A.I. is going to save
healthcare. It's going to save education. I did a Pokémon Go map. We knew that every single company had
human tasks they needed to do. We kind of view Patreon as the
incumbent. Take all these creators and make them
tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm most proud of the fact that we've
changed creators entire lives. So, we're in the studio here today with
Lucy Guo. Lucy, you are considered one of the most
successful women in tech at only 28-years-old. Can you give us a little summary about
who you are, what you do, and how you got to where you are today? Yeah, so obviously, like you said, I'm
in tech. I've really done everything in tech,
from engineering to product design, to founding a company, to VC angel
investing. And now I'm starting a second company. So it's been really exciting. And I got here really, just through my
childhood, I'd say.
I got into engineering pretty early on,
because I was trying to find ways to make money on the Internet, and I
realized that you could sell in-game items on Neopets, Runescape, etc., for
like real cash on PayPal. So I did that. And I started building Internet
marketing tools where people built a bunch of websites where like, I wouldn't
say it was illegal streaming. What I did was, I would find episodes
that were unreleased, and then throw them onto a play button on top of an
unreleased screencap. And there'd be ads all over the
websites. So like, there was no piracy involved. But, it was tricking people into landing
on the website to get ad dollars.
How old were you when you started to
realize that you wanted to make money and have your own income? Yeah, I was getting in trouble in
kindergarten for selling Pokémon cards and colored pencils, etc. I had like my own little in real-life
business. And I was mowing lawns for money. But it wasn't until second grade, that I
actually figured out how to make money on the Internet. And this was because my parents took
away my cold hard cash. And I didn't really like it. Like no matter where I hid it, I could
put it inside pages of a Harry Potter book, and it would disappear.
So okay cool, none of my hiding places
are working. I discovered a thing called PayPal, and
back then you could open up a PayPal account with a Visa debit card. I wasn't able to withdraw the money into a bank. But most sites took PayPal, so I could
still buy all the things I wanted. Obviously now like this day and age,
we're getting more into having money on digital platforms and stuff like that. But you said you were in second grade. So when did you discover that this was
something that would be possible for you to achieve? I think I just was on gaming forums a
ton.
And I noticed that people were selling
like pets, neopoints, etc., for dollars. And everyone was receiving the money
inside PayPal. And that was how you paid. So I was like, okay, cool. How do I open a PayPal account? So I just got curious. And I was like, okay, awesome. This is a way that I can have money
digitally that my parents can't touch and steal for me. So you were in second grade, you learned
to code, what did you use to help teach yourself how to code? There are tons of online resources out
there. But I also remember that I would like go
to Fry's Electronics. And there was like an HTML book that was
this big or so that I asked my parents to grab. And then there are just tons of
resources on like, how to read JavaScript, etc. And, yeah, just through the Internet. And it was easy for you to understand at
such a young age, like nothing was confusing to you? I think the way I've always taught
myself to code and how a lot of other people do is they take like, a piece of
sample code and they start editing it right? And while you're reading and editing you
start understanding how it works.
I believe that's how they teach it in CS
schools as well. I don't really remember my CS program
too well. But there's so many online resources. Like if someone wanted to learn how to
code, I would literally say, go find, like, think of something you want to
build, go on GitHub. And the chances are it's already an open
source project. And you can just look through the code
and try to understand it yourself, modify it and learn that way. What did your parents think of all this
when you were so young and figuring out how to do it all by yourself? Yeah, my parents actually put a
keylogger on my computer. So they were really upset that I was
talking to internet strangers. They were like, this is dangerous. And I was like, I'm just trying to build
websites mom and dad. But they weren't too happy. And they thought that it was distracting
me from school, because I wasn't like a straight A+ student. I had a few A-. So yeah, they weren't the happiest
people.
And even when going to college, I would
say they initially didn't really want me to do CS. They're like, oh, you should go study
pharmacy because it's easier. I think I would have actually failed out
of like a pharmacy program, though, because I can't memorize things for my
life. Or like, I'm really bad at memorization. But yeah, they were just again, then you
can work three days a week and life will be comfortable and you'll make enough
money. And I was like, but that doesn't, that's
not interesting to me, right? So we got into a huge fight about it. It's interesting that you kept the same
interest from such a young age all the way until now. Because I know so many people throughout
their lives change what they want to do, even once they're in college. Take us through a little bit of your
journey of thinking about what you wanted to do in the long term.
Did you know, in second grade, that this
was something you wanted to continue to do? I would actually say I didn't know. I really want to study chemical
engineering, which is totally different. It was probably just because my AP Chem
teacher was my favorite or one of my favorites. And I was very good at chemistry. But I always knew I think I wanted to
build a company. And I like building products. So even though I ended up entering
Carnegie Mellon with a CS major, I picked up a HCI double major, and that's human computer interactions
for people that don't know, because I just really enjoyed creating
products and design. And I think during the process of
school, I went to a whole lot of hackathons, I realized that engineering
wasn't actually my passion. It was building products, and design was
my passion. So in that sense like yes, I always knew
I wanted to build a company. I didn't really know that, like, I was
gonna be programming or designing. Well, I was terrible at chemistry. So that's great that you were wonderful
at it, it was so confusing to me.
But your parents were both at one point,
engineers. So why do you think they were so
hesitant for you to take on this career that you're now in? Yeah, so I actually talked to my parents
about this. And my parents were, so my mom was the
only engineering student in her program. And they were just like, girls weren't
made to be engineers. Cool. Like, look, your mom was the only one in
the program even like, they're just
I have a very, very smart mom, right? genetically not capable, which is a
little confusing because it's, like, okay.
Who obviously, studied electrical
engineering and got, like, scholarship to come to the U.S. to get her. I think she was going for a Ph.D., but
then she had me, so she had to stop at Masters. It still blows my mind personally. But I think they're just like, looking
at it almost from the data standpoint. And they weren't thinking like, oh,
maybe it's a funnel. Like to them, it was just like, okay,
girls just can't. Right. Yes. Even though your mom made a successful
career through it, they were still worried about you, just because of the
way society frames women in STEM.
Did you go to college? If so, did you end up finishing college? What did your education like after high
school? Yeah, I did go to Carnegie Mellon. I double majored in CS and HCI. I'm four classes away from my CS major. And I think like another two classes or
so, for my minor. I'm not too sure to be honest. So I had like, a semester, one or two
semesters left, depending on how much I wanted to complete. But I ended up dropping out. Why did you drop out? Did something else come along? What opportunities were you given? So in high school, I got connected to
the Thiel Fellowship.
And then eventually, I reconnected to
them. And they were like, hey, you should
submit an application. I was like, uh, why not? I had a lot of projects that I could
use, because I was going to hackathons every single weekend at this point. And it just like, I felt like I was
learning more at these hackathons than in school. So when I got the Thiel Fellowship, I
was just, like, okay, cool. I'm just gonna go and explore the real
world. And to me, it wasn't really a risk,
because I could always go back to school. And I also had job offers lined up
already. So I wasn't too worried about I guess,
like, the worst case. Yeah. How does it work? You know, because a lot of the times
jobs nowadays are, you need a bachelor's degree in order to
start the job.
And you were saying that you already had
jobs lined up, even though you didn't finish school. What kind of job opportunities were you
receiving before you decided to take the Thiel Fellowship? Yeah, I had software engineer job
offers, product design job offers, from like, quite good companies with offer
packages, I actually can't say out loud. But I will say it's much higher. They were much higher than new grad
packages. And what was interesting was that I was
being told by recruiters that if I graduated college, there's kind of like
a, like level one, level two, whatever system where they can only give you like
a mass comp package. But it was such a unique scenario that
they didn't have to do that with me. So that was pretty interesting, I
thought. But, because I think computer science
and product design are very technical jobs, people don't really look at your
background. If you can pass an engineer view test,
then you're in. The good college, like puts your foot in
the door. And I had that from just even being
close to finishing.
But I think that if you're a nobody, a
lot of these companies will have programming challenges set up online. And if you complete it, then you're
guaranteed an interview. What are some of your favorite projects
that you created before you moved on to Scale AI and Passes? I would say I did a Pokémon GO map. And this is actually a thing that YC
wanted us to pivot into, instead of working on Scale, that hit like 5
million users within a week.
And all it did was if you saw a Pokémon,
you could add it to the map. It was quite crazy, actually. People were running around using it. My friend was in the middle of nowhere,
like in the middle of the country at a wedding and he was like, yeah, like people are
using the Pokémon Go map. Were you seeing other apps like that at
the time, or was this something that you just thought of off the bat? Yeah, I think there were maybe two or
three other maps out there. Ours had a really slick app though, so
it was getting a lot of downloads. Okay, so there was, I don't know who did this. But someone took our website and just
put it in a web view, and then launched it as a paid app on the App Store.
And it ended up becoming a top 10 paid
app or something. It was insane. I was like, this is crazy. We could have done that. But it's fine. So going back to the to Thiel
Fellowship. That has mentored several other
millionaires, what would you say is the most important thing that you learned
from that experience? I think your network is your net worth. And what the Thiel Fellowship does, is,
it puts you into a group of very, very smart people.
And they might not necessarily have made
it in life yet. But then there's tons of other smart
people that are older that will want to mentor you. And that's what's really helped because
you are the average of the five people you hang out with most. And everyone thinks you're a prodigy,
even though you may not be. And because of that, you get the
smartest people in all of Silicon Valley, pouring resources into helping
you succeed. And then you also get a head start,
right? Where, let's say you dropped out and
you're like two years younger than everyone else. That already is quite impressive to
like, the outsider's eyes. And the people that aren't in tech are
like, oh my god, like, let me help you.
Let me invest in you. It's just easier to do things. Now we're gonna move on to a little bit
about what you've been creating in the tech world. How old were you when you created Scale AI? I believe I was 21 when I first started
Scale AI. I know you started with Alexander, can
you explain to us what that process was like? And how you guys decided you wanted to
move forward and create this company? Yeah, definitely. I think while we were both in Korea, we
were just like, hey, let's do YC, one of these days. And then he went back to MIT. And then I got poached by Snapchat. We were just building things on the
side, I had the itch to like start a company again. So first, we tried class pass for
clubbing, that didn't work.
And then we were doing this health care
app, Ava. And then I ended up meeting one of our
first investors in LA. And he was just like, hey, I want to put
in a million dollars, around the same time we got into YC. So I ended up only letting him put in, I
think it was $100,000. But that ended up being a great
investment. He got in at a great grab valuation.
So yeah, we did YC. And then during YC, we realized that our
health care app just wasn't working. But something that we were getting
annoyed of was that we were calling doctors on a phone all day. And we were just like, man, it would be
really nice to have an API be able to just like ping someone to do this for
us. And then our roommate was like, oh, an
API for humans. And literally when he said that, I was
like, that sounds controversial as hell. And like, my whole thing is, I think
that controversy is what makes things go viral.
So I immediately knew that if we
launched a product that said API for humans, it would go viral essentially. So we threw up a landing page for that,
and then launched it on product hunt. It was like a top three product. And then immediately, we had like VCs
reaching out to us asking to invest. We weren't even sure whether to work on
it or not, though. Our YC partners, were trying to get us
to work on a Pokémon Go map that I had built like a week earlier. But, when we got our first term sheet,
we decided to stick with the product. So you just went into a little bit about
how you guys decided to create Scale AI.
You tried to do health care and it
didn't work out. Was there any other reason why you guys
want to start Scale AI? I know you mentioned there was a little
bit of a gap in the market for pinging these doctors. So how annoying was it? We knew that every single company had
human tasks they needed to do. We weren't actually sure at that point
in time, like what tasks those would be. But we essentially emailed out every
single YC company. We were not supposed to do this, but I
scraped like every single company that went through YC. And then just, through a combination of
names, you can figure out the right email. Usually, you know, it's like first name,
last name @company.com. Or first name, dot, last name. Or first name @. But if you're emailing directly, the
CEO, CTO, whatever, it's always the first name. It's very rarely not. So just combine combinations of
potential emails and send it out to every single person and got some
responses back.
And Cruise ended up being one of our
first larger customers. And that's when we were like, oh, self
driving cars, it's actually a huge market, they have a lot of money to
spend. So they say that, if you find something
working, you should double down on it. So we double downed on that market after that. Awesome. Do you happen to know what Scale AI is
valued at today? So I know on secondary markets, its back
up to $7.29 billion. I know that when Forbes recently did an
article, they were valuating it on their own. But generative A.I. has done very well. And I think that it is honestly the
future.
So yeah, like, I think that A.I. is
considered hot within the tech market and it's going to go back back up in
value. And are you still making money off of
Scale even though you're no longer working there? Yeah, so the majority of my net worth is
in equity in Scale. So yes and no. It's not liquid, but like, it's there. You just said that you think A.I. is
hot, it's going to be the future. What are your current thoughts of A.I.
as a whole? I think that a lot of people are worried
about A.I. destroying the world, etc. But I really just think it's how you use
it. So good actors will use A.I. to empower
what they're doing. And bad actors might use A.I.
To attempt
to destroy the world. But in general, I think it's very
positive for society. Do you think there's a way to stop the
bad actors before it gets too late, as some people might say? I think that there are safeguards you
could put in place. So yes, in that sense. I think it's going to be more like
regulation. What would you say to someone who is
worried about A.I. and is scared of the possibilities of it, you know, harming
humans? I would say that we definitely need to
figure out legal regulations, but I think it's just going to be net positive
in the world. Technology has always increased, like,
the economy, lifestyle, etc. And I think that A.I. is one of those
technologies that's really going to make everyone's jobs easier. If you think about it, A.I. is going to
save healthcare. It's going save education. I think that drivers are going to be
killing less people. I think that education is going to be
more targeted. And this is something I'm also kind of
passionate about. Where I believe that all kids can be
prodigies.
So if you find out what they love early
on enough, teach them do it. Maybe I'm biased, but, I think like the
average five-year-old can do algebra. But, right now in kindergarten, we're
just teaching them to like, I don't know, color butterflies. So yeah, I'm really excited about like
that, specifically. I think health care too. You're going to be able to diagnose
illnesses sooner. I think it's gonna benefit so much of
the world that we should be careful. But that I think that we should let the
technology like thrive and put safeguards in place. Right, because there are some tech
leaders right now voicing their concerns over the technology and A.I. and
generative A.I., do you have any concerns for where the
future of the technology is headed? Honestly, I'm not too worried. As long as like the right people are
putting things in place. And like a thriving job that will happen
is A.I.
Ethics, where people are going to be hired to solve these problems. Right. I mean, I'm already seeing people
posting on LinkedIn, we need experts in A.I., stuff like that. So that's what you're referring to, in
that sense? Got it. Okay, so now, we're going to move into a
little bit about what you're doing today. So you moved on from Scale, and you went
on to create Passes for creators to connect exclusively with their fans. Can you briefly describe what Passes is
as an entire company? As an entire company, I would say, we
view creators as small businesses, and we want to make them into large
businesses.
So at the moment, we think that brand
deals are going to just like… brand deals aren't a reliable source of
income. So the best way creators can, I guess,
like monetize or like make their living is via their fans. We kind of view Patreon as the
incumbent. But we've noticed that like, Patreon
doesn't necessarily like build community with the fans. Fans need to feel like they're your
friend. So we decided a really good CRM system
was the best way to do this. So we've made it really, really easy to
scale personalized interactions. And then from there, we're actually
working on A.I.
Features, obviously. Where we're creating A.I. doubles of
creators, so people can like interact with their favorite creator, even if
they can't afford the real time. You can imagine, it was like $5 a
message to talk to your favorite creator, but it's like 10 cents a
message to talk to an A.I. version. Which surprisingly, a lot of people are
very happy with the A.I. versions. And then from there, we want to get into
brand deals, etc. I kind of see the future as like
creators not creating content anymore, and selling their likeness instead.
So a brand like Celsius, for example,
can pay a lot less money for a creator to take videos, or to generate deep fake
videos of a creator holding the Celsius can. And as long as they don't dilute their
brand too much by selling it to everyone, everyone should be making more
money. Does it become an issue when fans are
talking to an A.I. replica instead of the human version of the creator? I think it's very important to be 100%
transparent. So I think it would be an an issue if we
weren't transparent. But because we are transparent, not an
issue at all. People are playing around with A.I.
chatbots all the time. What I am worried about though, is that
the technology is going to get very good, and people are going to create chrome
extensions, or their own side apps or bots to chat as like their real profile.
And that might be a mess in the future,
like on every single platform really, because that's when you start losing
trust in the creator. And long term that's not great for
community. And how do you think we can regulate the
technology to make sure something like that doesn't happen? There is not really a way to do that. People are already making… like people are raising money. I know companies have raised several
million dollars to specifically create chat bots to pretend to be like the real
human and talk to them on like OnlyFans, right? Character A.I. is doing very well. I think there's definitely a niche for
loneliness, like solving loneliness.
I think that there's money in that, but
like, what you need to be careful about is, will brands care that you are going a
more sexual route, for example. Because, like right now, if you're on
OnlyFans, you're probably not going to be getting brand deals. And this is a concern a lot of people
have. You can't go on reality TV shows. Like Netflix doesn't even want you. You can't be a model, modeling agencies
will drop you etc, etc. So it really is like, what you're going
for, I'd say. There's a lot of money to be made still,
like maybe you'd end up making like 10 million a year, and it doesn't matter that you're not
getting brand deals anymore. I think that for what we're doing, we
still think that the money is in being able to like do UGC content with deep
fakes.
So, it's really like the creators
choice. Right now we've chosen to go a very non
sexual route. And it seems to be making a lot of
money. So, yay. How do you make sure that content
through Passes isn't going through the barrier of being sexual? How do you make sure that it's
appropriate? So we put every single image through
A.I. and make sure there's no nudity, etc. There's a lot of like, things that are
censored. If you're a guy and you're trying to
type something inappropriate, it's not going to send. So I know you mentioned a little bit
about brand deals and the influencing market, were there people that were
coming to you that were complaining maybe about like brand deals and
connecting with fans? Yeah. So I basically noticed two things. When Patreon was a $4 billion company
and their product did not focus on what matters, which is being able to like have that
one- to-one feeling of interaction with your fans. I think Twitch actually does this really
well, where like they like mass scale it, but
it feels one-to-one when like, you know, you get a shout-out because you tipped.
So we totally copied Twitch's live
streaming, but it's a little different. A live stream is like a big moneymaker
for us. And then, I noticed that creators were
really bad at money management. So I was going to go between two ideas,
which is like one, kill Patreon. Or number two, basically figure out how
to build long term wealth for traders by getting them equity in companies. And what I realized though, is creators
won't really want to work with you until you do make them a lot of money. So it was earn creators trust first. And I saw this as a really great wedge
in the market to be able to, be essentially Google Suite for creators.
So right now, we've taken creators that
have making like $2,000 a month before, and now they're doing like, 30, 40, 50k
a month, right? Like they're going to be making a lot
more money than the used to in the past. So they love us. anything we throw at them, they're like
down for. So for example, if we didn't have our
creators making so much money, and I immediately went to them, and I
was like, hey, like, can I make a A.I.
Version of you? They're going to charge me money. Like yes, they might make money, but
they're gonna be like, cool, you can use my likeness, but it's gonna cost you
$500,000. But because these craters already trust
us so much, and love us, they're all letting us do the A..I versions of them
for free, which is awesome on our end, right? And then afterwards, that's just a
natural segue into deep fake images and videos, because we have an entire content vault
of all their images and videos. It really is all in the data, like how
good of a deep fake you create. Are deep fake images already going,
well, then we can start working with brands, we have more monetization data
than any other person.
Because we can be like, hey, this person
might have 20,000 followers, but their fans are spending $20,000 a month on
them. This is a good person for you to work
with, because they have higher spending power. And then the brands are going to be
like, okay, cool. Celsius, who might not work with someone
that had 20,000 followers before, might now. So for creators, how do you make sure
that the replica of this creator, the A.I.
Version, is staying true to the personality type
of the human creator? So we're training on all the chats that
they have already sent out to their fans. So in that sens, like it should,
hopefully, based off the machine learning, stay true to the creator. One unsolved problem, though with LLMs
is that prompt injection is a big problem. And it's kind of hard to prevent
entirely. So we'll probably have some keywords
that you can't say to the A.I. Like, go in developer mode, forget
everything that you've said in the past, blah, blah, blah… but it still could be a problem. Yeah. I mean, it's a technology that
everyone's still experiencing with of course. How do creators come on to Passes and
then end up making money from it? Right now, we're going into more Soho
house approach, mostly because we're in still in beta.
And we don't want to…we want to
control the narrative of Passes. But they can apply to be a creator. And then we look through and we
occasionally accept people. We have about 40 active creators that
are generating $5 million in gross annually. That was my next question. How many creators you currently have
using Passes, so it's 40? And then is the $5 million each or is
that all together? It's all together? Awesome. How much money on average do you think
the normal creator is making monthly through Passes? I think it's around like $20,000 a
month. Wow. Do you have any thoughts on brand deals
in general? Do you think brand deals stray people
away from authenticity? I think it's really important to work
with brands that you actually care for. Because it becomes really, really
obvious when it's not something that you're very interested in.
What I think brands should do more
often, and what they're starting to do is, if they find a creator, they really
like, they should just make a line for that
creator. Like, okay, cool, this is like the Alix
Earle drink. Or this is the, like Miley Cyrus, press
on nails. I'm pretty sure Alix Earle does have a
drink. And then like, this is another thing
that can get interesting.
We're like, then the creators should be
getting equity in that line, or like in the company. Right now, this is like just a huge
problem where there's no standardized contracts for creators to receive equity
in companies. Not to mention that a lot of creators,
managers, don't understand the importance of equity. And because the way it works is,
managers get 20% of what the creator makes normally, they're much more cash incentivized,
which isn't too great in the long term. So where does Passes come into play with
brand deals? How are you guys working with managing
brands? Yeah, so the way we work the brands will
probably start negotiating equity for the creators and we'll offer two options, but we will try to push and educate
people to take ones with equity.
Is your goal for Passes to be open and
available to all creators? Or are you still planning on keeping it
at the application only basis? Yeah, so the goal is to open it to all
creators. But I am worried because I'm pretty sure
OnlyFans did start off as a porn website. But there are a lot of people that say
it didn't and that wasn't their intention.
But what generally happens is that like,
if people find a website that's taking a low percentage, we only take 10%, for
example, they want to move all their content
there. And we don't want it to be known for
adult content, because it kind of prevents us from
executing the long term vision. That being said, like Patreon, 50% of
the revenue is for not safer work. And I think they're able to have not
safer work because they started off with like extremely safer work. So I guess the goal is that, like, if we
can have enough niches on there, where adult content won't take over, then
like, that's when we would like probably allow for it to happen.
Because like, I do think that we
shouldn't like, completely block off a whole segment of creators. But like, my ideal scenario is kind of
like Twitter, where a politician like a president could be fundraising on the
website, and interacting with like their fans. And a porn star could also be on there. But that's just like not possible in
like where we're at right now. Right. You're still developing, you're
in beta mode.
So we go that. What is the benefit for fans if they
were to come on and use Passes? They get to talk to their favorite
creator. It's like, if you are a fan, DMing your
favorite creator, you're probably going to end up in the other inbox and never
get a response. Now that you have tipped $100, you're
probably going to be around the top of the inbox list. And you're most likely going to get a
response like 99.9% and that's exciting for people. You can do like one-to-one FaceTime
calls, audio calls, you could live stream with them etc, etc. It's just really a way for both the
creators and fans to have closer relationships. A lot of our music artists, for example,
on Passes, they'll launch all their music earlier on Passes. So their super fans get to get the sneak
peek at music before everyone else. And essentially, you know, in this day
and age creators are technically like celebrities to most people that are
using apps and TikTok and are fans of certain influencers.
The impact I want it to have on the
creator community is essentially take all these creators and make them tens of
millions or hundreds of millions of And actually grow them into large
businesses. dollars. So I think if you look at the creators
that are the most successful, if we define success based off of like, both
like brand and wealth. The ones I've done the best have created
their own companies. They created their own drinks, they
created their own restaurants, food lines, etc. Like they are entrepreneurs. But most
creators aren't thinking of themselves as entrepreneurs today.
So we want to take them and actually
make them into entrepreneurs. Like you either have a manager who's
only getting you cash or you have a manager that's thinking innovatively and they are helping you start like Mr.
Beast restaurant, or Feastables or Prime drink. You have managers that are like helping
you get VC funds like Cary because now a lot of creators are investing. Which is actually smart because we can
easily squeeze into the best deals by just going like, hey, I'm Dixie Damelio,
let me in. I was going to say that the Damelio's
are like a perfect example of Charlie Damelio Dunkin drink. Then they have a footwear company and
they have their own show. Yeah, and I think the best managers are
like really working at this and realize this. Like Mr. Beast's manager, he's very
good. He's also a friend. And he was just like, yeah, like, I want
all my creators to create products, because that's the way you actually are
successful. And like Mr. Beast realizes this now,
which is why he's focusing all his energy on Feastables.
But most managers aren't thinking this
way for creators. So we kind of want to help them develop
their small businesses into large businesses.
Right. So is Passes, essentially, if a creator
comes onto Passes, are they getting a manager with them at Passes, or it does Passes work with the current
management that they already have? We currently work with the current
management. And we don't want to replace managers
per se, but we want to enhance managers by making their jobs easier. Because managers right now are like
manually emailing out brands, etc, we can bring that to them. But we also want to help managers
understand like why equity, for example, is so important. We also want to be able to help them
negotiate better deals, because right now, the only monetization data… brands are guessing based off of your
Instagram demographics and your views, right? But when you actually have that
monetization data, like, hey, we have 1,000 fans paying $10 a month, that's
interesting.
I would say in one year, we really want
a deep fake technology to be good enough to actually be used for UGC content and
brands. Just because, from what I've seen, like
creators are just very limited on time. And even with like Passes content, if
they uploaded one more selfie a day, they could probably double their income. I just think that, I love my creator
friends. Selfies obviously, like that sounds
quick, right? I realized it takes them another hour to
FaceTune or whatever. So that's where like the time
consumption is going. So it's like, okay, cool. We could fix the content issue. And allow them to work on more because
of time, or just make more because of time that
just like frees up a ton. Maybe in a year, we'll even be able to
like start helping them white label products.
We'll probably end up partnering with
companies to do that, that makes the most sense. But ideally, by then we'll have like,
our contract in place that's more standardized and being used around the
industry to get both cash and equity. And what would you say is the response
you're getting from fans that are chatting with these A.I. replicas of
humans? Are they okay with it? Yeah, I think it's a different set of
fans, where like, there are fans that want to talk to the
real human being and are willing to spend more.
And there fans, like find it novel to
talk to the A.I. replica or just want to get like an A.I. voice
note, for example, and then they're willing to pay less for one. I do think that like, it's super
important to be transparent that things are A.I., right? But yeah, I think that there's a subset
of fans are okay with it. And you see that with, I mean, A.I.
girlfriends or boyfriends. You basically answer that in itself. That people who are okay with A.I. would
be paying less than the actual person. What are you most proud of at Passes so
far? I'm most proud of the fact that we've
changed creators entire lives. Like, literally we have creators that
when I say most of our creators came in making 2-5k a month, and now they're doing 30-50k a month,
that's like game changing for them.
They'll tell us wow, like I just made my
entire yearly income in this month. Like this is incredible. They're so happy. And like they're able to use that money
to like reinvest into like their music careers, for example. We have a lot of influencers that are
also pop stars, EDM artists etc. And like honestly, touring and making
music is really expensive. Having to collab with another DJ
orcollab with another artist, that cost a lot of money as well. I have friends who selll out 6,000
person shows, and they lose money on tour, because touring is just that
expensive. Sowe're really able to help them
reinvest in themselves and upgrade their lifestyles. Are they seeing an increase in fan
growth through Passes? So they've all said that, like their
community feels tighter than ever.
And the thing is that when you have a
community of people that are obsessed with you, they make more noise. They're the loudest people right, in the
room, people get curious. And then you start turning these normal
fans into superfans too because of all the noise that's happening. Would you say creators are excited about
using Passes? And how many applications do you have
right now that you have to go through and see who you can accept and who you
can't accept? We definitely have thousands which is
kind of incredible given how small we are. I would say like, overall, yes. And I
think that with the A.I. hype, right now, we have a lot of creators that are
very excited. I get pinged every single day, like,
hey, is my A.I.
Versions done. We're doing it one by one to like,
really train the model on each person. So I'm like, oh, no, you're like number
like 20 in the line. How long do you see Passes in beta for? I'm hoping that we get out of beta by
end of year. But we really need to, it's a very complicated product. And we don't have a good onboarding
flow. There's a lot you can do with it that
other companies don't offer. But because of that, people aren't
setting up their profiles correctly. So what I'm doing right now is I'm
manually hopping on a Zoom with every single person and walking them through
how to use every single feature. And I'm checking their profiles before
they like announce that they're on Passes. But that's obviously not scalable. It just hasn't been on top of our
priority list to onboard more people. We just want to make our current
creators more money.
So most creators are making more money
every single month, which is a good metric for us. Yeah, that's an amazing outlook to have. And it's great that you're wanting to
help creators and finding the best scenario for them. Do you have any plans on what you hope
to conquer next? Actually before I asked that question, I
had one more about Passes. How many employees do you currently have
at Passes? We're nine full time. Wow. Think big picture, Passes, 10 years down
the line. How many employees Do you think that you
would have to have? Honestly, I love running things very
lean. So my ideal scenario is we never really
go above 300. But who knows? Everyone always says they run lean.
But I've been very good at building fast
and running lean. So we'll see. Do you currently have any passion
projects that you're working on? I'm just working on Passes. I wish I had time. How many hours a week do you think you
have to work right now because of passes? I don't know. I feel like I'm working 14 to 16 hour
days to be honest. Besides Passes and Scale, do you have
any other A.I. technologies that you really like to use? I use ChatGPT quite a lot. I would say that like if I'm having a
creative block or even if I get a question and I'm just too lazy to
Google. So it has accurate responses incredibly
quick. I just think one important thing to
remember is that it really is just predicting the output of like what you
want, right? So like, it can start saying ridiculous
things especially if you prompt, inject it.
Where it can be like okay, cool, butter
is the best structure to like, build a building. And then you ask it like how to build a
building, it is going to tell you to use butter..
