From Journalism Startup to Blockchain Innovator: My Decade-Long Journey Solving Tech & Content Problems

As a seasoned entrepreneur, I've navigated the twists and turns of building startups, from overcoming cash crunches to achieving inflection points, and now I'm on a mission to revolutionize the intersection of content and technology with Story.

1. The speaker is a serial entrepreneur who has been focused on solving problems at the intersection of technology and content for over a decade.
2. Their first company, Byline, was a crowd-funded journalism platform that aimed to create a space for independent journalists and reporters to pitch stories directly to readers.
3. The advertising-driven model for news and journalism was collapsing, leading to many independent journalists becoming unemployed, which motivated the creation of Byline.
4. After facing challenges with funding and demand, the speaker pivoted their focus to fiction content and launched Radish, a mobile serialization platform for episodic, serialized content.
5. This shift was inspired by the trend of smartphone reading in Korea, Japan, and China, where people read serialized content on their phones.
6. The speaker saw an opportunity to bring this business model to the US, as people were still using Kindle devices for ebooks instead of smartphones at the time.
7. After launching Radish, they moved their startup from London to Silicon Valley and managed to secure funding from well-known investors like Greylock and Lowercase Capital.
8. Despite initial success with $10k in monthly revenue, it took several years for the company to see significant growth or an "inflection point."
9. The speaker emphasizes that every startup is an overnight success but takes a long time to achieve, often happening on the 2,000th or 3,000th night rather than the 500th.
10. Navigating this stagnant period can be challenging due to the uncertainty of when growth will occur.
11. The speaker's own experience with a cash crunch led them to take out loans against their personal credit and rely on friends for financial support.
12. They stress the importance of being pessimistic in the short term but optimistic in the long term, as great startups can take 5-9 years or more to develop.
13. The speaker had the opportunity to interview Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, who spoke about a much larger scale problem than their own: the rise of surveillance and AI systems controlled by
14. After selling Radish in 2020, the speaker started Story to tackle the mission they initially set out to accomplish with Byline: addressing the collapse of journalism and media industries.
15. They recognized that creating a transformative company with massive societal impact was essential during their 20s or early 30s, similar to successful entrepreneurs who founded trillion-dollar com
16. Story aims to maximize the empowering effects of social media and AI while minimizing the harmful impacts on creators' content and intellectual property (IP).
17. The company envisions a "defensive vision" for helping creators protect their IP and receive fair compensation, as well as an "offensive vision" that empowers creators to fully utilize technology
18. By turning the internet into an "IP Lego," where creators can use each other's content as building blocks while providing fair compensation and attribution, a digital Renaissance of creativity cou

Source: EO via YouTube

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