Rob Bralver Transcript
Clint Betts
Josh and Rob, thank you so much for coming to the show. It's a pleasure to have both of you. You recently launched DreamFlare AI, everybody go to DreamFlare.ai, I spent quite a bit of time on it this morning. Incredible, can't wait to dig in. Josh, tell us what it is. What are you guys working on?
Josh Liss
Yeah. Well first Clint, thank you for having us, it's a pleasure to be here with you. So DreamFlare is an entertainment platform. We are for consumers who have a dual interest in playing games and watching shows. So if you are someone who likes playing games and watching shows, we've created something pretty special for you.
So, what we do at DreamFlare is create interactive shows that leverage the capabilities of AI. So, we turn the show that you are watching into an interactive, gamified experience. We have a studio team that comes from Hollywood, that comes from gaming studios, that comes from technology, some of the largest tech companies in the world for better and for worse, such as myself, and from a team from all over the world. And we've got folks using us at this point. We've been in over 40 countries for two months. We're pretty excited about building with some incredible creators, and it's a really unique, fun gaming experience on DreamFlare AI that's grown pretty quickly here.
Clint Betts
Rob, how did you two get connected?
Rob Bralver
Yeah, happy to tell the old founding story story. My background is in Hollywood, as Josh mentioned, and working as a producer and director, working as a producer and director mostly, largely in the feature doc space and music videos. I worked with Moby; I filmed with Kanye West and a lot of other folks in that world. After a while, I became more interested in the financing side of things. Honestly, I sort of ran a decade in the director's chair and wanted a different part of it.
I actually worked with a group called Media Capital Technologies, which came together during COVID. It was one of those where everybody was stuck at home on Zoom formation companies, which ended up being a great thing. Great team over there that does late financing for the major studios. So we got together a deal for Lionsgate, which wrapped up in early '23. That was around the same time I started playing with Midjourney, just like everybody else on earth, and it became clear very quickly that content was about to, or just had changed forever. How we make it, how we consume it, how it's distributed, and it just got all of the ideas firing, what do we do with this? Because the career that I've been in, in traditional entertainment, is about to change.
And anyway, combining that with the experience that I'd had with this late financing company, with fundraising and all of these other parts of the business, it was clear that some sort of platform was needed because the volume that this new technology creates is insane. Josh can give you figures, but billions of images and billions of clips are beyond what we've seen happen with the iPhone and YouTube by exponential amounts.
And anyway, I didn't know how to make a platform or what anything like that actually really meant. It was a vague concept; there needs to be a platform for this in some way, and I need a co-founder who can help figure this out and really do it and knows how to build this. And that is Josh. We got put together by a friend of mine who works in VC in the Bay Area with an AI focus. He said, "That's the co-founder for you," and put us in touch, and he was correct. So Josh can kind of pick it up from there, but that's how we got together.
Josh Liss
So Rob pilfered me from the hallowed halls of Google. I was leading the strategy for one of their consumer messaging platforms there. And I've been working at the intersection of AI and consumer experiences, I'd say, for about seven years now. So long before anyone was thinking about AI and what it meant, I've been really digesting, how do you take this incredibly powerful new technology and improve consumer experiences, in a variety of ways.
Prior to working at a large shop like Google, I'd been at several other startups, starting something myself; I've got an exit and a failure, and lots of things in between. You typically, as we know, learn more from failure than from success, so you have learned from it all. I was looking for an opportunity to do something new that was going to create opportunities for people as a result of this new AI technology. I think people see what's coming; it's incredibly powerful and special. I'm sure we'll talk about it, and I wanted to be in the maker space of creating opportunities with this new technological revolution that was coming.
I'm a very bad artist, but an artist mentality nonetheless, and so was put in touch with Rob and in thinking about next steps and the potential of what was possible, and looking into what I wanted to build for the future. What he had as a kernel of an idea, we've really worked on together to build into something special that we're excited about.
Clint Betts
So let me see if I can boil it down. You're like Netflix, but for AI content, right?
Josh Liss
Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. We are focused on premium only.
Clint Betts
It might be too simplistic, sorry.
Josh Liss
Well, no, no, no. Simple is good; simple is much easier than complicated. To make it complicated for you, in 2024, there are going to be about 13 billion images and videos created with generative AI, and that's incredible.
Clint Betts
That's insane, isn't it? That seems like an insane number.
Josh Liss
It is an insane number. Well, it speaks to the interest level, the size of the audience, and the ease of creation. The flip side of that is that no one cares because anyone is now capable of creating an incredible image of a cow on the moon riding a unicorn. That's not really worth much. It is a fun hobby, but in terms of consumers desiring to experience something new, you have to live at the premium end of the spectrum. So, we are focused on the premium end of this entertainment revolution that's coming as a result of this new, powerful technology.
Netflix is a great example because they're focused on premium; you can't just come in and submit something and then have it exist on Netflix. We are somewhere between Netflix and a gaming platform because we're focused on interactivity and unique consumer experiences with this new format.
Clint Betts
So Rob, what does the future of content look like five, 10 years from now? I mean, what are we looking down the barrel of?
Rob Bralver
There's a long answer to that. I'll try not to take all the time and give you the brief highlights on it, my speculation, anyway. Obviously, we'll see. The way that we look at this as a starting point is not as honestly much of a competitor or replacement at all for the existing entertainment ecosystem. It's an entirely new medium, frankly. That's how we view it. In the same way, YouTube is different. You watch it on your screen; it was made with a camera most of the time, but it is not cinema, and it is not HBO either. It is a different sort of entertainment for a different time in your day with a different kind of talent in front of the camera and making that stuff. It goes for TikTok, which is still mostly video made with your phone, and it has a totally different format and aesthetic. Different technologies and different media have created entirely new platforms around them, with a new creator class each time.
And so while it's the case that YouTube gets a lot of eyeballs, that may have... You used to be watching cable, but you're not going to make Game of Thrones on YouTube. So it's not competitive in the sense of content, and we think this is very analogous to that. All these new creators have popped up, tens of millions of them, and it's a big spectrum, but they're making a new sort of entertainment. It is in as baby stages as the first Lumiere camera, so it's hard to say other than that it's going to get better, and what it is now is the worst it'll ever be. So I think that's fair to say, and it's almost photo-real; you can almost control your performances and direction, and that's coming.
So, all of which is to say it's a new type of entertainment. It's going to be its own space in the broader ecosystem. It's not going to replace Hollywood; it's not going to replace television. We think it, in fact, augments it. It creates more avenues for great storytellers to get out there, where we often encounter this, but household name actors and directors with a few Oscars on the shelf still can't get their dream movie financed tomorrow morning. It remains an extremely hard business to get your projects made.
And what we can do with our technology and platform is say, "We're not going to make an HBO version, and we're not trying to, but this is going to be better than it sitting in your drawer forever and never being made at all. So, let's whip this version up. It's going to take a matter of weeks, not years, and it's going to cost next to nothing. So let's just go do it." And we found a lot of exciting opportunities there. Anyway, you can still make the HBO version later once it's popular on DreamFlare. We like it as an additive that augments the whole thing and is not competitive or a replacement.
Clint Betts
Oh, are you guys buying films and buying different works from creators?
Josh Liss
It's a great question. It's a mix. So, right now, we have tons of original content on DreamFlare. We work with public domain IP, so public works that have been out in the world for some time now. We have original stories from original storytellers, and we work with individuals who have the IP to existing properties and are interested in telling those stories in new ways. Blending this idea of interactivity and high-end visuals to what was traditionally a very expensive medium to try to envision and re-envision those stories. And so we work across the IP spectrum, and we're excited about the potential of where this is going.
Clint Betts
The interesting thing is you said 13 billion images or videos have been produced this year. I just wonder, with that being true and it being so easy, how do you differentiate yourself? And I think the answer's probably pretty obvious: you have to be good at storytelling, and you have to really understand this stuff. But I wonder, tips for creators, people who would want to eventually be on your platform, what should they be learning and thinking about? What software should they be using? Things like that. I think that would be really interesting. How do you differentiate? Because we've all been on the MidJourney, like Discord, right? But it seems like it takes more than that.
Josh Liss
That's a great, loaded question. So there's the part that DreamFlare aims to solve and the advice for the community at large. I think Rob uses this analogy pretty effectively to describe what it's like to be a creator. You can be an expert cinematographer and shoot the most incredibly vivid moving scene, but that doesn't necessarily make you an award-winning writer as well. And with these tools, going forward, that will continue to be the case. We're not going to be entering a world where you can type up an idea of, I want a story that this character interacts with this character on the moon and get an output of something you as a consumer would want to sit there and watch, where if that's coming it's many, many, many, many years away. So, there's still a unique expertise.
So I'd say the first answer to that question is to understand what you as an individual do from a storytelling perspective that you are great at. You're great at character definition, you're great at thinking about scenery, you're great at thinking about action and movement, and you lean into the component that really separates you as a creator. That's the first thing; you're not going to do everything.
Second, it takes a variety of tools to create something that is consumer-ready. So don't be frustrated; understand there are several tools that are necessary to get from a starting vision to an end-state product that we believe consumers will want to watch, engage in, and embrace. You mentioned MidJourney, which is incredible; it's powerful. I have a ton of respect for what they've done, and you can't just use MidJourney. You have to use a variety of tools to get to something that you want to stand behind as a standalone story. So, I'd say expand the horizons of what you choose to interact with. Looking at the cues of how people are explaining the tech stack, I use these four to five tools to create this end output.
And I can announce this now actually, we're going to be including on DreamFlare some point pretty soon here, DreamFlare Basecamp, where we are actually going to help educate folks on how they can use a variety of platforms to create these incredible outputs that are worthy enough of being consumer-ready stories like you might see on DreamFlare.
Clint Betts
And do not go too far into the weeds, Rob. What is the tech stack?
Rob Bralver
The honest answer is that it varies per creator. There are some uniform things that I can mention that won't be revelations here. The reality is that to get from your idea again to what gets posted, it is often 10 to even 20 tools, depending on what you're doing. It's a very complex process, and the company of which there are several competing in the space that carries them all into one cohesive suite is going to be a great company, and we'll be happy to point you to them.
Right now, there are boards that change every week, frankly, and you've got your MidJourney runway, Pica, and ElevenLabs. It's a long list that anyone watching the space is familiar with, and we couldn't call out a winner at this time because creators change what they like for different moments. Within the same film, even the same shot, you're often using three of those things at any one moment because none quite gets you there. So we won't call out a leader because the reality is that it's just constantly shifting, and next month, there might be a new company that we haven't even heard of yet, which does it even better.
Clint Betts
Sure. Have you guys thought about being that company and creating these tools? Or are you focused entirely on the end product piece?
Josh Liss
We are interested from a tool standpoint, the interactivity component and how you make these consumer viewing experiences and turn them into something even more engaging in unique aspects. And to Rob's answer earlier, we work with any of the tools out there, so we are welcoming of the various tech stacks that our creators come in with. There are some really impressive tools that do a variety of things particularly well. And so, to Rob's point, we're not going to call it an individual leader. Our desire to get into the tool lands or model landscape, not in the cards, not something that we're interested in playing with. You used the term Netflix earlier. Netflix isn't going out selling cameras for cinematographers to shoot with.
Clint Betts
Yeah, they're not trying to compete with Blackmagic or whoever. They've got a whole different business model. So as I understand it, you have two different types of content on there, like comics and video, is that correct? And tell me the difference between the two and what you look for in each of them.
Josh Liss
You nailed it 95% of the way. The videos are a blend of videos and games. You could describe them as a game that looks and feels like a video or a video that plays like a game. As the content continues to evolve and you see some new exciting things on the platform, that line between games that you play and videos that you watch will get more blurred, and the spectrum between the two will really vary with what you can engage with on DreamFlare. In terms of what we look for on that side, and we call them spins, by the way, that is our DreamFlare name for these interactive show experiences. A couple of things. One, it has to have a great story, compelling characters, scenery, and storytelling that brings you in. Once you want to come in, keep engaging and go deeper, just like you would with any show you watch or any game that you play,
On the comic side, we do have this graphic novel format that we call flips, like flipping through pages of a book, and they are also interactive. So imagine a comic book but a comic book that has videos within the panel, and you can not just read the story but watch video cut scenes in between the story. And coming pretty shortly on DreamFlare, there will be more interactivity in this graphic novel experience. So similarly with any great story, what is the genre that you're interested in? What are the types of characters that you find compelling? And what do you want to continue to come back to and talk to your friends about and share? So, we look for the best across a variety of genres, and Rob, maybe you want to add something to that as well.
Rob Bralver
Yeah, just one piece on the interactivity, and it is going to evolve, and there are a lot of fun features and things that are coming. A simple one to communicate is the concept of these cinematic universes, which have become so popular, and the spins and the flips can tell a story within the same universe. So, a lot of creators will have a character with some practical reasons for this. Honestly, in addition to storytelling reasons, spin takes you a little more time to do. It's complex to create, so a creator may have some of those in-between stories, which is like you can kind of knock out a flip a bit quicker just by the nature of what it is. So a story can pick up in a flip, then it can go back to being a spin. You can actually jump back and forth between them.
And similar to, Marvel is just the easiest example to explain it. You can have Spider-Man appear in the Hulk's comic and back again and the same is true of our flip's universe. Creators can create shared universes and characters can cross-pollinate. And there's a lot of fun stuff that you can do jumping between content, which is pretty new, we think.
Clint Betts
How exciting is this? Is this happening in our lifetime? Isn't it crazy? It kind of blows my mind. Even like five, 10 years ago, I don't know that I would've thought that everything we're talking about here is possible.
Josh Liss
Yeah, when Rob and I were talking about DreamFlare and the potential of what this meant, I was thinking of experiences traveling, and somewhere at an internet cafe in El Salvador, there might be a 13-year-old kid who is an incredible storyteller who had no chance of having this grand creative vision made into a reality because of the apparatus of Hollywood. Not Hollywood, just all that it takes from a cost standpoint and an infrastructure standpoint to build something extraordinary. And now that power has been democratized, the power of storytelling at these incredibly vivid levels has been made accessible. So, what does that mean about giving existing creators new voices? This is what DreamFlare aims to be: the platform to allow great, passionate creators to tell incredible stories in captivating ways. And we think it's inspiring. We think it will inspire a new generation of people to have a new upper bound on potential. And what does the universe of entertainment and content and storytelling look like in this new reality? It's incredibly exciting for us.
Clint Betts
Yeah, so I'm sure you guys have heard Sam Altman say, "Hey, there's going to be a solo founder who starts a billion-dollar company, and he's the solo founder the entire way." I wonder if we are going to see solo filmmakers? When do we get to a point where literally, from writing to production to editing to everything, one person can go all the way through? How close are we to that?
Rob Bralver
We're basically there, honestly. I mean, many of our creators I would actually put into that category. They have the wherewithal and they're only waiting on the tools to get 10% better. Honestly, it's extremely close. We have some collaboratives, but most of the time it is a one man band, which is really something.
And I think, to Josh's point before, the nature of the content is that one person can make it, right? We've all gotten to the fact that anyone can kind of make something that looks like a reality show if they want to. And so green storytelling was democratized in that way for the last 10, 15 years, but now it's democratized so that it's not just filming yourself for YouTube or even with the Blackmagic or another pretty high-end camera that you can do some stuff with, but you couldn't make Star Wars by yourself, and you couldn't make the Lord of the Rings by yourself, and now you can. And the same goes for the game side of it, where 360 worlds, exploreable maps, a lot of stuff that we see coming with our creators is, yeah, it took 100 people or more before and a whole lot of money. So, it's fun.
Clint Betts
How do creators make money on your platform?
Josh Liss
Great question. So, we provide a couple of different revenue opportunities for creators. First, there is a revenue-sharing pool, which is the way a lot of these content platforms work; depending on the amount of content that's consumed by the audience, a portion of that pool gets allocated proportionally. Second, creators get to share in the subscription revenue that they bring into the platform, so it is a bit of a referral model-type approach. The more people that creators bring into DreamFlare to enjoy their creations, the more they get to participate in that revenue after you've reached a certain creator threshold. And then, at a certain scale, we'll begin to introduce ads into the platform, and similar creators will be able to participate in the revenue share that derives from ads.
Clint Betts
Do we have the power and the compute for this many new filmmakers? I'm just wondering, I'm thinking about how much it takes to edit something even in Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro or those types of things. What is this going to take? Are you going to need big, expensive Nvidia computers, or what's this going to be like?
Josh Liss
That's a little bit of our secret sauce on that one. We've got some cool ideas under the hood for ways to make this streamlined, but it's something we'll keep under the hood for now.
Clint Betts
Yeah, and how much have you raised?
Josh Liss
So far we've raised a little under two million, pre-seed. We've got some exciting announcements on that front coming up pretty shortly here, and things are moving quickly with Team DreamFlare.
Clint Betts
What content that's on the website now, would you recommend to people? Obviously, you'd say all of them.
Josh Liss
Everything is like your children; we can't pick favorites; we love them all equally.
Clint Betts
Well, maybe I'll ask it in a different way then. Which ones are doing really well right now?
Josh Liss
Perhaps we could answer that about from the perspective of, what do we think are some new distinct pieces that feel like they're on the cutting edge of what we're seeing? And Rob, you can probably answer that more effectively.
Rob Bralver
Sure, yeah, I'll call out a few different genres so as to avoid us picking our favorites. And so I mean, a couple that stands out recently, Around the World in 80 Days, is an exceptional piece of work. The difference between what a $100 million animation studio might cook up and what it might cost is pretty negligible, honestly. And to your point, the question earlier, this by one guy, and when you think about the level of detail that's going into the images, the creation of the music, it's really bananas that it's one person doing it.
Another in that mold is actually coming out tomorrow, so I might as well promote a release tomorrow called Darkfire Realm. If you're a fan of games like Elden Ring or if you've heard of that, that whole kind of model of the dark fantasy world is pretty spectacular, we think. And similarly, just not 18 months ago, it cost a couple hundred million dollars to make something look like this. And I won't tell you what it cost us, but it was less and by one guy. So it's pretty remarkable, and I know we have a bunch of other favorites, but those two jump to mind right now.
Josh Liss
And for folks who are... We think there are a lot of exciting boundaries to push on the anime side, particularly blending both the convergence of manga and anime in our interactive graphic novel formats; we're really excited about that. People are really gravitating towards that format and those types of stories as well. One of the interactive shows that really plays off that visual aesthetic that we like is Destiny's Kingdom, which is another great one. It's sort of a blend of that visual approach with Dungeons and Dragons, and it's just a lot of fun. It's like a bit of a puzzle adventure, very creatively put together, funny, and compelling. So, they're all great.
Clint Betts
This whole idea of it being interactive and almost like a game is really fascinating to me, right? Particularly on both the comic side and the video side. I think that's incredible. I mean, will there be a point where there are entirely AI-generated games?
Josh Liss
There are already eight-bit graphic AI-generated games that are; I don't know to what degree they're playable right now, but I know that they exist, and they're being built and worked on. I think something that we can all look forward to in the same way that you can today prompt a video into existence or an image into existence is that you will be able to prompt a game into existence as well. And what does that mean about the future of entertainment and game-playing? And we're leaning into some of those things internally right now, so we look forward to pushing the boundaries and the frontier of where that's going.
Clint Betts
Does it seem like having technical skills is super important, obviously, but we're almost going back to a period where humanities degrees and creative writing and all of these types of stuff, maybe even more important at this point with AI kind of taking up over most of the technical stuff. Is that what you think? Are the really great writers who have never really had an opportunity to publish things now going to be able to create their stuff without any technical expertise?
Rob Bralver
Yeah.
Josh Liss
There... yep.
Rob Bralver
I'll give you a version, and you probably have a different angle on it. Yes, to the writer, and we think it's an amazing thing that anyone can go write, anyone can go paint, anyone can go learn an instrument. And the film just isn't one of those things. Not really, right? It hasn't been, nor has game making. There are small studios, of course, and small indies that get by, but at the scale that we think about movies being as nonsensical to be a one-person form of expression. And so yes, one person can do that and unlock who that brings in, right? There are a few different things I think that are fun to call out there.
It is the writer; it's someone who has the capability to sit by themselves in a room and pour this thing out of themself. And that's hard to do, but it's a very different challenge than corralling a 1,000-person crew with a gigantic budget and a bunch of people running around screaming, carrying heavy stuff. It's just a different muscle. And so that person who had an amazing story in them who just maybe didn't have the social chops to go do that other thing or navigate the whole world of it can go do that story on screen now; it is pretty amazing.
And only other group I'll call out just because it's a special one to me, are the editors. Editors and VFX artists who know movies really well. And similarly, they would operate in a dark room generally and put it all together by themself and maybe couldn't go direct, but now they can kind of whip the thing up. So, that's pretty fun.
Josh Liss
I think what we're seeing, Clint, is a completely new creator economy forming in front of us. If we think about what our conceptions of the creator economy are today, it's someone who is in front of the camera. Their personality has to be one that the camera can really pick up on and elevate in a specific way. And that doesn't mean all great storytellers with something captivating to say need to be in front of the camera to be able to do that effectively, and that's what this is enabling. It's enabling a new creator economy where the next generation of creators don't have to be the folks who are necessarily in front of the camera. They can be the storytellers who are crafting this compelling vision that you're seeing and hopefully were given the platform to share that at scale in ways that are meaningful to them and people who want to consume it.
Clint Betts
Well, to me it's like if you go on X right now or any social media platform, it's all doom and gloom, right? This is so exciting and so it just feels like there's such incredible opportunity here. What you all are working on is fantastic. Final question to both of you. Well, I have another question after this because we end every interview with that question.
Josh Liss
Sure.
Clint Betts
But my final question about DreamFlare is just around, where do you see this? What do you hope like it becomes?
Josh Liss
Today, when you think of AI entertainment, we want you to think of DreamFlare. And in five to 10 years, when you think of entertainment, we want you to think of DreamFlare. We believe that by empowering individual creators to craft and distribute compelling stories to people who either A, love stories or B, love playing, playing games. Two things that are just innate human instincts, playing and story, by giving rise to a new voice of people to craft in this new format, we believe will help transform the future of entertainment and give this new class new opportunity. And we want to be the platform where folks come to experience that entertainment.
Clint Betts
Finally, and this one's for both of you and Josh, we'll have you go first. At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Josh Liss
This might be a cliche answer. I will say my parents and I feel incredibly grateful to be able to say that. And it's not so much that they were parents who do all the things that parents do, and they're wonderful, of course, for that. But I think what I tremendously value at this stage in my life about the way that they parented is the sense of belief. I think one of the most important things that you can imbue on someone is a belief in what they're capable of. They were communicative of that belief, and I've taken that forward as something that I pass on to our team, give people the voice to be able to speak up for themselves and to know that their leaders believe in them and we want them to have everything that they need to believe in themselves. I'll go with my parents.
Rob Bralver
Yeah, I wish I had something profoundly different to say, but I quickly thought about it as you asked the question, and I arrived at the same answer. Definitely, the parents are a big deal, and there are a lot of other professionals along the way who have been collaborators and opened doors, which were amazing, but it does all start with them. And as a new parent myself, I can only say that that rings the truest. And tying it all together, yes, take the chances, believe in yourself, enthusiasm, all of these things. And with AI, you really have no excuse not to go do it. You can go do it cheaply and find out. So whatever your idea is, you should just be taking a swing day after day.
Clint Betts
I love that. Rob, Josh, seriously, come back in a year because you're going to... I just can't even imagine the progress that you're going to make here. You're working at the forefront of one of the most incredible, exciting things in AI. Thank you so much for coming on the show, really means a lot.
Rob Bralver
Thank you for having us.
Josh Liss
Thanks for having us.
Rob Bralver
Great to meet you.
Edited for readability.