world, it's not JP Morgan, it's, it's Facebook, it's Apple, it's Netflix. It's these consumer companies that create media and create culture and allow others to contribute and remix that culture, right? So ultimately that's what people spend their time doing. They're not on Charles Schwab for 10 hours a day managing their 401 [k] or their finances. They're on TikTok, they're on Netflix, they're on Facebook. And so to me, the idea of blockchain as a source of digital property rights was extremely exciting, and because I had worked in AI, I understood that AI was about to reshape creativity. AI was about to create infinite abundance of content, right? You and I from our bedrooms, we can create Hollywood-level content, share it with the entire world, and that's a great thing. But how do you actually create incentives for people to, to create content? How do you create a business model around that content and network effects around that content if everyone's able to produce, you know, hours and hours of content with a single prompt? That's gonna be a big problem, and it can only be solved by blockchain because blockchains are digital scarcity, provable scarcity, and AIs are infinite abundance, right? So I found that blockchains to secure intellectual property rights, blockchains as infrastructure for creativity, was almost obvious to me, but no one was doing it. And because no one was doing it, you're actually really limiting the, the scale and the impact of this technology because you're not able to reach consumers that don't care about DeFi, that don't care about finance, that they, they just want to own and create and remix and consume content. So that's kind of how the, uh, the vision for Story started. And to be completely honest, I quit DeepMind knowing not exactly what Story would look like. I quit DeepMind not knowing SY. I quit DeepMind because I just knew that I couldn't stay there anymore, right? Like, I just knew that this was the future, that I wanted to work on blockchain technologies, and that I couldn't wait. Even though DeepMind was a dream job, for me it was the easiest and the best decision I made to just quit, not even with a plan, but just trust that, you know, this vision and this interest would

3. 10:22 – 17:38

   The Story team

   1. SPSpeaker10:22

      lead to something great.

   2. SPSpeaker10:26

      So my co-founder, Jason Zhao, I met him two years ago. He was very special. He's a student of philosophy and computer science at Stanford. For me, the best crypto and Web3 blockchain entrepreneurs are first a philosopher, and second a technical visionary. If you look at Vitalik Buterin, I think, the founder of Ethereum, he's not just a computer scientist or t- technical visionary. His writing is incredibly thoughtful. He's a philosopher. He's a political thinker. He's an economic thinker. He's deeply thinking about the intersection of politics, philosophy, economics, governance, and, and technology all at the same time.

   3. SPSpeaker11:00

      So the way that I met SY, we were both in the same accelerator and we didn't e- know each other at the time. But then the next day we, we got coffee, we got to know each other, and it became very obvious that SY, he's a visionary and he's an experienced entrepreneur. He knows how to build a business and he knows all the real problems that people are facing in the world of entertainment, in the world of IP, in the world of media. I, on the other hand, had this very technical background, and so for us, we had a very similar vision. We wanted to use blockchains to solve these real problems in IP, but we had very, very complementary skill sets as well.

   4. SPSpeaker11:27

      I started working with him, uh, kind of casually first. Let's try our chemistry. Three to four weeks into, uh, kind of working together, he just came back with this, like, 10 or 11-page white paper. When I read the first page of his white paper, I sensed that he had even bigger ambition, and I was very encouraged because I really wanted to partner with someone who's ready to take on a very ambitious project.

   5. SPSpeaker11:50

      So the fundamental thesis in this white paper is what does the world look like and what do we have to do in order to make intellectual property fully programmable? The fundamental principle behind the white paper is that just like blockchains made money programmable, we will also, through Story, unlock an internet where creativity, where intellectual property, where ideas have property rights, and not just property rights, but that those property rights can be programmed so that every piece of content on the internet, whether it's on Netflix, whether it's on Twitter, whether it's on a decentralized application, it's registered on Story and has an API for rights that anyone, whether they're a developer, an individual, or a creator, can interact with. That's the vision, and it's really about the next era- of creativity. And we really do think that building this infrastructure will lead to a, a renaissance where instead of, you know, having the same movie, you know, four Avengers movies, five Spider-Man movies, seven Harry Potters, and then, then many more sequels. What we want is a future where culture is more vibrant, culture is more bottoms up, and it's more owned by the creators and their communities, right? And so without making IP programmable, that's not possible.

   6. SPSpeaker12:53

      [upbeat music] We've led three rounds of financing for Story Protocol, and the first round we led, it took about three weeks from the first time we met, came to a investment. So the big vision is that data and intellectual property become like Lego bricks. The idea would be someone could create a, let's say, like, a superhero or fantasy character, the new Harry Potter or something, character or a story, or it could be a game object, it could be a piece of data used in the al- algorithm, any kind of intellectual property. The vision would be that one person or a set of people can create some objects, and then someone else can come along, "I'll take your character, and I'll write a story about it." And then someone else comes along and creates a game about it, and it becomes like Lego bricks in the sense of you think about Lego bricks, you have one piece and one piece, and you recombine them in different ways. But each person that creates a brick has the control of setting the terms, saying, "If you want to use this, you've got to give me some percentage of any revenue you make," or whatever licensing terms. The, the person who creates the Lego brick is in charge of the economics, and they decide you can use this under these circumstances and under these, you know, payment arrangements. And then anyone else can come along, and assuming they comply with those things, and that's enforced through copyright law, they can reuse those things. And so the kind of beautiful idea here is that you create a really inclusive, participatory, creative ec- economy. And so anyone can come in and join, no matter how big or small you are. You don't need to be big, a big company to be able to license your data. You can just be a single provider. You have the artist, the creator has full control of the terms, so they're empowered. You get sort of what's beautiful about the internet. You get the combined creativity of all these people. Maybe one person's good at creating stories. One person's good at inventing characters. Someone else takes that and forks it the way you fork a software project and creates a different version of it. Maybe one person creates a comic. One person creates a video game. Maybe one person does it by hand, and someone else uses an AI system. And all of that stuff is allowed as long as the person creating that Lego brick decides it's allowed, and they can set those terms. And so that's what Story Protocol does is it lets you set the... create those objects, set the terms, track that on a blockchain. Blockchains are very good at tracking that in a immutable way. What's great about it is it, is it... If you, you look at these AI systems, they've basically sucked in all the data on the internet. So you think about Google, you know, you search for something, you still click through and go to these websites. And those websites make money on advertising and paywalls and other things. In an AI world, you're not going to need to go to the websites, okay? So we're very clearly, quickly entering a world where a lot of these creators will not have an economic model anymore, right? Why would I pay an illustrator when I can just go to Midjourney and create an illustration? And of course, Midjourney and all these services probably learned a lot of their AI from that data, but they're not paying them any money.

   7. SPSpeaker15:45

      So what needs to happen on a first principle level is for users and content creators to declare, "Don't fuck with my data. You know, I own this data. This is my sovereignty, my precious private property. This is my precious intellectual IP, intellectual property." It's a pro- It's your property rights. It's your sovereignty. You're saying that, but at the same time, what you're saying is, "Okay, here I'm embedding the information about, around my copyright. I'm embedding the terms around licensing. I'm embedding the terms around royalty sharing." You embed it into your IP in writable format. It's encoded. It's, uh... Now we're saying code is law. This code is law. That's getting embedded into the IP. You know, what would have taken hundreds of pages of legal docs, actually we abstract away, and we put that into a set of small number of parameters: revenue share, geography, commercial, non-commercial users. You actually set the parameter, ri- configure your parameters around the usage of your IP, and you program that into the IP and write, and you put it on the blockchain. Now, what would have taken hundreds of legal docs, an army of lawyers, you can do that permissionlessly, frictionlessly, without any intermediaries, and you can license an IP. You can interact with an IP. You can repurpose that IP.

   8. SPSpeaker17:02

      Ultimate goal for Story is that to the creator, to the developer, to anyone that interacts with the blockchain, they don't have to understand a single thing about how blockchain works. They don't have to understand a single thing about how law works. They might not even have to understand the concept of IP itself. And we really take a lot of inspiration from Stripe. You know, it's so simple to pay using Stripe. But behind that Stripe checkout widget is so much complex logic, so much complex regulatory and compliance activity that really abstracts away all of the complexities of the global payments and banking system. Similarly for Story, we've built very simple UI and developer tools so that if you're a Web2 developer or if you're a creator that doesn't understand anything

4. 17:38 – 23:57

   Builders using Story

   1. SPSpeaker17:38

      about technology, it just works.

   2. SPSpeaker17:43

      Okay, so should I just go through the demo? All right, yeah. So there's a story opening. There's a theme song here, and then on the right side you have more information about the story. You can expand it and then see more information here, like different characters, location, the world, and theme song. And here you can, you know, create the story. Right side, you can see more of, um, the story that you're creating real time. If you scroll down here, these are all the characters, the branch, and then the world. So you can choose between different worlds, like Azuki is the garden here, or if you have, like, Bored Apes or Pudgy Penguins, you can choose that too. And if you select a world, then you can import different characters from that world. And you can also create, uh, your character really easily with AI, create different locations, and then, and then here you can update dialogue here with AI, and that's all AI-generated voice. Or you can upload your own voice.

   3. SPSpeaker18:29

      Fuck these robots. I'm going to destroy them all.

   4. SPSpeaker18:31

      Uh, everything here is, like, minted as, like, a Story Protocol IP asset. And then once you create the story, then you can set licensing terms. You'll be able to say, "I want to earn 50% commission if somebody else uses my story."

   5. SPSpeaker18:43

      Or like uses a character. Yeah, this is, this is all the contracts that we have

   6. SPSpeaker18:47

      You know, we met Kaiser very early on in the company, uh, in our first ever hackathon. So we had an alpha release of the protocol. Kaiser was there because he was friends with one of our engineers. He was a Coinbase engineer, but on the side, you know, he's a big part of the Zuki community. He was building this sort of comic app where people could license in their IP in the form of NFTs a- and use it in comics, and allow other people to use their character in those comics as well. And this idea of IP Legos being composable and monetizable, it was just so aligned with what we're doing. So he won a prize at our first hackathon. And then, you know, a few months later, he went to ETHDenver and actually won the, the global prize there. So there's, I think, 300 projects at ETHDenver. Some of the best builders in the world are there, and he won the grand prize, right? So he's just an excellent engineer. He's building for himself. He's building for his childhood, basically. And he told me something very interesting, which is, "You know, I built Sekai because this is the tools that I would've wanted to have when I was a kid growing up and, and thinking about stories," but using AI and using blockchain and using Story to make it super easy for people to realize, you know, their, their almost childhood dreams about creating content.

   7. SPSpeaker19:50

      So Mahojin is a remix AI layer for builders, which third-party app creators can give their users instantly, easily create gen AI images. If you look at the world from, like, builder's perspective, there are some things that doesn't really make sense. For us this time it was gen AI is, like, very, very popular, but when I, when we try it, it doesn't seem it's consumer level. So to think about it, better dataset leads to better AI models, and better AI models leads to better generated AI outputs, and better AI outputs obviously leads to whatever, like, better use of that's content, and it can make a flywheel. To run that flywheel, uh, faster, the connection between dataset provider to the end consumer, the whole chain has to be connected seamlessly. If you think about the industry right now, the... All the model developers are developing their models for free. It makes a lot of business models that are impossible on Web2 actually possible on the Web3 because if you think about Story Protocol and us, when there's too many stakeholders and contributors on a single value chain, it's really hard to get into a contract of five or six or seven different contributors, but I think Web3 makes it possible. [gentle music]

   8. SPSpeaker21:19

      My name is Ollie Strong. I am based in London, and I am the COO of the American company Magma. Magma is a web-based creative platform. We offer the sophistication of professional-grade art tools with the fun and accessibility of a social media or gaming platform. Magma launched four years ago, and in that time, we've grown organically to a user base of in excess of 2 million. Uh, we've got over nearly 100,000 daily active users. There are a couple of reasons, uh, why we're motivated to partner with Story. Number one, we are very aligned in terms of how we see the future. We both believe in empowering creators, and that ultimately anyone can be a successful creator, and putting that ability in the hands of users around the world. So one feature that we've been developing and already seeing very organically is remixing. This is where artists sort of riff off other creators' skills and ideas and start to develop it. By using Story Protocol as the backend infrastructure, we give the original creator that authority and attribution that they deserve instead of artists just being able to come in, copy content, take it illegally or unfairly. By using Story, we can trace that IP, um, in a graph. We can show users how it's evolved over time, potentially where it's forked off in different directions, and ultimately, we can see this sort of ripple effect as a result of a single idea. So I think partnering with Story on that is really exciting because it, it gives real transparency to our users.

   9. SPSpeaker22:53

      We're solving a problem for them. And just like with Kaiser, just like with Mahojin, they're doing something that they wanted to do, but they couldn't do without Story, right? So that's the most important thing, is not the support we're giving them, but the fact that we're solving a problem that couldn't be solved otherwise. And then on top of that, of course, as a company, we really want to make sure that the builders succeed on Story. So in the example of Sekai with Kaiser, the CEO and founder, he has key access to our office. He comes in multiple times a week to use our office. We've introduced him to all of our best investors and got h- got him a seed rounds led by, you know, a16z, and it's almost like we're helping him incubate the project, right? So no other project cares as deeply, I think, about just making sure that these partners succeed because for us at, at Story, if our developers and our entrepreneurs that are using our software, they're not succeeding, then we're not succeeding, right? So instead of going, like, to the creators directly, we're saying, "Look, Kaiser, you know the customer that you're building for. We just wanna make sure that you're supported, that we're solving real problems for you, and that you will go and, and, and solve these problems for creators in turn," right? So that's kind of our go-to-market strategy. It's very real-world focused, and then it's also very developer

5. 23:57 – 31:21

   Future of Media

   1. SPSpeaker23:57

      focused, where we're, we're focused on entrepreneurs. [gentle music]

   2. SPSpeaker24:02

      The internet likes to copy. One way to think about the internet is a supercharged copying machine. So you go on Twitter and you create a meme and someone else copies the meme and they spread it. The internet likes to spread things. The traditional media business, uh, likes to restrict things. So you think about, you know, paywalls or Spotify, and generally what, you know, the media business does, right? Is they, is they go and they market something, and then they try to charge you to access it. So those two things are... There's some tension there. I call it the attention monetization dilemma. You... On the one hand, when you have a piece of media, you want as many people to see it as possible. On the other hand, in order to make money from it, you need to restrict something. You need to charge for something. I always found the video games industry to be particularly interesting because the video games industry has taken a different approach to this dilemma than every other form of media. So rewind back to the beginning of the internet. So the beginning of the internet, the video game industry, the way the video game industry worked is if you wanna play a game, you'd go to the store, you'd buy a box, and you get a video game, and you'd play it. And it was the same model as DVDs or movies. You go buy a movie, same way. The internet comes along, and you know, you fast-forward today, you know, you have streaming services and things like this, but for the most part, the music and movie business kind of works the same way. You go on iTunes, you pay whatever dollars to buy a movie, or you buy a bundle of movies through a streaming service. Same with music. The video game industry has evolved very differently. Most of the best video games today, like Fortnite as an example, or League of Legends They are free to play. And then what they do instead is they charge, they upsell you, they charge for virtual goods and other things. Why do they do this? They make it free to play because they realize that the benefits of making it free and letting it spread across the internet, people can copy it, they can stream it, they can create memes, they can create whatever they want. Those benefits make it so much more popular that we shouldn't charge for the game. We should let people take it, stream it, do whatever, and instead make it so popular, make it so ubiquitous that so many people will want to play it, they'll get so engaged in it that they'll end up buying better outfits and better dance moves and all the other things you buy in video games today. So video games, they have a radically different model than they did 30 years ago because they embraced the fact that the internet likes to remix and spread things. Now, look at the revenues of these industries. So the video game industry, beginning of the internet, they were roughly equal to the music business. I think it was around $25 billion a year. Then fast forward today, video game industry is something like $180 billion. And the music industry has basically stayed flat at $25 billion. And then if you look at places like Steam, the game store on the PC, you have this really interesting modding communities where people take these games and they remix them. League of Legends, that was, of course, actually originally a mod of World of Warcraft, right? So it was a user-created mod. Originally Dota was, and then League of Legends was taken from Dota. But so there's a long tradition, too, of kind of remixing in video games, of spreading things around, and how I've always felt that these concepts that the video game industry pioneered should proliferate beyond video games. So when I met SY, what was intriguing was that he had also thought a lot about these ideas and had come up with a lot of interesting solutions. And so it's like prepared mind. Like I had been thinking about this for a long time. And, you know, and I'd been looking for somebody who was thinking about that, too. And so a lot of what he's doing in this way you can think with Story Protocol is kind of providing a tool set to creators in other areas, so like musicians and writers and artists, to let them embrace these concepts that video games pioneered.

   3. SPSpeaker27:25

      Hi, my name is Scott Trowbridge. I'm the Vice President of Biz Development and also on the Board of Directors for Stability AI. Stability AI is a leading image generation and media generation AI company. So we started with pushing stable diffusion to market, which is, you know, the leading open source image generation tool used by 5 million plus creators globally. We now expanded to offering generative AI models across image, video, audio, 3D and other modalities and effectively now serving enterprise companies, creators, enabling generative AI media solutions. I'm quite intersected with crypto. So some of its earliest investors were Web3 crypto funds. And actually the first use of Stability and looking at, you know, machine learning and predictive modeling was actually looking at NFTs on Discord and looking at the attributes and characteristics of those and looking at like scoring them and effectively, you know, what is the value of these depending on what those attributes are. So that started there. The whole philosophy and the whole focus behind Stability is really focused on open source models. A decentralized protocol for the creator industry is going to become increasingly important.

   4. SPSpeaker28:42

      We have a pretty defensive vision, what I call defensive vision. The reason why I call it defensive is we are helping creators protect their IP in this age of AI and get the fair compensation. I would also play an offense. IP can't just sit and try to protect themselves. The IP needs to play offense and they should fully utilize the technology, this powerful technology that is generative AI. We are at a massive crossroad. Social media made everyone a creator, but now they are a studio because with their fingertips, they can make incredible content with just an idea, with just a prompt, you can do that, right? But at the same time, it's in a massively huge danger. And I think that for me, that is actually turning the internet into an IP Legoland. Give every creator amazing set of IP Legos. Imagine that millions of characters created by your fellow creators, millions of games that are created by other fellow creators while giving them fair compensation, attribution of provenance. And now you have this magic wand of generative AI, right? Combine these two things, we'll see an explosion of creativity. We'll see a digital renaissance. I, above all, feel extremely grateful because I've struggled for a long time for my last startup because I've had cash crunch issue. I've had team issues. I think I was a pretty immature entrepreneur. I fucked up on many things. So I struggled a lot in this kind of situation that I'm in with being able to partner with world's best team, the team members that I can only dream of and investors I can only dream of. You know, when I first came to Silicon Valley, when I first came to America, all these type of employees that I'm actually partnering with, they were untouchable. And also this kind of investors like Andreessen Horowitz, like the world's top tier investor, they're untouchable to me. And I'm really grateful that I can have this massive ambitious vision. You know, I've had this vision from the get-go, but AI is making it a lot more relevant, right? A lot more urgent, what we are building. And I feel like I've been waiting for this. Usually startups take eight to 10 or 12 years to actually start working. I know that because I've experienced it. I know how hard it is. I knew that was going to happen. I feel like I've been waiting for this for more than a decade, right? Now I have this chance and, you know, and this is a problem that I think needs urgent solving. And also it's not just about solving that problem. If we enable this primitive, we think we can actually open up a very empowering world for creators. That gets me going. That's very exciting because, you know, I struggled for a long time and now I'm finally getting the chance and life is long, right?

Episode duration: 31:30