therealsanchan

Helping builders build successful products and scale companies.
➡️ Investor, former Coinbase VP, ex-Instagram, Facebook, AirbBnB, & Microsoft

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

@Dakshay @gdb @sama @thsottiaux @romainhuet Super awesome!

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

@aakashgupta Very well said - I see and feel the same.

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

@jai_prasad17 @ostium 🤣😂

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

@Dakshay Love it

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The next generation Starlink satellites, which are so big that only Starship can launch them, will allow for a 10X increase in bandwidth and, with the reduced altitude, faster latency

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Which path do you want for AI?

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

You'd think that AI would drive a boom for the entertainment/gaming industry. Instead, incumbents from entertainment are facing incredible friction as they attempt to experiment with generative AI.

Startups have a huge opportunity to reinvent entertainment and gaming as a result -- which is very exciting!

Why are big cos in entertainment + gaming not aggressively embracing AI? And why does that turn into a startup opportunity?

- Innovator's dilemma: If it works, don't fix it
- Desire to "bolt on" AI as a feature rather than AI-first
- Legal pushback from questions on IP ownership
- Pushback from creatives/designers
- It's hard to hire AI engineers

Let's explore each of these.

AI could be very powerful for entertainment and gaming companies, but it's also very much an Innovator's Dilemma -- or as some like to say, "if ain't broke don't fix it." In my conversations with folks across the entertainment+gaming industries, it's both clear to people that AI will reinvent their industries, yet a low will to proactively embrace the technology. After all, when you have a series of franchises and delivery channels that work, why take the risk with new tech that reaches a smaller audience, requires a lot of rethinking, and maybe not even work? Within gaming, this is why it's taken over a decade for bigco developers to embrace mobile and free-to-play. Call of Duty finally released their first mobile game in 2019, alongside Blizzard's Diablo Immortal mobile game in 2022, both more than a decades after mobile was released. AI-first gaming will be similar.

When new tech is embraced by incumbents, it's often "bolted on" rather than reinvented from scratch. That is, it's much easier to imagine what it's like to use AI in the backend production process to build games and films we already know and love. There's interest for cost savings from the business side there, but we'll discuss later why the creative arms of these companies are up in arms. However, AI will deliver more than cost savings and it's much harder to imagine brand new genres that haven't existed in the past. That will require experimentation and radical innovation, most likely coming from startups.

Timing plays a major role here. The gaming industry is in transformation, with a steady drumbeat of M&A changing the landscape, and a lot of RIFs as companies restructure. Hollywood has much the same happening, with a flat/shrinking film market transitioning to streaming. Who wants to take risk right now?

A metaphor here comes from the last generation of creative disruption, with user-generated content and services like YouTube and TikTok. In the same way, Generative AI innovates along a series of axes that bigco entertainment companies do not, and will not love. At it's core, this new generation of technology makes creative work both lower cost, highly productive, and available to a much wider base of creators. YouTube and Instagram might have made it easy for amateurs to distribute their low production quality vlogs and photos to the Internet, but generative AI will make it easy for amateurs to create content that's professional level. And amateurs will be able to make a lot more of it, too. And some of it won't be brand safe, nor follow intellectual property laws, or anything else. I've previously discussed the idea that a gal with a typewriter can write a book for millions of readers, but we don't currently have the conception of a gal with a laptop making a 2 hour movie for millions of viewers -- but this will happen.

Big technology dislocations like the type we're undergoing right now typically create huge opportunities to build new, strong form, "native" products. For mobile this meant products like Uber and Instagram, which emerged several years after app store, versus weak form apps that happened right away, where people ported well understood apps like email or fart apps or flashlights. AI-native gaming and entertainment experiences are likely to deviate significantly from our current understanding of the medium. They might be more meme-like and ephemeral, meant to be created in a few days and played for a week or two, alongside a major world event like the Super Bowl or a Presidential Election -- because there was a funny moment that became sort of a meme game. Or perhaps the game experiences themselves will target much smaller niche audiences, the same way that people often build websites for small groups. Perhaps there will be new genres, just as "6 second dance video" has become a new category. We'll likely see low-hanging fruit like AI sim games and narrative gaming -- anything with a lot of content, many characters and NPCs, end up being reinvented first.

The other big obstacle for incumbent game+entertainment companies comes from the way AI works -- in particular the fact that the models are trained on huge amounts of text/image/video/3D assets that are presumably "public domain" but what if they're not? The legal departments within many of these companies have held their product teams back because sometimes the models seem to spit out copyrighted content when prompted with the right set of prompt text. On the other hand, startups tend to run towards this type of risk and validate product/market fit first, as YouTube did early on with all their pirated music video and TV content. The assumption from many startups is to try and prove that consumers love this kind of content first, and then to put themselves in a better legal position as they grow. This may or may not be a good idea, but it's another thing that makes AI-first startups must more productive.

And of course, all of this makes the companies also reluctant to share their data with AI companies because they might suspect their IP will eventually get incorporated within the model. We dealt with some variations of these trust issues with cloud computing, and in the end a lot of companies put their email+data in the cloud and everything's fine. Or maybe we'll have lots of "on prem" AI models trained on small bits of internal data + big external public stuff, and companies will try to keep things within the firewall.

All of the IP in these gaming+entertainment companies are of course created by the vast numbers of creative workers within these companies -- the artists, writers, designers, and so forth. Maybe of these folks have a tough time grappling with the idea that these AI models are built from other peoples' work. Unlikely pure software companies, you might have a ratio of 3:1 artists:engineers within these organizations -- and thus the creative employee base is a very powerful one. There's already been examples, like the SAG-AFTRA strike, trying to head off AI as a disruptor in the industry. I'm sure we'll see more.

The most positive thing I can argue with the creative work force within these companies is to point them to the trajectory of the software engineer. Everything that's happened in the past decades -- open source, cloud computing, better languages, better IDEs, etc -- have made software engineers even more general and applicable to any problem. It's grown the demand for their skills, not reduced it. The world would not be better with 100,000 FORTRAN engineers -- it's better we have 10s of millions of devs that can tackle any field. I think that as creative workers are more empowered with better tools, we might see them able to develop entire prototypes or start companies themselves (no code!) and be otherwise even more valuable. And that might increase the demand for their skills. Similarly, you might just see them make more content, or try more things. All of these can be good outcomes -- not to say that there won't be winners or losers, but that some forms of creativity are likely to thrive.

All of this is further compounded by the simple fact that it's hard to recruit great AI engineers. It's difficult for everyone. It's hard enough for top-end tech companies that pay very well, or where there's significant equity upside. But it's even harder for older and more established companies that can't stretch using high-upside equity. If AI becomes as impactful as we all think it'll be, there's a major issue in simply getting good talent into incumbent companies.

These are all interlocking issues. This is why it's super hard for incumbents in entertainment and gaming to embrace AI. Although it's the obvious New New Thing, many organizations are fundamentally limited by their internal structure, legal liability, their desire to incrementally build their businesses, etc.

[FIFA World Cup @FIFAWorldCup]

🥁 The #FIFAWorldCup trophy will be raised in New York New Jersey!

#WeAre26

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

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[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

3. Build something cool even if it’s uncool right now: if you believe the time will come for it to be cool again then you’ll be at the top

The lesson here is that your product research must be done carefully and make sure you hit the market at the right place and right time

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

3 Major Points To Touch on for a Startup Founder

#market #startup #founder
#coach #exec #leadership #entrepreneur
#early #research #opportunity

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

Having enough Runway: the longer you build something up the more runway you have but be very careful that the opportunity and destination is still there for what you’re building

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

1. Being early is as good as being wrong: examples like Rossi where you enter a market and it won’t take off due to the little traction there is in the market

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

But it’s not enough to just be there you have to expose yourself to it - get down and dirty with trying and using every aspect of it

By being in the deep end of it you truly are providing a solution to a problem that will arise for other users

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

Being the OG of Crypto You Have an Amazing Front Row Seat of Seeing all the Gaps You Can Improve

#problem #identify #gap
#entrepreneur #founder #exec
#test #try #adapt #solution

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

This is what the Meet the Founder Series is all about - world changing ambitious people

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

Jai began with an investment platform for investors to invest in startups for equity

#vision #invest #finance
#exec #founder #leadership #business #open #opportunity

[therealsanchan @therealsanchan]

The idea and vision with Definitive Finance was to create a permissionless platform of finance and investing where anyone can openly access and use

Truly a brilliant platform to expose founders to investors and investors to startups