Happy Memorial Day weekend and happy start of summer! It’s down pouring here on the east coast so instead of pool time and BBQs, I am sipping tea and writing on a cold, wet, windy Sunday. Onto the letter…
Last week, we co-hosted with Delphi an event exploring how creators can scale themselves and their businesses in the age of AI. As you can imagine, this is a divisive topic but one that creators, or really anyone, cannot ignore. We heard from creators like Matthew Hussey and Gabby Bernstein about how they are, counterintuitively, using AI to combat deep fakes and IP misuse, and how the technology now makes being “good enough” not enough. Spoiler: when AI makes everyone “good”, you have to be freaking great at what you do to stand out or, at least, be niche enough where you don’t have competition.
We heard from Thomas and Julia Berolzheimer and Will Lasry about how they use AI to work 10x more efficiently and how it massively increases the upper bound on their business. And finally, Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s VP of Media Partnerships, shared what is really happening inside the organization post-Sora and TPBN acquisition, and why creators and consumers should switch (back) to ChatGPT from Claude… tl;dr Codex is getting really, really good.
This event is also coming on the heels of our two-day Creator Bot School (TM) in San Francisco, which both Thomas and Will said was a “turning point” for their understanding and use of AI tools. We plan to do an NYC installment of bot school later this summer so stay tuned for details.
If the last few months have taught me anything, it’s that there is so, so much opportunity ahead for creators with trust and community — and especially for those that are entrepreneurial and unafraid to harness the technology. I even wrote about this theme in our quarterly letter to Creator Fund LPs (our fund investors). In it, I attempt to paint the 30,000 foot view of the opportunity AI opens up for creators savvy enough to seize it.
Read the excerpt below:
Dear Limited Partners,
I’ve tried for a while to avoid writing about it but here we are. We have to discuss AI and creators. There are two things going on: one macro, about meaning and community; one micro, about what a single (non-technical) creator can now build.
On the macro side, many of you have read Sam’s piece about the impending meaning crisis from AI. The future that AI promises may deliver abundance, sure, but not meaning. Meaning and purpose are achieved through struggle and achievement – and in their absence, humans lose their sense of purpose and motivation. And because we are all human, happiness is relative, not absolute… even if your life gets objectively better with abundance, it will always feel way worse compared to those with more. The antidote, as Sam argues, is community. People fragment into narrower groups organized around interests and identities that provide deep connection and purpose. These serve as proto-religions, often with a single leader at their center and will only matter more in an AI abundant future. Religion itself is also coming back. Church attendance is up and much of the resurgence is being driven by individual leaders rather than institutional reach. Pastor Johnny Chang is the obvious example. He is an ex-gang member turned pastor with a community of more than three million people. He fills 5,000-seat venues for Gospel events, has a devotional app, and hosts live Bible classes and community prayer. John Mark Comer is another: a former Portland pastor who left a megachurch and has become one of the most influential voices in American Christianity for those under-40.
On the micro side, AI is transforming what a single creator or SMB entrepreneur can build. Last month, we hosted a two-day "Bot School" in San Francisco for creators. We gave them the AI starter pack, helped them scope projects, and taught them how to build using Claude Code in the terminal. By the afternoon of day two, every single creator had shipped at least one product spanning internal tools, agents wired into workflows, prototypes of subscriber apps, and more. It's the most concrete example of AI providing massive leverage to the non-technical class. The winners will be the ones with trust, distribution, and the willingness to point a model at a problem. Creators have all three.
AI is doing two things at once. It is simultaneously creating the demand for creator-led community and equipping creators to meet it, compete at scale, and build category-defining businesses on the other side.
Reach out if you want to talk more about this topic and stay in the know about other events we are hosting around it.
Happy MDW :)
— Megan