Inside Genies' Push to Build an Engineering Powerhouse With Ex-Snap Employees
Virtual avatar company Genies wants to be the go-to option for online personas and it's targeting the wealth of talent and seasoned executives from the area's biggest tech firm, Snap Inc., to help make that goal a reality.
Genies' latest hire from the Venice-based social camera company is George "YJ" Tu, a former senior engineer who worked on its Snapchat app and Spectacles camera glasses. Prior to working at Snap, Tu worked for three and a half years as a senior engineer at Facebook and specialized in developing the company's mobile infrastructure.
Tu joins Genies as its director of engineering. Genies CEO and founder Akash Nigam told dot.LA Tu's main mandate is hiring engineers to continue developing its avatar creation platform and digital marketplace, where users can buy and sell digital collectibles and wearable items for their virtual selves.
Tu is the first engineering executive the company's hired since its launch in 2017, but it plans to devote a big chunk of its recent $65 million Series B raise to attracting new talent.
"I think we've landed quite a few Snap employees for a few reasons," Nigam said. "Genies and Snap are probably the two biggest social companies on the Westside in LA, so I think that's an attraction for people that are already local."
The company already has some big celebrity names using its tech to make and share avatars -- including Justin Bieber, Rihanna and hip-hop tycoons Migos -- and the next step is to bring in more users.
George "YJ" Tu is Genies' new director of engineering.
Nigam said the company's hired close to 30 new employees in the last three months, with about 80% of those hires being engineers. He added that roughly 90 people work at Genies, and estimated that 10% of them are ex-Snap employees.
"I think from a product perspective, we share a lot of philosophies and we're very similar in the way that we scheme and we game plan. Snap always is kind of shooting a few years in advance specifically within the social category."
Matt Sibka, Genies' vice president of recruiting, spent three and a half years at Snap creating a team for its CEO Evan Spiegel and was hired to do the same at Genies earlier this year. Genies competes with Snap's Bitmoji avatars, which got a 3D upgrade this July.
"Eighty percent of new spend after our fundraise, and anything moving forward for the next two years, is all going to be on engineering to become an engineering powerhouse," Nigam said. Genies has raised $110 million to date and Nigam previously told dot.LA the company wants to make "Ninety nine point nine percent of its revenue from selling digital goods.
Nigam said that the synergy between Genies and Snap wasn't a conscious choice, but noted that both companies have a similar vision – to advance augmented reality and encourage people to adopt virtual avatars that they can increasingly use as an extension of how they express themselves online.
Nigam's plan is to integrate Genies avatars into as many applications as possible. Currently the company has a deal with Facebook's Giphy that will let users bring their avatar with them to platforms where Giphy is integrated, like Facebook, TikTok or Snapchat – but Nigam said it wants to bring its avatars to popular games like "Roblox" too.
"That's the first API partnership, but we want to have hundreds of those," Nigam said. "So all of a sudden if you get ported into 'Roblox,' you can get any avatar."
Genies' next big goal is getting Generation Z to buy into the NFT hype by creating unique items for their avatars and then trading them. Genies is working with Dapper Labs, which operates NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, two of the most popular NFT exchanges, to create its own blockchain-based system for creating, verifying and selling digital goods.
Genies plans to make the marketplace available by the end of this year. Right now it's only accessible to celebrities, but Nigam said it'll open a beta version to customers by year's end.
"It almost becomes like a login authentication button, where you can port your Genie and your digital goods associated with it from one environment to the next, and in that case, we're kind of creating a new digital identity layer," Nigam said.
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New Streaming Data Underline Quibi's Struggles
Things started so rosily for Quibi, with a fat $1.75 billion fundraise, loads of content deals with A-listers, and a sold-out advertising slate. But lately it's been nothing but bad news.
Recent reports have depicted all kinds of troubles: low demand, executive departures, unhappy advertisers, an ongoing intellectual property lawsuit, and a potential rift between its two chiefs, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. All this on top of a global pandemic that has done no favors to the company's initial value proposition of serving the "on-the-go" moments of consumers' lives.
Quibi is apparently trying to respond. Variety reported on Wednesday that the L.A.-based mobile-first, short-form video platform has been negotiating with Amazon and Roku to accelerate its availability onto connected devices. Company executives have also reportedly taken pay cuts.
Data provided to dot.LA by JustWatch, an analytics firm with offices in L.A. and Berlin, show that in May, Quibi and its content library captured just 0.5% of the U.S. streaming audience's interest. Netflix led the way at 31%, followed by Amazon Prime Video at 18%, Hulu at 11%, and Disney+ at 8%.
Industry observers have frequently cited Quibi's lack of a hit show, combined with its nonexistent back catalog of familiar favorites, as a key reason why it has struggled since its April launch.
JustWatch's data suggest that Reno 911!, which debuted on Quibi in early May, was far and away the most popular show on the app last month. The firm estimates that the rebooted police satire was four times more popular than the runner-up, The Stranger, and 12 times more popular than Quibi's third-ranked title, Most Dangerous Game.
Quibi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
John Legend Takes to Wave's Virtual Stage
Wave, an entertainment technology company that turns performers into digital avatars and puts them on virtual stages where they can entertain and interact with fans, announced that John Legend will perform on the platform on Thursday, June 25th at 3:00pm PT.
Legend had previously been slated to participate in the L.A.-based entertainment firm's "One Wave" virtual concert series, but no date had been announced before Wednesday.
The performance, available via YouTube and Twitter, will feature new songs from the EGOT winner's upcoming album, "Bigger Love." Leveraging the Wave platform's interactivity, attendees will be able to send "visual gifts" throughout the performance, with 100% of the proceeds going to Legend's FREEAMERICA criminal justice reform campaign.
Wave is partnering with PEOPLE for the Legend performance. Sponsors also include Yamaha and Valence, a "new social network addressing diversity by connecting Black talent with economic opportunity." The Ad Council will also be providing public service announcements and resources during the show for fighting racial injustice.
Fresh off a $30 million Series B fundraise, Wave has hosted over 50 events, for up to 400,000 people at a time.
TIkTok Reportedly Raked in $200M
The Information reported Wednesday that TikTok earned between $200 million and $300 million in revenue worldwide in 2019. The news site also said the Culver City-based social media phenomenon's 2020 revenue goals are $500 million in the U.S. alone. These figures follow a separate report from Bloomberg last month that TikTok's parent company ByteDance raked in $17 billion in 2019, and pocketed over $3 billion in profit.
A TikTok company spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the figures, saying "we don't publicly share company data or revenue metrics."
In response to The Information's report that TikTok is considering hiring an American executive to oversee its sales team, the spokesperson said, "We are always looking at new opportunities to scale and attract great talent for our teams."
TikTok, which is now under the leadership of former Disney streaming executive Kevin Mayer, will be participating later this month in the NewFronts, the digital media world's jamboree of presentations to woo advertising buyers, which will be virtual this year.
Snap Rolls Out Pride Lenses For U.S. Regions
Courtesy of Snap
June is Pride Month, and instead of the annual in-person festivities, L.A. Pride has been celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of virtual events. Now, Snap is adding augmented reality (AR) to the mix. The Santa Monica company released five new AR lenses on Wednesday in partnership with L.A.'s Pride Media. The "community of storytellers, innovators and influencers" reaches over 6 million monthly unique users, which Pride says surpasses any other LGBT media brand.
The new lenses, which is Snap-speak for the digital overlays that transform a camera image, "spotlight diverse, queer-identifying changemakers advancing equity for all people in every U.S. state," according to a company statement. The release is paired with the annual "Champions of Pride" issue from The Advocate, a Pride Media subsidiary publication.
A Snap spokesperson describes the five new lenses as "art gallery-style spaces" that help Snap's young-leaning users learn about LGBTQ+ and BIPOC advocates. These include "Mighty" Rebekah, a 13-year-old who successfully lobbied for an LGBTQ-inclusive school curriculum in her home state of New Jersey, and Brandon Wolf, the first survivor of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando to testify before Congress.
Snap tapped five designers from its official lens creator cohort to represent five U.S. regions. Each creator has regional ties and either identifies as LGBTQ+ or an ally, the company says.
Brielle Garcia, designer of the Pacific West lens, says, "I wanted to work on a Pride lens that was not just a celebration of the past, but a celebration of our future. I hope these Lenses can be an encouragement to everyone in the LGBT community. Encouragement that people as unique as you can have success in business, politics, art, or anything you can dream of. This message is important to me because this kind of success has not always been available to us. So many amazing people have come before us to pave the way and this is a celebration of their success and a guide to what you can achieve."
Joshua Keeney, repping the Northeast, says, "The takeaways that I want people to have with this Lens is that there is incredible diversity within the LGBTQ community, that everyone can be a champion in their own way, and can bring changes to their own communities."
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Read on to learn about how Russell Palmer (an AI engineer and product manager) and his brother Andrew (a computer science major turned filmmaker) are building a company to lead Hollywood into the AI era.
CyberFilm sits squarely at the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with some generative AI pixie dust sprinkled on top for good measure. The company does pretty much exactly what you’d expect, given the name. It’s a tool for filmmakers, using AI to help with the creation of screenplays and storyboards. The goal is not to replace human screenwriters and filmmakers (Andrew is one such human filmmaker), but rather to democratize feature filmmaking. So how did this all start?
Russell’s journey began in the city of Toronto, where he grew up watching movies like Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters, which captivated his imagination as a kid. Alongside Andrew, Russell reenacted these films, immortalizing their performances with his father's VHS camcorder. This early creative outlet, balanced with his father's insistence on equal hours of reading, fostered a deep appreciation for storytelling and science fiction, with works like Ender’s Game, Dune, and the Foundation series leaving a lasting impression.
Russell’s Holy Trinity of Science Fiction Novels
Russell followed his interest in tech to college, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science. This educational foundation laid the groundwork for his initial foray into the professional world at Microsoft, where he began to explore the depths of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, his brother followed a parallel path in the arts after receiving his degree in computer science, developing his creative side in film school and eventually working as an assistant director. This juxtaposition of technology and art within the family would later prove pivotal in the creation of CyberFilm.
In 2017, after 8 years at Microsoft as a product manager, Russell dove headfirst into AI, joining Viv Labs, a startup founded by the Siri founders, building a new AI assistant. Russell was the first PM at Viv and spent 3 years at the company until it was acquired by Samsung and became the new version of the Samsung AI assistant, Bixby. Side note - who knew that both the Apple and Samsung virtual assistants were built by the same people?
After a brief stint helping lead JP Morgan’s AI/ML Acceleration team, Russell took the entrepreneurship plunge.
The catalyst that led to CyberFilm was something that didn’t really hit headlines in the rest of the world until a year later: OpenAI’s GPT-3 model. Russell started playing around with GPT-3 a year before the release of the ChatGPT chatbot and knew it was a seismic shift in artificial intelligence. Russell wrote a blog post about how AI could impact Hollywood, started talking to other AI experts and Hollywood types, and CyberFilm was born.
Russell and co spent the next year working on CyberFilm’s core product, Saga. Saga’s first key feature is a screenwriting assistant. You can input all the building blocks of a story, from the characters, to the genre, to the story arc, and it will help you complete your first draft faster, with suggestions for dialogs or scene narration when you’re stuck, along with Hollywood story and character archetype patterns.
By spring 2023, Saga was ready for release. After working with screenwriters (including Russell’s brother Andrew) throughout the development process, they were pretty sure they’d have a receptive audience in the screenwriting community. Russell and Andrew released Saga… and the Writers Guild of America went on strike less than a month later (check out our coverage of the conclusion of the strike here).
Initially not a core focus of the strike, AI became the writers’ boogeyman. While writers on the platform continued to love the product, many other writers publicly denounced any and all AI. So Russell did what any good entrepreneur would when he realized the timing was wrong: he cut costs and got back to building.
Russell built out storyboarding as a new core feature of Saga. The storyboarding side of the product lets you create fully rendered storyboard images for any scene you want to develop based on simple prompts. The goal is to bring the tools (and teams) of a major studio to any indie filmmaker or even someone looking to create content for YouTube or Tiktok.
Fast forward to today, and Saga is now positioned to sit squarely where filmmakers want it: as an assistant not a replacement, like a writing room partner or a script doctor many in Hollywood use today. Now that the strike is over, writers have started flocking back to the platform to improve productivity, and the company is looking to raise a new round of capital to support its growth this year.
If you want to learn more about CyberFilm and Saga, shoot Russell a note at russellp@cyberfilm.ai.