17 October, 2024
Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs
Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s him. Now Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories.
If you said, “Huh?” when reading that, I wouldn’t blame you. But the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has more expertise here than you might realize. First off, Kaepernick says this is a solution for storytellers, and generative AI is merely a tool to get there. Kaepernick spent the last 10 years building a media company, Kaepernick Media, which exposed him to some of the media industry’s deeply entrenched problems. He’s also served on Medium’s board since 2020. Lumi attempts to address issues like gatekeeping, production costs, and creatives losing ownership of their work. The solution is not revolutionary — an AI subscription, a distribution platform, and a revenue share plan — but the implementation might be.
Kaepernick made headlines during the 2016 NFL season, not for his passer rating, but for kneeling during the national anthem before football games. It was a protest to civil injustices against Black people, but many took his kneel to be disrespectful. At the time, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “I don’t necessarily agree with what he’s doing,” while others, including former President Trump, said worse. After leaving the 49ers, Kaepernick struggled to land with another team despite leading San Francisco to a Super Bowl a few years earlier, leading to suspicions he’d been blackballed by NFL owners.
“On my own story — the impact and implications of other people creating their narratives around it and telling it from their perspective — why should that be the case?” said Kaepernick in an interview with TechCrunch. “There are times in the past where I could have jumped out and told my story in different ways, but I try to be thoughtful of how I’m building things and why I’m doing them. If it’s something that is just self-interested or self-fulfilling, that doesn’t particularly interest me.”
But with Lumi, Kaepernick sees an opportunity to empower storytellers more broadly. He may release a story on the platform himself, but that’s not quite the point. Kaepernick’s difficulties with the media industry have greatly impacted his own life, but now he’s using the lesson to create a solution larger than himself.
On Wednesday, Lumi is emerging from stealth with $4 million in seed funding led by Seven Seven Six. The company is also allowing creators to sign up for its beta version today.
Cool! So what is it?
Kaepernick ultimately sees Lumi as an end-to-end media company — venturing into video eventually — offering creator tools, a distribution platform, publishing and merchandising services. For now, Lumi is starting small with creator tools for comic book illustrators, specifically the Japanese style, manga.
The first thing creators do when storytelling with Lumi is visit the website. There, you can create your story’s main character by describing their backstory, physical characteristics, and other traits into a text-based AI model. That leads to an AI image generation of your character, which illustrators could use as inspiration or the actual character imagery to build a story around.
Then Lumi’s AI helps you plan out your story, asking questions about story structure, protagonists and antagonists, and themes and helping to generate a script. Then you’ll get to the final product page, where all the imagery, dialogue and captions are formatted into a graphic novel. You can then publish your story and a digital version will go live on the front end of Lumi’s website.
But Lumi also wants to make physical publishing and merchandising easier for creators. Kaepernick says his company will handle all the business logistics so creators can focus on storytelling, making Lumi a one-stop shop for all a creator’s needs.
Creators can choose from three monthly subscription tiers — $20, $40, and $75 — with more expensive tiers unlocking advanced features for creators. Kaepernick wants to share the revenue from these stories, physical copies, and merchandising with the creators.
Kaepernick’s plan is centered around making Lumi an entertainment platform for manga fans. The idea is that there’s some value baked into getting a story on Lumi’s website, but that only works if people are coming to the destination.
No stranger to Silicon Valley
Lumi is the first startup Kaepernick has founded, but the former QB has been angel investing since 2017 and tells TechCrunch he has more than 50 investments to date. Kaepernick also sits on the board of digital publishing platform Medium and has since 2020. There, he’s worked alongside influential Silicon Valley investors — including fellow board members such as a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, Medium co-founder Evan Williams, and Heretic Ventures founder Mariam Naficy — who he says have shaped his business sense as a tech founder.
“I don’t think I woke up one day and was like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna build a tech company,’” said Kaepernick. “But we were trying to solve this problem for creators that we’re engaging with. It just so happens that the best way for us to do this is by building a tech company.”
Kaepernick says he’s not worried about wading into Silicon Valley more publicly as a founder at this politically charged moment, as some Silicon Valley leaders have publicly endorsed Trump. Kaepernick has been a civil rights activist for nearly a decade, leading the Know Your Rights Camp since 2016, whose mission is to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities.” With Lumi, Kaepernick says he’s just focused on product.
“I don’t have any concerns entering the space during this time,” said Kaepernick. “My thinking is, if we are serving our end user and creator in the best way possible, then we will have a successful company and everything else will take care of itself.”
Lumi aims to uplift voices that aren’t given a sufficient platform today. Kaepernick’s business will use a few different foundational AI models, but he’s keen to address the biases that have plagued LLMs for years.
“AI models as they exist today, they’re going to have the biases of the past built into them. We’ve seen that, we know that,” says Kaepernick. “When we think about narratives and how people are represented, AI is going to accelerate things exponentially. That can be both exponentially good and bad. Our hope here is that we build something to create that better path forward for storytellers and creators.
MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, is lobbying for creators on Capitol Hill
Matthew Patrick’s most unique achievement isn’t that he grew his YouTube account into a multi-channel media business with over 40 million subscribers. It’s that he managed to sell his company and successfully transition away from a career that’s so hard, both emotionally and logistically, to leave.
In an emotional video posted earlier this year, Patrick — known as MatPat online — shocked viewers with his decision to step away from his illustrious career. He explained, “I don’t love late nights. I don’t love the fact that [my wife] Steph and I have been work-first for over a decade, where I’m sitting down at dinner with my best friend, and we’re talking about business logistics. … I miss the days when I could just sit down on the couch with her and play video games, and it’s not for content.”
When other YouTubers quit, they usually just stop uploading videos and move onto other pursuits. Even for YouTubers big enough to think about selling their channels, exits remain notoriously difficult in the industry. Their businesses are already considered risky to buyers, because they’re so dependent on the whims of social platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. And creators themselves are central to their companies’ brands, which makes it hard for buyers to gauge how crucial their involvement is to the channel’s success.
Yet MatPat got the media company Lunar X to take over his company, Theorist Media, in a transition process that took a few years to complete and gave him enough money to retire. (He won’t disclose the exact amount.)
“We had conversations with 10 different companies,” MatPat told TechCrunch. “We ended up just going with a product that liked us for the brand, that recognized that we had spent the last 10 years developing a very solid, very recognizable, very beloved brand.”
Turning YouTube into a full-time career is a dream, but it’s not sustainable forever. As the creator economy matures, Theorist — which employs 22 full-time staff and around 20 freelancers — is being viewed as a blueprint for how creators can make this sort of business transition.
“Creator media companies are so key person-led, that it’s a vulnerability,” Hank Green, a longtime creator and entrepreneur, told TechCrunch. “When you die, or when you want to retire, it just ends, and that’s kind of sad. It’s like, did I build a thing that will outlast me, that I can take a break for the first time in 10 years?”
Green’s oldest channel, vlogbrothers, for example, probably couldn’t be acquired — it’s a 17-year-long series in which he and his brother John make videos back and forth to one another. You can’t take the titular brothers out of vlogbrothers.
“Even that was something that was part of the valuation process,” MatPat said. “How person-centric is Theorist, and if we as a company acquire them, are we beholden to that?”
But according to MatPat, Theorist was well-positioned to transition to new hosts, because the formats of its shows are more easily reproducible. Though MatPat’s personality drove the channel’s initial popularity, the formats of his videos made it a bit easier to onboard new hosts. On Game Theory, his main channel, MatPat would analyze video games in deep detail and make explainer videos about his theories. But with the right writers, another host can mimic the format and quality of his videos.
“It’s an unproven ecosystem right now. We were one of the first successful acquisitions and successful transitions in the space,” he said. “But we know after we did our acquisition, we got a lot of calls from other YouTubers who are looking to sell.”
Lobbying for creators
Though MatPat retired from YouTube, he’s still pretty busy. In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. Now that he isn’t making videos anymore, he wants to use his position as one of the most successful YouTubers ever to educate legislators about what creators need as small businesses.
“It’s weird to be in a position where I, YouTuber MatPat, who just had this big exit from the platform and is very well known in this space, am suddenly like, no man in Washington, being a literal salesperson for a $250 billion industry,” he said.
He’s more than happy to take a hit to the ego for the sake of his industry. MatPat and his wife Stephanie — who was a co-owner and COO of Theorist Media — feel strongly that their representatives need to understand how creator businesses operate. According to Goldman Sachs, the creator economy could be worth half a trillion dollars by 2027. Oxford Economics estimates that YouTube’s creative ecosystem supported over 390,000 full-time equivalent jobs in 2022.
“We’re trying to educate lawmakers about what the creator economy is, and that it’s an actual job and that we are actually small businesses, and as a result, there are certain tax codes and things that apply to small businesses,” Patrick told TechCrunch. “Even when you talk to accountants, they’re like, well are you though? Because there’s not a clear indicator on tax forms — like, what is a creator business?”
Legislators are notoriously behind the times when it comes to technology. It’s hard for some elected officials to conceptualize how Facebook itself makes money, let alone how creators are using social media platforms to start multi-million-dollar businesses. When TechCrunch met MatPat at VidCon, he had recently returned from a trip to Capitol Hill, where he realized just how far we have to go.
“The other week when we [spoke with legislators], it was like, ‘Question one, what is Roku, and how is it different from YouTube?’” he said. “Which is telling about where we’re starting from.”
Without much regulatory oversight or understanding of their work, creators and their businesses are left vulnerable. It’s hard to be a self-employed business owner, but being financially dependent on Big Tech platforms further complicates things. Even a small algorithm change can impact a creator’s ability to reach an audience, and less views means less money. In terms of brand deals and partnerships, there are no industry standards for pay.
“This isn’t just relevant to New York and California. The biggest creators are coming from all parts of the U.S.,” MatPat said. “When we were on Capitol Hill, we were meeting with our local district representative, and we were like, ‘Hey, are you aware that the largest YouTuber in the world is in your state?’ and she’s like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s MacBeast, right?’”
Even small policy changes can make a big difference for creators.
“Right now, there’s no designation and official government records that say like, ‘I am a content creator by trade. I make a bulk of my income through creating content, video, social content, whatever that is,’” he said. “Then a lawmaker can see, ‘Oh, my district in the middle of Iowa has a lot of content creators; this is an important part of my constituency.’”
The creator industry is often delegitimized — making online videos sounds like a hobby, rather than a career. More children are saying their dream job is to be a YouTuber, but only a small percentage of aspiring creators will make enough money to stay afloat. But the way MatPat sees it, aspiring creators can learn a lot of transferable skills from YouTube.
“I do think it is absolutely valid and encourage anyone to start a YouTube channel with the hope of becoming a successful YouTuber, because the skills you get from doing that apply to so many different worlds,” MatPat said. Creators need to master public speaking, scriptwriting, video editing, filming, social media marketing, data analysis, and more. “One of the things I’m hopeful for is that people figure out that there are transferable skills, where it’s like, maybe I wasn’t doing this exact job, but I learned all of these things by doing YouTube, which applies.”
MatPat’s exit pushed the industry forward by showing that it’s possible to retire, and he’s hoping to make even more waves on Capitol Hill.
“If our legacy is empowering the legacies of the next generation of creators, that’s awesome,” he said. “That’s the best note that I can end on.”
Why Anthony Levandowski returned to his off-road autonomous vehicle roots with AV startup Pronto
Five years ago, as robotaxis and self-driving truck startups were still raking in millions in venture capital, Anthony Levandowski turned to off-road autonomy.
Now, that decision — which brought the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur back to the roots that helped launch his pioneering and controversial career — is starting to pay off.
Pronto, the San Francisco-based startup Levandowski co-founded with Ognen Stojanovski, has developed a self-driving system designed for haulage trucks and other off-road vehicles that are used at construction and mining sites. About a dozen companies are now using its “autonomous haulage system” or AHS, according to Levandowski, who noted that not all of those deployments are driverless.
A newly announced partnership illustrates Pronto’s traction in the niche market. Pronto exclusively shared with TechCrunch that it has extended a partnership with Heidelberg Materials North America, one of the largest build materials and cement producers in the world, following a pilot program last year at the company’s Bridgeport Quarry in Texas. Under the agreement, Pronto’s technology will be integrated into Komatsu haulage trucks, which will operate autonomously at the site. This time around, the trucks will also include Komatsu’s connected vehicle technology to improve data collection and analysis.
The 30-person startup uses advanced sensors, cameras and artificial intelligence to operate haul trucks autonomously. Pronto also uses Pollen Mobile, a peer-to-peer open source mobile data network the startup launched in 2022 that allows it to exchange data anonymously and at high speeds without relying on legacy carriers. Pollen is used to support sites with little to no connectivity.
Interest and investment in off-road autonomy has increased as startups and more established technology companies seek out the best and fastest path to commercialization. It’s what motivated Levandowski to change course in 2019.
“Obviously, autonomous vehicle technology is going to be transformational for all applications that have wheels, but I think that they’re going to come sooner in the applications where the technology and the market needs it and really lines up,” he said in a recent interview.
For Levandowski, off-road is the most compelling because it is used on private property. And while the complexities of the environment are more difficult from a driving perspective, the people working at the site can be properly trained to interact with autonomous vehicles.
“The actors all know what’s happening, and they’re all accountable for their actions, so they can go through training and know how to behave around a car versus some of our pedestrians in San Francisco,” he said. “It’s an application where the tech is ready today, and the market needs that technology now. So it’s a great spot to start off with.”
Levandowski first formed Pronto in 2018 with a different aim. The startup was initially working on advanced driver assistance features built for Class 8 trucks and passenger vehicles.
Pronto pivoted to off-road autonomy in 2019 because “it became clear we couldn’t do on-road autonomy on a timeframe that we want as a business.”
The move brought him back to where he started.
Levandowski participated in the autonomous-driving Grand Challenge in 2005, an off-road AV competition sponsored by the DARPA. His experience — and the connections he made, including with Stanford professor and eventual Google X founder Sebastian Thrun — would shape his career.
Levandowski had already co-founded a Berkeley, California, startup called 510 Systems that was working on a mobile mapping system. The startup experimented with using cameras and a timing system to assist drivers in steering tractors and controlling bulldozers. Levandowski then joined Google in 2007 to work on its mapping technology, which would eventually evolve into the Street View system.
Those Street View systems used the Topcon box, designed by 510 Systems, which combined lidar and camera sensors, GPS and wheel encoders and was mounted to a car.
Levandowski would go on to become one of the founding members in 2009 of the Google self-driving project, which was internally called Project Chauffeur and evolved into Waymo. Google ended up buying 510 Systems and its sister company, Anthony’s Robots, in 2011. He would later become a central figure in a trade secrets lawsuit that pitted the Alphabet subsidiary against Uber.
“I like off-road because that’s where you can build a product and you’re ready for today,” Levandowski said. “The market is obviously much, much smaller than on-road and typically, investors will want to chase a large TAM [total addressable market].”
Pronto has raised an undisclosed amount from investors, Levandowski said without naming his backers. He added the funding wasn’t through a traditional VC series round.
“I don’t think it’s like the next frontier,” he said of off-road autonomy. “It’s almost like the skipped-over frontier that we really should have checked off along the way to on-road autonomy.”
Why Anthony Levandowski returned to his off-road autonomous vehicle roots with AV startup Pronto
Five years ago, as robotaxis and self-driving truck startups were still raking in millions in venture capital, Anthony Levandowski turned to off-road autonomy.
Now, that decision — which brought the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur back to the roots that helped launch his pioneering and controversial career — is starting to pay off.
Pronto, the San Francisco-based startup Lewandowski co-founded with Ognen Stojanovski, has developed a self-driving system designed for haulage trucks and other off-road vehicles that are used at construction and mining sites. About a dozen companies are now using its so-called “autonomous haulage system” or AHS, according to Levandowksi, who noted that not all of those deployments are driverless.
A newly announced partnership illustrates Pronto’s traction in the niche market. Pronto exclusively shared with TechCrunch that it has extended a partnership with Heidelberg Materials North America, one of the largest build materials and cement producers in the world, following a pilot program last year at the company’s Bridgeport Quarry in Texas. Under the agreement, Pronto’s technology will be integrated into Komatsu haulage trucks, which will operate autonomously at the site. This time around, the trucks will also include Komatsu’s connected vehicle technology to improve data collection and analysis.
The 30-person startup uses advanced sensors, cameras and artificial intelligence to operate haul trucks autonomously. Pronto also uses Pollen Mobile, a peer-to-peer open source mobile data network the startup launched in 2022 that allows it to exchange data anonymously and at high speeds without relying on legacy carriers. Pollen is used to support sites with little to no connectivity.
Interest and investment in off-road autonomy has increased as startups and more established technology companies seek out the best and fastest path to commercialization. It’s what motivated Levandowski to change course in 2019.
“Obviously, autonomous vehicle technology is going to be transformational for all applications that have wheels, but I think that they’re going to come sooner in the applications where the technology and the market needs it and really lines up,” Levandowski said in a recent interview.
For Levandowski, off-road is the most compelling because it is used on private property. And while the complexities of the environment are more difficult from a driving perspective, the people working at the site can be properly trained to interact with autonomous vehicles.
“The actors all know what’s happening, and they’re all accountable for their actions, so they can go through training and know how to behave around a car versus some of our pedestrians in San Francisco,” he said. “It’s an application where the tech is ready today, and the market needs that technology now. So it’s a great spot to start off with.”
Levandowski first formed Pronto in 2018 with a different aim. The startup was initially working on advanced driver assistance features built for Class 8 trucks and passenger vehicles.
Pronto pivoted to off-road autonomy in 2019 because “it became clear we couldn’t do on-road autonomy on a timeframe that we want as a business.”
The move brought him back to where he started.
Levandowski participated in the autonomous-driving Grand Challenge in 2005, an off-road AV competition sponsored by the DARPA. His experience — and the connections he made, including with Stanford professor and eventual Google X founder Sebastian Thrun — would shape his career.
Levandowski had already co-founded a Berkeley, California startup called 510 Systems that was working on a mobile mapping system. The startup experimented with using cameras and a timing system to assist drivers in steering tractors and controlling bulldozers. Levandowski then joined Google in 2007 to work on its mapping technology, which would eventually evolve into the Street View system.
Those Street View systems used the Topcon box, designed by 510 Systems, which combined lidar and camera sensors, GPS and wheel encoders and was mounted to a car.
Levandowski would go on to become one of the founding members in 2009 of the Google self-driving project, which was internally called Project Chauffeur and evolved into Waymo. Google ended up buying 510 Systems, and its sister company, Anthony’s Robots, in 2011.
Levandowski, who helped pioneer the technology at the heart of self-driving leader Waymo, would later become a central figure in a trade secrets lawsuit that pitted the Alphabet subsidiary against Uber.
“I like off-road because that’s where you can build a product and you’re ready for today,” Levandowski said. “The market is obviously much, much smaller than on-road and and typically, investors will want to chase a large TAM (total addressable market).”
Pronto has raised an undisclosed amount from investors, Levandowski said without naming his backers. He added the funding wasn’t through a traditional VC series round.
“I don’t think it’s like the next frontier,” Levandowski said of off-road autonomy. “It’s almost like the skipped-over frontier that we really should have checked off along the way to on-road autonomy.”
MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, is lobbying for creators on Capitol Hill
Matthew Patrick’s most unique achievement isn’t that he grew his YouTube account into a multi-channel media business with over 40 million subscribers. It’s that he managed to sell his company and successfully transition away from a career that’s so hard, both emotionally and logistically, to leave.
In an emotional video posted earlier this year, Patrick – known as MatPat online – shocked viewers with his decision to step away from his illustrious career. He explained, “I don’t love late nights. I don’t love the fact that [my wife] Steph and I have been work-first for over a decade, where I’m sitting down at dinner with my best friend, and we’re talking about business logistics… I miss the days when I could just sit down on the couch with her and play video games, and it’s not for content.”
When other YouTubers quit, they usually just stop uploading videos and move onto other pursuits. Even for YouTubers big enough to think about selling their channels, exits remain notoriously difficult in the industry. Their businesses are already considered risky to buyers, because they’re so dependent on the whims of social platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. And creators themselves are central to their companies’ brands, which makes it hard for buyers to gauge how crucial their involvement is to the channel’s success.
Yet MatPat got the media company Lunar X to take over his company, Theorist Media, in a transition process that took a few years to complete and gave him enough money to retire. (He won’t disclose the exact amount.)
“We had conversations with 10 different companies,” MatPat told TechCrunch. “We ended up just going with a product that liked us for the brand, that recognized that we had spent the last 10 years developing a very solid, very recognizable, very beloved brand.”
Turning YouTube into a full-time career is a dream, but it’s not sustainable forever. As the creator economy matures, Theorist – which employs 22 full-time staff and around 20 freelancers – is being viewed as a blueprint for how creators can make this sort of business transition.
“Creator media companies are so key person-led, that it’s a vulnerability,” Hank Green, a longtime creator and entrepreneur, told TechCrunch. “When you die, or when you want to retire, it just ends, and that’s kind of sad. It’s like, did I build a thing that will outlast me, that I can take a break for the first time in 10 years?”
Green’s oldest channel vlogbrothers, for example, probably couldn’t be acquired – it’s a seventeen-year-long series in which he and his brother John make videos back and forth to one another. You can’t take the titular brothers out of vlogbrothers.
“Even that was something that was part of the valuation process,” MatPat said. “How person-centric is Theorist, and if we as a company acquire them, are we beholden to that?”
But according to MatPat, Theorist was well-positioned to transition to new hosts, because the formats of its shows are more easily reproducible. Though MatPat’s personality drove the channel’s initial popularity, the formats of his videos made it a bit easier to onboard new hosts. On Game Theory, his main channel, MatPat would analyze video games in deep detail and make explainer videos about his theories. But with the right writers, another host can mimic the format and quality of his videos.
“It’s an unproven ecosystem right now. We were one of the first successful acquisitions and successful transitions in the space,” he said. “But we know after we did our acquisition, we got a lot of calls from other YouTubers who are looking to sell.”
Lobbying for creators
Though MatPat retired from YouTube, he’s still pretty busy. In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. Now that he isn’t making videos anymore, he wants to use his position as one of the most successful YouTubers ever to educate legislators about what creators need as small businesses.
“It’s weird to be in a position where I, YouTuber MatPat, who just had this big exit from the platform and is very well known in this space, am suddenly like, no man in Washington, being a literal salesperson for a $250 billion industry,” he said.
He’s more than happy to take a hit to the ego for the sake of his industry. MatPat and his wife Stephanie – who was a co-owner and COO of Theorist Media – feel strongly that their representatives need to understand how creator businesses operate. According to Goldman Sachs, the creator economy could be worth half a trillion dollars by 2027. Oxford Economics estimates that YouTube’s creative ecosystem supported over 390,000 full-time equivalent jobs in 2022.
“We’re trying to educate lawmakers about what the creator economy is, and that it’s an actual job and that we are actually small businesses, and as a result, there are certain tax codes and things that apply to small businesses,” Patrick told TechCrunch. “Even when you talk to accountants, they’re like, well are you though? Because there’s not a clear indicator on tax forms – like, what is a creator business?”
Legislators are notoriously behind on the times when it comes to technology. It’s hard for some elected officials to conceptualize how Facebook itself makes money, let alone how creators are using social media platforms to start multi-million-dollar businesses. When TechCrunch met MatPat at Vidcon, he had recently returned from a trip to Capitol Hill, where he realized just how far we have to go.
“The other week when we [spoke with legislators], it was like, ‘Question one, what is Roku, and how is it different from YouTube?’” he said. “Which is telling about where we’re starting from.”
Without much regulatory oversight or understanding of their work, creators and their businesses are left vulnerable. It’s hard to be a self-employed business owner, but being financially dependent on big tech platforms further complicates things. Even a small algorithm change can impact a creator’s ability to reach an audience, and less views means less money. In terms of brand deals and partnerships, there are no industry standards for pay.
“This isn’t just relevant to New York and California. The biggest creators are coming from all parts of the US,” MatPat said. “When we were on Capitol Hill, we were meeting with our local district representative, and we were like, ‘Hey, are you aware that the largest YouTuber in the world is in your state?’ and she’s like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s MacBeast, right?’”
Even small policy changes can make a big difference for creators.
“Right now, there’s no designation and official government records that say like, ‘I am a content creator by trade. I make a bulk of my income through creating content, video, social content, whatever that is,’” he said. “Then a lawmaker can see, ‘Oh, my district in the middle of Iowa has a lot of content creators, this is an important part of my constituency.’”
The creator industry is often delegitimized – making online videos sounds like a hobby, rather than a career. More children are saying their dream job is to be a YouTuber, but only a small fraction of a percentage of aspiring creators will make enough money to stay afloat. But the way MatPat sees it, aspiring creators can learn a lot of transferable skills from YouTube.
“I do think it is absolutely valid and encourage anyone to start a YouTube channel with the hope of becoming a successful YouTuber, because the skills you get from doing that apply to so many different worlds,” MatPat said. Creators need to master public speaking, scriptwriting, video editing, filming, social media marketing, data analysis, and more. “One of the things I’m hopeful for is that people figure out that there are transferable skills, where it’s like, maybe I wasn’t doing this exact job, but I learned all of these things by doing YouTube, which applies.”
MatPat’s exit pushed the industry forward by showing that it’s possible to retire, and he’s hoping to make even more waves on Capitol Hill.
“If our legacy is empowering the legacies of the next generation of creators, that’s awesome,” he said. “That’s the best note that I can end on.”
Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs
Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s him. Now Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories.
If you said, “Huh?” when reading that, I wouldn’t blame you. But the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has more expertise here than you might realize. First off, Kaepernick says this is a solution for storytellers, and generative AI is merely a tool to get there. Kaepernick spent the last 10 years building a media company, Kaepernick Media, which exposed him to some of the media industry’s deeply entrenched problems. He’s also served on Medium’s board since 2020. Lumi attempts to address issues like gatekeeping, production costs, and creatives losing ownership of their work. The solution is not revolutionary — an AI subscription, a distribution platform, and a revenue share plan — but the implementation might be.
Kaepernick made headlines during the 2016 NFL season, not for his passer rating, but for kneeling during the national anthem before football games. It was a protest to civil injustices against Black people, but many took his kneel to be disrespectful. At the time, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “I don’t necessarily agree with what he’s doing,” while others, including former President Trump, said worse. After leaving the 49ers, Kaepernick struggled to land with another team despite leading San Francisco to a Super Bowl a few years earlier, leading to suspicions he’d been blackballed by NFL owners.
“On my own story — the impact and implications of other people creating their narratives around it and telling it from their perspective — why should that be the case?” said Kaepernick in an interview with TechCrunch. “There are times in the past where I could have jumped out and told my story in different ways, but I try to be thoughtful of how I’m building things and why I’m doing them. If it’s something that is just self-interested or self-fulfilling, that doesn’t particularly interest me.”
But with Lumi, Kaepernick sees an opportunity to empower storytellers more broadly. He may release a story on the platform himself, but that’s not quite the point. Kaepernick’s difficulties with the media industry have greatly impacted his own life, but now he’s using the lesson to create a solution larger than himself.
On Wednesday, Lumi is emerging from stealth with $4 million in seed funding led by Seven Seven Six. The company is also allowing creators to sign up for its beta version today.
Cool! So what is it?
Kaepernick ultimately sees Lumi as an end-to-end media company — venturing into video eventually — offering creator tools, a distribution platform, publishing and merchandising services. For now, Lumi is starting small with creator tools for comic book illustrators, specifically the Japanese style, manga.
The first thing creators do when storytelling with Lumi is visit the website. There, you can create your story’s main character by describing their backstory, physical characteristics, and other traits into a text-based AI model. That leads to an AI image generation of your character, which illustrators could use as inspiration or the actual character imagery to build a story around.
Then Lumi’s AI helps you plan out your story, asking questions about story structure, protagonists and antagonists, and themes and helping to generate a script. Then you’ll get to the final product page, where all the imagery, dialogue and captions are formatted into a graphic novel. You can then publish your story and a digital version will go live on the front end of Lumi’s website.
But Lumi also wants to make physical publishing and merchandising easier for creators. Kaepernick says his company will handle all the business logistics so creators can focus on storytelling, making Lumi a one-stop shop for all a creator’s needs.
Creators can choose from three monthly subscription tiers — $20, $40, and $75 — with more expensive tiers unlocking advanced features for creators. Kaepernick wants to share the revenue from these stories, physical copies, and merchandising with the creators.
Kaepernick’s plan is centered around making Lumi an entertainment platform for manga fans. The idea is that there’s some value baked into getting a story on Lumi’s website, but that only works if people are coming to the destination.
No stranger to Silicon Valley
Lumi is the first startup Kaepernick has founded, but the former QB has been angel investing since 2017 and tells TechCrunch he has more than 50 investments to date. Kaepernick also sits on the board of digital publishing platform Medium and has since 2020. There, he’s worked alongside influential Silicon Valley investors — including fellow board members such as a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, Medium co-founder Evan Williams, and Heretic Ventures founder Mariam Naficy — who he says have shaped his business sense as a tech founder.
“I don’t think I woke up one day and was like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna build a tech company,’” said Kaepernick. “But we were trying to solve this problem for creators that we’re engaging with. It just so happens that the best way for us to do this is by building a tech company.”
Kaepernick says he’s not worried about wading into Silicon Valley more publicly as a founder at this politically charged moment, as some Silicon Valley leaders have publicly endorsed Trump. Kaepernick has been a civil rights activist for nearly a decade, leading the Know Your Rights Camp since 2016, whose mission is to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities.” With Lumi, Kaepernick says he’s just focused on product.
“I don’t have any concerns entering the space during this time,” said Kaepernick. “My thinking is, if we are serving our end user and creator in the best way possible, then we will have a successful company and everything else will take care of itself.”
Lumi aims to uplift voices that aren’t given a sufficient platform today. Kaepernick’s business will use a few different foundational AI models, but he’s keen to address the biases that have plagued LLMs for years.
“AI models as they exist today, they’re going to have the biases of the past built into them. We’ve seen that, we know that,” says Kaepernick. “When we think about narratives and how people are represented, AI is going to accelerate things exponentially. That can be both exponentially good and bad. Our hope here is that we build something to create that better path forward for storytellers and creators.
Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs
Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s him. Now Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories.
If you said, “Huh?” when reading that, I wouldn’t blame you. But the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has more expertise here than you might realize. First off, Kaepernick says this is a solution for storytellers, and generative AI is merely a tool to get there. Kaepernick spent the last 10 years building a media company, Kaepernick Media, which exposed him to some of the media industry’s deeply entrenched problems. He’s also served on Medium’s board since 2020. Lumi attempts to address issues like gatekeeping, production costs, and creatives losing ownership of their work. The solution is not revolutionary — an AI subscription, a distribution platform, and a revenue share plan — but the implementation might be.
Kaepernick made headlines during the 2016 NFL season, not for his passer rating, but for kneeling during the national anthem before football games. It was a protest to civil injustices against Black people, but many took his kneel to be disrespectful. At the time, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “I don’t necessarily agree with what he’s doing,” while others, including former President Trump, said worse. After leaving the 49ers, Kaepernick struggled to land with another team despite leading San Francisco to a Super Bowl a few years earlier, leading to suspicions he’d been blackballed by NFL owners.
“On my own story — the impact and implications of other people creating their narratives around it and telling it from their perspective — why should that be the case?” said Kaepernick in an interview with TechCrunch. “There are times in the past where I could have jumped out and told my story in different ways, but I try to be thoughtful of how I’m building things and why I’m doing them. If it’s something that is just self-interested or self-fulfilling, that doesn’t particularly interest me.”
But with Lumi, Kaepernick sees an opportunity to empower storytellers more broadly. He may release a story on the platform himself, but that’s not quite the point. Kaepernick’s difficulties with the media industry have greatly impacted his own life, but now he’s using the lesson to create a solution larger than himself.
On Wednesday, Lumi is emerging from stealth with $4 million in seed funding led by Seven Seven Six. The company is also allowing creators to sign up for its beta version today.
Cool! So what is it?
Kaepernick ultimately sees Lumi as an end-to-end media company — venturing into video eventually — offering creator tools, a distribution platform, publishing and merchandising services. For now, Lumi is starting small with creator tools for comic book illustrators, specifically the Japanese style, manga.
The first thing creators do when storytelling with Lumi is visit the website. There, you can create your story’s main character by describing their backstory, physical characteristics, and other traits into a text-based AI model. That leads to an AI image generation of your character, which illustrators could use as inspiration or the actual character imagery to build a story around.
Then Lumi’s AI helps you plan out your story, asking questions about story structure, protagonists and antagonists, and themes and helping to generate a script. Then you’ll get to the final product page, where all the imagery, dialogue and captions are formatted into a graphic novel. You can then publish your story and a digital version will go live on the front end of Lumi’s website.
But Lumi also wants to make physical publishing and merchandising easier for creators. Kaepernick says his company will handle all the business logistics so creators can focus on storytelling, making Lumi a one-stop shop for all a creator’s needs.
Creators can choose from three monthly subscription tiers — $20, $40, and $75 — with more expensive tiers unlocking advanced features for creators. Kaepernick wants to share the revenue from these stories, physical copies, and merchandising with the creators.
Kaepernick’s plan is centered around making Lumi an entertainment platform for manga fans. The idea is that there’s some value baked into getting a story on Lumi’s website, but that only works if people are coming to the destination.
No stranger to Silicon Valley
Lumi is the first startup Kaepernick has founded, but the former QB has been angel investing since 2017 and tells TechCrunch he has more than 50 investments to date. Kaepernick also sits on the board of digital publishing platform Medium and has since 2020. There, he’s worked alongside influential Silicon Valley investors — including fellow board members such as a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, Medium co-founder Evan Williams, and Heretic Ventures founder Mariam Naficy — who he says have shaped his business sense as a tech founder.
“I don’t think I woke up one day and was like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna build a tech company,’” said Kaepernick. “But we were trying to solve this problem for creators that we’re engaging with. It just so happens that the best way for us to do this is by building a tech company.”
Kaepernick says he’s not worried about wading into Silicon Valley more publicly as a founder at this politically charged moment, as some Silicon Valley leaders have publicly endorsed Trump. Kaepernick has been a civil rights activist for nearly a decade, leading the Know Your Rights Camp since 2016, whose mission is to “advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities.” With Lumi, Kaepernick says he’s just focused on product.
“I don’t have any concerns entering the space during this time,” said Kaepernick. “My thinking is, if we are serving our end user and creator in the best way possible, then we will have a successful company and everything else will take care of itself.”
Lumi aims to uplift voices that aren’t given a sufficient platform today. Kaepernick’s business will use a few different foundational AI models, but he’s keen to address the biases that have plagued LLMs for years.
“AI models as they exist today, they’re going to have the biases of the past built into them. We’ve seen that, we know that,” says Kaepernick. “When we think about narratives and how people are represented, AI is going to accelerate things exponentially. That can be both exponentially good and bad. Our hope here is that we build something to create that better path forward for storytellers and creators.
Garry Tan has revealed his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into Y Combinator
If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies from someone who knows best: Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator.
The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. hosted Tan Wednesday for a one-on-one interview with Teresa Carlson, a General Catalyst board member.
It’s widely known that Y Combinator accepts less than 1% of the applications it receives — the last batch was whittled down from 27,000 applications, Tan said. Cohorts these days tend to be around 250 companies. So Carlson wanted to know, among other topics, what is the “secret sauce,” if you will, to getting accepted into Y Combinator?
First, it might be one of the few places where you don’t have to know anyone to get in, Tan said. Anyone can go to the website, apply and submit a one-minute video. YC’s 14 partners read the applications to understand a few things: Who is the applicant’s potential customer and what have the founders built in the past? Top applicants then go on to answer a handful of questions from the partners.
“So many venture capitalists are taking meetings, week-to-week, and saying ‘no, no, no, no,’ and then maybe a few times a year saying, ‘yes,’” Tan said. “YC turns that on its head.”
One of the things YC is looking for is founders who can create a market, that they see a technology no one has envisioned yet, he said.
Tan used Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong as an example of someone who created a market. When Tan first met Armstrong, he was still working as an anti-fraud engineer at Airbnb. Armstrong had read the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper, and had an idea.
“He said, ‘Nobody believes this yet, but I believe it, and I want to work on software that would manifest this crazy idea that you could have a sovereign cryptocurrency,’” Tan said. “This was a very fringe idea at the moment, but that’s what we’re looking for — a fringe thing.”
He went on to explain that the “fringe thing” is a new technology “that deeply technical people are obsessed with” and one that goes on to “touch all of society.”
After the YC partners interviewed and accepted Armstrong into the program, Tan recalls working with him weekly. And during those chats, he realized that if something like Coinbase existed, “that’s gonna be really big.” Then came the discussion about how to build it out.
“The cool thing about what he was doing was that it was really hard to even get Bitcoin,” Tan said. “I personally experienced that. These fringe things can basically turn into something very big.”
He also said that Armstrong was an example of another thing that YC partners look for in candidates: “He was a first principles thinker.” By that Tan meant that Armstrong not only believed what no one believed yet, he set about figuring out what the necessary things were to build, whether that was software or distribution, to create this thing that no one else saw. It’s not enough just to recognize a new thing, you have to understand some of the steps toward building it and have a plan to validate that what you built is solving the problem you originally set out to solve, Tan said.
YC went through a round of interviews last week, and Tan said all of the founders that he chose to fund “came in with some new discovery that they had discovered interacting with the technology itself.”
“Like sitting on a workbench realizing, ‘Hey, did you know there’s a robotics manufacturer that’s making a humanoid robot now for $16,000. It’s arriving on my desk on Monday, and we’re going to try and be the first people that commercialize that,’” Tan said. “That’s an example of a first principles insight that is a very interesting area.”