YouSaid · the spoken record

Karen X Cheng

lines on the record: 95
first: 2022-11-09
most recent: 2022-11-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, and that's a great insight. It's like you can make something go viral, but it's a one off and people aren't necessarily going to be inspired to continue to hear from you. Or you can continue to put out positive content in each piece of positive content isn't going to get as many views, but you will kind of form a more long-term relationship in people's minds. And there's actually this really incredible quote that I saw a while ago, and it actually changed a lot of how I think about things as a content creator doing social media. And I don't remember who said it, but the quote is seek respect, not attention. It lasts longer. I was like,”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because I was just curious. I mean, you mentioned news as an example. Pessimism sells, right? Clickbait sells. It captures your attention. Fear is like a very natural human emotion. But I do wonder if, to your point, more optimistic creations endure, right? So like people follow you because they're like, Karen is this inspiring person. She's learned all these technologies. She's creative. So they view you as truly this creator that they more so want to be like instead of, I think pessimism sometimes is quite surface level, right? It does capture your attention, but you're not inching to go back to hear from that creator, right? It's very like transient.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think on a one-off basis, each thing is less viral. There are many pieces where I was like, if I had written the headline in a more controversial way, it would have gone bigger. But I definitely think long-term, it's a better strategy for me to Consistently put out positive stuff so people associate that with the content I'm putting out.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, since I no longer care about growing my followers, which was very freeing for me, it's like, well, I actually don't have to do this quickbait thing. I actually don't have to try to get the most views by doing this controversial AI stuff. I actually can just make like wholesome, positive, fine creative uses of it. Because if it is a technology that can be used for good or for bad, like why not, you know, it's more rewarding for me to make it for good, even if it's less viral. Oh well. Doesn't matter.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just going to freak people out. And I do think there are reasons to be worried about AI. I think there are very many legitimate ones. And it will negatively impact some people more than others. But AI is a technology. It can be used for good. It can be used for bad. And I think it clicked that like every gravitational force for the media is going to push towards the bad because that is what's going to get more clicks and engagements and views. And what's not the natural gravitational force is to actually think of ways to use AI for good. And so I was also in this turning point in my career where I just spent two years optimizing for growing followers and I finally sort of let go of that. And I was like, what would it look like if I stopped trying to grow my followers? What would it look like if I actively stopped trying and just made like what I wanted to make? And I was like,”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had to unlearn a lot of my bad habits in terms of I am a trained viral video creator, and so in many ways I'm trained very similar to the way a reporter would be, which means that I'm rewarded for making clickbait headlines. And so when all this AI stuff came out, my first instinct was like, ooh, let me make a bunch of human versus AI. Like, let's have the AI do something and the human do something and let's have judges critique and say which one's better. That was my first instinct to do that. And then I realized, like, well, what is that just going to do? That's just going to.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That reminds me of something I want to discuss with you, which we've actually talked about before in a call we had, which is the perception of AI. So there's almost two framings, and I know this is overly simplistic, but on one side, there's human versus AI or human versus machine. It's like an age-old trope. And then there's another, which is human plus AI, right? Which is more optimistic. It's like, whoa, like what can we do with this partnership? And you've told me that you feel almost a responsibility to portray this technology, these tools in a certain way, maybe even, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but more of this optimistic versus pessimistic doomsday lens. So can you just speak to why you feel that responsibility or almost how you think AI should be portrayed or how you want to portray it?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% the second one, it does feel like a collaboration. And so you oftentimes get things you don't expect. You're like, oh, I didn't think of that. Let me go down that rabbit hole now more.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back, and you're like, no, no, no, that's not what I want. You have a vision. But if it's more bi-directional, did you get a sense of like gave it a prompt? You got something back and you go, whoa, I didn't even think of that, but I like that. So was it more unidirectional or was it more bidirectional?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's almost just reshaping the like skill ecosystem. And some people who have invested in skills for many decades, if they were just like an A plus oil painter. Unfortunately for them, that skill is somewhat being replaced by this technology. And it reminds me a little bit of, you know, if we use like Uber as an example, like some of those taxi drivers had invested in their taxi license for many, many years. And so there's kind of a parallel there. Doesn't mean it's bad or good, but it is just a fact that these AIs are like, as you said, almost cherry-picking skills and dropping them on the rest of the population. And it's this great experiment to see what comes out of that. I also kind of want to hear from you as you worked with these AIs. Was there any aha moments or did you feel like it was truly a back and forth process or did you feel like it was unidirectional? And let me explain what I mean by that. If it was unidirectional, you're basically giving the AI prompts. You're seeing what comes.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They actually do have the talent to be able to describe what's in their imagination and continue to refine until they get the result they want. So a lot more people are going to be empowered to be artists. There will still be the standouts and the extraordinary people because they're going to be the ones who are finding different or creative or innovative ways to do it as much innovation as there is, there's always going to be the ability to combine things in new ways or find the latest. So I definitely think that there's going to be a lot more artists, a lot of unhappy artists, a lot of happy artists, and also still stand out artists.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think that what this is going to do, what AI art is going to do is it's going to significantly lower the barrier to entry to become an artist. To be an artist right now, you have to have a lot of time, a lot of training. Sometimes the monetary financial need means to be able to do that, or the willingness to be like a starving artist to do it, or it's a hobby on the side. There's definitely a barrier to being an artist. And now it's like everyone can do it. I almost liken these image synthesizers like Dolly, your midjourney to like a Peter Pan. But instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it takes the artistic skill of artists and it gives it to everyone. Like, here you go. You know? And so I do think that a lot more people are going to be empowered to be artistic.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a tool, as you said. But the reason I asked if you were fungible is because I just really wonder how this progresses in terms of we know it's going to be somewhat of a democratizing force because now a bunch of people who like couldn't paint or couldn't do Photoshop in certain ways can now do it and create all of this art or these outputs. But I do wonder then does that make a lot of people really successful or a lot of people really capable or does it still surface the very, very best to the top right where there's a different filter and now the filter is prompt engineering versus painting or drawing or singing or whatever it might have been in the past? So do you think that's still the case where you're still going to see these like outliers who are just so much better than the rest? Or do you think it'll be more of a level playing field than what we were seeing before?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hired her to do this Pearl earring, and when she showed me hers. I was just like moved to tears almost, like jaw drop. I was like, that is what you made. And so I felt like she was irreplaceable in this. I mean, I could have hired 10 different artists to do this pearl earring and gotten 10 very different results. And what I like about this example is that everyone is starting with the same source image. And so it's almost establishes like a little bit of like a control for it. And so I think this is the perfect case study for like, hey, different humans get very different results with AI.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I made a video a while back where I imagined her in a library and she was holding a book. And I was like, I want her to be an educated woman. And so I made that. And then I actually am working with a project with OpenAI actually right now. It's one that they commissioned. It's not out yet, but it will probably be out by the time this podcast releases. So if you go on my Instagram on Caranexchen, you'll be able to go and see this filter. We made this Instagram filter where we expanded these famous paintings. And you can actually go inside through them and see these famous paintings. And I looked at my girl, the Parliamentary, and I was like, this can be done better. And so I hired August Camp, who is the person who taught me about this method. And she has spent way more time in Dolly than I have. She's so artistic and talented.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of people would have been able to make a really good Cosmo cover. The people who would have done it best are people who have a good artistic eye, have the kind of the patience and the motivation to keep going and keep refining on the prompt and who can describe what they see in their head. And so a lot of these people are not necessarily traditional artists. I think a lot of people could have made a really, really good result. There's actually an example that I have that we can show on screen. I a while ago wanted to expand the girl with a pearl earring. So you may have seen one thing that you can do that was actually just announced is you can expand paintings in Dali and so you can basically take a famous painting and then imagine what was all around it. So you can take like the Mona Lisa and imagine like where was she? You can take the girl with the pearl earring, imagine everything that was around her.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little easier to do back then. Yeah, and I think it's, I don't know if they think they may have changed their business model recently or their pricing, but I saw an article that this woman was basically creating like a llama dunking a basketball. So we'll pull that up too. But I think that one took 100 iterations. And I think it was like around $13 with that pricing. So that gives you an idea. And as you said, it'll depend. But I think the maybe more interesting question is how fungible was Karen in that process. And I don't want this replaceable am I, but if you gave average Joe the same project and the same tool.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will depend a lot from artist to artist. You know, I think some people share their first prompt and that's interesting. Some people will spend maybe five to ten prompts. And then for some people where they're really trying to achieve a very specific result for a specific project, I mean, we'll be in there for like hours and hours running like dozens or hundreds of prompts. And in the early days of Dali, it was unlimited and free. It was a little easier to do back then.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Painting is like magic Photoshop. Like, if Photoshop worked magically, that's what it would be. So imagine there's like a photo and let's say you don't like what you're wearing or you don't like the person in the background or you don't like anything about it, you erase that, you type in what you want, and then boom, you get three options.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boom, it made it way more dramatic. And then the image that I got actually, its face was sort of messed up. So then I did in painting and stuff to fix the face. And then I did in painting to like extend the boots. So I did quite a bit of fixing up of the original image. If you look at the original image, it was quite a bit of a diamond in the rough. If you look at my behind the scenes video, there was a significant amount of human work to make it happen.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I can make a better image than this. And so I spent hours trying to make a better image than that, and I could not. And I was like, like, they hired me to do this. I obviously have to do a better job than what they quickly threw together. So I just kept going for like a few more hours. And then eventually I was like, okay, I kept on troubleshooting it. I was like, okay, I want this woman to walk with swagger. I kept on saying like walking confidently, walking proudly, like walking energetically. And none of those prompts working out. And then eventually I was like, walk with swagger and then boom. Then I got the hip thrust. And then the other thing I was thinking of was there's an influencer tip that's popular on social media for taking photos. The hack is that you bring the camera to the ground and shoot from the ground up to make it look really dramatic. And I was like, oh, let me try that. So then I was like, how about wide ankle shot from below?”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they had that direction, and then they showed me a reference image that was generated in Dali. And I was like, damn, this is so good. I don't know that I can even top this image. And I was just like,”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, my first reaction was worried, I guess. Like, I hope I can do a good job because I can't emphasize enough how much the human is needed in this process. You can't actually have a fully AI generated magazine cover because you have to give a prompt. And I guess you could theoretically ask like an AI to generate the prompt, but still the human needs to give some input, right? And so for our process, actually, We went through so many different rounds of iterations. And eventually we landed on the creative direction of a woman astronaut. And this was actually, I thought, a really clever workaround by OpenAI to not show a human face. Because at that time, human faces were not allowed in Dali. And we also were like, well, what race is this one going to be too? We didn't want to make a race statement. And so by making it a woman astronaut, it could be any ethnicity as well.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so this was kind of shortly after Dali was released. The people OpenAI gave me a call and they were like, hey, we have this really cool potential opportunity where Cosmo wants to make the first ever AI generated magazine cover. And they were like, and we want you to generate it. I'm like, what? That's crazy.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, different companies will have different strengths, and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that. But I do imagine that some of these companies are going to buy other companies. And then so they'll like have more verticals, kind of like how Meta bought like WhatsApp and Instagram. I see that happening with AI tools too.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it gets harder and harder to reach perfection, right? So you could be the AI researcher trying really, really hard to get that last 1% or a creator could just be like, I'm just going to run this through face tune. Yeah.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, guess how you can fix them? You can run them through FaceTune, the app that all influencers use, and that'll fix it.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can speak from the creator side, maybe more from the business side, but I think right now AI in the mass media, there's sort of this misconception or perception that AI is just this all powerful thing that's going to replace humans. But I think a more interesting way to think of it is that they are tools. And each one is a specific tool for a specific purpose, just like I would have like a calculator or a compass or something else, where you get interesting things is where you combine the tools, right? So for example, you can generate an image in Dali and then you can use Capcut, which is like an app on your phone that will literally turn any image into like a 3D image. Then there's another problem, which is Dali and Midjourney. I think all of these images synthesizers have, which is that they don't do human faces very well. There will be like artifacts on the eyes. They'll just look kind of droopy or a little messed up.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas, like traditional photogrammetry can't. Then there are other tools too that we've played with. I recently discovered EB synth, which I actually learned is not an AI tool, but I use that to basically figure out how to make Dali work for video. So Dali is photo only, but using EB synth, I was able to make Dali work for video.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That using Dane. Right, exactly. So if you're just listening to this, imagine a stop motion of someone on the ground planking basically and then just like slithering across the ground in stop motion, right? But then with Dane, you can make it perfectly smooth. And so it looks like I'm literally being dragged on the ground by like an invisible string or something. But actually that was just a stop motion video that we used AI to smooth out. And so I did that with James Pearlman. So he helped me out with smoothing everything out. Other tools are nerf so nerf has gotten pretty popular. Nerf is a way to use any camera like your phone to scan a scene and then all of a sudden you have this beautiful 3D like scan of it. And what's interesting about it is it's different than photogrammetry because it can handle like light. It's basically constructing like a particle light field. And so where you look at things from different angles, the light changes. And so that's why it can handle mirrors.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. We'll bring all of them up. Yeah. And so those are really popular right now. I also think there are other ones that are, they require more technical knowledge, but they enable more techniques that are less mainstream and so therefore more unique if you can pull them off. So one of them is Dane. Dane is really simple. All it does is it applies artificial slow motion to your video. But I thought it could be used in really interesting creative ways by like actually shooting a custom stop motion video for the purpose of it being interpolated to create in these impossible movements. And I can't describe.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there is, and I'm not that technical. I took a coding class once in college, but I prefer not to get into that myself. So I actually work with really talented programmers who help me run it or they'll teach me to set it up. So that's why I think when Dolly came out, I was like, oh, this is requiring no technical ability. Like this is if you can do a Google image search, you can use Dolly, you know. And so that was really interesting for me.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of the ideas are taken. It is very, very hard to think of something clever or new with an iPhone camera trick, TikTok transition, very, very, very hard. But with the AI stuff, it's like, this is just free for all right now.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not their job to think about the storytelling or the cinematics of it. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I don't think anyone is actually doing that yet. So I could try doing that. And so I started experimenting with like, well, let's take the research from white papers and make it a social media friendly video. And I started doing that at the beginning this year. And it was just so fun. I think I'm like a very novelty-seeking personality. And like my greatest motivation is, can I try to do something that hasn't quite been done before? And like, yeah, sure. Like, probably someone has done it, but can I find my own original twist on it? And so the fact that these white papers known was really using this technology, no one was really using in creative ways. So I could be like, wow, I really am the first to do something with this. That was very exciting for me. Whereas trying to come up with like the latest iPhone transition.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like the low budget camera tricks. So there was one video actually where I attached a phone to a ceiling fan and then made that into like a matrix bulletime effect. And I got 300,000 followers from that one video. So every time I got a surgeon followers, it was the same thing. I would attach a phone to some household object, find some hack to do a camera trick with it. And people are following me for that. And I was just like, I'm out of household objects. I'm out of ideas. I just felt like I was running out of ideas. And I was like, I have to find new tools, new toys to play with. And in the meantime, I was starting to see some of like the really insane AI stuff coming out in white papers, but it was all like two minute papers, like research videos of researchers shooting whatever they had in their bedroom. And of course, they're so focused on the research.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was really just feeling quite stuck in my work. I felt like I was doing basically like almost all one million of my followers are from the same video. I mean, it's a few videos, but it's the same kind of video. It's my whole budget.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the black box is actually what it makes it feel like a cult or a religion because it's like you don't know it's like a mystical force.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's gotten a lot more competitive. I think people are a lot more aware of the downsides of social media now. So we're no longer in like the honeymoon phase of it for sure. You know, it's kind of interesting that for most of history, I feel like humans have prayed to God, you know. But now I see that like content creators, we pray to the algorithm. It's almost like a superstition. It's like, what does the algorithm think? My videos are not doing well because of the algorithm. It's like how can I optimize my video for the algorithm? And it's like we're no longer, it's like we're almost no longer designing ourselves for like human taste, but we're designing ourselves for the algorithm. And I do think there are quite a few downsides to doing that. And there are good reasons to resist that as well.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is you kind of have to build a I remember when I first tried growing my Instagram following, I was like, why is this so hard? You know, I would get things to go viral and it would be very hard to get any followers out of it. The unlock for me was actually sharing my behind the scenes. And that was it. Before I would just show these cool shots and I'd be like, look at this cool shot, you know, and then maybe I would describe how I did in the caption. I'm like, nothing crickets. If I showed the same shot, the exact same shot, but show the behind the scenes with it, all of a sudden it was going viral. And I've done that over. I've done that so many times now that I am confident that that was the defining thing. There are lots of other things that I learned along the way to grow my followers, but if there was one thing, it would be that.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely there was. So for a very long time, I struggled to grow my following. First, I resisted. First, I was like, well, I don't even need to grow my following. So I was just making like viral one-off videos. That was back in the days when you can make things go viral in a completely different way that doesn't work anymore. So back in like 2012, up until around 2016, you could make videos go viral just by coming up with something clever that would be a good headline, cold emailing like 300 reporters, getting them to write about it, and then it would almost guaranteed go viral. That does not work anymore because Facebook ate all the reporters' jobs. And now videos don't spread the reporters. They spread through algorithms. And so it is actually so competitive now. It's so much more competitive now than it was like 10 years ago. It is much harder to make a viral, a video just go viral. And so the way to do it now.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried running an agency. I've tried everything and I've come to the realization that for me actually, like being an influencer is the best thing for me, which is crazy because I always swore I would never be an influencer.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no, it's like you fail. There's no failure. Exactly. Right. And so I sort of had to come to terms with that. But honestly, going through that startup, I learned so much about video that I then applied to doing my own stuff. And actually, I got this really interesting feedback when I was trying to get business from my startup. And I was talking to someone, I was trying to like get them to invest in my company. And they were like, we're not interested in this company. Like they could see that it wasn't a scalable business. But they were like, but we actually just wanted to hire you to make some videos. And I was like, I don't want to do that. But then actually it turned out, you know, the years later, I'm like, yeah, that person was actually right. And I think it just took me trying every single career. I tried working for a huge company. I've tried working at a startup. I tried being a founder of my own startup.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so yeah, this was back in my failed startup days. And so I really badly, very badly wanted to get into YC as like everyone did. And managed to get on stage office hours. Spoiler alert did not get into YC, was turned down, I think, multiple times, was interviewed on stage and answered their questions. That startup eventually failed like a year later. I think it was really tough on me at the time because up until then, I had like, you know, good academic achievements in school. And it was my first, I think your first startup failure is your first definitive failure. It's like.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I'm watching this video. Someone else familiar pops into it, Ryan Peterson from Flexport is in this video. And I'm like, okay, flashback. And then someone else is in this video and it's you. And you're pitching this company, give it 100, which is basically your startup at the time. And the startup was structured around people sharing their journey in learning skills, sharing their progress every single day for 100 days. You also then, I think around a year later, you did a TED talk where you kind of used that framework of 100 days to go and learn dance and you shared that. And it was fascinating. People can look it up. We'll have it in the show notes. Okay, so this is a broad question, but how do you go from that, right? 10 years ago almost, were you building this startup to where you are today? When did you, was there a point in time where you decided I want to start sharing this information online? I want to start being a creator.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am absolutely thrilled today to have Karen Chang on the line. Karen is a digital creator. She has taken social by storm. Seriously, she's all over my feeds. I can almost guarantee you've seen one of her videos. And she's done everything from high-five Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse. She's partnered with several A-List celebrities. She also was commissioned by Cosmo recently to create their first AI generated magazine cover. So super cool. We'll be talking about that. And in particular, we'll be talking about her foray into AI, how she's using AI to be more creative, and how that relationship between humans and AI is evolving, how it enhances our creativity, or how it doesn't. We'll see. But Karen, welcome to the show.”
2022-11-09 · a16z Podcast · AI and the Creator Economy with Karen X Cheng · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source