Chang Chen

Founder at @Hockey_Stick_G. We help startups and scale-ups unlock rapid growth. 3 successful exits. $1B+ in revenue generated.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@MaksimXBT @frydwia Curious to see how it goes

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

Remember when Series A meant "we have product-market fit and need to scale"?

Now it means "we have a category-defining wedge, eight logos paying real money, and a CFO already on the cap table."

The bar moved up an entire round. Viktor cleared it cold.

Congrats! @frydwia and the team!

[Fryd Wiatrowski @frydwia]

Today, we’re announcing Viktor’s $75M Series A, led by @Accel .

@viktor__com was supposed to be a small experiment.

It became the AI coworker 10x'ing real businesses.

$15M in annualized revenue run rate. In 10 weeks.

– Small companies saving millions of dollars
– Sourcing hundreds of thousands in new revenue in their first 30 days
– Whole teams getting half their week back
– Companies running 40% leaner without cutting output

Viktor is not another AI tool.

It’s the first true AI employee.

The vision that has been with us since 2023 when we started the company has finally been shipped.

Back then, it was just the two of us, with a very small but dedicated team, iterating for years. Failing multiple times.

Showing products that users didn't even want to test!

But we never gave up.

Our decisions were often wrong. Certainly more often than not! We kept trying.

Now we’ve shipped something people love.

Worth every sleepless night. Every sacrifice.

The best employees don’t need to be told what to do.

Neither does Viktor.

Grateful to @Accel, our team, our earliest users, and everyone who believed this category could be bigger than chat.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

You just know the OpenAI group chat is dead quiet right now.

Anthropic is out here casually collecting the crowns of AI research.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@Soulmotionlabs @runwayml Just beautiful imaginations, please share more. I'd loooove to see more work like this on my timeline.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@jerrod_lew @chrisfirst Hahahahhaa the game is more interesting outside the court

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@ai_for_success awwwwww congrats! Looks so adorable.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@KristinFracchia And build for humans to spend more time with humans

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@joshua_xu_ code is the new video language.

[Inworld AI @inworld_ai]

Introducing Realtime TTS-2, a new generation of voice model built for realtime conversation.

It is the first voice model that hears the conversation, takes natural-language voice direction, holds one voice identity across over 100 languages, and speaks like a person who is paying attention.

The result is voice AI that feels as good as it sounds.

Try it out: https://t.co/80xL7AJveV
Learn More: https://t.co/PLUiAEFizP

[Contanimation @Cont_animation]

Sincitium is finally here.

We are pleased to present our latest piece: a concept trailer created specifically for the @runwayml Big Pitch Contest. For this project, we wanted to explore a completely different aesthetic from our usual studio style, and this film is the result of that experimentation.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed the creative process.

Produced by: Contanimation
Directed by: Javier De La Chica and Guillermo Miranda Art Direction: Javier De La Chica
Editing: Guillermo Miranda
Voices: Juan Rabadán
#runwaybigpitchcontest

[HeyGen @HeyGen]

Video gets better when people share, build together, and learn together

https://t.co/qAAlTHIhcH is live. Browse community projects, download any zip, hand it to your agent or publish yours

$ npx hyperframes publish

Publish then RT + comment "dev" for credits
(must follow)

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

OpenAI changed their banner yesterday.

It looks like they were trying to recreate the viral UGC explosion from the GPT-4o Miyazaki Hayao art style era.

But the same trick didn’t land the second time around，fewer people bought into it, and the new art style wasn’t nearly as stunning as the original Miyazaki one.

@OpenAI quietly switched it back to the previous banner.

[Amir D @starks_arq]

Traditional studios require substantial budgets to craft a film spanning 10,000 years of human history.

We made one with Seedance 2.0 via @BytePlusGlobal and the oldest instinct humans have... the need to tell a story.

1000+ generations of learnings, every secret below.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@lina_colucci @twistartups the troll alien is too polite 🫣

[Lina Colucci @lina_colucci]

update! the @twistartups AI sidebar is going well

The goal: a live AI sidebar with 4 personas watching the pod in real time

Progress update:
✅ Side bar (Chrome extension works with any website)
✅ Two characters: comedian fox + troll alien
✅ Ability to adjust frequency / skip commentary

it's honestly starting to feel pretty good

"they want to integrate a fact checker, which is just a polite way of saying their show needs a fact checker"
-fox 😂

@Jason check it out 👇

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@future_coded Reach the right audience.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

A quote from the Snapchat CEO on a podcast is worth every AI founder thinking about:

"15 years ago, we learned a lesson: software is not a moat. This is something everyone is only starting to realize today in the AI era."

Every feature Snap built was copied. Stories, AR filters, subscriptions, everything.

So they stopped competing on features very early, and turned to competing on distribution.

Regarding where the moat is in the AI era, Evan gave 3 answers:

1/ Ecosystem: Copying a software feature is easy, copying a complete ecosystem is almost impossible. This refers to the relationship network between creators and users, millions of lenses on the AR developer platform, and the flywheel formed around these relationships.

2/ Hardware: When software becomes easier to copy, hardware instead becomes a new barrier. This is the core logic behind Snap betting on AR glasses Specs.

3/ Distribution capability: Breaking down the success and failure of consumer tech in the past 15 years, TikTok used money to subsidize a two-sided market, and Threads relied on Meta's existing network. For both successful cases, the core is not the product itself, but distribution.

Too many people in the consumer tech space put their energy on "Did I find PMF?", but the time spent thinking about distribution is far from enough.

In the early days of the mobile internet, distribution was almost free. In the starting phase of the App Store, users would actively go into the App Store and download apps.

But today, users no longer actively download new apps, and attention is monopolized by giants.

So when everyone can quickly build similar products, the winner is the one who can deliver the product to the right users.

In addition, a problem I want to add that many founders ignore: most consumers actually do not like AI. A survey of US users by Quinnipiac University shows that 80% of users are resistant to AI.

Founders stay in Silicon Valley for too long, and naturally think everyone is excited about the future of AI. But in reality, Silicon Valley did not spread this story very well.This means the distribution of AI products is not just an "exposure" problem, but a "trust" problem. TRUST is what actually matters.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Software is not a moat

Over the last 15+ years, nearly every innovation @EvanSpiegel and his team shipped got copied. Stories. AR glasses. Swipe-based navigation. The camera-first interface.

And yet @Snapchat is the only independent consumer social app that has lasted. Nearly 1 billion MAUs. ~$6B in annual revenue. Over 8 billion AI photos shared on Snapchat *every day*.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:
🔸 Why distribution—not product—is now the biggest challenge for startups
🔸 How Snap keeps inventing with a 9-to-12-person design team
🔸 How AI is changing the way designers work
🔸 Why humanity's comfort with AI will be a bigger bottleneck than the technology
🔸 Why Evan is calling this year a "crucible moment" for Snap

Listen now 👇
https://t.co/2KO5eH2GHC

[Uncanny Harry AI @Uncanny_Harry]

I wanted to make something heartfelt and hopeful.

Made this with just one Midjourney image (see in replies) and everything else was done inside Seedance, (apart from the Suno music track).

Really pleased that model was able to maintain the animation style and give such solid character performances. Seedance is not the cheapest model but bang for buck it's produces the best quality results. The 1080p is virtually Broadcast quality IMHO. Seedance 2.0 is now available via @BytePlusGlobal API

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@Mayhem4Markets 😂

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

Today in AI :

ChatGPT: We make models stronger.

DeepSeek: We make models cheaper.

Anthropic: This model is too dangerous! Only a top-tier, safety-obsessed lab like us knows how to control it... Oh, btw, yes, the model did get dumber. We are tuning it back today.

[Chang Chen @ChangChen_CC]

@victoriawu77 lol