I. Everyone Will Be a Creative, but Not Everyone Will Be an Artist

It has never been easier to create – just look at the piles of AI slop crowding the internet. But the best impact of expanded access to creation is not necessarily more art. Instead, it’s a new form of fan engagement. Companies like Showrunner and OpenAI have begun engaging IP in user-generated GenAI content, allowing users to develop a new, more hands-on relationship with the characters and worlds they love.

It reminds me of a lower-barrier-to-entry version of Wattpad, where writers can publicly share their own fan fiction. Like Wattpad, I think we’ll also see the rare breakout creator get their career jump-start from sharing great storylines and content. Similarly, this technology also unlocks a new form of entertainment – vibe-coding creations.

II. Human-Made Will Always Reign Supreme

It has been 200+ years since the first piece of mass-produced clothing, and yet we still value handmade items the most. GenAI will follow a similar path, most readily disrupting the areas of production where technology is already at play, while never being as socially valued as handmade creations.

The strongest applications of GenAI I’ve seen so far in media and entertainment have been in the world of computer-generated imaging. Major disruptions in image technology have only come a few times in history: from the photograph, from the video, and from the computer-generated image. CGI now has new technology fueling it. Runway, Moonvalley, and GenAI-friendly studios like Asteria are working to produce some incredible video content.

Last week, I found myself sitting in the soundstage-turned-office of Asteria as CEO Bryn Mooser and Creative AI Pipeline Director Don Allen Stevenson III shared exactly how they work to produce content. The answer is a collaboration between artist and GenAI, where the artist creates the look and feel and then collaborates with the technology to scale it.

There is no art without humans, and the winners in this space will be, as with any tech product, the businesses that understand their users best. In the world of GenAI video for media and entertainment, precision controls, content rights, and collaboration pathways will all determine which GenAI companies exist ten years from now.

III. The One-Person News Company

My writing partner’s name is Charlie, and she is a GPT that I built. I’ve programmed her to be direct, concise, and critical. I send her excerpts of my writing, and she gives me pretty decent feedback, especially around structure, grammar, and formatting. Other writers I speak to do the same.

In the same way Sam Altman predicts the 1-person billion-dollar startup, it’s now entirely possible to be a successful, one-person media business. Supported by an army of GPTs with data-fed skill sets, the deep research capabilities of these LLMs, and, even more recently, the services of personalized agents like OpenClaw, one person can build an entire newsroom in a matter of minutes. TV shows and films can also be created with leaner, less expensive teams.

I’m not saying this is a good thing. This is just a fact. If you talk to creatives in Hollywood right now about the industry, the story they’ll tell is one of anxiety, uncertainty, and sadness. It’s incredibly important that creatives are able to practice their craft and live good lives doing it.

IV. Continued Love for Live Events

Every media company has become a live events business. This was true before GenAI, as media businesses sought additional, alternative revenue streams. And it’s even more true now, as businesses seek an area they can count on amid all this technological uncertainty. MARI, started by former CEO of Endeavor Ari Emanuel, is a $2B bet on the live events and experiences business, owning the Frieze art fair, TodayTix, and tennis tournaments like the Miami Open, among others. A24 has Cherry Lane Theatre for its live events, and Netflix has launched Netflix House. If it doesn’t have one already, every large media and entertainment business will have a live events strategy in the next few years.

V. It’s All Going to Be Okay

As both a creative and a technologist, I find the adoption of GenAI in media and entertainment inevitable. Coming from the institutional perspective when consulting for media and entertainment companies at BCG to the grassroots view of a consumer AI startup in the Creator Economy space, I feel like I’ve seen both ends of the media and entertainment spectrum. And one of the key challenges I see facing the industry at large is slow adoption in times that have obviously changed. This is driven, in part, by the industry’s heavy unionization. Sometimes, I wish media and entertainment would evolve faster to catch up with the times and re-enter a phase of growth rather than slow contraction.

Lowering the barrier to entry for creation (and the cost) will give voice to artists who otherwise may not have it. And some amazing things will be created as a result. However, as we evolve, we need to do whatever we can to maintain the heart of the media and entertainment world – real people creating things together and making a living doing so.

85% of MBA students begin school wanting to be entrepreneurs. In an age where the MBA degree feels ever more optional, business schools have doubled down on this value proposition—presenting themselves as a breeding ground for the next great unicorn startup.

Innovation labs have been built, pitch competitions funded, and startup incubation programs launched. Entrepreneurs and investors sit in residence, ready to offer advice. At times, campus can feel like a you-pay, degree-carrying version of Y Combinator, boasting rarer but similarly standout successes among the likes of Cloudflare, Hinge, Rent the Runway, Warby Parker, SoFi, and DoorDash.

But attend a pitch night, talk to a student founder, or sit in on an Entrepreneur-in-Residence advice session, and one unresolved question becomes clear: within a class of former operators and investors brimming with ideas, who will actually build these companies?

This is a question I’ve been kicking around since starting at HBS this fall, and so, to try and answer it, I did what I’d assume any investigative journalist would do: surveyed my classmates and cornered founders in the dining hall for quotes.

Among survey respondents, only 9% identified as skilled enough to build the products they are designing. 39% say they can “speak technical,” often because of product backgrounds, while 52% report not being technical at all.

Excluding the 4% who neither needed nor wanted technical support, nearly half of respondents were still searching for it. 17% had found technical support, and 30% had secured a technical co-founder. 48% described the search as “harder than expected,” citing—more than any other reason—the lack of technical talent at their school.

Miles Francis, a current HBS student, former operator, and founder of Brand Muse—the AI-native strategic intelligence platform for creator marketing—describes the challenge: “There just aren’t many people in the MBA program with true technical backgrounds,” he says. “And if they do have one, they’re likely getting an MBA to pivot out of engineering or start something on their own. They know their value, so it’s tough as a founder to find someone willing to meet you as an equal, work with you, and be passionate about the idea. There are too many business or idea people looking for a technical co-founder. It’s kind of a joke on campus at this point.”

Even when technical students are present, incentives often misalign. “Students coming from technical backgrounds seem to want co-founders who are also technical,” says HBS student Arshaan Ali. His classmate, J.C. Moubarak, echoes the sentiment: “The technical people here, myself included, don’t always want to be the technical co-founder in their startup, which reduces the options available.”

Some entrepreneurial-minded technical students have capitalized on the demand for their skill sets, building out informal one-person development shops to help classmates build MVPs. Nathan Alam, a student in Harvard’s dual-degree Master of Science–Master of Business Administration (“MS-MBA”) program and a former software engineer at Scale AI and Amazon Web Services, has volunteered his expertise to help three founders build MVPs so far.

Alam spends the rest of his time working on his own startup—a requirement of the joint-degree program. Through the Technology Ventures Initiative (“TVI”) and Designing Technology Ventures (“DTV”) courses, MS-MBA students must research, prototype, and pitch a startup idea, leaving little room for outside entrepreneurial commitments. “Most MS-MBAs want to work on their own idea or commercialize research a lab has already done,” Alam explains. “But if you engage early, they might bring you into their TVI project.”

Alexandra Zaoui, a former data scientist building an AI startup for the music industry, did exactly that—reaching out to a technically trained classmate before school even began. “We connected through an admissions list, realized we shared an interest in entrepreneurship within the music industry, and have been working together since,” she says. The pair will participate in TVI together this winter.

Beyond campus, aspiring HBS founders report finding support through nearby technical programs like MIT, online job boards like the Harvard Grid, or former colleagues. Of those who succeeded, 36% entered school with technical support already secured, another 36% found it among classmates, 18% through prior co-workers, and 10% online. Most searches took between one and three months.

Unsurprisingly, higher levels of commitment correlated with success. Every founder who secured technical help viewed their startup as a full-time post-MBA pursuit, spending an average of 14 hours per week on it during school.

In an age of vibe-coding and the lore of Sam Altman’s “one-person, billion-dollar company,” a natural question emerges: is a technical partner even necessary?

Despite his engineering background, Alam argues no. “A lot of people who think they need a technical co-founder don’t. Giving up significant equity for a technical co-founder is the most extreme option,” he says. “There are other ways to be successful.”

Alam suggests founders vibe-code MVPs and outsource development to make products scalable. “It’s probably better to bootstrap a build for $500 on Fiverr than to give away so much equity early on.” Alam also suggests recruiting technical undergraduates: “There are a lot of undergrads looking for something to put on their project portfolio.”

Francis is living Alam’s advice. He and his co-founder have scaled Brand Muse to its first customers simply using Cursor. “There’s a learning curve,” he says, “but with a little help upfront, it’s manageable.”

Still, he sees the solution as temporary. “We’re actively looking for a founding engineer, both to move more quickly and to have a product that’s more cutting-edge. But the way we’re set up works well for now.”

Thanks, Internet! Things I Liked This Week:

No Drama, No Guys – A Tiny House Retirement

This NYT piece about the Bird’s Nest in Texas – a women-only, tiny-house village in East Texas where older women are looking to retire cheaply, care for each other, and stay out of nursing homes.

These women seem badass, and the one-liners in this article are A+. When asked about their no-men-allowed rule…

What Even is Instagram?

A good take on Instagram’s mishmash of features and its dire need for direction. Instagram rolled out some new features recently, including one that lets you see your friends’ locations. If you’re thinking: “Like Snapchat?” Yes, like Snapchat. They also let you see what your friends are liking and commenting on. Wait, like X? Yes, like X. As I’ve written about before, all these social media companies are slowly conforming to be exactly the same.

Speaking of Instagram… I’ve been loving @CrustByCarson

Sometimes, though, Instagram does lead you to great stuff… like @crustbycarson. He’s upbeat. He’s funny. He’s also training for a marathon. He has a great hook. Great hooks can get you far in short-form. Carson has grown ~300k organically in 1.5 months. Carson nails the relatable 4HL (four-hour life) experience of trying to reset after the workday. He also, I’ve discovered, writes a Substack (). Way to own that follower list, Carson!

If you have content you’ve loved and want to share, send it my way by replying to this email or texting me!

-KK

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P.S. These movies I wrote about from Sundance are hitting theaters. Go see Together and Oh, Hi!. So impressed by Sophie Brooks and Molly Gordon.

Recently, I’ve taken to asking people their Subway Takes. For those who have never seen Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes video series, a Subway Take is a hot take communicated… wait for it… on the subway. In my version, no subways are involved, but yes, it’s still a Subway Take. No further questions.

If I had one Subway Take for this blog, it would be: I think people should spend their first year out of college doing internships. The reason for this is simple: if people took one year to try a range of jobs, they might spend the rest of their lives happier in their careers, knowing it was the best place for them.

When we choose colleges, we spend so much time experiencing the ones we’re considering. We walk the campuses and shadow classes. We meet the students. Maybe we even spend a night in their dorms. Before I agreed to attend Dartmouth, I had visited three times, eaten multiple meals in the dining hall, met dozens of current and prospective students, slept on an air mattress in some girl’s dorm room, and attended a class. I was encouraged to do this by my parents, teachers, and college counselor.

On the other hand, when I picked my first full-time job, I held a few phone calls.

There is so much pressure at the end of college to have a job that we often don’t think critically enough about what that job should be.

We also don’t even know the extent of the opportunities available to us. We get swept up by the possibilities on the campus job boards, by what our friends are doing, and the pressure to “just commit to something.”

We are told that jobs can always be changed, so start somewhere, and if it isn’t a fit, just switch.

Which is true, in theory. But when I speak to my friends these days, a few years into the workforce, most everyone feels somewhat pigeon-holed. They’ve chosen an industry and a role rather cavalierly, and when they look for new jobs, it feels like now they can only choose a new industry or a new role.

And so, people seem to be side-stepping their way to different jobs all the time, more focused on the jobs they “can get” than the jobs they want to have.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to pivot entirely; I’m simply saying that if people pick something nonchalantly only to then feel stuck, why don’t we give them the opportunity — like we do with colleges — to choose more intentionally? Why don’t we give them more internships?

I am a huge advocate for the adult internship. Internships are the best way to sample a career path. Every internship I’ve ever had has helped me understand more about myself — types of people I like to work with, cultures I appreciate, work I find interesting, things I’m good at. (One of the reasons I liked management consulting so much was because the range of clients, industries, and teams I experienced felt like many internships in one job.) Internships also simply help narrow down the list of job ideas.

I often get reached out to by young adults torn between many career paths, maybe partially because of this piece I wrote, which is still the most verbally cited piece I’ve ever published. The students I speak to are usually torn between many, totally different careers. Maybe they’re considering government or business. Maybe they also have a knack for graphic design, and their secret dream is to live in a loft in Brooklyn printing T-shirts. Who knows. People are multi-dimensional, and so are their career interests.

If a student like that was encouraged to slow down and spend more time experiencing their career ideas — if they spent nine months post-college doing three internships, using their experiences from internship one to pick internship two and so on — they could answer those tugging questions in a better way from the start and live a lifetime with more personal satisfaction as a result.

Recently, I’ve been building apps for fun on Bolt. They are aesthetically pretty and work somewhat. If I tried to scale them to commercial standards, they’d fall apart.

But still, pretty cool considering the only coding I learned at Dartmouth was Stata. For those not familiar with Stata, telling Computer Science majors you can code Stata is like telling English majors you’re sort of like them because you’ve read a few picture books.

And so, to create these apps, I use words. When the app is broken, I type: “You’re broken. Fix yourself.” (Literally.) When the app uses colors I dislike, I write: “New colors,” and when I want it to do something specific, I simply explain what that specific thing is. I try to be as impolite with my requests as possible in order to save our water.

What I get, in the end, are essentially refined wireframes — an interactive experience that helps me communicate what I hope to build to potential customers for feedback and to people who can then actually build it.

In the past year, I have gone from being able to code nothing to coding something. But so too has everyone else.

When technology makes it easier for you to do something, it makes it easier for everyone. And in the case of technology these days, where anyone can create apps, publish photos, and write and post thoughts, what it also does is create a lot of volume… a lot of noise.

Let’s use another non-tech example: podcasts. To make a podcast, all I need to do is record myself talking on an app like Riverside and then upload Riverside’s auto-edited version to Spotify. Riverside will even make me marketing clips for distribution on Instagram and TikTok. It has never been easier to make and share a podcast, which is why there are way too many podcasts.

The barrier for production has historically been the capacity to create. No longer. Now, it’s being able to determine what is worth creating.

There have been many great pieces written recently about the attention economy and the fight for eyeballs in an overwhelmed world. Kyla Scanlon’s recent essay even added “attention” to the foundational inputs of creation, along with land, labor, and capital. But as a creator of things, how do you predict what will produce attention? First, you need taste.

Anu Atluru puts it well in her essay: “In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste.”

Taste, I’d argue, is a human-only skill. At the highest level, taste is unformulaic and unpredictable — not replicable through training. Elements of taste include judgment, intuition, style, and sense — skills that are born innately into humans only, refined through lived experience. And as we know, some humans have better taste than others.

The more time I spend at the intersection of AI and creativity, the more convinced I become that, in the end, AI-generated and predominantly man-made art will always be regarded as separate entities. The former will be considered “mass market” and the latter will be reserved for “high end.” AI and humans will work together to break new artistic ground, in the way CGI has done for movies or auto-tune has done for music, but AI will never overcome human-made art’s value to society because AI will never have human taste.

We like art because it speaks to something innate in us, a feeling or experience that we did not even consciously recognize. And if we can not identify this in ourselves, how do we expect technology to?

Related writing:

• Cracking Consumer AI

Stepping off the management consulting diving board and plunging into the world of startups, I was introduced to a new definition of a familiar word: “magic.”

When building a consumer application, magic is the gold standard for success – the sign of product market fit.

How do you know when you’ve created a magic app?

Oh, you’ll just know.

Symptoms of app magic include creating a product so beautiful, fun, and easy that consumers can’t help but tell all their friends about it. Under the hood, magic looks like steep, hockey stick-like curves of user counts with high, active user and retention numbers.

The diagnosis is easy, but getting there is incredibly hard.

Consumer AI applications have been, up until this point, an underwhelmed market. The biggest wins in AI have gone to the LLM developers themselves (OpenAI is now valued at $300B), and then, more recently, to B2B applications like HippocraticAI, Harvey, and Hebbia, which are proving real utility in streamlining workflows and seeing around corners of employee responsibilities. Building for Consumer AI is the hardest challenge of all. Supplemental to business basics like “building something people want”, to build a strong consumer AI agent you need three core things that are all individually incredibly challenging to achieve.

I. Data

People often talk about “trust” and “personalization” when evaluating AI applications. To me, those things go hand in hand and are both unlocked with good data. Like real relationships, trust between a consumer and an AI agent is built over time by repeatedly meeting or surpassing expectations – by being truly helpful. The way to be truly helpful is to truly understand the person you are trying to support. This is only possible with good data on both 1) who the user is and then 2) how to generate the most helpful output.

The challenge with Consumer AI is that data on consumers is not as readily available as it is with businesses. Companies have been storing their data for decades, providing a deep data lake for AI applications to connect to. With consumers, information is spread all over businesses and the internet, much of which sits in “walled gardens” where data is privately owned. Compared to B2B tools, consumers have even less patience to try and help an AI agent build data and understanding.

Social media platforms, arguably the best publicly accessible storage units for consumer data, dish information out to apps through APIs. These APIs restrict the types of accessible data, never providing the full picture. Incumbents like Meta and Google who already hold and control so much consumer data are, in my opinion, at a clear advantage when building for Consumer AI, unless you really knock the second pillar out of the park.

II. Design

Once a consumer AI agent understands you, it must tell you so in a way that’s clear and fun – like the best motivational speakers do. Good design is a way to differentiate in the crowded consumer ecosystem and turn an application into something that’s fun to use. Design is always important to apps, but even more so in the age of AI agents. Agents provide information. The more fun and less burdensome getting to the information feels, the more likely the consumer is to pick the app versus its competitors.

III. Making the impossible possible.

With killer data and design, a Consumer AI agent is probably most of the way to “magic”. Now, all it needs is one more sprinkle of something special: disbelief. Magic is realized in witnessing something that you never thought would be possible. This shock and surprise typically translate into an urgent need to tell all your friends, driving rapid, organic growth of the product. The go-to-market dream!

Where is the magic happening now?

Generative AI has been a known, popular technology for two years now, and I’ve tested countless consumer AI apps. But I never felt magic with anything, until recently when I first used Lovable. Lovable takes consumers from an “idea to an app in seconds.” All you do is type in what you want it to build, and it simply does.

As someone who has never been able to code but always wished to build products that require it, I was able to design and build frontends of websites, mobile, and desktop apps on Lovable just by prompting it through good old, regular words.

Lovable made me feel more capable. It allowed me to turn ideas into reality. It made me feel like I had magic powers. And so of course, I had to tell my friends.

*This is not a Lovable ad at all, even though it sort of reads like one.

Recently, Instagram has been feeding me videos of founders “building in public.” Poorboy Coffee shares, through carousels and reels, how they’re bootstrapping their way to their first SF-based coffee shop. Beny Yogurt takes its followers to dairy farms upstate and offers interactive polls. “Do you like your yogurt in plastic or glass?” Your answer may influence their very first mass product order. Hot Girl Pickles mislabeled 1500 of their jars. They almost got sued, and they want everyone to know.

Starting a company is hard, and so is becoming a content creator. The expectation for founders these days is to do both. Social media is seen as a free tool for staying close to your customers, building your own direct communication platforms, and owning your narrative. Founders seem to get there with a lot of talking-to-the-camera reels that open with catchy, repeated hooks and interactive polls. They’re likely aiming for high engagement which will help them stay at the top of followers’ feeds and also be discovered by new, future customers. If they succeed, they can organically build brand recognition in often-crowded markets and a pipeline for quick customer feedback.

Frothing in this changing tide is the birth of the modern-day PR firm. As founders change their approach, so do innovative founders of new PR firms. The modern-day PR firm helps founders “go direct”, turning founders into the primary megaphone for their business and its mission. One of these new PR firms, Rostra, puts it well in their manifesto to founders:

“You may not be interested in The Discourse, but it is interested in you. And if you bow out, you are forfeiting your license to build a movement and thus build a company.”

Another PR firm, Sisu tells founders:

“A defensible business starts with a story only you can tell.”

These PR firms help founders craft a voice and a megaphone rather than another press release. In structure, they reflect the startups they aim to support. They are lean, often made up of ex-VC people staff. One of their biggest selling points is that they have no PR backgrounds.

As a media enthusiast, it’s amazing to observe the extent to which social media has altered the entirety of the media industry. We’ve talked a lot about the birth of content creators and production studios that create content native to these platforms. Now, we’re seeing social media alter the roadmap for founders themselves and the PR firms that support them.

The Kitchen Fridge: What’s in the Fridge? 2/2/25

1. Is the arena crowded?: ’s article discusses the magic of being in a space before it’s popular. She likens it to sitting in a near-empty arena. The article was sent to me by a Substack friend (Hi Joe! Plug for Joe: he writes a great blog analyzing consumer data.) Joe sent me this after a conversation we had about the changing ~feel~ on Substack. Back in 2022 when I started hitting “submit”, Substack felt like a long, sprawling desert where you could shout soundlessly into the void. The vastness and anonymity of the ecosystem felt like a safe place to take risks and make new friends. Now, most of my IRL pals seem to have Substack accounts. This is great for Substack, but I do sometimes miss that empty arena.

   “Everyone who arrives at an arena early is suspended in a time and space of possibility — and suspended from the usual judgments — for a little bit.” - Anu Atluru

   ---

2. Can you change a chatbot’s mind?: Ever ask ChatGPT for an opinion and wonder how it decided? I read this a few months ago about how reputations with GenAI bots are made and now I think about it all the time. Specifically, I’ve been watching this startup Profound which offers A.I.O services to brands (AI Optimization, a play on S.E.O). By feeding news to sites chatbots often reference or by swarming the internet with high-volume content representing a specific perspective, you can, as it turns out, change a chatbot’s mind.

   “A few days after putting secret messages on my website, I noticed that some chatbots seemed to be warming up to me.”

   ---

   

3. Sundance: I spent this past week with my hand in a bucket of popcorn and my eyes glued to screens. It was heaven. If you know me very well, you might know that one of my absolute favorite things to do is rip a movie solo. The best films? Sophie Brooke’s Oh, Hi! with Molly Gordan and Logan Lerman and Michael Shank’s Together, starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie (who are also married in real life.) Both of these movies are really funny, very creative, and quite thoughtful about how they explore relationship dynamics. Together already sold to Neon for $17M in a bidding war.

In my ears:

Arcy Drive: A four-piece indie rock band playing, what they call, “Attic-Rock” style. I love their sound and the fact that the drummer also spends time on the mic. She’s living out my childhood band dream. Check out “Time Shrinks” and “Louie”.

My vision for this feature is to have a crowd-sourcing component. If you have articles you’ve discovered or Substack pieces you’ve written that you want to share, reply to this email or submit them anonymously on this form.

In my current job, I spend a lot of time trying to understand how social media algorithms work in order to help content creators. At this point, I feel I could grow a social media account from 0 to 100,000 if I wanted to but I choose not to, finding that pursuit to be more about business and community management than creation itself. After all, I write on Substack for fun.

Of course, I get curious to see if the strategies I’m developing for growth will work. Recently, I decided to put some lessons to the test to see if I could make myself go viral. And I actually did.

While social media algorithms are intentionally a black box (if they were easy to crack and static, they would be highly susceptible to bot-spamming), there are two key things I’ve come to understand about them.

1. Algorithms reward consistency.

The only strategy all creators can agree works is posting often. Not only does posting often increase chances for engagement, but it also signals to the algorithm that you are trying to grow online… which leads me to my second point.

2. Algorithms like small, hard-working creators.

As I discussed in my recent post about Substack, social media platforms are ultimately businesses that measure their success using their number of active users. The best way to get the most active users on social media is to build small communities for all hard-working creators, rather than large communities for a few. As of algorithm updates in April 2024, small creators on Instagram have an easier chance of popping up on your reel than larger ones.

And so to see if I could go viral in a low-stakes, low-effort way, I crafted a Substack note signaling to the algorithm that I was a small, hard-working creator hoping to grow. This is the note:

This note got ~815 more likes than I typically receive, 15 more restacks, and 94 more comments than I’m used to. Although it took me two years to get to 200 subscribers, because of this note, it took me less than a week to gain 100 more.

I had achieved every creator’s dream. I had been lifted by the algorithmic gods and taken to the front of the feed of thousands. I had expanded my community rapidly. But I also felt, for the first time, unmotivated to write. Finding virality had never made me so uninterested in continuing.

I have always thought about this blog as my little corner of the internet. It’s like a curated room for my brain. It looks the way I want. It says the things I want. It starts conversations I want to have. It brings me opportunities I’ve hoped for.

Going “viral” reminded me that although I twist and tweak this blog into something that feels so entirely mine, it is ultimately accessible to all. This might be my corner of the internet, but there are no gates. And although I welcome and get excited by each new subscriber, it was certainly uncomfortable to watch my corner of the internet expand in directions I did not necessarily intend.

I am excited to have new members of my community, and it felt great to feel “noticed” by Substack after years of writing. After all, I put the same time and energy into my posts regardless if one person reads it or 1,000; obviously, I’d prefer 1,000. But my experiment and the surprising unease I felt at its success served as a humbling reminder of why I log on in the first place: to share thoughts and commit continuously to the craft of writing. It was never about the numbers.

If I had a million dollars to invest in startups today, I’d put it into healthcare businesses offering specialized, preventative healthcare to youth. Here’s why:

Preventative healthcare is incredibly effective and currently under-invested in.

Preventative healthcare appeals to all sides of the healthcare system – payers, providers, and patients.  Every dollar invested in evidence-based prevention programs generates $5.60 in savings. For patients, seeking preventative healthcare expands both lifespan (years lived) and healthspan (quality of health in years lived). Americans who participate in employer-sponsored health plans focused on preventative care are projected to increase their lifespan from an average of 77.9 years to 90 years. Additionally, while the value of preventative healthcare is recognized in the healthcare system, there is much more room to invest. Preventative healthcare still receives just 2.9% of all healthcare investment dollars.   

Preventative healthcare is more effective the earlier it’s introduced.

Healthy habits (or lack thereof) are formed early. Take nutrition. Poor nutrition is the leading risk factor for early death in the US, and 60% of American adults have a chronic illness that is exacerbated by bad diets. Dietary habits are solidified at a young age, which means preventative healthcare efforts aimed at children would allow kids to form healthier eating habits and stave off chronic disease. For example, the more fatty tissue people develop as children (which is caused by being overweight), the greater their risk for Type 2 diabetes. A similar parallel can be drawn with mental health. If children receive mental healthcare earlier, when their brains are still developing, they can take the practices and self-understanding learned into their most formative years, operating with healthier habits. In addition, with an adolescent mental health crisis happening in our country today (more than 20% of teens report having considered suicide), mental health treatments for teenagers are becoming less preventative and more a necessity.

So… what’s the best form of preventative healthcare? Specialized healthcare.

I’m excited about the evolution of our healthcare system to see patients as one holistic vessel – body, mind, and soul (…beliefs long held in eastern medicine.) I’ve admired companies like Tia that build holistic healthcare for women, offering therapy, dermatology, gynecology, and other forms of care in one place, framing it as a “team” of providers for one patient. This approach seems to increase patient adherence and use of preventative care. 72% of Tia patients report having their diabetes under control, versus the national average of 55%. The same will likely ring true for specialized care for kids.

What does the future look like?

To me, an effective startup in this space will be one that doles out personalized care in an area where early intervention influences outcomes, typically in behavioral health. I’ve been watching startups like pediatric speech and physical therapy company Coral Care or the group therapy startup aimed at teenagers, Marble Health. Being insurance covered (or on track to be) is a prerequisite for success. Of course, the biggest question is whether guardians of these children will buy into this form of care without experiencing the benefits. However, I believe that if the growing investment in our pets has taught us anything, it’s that people are skewing more caring of other beings and their health, not less so.

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Other related pieces: HERE is a piece I wrote on the nutrition industry. HERE is one on healthspan.

We are all creators, and social media has become our modern-day showcase. On these platforms, amateur comedians, artists, and writers abound, finding creative expression and also a lot of random viral dance videos.

As social media has transitioned from a place to connect with your friends to a place to consume content, so to has the medium with which we express ourselves.

Each social media platform used to be known for a specific content type. Twitter monopolizes short-form text. Substack captures long-form writing. Instagram was originally the place to share photos. YouTube and TikTok were for sharing videos. But now, I can’t help but observe that all these platforms look exactly the same.

Social media platforms measure their success based on their number of active users and the amount of time they engage them for. Capturing a consumer’s attention in today’s attention economy is very difficult. The most recent social media success, BeReal, which was acquired for ~$500M+ in June was only able to bring 9% of their users back each day. In order to compete for the same users and their same free time, social media companies have become identical. No matter which form of communication these platforms start with, they ultimately roll out the same features: the ability to share text, images, videos, stand-alone audio (podcasts), and to go live.

Yes, even Substack.

I hold Substack in higher regard than I do Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or TikTok. It feels calmer, more thoughtful, more authentic. It feels like a warm community. I love that I can write long pieces that arrive in the email inboxes of willing readers. I love that I, in exchange, can be the willing reader for so many amazing writers. Substack feels like it respects and rewards the craft of writing.

Want proof? Read the thoughtful comments on writers’ pieces.

But maybe I’m giving Substack too much credit. In the past two years I’ve been writing The Kitchen Fridge, I’ve watched Substack change into every other social media platform. First came the podcast feature and then the Substack app, which introduced Substack Notes, identical to Twitter-like short-form thoughts or Instagram Threads. With Substack Notes came that dreaded social media algorithm, feeding me an endless supply of content I hardly want. With Substack Notes also came the ability to share Instagram-like photo dumps. Now, Substack has rolled out a “Live” feature.

When the features changed, the creators changed. From my experience scrolling Substack, it seems like innovative thought and artful writing are no longer the ways to win on the platform. Instead, Substack appears to be taking a page from Instagram and TikTok and leaning into the volume game. Similarly, the way I see creators interacting with Substack today reminds me of the way I see creators interact with Instagram or TikTok to grow. They post often, regardless of quality, and they take advantage of new features in the hopes that they will be rewarded by the algorithm. As points out in The Machine in the Garden: “I’m noticing this platform has become a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries — lists, random thoughts, and (easy to write) roundups of “what I’ve been doing” do really well on this site.” Essentially, the Get Ready with Me content that speckles my Instagram and TikTok feeds has made its way to my writing haven.

I like reading public diary entries as much as the next girl but when I do so on Substack, it feels like the platform is losing its goal of “restoring the value of online writing.” Substack doesn’t feel like a space meant for writers anymore. Substack’s easy monetization path for creators, as well as its ability for creators to own their audience, has attracted creators of all types.

I’m not alone in this observation. puts it well in her blog : “Along with the introduction of social-first features, there’s been an influx of “creators” on Substack—influencers, founders, podcasters, and YouTubers—with little writing experience (non-derogatory) but huge audiences that Substack hopes they can bring over and convert to paying subscribers.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with creators playing algorithms to grow. Rewarding compelling voices with large platforms and larger paychecks is good for diversity of thought. But as a passionate believer in Substack because of its differences from Instagram and TikTok, it’s also just kind of sad to see.

My favorite Substack creators are world-class writers using the platform to engage with their readers and earn a larger income than the print media world typically provides. Amazing fiction writers like and my former professor are on Substack. Incredible journalists like are here too. Being able to get unfiltered easter eggs of writing frequently in my inbox from some of the world’s greatest writers is a testament to the positive cultural implications of technology. It’s a testament to how amazing Substack can be. To see Substack rolling out additional features clearly meant more for engagement than for supporting the creative act of writing makes me question my belief in the platform I hold so dear.

Today, I’m tackling an issue I’ve been meaning to write about for a while: what has happened to the media industry, and where is it heading?

I am a student of media businesses. At BCG, I helped craft growth strategies for some of the largest media companies. Now, at HelloCreator, I’m working to support the modern media business: the content creator. You could also easily argue that this blog is a media business, although a horribly unprofitable one at that.

Media is captivating to me because it is everywhere (“every business wants to be a media business” is a saying my former BCG colleagues discussed recently) and also because, from a business perspective, it is so incredibly difficult to succeed. Media is the primary way humans stay informed and inform others. Innovation in media, beginning with the typewriter and most recently with short-form video on TikTok, fundamentally changes how we communicate and who we communicate with, generating seismic cultural shifts. (Pace Capital’s Chris Paik explains the historical impacts of new communication styles on society well in this interview.) Succeeding in media drives the success of an institution. Just ask Kamala Harris and the 200+ content creators she brought to this year’s Democratic National Convention.

And yet, while every business may want to be a media business, every media business is also, arguably, a struggling business. Even the largest media companies, the emblems of success for the up-and-comers, are riddled with challenges. It is difficult to identify a media company that hasn’t undertaken massive layoffs in the past few years, and it is even more difficult to identify a large media company that serves as a realistic, optimistic, playbook for the future. Warner Bros.? Struggling with debt. The New York Times? More of a lifestyle company than a pure-play media company, as I’ve discussed. Disney? Have you seen the challenges CEO Bob Iger has been dealing with?  

I. Understanding the Source of the Struggle (for Entertainment Companies)

A. The shift from linear to streaming   

For so long, companies like Disney and Warner Bros. were propped up by the reliable and profitable linear TV business (i.e., cable). As more consumers cancel cable packages and “cord cut”, the business is shrinking and the emphasis on streaming has increased.

Streaming is a way worse business model than linear. It is a far less reliable and far less profitable income stream. While linear TV businesses involved selling bundles of channels to cable companies that consumers would pay for consistently in their cable bill, streaming revenues rely on ever-fickle consumer subscription models. 23% of consumers are “serial churners” for subscription platforms, meaning that they cancel and then re-buy subscriptions frequently, typically to gain access to the content they most want to watch. For example, a consumer might subscribe to Netflix to catch Bridgerton’s newest season, but when new episodes of The Bear drop on Hulu, they’ll cancel their subscription to Netflix and subscribe to Hulu instead. To make matters more difficult, studies have found that consumers group all content subscriptions together, forcing all media types (news, streaming, etc.) to compete with each other for share of wallet.

B. The fruitless battle for content

The way to win then for streamers is to always offer content interesting and new enough to the consumer to be worth the subscription. And that’s an expensive game to play. Media companies like Netflix and Disney have tripped over themselves trying to play a content race for the most in-demand content always. They still try for this, although spending has cooled. One stat I found stated that according to their annual reports, Netflix’s streaming costs in 2021 came out to ~$6 per subscriber. Disney+ spent ~$5 per subscriber.

II. What the future looks like

While costs for streaming businesses soar and the demand for new content feels relentless, the irony is that creating and distributing high-quality content has never been cheaper and easier. As a result, it's hard to see a future in which large media companies succeed. The business has changed too much, and large media companies are too big to pivot into the lean, cheap content machine that succeeds in this modern media landscape. They are too big to not fail.

We’ll likely continue to watch large media players aggregate again and again, as we’ve recently seen with Skydance merging with Paramount. And we’ll also likely see them continue to pay up for sports content, which has been a consistent source of consumer demand in an inconsistent market. Right now, more than 1/5^th of companies’ content budgets are dedicated to sports.

The real winners in media’s future will be the little guys who can create highly-entertaining, high-quality content in a way that is quick and cheap. Essentially, the future of media is the 200M+ content creators expressing themselves online. But that’s hardly a new observation. So instead, I want to highlight the characteristics of the successful future media business.

III. Components of the media businesses of the future

A.   They will leverage algorithmic distribution platforms

Social media is the new TV. The average consumer spends 33% of their screen time on social media, watching short-form video content fed to them through a smart, personalized algorithm. These algorithms have a knack for finding little-known high-quality content and making it “go viral”, placing it in the feeds of millions overnight. Recently, startups like Gymnasium have been using the algorithm to their advantage as a free, very effective distribution source. From idea generation to the editing process, the Gymnasium team creates content they think the algorithm (and their social media-based audience) will like. It seems to work. The first episode of Gymnasium’s most recent show “Boy Room”, was posted to TikTok on an account without followers, acquiring 3M views within two weeks.

B.    They will own their audience

Algorithms can be great distribution channels, but they are also entirely unpredictable. When using algorithms that drive SEO and social media feeds, it’s hard (and expensive) to stay relevant. This is why we’ve seen a greater push among media businesses to own the contact channels for their audiences. For print media, for example, this has led to the rise of newsletter culture. With newsletters, media businesses know who their audience is and how to reach them. Traditional media platforms have rolled out newsletters appealing to a plethora of niches. New York Magazine currently has 39 newsletters. Journalists have also started owning their direct readership with newsletters of their own. Former New York Magazine Editor ’s business newsletter Feed Me is an example of this. Writing on Substack instead of for NYM grants Emily creative freedom and a significantly higher paycheck for her work.

The other way media companies own and cultivate their audience is through a community-focused media strategy. Substack has “Substack Chat”, Puck has The Puck Private Conversation, and production studio A24 has “A24 All Access (AAA24)” that all serve the same purpose: providing a platform for their community to converse, strengthening their understanding and relationship to their audience in the process.

A.   They will have very-specific niches  

To cut through the content noise, the future of media will speak to a deliberately-very-specific audience. A24 is an example of this. As New York Magazine journalist Nate Jones explains when referencing A24’s decision to produce Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, “The studio doesn’t just make a ‘high-school movie,’ it makes a ‘Catholic school in Sacramento in the spring of 2003 movie.’” Recently, we’ve also seen this with the modern media company Smooth Media. Started by early employees at Morning Brew, Smooth’s mission is to make newsletters for “knowledge creators” or those who educate their audiences through “smart, insightful content”. Most notably, Smooth hosts the creator-focused newsletter The Publish Press (). Smooth recently acquired Energy Central, a media publication for “electric power professionals.” It’s hard to come up with a more specific niche.

I’ve certainly seen this trend at HelloCreator. Conversing with content creators daily, creators seem to have a strong, very-specific sense of their niche. Creators will consider themselves to be a “lifestyle influencer who provides advice on how to make passive income through real estate” or a “health and wellness influencer who shares vegan, high-protein recipes”.

B.    They will think like traditional businesses.

Great media companies think like traditional businesses. They set out on an intentional path to profitability, minimizing costs and planning their revenue sources strategically and creatively. Usually, this drives new media businesses to find revenue sources beyond content itself. Brand sponsorships, rather than advertising revenue, fuel the modern media businesses. Creators are projected to earn $8B from brand sponsorships this year and only $1B from platform advertising dollars. Beyond sponsorships, brands look for diverse revenue streams. A24, for example, rolls out limited-edition merchandise that sells out often within seconds. The Paris Review does this as well.  

Community can also be a revenue source. Substack writers monetize their communities, typically making $5 per month per reader. This is a pretty notable sum when you do the math, especially when you consider the lower salaries journalists are used to making. Substacker takes home $800k+ annually for aggregating her readers onto her own site. A24’s community brings in upwards of $1M+ in annual recurring revenue in exchange for providing its passionate fans with a quarterly magazine, free movie tickets, early access to merchandise, and the ability to chat with the other community members on Instagram.

IV. Conclusion

Ultimately, the beauty of media is that it is a persistent reflection of the technological and cultural zeitgeist. Succeeding as a media business requires constant evolution and with it, the requirement to stay lean enough to do so.

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The essay in bullets: (I know…this is a long one.)

·      Consumers are canceling their cable subscriptions, causing large media companies that relied on revenue from linear TV to lose reliable income.

·      Recognizing that cable is a declining revenue source, media companies have been trying to make streaming happen. They do this by spending big $$ on producing content for a fickle population of “serial churners”.

·      It has never been easier to produce high-quality content quickly and cheaply, clearing the way for a new operating style for the media companies of the future.

·       The best media companies of today will have clear audience niches, own their audience (literally, by being able to contact them), be intentional about their P&Ls, bring in revenue beyond content itself, and tap into distribution systems on existing platforms that capture audience attention like social media feeds.

·      Media is changing all the time. Media companies must stay lean and nimble to be able to adapt.

Last spring, in a very-Kiera way, I went down a rabbit hole into the telehealth-based nutrition support space. I studied the market, narrowed down the players to the top three (Nourish, Berry Street, and Fay Nutrition), and then booked calls with all of them to get some nutrition advice, see what these platforms felt like, and what their differences were. I did so more out of curiosity than need. I am a member of the “worried well” – health-conscious consumers who seek preventative healthcare less because they acutely need it and more because, well, you can never stop improving.

Recently, I’ve watched the nutrition space get a lot of love. Americans were overweight and now fewer of them are overweight, largely due to a magic drug (GLP-1s) that increases insulin production, reduces glucagon, and squashes your appetite. While GLP-1s feel novel, it is in public discourse only. Discovered in the 1970s, the first GLP-1 received FDA approval in April 2005, originally for diabetes patients who used it for managing their blood sugar. When it became apparent that GLP-1s also had widespread weight loss capabilities, that’s when you probably started hearing about them. Take a second look at anyone you know who has had a miracle-like weight-loss transformation in the past few years. Chances are it wasn’t all because of a leafy diet and the treadmill. Just ask Oprah.

Beyond GLP-1s, nutrition support is getting a much-needed makeover. Gone are the days of the (now disproven) food pyramid and elusive nutritionists hanging out in unmarked offices. And in its place is a technologically-enabled reinvention of the nutrition industry into something that is widely accessible, easy to understand, and far more effective.

Nutrition is arguably the largest health issue for Americans today. 50% of Americans have a poor-quality diet and 60% of American adults have a chronic illness that could benefit from nutrition care. Poor diet is the leading risk factor for death in the US and the greatest driver of healthcare spending. $50B of total US healthcare spend goes towards combatting nutrition-related ailments. Improving nutritional care in America will not only greatly bring down healthcare costs but can also be the single greatest catalyst for expanding the American lifespan.

Because it’s heavily habits-based, nutrition has historically been a hard thing to support through our traditional healthcare infrastructure which prioritizes acute care over preventative health. Due to technology, this is all changing.

The best comparison to the nutrition support market in 2024 is the mental health support market in ~2020. Like with mental health, successfully supporting nutrition outcomes takes constant communication between a patient and provider. Also like mental health, nutritional care providers historically consist of individual, mom-and-pop-style private practices that are hard for patients to find, assess, and then predict the cost of. Pricing for nutrition care is made more complex due to the range of certifications nutrition providers have. There are many in the nutrition space marketing themselves as “nutritionists” and “dieticians” but only those who are "Registered Dieticians" and "Registered Dietician Nutritionists" will be insurance covered. Knowing this and making this distinction as a patient is difficult.

Mental health support was transformed by technology. Teletherapy companies like Lyra and BetterHelp popped up to aggregate these small practices onto one easy-to-navigate platform, made pricing transparent, supported insurance coverage for care, and also built digital tools to allow providers and patients to keep in better touch. Now, the same thing is happening with nutrition. Companies like Fay Nutrition, Berry Street, and Nourish are doing the same in the nutrition space. They offer databases of nutritionists, guarantee insurance coverage for care, and work with platforms like Healthie (founded by the formidable duo Erica Jain and, my amazing brother, ) to maintain constant communication with their patients.

The result is a win-win-win for providers, patients, and payers. The providers get to reduce their burdens by reaping the benefits of what ‘s Brian O’Malley might call a “digitally-native franchise” model — joining a scaled, business platform with a built-in network and administrative support. The patients can quickly navigate and get care that works. And the payers save money because better nutrition support means fewer Americans with poor diets, which drives down rates of chronic illnesses and other expensive healthcare costs.

GLP-1s are getting all the media love now because their impact is instant and guaranteed but soon, the 9 million GLP-1 users, tired of side effects and overwhelmed by the cost, will find their way to platforms like Nourish, seeking sustainable solutions to America’s largest health problem.

“What would you be doing if not this?” an executive asked my friend in a final interview for a finance role. He was caught off guard and stumped. To me, that would have been the easiest answer in the world.

If I was not doing this, whatever this is, I would be a writer. Not a weekend writer who drafts pieces for a quiet blog on long plane rides (as I’m currently doing) but a real writer. A writer who lives by the sea in Maine. Who wakes every morning and visits the local farmers market, picking out radishes at the recommendation of the grizzled farmer whom she certainly knows. Who stays in Maine through every season, who remarks in Winter, on the pleasant newfound ease of parking and shares in Spring, memories of Summer, when the days were longer and the sunshine constant.

There are many reasons why I’m a full-time business builder and not a full-time writer. To name a few: money, a fear of isolation, genuine interests, upbringing, youth. Also because I genuinely really like my career path and plan to stay on it for a long time. But this alternate reality soothes me because it’s always there. Being a full-time writer simply means writing full-time, and I know I can do that whenever I want.

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It dawned on me recently that my age group has a uniquely fraught relationship to employment. Graduating college in 2021, when talks of potential recession became replaced by periods of rapid inflated growth, we entered into a prospering workforce and were introduced to a world where employers needed you. It was the Great Resignation. New job opportunities seemingly fell from trees and current employers let you define a personal, flexible working style.

And then things calmed down. We began this “will they, won’t they” dance with an economic recession, and the power dynamic between jobs and workers reversed. Job flexibility reduced. New opportunities stopped coming, even for those who really wanted them. Rates of feeling “stuck” in a job surged. Now, 34% of people dread starting their workday, up 11% from 2020. Layoffs became frequent. Performance improvement plans became more common. Fear at work and fear for work increased. And a young population of workers were left with their heads swiveling, asking themselves: “what just happened?”

It's so interesting to hear my generation talk about work. For those in tech, layoffs are permanently part of the culture, with many having been laid off themselves. For those in consulting, “beach time” or “bench time” has become something to fear. For those pursuing investing, the future of partner promotion has never seemed more uncertain. Losing jobs is not socially associated with a person’s work performance. Quitting jobs without another lined up is a heroic act. The taboo of unemployment doesn’t exist. Compound this with high inflation, low purchasing power, and the joke that if you wanted to buy a home you should have done so as an embryo, and what’s left is a feeling towards work that could only be colloquially summarized as: “what’s the point?”

Eventually, the economy will shift again and a feeling of sustainable growth will return. The pressure to cut costs will lessen. LinkedIn #opentowork banners will become less frequent. But I am left wondering: how will my generation do in the long term after this start in the workforce?

Research finds that graduating into poor economic conditions often leads to persistently lower salaries and underemployment. The median income of those who graduated during the Great Recession is 36% less than those who graduated in the bubble right before. While this economic state is not as grim as in 2009 and the 2021 graduates aren’t even exposed to the downsides of the current economy as much as younger ones, I do wonder if we will forever see work as something that is abnormally unreliable and if so, what the implications of this will be. Will we earn less in the long term? Will we work less? Will we have as much confidence in our abilities as those who found easier paths to the same promotions? One difference I believe we are already seeing is a changing role for passions.

Job uncertainty has bred an increased desire to manage your destiny. We see that with people taking two jobs (37% surveyed have more than one full-time job), and we see it in the growth of the creator economy. Jobs aren’t reliable, but creative pursuits are both monetizable and controllable. After a catalyst of a layoff, a breaking point in a traditional job or just a fear of either, we turn to those.

And so, I reflect on my own persistent vision of writing full-time. And I ask myself, why do I truly dream of this? The answer is a little bit personal interest, a little bit lifestyle appeal, and a little bit of fulfilling childhood dreams. But it’s also likely a little bit of self-protection.

Things were busy, but they are calming down. And so, I’m back, finally, to write that part two I promised on loyalty programs and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on how Web3 has expanded capabilities within loyalty rewards programs by using NFT technology to generate ID codes and metadata that separate you from anyone else. In that piece, I talk about Blackbird Labs, which raised a $24M Series A last week!  

This week, I’m going to dive deeper into why loyalty programs are especially important to consumer companies now and how GenAI technology can be used to transform rewards programs and, subsequently, business outcomes.

As I mentioned in my first piece, loyalty rewards programs are one of the most important revenue drivers for consumer businesses. But while the average American is a member of 16 loyalty programs, usage rates are below 50%. A strong loyalty program with high customer engagement increases transactions per member by 3.5x and revenues by ~20%. This means that if a business can create a differentiated loyalty program with high customer engagement, it will have a significant positive impact on that business’ revenues and overall profitability.

Loyalty programs are becoming even more important today as the cost to acquire new customers (CAC) heightens due to an increase in paid advertising by platforms like Meta, a declining effectiveness of those ads due to increased privacy controls, and also a pressure to develop an omnichannel presence early. Increasing costs are directly impacting the profitability of DTC businesses. While businesses like Warby Parker or Away were able to get onto your radar by buying cheap ads on Facebook and then Instagram, younger DTC businesses like, most recently, Parade are struggling to prove significant returns due to the large costs of the DTC business model.

As the cost to acquire customers increases, it is ever more important to keep those acquired around. A strong loyalty program increases the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer by driving increased customer activity (visits to site, frequency of purchase, size of orders) over a longer period.

But what makes a loyalty program good? The number one factor is personalization.

In order for a business to entice you, it has to provide something you actually want, when and where you actually want it. The competitive advantage between businesses comes from the ability to gather and then effectively utilize personalized customer data across the entire customer journey and at scale.

A really strong loyalty program has to do the following for each customer: 1) understand her habits, 2) accurately identify her desires, and 3) generate enticing offers based on those desires.

GenAI, with its ability to use large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing to rapidly analyze data sets and then generate unique content outputs, unlocks new capabilities across all three of these areas.

Let’s break it down.

1 ) Understand habits: Customers prefer omnichannel shopping experiences (i.e., experiences that span across both brick & mortar stores and e-commerce sites) and so habits must be gathered across all platforms and then traced back to the same customer. While email addresses (e.g., giving your email at checkout) are an easy way for businesses to consolidate data behind specific customers, data gaps (i.e., data that doesn’t integrate across systems, data that is unusable because of errors) still appear. However, LLMs can automate data transformation and maintenance to streamline the integration process and resolve errors, as done by companies like Amperity, Twilio, and Lume AI. AI can also be used to identify strange habits, alerting businesses of potential fraud.

2 ) Accurately identify desires: Once a customer’s habits are established, playing to those habits is an easy way to predict customer desires. LLMs can further train on customer responses to promotions to refine offers and ultimately improve hit rates.

3 ) Generate promotions: This is where the new capabilities provided through GenAI truly come in. GenAI technologies can use insights into a customer’s habits and desires to rapidly create tailored promotional materials. An example is offering a price-sensitive customer a discount on the shoes they were looking at before they close the tab. Examples of businesses in this space include adcreative.ai or text-to-image programs like Dall.E2. Google has also begun to enter the AI-driven, ad-campaign generation space.

Established companies are already using AI to propel their loyalty programs and are seeing results. The Starbucks loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards, offers personalized promotions based on past ordering habits. Sephora’s Beauty Insiders uses AI to analyze customer data to provide customized product recommendations. Sephora also recently launched a Visual Artist feature which uses AI to scan a customer’s face and provide customized product recommendations. However, I have not yet come across a start-up that leverages GenAI to build a one-stop-shop loyalty infrastructure for consumer businesses in a way that Blackbird does for restaurants using Web3 tech. Given the significant revenue uplift provided by strong loyalty programs and also the cost-saving benefits through reduced fraud and expanded capacity for the marketing team, I do feel there is demand for this product if created. And so, if you’re building this product that supports all three features of a loyalty program that I outlined above, I’d be interested to hear more!

My dream as a consumer is to be a local somewhere. I’ve written about it before, and I’m sure I’ll write about it again. But it is pretty gratifying to feel that you mean something to a business that means something to you.

My pursuit of the local has manifested mainly within the confines of coffee shops. If you know me well, you know that I have one favorite coffee shop per place and am religious about returning to it. When I get to the shop, I try to be as friendly as possible without being weird and when I order, I keep my request consistent enough to be remembered.

My fascination with being a local spawned during my high-school job at Tate’s Bakeshop, where I watched my co-workers recognize customer’s faces and associate them with orders: the man with a coffee and an apricot scone, the woman with a half-dozen croissants, the guy with the weekly party plate of lemon squares. These people shaped the Tate’s community, establishing surprisingly strong relationships with the people behind the counter. Watching them made me eager to have that effect somewhere too.

For the most part, my pursuit of being a local has been an expensive and fruitless endeavor, with a few scattered success stories.

I became a local successfully at Huxton’s coffee shop in Sydney, Australia, where I studied abroad. Marcello, Huxton’s manager, eventually learned my name and cappuccino order. He would brew the cappuccino as we swapped surf stories and would return, throughout the morning, with free snacks he thought I’d like.

At Dartmouth, I tried (and failed) to become a local at Umpleby’s. Despite spending every morning there for four years, I never received anything for free, and they never did learn my cappuccino order. But I did build strong rapport with David, the barista, who still recognizes me when I return to campus and asks how post grad life is.

In Park City, there is the Daily Rise (shout out to Ben who is a subscriber!). In Boston, there is Greystone. In New York, there is Blackstone.

My innate sense to express loyalty in exchange for community and monetary benefits is far from original. Effective loyalty rewards programs are one of the most important revenue drivers for consumer businesses.

The average American consumer is a member of 16 loyalty programs. 84% of consumers are more willing to choose a retailer that runs a loyalty program over one that doesn’t, and those programs increase transactions per member by 3.5x and revenues by ~20%.

Loyalty programs are pretty fascinating things. They involve a significant level of consumer psychology, business strategy, and UI/UX design to pull off. A strong loyalty program is easy to navigate and personalized. While the average consumer is in several loyalty programs, usage rates for each are below 50%. To be used and be effective, loyalty programs must offer the consumer something they actually want. A good example of this is Starbucks which always seems to know that you love flat whites and cake pops and offers discounts on both when your loyalty has waned.

Recently, loyalty programs have undergone a massive capability shift, driven by technological advancements in Web3 and Generative AI that have unlocked capabilities in identifying, tracking, and rewarding consumer loyalty. While these programs used to be able to do cool things, now they can do really cool things.

Because Web3 and GenAI are mountainous topics in themselves, I’m splitting this conversation into two blog posts. Today’s is about Web3. The next one will be about GenAI.

Web3, although historically over-hyped, is a pretty neat technology. And by recognizing it as a technology (and not a cultural disruptor), we can approach it as an asset to innovation – celebrate the things it has proven to allow for and push aside the rest.

Web3 technology has brought many new capabilities to loyalty rewards programs. It has made it easier to collaborate across brands (as seen with this Starbucks and Delta collaboration), sell perks generated from loyalty programs that would otherwise have gone unredeemed, and perhaps most interestingly, it has allowed for a more direct relationship between a business and a customer.

Web3, specifically the distribution of non-fungible, non-tradeable tokens on a blockchain, can generate ID codes and metadata separating you from anyone else. This offers up a way to distribute and leverage people’s unique identities. These NFTs can be created for you, traced back to you, and represent you only. When non-tradeable NFTs enter the world of loyalty rewards and each loyal member is given their own individual token, they create an opportunity for a business to identify, without question, who the customer is.

The breakthrough here is a two-way relationship between a consumer and the business (specifically a non-e-commerce business like a restaurant).

While I might know that I’ve been to Kava a dozen times just to eat their zucchini chips, Kava likely has no idea that I’ve been doing that. Maybe they could figure it out if they took the time to trace my OpenTable account through their reservation records, but I could have just as likely saved the table for my parents to go. With NFT-based loyalty programs, the business is able to collect unique data on each customer in a way they couldn’t do effectively before. They can understand things like who visited, when they came, and what they ordered. They can then use this information to roll out tailored loyalty rewards programs. They can, essentially, identify you as a local sooner.

A neat start-up that is doing this already is Blackbird Labs, Inc. Blackbird ($11M Seed, 2022), started by former Eater and Resy CEO Ben Leventhal, uses NFTs to reinvent how loyalty, and subsequently hospitality, is approached in the restaurant industry. Blackbird works with a restaurant to create an NFT program with customized branding and rewards. Customers can then use their card to check in and earn perks. The rewards tend to revolve around benefits you would get if you were a local (discounts, free coffee, even your own personal mug) and as seen with their program for Williamsburg restaurant Gertie, your status at the restaurant can scale from “Neighbor” (on the first visit) to “Fam” (at fifteen visits).

The benefit to the consumer is quick recognition for loyalty and strong perks. The benefit to the restaurant is a clear plan for generating loyalty, a greater repeat customer base, and a way to revive and re-define hospitality in the 21st century. The benefit to me is, of course, an easier path to being a local.

I am writing this from the international terminal at JFK where I am about to board a flight to Switzerland. I’ve realized that without the academic calendar to mark time, I’ve built in my own ways of breaking things up. Taking a week to travel in June seems to stand in for end of school year events. This is a far away trip with friends who now live far away. I’m excited.

Recently, I wrote about my love for music and the role it plays in my life. While that was more of a personal take, I thought I’d re-visit the topic to discuss a business side of it.

The music industry has been heavily disrupted by the rise of streaming. But most interestingly, the structure of the song has entirely shifted as well. Today, the pay-per-play revenue model put forth by streaming has shifted the incentive structure to reward volume. For artists to make the most money through streaming, they are best off encouraging as many plays across as many songs as possible. To do this, they’ve entirely shifted the structure of the songs they put out. Here are the three most impactful changes:

1.     Song intros are nearly obsolete

The artist’s priority today is to capture the listener’s attention as fast as possible. The result is a song that is quick to get to the point. In the mid 1980s, intros before songs ran 20 to 25 seconds long on average. By 2015, intros had shrunk to an average of five seconds, marking an 80% decrease across thirty years.

2.     Songs are shorter

Probably helped by the lack of an intro, song lengths have rapidly declined in the age of streaming. The median song length on Billboard’s Hot 100 song list was over four minutes in 2000, dropped to 3.5 minutes in 2018 and recently came down to 2.5 minutes. Over the years, artists have rapidly cut down the lengths of their own songs. The tracks on Drake’s 2018 album Scorpion are 11% shorter than the tracks on his 2016 album Views. Out of all genres, Rap has seen the greatest decline in music length.

3.     There are more songs per album

A good thing about streaming is that, unlike Vinyl which can only hold 15-22 minutes of sound per side, digital albums have no song or length limitations. Today, artists have begun crafting albums with far more songs than was previously typical, a phenomenon called “track creep”. They do this because 1) the songs are shorter so they have the capacity to create more in a shorter timeframe and 2) more songs on an album means more potential plays. While 10-12 tracks per album used to be the norm, recent albums have blown through those numbers. Morgan Wallen’s most recent album One Thing at a Time includes 36 songs across 1 hour and 52 minutes of listening length.

While these shifts may point to an over-simplification of music, streaming and the influence of the internet have also increased accessibility to all types of music and artists, a factor that has rewarded creativity. Before streaming, songs were known to be all about the chorus as that promoted the radio-friendly sounds. While this is still true, now, chorus-less songs created by artists like Bon Iver or Post Malone have been able to find popularity. In addition, the internet and streaming have not only driven discovery of popular artists like Billie Eilish (discovered on Soundcloud) or Justin Beiber (on YouTube) but have also made it easier for more people to have their music heard. Although making a living off of streaming is hard, streaming makes making any money from music significantly easier.  

Back to regularly scheduled programming this week…I am writing this from my family’s house in Long Island after a day of so much sunshine. Summer is coming, and it feels great.

Recently, I’ve been fascinated with how much science has made it into the zeitgeist. Being a fan of podcasts like Huberman Lab, The Peter Attia Drive, and Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair, I have developed the ability to identify fellow followers by recognizing the source of the very specific scientific facts they share.

These days, it seems like everyone is cold plunging, sauna-ing, and staring at the sun in the morning. They are walking backwards more and drinking less. My New York mom does it, my Massachusetts friend does it, the Park City barista at The Daily Rise mentions it, and I (try) to do it.

Before, biohacking and science-driven lifestyle choices seemed to be reserved for tech enthusiasts and workaholics (often not mutually exclusive). Now, maybe largely due to the popularity of podcasts, science has become more accessible and more actioned on.

I’ve been speaking on an anecdotal level so let me scale it up a notch: Huberman Lab has 3.3M subscribers to his YouTube channel and shows up fourth on Spotify’s top charts. Andrew Huberman also tours (and often sells out) his live show “The Brain Body Contract” where everyday people sign up to hear him talk about science-related tools for health and performance.

Science has a new place in society, and this newfound accessibility and adoption comes with added opportunities in business: new ways to communicate with the consumer and new product demand.

We’ve already seen this play out in the form of the ~$45B fitness tracker market. From the wearable Whoop to the glucose monitor Nutrisense, people love generating concrete data about their health and then acting on it.

One area that I think is next to be disrupted is the Consumer Longevity sector. While the anti-aging market may bring to mind questionably-effective supplements and salves, now, companies like Dr. David Sinclair’s Tally Health ($10M in Seed funding led by Forerunner) offers science-based approaches to feeling and looking younger. Tally Health’s cheek swab test identifies biological age and then reduces it through actionable measures and a daily supplement. As life spans expand, there will be a growing demand for consumer products and technologies that can support a person’s desire to feel younger for longer. And a growing interest, I expect, to do this through science.

I am writing this from my kitchen table in Boston. I am not on a plane, on a train, at someone else’s table but my own. A first in the history of Kitchen Fridge opening paragraphs. 

Because of the sparse amount of time I actually spend in Boston, my daily routine is pretty undeveloped. When I am here, I try to frequent my local coffee shop so I can drink their creamy flat whites and they can remember my face. I also frequent the Equinox gym. I like Equinox for the classes, for the clean environment, and also for the community feeling. 

Here’s a thesis: The market for community-centered fitness is growing. 

I. What is community-centered fitness? 

A potentially self-invented phrase to describe fitness start-ups that market themselves more as a space to make connections than as a space to get fit. 

Fitness, its role in society, and how it's marketed has gone through several iterations in the past fifty years. Although exercise movements haven’t varied wildly, the reasons for why we work out have. 

Exercise has always existed in some form, dating as far back as 776 BC. in Ancient Greece. But “working out” as we know it today really originated with the rise of suburban living in the 1950s. People spent more time commuting in cars, eating fast food, and working at desks. American life became more sedentary and deliberate exercise became necessary. 

The publication of the book Aerobics by Kenneth Cooper in the 1960s emphasized the health benefits of fitness and encouraged people to work out on a regular basis. In the 1970s, this fitness came in the form of Jazzercise classes and with the growing popularity of jogging. The 1980s gave rise to the gym, gym culture, and the hype around body building. And in the 2000s, “boutique fitness” launched, bringing smaller group fitness workouts through companies like SoulCycle and Barre Method to the forefront. 

In 2010, we entered into an era of holistic fitness, in which exercise was seen not as just a way to look good but also as a way to feel good. Health as a lifestyle became popular. The concept of mind and body as interrelated became core and boutique fitness studios like The Class began integrating moments of mindfulness between burpee sets. 

2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic created the years of accessible (and solitary) fitness. At-home fitness options like Peloton and Tonal rose in popularity, sending the expensive boutique fitness studios into a tailspin. Now, I believe, we are entering into an era of community-centered fitness where people leave behind their living room spin workouts in pursuit of human connections. Never before have people wanted so badly to be a part of a team. 

Shifts in fitness trends continue to reflect changes in cultural phenomena. COVID-19 quarantines and social media have been isolating human experiences. Now, as we move beyond quarantines and recognize the negative impacts of technology, we crave time alongside others. This reaction has already surged participation in community events. Live concert attendance, for example, is up by 20% vs. 2019 and there has been a 38% increase in tickets sold. Apps for making new friends like Bumble BFF or Peanut have risen in popularity. And now, fitness businesses are taking notice. 

II. What is the appeal of community-centered fitness? 

The fitness industry is an $81B market and growing. Millennials and Gen Z, nicknamed Generation Active, account for 80% of all gym goers and 89% of users within app-based or online workouts. There are over 115,000 fitness businesses in the US in 2023, a one-year increase of 1.9%. The fitness market is crowded, and with only so many ways to stretch and tone, it is becoming difficult for businesses to differentiate. And so, community has become the foundation upon which to build. If workout styles can’t get you coming back, hopefully, the people you might see there will. While community has always been a side-effect of fitness, now it is being put at the forefront. 

III. What's out there already? 

The Athletic Clubs (Greenwich Village Athletics, West Village Athletics), founded during the height of COVID-19 restrictions, is built off of a “squad training” model where members train with the same small group twice per week. The ACs organize and promote social events to bolster relationships like weekend brunch and coffee after squad training sessions. They advertise as “just as much a community as a gym.” 

High-end, application-only fitness communities like LA’s Heimat or Williamsburg’s GHOST have cropped up, offering amenities that extend far beyond weight racks. Heimat, in addition to spin and Pilates classes, offers astrology workshops and co-working spaces. To be accepted, members must prove that they are joining the space to meet new, like-minded people. 

Collecting members that are interested in more than getting swoll seems to be a large factor in exclusive-community-centered fitness. GHOST only accepts those that can prove they are “thought leaders, creatives, founders or executives”, and Monarch Athletic Club in West Hollywood requires each applicant to undergo a medical evaluation as part of the review process in order to attract people who are committed to “getting well.”

Lastly, Peoplehood, created by SoulCycle’s founders Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler focuses so heavily on community that it has removed fitness from the equation altogether. At Peoplehood, attendees take part in 55-minute Gather sessions where strangers converse with each other on prompts like “uncertainty”. Peoplehood’s goal is to help you build “high-quality human connections” and markets itself as “modern medicine from the loneliness epidemic.” 

IV. Final thoughts

Making friends as a (young) adult is difficult and free time is limited. The idea of organically meeting like-minded people while crossing the workout off of your daily to-do list at The Atheltic Clubs is definitely appealing. I love Equinox but if you could promise me similar amenities with a side of friendship, I’d cancel my membership in a second.

The difficulty for community-centered fitness businesses rests in the fact that they are raising the bar on themselves by promising more than the gym next door. Community-centered fitness is not only changing the way fitness businesses are marketed but also the way they are measured. Community-centered fitness businesses are asking to be judged not only by the quality of workout but also by the quality of their community. (And, if built on exclusivity, how selective they actually are.) Who they are able to attract and how much they are able to foster friendships will become the new key to fitness businesses’ success. 

I am sitting at my family’s kitchen table in Utah as I write this, putting words on the bright screen that stands contrast to the dark night outside. It is 7am here, 9am on the East Coast. This conversion of Eastern Time to Mountain Time really makes you feel like a morning powerhouse.

I’ve been in Utah all week, as my team at work is temporarily remote, and I’ve spent most of my time at this kitchen table working. On week days, I get up at 6:30am to log on for the East Coast work day. I then plow through until dark, here, at this kitchen table, except for 20 minutes where I do my favorite remote, Utah, work day activity: I visit the Daily Rise Coffee shop.

To understand why I’m dedicating an entire blog post to the Daily Rise, it is important to visualize its location: a fairly sterile booth in The Fresh Market grocery store. The shop is run by Ben, a cheery local, who has a knack for remembering (or just explicitly guessing) people’s orders. He remembers faces first, then whether you like sweetener or not, your order, and lastly, your name. Coming to Utah a few weeks a year, Ben doesn’t remember what I want from the booth. But every time he sees me, he welcomes me back to town and makes sure to tell me that I do not like my coffee sweet.

As someone who treats grocery store coffee shops like a person on public transport with a hacking cough, I’ve been intrigued by my desire to return to the Daily Rise every day. Even more so, I’ve been surprised by how crowded the booth is every time I’m there. People of all ages and backgrounds drive past the several artisan coffee shops scattered through Park City town to crowd around the light wooden edges of the booth and chat with Ben. They want to hear their order repeated back, chat about the news of the day, and receive a (fairly middle-of-the-pack) cup of coffee. When Ben isn’t there on the weekends, the line dissolves.  

There has been a lot of commotion in consumer business news recently about the rise of the Shoppy Shop, simply explained as stores that sell “small-washed products.” “Small washing” refers to a product that appears locally made when under the hood, it is a scaled e-commerce good (think: Graza, Brightland, Diaspora, Fishwife). “Small-washing” is an intentional branding decision based on the notion that people want things that feel local (even if they are actually not.) Local – unlike large, e-commerce brands – comes with an affiliation personal identity and place, an emotional benefit we are willing to pay up for. And so, to reap the profits of “the local”, companies have begun to fake it.

Reading about the Shoppy Shop and the products it sells has helped me explain my love for the Daily Rise. While people may visit the Shoppy Shop to buy products that look local, the Daily Rise provides me with a similarly valued experience: a place that feels local. There is, perhaps, no business with more of a social ecosystem around it than a coffee shop, and there is no more “local” of a social ecosystem to be found in Park City than that created at the Daily Rise.

Coffee shops are considered a “third place” in society (not the home or office.)^[1] They are where we hold “long range” interactions, and where we’ve mingled and shared ideas since the Ottoman Empire. Coffee shops provide us with a “daily experience and identity that cannot be quantified.”^[2] Our coffee orders, and where we do the ordering, contribute to how we want to be perceived as people. Are you a Trenta Cold Brew from Starbucks or a Cortado from the small, artisan coffee shop x book store x wine bar x ping pong venue down the street? Humans are tribal, and coffee shops are our HQ. The more you can make someone feel like part of the tribe, the better you can do as a coffee (or any) business.

Which brings me back to Ben at the Daily Rise…

Ben, probably without realizing it, has created a strong coffee tribe by playing up the local experience. Every time he recognizes a face, he indoctrinates someone into the Daily Rise community. And then, like clockwork, they overlook the stark aesthetic to return the next day, driven less by a desire for caffeine and more to fulfill the nagging sense that he is expecting you. And through these interactions, tribal status forms. At first, being recognized is enough. And then you want Ben to remember your order. Then, you want him to be more excited to see you than the others in line. There are levels to the Daily Rise community, and everyone is willing to pay to be at the top.

The difference between feeling local (the Daily Rise) and seeming local (the Shoppy Shop products) is that feeling local cannot be capitalized on and then homogenized. A problem with the small-washed products at your local specialty store is that they have the scale to be found at every other specialty store in your region. It is a possibility that eventually, if small-washing keeps up, every specialty store’s inventory will be the same. There can be thousands of Graza olive oil bottles, but there is only one Ben.

^[1] The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg.

^[2] “The Smart Reason We Waste Our Dollars on Coffee,” Forbes.