The startup world worships people who have only won. The only ones who can coach you through a real company are the ones who know how to lose.

Wednesday night, Game 4 of the NBA Finals, Madison Square Garden. The first quarter ended 41 to 22. By the second quarter the Knicks were down 29 points. At home. In the Finals. In front of the loudest, most wounded fans in basketball.

Down 29 in a Finals game is not a deficit. It’s a verdict. The room had already decided. You could feel it through the TV: the Garden went from a roar to that low murmur a crowd makes when it starts rehearsing its grief.

Here’s what the Knicks did. Nothing dramatic. No miracle shot, no fight, no speech you’ll see in a documentary someday. They made one more play. Then another one. They won the third quarter 26 to 14. They won the fourth 32 to 16. Brunson finished with 36. Anunoby hit seven of nine from three for 33. Final score: 107 to 106.

One point. After being down 29, they won by one.

I’ve been building companies for twenty-five years, and watching that game I realized something founders and VCs almost never talk about: nobody teaches you how to be losing. Everybody teaches you how to win. Pitch decks, growth playbooks, hiring frameworks. There’s an entire industry built on winning. There is no industry built on being down 29 with the room against you, because nobody wants to admit how much of company building is exactly that.

And in sports, at least there are refs. Somebody to call the cheap shot, stop the clock, restore order. In business there are no refs. There’s just you, your team, and your investors, all betting that you’ll find a way. Nobody is coming to call a foul on the market.

I know what down 29 feels like. I’ve been there three times. Once we came back and won. Once we played to the buzzer and lost anyway. The third game is still going on right now.

The first time, my cofounder Scott Yara and I sat in his black 5 Series BMW in the pouring rain. It was the same car we took on every sales call, and now there was no one left to sell to. The dot-com crash had erased our market. Our company, Metapa, was out of money. We had eighty employees and an office lease big enough to bury us, and there was no way out that didn’t hurt.

So we did the unglamorous thing. We pivoted the whole company into a pure-play database business. We recapped, which is a polite word for everyone taking pain. We renamed it Greenplum. The grind that followed was long and it cost me personally: I left the team before the ending. But the company we refused to let die in that car sold to EMC in 2010 for a reported $300 million and became the foundation of what’s now Pivotal.

That’s the comeback. Down 29, won the second half. Now let me tell you about the loss, because if I only tell you the comeback, I’m selling you a poster.

In 2004 I founded Buzzmedia. I grew it from eight slides to 250 people and a $50 million run rate. We had great content, great talent, and more than 100 million people a month reading our 45 sites. Looking back, we’d built something between Snapchat and TikTok, all aimed at pop culture, years before either existed. We called what we were doing social media. The entire market, every reporter, every buyer, every analyst, insisted on calling it social networking.

Two words. That’s all it was. And we lost a war over them.

Because while we were trying to get our story out, the world turned mobile and video, and we weren’t built like Facebook was. Facebook bought Instagram and started really winning. Nobody cared about our traffic or our engagement, because they were buying, writing, and talking about a category we weren’t the name for. We were right about everything and it didn’t matter. We made some money, but not the return my investors at Redpoint, Sutter Hill, and NEA bet on.

Here’s the lesson that cost me years to learn: businesses don’t win and lose on who’s right. They win and lose on details and the story the market buys. We had the better product thesis. They had the better story. The scoreboard doesn’t have a column for being early.

And the third game? That one’s live. At Wevr, we’ve spent a decade building immersive experiences, with Epic Games and Warner Bros. on our cap table and some of the most iconic VR work ever made on our resume. The market we bet on still hasn’t fully shown up. The TAM, the thing investors size before they size you, isn’t there yet. So we keep playing forward while we figure it out. No buzzer has sounded. We’re down, and we’re still on the floor.

So what do you do when you’ve come back once, lost once, and you’re mid-game on the third?

You keep playing.

Here’s why this matters more right now than at any point in my career. AI is making everything faster and flattening the field. Your two-person competitor now ships like a twenty-person team. The punches come more often, for everyone, and from directions you can’t scout. Deals you counted on won’t close. Investors will go quiet at the exact moment you need them most. The advantage is shifting from the teams that punch hardest to the teams that recover fastest.

And here’s the problem: a lot of the people coaching founders have never recovered from anything. There are too many VCs and operators whose entire careers happened on winning teams. If every company you joined was a rocket, you learned a lot about riding rockets and nothing about what to do at 41 to 22. They’re not bad people. They’ve just never been down 29, and you can’t coach what you’ve never survived.

Watch that Knicks roster and you’ll see what a resilient team actually looks like. It’s not a collection of the most talented people available. It’s a mix. Veterans who’ve eaten playoff heartbreak next to young legs with no scar tissue yet, feeding off each other. Guys coming off the bench and changing the temperature of the floor. Down 29, the veterans knew something the scoreboard didn’t: the game is longer than the moment.

If you’re building a company, build that. Mix the ages, mix the talent, and above all mix the scar tissue. Find a few teammates who have been punched in the mouth and got up. Then build a culture around a single belief: there is always one more play. Win the customer back. Make the product better tonight. Send the cold DM. The play doesn’t have to be brilliant. It has to be next.

I’ll tell you who I watched closest Wednesday night. Brunson. A second-round pick nobody projected as a Finals star, who turned himself into the player New York trusts with the last shot. He dropped 36 on the night his team was left for dead. He has spent his whole career on elite teams, playing the game at the highest level there is. And he has never won a ring. As I write this, the Knicks are up 3-1, and he still hasn’t.

I know that scoreboard. I’ve spent twenty-five years on elite teams, building things that mattered, playing at the level I always wanted to play at. If winning means the IPO or the billions, I’m not there. By that math, neither is Brunson. But watch him play for one quarter and try telling me that man is losing.

So here’s the question that game left me with. Is winning the ring? Or is winning getting to keep playing the game you love, with great teams, and still wanting the ball when it matters? I know my answer. These days I help business owners too, and when they call me down 29, I tell them what I’m telling you.

The Knicks came back from 29 down and won by one. A historic team effort and win. Games, companies, and lives are won by milliseconds. The clock hasn’t stopped on yours, and it hasn’t stopped on mine.

Keep playing.

-Anthony @djabatt

They’re called micro dramas, and most Americans have never heard of them.

Here’s what’s weird: these things started in China and are now the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the US. Three of the most popular apps were downloaded 34 million times last month, grossing $78 million in revenue. They’ve knocked longtime favorites like YouTube and Netflix from their top spots in the app stores.

I talked to a director working in this space who told me he’s made movies for $200,000 that generated over $30 million in revenue. That’s a 150x return. When was the last time you heard those numbers from Hollywood?

So I started digging.

Micro dramas aren’t really a new format. They’re soap operas perfectly adapted for phones. Each story is a full 90-minute movie cut into 60-90 episodes that are each about 90 seconds long. They shoot with the same cameras Hollywood uses—just rotated 90 degrees.

The monetization model is what blew my mind.

You watch the first 10-15 episodes for free, then pay 25-50 cents to keep watching. That 50 cents happens 80 times over the course of a complete story. People regularly spend $30-40 per movie without realizing it.

Never. But I might pay 50 cents to see what happens next. Especially if the last episode ended with “You slept with my husband.”

Here’s the key: every 90 seconds, there has to be a cliffhanger. That means 90 cliffhangers per movie. “You slept with my husband” can end one episode, and “You slept with my husband” can start the next one, with just a slightly different inflection. Sometimes the cliffhanger is dramatic—a character death. Sometimes it’s tiny—just a meaningful look. The variability keeps you guessing, which makes it psychologically harder to stop.

They’ve weaponized the scroll.

The audience surprised me. It’s women aged 25-55, globally—the same demographic that used to watch soap operas. Women comprise 70% of users on these platforms. These aren’t people who got left behind by technology. They’re people who got left behind by entertainment.

Hollywood stopped making mid-budget romantic dramas. Television moved to prestige content that requires full attention. Micro dramas give them beautiful people, romantic storylines, and the ability to watch during gaps in their day.

This has created a parallel film industry with completely different economics. The creators I’ve spoken with are averaging 12 feature films per year. That’s a movie a month. They operate completely outside the union system with lower budgets, faster timelines, and global crews.

It’s like the entire film industry forked, and most people don’t know the other branch exists.

Are micro dramas training people to have shorter attention spans? Maybe. But there’s a paradox: while each episode is designed for fragmented attention, people often binge entire series in one sitting. That’s 90 minutes of sustained engagement.

Maybe they’re just repackaging long-form content for how people actually live now.

The reason this matters isn’t just the money. It’s that micro dramas represent something Hollywood can’t easily replicate: content designed from the ground up for mobile consumption.

Hollywood will probably try to get into this space, but I don’t think they can. The deeper problem is that traditional Hollywood creators fundamentally don’t understand how content works on mobile.

Hollywood Will Miss This. Digital-Native Creators Will Win It. I Have the Internet Media Receipts to Cash This Check.

Look at Quibi. Jeffrey Katzenberg raised $1.75 billion and hired A-list talent from across Hollywood. The concept seemed obvious: premium short-form content for mobile.

But Quibi failed because they missed something crucial: content created for mobile runs at a completely different speed than traditional TV and movies.

Quibi Tried to Shrink Hollywood for Mobile. Micro Dramas Built Something Entirely New.

This is the fundamental difference. Quibi took existing Hollywood talent and production methods and squeezed them into shorter formats. Micro dramas started from scratch, asking what storytelling would look like if it were designed specifically for phones.

I’ve spent years creating sticky web content projects that have scaled, and there’s something I learned early: frequency and consistency always beat production perfection. You’re better off shipping 12 decent videos per month than one perfect video per quarter.

Micro dramas operate exactly like this. They use a digital media programming mindset—ship fast, iterate, respond to what works. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s creative development process can take years to make anything. Studios spend months in development, then months in pre-production, then months shooting, then months in post. By the time they ship, the market has moved.

If I were building a micro drama studio tomorrow, I wouldn’t hire TV or movie producers. I’d look for teams from social media and ad creative departments. Those teams natively understand the speed and beat structures that mobile consumers expect. They’ve spent years figuring out how to grab attention in the first three seconds and create compelling narratives within severe time constraints.

Hollywood veterans have trained their instincts around long-form storytelling for decades. That’s great for traditional content, but becomes a liability when you need cliffhangers every 90 seconds.

I have nothing against genius showrunners like David Simon, but he would be the last person I’d hire to run vertical stories today. He may even agree with me.

The Chinese companies behind these apps have figured out something about human attention and monetization that Western companies are just starting to understand. One platform’s Spanish version of an English-language series has gained nearly half the 450 million views of the original. They’re not just translating content—they’re recreating it with different actors for each market.

But this might not be a replacement for traditional entertainment. It might just be a new category.

In my discussions with people working in this space, I keep hearing: “We’re separating art and commerce. You want to watch celebrities eat hot food, you go to YouTube. You want to see a new Wes Anderson movie, you go to the theater.”

Maybe the future of entertainment isn’t one format replacing another. Maybe it’s having the right format for the right moment.

Sometimes you want Oppenheimer on a big screen with full attention. Sometimes you want beautiful people making out while you wait for the subway.

The companies that understand this distinction—and can serve both needs—are probably going to win.

I used to think the future of entertainment was about better technology or bigger budgets or more sophisticated storytelling.

Turns out it might just be about understanding when someone wants to pay 50 cents to find out what happens next.

I’ve been building audiences since 2004. Back then, when I founded Buzzmedia, we called it “digital media” and most people thought we were crazy. We ran 45 sites that reached 102 million people every month. We launched the Kardashians. We helped break Fallout Boy, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Adele. We did this before anyone called it “the creator economy,” but we understood something that most people are only now beginning to grasp: the people who can capture and hold human attention hold the real power.

Today, while everyone’s panicking about AI taking their jobs, there’s one group of people who seem completely unfazed. Not the TikTok dancers you’re probably thinking of, but people who’ve figured out how to build and keep an audience. The newsletter writer who explains chip shortages. The YouTuber who makes tax law interesting. The guy on LinkedIn who actually makes supply chain management sound compelling.

These people have learned something that’s becoming more valuable than any degree: they can capture attention and bring people back. If you’re worried about AI displacing you, here’s what you should do. Stop learning to code. Start learning to create audiences.

The timing of this realization isn’t coincidental. We’re witnessing what I think will be remembered as the great unbundling of traditional employment. For decades, companies provided three things in exchange for your labor: steady income, distribution for your work, and professional development. The internet has systematically disaggregated all of these. Freelance platforms handle income. Social media provides distribution. YouTube teaches skills faster than universities.

But here’s what most people miss: as these traditional structures crumble, a new form of security is emerging. Not the security of depending on one employer’s goodwill, but the security of having your own audience that trusts you and wants to hear from you.

This brings me to a crucial distinction that everyone gets wrong. When I say “creator,” most people think of young, attractive people selling products they don’t need. That’s not what I mean. A creator, in the sense that matters for your career security, is someone who’s learned to capture people’s attention and bring them back over and over. It could be a newsletter about semiconductor policy. A YouTube channel explaining Supreme Court decisions. A LinkedIn presence offering insights about industrial design. The format doesn’t matter. Your age doesn’t matter. Being conventionally attractive doesn’t matter.

What matters is this: Can you make something people want to consume regularly? Can you build trust? Can you develop a voice people recognize and seek out? If yes, you have something more secure than any corporate job.

But there’s another distinction that’s even more important: the difference between traffic and audience. Traffic is what you buy. Audience is what you earn. Traffic comes and goes—someone clicks your link, reads your content, leaves. You have to pay for traffic every time you want it. An audience is different. These are people who choose to follow your work because they trust you. They come back without you having to re-acquire them. They engage with your content and each other. They trust your perspective enough to act on your recommendations.

This distinction matters because building a brand is different than building an audience. You can build brand pages that scale to millions of followers, but if those followers don’t trust you or engage consistently, you just have expensive traffic, not a real audience.

The investors I meet understand this. Over the past year, I’ve been introduced to countless investors and VCs who typically would fund companies, but something has changed. Now they want to invest directly in creators—or at least they’re starting to think that way. When I raised Series A from our lead Redpoint, partner Geoff Yang zeroed in on this point right away. He used terms like “content programs,” but he knew what I was pitching was a coming shift. Well, it’s here in a big way. The thesis makes perfect sense: traditional business wisdom says build a product, find product-market fit, then figure out distribution. The creator economy inverts this: build distribution first, then create products for your audience.

A creator with a loyal audience can launch almost anything—software tools, information products, physical goods, services—all with built-in demand from day one. Compare that to the traditional startup path: spend years building something, then hope people want it. Most startups die from lack of distribution, not lack of product quality. But a creator starting a business already knows what their audience wants because they’ve been talking to them for months or years.

This shift is happening because we live in what people call the attention economy, but I think that phrase misses something important. It’s not just that attention is valuable—it’s that the old gatekeepers of attention are dying. Cable television is a wasteland of people half-asleep with their phones out. It’s lean-back, tune-out entertainment. Social media is the opposite—lean-forward, interactive attention. Real people making real things, telling stories, explaining complex subjects in ways that stick.

Smart brands know that creators hold the keys to the kingdom they’re trying to get into—your eyeballs, your attention. Twenty years ago, we were competing with traditional media for attention. Now traditional media is more or less dead, and everyone’s scrambling to figure out where audiences went. They went to creators.

This creates an opportunity, but also a challenge. Building an audience isn’t magic, but it does require a specific set of skills that most people haven’t developed. After doing this multiple times across different industries, I can see the pattern. First, there’s consistency—not posting every day, but showing up predictably so your audience knows when and where to find you. Then there’s voice—not just what you say, but how you say it, your unique perspective on whatever you cover. This can’t be automated because it’s inherently human.

Value is what keeps people coming back. Every piece of content needs to give your audience something: information, insight, entertainment, or emotional connection. Understanding distribution is how you grow—knowing how platforms work, what formats perform well. This changes constantly, which is why it’s valuable. Finally, community building is your moat. An audience that talks to each other is infinitely more valuable than one that just listens to you.

None of these skills require youth or expensive equipment or technical expertise. They require something much rarer: the courage to share your ideas in public and the persistence to keep going when it feels like nobody’s listening.

And this is where most people fail. Not because they lack interesting things to say, but because saying them publicly feels terrifying. I know brilliant engineers who could explain complex systems perfectly but won’t start a blog because they’re worried they don’t know enough. I know marketing executives with decades of insight who won’t share their thoughts because someone might disagree. Meanwhile, their jobs are increasingly vulnerable to AI that can code and strategize faster than any human.

Here’s what I’ve realized: the cost of being wrong on the internet is embarrassment. The cost of not building an audience in the age of AI displacement is career extinction. The irony is that sharing your knowledge doesn’t diminish your value—it amplifies it. Teaching something forces you to understand it more deeply. Building an audience around your expertise makes you the go-to person in that space.

I keep hearing this myth that being a creator is only for young, attractive people. It’s complete nonsense. The creators I know who make real money and have real influence come in all ages and backgrounds. What they share is courage and consistency. The 45-year-old supply chain expert who started a newsletter explaining global logistics. The 55-year-old tax attorney making videos about legal precedents. The 38-year-old engineer blogging about database optimization. These people have something more valuable than youth: expertise, perspective, and the life experience to explain complex things clearly.

When you build an audience around your expertise, several things happen that completely change your career trajectory. Opportunities find you instead of you having to apply for jobs. Companies start reaching out instead of you pitching clients. Feedback loops accelerate because your audience tells you what they want more of, what problems they’re facing, what solutions they need. Everything compounds—each piece of content can work for you indefinitely. A blog post from 2020 might bring in clients in 2025. Leverage multiplies because when you have an audience, everything you do reaches more people with built-in trust.

This is different from traditional job security, which was always an illusion. You were safe as long as one company decided you were valuable, but if that company restructured, got acquired, or had budget cuts, your security evaporated overnight. Creator security is security through diversification. When you have an audience, you have multiple paths to monetization: sponsorships, products, services, speaking, consulting, courses, books, affiliate partnerships, direct subscriptions. If one revenue stream disappears, others remain.

More importantly, you’re not dependent on any single gatekeeper. No boss can fire you from your audience. No company can eliminate your distribution. No algorithm change can destroy years of relationship building.

But here’s what’s really interesting: as AI becomes more capable, it will eliminate many jobs, but it makes creator skills more valuable, not less. AI can write code, but it can’t build trust with an audience. AI can generate content, but it can’t develop a unique voice. AI can analyze data, but it can’t share insights from lived experience. The more automated our world becomes, the more valuable human connection becomes.

This leads to what I think will be the great division of the next twenty years. There will be two types of professionals: those who have audiences and those who don’t. Those with audiences will have options. They’ll be able to launch businesses, find opportunities, command premium rates, and adapt to whatever changes come next. Those without audiences will be at the mercy of systems they don’t control.

If you’re reading this thinking “I should become a creator,” you’re already behind. You should have started years ago. But the second best time is now. Pick one platform—not three, not five, just one. Master it before expanding. Choose a topic you could discuss for hours without getting bored because your enthusiasm will be evident and infectious. Commit to publishing regularly for at least a year, not when you feel like it but consistently. Focus on value, not virality, because one person who becomes a loyal follower is worth more than a thousand casual viewers. Engage with your audience—reply to comments, start conversations, build relationships rather than just follower counts.

We live in an attention economy, and if you want to reach your audience, you better do it through a creator. If you have concerns about job stability in the future because of AI, you should become a content creator. The question isn’t whether you should become a creator. The question is whether you can afford not to.

Twenty years from now, when we look back at this period, I think we’ll see it as the moment when the old employment compact finally broke down completely and something new emerged. The smart people will be the ones who saw it coming and built their own platforms while they still had the luxury of steady income from traditional jobs. The rest will be wondering why nobody warned them.

Nobody can take away what you build when you build an audience. That’s the real advantage, and it’s available to anyone with the courage to start.

Special thanks to Kevin Kelly and his wise words.

So when OpenAI suddenly removed eight models from user accounts last week, including GPT-4o, it hit different than it would for someone who just started using ChatGPT last month. This wasn’t just a product change. It felt like losing an old friend.

The thing about AI right now is that it’s moving so fast that even the companies building it seem surprised by what happens. Sam Altman admitted the GPT-5 rollout was “a little more bumpy than we hoped for” — which is CEO-speak for “we messed up pretty badly.”

Best AI Developer Tools – Handpicked list of the top vibe coding tools

Here’s what actually happened: OpenAI’s new automatic “router” that assigns user prompts to one of four GPT-5 variants was “out of commission for a chunk of the day,” causing GPT-5 to appear “way dumber” than intended. Meanwhile, users were hitting new usage limits that made paid subscriptions feel like free trials.

The pattern here is telling. Companies in this space are moving so fast that they’re essentially doing live product testing on millions of users. And that’s both the good news and the bad news.

The Influencer Paradox

Here’s where it gets weird. Right as regular users were posting screenshots of GPT-5’s bizarre errors and launching Change.org petitions, a carefully orchestrated PR campaign was running in parallel.

Just weeks before the chaotic rollout, OpenAI had invited five select developers—including Theo Browne—to their headquarters for a “preview event.” They were given early access to the new models and filmed by a professional camera crew while experimenting with GPT-5. All participants had to sign NDAs and video release waivers.

The resulting promotional video went live on YouTube around the same time users were revolting. So while your average ChatGPT user was discovering their workflows had been broken overnight, a curated group of influencers was showcasing GPT-5’s capabilities in a controlled, professional setting.

Now, I generally enjoy Theo’s content—his takes on tech are usually solid and his coding videos are genuinely helpful. But watching his enthusiastic praise of GPT-5 while Twitter was flooding with user complaints felt… cringeworthy. The stark difference between his polished preview experience and the reality that regular users were experiencing made the whole thing feel like watching a commercial while your house is on fire.

The gap between the polished preview experience and the reality of the public rollout highlights something deeper about how these launches actually work.

The Messy Reality of AI Leadership

As someone who’s watched this space evolve from the beginning, the leadership dynamics are… interesting. Altman acknowledged that “suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake”. But the fact that this mistake happened at all says something about how these companies are operating.

The good side: they do listen and adjust quickly. Within 24 hours, OpenAI brought back GPT-4o for Plus subscribers and doubled GPT-5 limits. That’s actually impressive responsiveness for a company this size.

The concerning side: users reported basic errors like maps labeling Oklahoma as “Gelahbrin” and math problems solved incorrectly, despite Altman’s claims about “PhD-level intelligence.” When your latest model can’t correctly label Oregon on a map, it casts doubt on the internal testing processes.

Why This Matters for Developers and Creators

The real issue isn’t that GPT-5 had problems. It’s that LLM technology is fundamentally different from any other software we’ve used before.

When Microsoft updates Excel, you might be annoyed about moved menus or changed shortcuts. When OpenAI changes your AI writing partner, it feels personal. Users—myself included—build a conversational reliance with these models that goes way beyond traditional software interactions. You learn their quirks, their strengths, how to phrase prompts to get the best results. It becomes a creative partnership.

This is new territory. We’ve never had tools that felt collaborative in this way. When you build your workflow around a tool that has a particular “personality” and way of reasoning, sudden changes break more than just code — they break creative partnerships that users have spent months developing.

This goes beyond just developers and creators. Millions of people have started incorporating these AI conversations into their daily thinking—brainstorming life decisions, working through problems, even seeking emotional support. When you suddenly change the personality they’ve grown comfortable talking to, you’re not just breaking a workflow, you’re disrupting a relationship they might not even realize they’ve formed.

The core product messiness does make you wonder what else might be unstable behind the scenes. If the autoswitcher can break on launch day, what about data handling? Training processes? Safety measures? For those of us building businesses around these tools, that uncertainty is expensive.

But here’s what OpenAI and other LLM vendors need to understand: the world has changed. They can’t treat model updates like traditional software releases anymore. Users form genuine attachments to these AI personalities and workflows. Every major model change needs to be handled with the care of a major life transition, not a routine software patch.

The conversational nature of these tools creates a responsibility that software companies have never had to deal with before.

The Bigger Picture

Despite the chaos, I’m still optimistic about what we can build with AI. But watching this rollout taught me something important: these companies are figuring it out as they go, just like the rest of us.

Altman believes OpenAI has “a good shot at getting this right” when it comes to balancing AI personality and functions. Maybe he’s right. The fact that they reversed course so quickly suggests they understand what’s at stake.

But the GPT-5 launch revealed a fundamental challenge that goes beyond OpenAI. LLM vendors are dealing with something unprecedented: software that users talk to, confide in, and build genuine working relationships with. This creates obligations that traditional software companies never had to consider.

The future of AI isn’t just about making smarter models. It’s about building them in a way that respects the unique bonds users form with these tools. That means better testing, more gradual rollouts, and perhaps most importantly, acknowledging that changing someone’s AI collaborator is more like replacing a colleague than upgrading software.

For now, I’m keeping backups of my workflows and watching the Sam tweets a little more carefully. Because in AI, your favorite tool can become a stranger overnight — and the industry is still learning that’s not okay.

We’ll get there. But the bumpy road ahead isn’t just about technical challenges. It’s about learning to handle the most human thing about artificial intelligence: the relationships we build with it.

That’s exactly what’s weird about this. That kind of programming doesn’t exist anymore.

I started thinking about what just happened. I was coding, sure, but I wasn’t really coding alone. I had an AI pair programmer that could write functions faster than I could think of them, suggest architectures I’d never considered, and debug problems that would have taken me hours to solve. When it got cut off, I didn’t just lose a tool—I lost a collaborator that had become an extension of my own thinking.

And then I realized: I couldn’t really continue without it. Not in any meaningful way.

That’s when it hit me. This isn’t just about AI. This is about everything now.

When was the last time you built something that worked entirely on your own machine? I mean really worked, not just a hello world app, but something you could show to users? Think about it. You probably need AWS to host it, Stripe for payments, Auth0 for users, and on and on.

We’ve created this incredibly complex web of dependencies, and we call it progress. And it is progress, in a way. I can build in a weekend what would have taken a team months just a few years ago. But I can only build it if all these services are up, working, and willing to take my money.

There’s something almost feudal about it. We’re all tenant farmers now, working land we don’t own, using tools we can’t repair, selling crops we don’t control the price of.

I keep thinking about this idea of efficiency versus resilience. In biology, the most specialized organisms are often the most efficient at their particular niche, but also the most fragile when conditions change. An organism that evolves to thrive in one specific environment often struggles when that environment disappears.

We’ve done the same thing with our technology stack. We’ve optimized for the happy path so completely that we’ve forgotten what the sad path even looks like.

My grandfather used to tell stories about working in machine shops where each shop could make almost anything. They had lathes, mills, welders, and machinists who knew how to use all of them. If you needed a part, they could make it. If a machine broke, they could fix it. The whole operation was antifragile in a way that seems almost quaint now.

I remember my first startup wasn’t that different, in its own way. We racked and stacked our own servers in the office. Bought our own router, ran our own cables, configured our own firewall. When something broke at 2am, I’d drive to the office with a screwdriver and a spare hard drive. It was a pain, sure, but we owned the whole stack. We understood every piece of it because we’d touched every piece of it. That wasn’t that long ago—maybe fifteen years?

Now I work in an industry where we celebrate removing dependencies on our own infrastructure. “Don’t roll your own authentication” has evolved into “don’t roll your own anything.” And mostly, this is good advice. The security engineers at your startup probably aren’t better than the ones at Auth0. Your database probably isn’t more reliable than the one AWS manages.

But what happens when Auth0 goes down?

I remember the great AWS outage of 2017. We’d built a civilization on top of a few data centers in Northern Virginia, and we didn’t even realize it until it stopped working.

The weird part is that this fragility is a choice. We could build systems that work offline, that degrade gracefully, that have real redundancy. But we don’t, because it’s slower and more expensive and the market rewards shipping fast over shipping robust.

There’s this concept in economics called “optimization for local maxima.” You keep making the system better according to your current metrics, but you might be climbing the wrong hill entirely. I wonder if we’ve optimized so hard for development velocity that we’ve created a local maximum we can’t easily escape from.

Because here’s the thing: everyone is making the same trade-offs. Your competitors aren’t building resilient systems either. They’re using the same cloud providers, the same SaaS tools, the same APIs. When those services have problems, everyone has problems at the same time.

And it’s not just the money. It’s the cognitive overhead. You need to understand dozens of different APIs, dozens of different billing models, dozens of different outage patterns. You need to know which services play nicely together and which ones have subtle incompatibilities. You need to monitor the status pages of services you didn’t even know you depended on.

We’ve traded the complexity of building things for the complexity of integrating things, and I’m not sure we got a good deal.

But then I think about what I actually accomplished in those few hours before hitting the API limit. I built something that would have taken me weeks to build five years ago. The AI helped me think through problems I didn’t even know I had.

Maybe this is just what progress looks like. The printing press made us dependent on paper mills. The assembly line made us dependent on supply chains. The internet made us dependent on packet routing. Each time, we traded independence for capability, and mostly, it worked out.

But this time feels different. The dependencies are deeper and more concentrated. A handful of companies control the infrastructure that everything else depends on. And the speed of change means we’re building new dependencies faster than we can understand the implications.

When that API limit message appeared, it wasn’t just telling me I’d hit a usage limit. It was reminding me that I’d become dependent on systems I don’t control, built by people I’ll never meet, running in data centers I’ll never see.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s just how things work now. But it’s worth noticing.

Working alongside Craig Newmark on Craigslist, we learned the power of simple software to enable powerful communities. At the same time, we were both active on message boards like The WELL, which demonstrated that decentralized, community-run boards were incredibly effective engines for communication, learning, and entertainment. That was the insight that gave me my direction: to build software platforms that empower average people to share their worlds directly with their fans. It has been my life’s long work.

Later, when I founded Buzznet, which would become SpinMedia, we weaponized this insight. The idea was simple, yet radical for the mid-2000s: what if the fans, the passionate ones, were the media? We built a portfolio of over 30 web communities not by hiring a legion of journalists, but by empowering the most passionate users to create content—effectively giving birth to the model we now call the ‘influencer.’

That’s how we ended up at the center of cultural moments the mainstream couldn’t yet see. We changed the media landscape forever with SpinMedia.  We platformed a firecracker of a personality named Jeffery Star and an entire music scene that the legacy media dismissed. The Emo movement, with bands like Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and My Chemical Romance, was a subculture built on raw, unfiltered emotion. Rolling Stone didn’t get it, but we gave them platforms like PureVolume and AbsolutePunk, and they exploded.

It’s also how we discovered a sixteen-year-old assistant to Paris Hilton named Kim Kardashian, not through an agent, but through our own community’s obsession. We built and ran the Kardashian family’s blogs and social media before “Keeping Up” was even a concept. Our insight wasn’t a gut feeling; it was based on first-party data. We saw the comments, the astronomical engagement on her photos, and we knew she was a supernova in the making.

As we watched this new form of celebrity gossip exploding, we made a strategic move to dominate the space. We launched Celebuzz and acquired a network of over 20 leading celebrity blogs. At our peak, the SpinMedia Entertainment Group, which included Celebuzz, was a dominant force, reaching over 100 million unique visitors a month and becoming a top 10 comScore-ranked entertainment news property. We didn’t just participate in the celebrity gossip narrative on the internet; for a time, we owned it.

Why did it all work? It comes down to a few core principles that Marc and Ben are talking about today.

First, authenticity over everything. I have always found that true authenticity comes from the edges of society, not the middle. What moves culture today are the new, authentic ideas found on a random Reddit thread, a GitHub repo, a niche podcast, or a deep-cut YouTube channel. Hollywood has lost its importance as a source of new ideas; it’s mostly just looking to monetize old franchises and safe bets. If you want real authenticity, you have to go looking for it on the fringes. That’s precisely why the kids in the Emo scene connected so deeply—they wanted artists who screamed their insecurities into a microphone. It’s why Jeffery Star, who was pure, unapologetic Jeffery, built a kingdom. It’s why Kim’s early appeal was her accessibility. That rawness, that “uncomfortably unusual” quality that Ben ascribed to Trump, is what builds a true connection with an audience in this new world. It’s the opposite of the polished, media-trained image that old media projects.

Second, drama is the engine. In a world of infinite content, you need to be interesting. You need to create what Marc calls “heightened drama.” When working with Ashton Kutcher at Katalyst as President of Digital, I learned so many unique insights that Ashton had on social media, entertainment, and storytelling. He was a master of many things, but one that amazed me was his deep understanding of creating improvisational theater on the streets for Punk’d. We made a whole YouTube Channel called Thrash Lab which was all about finding dramatic stories and ideas that could be entertainment or software. It reinforced the idea that Kim Kardashian’s rise wasn’t just about a TV show; it was a masterclass in turning life into a movie, a concept Neal Gabler wrote about in “Life the Movie” long before the first iPhone.

Third, go direct or go home. The most profound shift is the death of the middleman. The internet allows for a direct, unmediated relationship between the creator and the audience. At Buzznet, we didn’t need a journalist to tell us if a band was good. We could see it in the passion of their fans. We built our own network because we knew that relying on traditional media was a losing game. Their business model was fundamentally at odds with the decentralized nature of the internet.

So, when I hear the discussion today about the crisis of authority in media and the rise of the creator, I nod in recognition. This isn’t a theoretical exercise for me. It’s the story of my career. From helping to name Craigslist and watching it dismantle the newspaper business model, to building a social media company that gave a voice to the misunderstood, I’ve seen firsthand how technology empowers the individual and disrupts the established order.

The playbook is out there for everyone to see now. The question is, who has the courage to use it? The old guard is still clinging to the wreckage, and many in the new guard are still afraid to truly embrace the chaos and the power of the individual. But the future belongs to the authentic, the dramatic, and the direct. It always has. The rest of the world is just finally catching up.

..

Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder, has just posted: “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

I pause, read it again. He continues: “I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding—I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

Like naming a constellation that’s been in the sky all along, Karpathy’s term crystallizes what thousands of developers have already been experiencing: a fundamental shift in how software gets built. What began with simple code completions has evolved into a radically different approach where AI handles the technical implementation while humans focus on creative direction.

Three months later, Karpathy’s term has sparked nothing short of a revolution. Job postings for “Vibe Coders” are appearing on LinkedIn, Y Combinator’s latest batch is filled with startups building entirely AI-generated products, and a whole ecosystem of tools has emerged to support this evolving paradigm.

The long evolution now has its vocabulary

While the term “vibe coding” is new, the practice has been evolving organically since OpenAI released Codex in 2021. Early adopters were already letting AI generate substantial portions of their codebase, though the process still required significant human oversight and technical knowledge.

Each successive generation of models brought capabilities closer to what Karpathy described. GitHub Copilot began suggesting longer snippets. Claude started understanding multi-file projects. GPT-4 could reason through complex architectural decisions. The incremental changes added up.

“We’ve been doing something like vibe coding for nearly two years,” explains Mohammed Patel, CTO at Dataflare. “But we didn’t have language to describe it. We’d just say we were ‘heavily leveraging AI’ or ‘pair programming with GPT.’ Karpathy’s term captures not just the technology but the feeling—this sense that you’re vibing with the AI rather than writing code yourself.”

The history matters because what we’re experiencing isn’t a sudden emergence but the culmination of a trend that’s been hiding in plain sight. Developers have been gradually relinquishing manual coding tasks to AI assistants, starting with simple autocompletions and progressing to entire functions and architectures.

Now, with the most advanced models, the balance has fully shifted toward human-as-director and AI-as-implementer—a change significant enough to deserve its own terminology.

The elite tools of the vibe coding ecosystem

The ecosystem that’s evolved around this practice has become remarkably sophisticated. Based on my conversations with dozens of developers and extensive testing, here are the standout platforms driving the vibe coding revolution as of May 2025:

1. Cursor (Anysphere)

The undisputed flagship of vibe coding, Cursor has become the standard-bearer for AI-assisted development. Built on VS Code architecture, its “Composer” feature acts as an AI agent that can generate, edit, and debug code based on natural language prompts.

What makes it exceptional is its integration with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, widely regarded as the most accurate model for coding tasks. The combination of a familiar interface with cutting-edge AI capabilities has made it the tool of choice for both experienced developers and newcomers.

“I’m spending 80% less time actually typing code,” says Elena Varga, CTO at Quickshift, a Y Combinator-backed startup. “Instead, I’m thinking more deeply about system architecture and user experience—the stuff that actually matters.”

2. Replit Agent

While Cursor dominates the desktop experience, Replit has claimed the cloud development space. Its browser-based platform eliminates setup entirely, making it particularly popular for rapid prototyping and collaborative projects.

Replit Agent functions as an AI software engineer, capable of not just generating code but also configuring databases, automating deployments, and fixing bugs autonomously. Most impressively, it supports over 50 programming languages and offers mobile app access—perfect for coding on the go.

3. Windsurf (by Codeium)

Windsurf has emerged as the power user’s choice, particularly for managing complex repositories and large-scale projects. Its “Cascade” feature enables developers to orchestrate sweeping changes across massive codebases with simple natural language instructions.

The platform excels at maintaining context across large projects, making it ideal for enterprise applications where understanding the relationships between components is critical.

4. Claude Code (by Anthropic)

Anthropic’s entry into vibe coding takes a unique approach, operating as a command-line tool rather than integrating with a specific IDE. Launched in February 2025, Claude Code is designed to understand your entire codebase and help you code faster through natural language commands.

What sets it apart is its deep integration with terminal workflows and direct access to the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, known for exceptional reasoning abilities. It excels at executing routine tasks, explaining complex code, and managing git workflows. While still in beta as a research preview, Claude Code has already demonstrated impressive capabilities, particularly for developers comfortable with terminal-based workflows.

5. Augment Code

One of the newest entrants, Augment Code has made waves with its ability to understand and manipulate massive codebases with remarkable precision. What distinguishes this platform is its context engine, which allows it to navigate complex dependencies and maintain awareness of the entire project structure.

Recent benchmarking showed Augment Code outperforming other tools by up to 70% on certain tasks, particularly in handling larger repositories with sophisticated architectures. Its ability to automate updates across entire projects makes it especially valuable for enterprise settings with established codebases.

6. Lovable

The most beginner-friendly option in the ecosystem, Lovable embodies pure vibe coding through its innovative two-pane interface: AI chat on the left, live preview on the right. Users describe what they want, and the interface materializes in real-time.

“It’s the first true no-code platform that actually works,” explains Tariq Johnson, a graphic designer who built his portfolio site without writing a single line of code. “Previous no-code tools still required understanding their specific logic. With Lovable, I just described what I wanted, and it appeared.”

7. v0 (by Vercel)

Specializing in frontend development, v0 has gained traction for its ability to transform design concepts into pixel-perfect implementations. While less versatile than general-purpose tools, its specialized focus makes it unbeatable for UI/UX tasks.

Many developers use v0 alongside other tools, creating a workflow where v0 handles the interface while platforms like Cursor or Replit manage backend logic.

The first “Vibe Coding” jobs emerge

In a signal of how rapidly this trend is professionalizing, CO/AI, a Venice Beach startup, posted what appears to be the first “Vibe Coder” job listing on LinkedIn in April 2025. The post drew 300+ applicants in three days and spawned sibling roles such as “Vibe QA Analyst” focused on “testing the vibe as well as the code.”

The listing emphasized translating conceptual ideas into shipped products using AI tools, with the provocative tagline: “Keyboard optional.”

This evolution reflects an astonishing productivity claim echoing through Silicon Valley: Fortune reports that some CEOs believe vibe coding “lets 10 engineers do the work of 100.”

Y Combinator’s stamp of validation

Perhaps most telling is data from Y Combinator, the influential startup accelerator. In March 2025, YC reported that 25% of startups in its Winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated, reflecting a dramatic shift toward AI-assisted development.

Many founders are embracing this approach not just for efficiency but as a competitive advantage, allowing small teams to ship features in days rather than months.

The rise of non-technical creators

Kevin Roose, a New York Times journalist with minimal coding experience, experimented with vibe coding to create several small-scale applications in February 2025. He described these as “software for one”—personalized AI-generated tools designed to address specific individual needs, such as an app named LunchBox Buddy that analyzed his fridge contents to suggest items for a packed lunch.

This democratization effect is perhaps the most profound consequence of vibe coding—turning consumers into creators without requiring years of technical training.

The skeptics’ valid concerns

Not everyone is embracing the vibe. Critics point to serious limitations:

Security Vulnerabilities: MIT Technology Review notes that while vibe coding “can help make a vague idea for a website or a game into a reality, it can’t make it reliable or secure.” This was dramatically demonstrated when a vibe-coded SaaS application posted on social media was immediately compromised by security researchers.

Knowledge Gaps: When developers don’t understand the code they’re deploying, diagnosing and fixing subtle bugs becomes nearly impossible.

Maintainability Problems: As AI-generated codebases grow, they often lack the organized architecture that human developers would create, leading to what some critics call “LLM mush.”

Auditability Concerns: For regulated industries like healthcare and finance, the lack of explainability in vibe-coded systems poses significant compliance challenges.

Emergent best practices

As the movement matures, a playbook for responsible vibe coding is taking shape:

1. Start with clear documentation: Write a comprehensive README first, serving as a single-source specification. Claude Code has tools to create README.md files and todo lists.
2. Iterate in small chunks: Work in modules of under 30 lines, regenerating freely but testing thoroughly
3. Voice dictate regularly: This forces clearer intent and higher-level thinking
4. Maintain a critique log: Document hallucinations and mitigation patterns for knowledge transfer
5. Use specialized testing: AI-generated “integration test carpet bombing” to catch edge cases

The bottom line

What Karpathy’s tweet did was give a name to a transformation that’s been underway for years. Vibe coding isn’t just a new approach—it’s the recognition that the relationship between humans and code has fundamentally changed.

The tools will continue to evolve, but the core shift is permanent: humans are becoming orchestrators rather than implementers, focusing on what to build rather than how to build it. This redistribution of cognitive labor allows for unprecedented creativity and productivity, though not without risks that demand careful attention.

As I look ahead, one thing is clear: we didn’t start vibe coding in February 2025, but naming it has accelerated its adoption and expanded its possibilities. The question now isn’t whether AI will transform software development—it’s how quickly this transformation will spread to other domains.

Wevr - EVP Digital & Software Products

Accio Unreal Engine! The Making of New York's Harry Potter VR Experiences

Learn how Dreamscape Immersive created magical VR experiences for Harry Potter Store NYC using Unreal Engine.

www.unrealengine.com

WEVR, still going big after 15 years — why we invested

How WEVR pioneered virtual reality content creation and why BoldStart Ventures invested in their future.

medium.com

Lights, Camera, Virtual Reality!

Andrew Marantz on “Hard World for Small Things,” Janicza Bravo’s virtual-reality film project with Wevr.

www.newyorker.com

Wevr | Company Profile - Fast Company

Virtual reality content studio and platform company creating immersive experiences and tools.

www.fastcompany.com

Virtual reality animator Tyler Hurd on the rebirth of the music video

'It's like your brain just switches something else on.'

www.theverge.com

MTV made music videos cool. Technology will make them epic

Digital Trends explores how modern technology will make music videos relevant again with interaction, social media and virtual reality.

www.digitaltrends.com

Wevr Transport launches premium subscription for virtual reality apps

Wevr's Transport platform introduces paid subscription tier for premium VR content including Deepak Chopra experiences.

venturebeat.com

Sundance 2016 Celebrates 10 Years of New Frontier Program with Björk, Kendrick Lamar, and Immersive VR

Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program showcases cutting-edge virtual reality and immersive media experiences.

www.indiewire.com

Run the Jewels launch virtual reality video for 'Crown'

The video is 'app only' for now, but will be on YouTube and Facebook next month

www.nme.com

Anthony Batt Is Just Getting Started

An in-depth interview with Anthony Batt about his career in virtual reality, content creation, and building the future of immersive media.

medium.com

Wevr Selected for Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies of 2017

Wevr has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2017 in the VR/AR category.

blog.wevr.com

Katalyst - President of Digital at Ashton Kutcher’s Digital Production and Investment company

YouTube PrimeTime: Ashton Kutcher's Thrash Lab Goes For 'Cultural Relevance'

When YouTube announced its premium channel initiative, one of persistent names in the coming lineup was Ashton Kutcher.

www.forbes.com

Portrait: Katalyst

How does a brand hack into the Hollywood spotlight? When Mother wanted to create a celebrity couple for Virgin Mobile, Katalyst helped bring the spoof to life.

www.adweek.com

Link

www.washingtonpost.com

Home

Social video moves fast. Tubular provides a unified view of the interests and behaviors of social video audiences across social platforms.

tubularinsights.com

anthony batt

Co founder of Wevr in Venice CA. Previously Founder of BUZZmedia/SPINmedia. Co-founder Thrash Lab with Ashton Kutcher.

vimeo.com

Buzz Media & Buzznet Co-founder/CEO/CPO - My early startup in social media and web publishing 2004 ~2012. Funded by Redpoint Ventures, NEA, Sutterhill.

Buzz Media to expand social media empire with $12.5M round

Buzz Media, the social media network formerly known as Buzznet, has announced raising a $12.5 million round of funding.

archive.nytimes.com

Spin Magazine Sells to Buzzmedia

The digital media company, which operates Kim Kardashian's website, plans to expand the Spin.com staff.

www.hollywoodreporter.com

BUZZMEDIA Signs Up 6 Major Music Sites, Including The Hype Machine And RCRD LBL

Entertainment media company BUZZMEDIA adds 6 music sites including PureVolume, The Hype Machine, and RCRD LBL.

techcrunch.com

Page not found - Ad Age

adage.com

Early Web Days in SF: Naming Craigslist and Building Products with Craig Newmark

While working in San Francisco Craig Newmark and I became friends while meeting on The Well message board. We started a small company called Digital Threads where we built the earliest websites using PERL. Craig had started a mailing list and I helped him. He credits me naming it Craigslist. Building a web app in 1994 changed my life.

The Rise of Craigslist and How It's Killing Your Newspaper

How a schlumpy IBM refugee found you your apartment, your boyfriend, your new couch, your afternoon sex partner—and now finds himself killing your newspaper.

nymag.com

Craig Newmark of Craigslist Has a New Mission: Saving Democracy

With gifts supporting cybersecurity initiatives, trustworthy journalism and veterans, the Craigslist founder aims to give away virtually his entire fortune.

observer.com

Various Talks

Bryn Mooser + Anthony Batt: Is Virtual Reality Too Advanced For Us? - DigitasLBi NewFront 2017

Is VR real or not? And do brands need to care or not? Panel with Bryn Mooser of Ryot and Anthony Batt of Wevr.

www.youtube.com

Anthony Batt, President of Katalyst on Valley Girl Show with Jesse Draper

Anthony Batt discussing the future of New Media, Thrash Lab and Ashton Kutcher on Valley Girl Show.

www.youtube.com

2016 TFNW - Anthony Batt

Anthony Batt speaking at The Future of Now event about virtual reality and immersive content.

www.youtube.com

Interesting Web Links

Why Run The Jewels and Virtual Reality

Anthony Batt explains the creative process behind Run The Jewels' groundbreaking VR music video 'Crown'.

medium.com

I worked with Kevin Kelly for a year while serving as creative director for a digital agency TROON. We became the agency of record for Absolut Vodka and expanded their artist spotlight program for the web. We selected Kevin Kelly as our first artist and created “Absolut Kelly.” Throughout that year, I implemented Kevin’s ideas from his book “Out Of Control” into our interactive web project. His work made a lasting impact on my life and career.

During the Absolut Kelly project, I collaborated with Jeffrey Ventrella on genetic artwork that allowed website users to breed Absolut Vodka bottle art. Jeffrey’s innovative ideas left a lasting impression on me. These were the earliest generated images made on the Internet.

Absolut Ventrella

Interactive genetic art project created for Absolut Vodka featuring evolutionary bottle designs.

www.ventrella.com

More links that are interesting…

Simplify your Unity game development with WVS

Anthony Batt shares insights on Unity game development and VR content creation workflows.

dev.to

A Brief History Lesson in VR // Anthony Batt, WEVR [FirstMark's Hardwired]

Anthony Batt provides a brief overview on the history of virtual reality and its future potential.

youtu.be

Meditation in virtual reality: it's like French philosophy meets the Matrix

There's no paradox in finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is a simulation, says self-help guru Deepak Chopra.

www.theguardian.com

VR Short Film Extravaganza: Puppet Show

Coverage of VR short film experiences and immersive storytelling.

vrscout.com

Wevr Launches First Subscription Service for Cinematic Virtual Reality

Wevr just launched a first paid subscription service for virtual reality content.

variety.com

Run The Jewels - Crown (Extended Behind The Scenes Of VR 360 Video)

Behind-the-scenes footage from the VR music video for 'Crown' by Run The Jewels, available through NY Times VR app.

youtu.be

The best virtual reality from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival

Plus the stuff you should try right now

www.theverge.com

Skybound, Wevr and Samsung Release 'Gone', a Serialized Virtual Reality Thriller

The new serialized thriller lets users change their point of view while the story progresses.

variety.com

Harry Potter VR Experiences - Technifex

A new VR immersive experience has opened in New York City at the new Harry Potter Store, produced by Dreamscape Immersive.

www.technifex.com

AFI FEST State of the Art Tech Showcase Launches November 12 With Anthony Batt Keynote

AFI FEST's State of the Art Technology Showcase featuring Anthony Batt keynote on Innovation and Immersive Storytelling.

www.afi.com

Virtual reality animator Tyler Hurd on the rebirth of the music video

'It's like your brain just switches something else on.'

www.theverge.com