Will Kaplan
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Will Kaplan (Tano): launching the creator-ads AI agent
Will Kaplan, co-founder of Tano and ETN shareholder, introduces the newest agent in Tano's influencer-marketing suite: creator ads, the whitelisted Instagram and TikTok ads that look like they come from influencers. He explains brands spend billions on these but find working with creators messy, and says deals worth thousands of dollars now run end-to-end with no human touch. On Sequoia's services-as-software article, which he calls about a year late, he notes the upside of opex budgets and bigger deal sizes but says you effectively build two products at once: the customer delivery mechanism and the internal automation stack. He adds customers rarely need educating since they know the pain, citing a London skincare client case study.
Influencer pricing surge & the UGC farm playbook
The hosts note money flowing to influencers keeps scaling, pointing to Anthropic and OpenAI running UGC-style ads, and ask Will what he is seeing on pricing. He confirms rates are crazy in competitive AI-software niches with clients like 11 Labs and Granola, so startups increasingly use UGC farms that pump out cheap videos in volume, since platform algorithms mean one viral hit out of a thousand is all you need.
Social media to 'information media' & the deepfake era
Revisiting Will's earlier point that Instagram, TikTok and X are now purely algorithmic feeds, the hosts note Gary Vaynerchuk's new essay making the same argument. Will explains the platforms' incentives of maximizing eyeball hours to sell ads and calls Meta and Google phenomenal businesses. The group then debates where algorithmic feeds plus powerful video models lead: dopamine doom loops, rage bait and an escalation spiral for AI content, as well as deepfakes now fooling ordinary people, from a scam video to AI-generated posts on Facebook.
Bullish on live streaming; Justin Bieber's warehouse streams
After the polar-bear-rescue deepfake example, Will argues live streaming is one of the few hard-to-fake formats and floats putting cameras in Tano's office. The hosts describe Justin Bieber's eight-hour Twitch streams from a warehouse with a skate ramp, PS4 and unreleased-song sets, where he reportedly makes millions, and joke about live-streaming the team's workday as a marketing stunt before wrapping the interview.