Raising $140M at $2B to protect IP in the age of AIㅣSY Lee, STORY

00:00I'm a Ser entrepreneur that's been focused on solving problems at the intersection technology and content for more than a decade so the first company that I built was a startup called by line which is which was a crop funded journalism platform a month or two month before the cash runs out I launched a company we miraculously got 10K per a month and I actually moved my startup from London to Silicon Valley so I felt okay wow this is going to work but actually you know it took me at least 3 to four more years until I got a inflection point every startup is an

00:31overnight success but it happens on actually not just 500 night hello uh this is syy I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of story we're building the world's IP blockchain and with the particular focus on building the programmable intellectual property ler we're one of the fastest uh growing ecosystem we are very fortunate enough to actually have raised great funding I previously found a consumer app that's sold to kaca for half a billion dollars we have a lot of Builders you know 400 plus Builder who are actually building on top of our ecosystem to solve problem together uh that that we are

01:07[Music] tackling I was very interested in socioeconomic problems from a very young age I had this unique upbringing where I lived at the outskirts of Soul where it was a very developing area of Soul where you had a lot of kind of low-income family but also a new apartments were getting built so you have some professional middle class families coming in so I I saw like this stalking in inequality and ended up kind of moving to like a very rich private

01:33school transferring out to that school and I was exposed to this kind of massive income inequality I started thinking why is society like this I read upon on history and so on and so forth and I really got interested in politics philosophy and economics were the best subjects to kind of understand these problems that Drew me to Oxford and I thought the two biggest levers around kind of impacting Society was one was actually going into Politics the second was actually going into uh media so the first company that I built was a startup called Bine which was a craft funded

02:04journalism platform and the kind of the chief reason why I built them platform was that the advertising driven model for news and journalism was getting collapsed and all these independent journalists were getting unemployed and I wanted to create a platform where these journalists and reporters can directly pitch to readers about what they want to write about and match the demand of the readers it was almost like a pre sub deck it was extremely hard because not many projects were getting funded okay I have some cash left I have this great team who I gathered try to

02:36tackle something at the intersection of content and Technology I've had experience around helping creators monetize content especially with writers and I went kind of the opposite of Journalism in this kind of written content which was fiction I was dealing with facts dealing with journalistic content I was going to very fictional content and the reason why I pivoted to that kind of vertical was at the time I I came from South Korea in Korea everyone was reading what they call Web tune and also web novels so these are bided episodic content that you read on

03:09the phone that are serialized weekly or some even daily on smartphones you can really easily folks reading this kind of content in subways in Korea I was looking at that Trend in my home country in Korea I thought basically that trend of smartphone reading small phone reading of serialized content was actually delayed in the US because you instead of jumping straight to smartphone reading they were actually reading on Kindle devices ebooks so I thought wow uh there's going to be an opportunity and people are just going to kind of read this kind of snackable

03:41episodic content on the phone in the same way it did in Korea Japan and China so why don't I actually bring start a mobile platform focused on this segment of content and also bring the business models that actually worked out in in Korea and I thought that was a shot I then pivoted my St brought up to radish which was a mobile serialization platform and initially you know and I had about 2 to 4 months left uh in terms of cash Runway the month or two month before kind of the cash runs out I

04:11launched the company and we miraculously got 10K per a month in terms of Revenue and I actually moved my startup from London to Silicon Valley kind of listening to the advice and I got some you know good big names Silicon Valley investors like Greylock to you know lowercase capital and so on and so forth so I felt okay wow this is going to work I'm in Z Valley I have this great investors now there's some Revenue coming but actually you know it took me at least three to four more years until I got an inflection point and actually started seeing some kind of up and to

04:43the right curve for the business the company was stagnant for I think 3 to four years after that launch one year into it but still flat after that fundraising I started thinking like what can I do and I started just trying to knock on door of Veteran employees of you know successful startups who've actually been there and done that it was a very tough experience in terms of like changing the team getting new members and trying to hire new people so that kind of team transformation was a very very tough experience for me because I

05:15never done that it requires a massive emotional energy and once I got the team I was pretty naive I I I brought all these very very talented people and expensive people actually I brought them on with the expectation that there were it's going to be more cash coming into the business and I had like an next promise of $5 million of funding and actually like a few weeks before it that fell apart and I was pretty naive and one thing that you should know as a

05:41startup entrepreneur is until the money hits the bank it's not an actual funding right and then I had a year of cash crunch for about 12 to 13 months straight I'd only a month or sometime at it's worse like few weeks of cash left that was massively stressful because I was trying to put on a poker face race everything's going well everything's fine but in reality you know the cash was running out no one wants to fund cash crunch startup but I had to keep things going so there's this concept of convertible debt right which is a kind

06:14of a in one on the one hand a debt instrument then the other hand it's like an investment instrument so it's basically still a debt so I was getting death after death convertible debt kind of coming into the company so I had like about 20 20 to 25 convertible debts that I signed uh to get the company going and at one point I ran out of I really ran out of cash and the de convertible debt I was promised was not coming in so I had to take some loan out against my personal credit take some loan out from

06:45my family about I think 250k 200k I just never wanted to cross that line but had to and then I even had to rely on my best friend who actually came all the way to America to kind of follow my journey I had to even ask ask him to lend on money I miraculously ended up raing raising about you know 7 to8 million of funding and I had a sec like a the last shot to actually execute on division the biggest lesson I learned uh is that every startup is an overnight success but it happens on actually not

07:17just 500th night like 2,000th night or 3,000th night it takes a long time to make this happen you have a lot of startups that you see that wow it just came out of nowhere but they had this long stagnant line one of the toughest thing as an entrepreneur is in that stagnant line you don't know when it's actually going to go up that there's that huge uncertainty so how do you actually keep on going what really kept me going was that I although I quantitatively numerically see a hockey

07:50stick growth that is happening in front of me visually I I still felt that I was improving as an entrepreneur team was was getting better the strategy was getting better I was starting to get funding I was just learning a lot more and the secondly I also felt that there's always something to try if this doesn't work the next thing's going to work the next thing are going to work so that kind of kept me going and suddenly there's one moment where everything kind of clicks and because you've been waiting for that moment for so long when

08:23something clicks you just desperately want to grab it right you you want to do everything to sustain that you don't want to it up you don't want to let it go right so you just grab on it and you hold on to it uh because you don't want to make that overnight success just overnight dream you want to turn that into a sustainable growth knowing that it's going to take a long time is is very important so I always tell an entrepreneur in short term be pessimistic in midterm be a little bit

08:53even more pessimistic but in long term be optimistic because in long term the only that optimism can can keep you going any great startup will take 5 6 7 or 8 or 9 years it's it's it takes a lot of time even then you're still lucky because I've had a lot of friends whove worked on a startup 5 years 10 years 12 years but it doesn't go anywhere yeah so that's kind of the biggest learning it takes a long time to make something great happen probably someone that created the most disruptive media and journalism platform at the time when I was uh running line was a founder of WikiLeaks

09:31jul nange and he was the enemy of all the governments and he had to find his Refugee he said had to find his asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy and I had a chance to interview him directly uh in the embassy he was the first person that I've seen who's deeply political philosophical but at the same time deeply technical the best way to describe it he was very intellectually original I was a very struggling entrepreneur at the time uh I was running out of money by line wasn't going as well as expected so I had a lot of doubts you know it's my first time uh

10:02starting a company jul nange was you know when when I met him he was actually speaking about a much bigger scale problem than the problem that I was talking which is like okay how to fix journalism he said basically he said you know the Western Society is building a new kind of God it's a surveillance God he said basically big Tech is a new kind of God who's like omnipresent only sin they know everything that's going on they're everywhere what they're doing is they're basically training and collec in all your data all your information and making this insane Ai and insane

10:35surveillance system was kind of what he was arguing and they're going to be having dramatically exponentially Rising monopolizing power over everyone's lives everyone's information and that centralizing power over all of us is something that we need to think very very deeply about that really left a mark on me but at the same time I'm must a strong entrepreneur who's trying to make ends meet my startup is kind of running out of cash I'm not getting a product Market fit and you know he's talking about this massive Grand problem but you know what can I do right when I

11:07first started by I was like 22 23 and then when I started radish I was like 25 and and obviously I had a lot of ups and downs the start ended up getting acquired by um caca for almost half a billion dollars in 2020 and I left cacao and I I started Story the big reason why I ended up starting story is I really felt that at the end of the day I didn't tackle the mission that I really wanted to for me I had this massive ambition with by line the industry of Journalism was getting collapsed in the industry of

11:38media was getting collapsed with all these big advertising Revenue being taken away to Big Tech I want to tackle this massive problem and I kind of I had to give up on it so I had to focus on a mobile platform mobile content platform mobile fiction platform that's also focused on mobile romance and it's it's a serialized content so I had to go very very deep in n nrow and to monopolize the niche and to actually work on that you know to take over that Niche and try

12:04to expand down the line later right it was a good run but one of the kind of Chief reasons I ended up solding the company was that realizing the fact that I'm just kind of one of one of many small fish in that content ecosystem I was thrwing bunch of money on marketing to Big de companies to get my content noticed and discovered I was uh you know spending a lot of money on content I was kind of fighting this zero some War against other content platforms to get more attention I I just saw the the business you know not scaling in a way that I wanted to unless I kind of join

12:38forces with other biger companies that has a bigger content budget and marketing budget I wanted to make a company with massive impact but I ended up kind of having to get my company acquired it was a great great Su it was it was good success all the shareholders won was a really good personal outcome but I didn't build a transformative company and like gamechanging company that I I've wanted to build and what was really fortunate was that I had a good exit I was still young I have this now great Network I have this great financial resources above all I have

13:12this experience while that fresh feeling was alive I really want to tackle a bigger problem with the intersection of content technology uh one of my advisers investors said is that going from Zer to one especially making a very disruptive transformative business you want to do that in your 20s or maybe at early 30s at the latest it's almost like being an athlete so every single company that you think of that a trillion dollar plus with massive kind of Market impact and societal impact there were being started by early mid2

13:45something and at the latest 30 or 31 right when I sold my company I was 30 and I felt like okay I don't know why I thought that but the time is running out if you're going to start a business anyway maybe you should do it now because that's your prime time we at a massive Crossroad one is that IP can have a massively empowering moment because everyone is becoming a Content Studio social media made everyone a Creator but now they are a studio because with their fingertips they can make incredible content with just an idea with just a prompt you can do that right it's massively empowering

14:26but at the same time it's in a massively huge danger because people are training and stealing your cont content without your consent and they're hijacking your future traffic so as story we want to maximize that empowering effect we want to minimize that harmful and dangerous impact of just nonconsensual without your permission other big AI models in big Tech taking away your company right we have a pretty defensive Vision what I call defensive Vision the reason why I call it defensive is we are help helping

14:59creators protect their IP in this age of AI and get the fair compensation but I also have a more empowering Vision I I want to also play an offense IP can't just sit and try to protect thems IP needs to play offense creators need to play offense and they should fully utilize the technology that is this powerful technology that is generated Ai and I think that for me that is actually turning the internet into an IP Lego L if you give every Creator amazing set of IP Legos imagine that millions of characters created by your fellow

15:34creators millions of games that are created by other fellow creators all these story universe that are created by fellow creators are actually a Lego piece that you can utilize while giving them Fair compensation attribution of Providence and now you have this magic wand of generative AI right combine these two things we'll see an exposion of creativity we'll see a digital Renaissance because it's amazing that you have this magical tool of generative Aon and it's amazing you have this entire playground of ips that you can use as a Lego piece

16:09so I think only sky is a limit when when you can Empower all of us to have those IP Legos and generative Aon [Music]