AI Micro Dramas, Generative Media, and the Future of Creativity

I think folks would be surprised by how many TV shows and movies today already have some element of AI being used. I spent a lot of time with studio execs and Amazon and Netflix have already both announced programs for fully AI-generated animations. It's 90, 95% of the quality of filming, but it's so much cheaper and faster and easier. And I think the mass market consumer does not care that it was made with AI. But many of the people who were early adopters of AI video were not inherently amazing storytellers. And so they were making things that were novel, but were not necessarily the most compelling narratives. That is the major challenge. Now what we're starting to see is professional creatives who have worked in the space, seen the opportunity in this. And so we have people who know how to tell a narrative, which means we're going to get an explosion of really ripping stories. Sort of just unlocks all of this crazy weird interesting ideas that people have in their imagination that they could never make before. You see a lot of folks who have either started a kind of full new AI native studios or who are just individuals running a brand and scaling their own content, creating narrative stories, turning around things in hours or days. And so most people don't want to be competing on more of the low-brow soft content. But I think in terms of what creators should do, it really depends on like. AI isn't just changing how content is made. It's changing who gets to make it. In this feed drop from new economies, A16Z's Justine Moore joins the show to discuss the rise of AI native entertainment, why AI micro dramas are exploding in popularity. And how generative media is lowering the barriers to storytelling for creators around the world. They also explore AI agents, consumer startups, and the next wave of opportunities at the intersection of AI and media. Justine, welcome to new economies. We've been in touch kind of over the years with DMS for this is the first time we're meeting. And wow, so much is happening across AI, new media, and now the latest trend, AI micro dramas. So we have so much unpack, but big welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to chat about all those things. So I feel like we're at this incredible inflection point around generative media. And so much has just been happening really in the last six months. We've had this explosion new term, new media, which is kind of just replacing the creator economy. We've had obviously so much change in AI. And like we said to the beginning, this new incredible form of entertainment, AI micro dramas. Help us unpack what is the current state of everything happening in generative media? What's your hot take? Yeah, I would say I've been following the generative media space for a couple of years actually really got into it a couple of months before chat GPT came out when the first stable diffusion models came out. And you had folks like levels IO building really cool products on top of them, like the original profile picture AI profile picture generators. And it's really been remarkable to see the progress we've made since then. Like we went from not very good images to not very good two second videos now to like full coherent 15 second videos that people can generate let alone, you know, all the advancements that have happened in image and voice and 3d. I think we've we're at a really interesting point where the model quality has gotten good enough that you can actually make things that are compelling to watch. And that carry a storyline versus things that are just like interesting for the novelty value of like whoa AI can make something that almost looks real. And so as a result we've had a ton of progress happening both on the model layer obviously and those improvements will continue to happen. But also on the products layer like when the models are finally good enough for people to use you kind of have to create the right harnesses and workflows for people to actually leverage them especially people who. You know aren't full time prompting all of these models and so they don't know what model to pick for which use case how to write a really good prompt things like that so to me it feels like where we are in generative media right now is really the entire ecosystem matureing both consumers but also professional studios waking up to the fact that these are. Models are finally good enough to use and the product builders realizing that there's a lot of opportunity to create like the interfaces to which we use them. And the content which is being produced by somebody's AI models for AI micro dramas some of the storytelling is so good and your accuracy is incredible. What do you think makes these AI micro dramas and we should probably explain actually what AI micro dramas are what you actually think makes these yeah micro dramas so cool to watch. Yeah so I described micro dramas as almost like the tick tockified version of soap operas so they're usually like pretty dramatic salacious like interesting pieces of content that are relatively short they're typically vertical video they play both on places like. Tick tock but also on apps like real short or drama box they really started blowing up first in China like a few a few years ago and. Now the the micro drama market in China is larger than their domestic box office there's everyone there is just you know describing to these apps viewing all of these micro dramas. And I think they started to take off in the US quite a bit last year like when you look at the app store data they were some of the fastest growing in the highest monetizing apps in the country which is. Pretty rare that you have a couple apps in a new category like that grow that quickly that's kind of when I started paying attention and then I think the AI element of it came in when you know you look at this sort of content and. The micro dramas often similar to soap operas have like a relatively limited cast they have relatively limited sets like it's not a game show or competition show where you're filming all over the world like it's not a big blockbuster movie. And the thing that really gets people interested is the storyline and the suspense and the drama and like what's going to happen next and so it doesn't need to be a Hollywood grade production to get people interested and so I think a lot of folks looked at that and said this is sort of this kind of content is sort of a perfect fit for what we can do with AI models today. Some of the dramas I've seen they they are so gripping I did if you saw this one around Darry from I'm from a false in love with this girl from China you may have seen as so I met the creative designers and I thought this story telling is incredible will again the show knows and then I later found out the the girl who's actually in the micro drama it is a true story. And the whole story can to light I told this story line storytelling is so incredible but there are two sides of these I think I am micro dramas working right you have the one side wears incredible storytelling you have incredible designs low cost to make which is absolutely fine but then you have the other side whereas well designed for the storytelling is just not as good as it could be right. What do you think this actually I will go next in order for a micro dramas actually to stay around. I mean I think the good thing about it is there a lot so I have this I have this thought for a lot of AI video actually which is many of the people who are early adopters of AI video were not inherently amazing storytellers they were early adopters of technology and so they were making things that were novel they were not necessarily the most compelling narratives like I put myself in that category a hundred percent like I never trained or learned how to shape a really compelling narrative. Now what we're starting to see is you know professional creatives who have worked in the space who know how to tell really good stories maybe they're not like what we think of as a traditional professional professional creative but they've been a creator for a long time they've learned through honing their craft how to tell a story all the way to the big studios are seeing the opportunity in this and so we have people who know how to tell a narrative seeing the opportunity in the micro drama space which to me means we're going to get an explosion of actually really gripping stories like super interesting content beyond the AI element of it. I actually think we might be at this point already but there's going to be a lot of micro drama content that you don't even know is AI and people don't even care it's they're just there for for the story. I'm happy you pull this off because honestly six months ago I was like I'm never going to wash an AI generator program never going to wash an AI generates a movie. I'm like as she is gripping and is interesting or what totally I think the quality has gotten a lot better too. I spent a lot of time with studio execs and sort of you know want to get involved in the investing space or curious sort of what's happening in generative media from an early stage perspective. I was just down at AI on the lot in in Hollywood and like sat through a bunch of panels of. help people are actually using this. And I think folks would be surprised by how many TV shows and movies today already have some element of AI being used. And how many of the big studios are considering fully generative content? Like Amazon and Netflix have already both announced programs for fully AI-generated animations. And I think the bigger studios are afraid of like PR risk around things like that, but are absolutely exploring very similar things. - Yeah, and you know, when I talk to creators as well, execs, founders, people were interested in this space. And also just like white consumers. Some people are like, this isn't just gonna replace like Netflix or, you know, movies or actors, actors. And I'm like, no, I just actually think it's gonna be a different type of content and entertainment we consume. Do you feel as accurate and as that where we're going? - I think it's gonna be a mix. So I think we're gonna get new types of content. And micro dramas are a great example of that where I think in the US they're really taking off with AI now making them much cheaper and easier to produce. I also think we're gonna see AI used in a lot of traditional production pipelines. And so many of the big studios, they're not like we're gonna replace every actor and actress and do an entire movie that is fully generated. But they are like filming people on sound stages and generating the background with AI or generating like the big scary monster or the giraffe or whatever kind of crazy animal with AI instead of either, you know, having to go film that somehow or using CGI. So yeah, I think it's gonna be a mix. I think we're gonna see new entertainment formats. And then I think we're also gonna see folks using AI in traditional entertainment formats like TV and movies to bring down the cost of production. - The opportunity also for creators and especially individual creators, maybe even with a small team rise is insane. There are a couple of AI micro dramas that's one in China which was published not too long ago and it's had like a hundred million views in a space of I think two or four weeks, which is crazy. You had this AI micro drama mentioned around Dario from Amphropic falling in love with this, go from China. This thing has had like two or three million views. And if it's that great thing, credit is consultant monetizing that, right? - I think a lot have, honestly. I mean, on X, on Instagram, on YouTube, you see a lot of folks who have either started kind of full new AI native studios or who are just individuals, you know, running a brand and scaling their own content, creating narrative stories, folks like Syop Anime or Gossip Goblin or Charlie Curran are putting out like insane numbers in terms of who actually use their content, the consistency at which they're releasing content and how their audiences are growing over time. And when you watch the content, it's immediately clear that one person or small teams could have never created this before AI. It's whether it's animation or anime or whether it's, you know, photo realistic live action. I'm not sure what you call it when it's AI. Like, it would have required massive budgets and months to do and they're turning around things in, you know, hours or days. - Before we saw the recording, we got chatting around, we've actually had to go creating our own AI micro dramas as actually pretty good fun. Have you had to go at a credit in your own and how have you found the experience? - I try to create all sorts of AI content largely to test the tools. Like, I try not to dilute myself into thinking that I have some incredible story that I need to tell that people will want to watch. But I do like testing various things across different styles, like, you know, anime, 3D animation, photo realistic. Just to get a sense of how the model quality is improving and then also how the harnesses are improving. There are things about it, like, we were chatting how, you know, the models have gotten so much better but they're not perfect. And so you can spend a lot of money generating over and over and over again to try to fix a small mistake or to try to get a scene perfect. But at the same time, we've come super far, like with things like character consistency with, you know, the physics of the real world working in most scenes, even if it's not perfect with video models being able to follow prompts around camera control and transitions and things like that much better than they used to. So it's much more fun than frustrating. I remember it must be like three years ago now, whatever I was trying to create a super basic, it was almost like a slideshow animation of like Calvin and Hobbs, you know, through the years. And oh my gosh, it took days and the output was terrible. At the time, I was like, this is incredible. I made this a day eye. But it was a very frustrating process and now I would say it's a lot more fun. - Exactly, I think we're still at the early empathy stages right, I was saying before we came on, I started creating our own micro drama around the Nike story. So my idea was, anyone who's listening can take this idea right, it's all these incredible companies we talk about on a daily basis, they all have an origin story. But nobody actually knows a lot of the time what the origin story is. How cool would it be to have an AI micro drama series called The Origins or The Tech Origins or something around how all of these incredible companies got created? Anyway, I saw them playing around with a couple of these AI models and tools around how the Nike stories, you know, journey started, the origin story. And the storytelling I think is pretty good. The design, the aesthetics of the actual show is so good. But maybe like where it's still lagging is the camera lens, the lighting, how quickly like people are walking every, every, maybe AI micro drama, need some of like romantic story to it. So maybe the romantic story for like the Nike story could be around when the founder, he's Michael Jordan for the first time, Michael Jordan falls in love with like this incredible shoe. You can make it so good. I don't see how I only spend like two or three hours playing around with it. And I think it's quite good. And that's in three hours. - That sounds incredible. I think also it's fun to think about different iterations of micro dramas like that. Like I think historically when people think micro dramas, they think like soap operas or just kind of, you know, crazy, suspenseful, pure romance. But there's an opportunity to tell so many different types of stories like what you're mentioning. There's an opportunity for it to be somewhat educational. Like there's so many different sorts of content that are unlocked here. - And it's pretty interesting to see the consumer adoption of this. I was actually just in China last week and seeing the adoption of technology and consumer social apps is so interesting to see versus what happens in the West, right? - Yeah. - How do you see the adoption of these like AI micro dramas as she sticking around? And is it just, are we just going for a phase? Is it just gonna die? Was it gonna loss? - I think from a consumer perspective, my instinct at least is that people don't actually care what it's made with. You know, at first, maybe the folks on X are Reddit or wherever people who care about technology and want to follow the progress may watch something because of AI and may follow along because of AI. The mass market consumer does not care that it was made with AI and isn't gonna watch it for that reason. And so the question is, do we hit the quality bar where it makes sense for all micro dramas or many micro dramas to be created with AI because it's 90, 95% of the quality of filming, but it's so much cheaper and faster and easier. And I think we are quickly approaching that point where some micro dramas can be entirely made with AI, some are made with the combination of human filming and then some sort of AI editing, adding backgrounds, adjusting things, dubbing, that sort of thing. So yeah, I don't think this is a trend just because it so massively shifts the what the supply curve can look like because now for $100,000 you can make so many more episodes than you could make before. It just makes a ton of sense for the producers of the micro dramas to be using AI because historically like one of their biggest problems was just having enough content, having the volume, having the diversity of content to be able to get viewers in and retain them on the platform. - I think it's also gonna be interesting to see the type of content, doesn't even have to be micro dramas in this case, that individual creators create versus the micro studio's rights. Like I was saying, it is still pretty expensive as a individual creator to create a AI micro drama. Like we didn't spend too much creating our own, maybe you know, under $500. But that said a lot and there's still these multiple iterations rights. Do you think the cost for individual creators will go down over time where you can maybe knock something out for a couple hundred dollars? - For sure, I think the trend we see with all of these models is that over time the quality that you can get for a certain price goes up, which is great, as more and more. and more new models come out. I think the frontier models, like right now, that C-Dance 2 will always be very expensive. I think there's an incentive with more and more competition in the space for the model providers to both continue improving their models and also to make their models less expensive over time. So more people can use them. I think Google did this with VO3 when they released VO3 fast. And we saw yesterday C-Dance is now doing this with C-Dance 2 fast, which is much cheaper and faster. And so my instinct is we're just gonna keep seeing that the costs go down over time. And then of course, hopefully we'll have better and better frontier models that will likely stay pricey for a little while. - Yeah, and you know, I feel this has all changed in maybe six months. I think if you asked a regular consumer six months ago, would you was a AI-generated movie program where they were gonna answer, they'll probably say no. Now, I think it is, they didn't, well, they don't mind, right, if it's good quality. - Right. I mean, some of the most viral clips I've seen from the World Cup are like AI-generated hilarious things of like an entire team forming a circle and moving down the field to score a goal. Or like the Brazil team building a brick wall in front of their goal, so no one can score. Like it sort of just unlocks all of this stuff, like these crazy, weird, interesting ideas that people have in their imagination that they could never make before, that they can then share with the world and a bunch of other people can be like, well, this is super cool or interesting or weird or entertaining kind of whatever it's intended to be. - Exactly. You know, we're both in this new media ecosystem rights. You know, it's spreading so much around what's happening in the Caligrian ecosystem. And one trend I keep hearing, I love to go take us around. What is AI's stop and to turn this around should creators be thinking about is their content timely or timeless? I know your colleague Eric did a great tweet about this recently where really, you know, the terms came from is that how creators should be thinking about creating content to avoid potentially being accused of oh, this is just all AI generators? - This type of concept is very interesting to me. Because I think it came out around AI, but my take at least has been, there's a ton of human-produced slot. Like, swap is more about the quality of the content and the narrative and like what it does to your brain versus whether it's made with AI or not. Like, I think you could argue that a ton of the like, clickbait, YouTube, like insane slime challenge, whatever shorts that people were posting far before AI are like human swap and AI swap is similar. To me, it's like, I don't know, I guess the way I understand swap is like there's no really underlying, I don't even know if compelling, because some of them do have like compelling narratives, but they just like triggered this primal part in your brain that like makes you kind of keep watching and be hooked even though you don't, even though it's not the highest quality story or narrative typically. I think yeah, like we shouldn't all spend our time watching AI swap, but I think also we shouldn't pretend that swap originated with AI because there was plenty of human-produced swap content before that. I think in terms of what creators should do, it really depends on like what sort of creator you want to be. I mean, there's a lot of creators who optimize for kind of near-term impressions and growing their audience and jumping on every trend. You see this in non-AI spaces, you see this with traditional YouTube creators. Like some are on every single trend. Like one week they're doing the 10,000 calorie challenge and the next week they're doing the like poor buckets of water on random people down the street, like hopping around between things that are definitely not like timeless, whereas others take a long time researching and filming really in depth kind of deep dives and videos. I think usually for companies, it makes sense to be more on the timeless side of things or at least to have sort of thoughtful content that articulates your thesis and who you are and who you want to be. But there are a lot of creators for whom they can grow an audience quickly and monetize really well by producing, I guess more of the like low-brow swap content. - We just gonna get to a stage where we don't actually know what is AI generated or not. And perhaps for a lot of these social platforms so like sort of sub-stag, maybe sort of larger platforms, maybe some new ones which come into play, should creators start citing if their content was created using any of the tools they use on a daily basis for better transparency? - I think my view on that has been, it's super hard to say what is AI or not. Like I remember when people ask this question, I saw a Reddit post like a year and a half ago where like steam or one of the game marketplaces was requiring games made with AI to be labeled AI. And one of the developers was like, well, I used like a tab complete model and cursor when I was coding parts of this game. Like does that mean I have to label it as an AI generated game? And I think steam's intention was like, oh, if it's AI generated assets or images or music or whatever, but like it's just such a slippery slope of like, oh, you know, what everyone assumes AI means. Like people will look at that. Many people, I think we'll look at that and assume this is fully AI generated. And in many cases, it's like a collaboration between human and some sort of model. I think my instinct is like the vast, vast majority of content will end up being partially AI produced or AI edited in the future. So there's probably no point in even labeling it because that's just going to be the defaults. That said, I am surprised on platforms, especially like Instagram, how many people don't recognize like clearly an AI video. So I know the social platforms are putting more disclosures and things like that over that sort of stuff. It's becoming much harder for sure on what has been AI generated. I mean, for videos, I think it's hopefully fairly easy to figure out, especially for like newsletters, right? I saw this start the other days and put together where if you look at the top newsletters globally on all platforms, something like 20% of the top newsletters writers all of their content is AI generated. And then it's like you get to that phase where if you were top newsletters, but as AI generates a content, I'm not sure where you stand with that. I think I have a controversial take on this, which is I don't actually care if the person is choosing to read the content and the person is choosing if they find the content meaningful or not and whether it resonates with them and whether it kind of speaks to something in their life and so it's sort of in the eye of the beholder. Like I think folks who are, and we've already seen this, like people who have a popular newsletter and have pivoted to just putting out purely claw generations that are not really in their voice and don't make a ton of sense, get called out for that like as they should. But I think there are some people who I've even been surprised by it find a lot of meaning and really resonate with certain things, certain AI outputs that people get by going back and forth with claw or GPT or whatever model about a certain question and then publishing it. I think some people get really offended when they see AI written output. I just sort of skim it and decide, is this meaningful to me? Do I want to read it even if it has an AI tinge? Is there still some element of sort of, I can understand what the author wanted to say and why? And if so, I'll still read it. Yeah, my personal take is also change fairly recently where if it's a creator who I respect and I'm going to that creator because they're sharing the latest tech trends or is the latest startups or what's happening like in healthcare, for example, I don't really care. If I'm still going to get the same insights what the creator's trying to say, great, I don't mind. Maybe six months ago they've been different. Why do you think your viewpoint changed on that? Because there's two points. One is, so many of these creators are using these AI models and tools anyway to help them with their work, which I think is totally okay, right? They're very small teams and I guess they need as much as they can. And secondly, it's just where the world's going. As long as the information I think is accurate and what the creator's saying is still accurate than I think is okay. I agree, I mean, I think the thing that I don't like to play the devil's advocate is, I don't know if they still do this, but for a while both Quad and GPT had this terrible habit of being incredibly long-winded and in like a way that like more human would be when explaining something. And so you could clearly tell if something was AI generated because it would take three paragraphs to say one sentence worth of confidence. And I thought that is like very annoying, but I don't know a lot of what I'm talking about. what I do when I write blog posts and stuff now is like, it's really hard to start from a blank page. And so often what we'll do is I'll create some sort of outline of what I want to say. I'll give it to both Claude and GPT. I'll see what angles they come up with. I'll paste them both in a doc. I'll take parts I like from each of them. And then I'll rewrite a bunch of it myself. And, you know, the end output is probably like 70, 60 to 70% written by me. Like, 30 to 40% written by AI. But I'm actually like, the process of writing is no longer as painful because I'm not starting from a completely blank page. - Well, exactly the same. We use all of the models to check for spelling mistakes, which I think is always a good thing. There's always a one or two things which you miss out right. We ask each of the AI model to rate the newsletter tradition out of 10 based on all of our previous content. So if Claude is saying 6.5, Gemini is saying 9 and Chaturgy is saying, I guess I'm going to 8.59. You know, perhaps you're on the right track for something right. If it is like all of our designs, we do these beautiful like Mark Mapps, 70U. All of those are human generated for now. But we always ask it to rate it. What do you think of this design? How should we make it a bit clearer? Should we move like the box around? When you've got 200 companies on a Mark Mapp, it does get a bit hard. But it's actually a super useful sparring partner on what great content could look like. - Yeah, I find it super helpful. Like I've also given it sort of presentations that I'm giving at our like GP meetings or wherever. And it's really, sometimes when you get deep in writing something or creating a presentation, you have so much context in your own brain that it's hard for you to imagine. Does this make sense to an external person looking at this for the first time? And I find the models are really good at reviewing something fresh and saying like, there is no coherent narrative underlying this. Or like you really need to move this part of the presentation before these other parts because without it, the rest of the parts don't make sense for someone who's not super deep in this space. And I find that to be super valuable. And I think we'll actually really improve how a lot of people communicate because that's a really hard skill to be able to do on your own. - The hardest part also for creators like us and maybe you agree is there are so many tools out there deciding which ones to stick with and deciding which ones to try out every week. It's opportunity course, it's just time, I don't know that you just go inside, I guess, well, well, it's better for you. - It's hard because you get on something that works well for you. And then something else comes out the next week that you want to try that looks even better. And then your original product upgrades. And so I don't know, it's difficult. I think we, I try to, I think I'm lucky that like, you know, since I'm investing in a lot of early stage stuff and it's helpful for me to use both all of the early stage products, but then also know sort of what the incumbents, which at this point are like the open AI and the anthropics and the Googles are doing and releasing so I can know how the product experiences actually compare. - We have a lot of founders who listen to the show and I think a useful question would be to talk around one of the hottest parts of building a generated media type of company from a startup point of view. And yeah, any characteristics you've seen there on all the hundreds of companies you've met? - Yeah, genitive media, I think is a great space and it's also really competitive space. So I think to me, the hardest thing right now has been figuring out who you want to serve and how you're going to be differentiated. Largely because it's gotten pretty expensive to train foundation models that compete with folks like open AI and Google, not as much anthropics, they do sort of less on the media side. But there's now, you know, a number of startups that have raised a bunch of money across different modalities as well as the big tech companies that are training models here. And so from a research perspective, it's harder than it used to be to, you know, train a new image or video or audio model scratch and like be a competitor in the market, which is not to say folks shouldn't do it, but I would say the bar has raised in terms of what folks expect in terms of differentiation, what your model can do that others can, that sort of thing. I think a lot of folks are now trying to compete at the app or workflow layer. And at first, the applications for these models were incredibly simple. It was like, you know, a text box prompt input and then you would get the output. And now there's a bunch of great services that host a ton of different models and they all offer, you know, text input to output. And so most people don't want to be competing on just offering the lowest price for every model or, you know, offering the fastest inference or things like that. And so they're really trying to think about how can I serve a certain user base better than anyone else can? Like what can I build product wise? How can I create features that really resonate with a particular audience? How can I go deeper into a particular type of creator or professionals workflow so that they have a real reason beyond price to stick with my platform? I would say that is the major challenge that everyone is thinking through right now and it's worth probably having a point of view on that if you're starting a new company today in the generative media space. - There are so many incredible creators out there who you can sell to, but also figuring out, you know, where the opportunities are because things changing all the time is the hardest part of the way it's where do you think the untapped opportunity is for a founder to build a defining company in this category? - I mean, I think most of the companies in this space initially targeted like the AI native creators, you know, folks like us who were early adopters of all of these tools who were using and sharing and posting about it who were reachable on platforms like X and Reddit. But I think there's a massive market of other people that are largely untapped who are less technically sophisticated who don't know every single tool out there and in some ways that's a benefit because if you get them on your tool and you get them to have a sticky workflow there like they're less fickle, they're less likely to turn and go to whatever they see the next day. I think there's a lot of opportunity and consumer that's honestly untapped like sort of the social layer of generating and sharing stuff is still almost entirely done on the existing incumbent platforms versus creating really fun and interesting compelling new playgrounds where consumers can make and share this sort of stuff. I also think types of content like microjamas are a great example where you need really specific things like and I saved ideas of characters with certain voices, saved sets like a sense of the right timing and pacing for a microjama in particular. Like that sort of knowledge in those features are gonna be different than a general video product. And then I think there are also a lot of opportunities in like vertical industries, things like architecture, things like design, marketing and ad industry is huge and is just starting to adopt AI. And so I think going into those markets that are not necessarily like the most AI native is an enormous opportunity right now. - It feels like there are so many opportunities found as good-go towards. I must feel is there gonna be like a robot equivalent for AI microjamas maybe? All of these AI tools where you can create ads and like a couple of minutes, I think it's been so interesting to see. We mentioned earlier on like presentations. Creators have to create slide decks and partial agreements and stuff that's kind of all now being done. I still think maybe where there is opportunity is actually just a typical create stack like running a creative business and just like all the day to day stuff you have to do. Like reaching out to podcast, potential sponsors, partnership agreements, like we just have to do this for it. And it feels like maybe there is still some opportunity there, but it's pretty hard. - For sure, I mean, yeah, there's so much work that is done beyond just the pure content creation side of it. I think a lot of the things you're talking about is more sort of the business, the tasks that today humans have to do whether it's research and outreach or whether it's creating and sending invoices or reviewing legal contracts or things like that. And obviously, big companies have a bunch of people who do those things, but for most creators, like they can't afford to have big teams who are taking care of all of that for them. And so every minute they spend on that sort of thing is a minute that they can't spend on creating content, which is generally what they like to do. So one of my takes is that AI agents are going to be particularly powerful for individual creators and small businesses just because they're so much more constrained, time-wise and resource-wise. And it's gonna be a massive step function improvement for them when they can spend much more of their time on their creation, their business, whatever they like to do, and less on all of this administrative and logistical type stuff. Have you tried any cool personal AI agents are you really excited about, and do you have one? - This is gonna sound like I'm showing. for an investment, but I was actually a user of this months before we invested. There's this new product called Town. It connects to your email and your calendar. And what I really like about it is it ingests all of this information about you. And then it proactively suggests things it can do for you. So most AI products, you're going to it and saying like, hey, can you set up this recurring workflow and describing exactly how it's done? Town looks at everything you've done and creates the description of what it needs to do and then asks if you can do it. One great example is I often get warm intros from other investors or other folks to companies. And one day, Town was just like, hey, I notice every time you get one of these, you send an email back thinking the referer, you move them to BCC, and then you loop in your EA Lauren to schedule a meeting. How about I just do that for you every time one of these warm intros you've agreed to comes in? Or like, I've noticed Friday nights at 11 p.m. you are forwarding in receipts that you get to your to Navon, your guys' expense provider. How about every time you get an email that's an invoice or receipt, I just auto-forwarded in for you and then sort it so it's not clogging your inbox. I think things like that I'm really excited for them to reach more people. - They just announce a fundraiser, right? - Yes. - This is almost what I feel we've been waiting for for the last two years. - Yeah. - And it feels like consumer tech intersecting AI is back. Consumer tech has always been, there's no opportunity. The returns have been super bad, but it feels like it's back. Where are you most excited about seeing consumer go next? - I always say it's super hard to predict consumer. It can only be observed just because it's consumer behaviors. It's very difficult to say even if you look at things like a TV show or music or a movie or a game, what is going to be the next major hit? I think you can see early signs though, just like you can see early signs of an indie songwriter rising up in TikTok and then eventually they become a big star. You can see signs from early adopters of these sorts of products of what the future might look like once everyone can get a hold of it. Like if something is a magical enough experience for the early adopters, it will likely continue to grow and spread. I mean, that's why we invested in town, like me and a number of other people on the team used it and we're just like, I think we see similar things for like texting, being able to text AI agents, for example, like a lot of people do not like having tons of apps on their phone and having to open an app and wait for it to connect and then send something to AI and then wait for the response to come back. Versus, go just on your phone and you're lost or you don't know when your next meeting is or you get some important email you missed and you can text your AI assistant or it can text you with products like POC or OLE, which is doing this for more kind of family and household management. And I think we saw the first wave of a lot of that kind of stuff with like OpenClaw honestly and the Hermes agent where really technical people were setting up super interesting things and finding a lot of value from it but the vast majority of users are not going to like get a Mac Mini or install the like Amphetamine thing on their Mac to keep it running all the time and go through the whole process of installing some open source project to set up their assistant and connecting the API key like there's still so much friction around that sort of thing that we have not yet reached the point where it's come to everyday consumers in a cool well packaged product. So I'm super excited to see that that wave kind of reach everyday people. - Yeah, and we have to remember a lot of these typical consumers, they're not that technically savvy right outside of San Francisco. I mean they probably don't know how to openClaw right. So when that becomes my GZM masterly widely adopted that is potentially the breaking point. - Yeah, I mean I think we saw something similar or generative media honestly where it's like before it required these really specialized skills to be able to make a good image or video or design or something like that and AI has really democratized that and I think we're gonna see something similar for code. Like a lot of what a lot of these agents are doing is they're writing some sort of code or some sort of ongoing workflow for people and running it for you. Just something that the vast majority of people like me included cannot do well on their own. - It's such an exciting time to be building. If you were to go and build a company tomorrow, what category would you build in? And I'm sure you for the better or you've got some ideas, you're maybe new to the other weekends. - You know, I'd never had the bug of like I have to go start a company. - I think like in general the good advice is probably start a company in a space that you know a lot about and you're really passionate about. So for me it would probably be either something in generative media or consumer agents. I just I think there's so much potential to build to bring the power of these models to consumers in consumer friendly interfaces. Like we have not at all reached sort of saturation in terms of the number of products that people will use. We're just so early like we don't even have kind of friendly accessible product experiences let alone like good brands or like great marketing for a lot of these AI products. And so I just think that's like a massively underserved space right now. I think there's a ton of really exciting things happening in B2B and on the infer side and sort of in research. I'm not a researcher or like I've never been like a kind of core B2B software person. So those are not my areas of expertise. So I would I would probably lean more on the consumer side of things. - There are also just so many incredible founders out there who people can like draw inspiration from. Any founders you really admire right now who are just building incredible things. - There's so many really fantastic founders right now. I think the 11 labs founders I will give a shout out to just 'cause we did this series A and a bunch around synth. So I've had the opportunity to work with them a bunch over time. And I think with all these AI products right now you sort of have to find like an initial wedge where you can get an attention and initial user base. And for 11 that was with a lot of random audio use cases. Like we talked to them a few weeks after they launched and it was like people making like voice overs for games or like people dumping audio bucks in like obscure languages or sort of interesting long tail use cases where you're like, I wonder what this is gonna be as a big company. Like I wonder who's that who's going to be using this. And then I think kind of co-developing like the research, the product and the go-to market, which is super hard to do so that they're all moving forward. So that as the models themselves get better they have these new product interfaces that can sort of capture and harness the value of the models. And then they can go and sell those to customers which at first was like largely consumers and prosumers but now is a lot of traditional enterprises. And expanding across categories like starting largely in the creative ecosystem media which is still a really big space for them. But then also exploring like where are the other places voices used and as voice agents became more popular. So to me they're sort of like how do you execute very well across all of these different categories at once? Staying focused on the core kind of keeping the models getting better and better but also not letting product or go-to market fall behind so that you can really take advantage of the opportunity in front of you. - I have so much respect for them. Mattie and Pietro to Polish founders from the tiny little country in Europe. They just cross five hundred million dollars I think and I'm kind of revenue and they're only a few years old so for respect to them. - Yeah, no it's remarkable working with them. They're like I think we knew that they were very special but it's also super fun to watch founders mature from like a team of maybe like 10 people when we invested to suddenly like hundreds of people at this company that they've created from nothing. Like it's when you kind of follow something like that. - Yeah, it's just truly remarkable. - You know, it was really annoying. I had a very similar idea to 11 labs about five years ago. There's a tweet somewhere out there where I said at some point how cool it would be for every creator in the world to translate their content into any language using their voice and at the time I was another VC fund and 11 labs came along. So I asked all of them, I'm really excited to see where they go next. - Me too. - Hey Justin, this has been amazing. Thank you so much, we've covered so much. I feel like now is the greatest time to build to be building but also anyone who's just interested in new media give it a go and get building some AI micro dramas. - Totally, yeah, I cannot wait to see all of the incredible content that's gonna be coming out over the next few months. - See what happens. Thank you so much for coming on the show here. - Awesome, thanks for having me. - Thanks for listening to this episode. of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X, A16Z, and subscribe to our substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only, and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party, and may include pay promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. 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