In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Bharat Vasan, co-founder of Intangible, a no-code 3D creation tool for filmmakers and game designers. Intangible aims to simplify 3D content creation using AI, making it accessible for both professionals and beginners. Bharat discusses the journey of founding Intangible, the challenges and opportunities in the 3D content industry, and his collaboration with Charles Migos, a former lead designer at Apple and VP at Unity. They also delve into broader topics like the current struggles in the film and games industries, the potential of AI to reshape these fields, and practical advice for startups aiming to leverage AI. Bharat shares insights on the importance of co-founder relationships, company culture, and the evolving nature of creative work in the age of AI.
Building AI-Powered 3D Creativity Tools with Bharat Vasan In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs welcomes Bharat Vasan, co-founder of Intangible, to discuss their development of a no-code 3D creation tool targeting filmmakers, game designers, and creative professionals. Intangible recently raised a $4 million seed round to simplify 3D content creation using AI. Bharat talks about his journey, including co-founding Basis Technologies and working with notable names like Charles Migos from Apple and Unity. They explore the challenges and opportunities in the film and games industries, the potential of AI, building a startup team, and maintaining work-life balance as an entrepreneur. Bharat and Jason also reminisce about their long history and shared experiences in the startup world.
00:00 Introduction to Bharat Vasan and Intangible
00:52 Bharat's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:58 Discussion on Founding Companies
01:26 State of the Film and Games Industries
01:57 Introduction to The Next Next
02:37 Reconnecting with Bharat
03:34 Bharat's Background and Journey to the US
05:11 Cultural Shocks and Career Beginnings
05:38 Bharat's Experience in Silicon Valley
08:54 The Importance of Co-founders
12:40 Key Factors in Starting a Company
17:15 Meeting Co-founder Charles Migos
19:48 Challenges in the Film and Games Industries
23:14 The Vision for Intangible
28:47 AI Transforms Creative Processes
29:35 The Role of Agents in AI
31:17 Simplifying 3D Creative Tools
33:48 AI's Impact on Production and Creativity
37:40 The Future of AI in Creative Industries
43:52 Building Intangible AI
53:22 The Startup Grind and Co-Founder Dynamics
57:37 Closing Thoughts and Future Outlook
Jason Jacobs: Today on The Next Next, our guest is Bharat Vasan, a co founder at Intangible, which is a no code 3D creation tool for filmmakers and game designers that recently raised a 4 million seed round. Bharat's other co founder is Charles Migos, a former lead designer for Apple's first party iPad apps, iBooks, Notes, and News, and the vice president of product development at Unity.
I was excited for this one because I've known Bharat for a while actually, back since he was co founder at Basis Technologies back in the day, one of the pioneers in fitness and sleep tracking, and I got to know him when I was the co founder of a fitness startup Runkeeper at any rate, I reached out to him recently because I saw that his new venture was focused squarely in a I and we have a fascinating discussion here about a number of things.
This is not Bharat's first rodeo. In fact, this is the fourth company that he's founded. And we talked about How he goes about founding companies, what it takes to get conviction, how he prioritizes team versus market versus the initial solution, etc. We also talk about how Intangible came together, how he first started talking with his co founder Charles, when they switched from an exploration to conviction, and how they've gone about going from zero to one.
We talk about the state of the film and games industries, why they've been struggling, what some of the answers are, and the role that AI is going to play. And of course we talk about Intangible, what their entry point is, how they're going to market, how they're thinking about building the company and product, and also who they think the end customers will be and why.
I learned a lot in this one, and I hope you do as well. But before we get started
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next, it's not really a show. It's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week, we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built.
And selfishly, the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself. While bringing all of you along for the ride. Not sure where this is going to go, but it's going to be fun.
Okay, Bharat Vasan, welcome to the show.
Bharat Vasan: Jason. Great to see you again, man.
Jason Jacobs: Nice to see you. Yeah, I think we met, I think it was back in the basis days. So what was that like 2012, 13, 14, something like that?
Bharat Vasan: something like that. So it'll be way back.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, we haven't talked in years, but what you were up to intrigued me for a few reasons. One, you're just launching a new company and it is right in the thick of what's happening in AI, which is of course relevant. To my journey but also we're of a similar demographic. You're a long time entrepreneur who was Middlebury class of 97.
I'm a long time entrepreneur who was Wesleyan class of 98. And that means that you probably have some fogey founder stuff you're sorting through. Like I do in terms of just how to build different and stuff like that. And so those two reasons made me think it was definitely time to reconnect with you.
Bharat Vasan: Amazing, man. Looking forward to it. Yeah, my journey started in health. That was my first startup. And you probably don't know about this, but the way I made it to Middlebury is also unusual. Like I grew up in India as a child of American pop culture. So I was watching shows like Knight Rider and A Team.
Playing video games and my entire that's how I learned English. Actually, I never actually learned grammar. I just literally watched it from shows and comic books. And then I just, my dream to come to America. I was like, that's where all the stuff is made. I have to be there. And you would think like you'd end up in a city or someplace else but I ended up in Vermont.
Most Americans don't know where Vermont is or haven't been.
Jason Jacobs: But isn't Vermont amazing? I don't want to announce it on the show because I don't want anyone else to know, but isn't Vermont amazing?
Bharat Vasan: It's really beautiful. And Middlebury was great.
Jason Jacobs: my family spends a bunch of time in Vermont. We love Vermont. But anyways, go on. So how did you find your way to Vermont?
Bharat Vasan: I, it was, it's one of those random life circumstances where you apply to a bunch of schools and you don't know what you look like any kid, but you're all the way in India. And this is before the Internet, right? You just had whatever you had seen brochures and they had this beautiful campus looking thing.
And I was like, that's amazing. I'm going to apply. I'm not going to
Jason Jacobs: me, it was what I saw on people's sweatshirts. That's how I chose where to apply.
Bharat Vasan: have the benefit of that. For me, I was just imagining what the place would be like. I'd never even seen snow before. And Middlebury accepted me and they were really good to me and made it affordable. We were lower middle class, nothing fancy. And kid from India got to fly all the way over the world ended up in New York.
And you think, oh, this is amazing. And then you go to Vermont and it's nothing like New York City. Completely different.
Jason Jacobs: I wonder too, what's a bigger culture shock, coming from India to Middlebury, or coming from a small liberal arts school to Silicon Valley?
Bharat Vasan: God, I, I don't know. It's got to be the, I got to say, I think it's got to be the India journey because there's so much things are different. So many things are different. My clothes were different. I was, I had never seen snow before. The cows were like 10 times larger than any cows in India.
It's just very different. I think the big shock, I lived in New York for a while as well. And then I moved out to Silicon Valley and it was, it's a long way of saying I got to my dream job. I worked at EA for eight years. And I was like, Oh my God, a job with people who make video games. I get to fly around the world, talking to other people that make video games.
And this is a real job with a real company. And so that was my introduction to technology and Silicon Valley. It was this combination of art and pop culture and software. And I think that was the kind of the ground, the grounding for me to do all the stuff I've done. This is my fourth startup now, and I've been in venture as well.
I've been through a few different platform shifts like you have. And I, honestly felt as a kid playing all those video games and being immersed in pop culture and how people communicated and, what was current has stuck with me. So coming back to your question about like old fogies, what do we find meaning in, for me, it's still the same stuff.
I still get excited about the small little things and new things that are interesting to me. And I think at this stage, I'm more excited than ever about saying there's lots of stuff happening in the world. I can't solve all those problems. Here's my collection of hobbies or things I'm interested in.
And that's someplace where I can, build a business, provide a living for my family, make a difference for my customers. And then, and that's good enough. That's the American dream, and I'm excited about that.
Jason Jacobs: Now it seems as an outside observer that the four different companies that you started are in completely different industries and categories do, are there common threads across or how does that happen?
Bharat Vasan: I could give you like a retrospective. Oh my God, here's the common thread. I will say like most things in life, it's a random walk. It's a combination of things I was really good at the time. And people who were like, Hey. I'd like to work with you and they lifted me up, I made it out here from banking in the middle of I think it was nine 11 had happened and everyone was letting everyone off.
And, my friend and then boss, Owen Mahoney who ran a large company called Nexon, all the way across the country, it was like, Hey, you should come join EA, right? And I think that the only other company I was interviewing back then was with Google. I'd never been to Silicon Valley. I don't know anything about the internet stuff. Now, maybe I should have taken the offer at Google, but I really loved, working in games and my experience at EA. So while I'd like to create some fantasy, cohesive type of thing, everything from that EA thing through starting a company to working with Dave Friedberg, at the production board.
He's on the all in pod now, but when I joined the podcast didn't exist. So in many cases for me, it's just been trying to work with good people. On ideas I find interesting at the time with that, like trying to figure out, Oh my God, is this going to be a rocket ship? Is it going to, I just think life is too hard to guess at those things.
So for me, it's been a little bit of who am I in business with? Who do I like working with? Do I like my customers? What do I want the culture of the day to be like, this is work with my family situation, those kinds of things.
Jason Jacobs: And have you found a sweet spot functionally? It seems like you've often been the the, in the COO seat, which I would imagine would be holistic and very operational. How do you think about your zone of excellence and delight? And also, what are the implications of that as it relates to The profile of an ideal co founder.
Bharat Vasan: Good question. The second part's easy. I look for co founders who are compliments to me. And again, this is just a philosophy thing. I find one person founding, lots of people can do it, it's not for me. And so I like a co founder, and what I've learned about myself over time, there are things I'm really good at.
And then there are things that I'm okay at, but somebody's probably better than me. So my current co founder, Charles, for example, is just amazing. He's a good friend, he's a good person. We argue about lots of stuff, like a work spouse type of thing. But he's phenomenally talented and brilliant on the product side in ways I can't match and I'm inspired by it You know, I've used this word about like I want to have admiration for my co founder not just a you do this job I'll do this job because then it you know, there's respect but there's not this law of attraction type of thing I find that's very helpful with co founders I've been in CEO roles.
I've been a board member at this point, I've invested in companies Gosh, I feel like I've occupied all of the different roles I think through all that, what I've realized is there are things that I love. I love the storytelling aspect for it. And I think this goes back to my childhood around what stories do people tell that inspire, move the world forward? And I don't think that's as important at the large company, unless you're the CEO of Salesforce or something like that, but in startups, no one knows your company. You're literally creating something out of like nothing, you have to attract people to join your company. You have to have a vision big enough, and those are not skills anyone's born with.
Like maybe some people are, but I wasn't born with it. So I had to learn some of those things. And then over time, what I've gotten to realize is I'm pretty good at narrative. I'm pretty good at understanding where the zeitgeist is going. And maybe some of the roles I've taken on are more a function of my training.
So I started in a, I was a CFO at EA because I was a banker before, but that probably wasn't the top end skill set that I had from the very, very beginning. I was never going to be the best Excel modeler out there. I was just going to grind away at it, but the things I could do really was like, this is the thing that's going to inspire people.
And a lot of that was 15 years of startups. Trying to attract, that next level of talent or your first engineer or your first designer when they don't even know what your company's about.
Jason Jacobs: So when you think about a compliment, you mentioned someone that comp, a co founder that compliments your skill sets. What is an example of how a co founder might compliment your skills or what that person's Zone of excellence and delight might look like
Bharat Vasan: Yeah. So I'm this unusual hybrid of being practical and wanting to tell the best story. So I'm always trying to bridge these two things. I think a good compliment for me has always been someone who is inspirational, drinking the Kool Aid a little bit and, doesn't suffer from my need to be practical and oh my God, what are we going to ship this time?
And they're like, it's going to be okay. This is going to be great. We're going to build this thing. This is what the future is going to be. And I think the other part for me is, I match their energy. And I'm looking for co founders who lift each other up. So you, cause you can't have this even keel all the time.
So it helps me to have another co founder who temperamentally is just different for me. And then we end up being really good compliments to each other. So I don't know if that's a good formula for everyone. I think a lot of it just comes from, I think one of the great benefits of startups is you get to pick your people. You get to pick who comes in, you get to pick the culture, you get to pick your co founder. So in many ways, if you have a good understanding of who you are. It helps you make better decisions about who else you want to surround yourself with, whether that's one co founder or, a couple of co founders.
Jason Jacobs: and before we get into intangible specifically, are there any themes? If you look across the four startups that you've co founded about order in terms of visit team first, is it idea first? Is it? Is it market first? Is it like how? How do you end up? Anchoring in a particular area with a particular group of people,
Bharat Vasan: It's a good question. I've always looked for three things. I think it's refined over time. When I look for a market where there's energy, I find that, startups is not a short game. It's not going to happen over two years. You're going to build it over many years. And so it just helps to have a market that's growing.
If you were shipping on the internet, if you're shipping at the app store during the app, app economy or social or SAS, these things lifted a lot of boats. And even if the first startup didn't work up, work out, you learn things you could take to the next startup. So I think that market's always 1.
That's just not be like market and reason said it. Other people have said it. I think AI will be another 1 of these waves that lifts all boats. But I'd say if, at a personal level, once you're like, okay, that's the space I like that market. I think the three most important things for me is, am I in business with people I like, is it a co founder I like, are we able to pick the right people for our team?
That's one. Am I in business with investors I like, and are they aligned and different investors that I didn't realize this until later in my career have different ways of doing business. And if you don't understand that, then, they're stuck on your cap table and they have, they cover a lot of your headspace because they are your boss.
Unless you own your own company. And I think the last, maybe the most important thing is you got to like your customers. Because I've got to be honest. I've been in spaces where I like my product. I like my co founders. I like my investors. I like everything, but I don't know that I had a particular passion for locks.
I never grew up, nothing I've told you about my background to go. Oh, man, like smart locks. That's the thing. You were always going to be excited. But if your dad was a locksmith, like your family has been the lock business. That, that's just not me. And so sometimes I think that one piece that's missing over time starts to wear on people over time.
And what I've realized about myself is I want these three things to align in addition to having a good market in order for it to be the right thing for me.
Jason Jacobs: And how do you think about the assessment process in each of those areas? In other words is it an arranged marriage? Is it people you've known a long time? Is it, how long Should you be steep in these areas before making the decision that I'm ready to anchor in any of those vectors
Bharat Vasan: This is probably not the best answer, but for me, it's been. Two things I've spent a lot of time with what's my value set truly? What is my way of working? What am I good at? What do I suck at? What are the things that, I'm just not the best at and I start to break down. And so just being clear about who you are actually is the biggest time suck. The rest of it has just been fortuitous for me. My current startup, it wasn't like I was like, Oh, this space with this customer set it's a little bit like meeting your wife, like you can't completely engineer all the circumstances. And all the qualities, someone who knew both of us that I hadn't been in touch with for many years, they introduced us.
And the first thing that, we talked about was just, values. How do you operate? What makes for a better headspace for you? What is your family situation? What's important to you? This is going to be rough. Are you ready for it? In what ways? What's what, whatnot.
If you're coming from big company what do you know? Not know. And can I take the load? Can I carry that burden for some of those pieces of it? And can you carry the burden for some of the pieces that I'm looking for? So most of the conversation Charles and I had were really about just value sets, how we operate, what do we want the DNA for the company to be?
Cause the founders, this is a sort of a bad analogy because, it's more like a team, but you'd really do set the culture and the DNA of the company. And I've never had luck in a company where the founders are at odds, don't communicate well, there's a lot of ego involved about who's the CEO and what they do and who gets what and what the spheres of influence are that leeches through to the whole team in ways you can't possibly fathom.
And if you have a successful startup, it just scales up the problem. And I've always hated that. I've seen that firsthand. I've seen that in other companies, from afar. I've seen that as a board member, those are really hard things to fix. It's like a family that has issues. And it's really hard to fix these issues when you have 20 family members as opposed to going to couples therapy when you guys just meet.
Jason Jacobs: And were you working as an investor at the time when you were introduced to Charles? It'd be helpful to understand what was your headspace at the time and also where was Charles and what was his headspace at the time when that first introduction happened?
Bharat Vasan: We were both in that headspace of, Hey, this is something new, and if we this as in this AI wave, at least in my generation, I feel like there's been four big waves. There's been. Software when it was packaged goods, and you have a little floppy disk. Then the internet came around and that was a whole new thing.
Then the app economy came around and part of that was also SaaS. And very rarely do you get these horizontal technology curves that lift everything and open up stuff that you haven't seen before. Charles and I are both creative people in different ways. I'm more creative on the business side and the company and the fundraising other side.
He's very creative on the product side. I was an investor working on climate stuff with Dave at the production board. And I was looking for ways in which I could get back to things I truly loved, which happened to be in the film and games and agency and event space. And Charles was heading up design at Unity.
Which is a public company, but he, he was the lead designer at Apple for all of the iPad first party apps. So his products have shipped to a billion people. Then he was heading up design at Unity and he was thinking deeply about this problem of what can AI do? All of the tedious stuff that we do, if you're in the film business or the games business, you're shooting a commercial, there's a lot of tedious stuff.
In the background, can AI start to take some of the tedium away so human beings who are creative can be creative again, as opposed to spend their time and all this production shit that you have to do that now seems to suck up 80, 90 percent of your time. It's like when you join a venture firm, you're like, I'm going to be meeting with founders.
I'm going to be spending all this time with them. If you've spent any time at a starting a venture fund, as there's a lot of other stuff you're managing LPs, you're setting the tone, which things should be, how what's the cadence of meetings, how many check ins and you're like, man, that, that's, this is not, I thought the job was like meet, hang out with founders all the time.
You're like, how many calls can I put into a day? You're saying no, a lot, it's a different job than the one you think it is. And I think it's the same thing for creative people in the film games, kind of media business. It's been a really rough five years and both Charles and I were thinking about this problem of are there things we can build that help real people build real businesses and solve some real problems as opposed to some AI engineering stuff that, might help people 20 years from now, or it's really cool, but isn't going to help people today.
So that was our common bond of here's a problem we want to work on.
Jason Jacobs: And for context for me or for anyone else that doesn't come from from these industries why and in what ways has it been a tough five years?
Bharat Vasan: I think the common theme, at least in film and games, has just been there's so much time spent in production today and so much effort put on production getting to pixel fidelity. It used to be that was maybe half the process. And what's happened over the last 15 or 20 years with tools is that's become 80 percent of it. And so the amount of time you get to be creative is like smaller and smaller.
And it's meant for the Christopher Nolans of the world who have, carte blanche to do stuff. But if you work in film and games a lot of our friends have been laid off because budgets are out of control. Games, for example, is a 200 billion global business. It's probably like a 0 percent profit business at this point just because it's a hit or miss business.
And the teams are now, 200, 500, a thousand people per people team working for three to five years. And so at some level, the business is broken. And that's not a fault of the people who work there. But we're at a time where hopefully something like AI can help the business reinvent itself. Because it's also true that people are consuming more content than ever before. So in Hollywood, for example, you have lots of script writers, you have lots of actors, but distribution has flattened it out. The types of content being made are very different. TikTok has cut into their share.
And so these productions for films and shows and other things you saw are more competitive than ever. So it's harder to break in. It's harder for someone like a Netflix to know exactly what's going to hit. And there's enormous pressure to just get it done in time, which means you get less of the HBO type or the Apple TV thing, where you get great content.
You don't see great movies. Like I don't, my wife and I don't have a dying desire to go to movie theaters anymore and watch stuff just because it's a low, small number of movies. And you're like, I'll just wait for it when it's. It's going to show up on streaming. So the economics of the business have changed where the business needs to go back to smaller budgets.
So they're not exploding. And I think the second problem it has to solve is like, how do you make the creative process easier at the very beginning, as opposed to trying to fix it, in post production. And so a lot of the promise of AI is really can we make it easier in those earliest stages for these teams to have strong conviction about, Oh, that's cool.
We should do more of that kind of like how, what we've done in startups, right? Like you test your way to product market fit. The old way of doing this in TV was like focus groups. You'd have a script, you'd pitch it. Your agent would take a chopper to studio. They would do a pilot and then they would do focus groups.
It was this whole process to getting to market that I think can be much shorter given the age we live in.
Jason Jacobs: So If I'm hearing it sounds like there's more options, there's more pressure, there's a treadmill, but at the same time, it's harder to know what's gonna hit once it comes out the other side, so there's a lot of wasted resource, and by making it cheaper and easier to get it. Higher caliber validation earlier in the process.
It means cheaper misses versus expensive misses so that when you actually invest the resources, there's a much higher probability that it's going to
Bharat Vasan: That's right.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. So where did you guys start? So you had this germ of an idea that the industry was in pain that I might be able to help. How did the dots connect from there?
What was the initial thesis? In what order did you work on validating that? And also just set the stage timeframe wise, when was that? Because it'll be helpful as we then talk about Thank you. Where you are today.
Bharat Vasan: So credit to my co founder, he discovered this problem at Unity. And Unity makes game engines, for those who don't know, it's the kind of thing that, you know, whether it's an Unreal Engine or like a game engine, it's the thing that powers all the Marvel movies. So you see all those fancy graphics and stuff like that in the background.
It's a combination of actors and green screens, but also a lot of visual effects, which are done in games engines. And you know what, Charles, and what game engines do is allow you to imagine a world in 3D. So it's just like shooting on a set. How many cameras do you have? What angles, all of that type of stuff.
How do you add color texture, create creatures that don't exist in the real world and make all those things possible on the visual effects side. And what Charles noticed was, the unity editor, for example you had millions of people downloaded a year, something like 10, 000 a day, astronomical number, but only like less than 10 percent of the people would actually retain over time. Because it was just too complex for non engineers, non programmers to actually learn how to do anything in it. And I think it's the same thing with podcasting. We're using Riverside right now, but there's Descript and Levin Labs. They're all of these things where like none of us, all of us would need to learn to be audio engineers and video adjustment people, splice to, there's a lot of complexity at the production level type of stuff. And so what Charles noticed was a lot of people who are interested. And doing it, they had taste, they wanted to be creative, but the taking it to production and getting something out, even like a V1 of an idea was just too hard. And most of these people were non engineering, non coding creatives in film, games, the agency space and events. And the idea was simple, which is building in 3d is pretty powerful, communicating in 3d is pretty powerful but it's too damn hard to actually build anything in 3d. And if you could make that a whole lot easier, it would just be easier for people to communicate at least in film and games, their creative intent. And the things that were hard before AI rolled, came along, can all start to be automated with AI.
And no one needs to be an expert videographer and cinematographer anymore. You can now be the director and you can write a script and you can direct it and these agents can help you and you could do it at the same level of fidelity that, a young Spielberg might have and get a sense for all of that stuff in software running in your screen before you spend a single dollar in production. And when you go and pitch that to a studio, like a Netflix, or you pitch it to your boss, if you're doing an event, within the marketing organization. Everyone has the same sense of, Oh, that would be cool. Or we should change this part. And that's what Figma did for its space and software. It's what Canva has done in a different space.
And 3D has been one of these last unconquered realms in terms of creative tools, and we felt if we can start to apply AI to this very hard to solve problem, then you can do video, you can do imagery, you can do all of these things in a way that, human beings naturally think about. So that was the core insight.
We saw a problem in the market. We felt like there was a technology that was able to solve it in this day and age that didn't exist before. And we had some validation that Charles had already done talking to those customers over time to know that there was this large market, but they needed a different solution.
You couldn't just add AI onto something somebody else had already built. You needed to invent a few new things. Started a year ago. We're already in closed beta today. We'll probably be, available fully to the public in a couple of months. So it gives you a sense for in a year, you can take something that probably took some of those game engine companies, five years, 10 years to build out completely.
So our velocity is one thing, but the space overall with AI startups is. It's also about being able to do more creative ideas in less time.
Jason Jacobs: Why do you think that 3D was one of the last holdouts and what is it that's changing that's making it possible to tackle it today?
Bharat Vasan: A lot of things about 3D are hard, at human beings perceive the world in 3D, right? Like when you're thinking about a set or an event or like your podcasting space, like your thing, how things compose, that's how our brains process it in order to communicate that to other people, you got to write a script and then you write a brief and then someone else who's a graphic designer re imagines that, re engineers that and brings that to life.
So this is like a human to human communication problem. So one thing is just like, how do humans describe stuff? It's a great medium and you need more than a 2D canvas in which you can describe it. And game engines were really the best you can do. The second thing that's really changed about it is the web has come a long way.
If you've been looking at Twitter for the last few days, you'll see a lot of people who are using cursor, which is this AI native, like in a programming coding environment to make games. So you can actually code up your own little game and it renders in a browser with three JS. Which is a JavaScript framework.
And so people are able to tinker around. They're, they're not coders. They're like, oh, I'd like to create a flight simulator. And I want the plane to be able to take off from here. And can you add a runway to the left? They're just using words and the computer is writing all the code and displaying something.
Something people would just not have been able to do. So AI is now able to take human instructions and translate them to something. As simple as a browser, so no big specialized hardware, no big downloadable package that you've got to compile. It's just running in your browser the same way anything else would launch. And I think the last part of it is on the backs of these foundational models, these media models that are coming up, which will take human instructions like chat GPT and then, answer a question. Or you give mid journey a prompt and it generates an image. There are these new structures in software called agents that are starting to evolve that basically say, why don't I actually do the work for you?
Let me take a first cut, Jason, at writing the script for you. Tell me your idea. I'll take a first cut of the script, or I'll take a first cut at what the game looks like. And then you tell me what's wrong with it, and you go back and forth. That agent builds it out for you. And so this human experience, how we used to film something, we'd write a script and then you'd have a sketch storyboard and you'd do sketches, and then you'd take it to pre-production and post-production.
You could start to compress all that stuff into one screen. So someone who's creative or a team of people who are creative can all be looking at the same thing on a screen and figure out, Oh, that's good. We really like that part. We like this scene. We like this angle. We like this shooting style and the agents do the work for you so that before you go into production, whether that's game engines or you're doing a physical shoot.
Everyone's on the same page, and that means better quality content. It's faster because you're all doing stuff in real time, and ultimately it saves money in production, right? So it's like the better, faster, cheaper value prop of, where AI can help. People always focus on the cheaper part, but I think it's actually the better and faster in real time.
That makes a difference for creative.
Jason Jacobs: So if you think about the different types of potential end users, I would imagine there's a spectrum from The beginner who hasn't worked in the industry at all to the expert in some or multiple areas of the production process. Where are these tools best suited today? And then separately, where are you choosing to focus as your initial market?
Bharat Vasan: So I think different people, different startups approach this different ways. Sometimes you start in the lab, you work at Google or you work at Stanford and you have some technological insight and you're hoping to find that market and you've built something really cool. We're not those people, Charles and I both come from industry.
Us. Non technical schlucks. Charles is way more technical than I am. I think the way we think about it is the same way we've always thought about business. Is this valuable to customers today? Will it be more valuable or less valuable? Year from now, two years from now, three years from now, because there's so much noise in AI.
And most of our focus, and where our focus has been for intangible, which is what the company is called is, can we build the world's Simplest 3D creative tool or, can we build in a no code AI native, creative studio, which is like cursor and, whether, we call ourselves like a Canva for 3D.
I think when Canva first came out and people like there's all the Photoshop, there's all the free tools. And Melanie had a tough time raising money because people were like, what does anyone need this for? But it turns out the combination of three things, making easy to use creative control at the level of professionals and collaboration, these three things I think have been the common tools for success, whether it's like a Canva or Figma or Salesforce, like the same three things repeat themselves.
And so the approach we've taken is like, why don't we take the industry's best? So we have people on our team that came from Pixar and Unity and other places working on the team who've done this in heavy duty production system for big budget movies. But the goal isn't to make more tools for people who already have tools.
The goal is to make this simple enough so that Normal people like you and me because I come from this space, but I've never directed a movie before, are able to walk up to a browser and be able to be like, Hey, I really want to be able to shoot a commercial in a city and I want to be able to shoot I don't know or I want, I'm throwing an event or I'd like, I'm throwing a a live event and it's a small concert with a bunch of my friends.
We're going to have a little stage and whatnot. I should just be able to describe something, have all of that stuff show up. And have it be rendered and beautiful imagery without needing to know anything about visual editors, images, shading, 3d objects, interactivity, or any of that type of stuff.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. So it sounds like initially it's focused on people that maybe do something related professionally but not necessarily professionals at this, but who, if they had professional caliber versions of this, they could bake it into what they do professionally and it would make them more effective, but they can't necessarily justify or it isn't practical to go do it the traditional big way.
Bharat Vasan: right. Yeah. Like this podcasting setup we have, it's an app that's running. It does a lot of audio sync and complex stuff that you and I are not super aware of, but it just takes care of business. And that's what you're looking for. Like you and I want to have this conversation. The software should get out of the way.
And so it's very similar for these tools. I think what AI can do is you can describe what you want and it can build it for you. And you're like, that's not quite right. I want this booth. I want to change it. And it just does that automatically. It's not like home construction, where I painted the wall white and the next day you look at it, oh man, I wish it was green, I should have made it green, and then you have to go through a whole big process and it's all this brain damage.
I think the beauty of doing all this stuff on screens and software is you can just talk to it, and it will do it for you in real time. You don't have to wait days for an editor or creative team to go out and do it for you. It just happens in real time.
Jason Jacobs: So it seems like on the coding tool side, there's a spectrum of the tools like Devon that will do it for you versus the ones that are more about just Augmenting and helping people that can already do it more efficiently, but it's still primarily you that's doing it Where are you guys in that spectrum and does that analogy hold as you think about?
3d film or game production as well
Bharat Vasan: I think the analogy is still holds. I do think even on the coding side, you have the full spectrum of stuff. When you talk to actual engineers, they're using coding tools to enhance what they do. And then there's a whole new group of people who've never coded before. And they just have an idea and they're just typing things into cursor or replit and it's doing stuff for them and creating something and they're able to edit that.
It may not become a production grade tool, or maybe it will, but it's their taste. It's their idea. They're able to see it in real time. And I think that's the real power of these AI creative tools. I think we fit that same mold. If you're someone who's a filmmaker and you're like, listen, I don't want to, I don't have a full team set up right now.
I just want to be able to mock up the first scene. You can feed it a few lines of script. You can tell it where things are going to be at. You can say. Hey, I want to put a camera over here. So if you're a professional who knows how to do it, you can now do it digitally. But if you're someone who has no idea and you're just like, look, I just have a good idea for an event, or I've got a great idea for this pitch I want to do to Netflix.
And I've got like the first few lines of a script. I'm a writer and I have no ability to visualize anything, right? AI can take you down that journey of Hey, is this what the first opening scenes would look like? And can I help you direct it in this style or that style and until you get comfortable with it, but just so it's good enough.
So it's like a V1 that you can communicate your idea. In many ways, communicating the idea starts this whole process of other people coming to your site and going, Oh, that's really good. Whether that's capital, whether it's other creatives, whether it's, production people. But getting the version one of the idea going, Oh, that's amazing.
It would be like Spielberg with. Jaws, Oh my God, a big animatronic shark, like with it's like that, like you have to have that vision. It's helpful to see that stuff digitally now when you can just talk it into existence, prompt it into existence, Lego, move it into existence. And that's what we focused on can be expand the market to all these people who don't have tools so they can look like they're doing high quality professional work and get a V1 out very quickly.
Jason Jacobs: So I remember way back when when we built an early fitness app in the App Store, there were limitations on the device itself, the GPS. wasn't as accurate as the standalone devices. The battery life wasn't as long. You couldn't run apps in the background, meaning you couldn't listen to music and also go on your run, which many people love to do.
But then over time, the GPS got better. The battery life got longer. Apps could run in the background. Some of the running apps would actually bake music right into the app itself so that you didn't need to leave the app to listen to music anyways, although you could if you wanted to. Using that same analogy, where are we today with this?
And then What are the gotchas that you see getting ironed out over time?
Bharat Vasan: I think it's like the Internet. We're in the earliest stages. That's how I put it. I think a lot of stuff that, you can't do today. Frankly, you couldn't even do it. See, 6 months ago, 3 months ago, 2 months ago. And so the speed at which these tools is evolving is just And I don't think it's going to slow any time soon, especially because the compute layer expands, the infrastructure layer keeps expanding, which means anyone who's building applications on top of all of it, which is what we were doing with the app store came along, there was an iPhone, it had an install base, you had the app store infrastructure itself, you had a, they provided you with libraries and then you were building apps on top of it and apps became the biggest part of that economy, right?
They still captured most of it. So we're still in the infrastructure phase. So if you had to compare it to the internet for AI in general, I think all of it, I think it's hard to tell where it's going to go, but, one concern people have is will AI replace human beings, right? Is, I don't I'm in video production.
Will I no longer be needed? And the way I've thought about it is the reason Charles and I got into the business is because. We don't think human beings should be excluded from the creative process. We think human beings, just like people who create art is always, revolutionary or a counter to the status quo.
So people naturally want to create stuff and communicate that and share that with other people. The goal is to expand the envelope of more people being able to do that. And I think that's a good focus for AI. I do think with AI, things that were hard to do before will become easier going forward. So if you weren't, an artist before, a digital artist and didn't know how to shape monsters and stuff like that stuff is going to get easier.
Some of the production tasks are going to get easier with AI, and I will say they've always been getting easier. So this is not like something new before people used to, the old Disney movies, you hand sketch those things. And now you do it digitally, and now AI is going to take it to the next level in terms of what it can do, but that human creativity element is still going to remain.
And I do think whatever, no matter what country you look at, no matter what culture you look at software enabling more creative people, I actually think could save the business instead of the concerns people have. The business is already in trouble, has been in for five years, right? Film and games and agencies, like everyone's worried about, Oh my God, what's AI going to do to it?
But the business has been in trouble even before AI arrived. So hopefully what this is it takes us back to a time when these businesses were growth businesses, creative people could be creative and they could take their content directly, without middlemen to audiences and find niche audiences that love their product or mass market audiences.
And I think, my hope for AI is not that it replaces people, but it allows more creative people to express themselves. And just like Hollywood had this era where Scorsese came in and, and Spielberg came in and it had petered out, it would become a generic formulaic type of thing.
It feels like we're at that moment where it feels like nothing creative can be done and hopefully new tools surface a new group of people who bring us these amazing things from their, from their minds and the tools are just enabling them.
Jason Jacobs: So if you're the kind of firm that would get hired to do this, the the full on expensive industrial strength, highest quality way how should you be thinking about? These tools and their implications and what would you be doing if you were sitting in their seat?
Bharat Vasan: It's a good question, and I think like the tools are both. It's available as third party tools, but they're also proprietary pipelines within the Pixar's and Paramount's of the world. These companies are also building their own technology. What I've heard from the market is, Hey, we like AI tools.
We want to use it. We want to make sure that IP is protected in other words, whatever the tools are trained on, our clients can use downstream. I think those are all table stakes for the business. And I think if you're on the business side of these agencies, right? You're running an agency, you're like, oh, how can I do this more efficiently?
Which is always code for how can I do this? With less people and in less time, and I do think some AI tools, I don't know if intangible helps with that. There are other companies that help with that. I think the area we've been squarely focused on is how do we buy people more time on the front end when you go talk to a client about some idea they've had, for your, your American express and you have a booth at the U.
S. Open or something like that, and you're an agency that manages that whole install. You talk to them in the morning. Can you send them something back in the afternoon? Instead of sending them something back 10, days later or two weeks later, can you send them something back the same day and be like, is this what you had in mind?
And then you go back and forth in real time and be like, that's really cool. Let's build that. That speeds up an existing business. And the way we've thought about intangible is we can either be on the side of saving people money, or we can be on the side of helping people make more money. And I think what we liked about, what Shopify did and the app store did and others.
It put lots of people in business and we really like this idea of helping lots of creatives start their own business, expand their own business. Or if you're at a large company, you can do more business with your clients.
Jason Jacobs: When it comes to the internal development of the product, how much have you been leaning on AI and how has it altered how you think about hiring number of roles, types of roles or, capital intensity, et cetera, if at all.
Bharat Vasan: I think it's been great. Partly because I like new things. And so everything from ops in our company, all the way through to writing code itself, we use the new AI tools wherever we can. Because you want to see what the state of the art is, it's the same as the app store. When new apps came out, we'd be like, Oh, that's really cool.
And like, when path came out, it was like the little springy UI that they'd done. You borrow from the greats. And so you can see what other people are doing, what's working, what's not working. So for me, it's this great period of learning. And, as a fogey myself, like I look for places where it's like.
Oh, that's really cool. I appreciate the craft. I appreciate what these people did. And I think AI has that energy right now where it's like all sorts of people, different who've seen different cycles who are, just out of high school building stuff together. So at least within our startup, we have that full range of people who worked at Pixar with proprietary tools, and then be a people who, this is their first startup and they just came out of school and the AI tools are helping them do things that they've never been able to do before. And they're able to take care of functions like payroll and other things that, would normally require like a full team and an outsourced vendor and all the stuff. We don't need any of that stuff anymore. So it's been really great around feeling self sufficient without feeling like, Oh my God, I'm starting this company and it's going to need all these resources and all these people and all this time.
Now we can just focus all of our time on let's build something cool and get it to our customers.
Jason Jacobs: Given the rate of innovation that's happening at the model layer and infrastructure, and also given the same way it's making it easy, you're making it easier for your customers to create, it's also easier for founders to go and Build the kinds of things that you're building, which you were just happy about, but at the same time, it lowers the barriers to competition.
And so what are the implications as you think about defensibility, moats and just the risk profile from a venture standpoint? In general? Does AI materially change the risk and return? Risk return, time rising it feels like it changes the game. Would you agree and how, and if so, how does it change the game in your mind?
Bharat Vasan: I think the way it changes the game is it speeds up the process, and so I think you, you get a choice now about where you want to invest that time, and how you want to validate whether the idea you have is the right idea or not, and it speeds up the cycle time for you to be able to test that. Does it make it more competitive? I would say yes, because it means people who are creative but just didn't have the technical ability. To do something before, are able to do stuff. If you want to destroy the media empire from this podcast, and I know that's not what you're going for, but if you did, the tools exist, they can distribute your podcast, they can cut up the video.
Like you can do this with, half a person apart and a lot of AI tools. And that's not something if you said five, 10 years ago, that would be more difficult to do for sure. But I think the benefit of all that is, Is that the person who was doing production who had really great ideas. I don't know if they went to art school, I'll tell you, for example, in games, there are lots of people who went to art school because they wanted to be artists and instead they're in this factory assembly style thing like shading leaves and coloring monsters and stuff for three years on end and no one appreciates their work. I'm here for those people who are like, I've got a great idea and man, if I could just find enough time. And headspace to do the thing I wanted to, that I went to school for, that I was excited as a kid about and returned that life energy to me. That's exciting for me. And maybe it's more competition, or maybe it's just that the people who, were stuck in these production roles go great.
I can build my own thing too. And if nothing else, you and I have seen the world has this inexhaustible need for software and content. It's like more code is going to be written in the coming years. And we thought that wasn't really possible. And more content has been created and we really thought who would need more content than Netflix and then TikTok came along.
It just seems like there's more options available than ever before. And as the, I think the marginal cost of creating content and code gets driven to zero, it's going to help people who are truly brilliant, truly amazing, truly customer focused. Rise to the top and I don't know, as an American, I that underdog.
If I wanted to start a business and I knew my customers really well, like I could do a good job serving them. It doesn't need to be the biggest business in the world, but it can provide for my family. And I liked that, and sitting in Silicon Valley, those are the kinds of things we're building as opposed to Salesforce gets bigger.
Jason Jacobs: Do you think that titans in general, so whether it's titans of film, titans of software are, are titans gonna get eaten away from all sides and either not be a thing or be a greatly reduced thing relative to the ratio that they are titans today
Bharat Vasan: I think that the layers go away, right? Like when Spotify came around the music business, like music. Publishing shrunk a little bit, but more music was consumed than ever before. And you had this dip for artists, but now you get more artists than ever before and the artists that can promote themselves, like you can hear about names and before all that was gated by like a few people in studios.
Do I like you? Did we discover you, et cetera, et cetera. The benefit of being, piratey and in Silicon Valley and is like the goal is to empower people who don't have those tools, the underdogs. And so if you're, mr. Beast in North Carolina, and you're obsessive about your craft, you can master a platform like YouTube, right?
If you're Eminem in Detroit, you can be discovered by somebody else who has taste. And so I think the goal is always, do the tools expand that envelope for, creative people to be discovered more and can the layers, that have gated them from getting there, just, start to disappear a little bit more.
I think the big question is like, what happens to the gatekeepers? What happens to the app store? What happens, do people find themselves on Twitter or algorithms, the new determinants of how people find distribution or will human beings figure out just like they always have how to find customers, fans, and then build that out to be bigger because every year we're surprised by some artists you never knew.
Some company you never knew, some YouTube star you never heard about. And so I have great faith that the problem is, not that there'll be more competition. I have great faith that like the talent that's in the market will rise to the top and they will build big businesses and those businesses will employ new people, but they will be new businesses.
And that's what I like about it. It's not existing business getting bigger. But it's new business is being created that, give people that sense of freedom.
Jason Jacobs: And just logistically, so it sounds like it's in private beta now. So if anyone listening wants access, is access something that's accessible? What types of people are you looking for this private phase? And then whatever you're comfortable sharing in terms of how you're thinking about going to market timelines and what key milestones you're driving towards and prioritizing as you think about this tranche of capital relative to the next round.
Bharat Vasan: Good God, Jason, you just sounded like a BC there for a second.
Jason Jacobs: Oh man,
Bharat Vasan: What milestones? When are you going to ship? How much money are you getting?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah I've just been around them long enough that I can parrot what I've heard them say, so that's all.
Bharat Vasan: We started building this a year ago. I think we built the technical foundations first. We're in closed beta now with people in film. Games, events, and agencies. I think those are like the four. Anyone can go sign up at Intangible AI. We're in closed beta right now. We've got a few hundred people in line.
But my hope is we get through that queue over the next couple of months, two, three months, but our hope is to be, to have the tool available to everyone by June.
Jason Jacobs: Nice and, will it be subscription model?
Bharat Vasan: Subscription and credits. I think it'll, the goal is to expand it to everyone. There'll be a nominal subscription fee and, but it'll be orders of magnitude cheaper than any of the industry standard stuff. And then it feels like for AI, the generation credits. So if you're generating an image or a video, whatever it is, it's much cheaper than obviously shooting real video.
But that credit system feels like the way most AI companies are going.
Jason Jacobs: Got it, and what was I gonna ask you? We've covered so much ground, I had a good one.
Oh, I remember. So you your official title is chairman, is that right?
Bharat Vasan: I'm a co founder man at the seed stage. It doesn't matter what the role is. I'm co founder and chairman. My co founder Charles is the CEO and co founder. So
Jason Jacobs: Uhhuh. . And I'm just curious how you divide roles and responsibilities and also just how you think about grind in general relative to how you thought about it earlier in your career.
Bharat Vasan: Oh, that's simple for us. He does product. I do business.
And business is everything from capital raising to ops to what the narrative of the company is, how we set things up, how we communicate ourselves and who the market is, all of that type of stuff. And product is everything about what is the actual product, who is it for what particular features, what kind of engineering do we need, all those types of things.
So that's we split it up. And then I think the things we share as co founders, cause I think it's really the only job you really, you can't get fired from, like you can. As founders, like we're all used to as the company grows, you're like, Oh, I'm not the best CEO for it. And Charles and I both like, if we're not the best people, that's fine.
The most important thing is this company succeed. And so that's the orientation across the team. But the founder solutions are like, do we have the right, culture? Do we have the right thing? Are we thinking about customers? Are we thinking too much about what we want to build? And so I think what I really love about my co founder relationship is this sort of Almost emotional support is as valuable through the ups and downs of building a startup as all of the other stuff.
And that's why I think like the co founder bond might be one of the strongest things a company can build on while you're looking for product market fit. I think so many things get easier once your product has a life of its own. People will join, people will give you money, like all the stuff becomes easier.
But the founder energy is the thing that really animates these places as they change.
Jason Jacobs: How do you think about grind and sacrifice as it relates to the stereotypical Red Bull all nighters, work around the clock, work seven days a week, prioritize startup over everything in life. As you've gotten older, do you find that your working styles changed or evolved at all? And if so, how?
Bharat Vasan: Like most people like, who have kids and families, like we have other people who rely on us. So it's not like you can't take your kids to school or anything. I think like most parents who get more efficient. At doing things and I think the other part is just deciding what not to do. I think when you're young, you chase every single thing in many ways.
I think that the benefit and curse of being young is when you're early, you chase everything and you can work 24 seven, if you're older, you just have to be more efficient about that stuff. And big part of that is deciding what not to do. We could decide to open up our platform. We could make APIs.
We could do, there's all the stuff that we could be doing. But we feel like that's false signal for where we are and what we need to focus on. So I think the thing that Charles and I like is we have focus around who we're building for, what are we building? Will they be customers? Will they just be free users?
Do we want a lot of influencers using our product? Are we focused on customers? There are all these little choices. And before, if you asked Bharat 10 years ago, like we should do all of it, and then you just had 23 hours in a day and you would just spend it. I will say there's no easy way at a startup, like we still work six, seven hour weeks easy, when you're shipping, there's no substitute to a grind.
I know everyone's
Jason Jacobs: six or seven, six or seven days, you
Bharat Vasan: six, seven days a week. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. And they were talking about 12, 14 hour days. So we wish it wasn't like that, but there are phases of the company where that's important. And I think that also sets the tone for your team. Cause if you take it easy, like your team's not going to work harder than you are working.
If that's the tone you set, so I don't think that part of the startup journey has really changed. But you, and you have a better sense of how to provide hope. Cause remember, like everyone's working for you, they're following your lead. They're hoping you know what you're doing and you have to do all the right things to figure that out and then communicate it back to the team.
So they feel like, okay, these people have a handle on what's happening in the market, how we're shipping, what they're doing, all that type of stuff. It's really like a co parenting relationship, like I hate comparing founders to parents, but to some degree, like the culture of the entire place, whether it's a distributed startup or like a in office or whatever, it all just comes from what's the relationship between that starting group and can they stay on the same page as the pressures of business keep increasing.
Jason Jacobs: So I know we're coming up on time. Two final questions. One is just for if you have any asks for listeners, if there's, jobs you're looking to hire for, or if there's homework you want to impart in listeners to, to take away, just, any way that we can be helpful to you.
Bharat Vasan: If you're in film, if you're in games, you're, events, you're in the agency space, and this is something that could help you. I'm not sure it can, but check out intangibleAI. ai and sign up for the closed beta list. We're happy to hop in a call and see if this is something that'd be helpful to you.
Or if you're just curious about AI in general, and you're like, Hey, what does this mean for my business? We talk to a lot of people. I talk to a lot of people, Charles talks to a lot of people. So we're happy to just be sounding forward to see what you're thinking about. How do I build a new business, or how do I orient my existing business is something we can also help with.
Jason Jacobs: And last question is just anything I didn't ask that you wish I did or any parting words.
Bharat Vasan: People always ask, why is the company called Intangible? And, Charles gets credit for it. He named the company. And he describes this much better than I can. But the reason he named the company Intangible is because it's the quality of fun when you're building something. That's meant to be creative and fun with a group of people and, all great content has this intangible sort of quality of Oh, that's really good.
And it's not covered in the script. It's not covered in the briefs. It's, it comes about by people working on it together. And I think for us, that's why we like to create the business with creatives, whether it's, it's film games, podcasting doesn't matter. It's people being creative to try to express themselves.
And once upon a while you hit upon like an idea that's Oh, that's really good. And that's really the fun part. So it's why the company is called Intangible.
Jason Jacobs: It'd be fun to almost build up the way VCs have tombstones for companies they back that go on to have big exits, it'd be cool if it was like, made with intangible becomes a thing.
Bharat Vasan: Yeah, that's right. Made with Intangible.
Jason Jacobs: Okay, Bharat, thanks so much, best of luck, and really nice to catch up with you
Bharat Vasan: Same here, Jason. Talk soon.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into The Next Next, if you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player. In addition to the podcast, which typically publishes weekly, there's also a weekly newsletter on sub stack at the next, next dot sub stack. com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground.
I'm covering areas I'm tackling next and where I could use some help as well. And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week!