CEO at AndThen
Gavin Purcell
I’m Gavin Purcell, CEO of And Then and former showrunner of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. I’ve spent my career creating formats that reach millions, and now I believe the future of entertainment won’t be passive... it will be interactive and voice-first. AndThen is built to let real human creators design experiences where AI characters have goals and stories, and players have something to do. We’re merging human creativity with AI to power the next wave of interactive entertainment, beginning in audio and extending to AR/VR and beyond.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
I've been obsessed by changes in media and how people use and consume forms of entertainment for my whole career. My co-founder Kevin Pereira and I co-created Attack of the Show in the 2000s and tracked (on-air) the rise of Web2.0 and viral video. GPT-3 was a watershed moment for me in terms of what AI might actually be able to do eventually when it came to AI & creation but it was the original OpenAI Advanced Voice Demo that was the spark for AndThen. Seeing how performative & responsive it could be, I knew that eventually people would be talking to it everyday and that new media forms would emerge from it. AndThen is what grew from that spark.
What inspired you to start your business?
I truly believe we're in the cusp of another major transformation in media. In my career, I've seen this happen multiple times now. AI, as a whole, will change everything yet again. But most people are looking at AI media as ways to improve traditional formats like film, video or podcasts & I noticed no one was really thinking about or planning for what *actually* comes next. The biggest insight I see is that AI-powered voice interfaces are going to transform not only how we interact with our AI & computers & devices but also how we *make* things & how we consume & interact with media. Everything becomes a conversation and your voice the controller. That's the world AndThen has been created for.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
I believe that we're building the tech stack that will power the next generation of interactive content for large audiences. That alone feels exciting to me. It may start with audio but our ambitions are BIG, we believe that AI characters *can* drive significant & personalized media in a way that hasn't been seen before & as more people onboard/grown up with voice interfaces that the TAM get bigger and bigger. And, maybe most importantly, I get excited about giving another avenue to human creativity in a world where lots more people have more free time. In a world of abundance, Humans will crave creative tools to express themselves and we think this is the next generation of them.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
Our team is special: We come from the combined world of media & tech and understand how content shifts over time. All three of us have been on the forefront of this before. Many other people in AI content are building for now, we're building for what's coming because we've seen it. We're also approaching AI character voice-chat with a goals / experience first based approach. Our competition is interested in idle chat, allowing the user to determine what happens & we want to program (in the content sense) what these things can actually do. Finally, an emphasis on making humans part of the creative loop in AI. We think that people will want to create & put their name on our experiences and share them with their friends, making them social in a way that our competitors have never tried or don't seem interested in.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
I was lucky enough to be employee number 2 at Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (Producer/Writer/Head of Digital), to see the show become a massive success and continue onto the Tonight Show. One of my proudest achievements there was fighting execs at NBC to allow us to upload clips of the show on YouTube while the company was embroiled in a lawsuit with the platform. To me, it was an existential risk *not* to be on YT at the time & Jimmy agreed. We'd already been first to many platforms with success & knew YT was next. We finally got the company to relent by using data to point out that our competition was increasing their ratings based on their YT clips. We soared past them in subscriber numbers to become the #1 Late Night Show on that platform, a distinction it still holds to this day. This taught me so many lessons but, first and foremost, that it's possible to fight for something you *see* is coming.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
My wife is a novelist and teaches writing to young people (kids & teens) and watching her play an early alpha showed me there was something here. She's not an AI enthusiast (in fact, a bit of the opposite) but I saw how voice-interaction opened the door to an entirely different sort of interaction with fictional characters. She was suddenly part of the story not just an observer. Her face lit up while she was talking through the experience and I realized, 'Oh, this might be a totally different way of approaching creative interactions.' Then, I saw the same thing with my teenage daughters. They immediately took to it and I realized there prob is something larger going on here.
