Happy Wednesday.
The current thing in tech and business is the shoe brand Allbirds pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure.
Today’s lineupSelva Ventures Founder & Managing Partner Kiva Dickinson at 11:30 AM
Objection Founder Aron D’Souza at 11:45 AM
Union Square Ventures General Partner Michael Mignano at 12:00 PM
Zapier Co-Founder & CEO Wade Foster at 12:30 PM
Carry Founder Ankur Nagpal at 12:50 PM
Cal.com Co-Founder Peer Richelsen at 1:00 PM
Mintlify Co-Founder Han Wang at 1:10 PM
The Future of Entertainment Is Interactive
Earlier this week, I tweeted the thesis I’ve bet my entire career on: that the future of entertainment is content you can engage with.
When I left my job in trad TV for a startup called HQ Trivia, it was for that exact idea. I used to ask myself why someone would sit on their couch and watch someone else play Jeopardy when they could hop on HQ and actively participate in the game show itself.
I took it a step further a few years later with Crypto: The Game, which was essentially the lifelong Survivor fan in me building an interactive, internet version of the reality competition I always wanted to play.
At TBPN, our live chat is an integral part of each episode. Viewers issue corrections, break news to John and Jordi, and ask questions to their favorite founders in real time. When you involve your audience in a show, the chat becomes a co-host.
Streamers like Clavicular, Speed, and Kai Cenat already build their broadcasts around this idea, letting their viewers dictate what they should do next, effectively turning each stream into a “choose-your-own-adventure.”
And this past weekend, Justin Bieber brought this thesis to Coachella, reading messages from fans in a live chat and deciding what to perform in real time based on their song recommendations.
I think we’ll see this trend move from media startups, streamers, and Coachella performers into more traditional forms of entertainment. Netflix experimented with this in Black Mirror (via Bandersnatch), but in my opinion, the next place it shows up is sports.
As tech platforms continue to acquire livestreaming rights, and networks like ESPN get more comfortable integrating betting odds directly into their broadcasts, the obvious next step is making that layer interactive, letting you bet in real time without ever leaving the game’s stream.
The infrastructure has been here for nearly a decade (HQ launched in 2017!), and the behavior is finally second nature among the next generation of viewers. Millions of people are used to watching content with a chat open and expecting to interact with what they’re watching.
And for the first time, that thesis is starting to feel less like a career bet and more like the direction everything is heading.
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