ryan rosenthal

I’m an AI-native creative director & designer with 10 years building, designing and directing creative. Now building AI Creative Studios for brands at scale.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

It's the expansion of your company, without a sight of AI slop or inconsistent creative, and led by a multi-industry creative veteran. LFG.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

That's the part that gets me genuinely STOKED. Because this was never about automating anyone, but expanding what I was already doing for brands, now at scale, with speed, and consistency.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

24/7, dialed exactly how you need them. The taste / brand / creative is still yours. The vision is def still yours. The engine just lets you run it at scale, at the speed of a damn F1 engine.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

You codify the soul of the thing, only once (if you do it right - I have my techniques 😎 Then every landing page, every asset, every campaign comes out in client engine - the dashboard. The copywriter, the designer, the strategist, all running as their own entities & workflows.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

& I can't begin to explain how fun these are to build (genuinely the most geek level excitement I've had making anything in years).

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

A full creative operating system that knows exactly what your brand does / doesn't do, says / doesn't say, looks like & feels like at creative scale - and it actually delivered REAL WORK.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

Building brains for brands. Or what I've been calling, "Creative Engines" or "AI Creative Studios" - semi-autonomous workhorses that are guided / designed by my taste, direction, and 1:1 meetings with founders.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

For over a decade I've worn every damn hat in the creative world. Writer. Designer. Content. App design. Strategy. Creative direction. Web design. The list goes on...

But the last couple of months, I started building something for my clients that I can't stop being giddy about. What's your guess?

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

@coachella isn’t a music festival. it’s the most expensive content studio on earth.

the question is whether that’s a good thing.

#coachella2026 #makeartnotcontent #influencermarketing

[Benlloyd Goldstein @benlloydg]

https://t.co/xfrhl1AgKk

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

@benlloydg nailed it

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

@hunterhammonds @WeAreOffMenu @iampetrknoll this is so sick. always best in class @hunterhammonds

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

the "one-dimension" brand era is dying.

but novel storytelling, evolving design, brands & artists with actual personality at scale.. that's timeless.

it's time to get weird.

what brand do you think is already doing this?

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

brands are going to look completely different in 3 years.

here's my prediction and why i think everything we know about "brand consistency" is about to get flipped.

[ryan rosenthal @ryan_rosenthal]

drop collections tied to the moment.

collab with brands or creators so far out of your lane it's confusing.

remix your logo every release. make something
nobody asked for or expected.

make your brand feel like a real f*cking person,
not an FAQ page.