# a16z Partner: Hollywood Is Secretly Replacing Films With AI NEW ECONOMIES · 2026-07-23 Justine Moore, a16z partner and early backer of ElevenLabs, explains why AI microdramas — short, vertical soap operas — are becoming the fastest-growing entertainment format, with China's microdrama market now larger than its domestic box office. She argues model quality has reached 90-95% of filming, making it cheaper and faster, and professional storytellers are now using it to create compelling narratives. Amazon and Netflix have announced programs for fully AI-generated animations. ElevenLabs, which she backed at Series A, has crossed $500M in ARR. She highlights consumer agents like Town that automate tasks such as warm intros and expense forwarding, and sees the biggest opportunity in serving less technically sophisticated users and vertical industries like marketing and architecture. ## Questions this episode answers ### What are AI microdramas and how large is the market compared to traditional film? Justine Moore describes AI microdramas as short, vertical video soap operas on platforms like TikTok and apps like RealShort. They first exploded in China, where the microdrama market now surpasses the domestic box office. In the U.S., these apps were among the fastest-growing last year. AI makes them cheaper and faster to produce, and the format’s limited sets and cast suit current AI video quality. [4:44](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/1d0fd40b-afad-4bb9-b5ff-693a9fe408b3?t=284000) ### Are Hollywood studios already using AI to create films and TV shows? Justine Moore reveals that many TV shows and movies already incorporate AI. Amazon and Netflix have announced fully AI-generated animation programs. Larger studios fear PR risk but use AI for backgrounds and effects on sound stages, saving costs. She says AI achieves 90-95% of filming quality much cheaper and faster, leading to a mix of new AI-native formats and AI-assisted traditional productions. [9:26](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/1d0fd40b-afad-4bb9-b5ff-693a9fe408b3?t=566000) ### Why is the quality of AI-generated storytelling improving so rapidly? Justine Moore explains that early AI video adopters were tech-savvy but lacked storytelling skills, producing novel but shallow content. Now, professional creatives and experienced creators are entering, using AI to craft compelling narratives. This shift means gripping, high-quality stories will proliferate, and viewers may soon not care whether content is AI-made, focusing only on the story. [7:32](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/1d0fd40b-afad-4bb9-b5ff-693a9fe408b3?t=452000) ### What are the biggest challenges in building a generative media startup today? According to Justine Moore, the generative media space is competitive. Training new models from scratch is costly, so startups differentiate at the app layer by serving specific user bases with deep workflow features. The key challenge is creating sticky products that prevent churn. Untapped opportunities exist in non-AI-native consumers, verticals like marketing/advertising, and social sharing platforms beyond incumbents. [33:47](https://neweconomies.podhood.com/1d0fd40b-afad-4bb9-b5ff-693a9fe408b3?t=2027000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intro** - [0:17] Justine Moore: 'The mass market consumer does not care that it was made with AI.' - **[4:24] Microdramas** - [4:44] Justine Moore: 'Microdramas are almost like the TikTokified version of soap operas.' - [5:09] China's microdrama market is now larger than its domestic box office, notes Justine Moore. - [8:03] Justine Moore predicts an explosion of gripping AI-generated stories as professional creatives enter the space. - [9:48] Amazon and Netflix have already announced programs for fully AI-generated animations, says Justine Moore. - **[10:04] New Formats** - [10:59] Justine Moore: Big studios are filming people on sound stages and generating backgrounds with AI, not replacing actors. - [12:07] Justine Moore: AI enables individuals and small teams to create stories in hours or days instead of months with big budgets. - **[13:54] DIY Creation** - **[17:30] Adoption** - [18:03] Q: Will AI microdramas stick around? A: Justine Moore says consumers don't care what content is made with, and AI quality is approaching mass-market standards. - **[22:04] Quality** - [23:05] Justine Moore argues that slop existed before AI: 'there's a ton of human-produced slop.' - [24:36] Justine Moore: Companies should aim for timeless content, but many creators can grow quickly with low-brow slop. - [26:28] Justine Moore predicts that in the future most content will be partially AI-produced or edited, making labeling requirements pointless. - **[27:00] AI Tools** - [27:55] Justine Moore: 'I don't actually care if content is AI-generated as long as it resonates with the reader.' - [30:27] Justine Moore reveals her writing workflow: she gives Claude and GPT an outline, picks parts she likes, and rewrites 60-70% herself. - **[33:47] Building AI** - [35:23] Justine Moore advises generative media startups to differentiate by going deep into a specific creator workflow, not competing on price. - [36:53] Justine Moore identifies untapped markets: less technically sophisticated creators and vertical industries like architecture and design. - **[39:45] Agents** - [40:21] Justine Moore describes AI agent Town: it proactively suggests tasks like filing expenses or scheduling meetings based on your email habits. - [44:10] Justine Moore says AI agents for consumers are still too high-friction, but she is excited for when they are packaged into simple products. - **[45:17] Spotlight** - [46:10] Justine Moore would build in generative media or consumer agents because these spaces are early and underserved. - [47:08] Justine Moore praises ElevenLabs for co-developing research, product, and go-to-market, moving all three simultaneously. - [48:47] Ollie Forsyth reveals ElevenLabs crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue. ## Speakers - **Ollie Forsyth** (host) - **Justine Moore** (guest) ## Topics AI ## Mentioned Amazon (company), Anthropic (company), ElevenLabs (company), Google (company), Netflix (company), OpenAI (company), ChatGPT (product), Claude (product), Cursor (product), DramaBox (product), GPT (product), Navan (product), Ollie (product), Poke (product), RealShort (product), Seedance (product), Stable Diffusion (product), Substack (product), Town (product), Veo (product) ## Transcript ### Intro **Justine Moore** [0:00] I think folks would be surprised by how many TV shows and movies today already have some element of AI being used. I spend 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, who've 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 gripping stories. It 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 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, like, low-brow slop content. But I think in terms of what creators should do, it really depends on, like— **Ollie Forsyth** [1:30] Justine, welcome to New Economies. We've been in touch kind of over the years on DMs, but this is the first time we're meeting, and wow, so much is happening across AI, new media, and now the latest trend: AI microdramas. So we have so much to unpack, but big welcome to the show. **Justine Moore** [1:49] Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to chat about all those things. **Ollie Forsyth** [1:53] 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 6 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 at the beginning, this new incredible form of entertainment: AI microdramas. Help us unpack what is the current state of everything happening in generative media. What's your hot take? **Justine Moore** [2:30] Yeah, I would say I've been following the generative media space for a couple years, actually. Really got into it a couple months before ChatGPT 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 2-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 product layer. Like, when the models are finally good enough for people to use, you kind of have to create theright 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 mediaright now is really the entire ecosystem maturing, both consumers but also professionals, studios waking up to the fact that these models are finally good enough to use, and the product builders realizing that there's a lot of opportunity to create, like, the interfaces through which we use them. ### Microdramas **Ollie Forsyth** [4:24] And the content which is being produced by some of these AI models for AI microdramas—some of the storytelling is so good, and the accuracy is incredible. What do you think makes these AI microdramas—and we should probably explain actually what AI microdramas are—what do you actually think makes these AI microdramas so cool to watch? **Justine Moore** [4:44] Yeah, so I describe microdramas as almost like the TikTokified 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 TikTok but also on apps like RealShort or DramaBox. They really started blowing up first in China, like, a few—a few years ago, and now the microdrama market in China is larger than their domestic box office. There's—everyone there is just, you know, subscribing to these apps, viewing all of these microdramas. 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 and 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 microdramas 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—this kind of content is sort of a perfect fit for what we can do with AI models today. **Ollie Forsyth** [6:29] Some of the dramas I have seen, they—they are so gripping. I don't know if you saw this one around, Dario from Anthropic falls in love with this girl from China. You may have seen it. **Justine Moore** [6:42] I have. **Ollie Forsyth** [6:43] So I met the creator who designed it, and I thought the storytelling is incredible. We'll link it in the show notes. And then I later found out the girl who's actually in the microdrama—it is a true story, and the whole story came to light. And I thought, this storyline storytelling is so incredible. But there are two sides of these, I think, AI microdramas workingright. You have the one side where it's incredible storytelling. You have incredible designs, low cost to make, which is absolutely fine. But then you have the other side where it's well-designed, but the storytelling is just not as good as it could beright. Where do you think this actually, like, will go next in order for AI microdramas actually to stay around? **Justine Moore** [7:32] I mean, I think the good thing about it is there are a lot of—so I have this—I have this thought for a lot of AI video, actually, which is many of the people who were 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 but were not necessarily the most compelling narratives. Like, I put myself in that category 100%. 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 would think of as a traditional professional creative, but they've been a creator for a long time, and 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 microdrama 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 microdrama content that you don't even know is AI, and people don't even care. It's—they're just there for the story. **Ollie Forsyth** [8:56] I'm happy you brought this up because, honestly, 6 months ago I was like, I'm never going to watch an AI-generated program, never going to watch an AI-generated movie. Now I'm like, actually, if it's gripping and it's interesting, I'll watch it. **Justine Moore** [9:11] Totally. I think the quality has gotten a lot better too. I spend a lot of time with studio execs and sort of, you know, who want to get involved in the investing space or are curious sort of what's happening in generative media from an early stage perspective. I was just down at AI on the lot in Hollywood and, like, sat through a bunch of panels of how 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [10:04] Yeah, and you know, when I talk to creators as well, execs, founders, people who are interested in this space, and also just, like, wider consumers, some people are like, this is—isn't this just going to replace, like, Netflix or, you know, movies or actors, actors? ### New Formats **Ollie Forsyth** [10:19] And I'm like, no, I just actually think it's going to be a different type of content and entertainment we consume. Do you think that's accurate, and is that where we're going? **Justine Moore** [10:29] I think it's going to be a mix. So I think we're going to get new types of content. Microdramas 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 going to see AI used in a lot of traditional production pipelines. And so many of the big studios, they're not like, we're going to 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 going to be a mix. I think we're going to see new entertainment formats, and then I think we're also going to see folks using AI in traditional entertainment formats, like TV and movies, to bring down the cost of production. **Ollie Forsyth** [11:30] The opportunity also for creators, and especially individual creators, maybe even with a small team,right, is insane. There are a couple of AI microdramas. There's one in China which was published not too long ago, and it's had, like, 100 million views in the space of, I think, 2 or 4 weeks, which is crazy. You had this AI microdrama I mentioned around Dario from Anthropic falling in love with this, you know, girl from China. This thing has had, like, 2 or 3 million views. And if it's that gripping, creators can start monetizing that,right? **Justine Moore** [12:07] I think a lot have, honestly. I mean, on, you know, 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 Psyop Anime or Gossip Goblin or Charlie Curran are putting out, like, insane numbers in terms of who actually views 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—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, photorealistic live action, I'm not sure what you call it when it's AI, like, would have required massive budgets and months to do, and they're turning around things in, you know, hours or days. **Ollie Forsyth** [13:05] We always have these crazy ideas for apps or websites, but sometimes we just don't know where to go to get going. That's why we have partnered with Hostinger for today's episode. Hostinger are the perfect tool for builders and founders. If you have an idea for a website or app, you can go over to Hostinger's latest vibe coding tool to turn your idea into reality. If you need a domain and, of course, that email address to help us look good and amazing in front of our customers, Hostinger has all of that covered for you. And that's why they are giving our fans and audience 10% off. All you have to do is head over to hostinger.com/neweconomies or enter code NEWECONOMIES to redeem the code. Go and build the thing you've always wanted to do. It'll be worth it. Now, back to today's episode. ### DIY Creation **Ollie Forsyth** [13:54] Before we start the recording, we got chatting around. We've actually, like, had a go creating our own AI microdramas, and it's actually pretty good fun. Have you had a go at creating your own, and how have you found the experience? **Justine Moore** [14:10] I try to create all sorts of AI content, largely to test the tools. Like, I try not to delude 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, photorealistic, 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, 3 years ago now or whatever, I was trying to create a super basic—it was almost like a slideshow animation of, like, Calvin and Hobbes, 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 with AI. But it was a very frustrating process, and now I would say it's a lot more fun. **Ollie Forsyth** [15:40] Exactly. I think we're still at the early infancy stages,right? I was saying before we came on, I started creating our own microdrama around the Nike story. So my idea was, and anyone who's listening can take this idea,right? All of 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 microdrama series called The Origins or The Tech Origins or something around how all of these incredible companies got created? Anyway, I started playing around with a couple of these AI models and tools around how that Nike story, 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 microdrama needs something like, romantic story to it. So maybe the romantic story for, like, the Nike story could be around when the founder meets Michael Jordan for the first time, Michael Jordan falls in love with, like, this incredible shoe. Like, you can make it so good. And honestly, I only spent, like, 2 or 3 hours playing around with it, and I think it was quite good. And that's in 3 hours. **Justine Moore** [17:03] That sounds incredible. I think also it's—it's fun to think about different iterations of microdramas like that. Like, I think historically when people think microdramas, 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [17:30] 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. It's so interesting to see versus what happens in the West,right? ### Adoption **Justine Moore** [17:47] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [17:48] How do you see the adoption of these, like, AI microdramas actually sticking around? And is it just—are we just going for a phase? Is it just going to, I don't know, die or is it going to last? **Justine Moore** [18:03] 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 or Reddit or wherever, the people who care about technology and want to follow the progress may watch something because it's AI and may follow along because it's AI. The mass market consumer does not care that it was made with AI and isn't going to watch it for that reason. And so the question is, do we hit the quality bar where it makes sense for all microdramas or many microdramas to be created with AI because it's, you know, 90, 95 percent 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 microdramas can be entirely made with AI, some are made with a combination of, you know, human filming, and then some sort of AI editing, adding backgrounds, adjusting things, dubbing, that sort of thing. So yeah, I don't—I don't think this is a trend just because it so massively shifts 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 microdramas 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [19:33] I think it's also going to be interesting to see the type of content—it doesn't even have to be microdramas in this case—that individual creators create versus the micro studios,right? Like you're saying, it is—it is still pretty expensive as an individual creator to create an AI microdrama. Like, we didn't spend too much creating our own, maybe, you know, under $500, but that's still a lot, and it still needs multiple iterations,right? 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? **Justine Moore** [20:11] 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 new models come out. I think the frontier models, likeright now that's Seedance 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 Veo 3 when they released Veo 3 fast. And we saw yesterday Seedance is now doing this with Seedance 2 fast, which is much cheaper and faster. And so my instinct is we're just going to keep seeing that the cost go down over time. And then, of course, hopefully we'll have better and better kind of frontier models that will likely stay pricey for a little while. **Ollie Forsyth** [21:07] Yeah. And, you know, I feel this has all changed in maybe 6 months. I think if you asked a regular consumer 6 months ago, would you watch an AI-generated movie, program, whatever you call that episode, they would probably say no. Now, I think it is. They don't—well, we don't—they don't mind,right, if it's good quality. **Justine Moore** [21:28] 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, whoa, this is super cool or interesting or weird or entertaining, kind of whatever it's intended to be. **Ollie Forsyth** [22:04] Exactly. You know, we're both in this new media ecosystem,right? It's, you know, it's spreading so much around what's happening in the Calgary and ecosystem. And one trend I keep hearing, and I'd love to get your take is around what is AI's slop? ### Quality **Ollie Forsyth** [22:19] And to turn this around, should creators be thinking about is their content timely or timeless? And 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-generated? **Justine Moore** [22:44] The slop 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 slop. Like, slop 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 slop. And AI slop is similar. To me, it's like, I don't know, I guess the way I understand slop 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, trigger 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 slop, but I think also we shouldn't pretend that slop originated with AI because there was plenty of human-produced slop 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, pour 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 slop content. **Ollie Forsyth** [25:00] Are we just going to get to a stage where we don't actually know whether it's AI-generated or not? And perhaps for a lot of these social platforms, the likes of Substack, maybe it's the slightly 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? **Justine Moore** [25:28] I think my view on that has been it's super hard to say what is AI or not. Like, I remember when people asked 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 an 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, will 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 default. 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, you know, putting more disclosures and things like that over that sort of stuff. ### AI Tools **Ollie Forsyth** [27:00] It's becoming much harder for sure on whether it has been AI-generated. I mean, for videos, I think it's hopefully fairly easy to, you know, figure out. **Justine Moore** [27:11] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [27:11] Especially for, like, newsletters,right? I saw this stat the other day someone put together where if you look at the top newsletters globally on all platforms, something like 20 percent of the top newsletter writers, all of their content is, sorry, 80 percent of their content is AI-generated. And then it's like, you get to that phase where it's, if you're a top newsletter but it's AI-generated content, I'm not sure where you stand with that. **Justine Moore** [27:40] I think I have a controversial take on this, which is I don't actually care if, like, 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, like, pivoted to just putting out purely claw generations that are, like, not really in their voice and, like, don't make a ton of sense get called out for that, like, as they should. But I think there are some people who, you know, 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, you know, going back and forth with Claude or GPT or whatever model about a certain question and then publishing it. I think some people get, like, really offended when they see AI-written output. I just sort of, you know, 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [28:53] Yeah. My personal take has also changed 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 it's 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 insight as what the creator is trying to say, great. I don't mind. Maybe 6 months ago it would have been different. **Justine Moore** [29:20] Why do you think your viewpoint changed on that? **Ollie Forsyth** [29:23] 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 support 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 is saying is still accurate, then, you know, I think it's okay. **Justine Moore** [29:50] 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 Claude and GPT had this terrible habit of being incredibly long-winded in, like, a way that, like, no 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, like, one sentence worth of content. And I find that is, like, very annoying. But I don't know, a lot of 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 I'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 percent written by me, like, 30 to 40 percent 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [30:59] We're 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, like, one or two things we should miss out,right? We ask each of the AI models to rate the newsletter edition out of 10 based on all of our previous content. So if Claude is saying 6.5, Gemini is saying 9, and ChatGPT is saying I think it's going to be 8.59, you know, perhaps you're on theright track for something,right? If it's, like, all of our designs, we do these beautiful, like, mockup maps similar to you. All of those are human-generated for now, but we would 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 boxes around? When you've got 200 companies on a mockup map, it does get a bit hard. **Justine Moore** [31:47] Yes. **Ollie Forsyth** [31:47] But it's actually a super useful sparring partner on what great content could look like. **Justine Moore** [31:53] 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 will actually really improve how a lot of people communicate because that's a really hard skill to be able to do on your own. **Ollie Forsyth** [32:48] The hardest part also for creators like us, 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. **Justine Moore** [33:02] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [33:02] Opportunity cost. It's just time. At the end of the day, you just got to decide, I guess, what works best for you. **Justine Moore** [33:10] 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, 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 OpenAI and the Anthropics and the Googles are doing and releasing, so I can know how the product experiences actually compare. **Ollie Forsyth** [33:47] We have a lot of founders who listen to the show, and I think a useful question would be to talk around what are the hardest parts of building a generative media type of company from a startup point of view? ### Building AI **Ollie Forsyth** [34:00] And, yeah, any characteristics you've seen there on all the hundreds of companies you've met? **Justine Moore** [34:07] Yeah. Generative media, I think, is a great space and it's also a really competitive space. So I think to me, the hardest thingright 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 OpenAI 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 from 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't, 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 professional's 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 throughright 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [36:17] 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 are changing all the time is the hardest part,right? Where do you think the untapped opportunity is for a founder to build a defining company in this category? **Justine Moore** [36:38] I mean, I think a lot 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 churn and go to whatever they see the next day. I think there's a lot of opportunity in 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, you know, creating really fun and interesting and compelling new playgrounds where consumers can make and share this sort of stuff. I also think types of content, like microdramas, are a great example where you need really specific things, like, an I saved ideas of characters with certain voices, saved sets, like, a sense of theright timing and pacing for a microdrama in particular. Like, that sort of knowledge and those features are going to 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 opportunityright now. **Ollie Forsyth** [38:17] It feels like there are so many opportunities founders could go towards. I'm just wondering, is there going to be, like, a Roblox equivalent for AI microdramas maybe? All of these AI tools where you can create ads in, like, a couple minutes, I think, has been so interesting to see. We mentioned earlier around, like, presentations. Creators have to create slide decks and partnership agreements and stuff. That's kind of all now being done. I still think maybe where there is opportunity is actually just the typical creator stack, like running a creative business and just, like, all the day-to-day stuff you have to do, like reaching out to podcast guests, potential sponsors, partnership agreements. Like, we still have to do this,right? And it feels like maybe there is still some opportunity there, but it's pretty hard. **Justine Moore** [39:07] 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, you know, research and outreach or whether it's creating and sending invoices or reviewing legal contracts or things like that. And obviously, you know, 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. ### Agents **Justine Moore** [39:45] So I don't 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 going to 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [40:14] Have you tried any cool personal AI agents that you're really excited about? And do you have one? **Justine Moore** [40:21] This is going to sound like I'm shilling 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, like, send an email back thanking the referrer, 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 11:00 p.m., you are forwarding in receipts that you get to your to NAVAN, your guys' expense provider. How about every time you get an email that's an invoice or receipt, I just auto-forward it 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [41:43] They just announced a fundraiser,right? **Justine Moore** [41:45] Yes. **Ollie Forsyth** [41:46] This is almost what I feel we've been waiting for. **Justine Moore** [41:50] Yes. **Ollie Forsyth** [41:50] For the last two years. **Justine Moore** [41:53] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [41:54] 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. **Justine Moore** [42:07] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [42:07] Where are you most excited about seeing consumer go next? **Justine Moore** [42:13] It's I always say it's super hard to predict consumer. It sort of can only be observed just because it's, like, consumer behavior is it's very difficult to say, like, you know, even if you look at things like a TV show or music or a movie or a game, like, what is going to be the next major hit? I think you can see early signs, though, just, like, you know, you can see early signs of, like, an indie songwriter, you know, 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, you know, wait for it to connect and then send something to AI and then wait for the response to come back versus, you know, you're just on your phone and you're lost or you don't know when your next meeting is or, you know, you get some important email you missed and you can text your AI assistant or it can text you with products like Poke or Ollie, 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 wave kind of reach everyday people. **Ollie Forsyth** [44:27] Yeah. And we have to remember a lot of these typical consumers, they're not that technically savvy,right? Outside of San Francisco. **Justine Moore** [44:35] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [44:35] I mean, they probably don't know how to have their OpenClaw,right? So when that becomes much easier, massive, you know, massively widely adopted, that's potentially, you know, the breaking point. **Justine Moore** [44:47] Yeah. I mean, I think we saw something similar with generative media, honestly, where it's, like, before it required these really specialized skills to be able to make a good image or a video or design or something like that. And AI has really democratized that. And I think we're going to 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, which is something that the vast majority of people, like me included, cannot do well on their own. **Ollie Forsyth** [45:17] It's such an exciting time to be building. ### Spotlight **Justine Moore** [45:20] Yeah. **Ollie Forsyth** [45:20] If you were to go and build a company tomorrow, what category would you build in? And I'm sure you've thought about that or you've got some ideas you would maybe, you know, noodle on on the weekends. **Justine Moore** [45:33] You know, I've 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 the 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 spaceright now. I think there's a ton of really exciting things happening in B2B and on the infra side and sort of in research. I am not a researcher. Like, I've never been, like, a kind of core B2B software person, so those are not my areas of expertise. So I would probably lean more on the consumer side of things. **Ollie Forsyth** [46:42] There are also just so many incredible founders out there who people can, like, draw inspiration from. Any founders you really admireright now who are just building incredible things? **Justine Moore** [46:54] There's so many really fantastic foundersright now. I think the ElevenLabs founders I will give a shout-out to just because we did this Series A and a bunch of rounds since. So I've had the opportunity to work with them a bunch over time. And I think with all these AI productsright now, you sort of have to find, like, an initial wedge where you can get an attention and initial user base. And for Eleven, that was with a lot of, you know, random audio use cases. Like, you know, we talked to them a few weeks after they launched and it was, like, people making, like, voiceovers for games or, like, people dubbing audio books in, like, obscure languages or sort of interesting long-tail use cases where you're like, I wonder what this is going to be as a big company. Like, I wonder 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 and media, which is still a really big space for them, but then also exploring, like, where are the other places voice is 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. **Ollie Forsyth** [48:47] I have so much respect for them. Mati and Pietro, two Polish founders from this tiny little country in Europe. They just crossed $500 million, I think, in annual current revenue. And they're only a few years old. So full respect to them. **Justine Moore** [49:07] 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, it's just truly remarkable. **Ollie Forsyth** [49:29] You know, it was really annoying. I had a very similar idea to ElevenLabs about five years ago. There's a tweet somewhere out there where I said, at some point, how cool would it be for every creator in the world to translate their content into any language using their voice? And at the time, I was at another VC fund and ElevenLabs came along. So hats off to them. I'm really excited to see where they go next. **Justine Moore** [49:52] Yeah. Me too. **Ollie Forsyth** [49:54] Hey, Justine, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. We've covered so much. I feel like now is the greatest time to be building, but also anyone who's just interested in new media, give it a go and get building some AI microdramas. **Justine Moore** [50:08] Totally. Yeah. I cannot wait to see all of the incredible content that's going to be coming out over the next few months. **Ollie Forsyth** [50:14] See what happens. Thank you so much for coming on the show. **Justine Moore** [50:17] Awesome. Thanks for having me. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.