Finding Genius: Hugo Amsellem, VP of Community at Jellysmack
In this interview, Kyle O'Brien talks with Hugo Amsellem, VP of Community at Jellysmack, about Hugo’s unconventional path into tech, his early blogging on the music industry, the founding of a crowdsourced music label, and his stint at the Paris‑Berlin incubator The Family. Hugo articulates a "post‑permission" worldview: the internet has removed the need for institutional permission to learn, build, and distribute, reshaping entrepreneurship and media. He explains how his multicultural background and relentless curiosity drove his expat experiences in the US, Germany, and Portugal, and how those experiences inform his community‑first mindset. The conversation then dives into The Family’s content‑driven community strategy—weekly workshops, curated dinners, and a relentless speaker‑recruitment engine that amplified its brand despite a tiny team. Hugo later describes Jellysmack’s tech‑enabled publishing model, which repurposes long‑form YouTube videos into platform‑specific edits, uses A/B testing and performance marketing, and offers creators cash advances or catalog licensing deals. He reflects on the cultural impact of algorithmic content distribution, the volatility of creator earnings, and the future of community‑led growth, arguing that while the creator economy democratizes opportunity, it also creates a hyper‑competitive landscape that will drive a new wave of community renewal over the next decades.
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Hello and welcome to Finding Genius. My name is Kyle O'Brien. I am the founder of Startup ROI and an operating partner at Revaya here in Paris, growth equity fund. My guest today is Hugo Amsellem. He's the VP of Community at JellySmack. Hugo, welcome to the show.
Hey Kyle, thanks for having me. And I had no idea that Startup ROI was pronounced like that. I thought it was Startup Roi, like king in French. I thought it was going to be like the French angle.
That's exactly why I created it. And all of my American friends call it Startup ROI. Oh. But really, it's a little play on words. So I'm glad you picked up on that.
Like, that's cool.
Well, thanks again for joining. I'm particularly excited about our conversation today for 2 reasons. One is we have a lot of overlap in our interest in community building and growth via community. And the second is we had lunch together last week and I know that we get along and we have a lot in common. So I'm just excited to dive in and have a fun conversation.
100%.
What I thought would be a good place to start is a little around your personal background. You've been in the tech sector for quite some time now, been involved with some pretty instrumental organizations here in Europe. Can you talk about how you got into tech, why you got into entrepreneurship, investing, Maybe start from the beginning.
Yeah, 100%. So it's super easy for me. It started like the way a lot of people enter the tech world when they're 35, like I am today. It's like you start gaming and then you discover that anything is possible online, that anyone can actually access to stuff, learn stuff, and then also pretend they're someone else. So when you have a Counter-Strike team, that was my case, someone is like 35, I was 17, the other ones were like 25, whatever. You have access from small towns. That's usually the story there. Like, from small towns in France, you have access to the whole world, essentially, or at least Europe. I was playing with Swedish people, et cetera. And so I got the bug, essentially. And so I didn't have a choice after that. I was just obsessed with internet and the possibilities. And essentially what happened is that when I was like 18 or something, 19, when I was starting my studies, I essentially started a blog about the music industry. I called it industrie-musicale.com, which is like musicindustry.com but in French. Started writing about my analysis about how the internet is changing the music world and the digitization. I was a beta tester of Spotify thanks to that, et cetera, et cetera. And essentially what happened is that top music execs started to call me for consulting, for press release, for book signing, whatever, like a lot of stuff. And I was 18. I was really, really not a professional. But on internet, nobody knows that you're 18. On internet, nobody knows that you're not the expert that they seem to read. And so from there, that started actually like my career in tech in the sense that that got me a job in label. I worked for music labels for just like an internship. And then I was like, fuck that. The revolution is never going to happen from the inside. I'm going to build my own music label. Internet-powered version. And so that was a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing sort of like a label where music, like where artists could raise money from their fans and then realize their project with the professionals that we had on the marketplace. And moving from internet/music world towards more like startup entrepreneurship in general really started the sort of like entering in the tech world. And so I did that. For a few years and obviously discovered everything, right? From reading TechCrunch every day, from understanding how fundraising works, et cetera, et cetera. The best way is doing. So that's what happened.
Very cool. Yeah, that's a wild experience, I would imagine, getting emails or calls from tech executives and you're 18 trying to figure out how can you present to them to appear more mature or older than you really are.
As long as you're having them on the phone, it's fine. That was the magic thing. It was like this physical realization that I had that the time, and that's like a thesis that I've been sort of like advocating for, for like 10, 15 years already. The time where you need to ask for permission is over. And I didn't need to ask anyone's permission to actually share my analysis and become a small-scale sort of like industry influencer. Where it was the realm of either journalists or actual tech execs that had a platform to actually share that, like interviews, stuff like that. 2007, 2008, when I started doing that, was really like the beginning of the blog movement in France. Of course, you had OGs that started doing that like maybe 10 years before that. But 2007, 2008, pre-Twitter, pre-distribution, pre-platform. you would have, like, you remember that probably, like, Google Reader, I think it was, where you had, like, RSS feed that you were subscribed to. Right.
Yeah.
And there was, like, a handful of blogs on each industry topics that you could have access to. And so the doors were wide open. And for me, that realization that, like, the doors are wide open and that, like, I have as equal of chance to become, like, an industry influencer than like a music exec, if my content was good and my analyses were right, that just shifted my brain. And that's why I never left internet in general, because for me, this is like the permissionless realm and I just love that shit.
Yeah, I was telling you the other day, I had an oddly similar experience where I sent a note on the Contact Us button on rapgenius.com back in 2000, I don't know, 12 or something. Expecting never to hear back, and the next morning I got a call from one of the founders. And the next thing you know, I was living in Malibu, California, working with rappers to verify them on the platform and teach them you know how to share and build community around their lyrics and their songs. Awesome. So that that for me was like a baptism by fire, and also an early taste of what it could be like to start a business in the tech world. The kind of anything's possible mentality that you mentioned, and and I haven't looked back since.
And even with startup, I'm gonna. pronounce it like that. Even with startup, why? Because tech now is hot. Even in France, it's really hot. A lot of kids, ambitious ones, want to build or join companies where like 15 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, it was not cool to be a startup founder. When I built my first company, 2010, you would go to parties, you would talk to girls and be like, hey, I'm a startup founder. And they'd be like, oh yeah, you don't have a job. Now, if you say you're a startup founder, which is like too many people are saying they're startup founders because that works, it's cool, right? And so I think that for you starting Startup Roy, the bar is quite high now because a lot of people want to share their analysis. So a lot of people want to become VCs or stuff like that. But because you were no one in France, you just arrived and landed in France and then you wrote a few articles, they were cool. You reached out to people in a smart and careful way. And then people just like, hey, they give you your chance and now you're there. And just as like a small segue, and this is like my main thesis in general for the creator economy, for the startup industry, for everything internet related, is that it used to be that in order to build, to learn, or to distribute anything, you needed the permission from university, banks, and media. And now it's over, right? And if you think about it, What you're doing or what I was doing is exactly that. As like a writer, you learn things online on super specific niche topics, music industry, creator economy, startup industry from France, et cetera. Everything is available for free. It used to be that you needed the permission of universities to have access to that knowledge, to those experts, like teachers and stuff like that. It costs a lot of money. Now you can do it for free online. It used to be that you needed money to actually build stuff. Media company, like content, whatever, was super costly. So you needed the permission from banks. You needed to look cool and be like, okay. And now anything is available with a MacBook or just like a fucking normal Google Chromebook that costs like $200. Yeah. So anyone can build like a media company. for nothing without the permission from banks, which I think is fucking awesome and which changes also sort of the capitalism core principles, which is super interesting. And then obviously, and that's sort of like the core of the creator economy, is that you don't need permission to distribute things anymore. Where like 10 years ago, if you wanted to access the general public, you needed to have access to one person that would have sort of like at the top of the pyramid that was usually white and was usually a man. the permission of that person to access the general public. And obviously YouTube and everything happens, and now anyone can put anything online, and the internet is a democracy. And so for me, that triptych of the post-permission world, no permission to learn, to build, or to distribute. When you integrate it in your mindset, when you really make one physically and spiritually with that thing, I think it's the most powerful realization that people can have. And so that's why in general, that's the way that I see things for myself, for the company that I invest in, the people that I work with. It's like, hey guys, we are living in the post-permission world, so let's celebrate it.
Yeah, I love that framework. I think about something you said earlier around kind of the There's a bit of discomfort going into a new market, trying to find your way. You know, I, you know, you were a teen kind of operating among record executives, and I was a college kid trying to find my way into the startup scene. I think one thing that we can both relate to is being expats and the discomfort and the kind of the challenges associated with being a foreigner in a different country. I speak to a lot of people that are American expats, for example, in France, because that's where I'm based. But in your situation, you're a French national who's been an expat in Germany and now you're in Portugal. So I wanted to get your sense of what it's like to be an expat, a French expat in other countries. And also, why is it that people who are willing to travel, maybe it has something to do with their risk tolerance or their kind of— Maybe. Adventurousness. What is the relationship perhaps between entrepreneurship and expats and the willingness to kind of pick up and leave and start a new life?
Absolutely. So, I'd say that I don't think it's about risk tolerance being higher because I'm more risk-averse. I mean, I'm less risk-averse than curious. Let's put it that way. So, I'm not like the craziest guy in terms of like, oh, I want to take risk and stuff like that. When I was a kid, when I was just walking, like 2 years old, I was afraid to just like, how do you say trottoir? Like the sidewalk. I was afraid to just go from the sidewalk to the road.
Off the curb.
Which is like this, right? So I was just looking at it and be like, so I'm not that head, but I am infinitely curious, and so I don't have a choice. Again, my life is about following the path where I just don't have a choice. And so because I'm so curious, the first time that I traveled was actually like— I mean, the first time that I traveled, the first time that I felt like as an expat was when I was 19 and I studied abroad in San Francisco for 6 months. I lived alone already by that time, but in another country, it's like another story. And I feel like this infinite potential rabbit hole that the expat life brings you, like meeting new people, new cultures, just like you can infinitely ask questions. The first time that I remember, the first time that I met Swedish guys, I was like, fuck, you're from Sweden. That's incredible. And so I had an infinite amount of questions about the Swedish culture.
Yeah.
And so for me, it's really much about following this, I mean, my almost infinite curiosity. And then also, and I think that's potentially something that a lot of people can relate to sometimes. So I'm like a mixed culture person. I don't know how you want to call it, not mixed race. My father is Jewish Moroccan, my mom is Christian French. And so I'm in between 2 cultures, right? And so when you're in between 2 cultures, you don't have an obvious identity foundation that you can really either build yourself upon, you can use other things to build yourself upon, but more importantly, that it's going to be like your foundations from day one. You always have like an identity crack at the beginning, and maybe it's confusing for some people, or maybe you actually follow that crack onto the core of human existence, which is like universality. And so You fall under that crack earlier than most people would. And so you ask yourself the question and you explore things a bit earlier, which is also the experience of an expat, right? You're not in this holistic identity or culture. You're mixed. You're a stranger everywhere. And so for me, really having that multicultural background plus that infinite curiosity made traveling Exploring, jumping on a plane to change cities and live somewhere else for a few years, it made it quite easy, or at least again, quite obvious that I had to do that. And so after that, that sort of helps you deal with a lot of uncomfortable situations because you have always more upside than downside because you just don't have a choice.
Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. I don't even know why I brought up risk tolerance, because I'm like you, I'm fairly risk averse on the spectrum, but I am endlessly curious. And I think curiosity is probably the main driver behind that.
Because also, it's funny, a lot of people are talking about risk and everything, and I agree, when you build a company, you take risk. But for me, I always just, when I was in the streets of Lisbon and I just crossed paths with a few militaries, And every time that I think about military, of course, now, like war in Ukraine and all of those people that are just joining the army, that's the risk spectrum on the extreme, right? And so wherever I am or wherever we think we are in the entrepreneurship thing, I always relate this to that because all people, when they're building companies—
Your life is on the line.
Exactly. Your life is on the line. You're raising money at like 10 pre. You know, like now, like in the blink of an eye. And more importantly, like the entrepreneurs, they usually compare themselves to like people with stable jobs that are not taking risks, that are blah, blah. Okay, fair enough. But like compare yourself to the military as well. So like you can actually have like a balanced version of what it is to actually take risks.
Yeah, I think that's a wise assessment. So I want to move on to kind of the core early phase of your career. At least publicly speaking in The Family. So for those watching, The Family is an incubator, accelerator, VC to a degree, if I'm not mistaken. They kind of combined, they kind of synthesized all 3 of those aspects of the tech world. And they were primarily located between Berlin and Paris.
Yeah, it started in Paris big time. Like that was the sort of like The bed of, yeah, of the family.
So maybe, you know, I'm familiar kind of from a distance how they operate and how they've been instrumental in building kind of tech culture in Western Europe. Obviously, there's been a little bit of controversy lately that we don't need to get into. This was a while back when you were there. Can you tell me kind of about those, the glory days, so to speak?
Yes, 100%.
What it was like, what was the approach and what was your role there?
Yeah. So essentially for me, I met Oussama, Nicolas, and Alice before they started the family. Oussama was an advisor in my previous company. I had become friends with him when he was not yet in the startup ecosystem, I would say, in the French startup ecosystem, because he was living in the US mainly. And I met Alice at the company and Nicolas from other friends from the music business, actually. And so when they started the Family, I was supposed to be initially a founder with my company being part of the Family. And then my company died. And so I just essentially joined the Family, part of the founding team. And the basis of the Family was really simple. And I resonated with it a lot because I was a founder in the French tech ecosystem before the Family existed. And it was essentially the Family was trying to solve the problems that I had, right? Which essentially were those ones. It was not cool to build companies. No one knew how to build companies because a lot of people thought that startup entrepreneurship was just like regular entrepreneurship. So Just to give you an example, I was part of the Sciences Po accelerator. Sciences Po is like political science school in France. So let's say that it's not the most obvious place to actually get incubated if you're building a company. And the mentors that we had, I remember there was an amazing guy that built like a huge company. He was selling socks. He was not selling socks online. He was selling socks. Like, the guy was just Great, like a socks entrepreneur. And he was telling us, like, and I was building a crowdfunding platform for musicians, right? So like, I respected the guy because he was a businessman, right? But he was not a startup founder. And so the difference between a startup and a company that is normal is quite obvious now for most of people, I would say, like, it's quite obvious in the Valley. It's been there for a long time. It's like, if you scale, you're a startup. If you don't scale, you're not a startup. It's not like, oh, you do digital things. So at the time when you were building a company, the VCs were uneducated about anything because they had weird incentive structures that I'm not going to get into, which basically made their risk aversion quite high. They had tax breaks, essentially. So if they didn't take risk, they already had like a 30% IRR from just like tax subsidies. They were also like, it was like at the time, the market was really in terms of VCs, it was really like a buy side sort of like function. It's like you have a few entrepreneurs, but you have a lot of them, not a lot of VCs. So they were looking at deals, like taking a long time to decide, et cetera. The talent pool was absolutely the worst because no one wanted to work in a startup. Developers didn't exist as this massive pool that you can tap into. And obviously a lot of the people around the startup founders, whether they are family, friends, blah, blah, they all didn't like sort of that function. So when you're actually building a company in that environment, we used to say to the family that this was like the most toxic place that you can build your company in, right? And so the goal was obviously not to say like, we're going to change France, we're going to detoxify France, because this is like an impossible endeavor. The goal was to say we're going to create the family as this place that was a physical place, but also as this mind place, right? Like with a lot of content where when you're a French entrepreneur that you are struggling with your local environment, but you don't really know why. And so you're sort of like in the woods. When you see the family, you'll be like, this is the place that I want to be. So we were just going to recreate a bubble of healthy environments in the French ecosystem. So then you increase your chances of success by 1% with a lot of different things like best people, best lawyers, best deals, best everything. And so at the beginning of the family, this was like just oxygen in the startup ecosystem and it just brought a lot of people in, right? So we would just say like, hey, we're not going to do an accelerator. Because this is an American solution for American problem, right? So which is at the time trying to optimize for D-Day, et cetera. We don't even have angels and VCs for D-Day. So let's not do a D-Day. Let's just do like a rolling thing where you enter the family and you never leave because you never leave the family, like they say. And so we did that and we started having this sort of like strategy of Content, community, and then sort of like mentorship or infrastructure. A lot of videos, like we were organizing a lot of events. We recorded those events in videos and we pushed it on our YouTube channel. YouTube just took care of the distribution. And because a lot of people liked it and we made millions of views on long-form tech content that is not fun, that brought in a lot of the people that were like, I like that vibe. that applied to the family that either got in as like a startup founder or got in the ecosystem, right? Like, oh, you're a cool lawyer, or you're going to work with our company, you're cool. So like a family, like an extended family with cousins and stuff like that. And so that was really the foundation of the family. Let's build a community of people that like each other so much that they're going to do irrational things for one another.
Yeah, I like that. I want to kind of double-click on the content and community piece. Something we've talked about before is leveraging content and community to build a bigger presence than you really have. So, for instance, early on, you were a very small team. And later on in the kind of history of the family, you were competing against, you know, other VCs that came into the market, other accelerators, other communities that were either better funded or— Yeah. Well-staffed. So, can you talk about what your event strategy was, how you appeared bigger than you really were?
Yeah.
Something that often comes up is kind of the Paul Graham saying of doing things that don't scale and then identifying what works and figuring out how to automate that. So, I know that you did a bit of that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
So, let's put it that way. At the beginning of the family, what we did weekly, was organize private workshops for founders, organize public events, and organize private dinners. Like, we had just YC, right? Like, YC, they have, I think it's a Thursday dinner or a Wednesday dinner every week. We were just doing that, but, well, without this batch format. So just all the time, right? So for at least 2 or 3 years, every Thursday we would organize, host a dinner at the family. What I mean by that is that the core of the family is the curation of people. So in order to have a highly curated group of people that are involved, you need to have people flow that goes beyond that. You need to have like a super top of, like super high top of funnel people flow. And in my opinion, and that's I built this infrastructure. In my opinion, the best way to have amazing people flow is to offer amazing people that you curate a platform so they can shine. And that obviously also serves the purpose of creating your brand. But more importantly, it's not about thinking about you first. Think about what's going to be the total upside of having that incredibly under the radar growth hacker girl share her knowledge in front of an audience, local one, recorded in video for any French person to actually watch it. Because at the time there was no articles about like, oh, this is like a growth case that I use for like Alain or whatever company in France. There was nothing. And the fact that we would organize events that are recorded, Sounded like a super appealing thing for those people that were under the radar, right? Of course they were afraid. Of course they were like, oh, because we're in France, it's not like in America. Sure, I'll pitch anything. Fuck it. I don't know shit about the topic. I just pitch it. People were just— and I'm going to give you an example so you're going to understand how the people flow, sort of like content creation people flow work in building a community. So I would just essentially have a huge list of top people in different functions that now are obvious, but at the time were not. Product, growth, culture, and then just like founders. And I would just organize series of meetups, different communities, like a growth hacking community, a product community, like a design community, stuff like that. And I would have all the top people in France, in Europe, and in the Valley, obviously, like the world, no, but like in the US, that I would just like automatically ping all the time. Obviously, I would jump on a call with them, tell them like, hey, we have like an amazing community that you can just like talk in front, a lot of founders. Then we record a video, so it's content for you. So like when people Google your name, they're going to have like this thing on the carousel pop up and it's going to be amazing. And like, this is what we believe in. That's the family. That's the company that we work with. That's the people that already talked at the family. And so it would be like an appealing sort of like proposition. Then I would get on call with them, just like validate once that they know what they're talking about, which is usually the case. Validate that they vibe with our values. Anyone can become an entrepreneur. That was the value of the family, that we're a bit crazy, palm trees, like laser eyes, cats and stuff like that. And then that they could commit to organize, to host a 30-minute talk about something that allowed us to scale our sort of community acquisition of top, highly curated people by 100x. Why? Because once you have someone that you contacted so they can talk at the family, either they accept, they give a talk, they have a positive experience, you follow up with them, and then you invite them in everything. Oh, cool dinners, like, come. Oh, like, we're going to do like a breakfast for like CPOs of the French tech ecosystem or the Berlin tech ecosystem. Come. Oh, we have like a company that like, you know, is building an amazing thing that sounds like it's your vibe. You know, talk to them if you want to angel ticket, if you want to like mentor them, come for like an office hour on Thursday. We give you like 4 top founders to join in. We're going to advertise that to our founders, right? So like when you get in from there, you have a positive experience. When you have a positive experience, you can recycle almost like plomberie, how do you call that? Like fluid mechanism almost, right? You can recycle them in a lot of different ways. And even if they haven't had a talk at the family yet, you can already invite them for future things. So then they're getting more ready to talk, right? So that strategy allowed us in the first couple of years to grow. We hosted maybe 150 events in 2 years. More, more. No, more, even more, because we were hosting like 2 or 3 events per week. Millions of views, hundreds of amazing people that entered the family's extended network and that we highly— I mean, that we recycled in different ways. And it was just me. It was just me, like a camera crew and some people sometimes to help me with events, like organizing, like cleaning stuff. I would buy the cookies and the juices and all the things that people like. I would do full stack everything. Promotion, curation, organization. It was me. I was cheap at the time. I was like 25 years old. I was just passionate about startup things. So I knew exactly who I wanted as a speaker. And so, of course, when you have such a highly driven company like the family that was super anchored in radical values that either you loved or you hated, and then had people like me, full stack, super cheap, but highly leveraged, it's impossible to compete with that. And so we took over— it was before Station F was there. We took over the French tech ecosystem like that. Everyone was excited about what was going on in the family. And that's obviously like the honeymoon phase where everything was right, right? Like that happened for us and that's what was glorious is that we were at the center of everything.
Yeah. Well, it certainly speaks to your drive and your passion, but I think it also speaks to the power of storytelling. I've been reading up a lot on how to build a brand and how to get people together. There's a great book called Get Together that was written by a couple folks that—
I read it.
You probably read it. You know, they talk about the story of me and the story of us and finding shared purpose. And it sounds like you did that by like hand-selecting and curating a group of people that had a shared interest but diverse backgrounds and perspectives. And when you get those people into a room and they share together, and then you take that as a reusable asset that you can put onto YouTube or Twitter or whatever, TikTok now it is, That is extremely valuable and other people find it interesting. It's not only valuable for the people in the room, it's valuable for the broader public that are—
100%.
And then they want to get involved and it becomes this flywheel for growth. So, I want to talk about events in the context of COVID You know, we're hopefully kind of on the brink of moving back into life as normal. But we all have become somewhat adjusted to teletravail and work from home and Zoom meetings and calls like this. So where do you see, you know, there's certainly a line where it makes sense to do something remotely. Other times I think there's tremendous value in meeting in person. I called someone this morning for the first time. We'd met a number of times over Zoom, but there was a, I don't know, an instant, like kind of—
100%.
Personal connection and new level of trust that we had just by virtue of meeting. So how valuable do you think it is to still meet in person? You know, what is your forecast for events and community building? Yeah.
Moving
out of the COVID era.
I think this is never gonna go away for obvious reasons, right? But one of the things that I see happening is sort of like now, like with remote work, a decorrelation between work life and private life in a sense where when at the Family we were hosting all of those events, it was an amazing excuse for someone that was just a weird kid watching videos and trying to build a company from his home. It was a really good excuse to just go out there, be at the Family like you go to a church. It was built like a church, right? Like the temple of entrepreneurship. Be like, wow, I am not crazy and I'm not alone, right? That's the value of physical spaces, is to realize not intellectually, right? Like when you're on the Reddit community, you're like, oh yeah, I'm not alone. But you don't feel it from your guts. You're like, I'm still alone in my home. But like, oh, I'm not crazy. I'm not alone. Other people like that are sharing the same intuitions that I had and put the right words and the right framework to actually unlock my full potential. So that type of events, the dinners, that's what made our business. Because you can create trust, you can create sort of like a soul in the game where you're involved, you give your full sort of like body and soul to a community. Yeah. Not just like, oh yeah, I'm on Zoom, I leave and that's fine. No, you're physically there. So I obviously think it's not going to happen. What I see though is that there is a correlation where a lot of people now are like, hey, I'm going to have my work life being high intensity, low touch, low touch Zoom meetings, top of funnel. I can have way more Zoom meetings that I can have per day than meetings. I'm going to select the people, right? And then high intensity. I'm going to go to London and I'm going to spend 3 days, 4 days meeting, having dinners, having coffee, having real-time interaction, real-life interactions with those people that I actually liked from the Zoom meetings, right? So you can really have that sort of selection. So that's work life, high intensity, low touch, a lot of Zoom meetings. And then you go deep, organize dinners and travel to those places. But then you have a thing that I see right now, and that's also one of the reasons that I moved to Lisbon, is that you have the the personal life, which when I was at the family or when you're in tech in general, you start to realize that a lot of your friends, a lot of your social connections start to become tech people as well, right? And so you blur everything. It's good, it's bad. I did it a lot. I don't have an opinion whether it's good or bad. It's just like everything at the same time. But now I see a decoration where people are just having different social circles. In the neighborhoods that they want to live in, where they can really get anchored, do whatever they want to do, like jiu-jitsu, painting, guitar, whatever, right? With non-necessarily tech people, with local people, and then have their heads on the clouds, on the Zoom cloud. And I think this is really new. This poses a lot of challenges of reorganizing. society, community as we know it. But I think it's quite exciting overall.
Yeah. Well, I want to talk a bit about the creator economy. And you've been a creator for most of your career, whether it was creating a business, creating content for the music industry. You were almost an in-house creator of sorts at The Family. And now you're kind of taking on a new role Maybe from a new vantage point as the VP of community at one of the biggest creator economy companies in the world, as far as I know. And it might not be a household name for everyone watching, but if you've been paying attention at all, JellySmack is a really interesting company with a really, really cool model. And it's kind of at the epicenter of this confluence of social content creation, scaling and monetizing work. on the internet. So maybe as a primer, you can give a little background on JellySmack as a company, how it operates, the business model, and then we can talk some more about what that means for you as the community leader there. Who are you meeting with? What are the cool people you're meeting?
100%. So the funny story is that, so I initially wanted to create a festival with the family. And the thesis of that festival was to put on stage the startup founders and the creators and show the next generation, the Gen Z, that those are the 2 kids of internet. And that's what you can do when you leverage internet. You leverage code, you build a startup, you leverage media, you become a creator. But in both ways, you can scale yourself permissionlessly, right? And so I couldn't do that because I started in December 2019. So really good timing to actually build a festival. So in February, I left the family because, yeah, impossible to do this. But essentially, the thesis of the creator economy was stuck in my mind. And like always, I don't have a choice. So when it's stuck in my mind, I have to get it out. And the best way to get it out, you would know that better than anyone else, is to write about it. So then it's out there, right? So you just get the trash of your mind out, it lives outside of you, and then new things can actually arise, right? So I was like, yes. So I did that. And a few of my articles resonated with people and sort of got nice distribution. And so I essentially jumped on calls with most of the founders from the creator economy, building tools for creators, et cetera. And at some point, the seed investor of JellySmack, Boris from Partec, which is an amazing guy, was like, hey, bro, you mapped the creator economy. You have every startup except the largest one, JellySmack. And I was like, who the fuck is JellySmack? And he's like, well, you have to talk to the founder. And so what's funny is that I jump on a call with Michael, which is the founder of one of the 3 founders of JD Smack. And he explains to me what JD Smack is. And he explains to me that essentially JD Smack started as a company that created content for Facebook video when Facebook video was started, and that became masters at identifying the right trends, creating the right content, and then distributing this on Facebook in a way that the algorithm would pick it up and it would become viral. And that they had just in-house created like a series of owned and operated media properties that were generating billions of views on Facebook. And that essentially the infrastructure that they had built to optimize for growth, to optimize for performance, to optimize for automation, for productization of that sort of content process, that infrastructure was now bottlenecked by the capacity that they had to produce content. And so when they saw this wave of the creator economy, meaning a shitload of YouTubers reaching amazing heights with super high quality content that resonated with niche audiences that can grow that could grow way beyond. They're like, hey, we just need to license that technology to those creators. And so what's funny is that talking to Michael, I realized that the position that JellySmack was in was sort of in a position of a tech-enabled publisher, which was something that I looked at for a while because I followed the Voodoo story, the Believe story. Which weirdly enough, we now, JSMAC, are like 3 of the only tech-enabled publishers out there that are French. They happen to be French and they are the world leaders in their category. So Voodoo for video games, JSMAC for video, and Believe for music. So the way it goes is really simple. JSMAC takes content from YouTubers mainly. So they have YouTube videos that are usually 10 minutes long. We're chopping down that content in smaller pieces that will fit the different platforms. So like on Snapchat, for example, it's like 1 minute. On Facebook, it's like 5 minutes. The hook is different on each platform because the way you start watching the content is going to differ. And essentially what we do is that We do different edits of that video from 10 minutes to 4 minutes, for example, on Facebook. We A/B test all the different editing so we can see what is the retention curve that is the flattest possible. And then we will also put performance marketing paid acquisition on those video platforms. Because we have so many lookalike audiences on specific topics that, for example, if we say like, hey, we have new beauty creators, we're going to be able to push that new beauty creators onto an audience that we know love beauty content. So then we can kickstart the creation of the Facebook presence of new creators, like under steroids. And so essentially this is a tech-enabled publisher because back in the days, publisher was really like a static work where you had static medias And you needed to just publish music, text, whatever, onto those platforms that were static. Now those platforms are dynamic, which is complicated because it changes all the time. The algorithm, the formats, you have to keep up to date to all of those things. But also the upside is infinite because if you get distribution, it's not linear distribution. The payback can be incredible. And so that's sort of like the way JellySmack works. It's a technical publisher. It's almost like if Universal Music was being born in 2022 and instead of serving musicians, they served the new entertainment class, which is the creators and the video ones.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of mind-boggling. I was reading the other day, it's either Forbes or Bloomberg uses AI to generate their investment memos or know, really, really basic articles, which is like, okay, great. You don't have to pay a bunch of staff writers to like publish, you know, relatively boring kind of content. But okay, that's cool. And like, it's an innovative way to like leverage NLP and AI to expand your reach. But like JellySmack makes that look like child's play. I mean, you're taking the video content of creators, you're splicing it up, you're doing A/B testing across multiple platforms. I'm just thinking of like, the decision trees there that take place, and you're pulling back all of that data and continually optimizing it to get the best reach.
Exactly.
And then on top of that, because you own the audiences from before, you know what works with one audience might also translate to another. So the beauty example that you gave, I think I've heard it described as kind of like a 21st century label that empowers the creators more than labels have historically. At least there's a lot of examples in the music industry where artists get stiffed, depending on which way you look at it. But there is a similar model for you guys where you essentially give like a cash advance.
100%.
In exchange for some of the royalties on, I would assume, ad revenue from videos. 100%. Is that how it works? Like, what does a typical negotiation look like with like MrBeast or something like that, one of these YouTube stars?
Yeah. So like we started with what we call the creator program, which is essentially like this syndication thing where we just repurpose the content from one platform and we make it multiplatform. And this is already amazing because sometimes we have cash advances on those deals as well, right? We have minimum guarantees, right? So we're like, okay, we're testing the content. We know that the potential is quite high on a few platforms. So we're like, hey, we can guarantee you that you're going to just generate X, you know, K amount per month. And so for creators, it's incredible because they potentially have lower ceiling because we take 50% of the revenue, of the net revenue. So they're not going to make 100% of what they could, but we can bring them to heights that they've never seen and also offer a lower floor, right, with a minimum guarantee. So that looks, if you know the music industry, that looks almost like a deal that a label would offer an artist. And so that's distribution. And if you think about it, distribution is historically through marketing or through physical distribution or through syndication is a big part of the music label's job. But now we released another offering called catalog licensing where we're coming to those YouTubers that have like a back catalog of 200 videos. Those 200 videos are still every day generating a bit of money, but after a few days, the number of views just drops and the ad revenue also drops. We're taking all of those long tail potential videos, like revenues, and we're just telling the creators, hey, we're just going to license you that back catalog for 5 years and we're going to give you that money upfront. So all of that money that those videos are going to generate over, we're going to give you the money upfront. And we just have to make sure that we're going to be able to make money underwriting the potential of that back catalog over the next 5 years. And if you think about it, there's like funding and distribution, which is the job of a label now. And I would know about that because I hated the gatekeeper model of the major labels where they could make you or break you. Like 20 years after the invention of the MP3, the major labels are still there. They have moved towards a more like scaling infrastructure for artists, where today 9 songs out of 10 of the top Spotify ranks are still artists signed at Universal Music, right? So you could say like, oh, now that you don't need the permission to build anything, distribute anything, blah, blah, then artists would just do whatever they want alone. They start alone. They don't sign with music labels at the beginning. And when they reach like 1, 2 million streams per month, they still want to sign with Universal Music as a way to scale. So it's great for both because artists can essentially retain more of the upside because they took the risk themselves and they just build their production, they have the rights, et cetera. And then when they want to go to the next step, they still want to go work with Universal Music. And it's great for Universal Music because they don't have to take so much risk and issue because the market just tests the artist and then they take potential and they make it like superstar. And so instead of taking 80% of the future revenues of the next 4 albums or 6 albums, because that was like a major deal by just advancing $1 million straight away, they now take like 30% to 50%, have more flexible deals, but also as like a risk profile, almost like, so Universal Music in the next 4 years in the next 5 to 7 years, I think, with the streaming era, actually improved their margins from like 13%. Yeah. And so it's incredible at that stage, that's a big company, or 10-something percent. So that's the model that we're looking at. We're not there yet. Right now we have those 2 offerings, funding through catalog licensing, distribution through our creator program. But ultimately, it's not impossible to think that you would sign as a highly promising, growing YouTuber or creator, You would sign at JSMAC so you can have this infrastructure that you can sit on top, both people, technology, data, money, so you can grow and go bigger, which is actually our tagline, like grow bigger.
Right. There's interesting parallels between kind of the music industry, the creator economy, and like a traditional startup. So if you think about it, 20 years ago when the infrastructure that you just described described wasn't there, you know, A&R was kind of the gatekeeper for finding, you know, the next hit musician, for example. And they had to put a lot of money, a lot of marketing, a lot of, you know, distribution effort to get, you know, I don't know, a young Britney Spears into the mainstream. And they probably did that 100 times, and only 1 or 2 of them worked out. Yeah. But it's kind of the power law situation in VC. And now it's like the market tests itself. There's a bunch of seed rounds essentially taking place on Spotify. Exactly. You know, people are voting with their ears by listening and stream counts go up. And then you have a lower risk profile and the ability to, I mean, look at performance. I mean, it's like in a Series A round, you look at like, you know, cost of acquisition costs and lifetime value. Here you look at number of streams over time and the growth of your audience and that kind of thing. And so you guys are almost like the Series A or Series B VC. Exactly.
It's exactly that. I mean, it's that I always do the same thing that you just did, which is like trying to draw parallels between what you know with your startup and then some other things that you're discovering. And essentially it's this with— but I mean, like, with the caveat that if you're an artist or if you're a creator, you don't scale with that much leverage compared to a startup. So if you look at media companies, which is probably what the creator is, a small one-person or a few-person media company that can scale, right? But the multiples are like 3, 4x max, right? That's how much you can trade a media company. Like, a tech company has multiples that can go from 10 to 40x the revenue in terms of valuation. So, yes, you can have that analogy with Series B investors. But as like a JellySmack or a Universal, you still need to take a big chunk on the future upside by lowering the risk of those individuals, right?
So 50% as opposed to like a 7% in a deal.
Exactly.
Yeah. I want to ask something, you know, kind of slightly on the dystopian side, but how this kind of content machine influences culture. You know, sometimes I find myself, I don't know, watching TikTok endlessly, and then you find yourself talking about the same thing with your friends. And it's because the algorithm has kind of fed us similar content. Yeah. And if there is this kind of secret Wizard of Oz machine behind the scenes that are pulling the strings and optimizing content, clearly the content that is the most optimized, that is tested the most, that has a preexisting built-in audience is going to like surface to the top. So what does that mean? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, from a technology perspective and a business perspective, it's freaking amazing. But from a cultural standpoint, you know, what does that mean for newer, smaller creators, for niche audiences or niche content? You know, what is like the long-term kind of impact 3 to 5 years from now? Yeah. If we kind of, I don't know, zero in on just this top-performing content that's being pushed out through algorithms.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of the general sort of like meta take on that, I'm exploring as we speak in a sense where like when you listen one day to Tristan Harris from, and I like, what's the name of the, like this Netflix documentary, you know?
Oh yeah, the one about the— The Social Network or something like
that? Yeah, sort of like, and I lived through—
He remembers Analytica, right? Or am I mistaking him? Tristan Harris?
No, I don't remember. So he created this famous, and I forgot the name, so like The Social Dilemma. And so when you watch that, and obviously I lived through that era of I was building a consumer company, I was building an app, and I was trying to create growth growth loops by just recreating slot machine sort of mechanism so you can hook people, right? And obviously give that type of knowledge to super smart people, they're going to optimize for something and that thing is going to be retention or variety. And then at some point it goes out of control. But whether it's necessarily a pure evil thing or not, that's something that I'm exploring. But I'm conflicted with this. Like, I just schizophrenically go from one side to another. So I'm not going to talk necessarily about that. What I want to talk about, though, is when you have algorithm like TikToks or YouTubes, they're amazing. The problem is that it's scary not just because it's dystopian, it's scary because it's fucking amazingly accurate. So, like, fuck, they know what— so there's a difference in general what people think they want to like and people than what people actually like, right? So if you ask people what type of content they like, they're like, yeah, historical videos where you can learn something that's like blah, blah. And then what they actually watch is just like whatever. I don't know. I don't even want to give an example of shitty things, right? So what's happening is that there is first, there is this sort of internal conflict in most people where this thing is so good that they actually give you what you like. The thing is that what that implicates for creators in general and content is that now you have no barriers to entry. So the competition is 100x what it used to be. So it's great because like I do, you can celebrate the fact that there is no need for permission, that anyone can play the game and that the chances of success are equal, which I truly believe. But the thing is that on the music industry example, for example, like 20 years ago, you had 1 million new songs that were coming to the market every year. Now that number is 20 million. So you have 20x the amount of competition as an artist that you used to have 20 years ago. When that happens and the distribution is taken care of by algorithm, which is amazingly accurate at giving to people what they want. And when you have a crowd of people, because now the world is flat, so like a Chinese Gen Z is looking like a European Gen Z way more than 20 years ago. And those people are susceptible to trends that are moving like a tsunami all over the world. What I mean by that is that trends are coming and going at such an amazing pace. It's difficult for a creator that has rode like a wave to actually stay on top. And so what you see is that because competition and trends, content trends are moving so fast that creators are being recycled all the time, right? They're just like going up. And so the thing is that it's just like the economy. And again, I don't know what's good or bad. I just think it needs to be balanced in some ways. It's like, I don't watch, I don't analyze the inequality of an economy by looking at what share the top 1% have. What I mean by that is that in France, the top 1%, let's say, has like 50% of the wealth, something like that. In the US, the top 1% has 80%, something like that. Right. But France is way more unequal, in my opinion, than the US. Because if you look at that 1%, if you look at that 1% and you follow them over time, in France, it's always the same guys. Always. It's been 200 years. It's the same guys. In the US, it changes all the time. So I am torn apart between celebrating the fact in the creator economy that anyone has a chance, that this 1% of top creators is changing all the fucking time, except MrBeast, because he's invincible and the guy is a fucking genius. But even that's going to have an end at some point. And the fact that those creators have no floors but no ceiling, and that right now they can drop from the top 1% to almost zero in a matter of a couple of years only, if not less. So that's how I think the algorithm that are amazingly good at distributing the right content to the right audience is impacting the fabric of our society. And I will just open in one last sentence. I think that this no floors, no ceiling type of situation that happens to the creators is just an introduction to what's going to happen to the rest of us in the next 40 years, where because the world is flat, because we are doing things on Zoom, because code, because media, there's got to be a high worldwide competition that was before not the case in countries like France. Right. And so I think that this question these interrogations, that challenge, intellectual, that I have, that I'm talking about, is just going to be the big question for the societies of the 21st century, to be frank.
Yeah, that's fascinating. I want to end on one last thing. I mean, as someone who's a growth lead and a community leader, we're always thinking about marketing and distribution channels. And if you look historically, those channels tend to get saturated. If you're early on to Instagram, early on to Twitter, early on to TikTok, you can, you can be a part of that 1%, just inherently by being there. Yeah. But eventually things level out and it becomes highly competitive and it's not as asymmetric as it once was. If you look through the history of software companies, they used to be very sales-driven and then they became very marketing-driven and then became kind of Product-led growth was kind of the word of the day. And now you see everywhere, especially us, because we're following probably the same people on Twitter, around community-led growth and building, you know, brand through community. My question for you is, are we at the end of community-led growth? Is that kind of trend over? And if so, what is the next stage of, what is the next channel for Kind of a unique distribution?
Yeah, I think there's 3 trends that are underlying this, and I literally sort of thought about those 3 underlying trends as you were asking the question. So it's a really rough thought. I believe that first, because anyone can become a creator, and I define a creator by being like an individual that scales without permission. So like individuality, leverage, and then sort of like rebellion in a sense of like, fuck the institution from before, I'll just do my own thing. Then any company that has stakeholders, users, investors, employees, whatever, right, also has access to a pool of individuals that can scale in terms of audience. So then community building makes a lot of sense. What I mean by that is that If you do, how do you call it in the US? Tupperware as well. I mean, that's probably—
yeah, Tupperware.
I was like, for us it's Tupperware. So the Tupperware is like, oh yeah, direct selling through community. So it's like community-led growth is Tupperware, right? But they needed to find a direct sales model that was incredibly powerful because growth was only linear because individuals could not scale. They can only organize hang out with 10 people. When you put media leverage, code leverage in that equation, those same individuals can do the same Tupperware thing but at scale, right? So essentially then as a company, you're like, hey, I'm leaving distribution on the table if I'm not leveraging my community. Again, all the stakeholders that have like solar skin in the game in my business. If I'm not leveraging them. So right now you're seeing a lot of things where companies are building tools for other companies to find in their users potential influencers so they can reward them sharing this thing. And you have a lot of people theorizing about that, right? Like growth-led product and everything. One of the only things that I think on the other trend that this is sitting on is the fact that now iOS 14.5, the ability from company to scale paid acquisition in a super targeted way has been diminished by half, right? So in order to get the same paid acquisition leverage on Instagram or Facebook, you need to pay at least like, I don't know, like twice the amount of money because you cannot target, you have to just spread and everybody wants to scale. And so right now they're like, hey, can we use creators and influencer marketing, like they say, at scale so we can actually find another channel that is less expensive and is also highly effective because people want to follow people and not brands, right? So there's like this second trend that be like, hey, this is also like a form of community because those creators have community, the community enters our community, et cetera, et cetera. And then the third trend I think that underlies, that is behind sort of like community renewal. And I think one of the trends that makes it sure that this is not a fad and that community-led growth, whatever you want to call it, like community exploration as leverage will never end, is that essentially people are lonely. The statistics are incredible. The millennial generation, our generation, is the first one that takes this wave in front. The Generation Z is just going to be impacted even more than us. 1 out of 5 millennials declare that they have no friends in the Western world. 3 out of 5 millennials declare that they feel lonely often or all the time. So what I believe is that We've been giving incredible leverage. And that's something, if you listen to me, that is quite obvious that I celebrate. We've given incredible leverage to individuals so they can free themselves from the old industrial world institutions that are starting to get outdated. Right. So amazing leverage. You're an individual. You can order food, you can order a taxi, you can move from one place to another. Airbnb, whatever. Like, you're the sovereign individual, like they say, right? The thing is that when you do that and when the market enables those people to be sovereign individuals, it has also a downside, is that in the meantime, you're destroying every institution that used to sit on top of individual as something greater than those individuals alone that we used to call communities, like neighborhoods, Like religions, states, unions, all of those things, right? Those are the institutions, the community institutions of the 20th century, and we're destroying them to rebuild something better. But in the meantime, people are lonely. People are not like individuals have been atomized to the individual level, but People are not just economic entities, they are also spiritual entities. They are like social beings, and they are craving for those new pillars of identity, for those new physical experiences to actually belong to something greater than themselves. And I will finish on that with this. I think that spiritually, the movement that any person goes through is a movement that starts with coming back with yourself, right? Like your psycho, like introversion, understanding yourself, meditation, yoga, whatever. whatever you call it, right? But it's never going to be fertile if it doesn't go into this next phase, which is forgetting about yourself, right? And this is like breathing in and breathing out. I think that right now, as a society, for better or for worse, we've been going back into ourselves, only thinking about ourselves too much. And now that we've destroyed all the structure that allowed us to actually forget about ourselves and have this sort of like cycle, people are craving that type of things again. And especially with the lockdown, it's been sort of like a conscientization of that need, of that core human need that we've been deprived for a while now. And I think now we're starting like a renewal of community because people are craving it consciously. And that will fuel— that would be like a third pillar that would fuel this sort of like a community trend for the next 20 years.
Well, here's to rebuilding community from scratch. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Really fascinating conversation. I had a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing you next time you're in Paris. Or maybe I'll come down to Lisbon and we can—
That would be a great pleasure. That was a pleasure. Thanks again for the invitation. That rocks.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, take care.
