ļ»æAnnalisa, welcome to the Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast. We're really excited to have you here today.
I'd love to start at the beginning of your journey if you don't mind. Where did entrepreneurship start for you?
I was an artist by trade before starting Catch and Release. I went to, I got my undergraduate degree in painting and drawing. I studied abroad in Florence, Italy. I did art residencies. I did group and solo exhibitions. I had a studio. So I think I was alwaysā¦ I was always a bit interested in working for myself. I didn't necessarily know that would take the form of a company or in the form of being a Tech CEO and raising venture money and all of that. But I think I always had the desire to see a vision and shape it. I think actually the thing that drew me in fact to company building and away from the studio was a deep desire to work with a team and work with people.
I found the studio to be very enterprising and entrepreneurial and it was like every day was my own making and that was amazing and even the business side of the art world is an interesting nut to crack. How to stand out in a sea of other people, how to bring something to the world that has a perspective others would want to engage with, and maybe even buy. But I was missing the team, I was missing people. And so when I got into the business that I'm in now, I think that was what attracted me to it and kept me in it. And it was actually a world of, the world of production, which I think the two of you can probably appreciate, which is a very fast moving, you know, within a few weeks, you've got to make something real. And there's all sorts of stakeholders involved and different people playing different instruments to get the thing off the ground. So I loved the pace of that. I loved the, I loved the deadlines. I liked the constraints. I didn't feel those constraints as much as an artist - sort of you could do whatever you wanted for however long you wanted and that ultimate freedom I think felt not as exciting in a funny way as like deadlines and teams and getting it all done.
I can relate so strongly with everything you just said, because I'm an artist too. And then I studied graphic design for the same reasons. I wanted the working in a business. I wanted the team. I wanted the deadlines because yeah, as an artist, it's so true as a creative mind you'd need some guardrails to work within. Otherwise, yeah, you could be all over the place. So I definitely respect that.
Tell us about Catch and Release. Can you explain it to everyone listening? What it is, what you do, how you help?
Yeah, absolutely. I think everyone listening to this podcast can imagine the internet as the most vast visual library we've ever had and seen, that we're all participating in too, by the way. So images, videos, music, writing, art, the internet is this massively exciting, growing creative database. And there is an entire market that us all as creators and consumers don't even know about.
And that is brands and advertisers that want to use images, videos, music, writing, art in ads or in films or in any kind of commercial context or project. In order for a brand to use something that you've made, they need to license it. They need explicit permission from you. They need to pay you. You have rights with regard to your content. It's your intellectual property. If there are people who appear in an image or in a video, those people need to consent and give their permission and be paid. It's a very messy, tedious and highly legal kind of process that is hard for people to just navigate on their own.
So Catch and Release is a technology platform that makes that very, very easy. So we make it easy for amazing brands like Google and TikTok and Meta and P &G and L'Oreal and all sorts of brands to use content that they're finding on the internet in a safe way that honours the creator's intellectual property, keeps them safe and gets them paid for the value that they've created in their photo or their video or any other creative asset that they've made. That's what Catch and Release does.
So Annalisa, I love this concept and what comes to mind are other platforms of course that creators will post their work to in order to sell under license. How is this different? What I'm hearing is that you're accessing content that people aren't necessarily proactively putting out there for sale, is that right?
That's right. And actually when I first got started in this business, I started as a video researcher. So I worked in the production industry for production companies, advertising agencies, even inside of brands that had their own production capabilities. And I was the person who creatives and editors would send out onto the internet to find gems that supported their brief or their storyboard or their project. And I didn't know anything about licensing. I was a creative. So I knew when a shot was right. And I knew when it evoked the feeling that the creative director wanted to evoke. But where I was searching for this content was all over the internet. It was Flickr, it was Vimeo, it was YouTube, it was ultimately Instagram and Snap and Twitter and TikTok.
And I remember the first time I did a job and I loved this process. I loved how hectic it was. I loved how harebrained the producer was and I loved the create how specific the creative director was. And I love the technical constraints that the editor had. You know, the editor would say it has to have, you know, a frame rate of this. And the creative director would say it has to evoke this. And the producer would say, we need it by tomorrow. So it was this really cool. Just how do you service the needs of all of them in the business affairs or the legal person would say, and we can't get sued. So there's so many interesting moving parts, but the internet was vast. It was an ocean. So it was kind of like, well, okay, where do I want to dive in? And I think when I first got started, the only platforms that were around were like the stock platforms, which you're referencing, like Getty and Shutterstock and others. And then there was Vimeo and Flickr. So I very quickly saw that my creative director loved the look and feel of the vimeo and the flicker and was a little less enticed by the sort of generic stock. And so I just went into Vimeo deep and I was just pulling all sorts of amazing videos from DPs and filmmakers who are using new cameras on the weekends and just gorgeous stuff and just pulling it at whim. And I would put it in front of my client and they'd say, I love this. This is great. And then the producer would say, how much is it going to cost? Do we have the releases that we need? And I had no answer for them because of course it was just uploaded to the internet.
So what I recognised in that first job and then in every subsequent job after that was that the internet really was a library. It just didn't have the licensing capabilities. And it was really a shame to say, ooh, if you want licensing, you have to go to this generic stock site and find something that's not quite right, but you can get it. I wanted to say you can have anything you want and I will license it for you and figure it out for you.
So those first few jobs were really me mapping out the process of reaching out to a person on Vimeo. Well, what do you say? What do you say to someone on the internet in a way that makes them want to engage with you and trust that you have their best interests at heart? I mean, we're ultimately going to be exchanging legal rights and money, so they have to feel good about it from the beginning. So it was really this, how do you craft the whole license and marketplace transactions so that it ends in a yes for both sides, which of course is the goal.
And once I saw some success with that, once I was able, I got a reputation for it. And I would get calls from producers and editors and creative directors all over the Bay Area saying, I heard you do this really weird thing where you can find all sorts of great stuff all over the internet and help us get the rights to it. Is that, do I have that right? And, you know, it sort of built and I built a team around it and I named it. It was called Visual Catch. It was a research agency. And I developed some licensing capabilities and some research and curation capabilities. And then that's when I started to get really intrigued by how to automate and build tech around this problem because there was so much nuance to it. And every single time I started a new project, I had to kind of recreate the wheel all over again. And I thought, this could be an app. Like, this could be an app. And I think I need to kind of explore that. And that's how Catch and Release was born.
I really appreciate how you have grown your business, first built and then grown a business based purely on demand is what I'm hearing. And also your passion and excitement for the craft of research and then problem solving, which is of course the gap that entrepreneurs play in.
And I will say, and this probably ties to the theme of resilience that I know is important to you both, this was a concept that is brilliantly simple on face value. It's like, well, of course, the internet should be licensable. And of course, you should be able to buy whatever photograph or video you see on the internet and creators should be paid. It's simple, right? Catch and Release, even the name is a simple name.
But in reality, I did this, I probably cleared the rights to 10,000 pieces of content myself by hand before writing any code, before bringing any technical person on board to help me translate all of that knowledge into a product roadmap.
And that was just a huge slog. Yeah, that's resilience. It really is. and it just, you, there's just so many variables in that process as you're sort of asking the question and thinking, it's probably is kind of complicated. And you're right. It is. How do you know that the person who posted the image or the video is the actual true owner? How do you know they didn't just repost someone else's? How do you know that they likely know the people in the image? And if those people would be interested in licensing, there'sā¦
ā¦as I started going through this process over and over again and making tons of mistakes, making so many mistakes, I began to predict the probability of someone licensing based on all the clues. And we were able to translate those into our product and into how we read an image or a video on the internet. We're not just looking at the image or the video. We're looking at all of the heuristics around it, the comments, the descriptions, the engagement with the creator and their audience, all sorts of, the tags, there's so much, when you know, when you've gone through the process and you know what to look for, it's really obvious. But if you've never done it before, it's kind of like, my God, where do I start? And that's why we take this. That's why I love taking this process off the, the painful part of this is the licensing. I love taking that off of my customer's shoulders because this isn't their core business.
Their core business is to tell beautiful stories and elevate the visuals and connect with their audience deeply and tell great stories. That's their job and they do that really well. I love taking this off their plate.
Yeah, I appreciate that. Creators don't want to deal with legal stuff at all. Yet, yeah, the internet has been the wild, wild west for so long that, absolutely people have posted all kinds of things and it's been found in an ad in Abu Dhabi somewhere, you know, and people go, these things have happened, right, to creators. So it's incredible that you've created a space that they can now.
Do creators work with you directly? So say if I was a photographer and I go out and take landscape photography, say, or whatever, can I work with you directly or do you go seeking out the creators? How does that part work?
Yeah, so what Vicki kind of identified is it really started with demand. So it started with the, we're a two-sided marketplace demand and supply. It started with demand coming to me and saying, we need content that looks like this, go help us find it and license it and then we would go out and reach out to the creators, which felt really good because we weren't asking them to do a bunch of extra work. In the stock world, creators who are known as contributors have to do a lot of work to get their content into a marketplace. They have to get it off of their hard drive or their phone, upload it to the marketplace, tag it, price it in some cases, manage it, get the releases that they need from all the people who appear in the shots so that it's ready to be sold. And that puts a lot of work onto the creator contributor and that means that there's only a fraction of the world's population that are invested in going through that process. They have to feel pretty sure they're gonna sell something.
What I love about ours was that we were approaching people and asking them to do virtually nothing until there was a real sure lead or sure opportunity that they would be getting paid. And so I could reach out to someone and say, hey, Laura, I'm working with a client right now. two weeks into the edit, they love the shot you posted on Instagram yesterday. They'd like to offer you an amount of money to license your stuff. Would you like to talk about this opportunity?
Now we may ask you for releases. We'll ask you to sign a piece of paper. We'll ask you to agree to a price, but you kind of, you're pretty sure that this is going to, this work will be worth it to you. And so we followed that ethos throughout building the company, which was really trying to create an environment for creators that minimized all that work and said, you don't have to do anything. We do work with creators in advance of buyers coming to us now. We've launched a creator community about a year ago.
It's going so well, creators can sign up and just connect their social accounts to Catch and Release, and we become their licensing layer. So you can connect Instagram and TikTok and Vimeo. We take care of all your licensing, but we've built tools to manage all the tagging for you. And we guide you through all the pricing and we guide you. You don't have to spend your nights and weekends on it. We believe that creators have already done the work. They've bought the right piece of equipment, they are publishing and sharing and distributing their content online and when they connect to Catch and Release they're saying we're interested in licensing and that's pretty much the only thing. I want them creating I don't want them managing assets on a database.
Yeah, agreed. That's what we want them doing too. I love that. I also know that you're connected with TikTok. So you're an official licensing vendor. Is that correct? Tell us a bit about that.
Partner, yeah, we're their UGC licensing partner. So this is hugely exciting and it's the first of many. Catch and Release is managing all of the licensing for TikTok videos. So if a brand wants to use a TikTok video in an ad, if TikTok wants to use a TikTok video in one of their own ads, Catch and Release is the platform that they have selected to manage that process for them.
Congratulations. That's massive. Yeah. I love also that you, yes, yes. I love that you also share your values on your website and that just speaks volumes about the type of business you are. I wonder if as much as I would love to speak for hours about all the possibilities that Catch and Release makes possible and makes available for entrepreneurs everywhere. I also would love to know a little bit more about you and your journey. So why are values important to you? Share with our audience because that's something that is also important to us.
Yeah, absolutely. When you set out to build a company, I think you need to sort of start with a, most companies or most leaders will start with a vision - why are we here? What are we trying to build? I actually went one altitude level up from the vision and it's a vision and a mission, right? What's the vision that we see for the future and what's our mission? What are we here to do? I sort of elevated out of that and said, what's our purpose? Like, why should we even be building something at all? You can have a vision for the world and a mission to build something, but like, why should you exist? What does the world look like once you've built the thing that you've built? And so we articulated our purpose statement as Connecting, Protecting, and Celebrating the world's creators and storytellers. So we believe that at the end of the day, when our company and product are massively successful and we've gone out to achieve this kind of visual democracy that we've aimed to create that's equitable and fair for everyone, we will have connected, protected, and celebrated storytellers and creators and that felt really good. Especially in a world where content has become almost a geopolitical issue. There's so much power in the data behind content. There's so much skepticism around the agendas of the people who have the power around that content and distributing it. There's just a lot of unknowns about the future of content and what we can believe and what we can sort of hold onto. So I felt like it was really important when starting this company and we haven't changed the statement in 10 years since I first launched my service and turned it into a product. It's connect, protect and celebrate creators and storytellers. And that guides everything that we do in the product. When a product manager is thinking about a button or an experience for a creator to go through on our site, they think, does this connect and does it protect?
How could we celebrate the creator in this moment? How do we make them feel even more? I'll give you a concrete example. We use PayPal as one of our channels for paying creators. And in the beginning, our PayPal notifications would get sent to creators that just said, your shot ID number XYZ is being licensed by Google for $500.
One of our, one person on our team one day looked at that and said, that doesn't, that's not very celebratory. Couldn't we make that language a little bit more, a little warmer? And so then the next day, cause I get all the PayPal notifications. The next day I opened up PayPal and it said, congratulations, person's name. Your amazing shot has been selected by Google for this incredible story. And we're so happy for you. Please expect your $500 momentarily. And it was just such, what a subtle shift but without that purpose statement without that direction from the very very top, and I don't mean me at the top I mean our purpose at the top, that might not have ever gotten changed. It might have just been people might have just said well that's just the way we do it so we're not going to think about it.
So there's so much opportunity in creating values and vision and purpose and all of those things to enable a culture where employees can make their own decisions and come up with their own ideas that still support the bigger thing but that don't have to be checked off by me or even ideated by me, right? People can come up with their own ways of solving those problems and that's awesome.
It truly is awesome and it's beautiful and it's building relationships and it's keeping the human in a tech company because effectively that's what you are by your own admission, right? A tech company.
Yeah. And we deal in human content. That is our medium, itās human content. That is exactly right. We are a tech tech company that works with humans.
Can you just share with us what your experience, what your journey was like in those early stages? For those of our viewers who are just at that stage where they have a great vision, they know they're on course, they're just not there yet, share with us some of the human experiences you had in those early days.
I mean, listen, I mean, you make a lot of mistakes. I mean, one of the things I use as a tool is I talk to lots of people. I had never, I didn't set out to build a tech company. I'd never, I'd never built a tech company. I'd never built a product before. I'd never been a CEO before, but I really was, I was on the scent that what I was doing manually could ultimately be productized. And that if we were able to pull that off, there would be a pretty huge market opportunity to go after and I was very compelled by that. But I had no idea what that entailed. I didn't, I'd never raised money before. I just didn't know. And so I met with anybody who would take a 20 minute meeting with me that I felt had some, was closer than I was to that kind of world. I was fortunate being based in the Bay Area that it wasn't hard. You could throw a rock and meet a founder or a venture capitalist. But I didn't run in those circles. I knew curators and I knew archivists and I knew art professors and I knew writers. I didn't know any of these people.
So I would talk to anyone who would listen, whether it was at a party or a coffee shop or anything. And anytime I, anytime I, someone sort of seemed like they were a little closer to that world than me, I would invite them for coffee and then they would say, you know, you know who you should talk to is, you know who you should, you know, there's someone I think you should meet. And I just kind of like a trail of breadcrumbs just kept following the trail until I ended up meeting people who were squarely in the industry. They were venture capitalists or they were advisors to tech companies or they had founded companies before. And I just soaked up as much knowledge as I could.
Meanwhile, I was able to go at my own pace because I was making money. So I had my service that was generating income and I had a small team, but we were very efficient. So I was able to sort of bootstrap for a few years before we actually raised any money. So that bought me some time to make horrible pitch decks to VCs that were beautiful to me, but like didn't make any sense to them and iterate on those and figure out how to like connect to that audience and what they cared about and how to frame my business in the lens that a finance person would understand. That took some cycles.
But yeah, you make a lot of mistakes, you just, being comfortable with these iterations, being comfortable with small amounts of progress over a prolonged period of time.
Yeah, that just cracked me up when you said like created a beautiful presentation and they were like what?
It was gorgeous. I know it was gorgeous, but like, didn't mean anything to them. Yeah.
That's so funny. Know your audience. That's exactly right? Know your audience. Yeah, 100%.
That's exactly right. There was a lesson there for sure.
What's it like being a woman in the tech world in California?
Just probably like being any other founder in the Bay, it's hard to say. I guess I stand out because there's not as many of us as there are of men. So that's an advantage. I'm memorable. I don't know. It's a tricky question. I think the venture world, especially when we talk about investors and raising money. Some of them are visionaries. Some of them are, and the ones that I like to work with are visionaries and they're also ex-operators. So they've, there are people who have actually built and run companies before and they've been in the seat of the entrepreneur and the founder and they know the trade-offs and the sacrifices and the opportunities and the kind of optimism and sheer reckless optimism an entrepreneur has to have to have, and the audacity to start something and build it from scratch.
Those are the people I love to work with. But the reality is there's a whole host of folks in the venture capital world that are really just pattern matching all the time. And they're just looking for people that look like the last successful person who did a thing. And so I do think probably the gender bias comes up in those situations where someone's like, you don't quite look like Mark Zuckerberg. I don't know, I have a tendency to sort of discount what you're saying. And you know what, like the way I look at it is fine. There's plenty of money out there. There's plenty of people to work with out there. Your loss, like I'm going to go find the people that I want to work with.
But when you look at the numbers, it's completely plain to see that it's less than 2% of women and minority businesses are getting backed by money. So I am in a very, very small minority of people who have raised venture capital, and that's unfortunate.
It's unfortunate and there's so much more to celebrate because of it. It's like, go!
Yeah, it's phenomenal. Now, when you were talking about playing in sand pits that weren't yours, that you weren't familiar with, and going for coffee with people who you'd met through somebody else, and they're suggesting that you meet somebody else, I can't help but think that there is people, and I know there's people that we work with regularly, who would be terrified at that thought, frankly. Where were you on that scale? Or were you just so determined and committed to your dream business that it didn't phase you?
I think this is where it comes down a little bit to personality. I'm very outgoing. Actually, one of my side hustles when I was an artist and I was working as a visual researcher, I also worked in restaurants and I was always committed to, in any job I did, I wanted to do the highest level version of that job. So I didn't want to just make money to just be in the studio. I was like, if I'm going to do eight hours a day somewhere, I want to come out of that job inspired by something or having learned something. So when I worked in restaurants, I became really interested in hospitality and I became really interested in wine and service and food. And I ended up working at restaurants that were increasingly higher and higher quality. My last restaurant gig before I converted to Catch and Release full time was at a Michelin Star restaurant in the East Bay called Comie. And it was a tough job, right? I basically had to learn, it was the art of service at the highest level. I felt like I was learning ballet or something. I mean, it was so precise. But I loved it. And so I think one of the things I loved about working in fine dining and in hospitality was constantly interacting with strangers. Constantly, and not only interacting with them, but...
learning and anticipating what they needed from the experience. And how could I read the body language and deliver something to them that they would really, really love? And so I leverage that skill all the time in conversations with investors and advisors and even recruiting. That's a huge skill with recruiting. It's a competitive, it has been a very competitive talent environment, you know, with people having choices of where they want to work. so being on an interview with someone that you really want to hire, knowing that they have other places they could go, you better be reading your audience and reading the room and really understanding what's important to them and how do I share what's happening at the company in a way that they will really appreciate.
So I think part of it is personality, I really love, I'm outgoing. I love being around people. Like I said, that was the thing that kind of took me out of the studio, was just wanting to be around other people. But I think that sort of skill set I developed in hospitality lent itself to being strategic with my extraversion. I was extroverted but also strategic.
If I wanted the coffee date to end in a certain way, I would be pretty damn sure I was going to make sure it ended in that way based on the clues they were giving me, based on the body language, based on all that thing. It was very opportunistic in that outgoingness. So I think that's a developable skill. And I think for anybody who feels like, I'm not so extroverted, like get out there. It's going to be a requirement for so many aspects of the job that's coming up for you when your company actually launches and you're in the fortunate position of building something, you're going to need to leverage that. So go for it. Just go for it.
Yeah, I mean, a thousand percent we know how important a strong network is and that you have to do networking to get ahead, to meet people, to get in front of the right people, to make the connections, to climb the ladder, to find the person you need to talk to. It definitely takes relationships. We've talked on this podcast before about relationship marketing. It is really, really key. Everything you do is relationship based in your industry.
I would also say like one other thing I think that might be helpful to someone is like, cause when you say networking, like even I go like, gross networking. And I was just kind of reflecting like, why do I have that response? And I'm like, well, because a lot of people don't feel comfortable selling themselves. And I would say I don't love selling myself either. I think the hack is don't make it about you, make it about your vision, make it about the customer, make it about the problem that you're solving. It's not about, it's not about like, look at me, this, I'm networking. Like it's about that. It's about the customer. It's about the pain that you're solving for them. And I found myself being able to get behind that all day long and every conversation I could point to that and be like, you need to understand why this is important.
And yes, of course at the end of that they're like, wow, she's so enterprising and I should connect her with someone else because, but really the thing that gave me the juice and the confidence to just keep talking about it was really not, was redirecting the attention from me to the thing I was building.
Which brings me to that belief in the thing we're building. You know, we have to have that big why. We have to have a big enough goal so that everything else falls into place. Or not just goal, but dream.
And you know, there's another hack for that because you could somebody might hear that and say, but gosh, is my dream big enough? And I don't know. Do I have a big why? Here's what you can also fall in love with is the problem. I fell in love with the problem. I was like, this problem sucks. This is so painful, it is awful, it's tedious, it's annoying. People are unsuccessful more than they're successful at doing this. They hate doing it, they hate doing it. There are so many parts of this problem that are just so gross and bad that I fell in love with solving that.
And so that was my big, so you can find a big why or a big dream in the pain point, in the customer's pain point. It's like, I want to solve that. I want to get that off the table for them. What's it going to take to do that? Well, it's going to take, you know, building a roadmap to license the internet, it's going to take a marketplace. It's going to take analytics around possibly and probability of licensing. It's going to take AI. It's going to take all sorts of, it's going to take a great team and culture. It's going to take a strong leader. It's going to take great venture capitalists. Like you, you can get to the, you can get to it from that angle. And I found myself just obsessing over the pain. The problem was endlessly fascinating because I was, I was so far away from solving the problem. Like at the beginning, you're, you've got nothing. You've just like, you got to go step by step, right? Move a mountain one grain of sand at a time and you can easily get really discouraged at the beginning because your dream feels so far from reality. But if you're obsessed with the problem that you're solving, that's like, that keeps you really curious. You're kinda like, I'm gonna get it tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm gonna be a little closer to that. It's like a puzzle, maybe. It's like sort of like solving a puzzle. So I found that to be helpful.
I love that. I love that. It's like the saying āBe interested, not interestingā, you know? The curiosity. If you want to have good relationships and create strong connections, be curious. That's why I love this podcast. Because we get to be curious and yeah, ask great questions. It makes a big difference.
Love that one. Love that. Love that.
Totally, I know asking great questions. There's a Masterclass with an ex FBI hostage negotiator and he talks about that. He's like there's a technique called mirroring where you just repeat the last thing the person said, like you're kind of asking them to go further on the thing that they just said. He said I have conversations at cocktail parties where I've given nothing to them about me. I've only made them feel more emboldened and more seen and they find him to be the most interesting person at the party. And he said he shared nothing about himself, which of course for a hostage negotiator is very strategic because he never wants to show his cards. But it's a fascinating idea, right? That we're so, humans are so vain. We're so interested in ourselves. Like if you can make someone feel more interesting, then you become more interesting as a result.
So well said. So well said. Yeah, nailed it. And did you envision that you would be the CEO of this big tech company that was VC funded and etcetera, etcetera, et cetera? Was that ever a part of your dream or did that happen as a result?
That happened as a result. think I sort of, I came into the, I mean, I remember my first time putting CEO on my email signature and feeling sort of apologetic about it. Like, my team is only 10 people who work here and here I am calling myself the CEO, you know?
But then I learned that there was real responsibility that came with that title. It was, that was, was a, I made a lot of mistakes in that journey of going from, I'm building this thing with this small group of people to, they actually need direction from me. They need, they need vision articulated for them and they need me to make really hard decisions. Even if those hard decisions are not popular decisions, that's my job. My job is to do that. And so, I became very up for that challenge. I loved, that was a surprise I guess, in the process, because I hadn't sort of set out to say, I want to be a CEO. And also at the time that I was starting, if I was starting a company now, I think I'd be much more inundated with people my age who were founding companies. And at the time, I didn't really know anyone else who was doing it. I didn't know that many, like you said, I wasn't in those sand pits. So, I didn't have a model for that, so it wasn't really part of my vision for myself. I was really just focused on this problem I wanted to solve, this puzzle I wanted to solve. But once it became clear to me through many mistakes I was making that I needed to step up as a leader, then I thought like, this is actually a really cool thing I get to do, and I want to embrace that more.
Did you have mentors along the way, Analisa?
My gosh, a million, a million mentors. People will say, you know, don't bring on too many advisors. That's a piece of advice, right, because you could stack your deck with like 25 advisors and you're giving them all equity and not all advisors bring the same amount of value. So I do agree with that, that when you're officially going to sign up an advisor who's gonna actually work with you, make sure you're signing someone who you think is gonna give you value and who's committed to following up with you and holding you accountable to certain things and who's open to helping about specific things. I think that is really important. But mentors, oh gosh, everywhere, People in my family, people in my friend group, artists, writers, people from all walks of life, definitely. And you meet those people through those coffee dates and those sort of like, how can I spread the good word of and evangelize this thing I'm working on? You end up meeting people on the way who just are a wealth of information and knowledge. And I'm so grateful for all of them. So grateful.
Yeah, it's so important. It's so key to success. Absolutely surrounding yourself with the right people makes all the difference. I have a curious question for you because I'm sitting here thinking, what does the future look like for the industry for the creative industry, especially because, we're in a new age, the new technology age, AI is everywhere and in everything. What do you see for the next five or maybe even 10 years for the industry?
I think we are in a really pivotal moment in the creator and creative industry. There's a lot going on. So you can look at it through the lens of how is creativity brought to life. And you could look at the change in the agency model and the agency landscape. You could look at it through the lens of how is content being created. In the past, creatives had the option of either custom shooting content or licensing stock. Now content on the internet has become a major medium for people to leverage.
I'm sort of interested in the generative AI evolution and where that's going to go. And I have some thoughts I can share on where I see that going.
Getty and Shutterstock have recently announced a merger. And I'm very close to the leadership of both companies. And I'm familiar with the challenges of the stock model. We talked about that a little bit here. And also the opportunity that stock has to, they reach a lot of people.
I think the thing that generative AI is poised and positioned to go after first is still photography, stock photography. The most generic of it, right? The sort of sunset shots and the sort of like boardrooms, people in conference rooms. Because that content was shot for generic purpose. It was shot with the intent of being used in a commercial context and it was created with the hope of being generic enough that it could apply to lots of different campaigns and lots of different industry verticals.
GenAI when it's legally trained is training on stock libraries. And so it's no surprise that the output of generative AI looks similar to some of that stock photography. Video is a different beast. GenAI is there with video in some cases, but again, it looks quite polished. It looks quite staged. It looks very high production value and it's shocking. I think we're all in this kind of shock and awe phase with regard to generative AI where we're like, wow, I can't believe it did that. Right. But when you're a creative director sitting inside of a brand or an agency trying to create a commercial, it's not all relevant to their strips and their ideas. And fundamentally, generative AI is a rear view looking tool. It looks at everything that's been created up to now, it synthesizes, it does things, and it creates out of that.
But the internet and creators on the internet are making things today that the world has never seen before. We're making memories today that GenAI can't predict. So creators really represent the future and authenticity represents the future. It's the crest of the human creative wave. GenAI is always going to be behind that wave. It has to be because it's only looking backwards.
And so for us, not only, GenAI can't recreate authenticity at the level that a human can. We've done plenty of tests with state of the art tools to say recreate this beautiful moment between a mother and a child that we found on YouTube. Show us what you can do. And it's like, you'd never use it. You'd never choose that over the real thing. And so we're betting on authenticity. We're betting on human creativity, not that GenAI will become a massively important tool, creative tool in this industry. It already has, but it can't do it without, it can't do it without humans continuing to create. If every human stopped creating today, GenAI would not evolve. It needs our memories, it needs the things we're making.
That's such a solid point and such a great optimistic view for the future, I think, for creatives. I truly believe that entertainment in all of its forms is going to be a part that will always supersede any new technology, new anything, because it has lasted since cavemen put handprints on cave walls, right? We created art from the very beginning of our journey as humans. That's never going to change.
I too believe it's just going to continue to evolve. So this is an awesome conversation for creatives to know that there's an incredible future. There's an incredible opportunity to license and share and get your work out there, which is more important than ever. And I love your mission, Connecting, Protecting, and Celebrating storytellers and creatives. Did I get that right? Did I nail that? I can't even.
You got it. You got it. Perfect.
Thanks, that was fun. Absolutely. Exactly. Such an amazing mission to be on. Thank you for being on it and thank you for your time today on Resilient Entrepreneurs Podcast. This was a great conversation. We'll certainly share in the show notes how people can check out exactly what you're doing. And if they're out there in the creative space, see how and if it can work with you and brands, of course, out there, you're going to need exactly this resource. It's incredible. I've checked it out. So thanks, and Analisa, really appreciate your time today.
Awesome. Loved it. You guys are great. Thank you so much for having me.
