CEO & Co-Founder at Marlo
Austin Chen
Austin is a second time founder with an exit to Apple. He previous built Asaii, an artist discovery platform (signing Alina Baraz, Khalid, Alice Merton) that Apple acquired to kickstart their in-house record label & Apple Music for Artists. Most recently, he was a product director at TikTok looking after creator monetization bringing products like TikTok Shop, Taylor's Eras Tour, & Super Fans to market driving hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Questions & Answers
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We've built countless creator tools (content distribution, analytics, fandom, commerce) at the largest platforms in the world (Apple, TikTok) AND we have deep experience with foundation models and RLHF (Scale AI). We know the space (and its problems) and we have the tools to fix it. Team Marlo will bring a new agentic tech stack to unlock creator monetization at scale.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
The social media ecosystem over indexes in unstructured data: posts, videos, captions, emails, DMs. This ecosystem is messy and clogged; creator monetization is dependent on brokers (talent coordinators) that constantly turnover. The agent paradigm is going to bring companies operating in the social media ecosystem into the modern era. We are excited about the opportunity to build deep vertical AI in the social media ecosystem.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
In 300+ conversations with prospects, the reliance on talent coordinators & assistants (with extremely high turnover) was our big aha moment. Most prospects were already across multiple social media tools, but constantly hired talent coordinators & assistants (~60k yearly) to manage these tools, inbound, etc. When we found out that the average tenure of these coordinators was around one year, we built conviction that AI talent coordinators is a powerful wedge into the social media ecosystem.
