Holly

✍️ helping founders go from 0 to 1 and 1 to 100 in web2+ and beyond 🚀 :: prev 🟧 Visiting Partner @ycombinator :: 🎮 founder @kabam

[Holly @hollyhliu]

We were making the same revenues as @figma - $400M in 2016 (w/ inflation almost $500M)

But, our exit and multiple was just 5% of theirs.

Here are THREE things you need to know to get the best financial outcome for your startup:

[Holly @hollyhliu]

@edenchen Congrats!

[Holly @hollyhliu]

My life is reduced to getting into a fight with an AI bot

[Jess Lee @jesskah]

“AI slop” might just spawn the next YouTube, driven by a new AI-native creative class: The Generators.

After sharing this thought on the @WithDelphi Library of Minds podcast, I’ve gotten a ton of follow-up questions, so here’s a deeper dive...

Consumer AI in 2025 rhymes with Consumer Mobile in 2008. Like early mobile, we’re seeing both potential giants and flash-in-the-pan fads.

In 2008, the top apps in the App Store were Facebook, Flashlight and iPint (a game that let you drink a virtual pint by tilting your phone). Only one became an enduring business.

As aggregation theory reminds us, the best consumer companies aggregate massive networks of demand or supply (h/t @benthompson). Everything else gets commoditized.

Beware vibe revenue (h/t @gregisenberg). Many current apps generate revenue from curiosity, novelty, or FOMO, with high initial conversion and fast growth, but poor long-term retention.

As competition increases, products will commoditize and pricing will drop. We need to separate temporary revenue from sustainable businesses.

Still, don’t dismiss “small” beginnings. YouTube started with silly homemade videos like keyboard cat, Numa Numa, and Chocolate Rain. Then came Ryan Higa’s sketches, Justin Bieber’s discovery, and OK Go’s treadmill music video.

Over time, quality rose, legitimacy followed, and YouTube became the world’s largest video platform. Similarly, TikTok began as https://t.co/FDUB60VNW2 with teens dancing and lipsyncing before evolving into a global entertainment engine. In consumer, what seems trivial or lowbrow can be the wedge into something massive.

Is “AI slop” this generation’s cat videos? What critics dismiss as junk is often content that would’ve been prohibitively expensive or impossible to make without AI: podcasts with historical or fictional guests, Pokemon nature documentaries, cooking shows hosted by animals, romantasy microdramas, Ghibli in real life, Dramione fanvids.

These technically imperfect but creatively unbounded experiments are just the first wave of a sea change in UGC content.

Every technology shift mints a new creator class that the old guard mocks.
Bloggers weren’t “real writers”.
Twitter microbloggers weren’t “real bloggers”.
YouTubers weren’t “real filmmakers.”
Instagram influencers weren’t “real tastemakers”.
TikTok teens weren’t “real creators.”

Now comes the AI-native generation, the Generators. They conjure worlds instead of filming them, blending ideas, moodboards, scripts, and real footage with prompts and generative AI models. They create, remix, regenerate,and refine until it becomes something new.

Today, many are teenagers in their bedrooms, not too different from how prior UGC revolutions began. Over time, this new creator class will become more mainstream: film students making dragons on dorm room budgets, camera-shy solopreneurs sharing their real voices and expertise through avatars, small businesses turning iPhone photos into cinematic ads, scriptwriters becoming their own showrunners, creative directors running one-person agencies.

AI doesn’t just lower the cost of creation. It expands who gets to create.

When new creators appear, old platforms rarely welcome them. YouTube and TikTok reward face-forward performance, not surrealist fantasy. A new home may rise for the Generators, with audiences who love their worlds and communities who nurture them.

For this shift to fully take hold, the underlying models must evolve. As @trymirage founder @gmharhar often says, the AI video race has barely begun. Producing scenes with consistent characters, voices, and styles still takes too much work. We need multimodal video models that can blend real footage and authentic voices with AI VFX. We need orchestration to handle multiple characters, multiple scenes, and multiple camera angles.

Apps like Sora, @canofsoup_inc, Captions by @trymirage, @Picsart, and @tavus hint at where this is going, but the creative tools for this new medium are only just being invented.

We’re witnessing the dawn of a new creative medium. Like every revolution before it, it’ll look weird and a little "sloppy" before it looks brilliant.

--

If you’re a founder, creative, or Generator building in this new wave, we at @Sequoia would love to hear from you. You can reach out via the normal channels to any of our partners, or feel free to pitch my Delphi about the future of consumer AI: https://t.co/QbTAN8GyD0.

---

Thanks to my partner @buckhouse for helping coin the term “Generator” and to ChatGPT for copyediting help.

Relevant reading

Augmented Imagination by James Buckhouse
https://t.co/O1VibcRyU6

Playlist of Generator content I mention above
https://t.co/INCRVUwg2n

Playlist of the earliest viral YouTube content https://t.co/UFDFpNSCIo

Vibe Revenue by Greg Isenberg
https://t.co/1YkwXPb9AV

Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson
https://t.co/MhsF7H6m4D

[Holly @hollyhliu]

Anyone going to San Diego Comic Con this year - we have a panel on Sat, Jul 26 at 1PM Room 7AB - come by and spread the word!

[Lisha @lishali88]

Presenting 🌹 @Rosebud_AI as @khoslaventures nominated company at the @ForerunnerVC Humans in the Loop conference. Come say hi!

[Kun Gao @kunoag]

Big announcement, @Forge GameLink: first ever link-in-bio made for games. PayLink: easiest way to grow your mobile game revenue by 35%.

We are on a mission to help indie games go direct to players. Like this post and join our mission! https://t.co/tqkan5MrlG

[Lisha @lishali88]

👋 I’m Lisha—if you found me from my Grok 3/o1 to Dune-Minecraft post, welcome! That was a side quest to test frontier llms on Rosebud. My main quest is building @Rosebud_AI so anyone can vibe code games!
👇 Watch how I prompt my way to building a browser based 3D city sim in 1 min (music on 🎹 )! I love experimenting with AI in creative app dev. Too many creative hobbies are gate-kept behind years of technical experience, so I started Rosebud to fix that. Removing technical barriers sparks new game experiences and allows more people to participate in creation.

I’ve seen everything from RPGs, FPS, horror games, sandbox, and various multiplayer experiences built on Rosebud... all by creators who, until recently, never coded. It’s so rewarding to watch users shift from consumers to creators and listen to them rave about the magic of creating their first game.

[JZCONCEPTS 🥊 @jzconcepts]

Here we go, Fight fans! @UFCStrike moments holders! Claim your https://t.co/uv4ok8soDo to earn rewards. Just the tip of iceberg on announcements…. 💥 🥊

[Nigel Eccles @nigeleccles]

4 years ago, I led a group of 100+ former employees and founders of @fanduel in a case of breach of fiduciary duty against FanDuel’s former board members (including investors KKR and Shamrock). Three months ago, the NY Court of Appeals found in our favor. The Court concluded that board members had indeed owed a fiduciary duty to shareholders. On Friday, we lodged an expanded complaint that, for the first time, publicly details the defendants’ various breaches of these duties, as well as outlines the defendants’ fraud, conspiracy and bribery under Scots law.

A very brief summary: In 2018, FanDuel merged with the US arm of Flutter Entertainment to create a new company called FanDuel Group. In exchange, FanDuel shareholders received 40% of the equity in the new company. However, the board (which was controlled by private equity investors KKR and Shamrock) used a phony valuation of $559M to wipe out common shareholders (largely the founders and employees). Less than 2 years later, those same investors sold that 40% stake in FanDuel Group for $4.2B.

Standing up against the likes of KKR is not easy, but I’m determined that the team of 100+ amazing people who spent years building FanDuel from the ground up will get back what was stolen from them in 2018. Link to the full complaint in the reply below.

[Forge @Forge]

We’re thrilled to share some exciting updates and milestones from the Forge team.

First, Forge has surpassed 1 million registered users! 🚀

Second, we're welcoming new investors to the team, including leading gaming protocols @AvaLabs and @SuiNetwork, plus all-star angels @dingalingts, @shanicucic96, @0804chris, James Zhang, and.

Third, over 60+ games have launched on Forge within our first year, with many more in the pipeline. 👀

And we're just getting started. We promise to keep building on this momentum to serve our amazing game partners, investors, and community 💪

Onwards.

[Holly @hollyhliu]

AI has the ability to take over jobs, careers, but can it take over callings?

[Kun Gao @kunoag]

Good morning Austin! First time at @sxsw speaking on streaming to gaming with @rottendoubt and @hollyhliu in an hour!

[Holly @hollyhliu]

No humans were harmed or used during this tweet.

[Holly @hollyhliu]

I'm so impressed with @baobabstudios and the amount of amazing content they are building.

I'm looking forward to the TV Show, as I'm pretty sure it will be award winning as they already received 10 Emmys!

[baobab studios @baobabstudios]

📣 We're excited to announce we've teamed up with 9 Story Media, the kids and family content powerhouse, to co-produce and launch a new television series for Momoguro.

The success of our line of Momoguro Roblox games, which garnered worldwide fandom with over 21 million visits and an 87% positivity score, have attracted demand for a television series for children 8 - 12 years old.

Read more below ⬇️

[baobab studios @baobabstudios]

📣 We're excited to announce we've teamed up with 9 Story Media, the kids and family content powerhouse, to co-produce and launch a new television series for Momoguro.

The success of our line of Momoguro Roblox games, which garnered worldwide fandom with over 21 million visits and an 87% positivity score, have attracted demand for a television series for children 8 - 12 years old.

Read more below ⬇️

[Holly @hollyhliu]

This is just a little too accurate.

If ever it felt like the system is rigged against women, it feels like it is now.

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

Greta Gerwig: Made a critically acclaimed, culturally profound, feminist movie about Barbie and the patriarchy that made a billion dollars at the box office.

Oscar nomination goes to … Ken.

#Barbie  #Oscars2024

[Holly @hollyhliu]

To get randomness , you need to plan it.

[Yat Siu @ysiu]

1/ #NFT sales last 30 days has exceeded $1.1 billion led by growth in projects such as @BoredApeYC @pudgypenguins @MocaverseNFT and also seeing particular growth in @EnterTheMythos @Immutable @polygon_onchain Solana and of course Ordinals and many more! https://t.co/YLseLF0Fdg

[Holly @hollyhliu]

Startup founders:

Always be recruiting, but not always be hiring.

[Holly @hollyhliu]

@kunoag @eshear @OpenAI @eshear is *THAT* good and efficient