How Tim Shea and Ez Blaine Are Using AI to Build Million-Dollar Brands: Super Vision Studio | S2 Ep. 153

0:04Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have two guests. I always like to have two guests than just a one-on-one conversation. And that's why we have two partners here, Tim Shea and Es Blaine. They're the founders of Supervision Studio. And you're doing something with AI. And that's why I bring this up because everyone has their perspective of AI, whether it's good, bad, changing the world for positive, maybe not, who knows. And I'm going to talk to you two, because I'm curious about not only what you're doing with your fund, you're reimagining luxury streetwear and all the companies that will come about, but the impacts that you see AI is having with our society.

0:42Before we dive so deep into this conversation, because we're going to get deep today, I'm curious as to your stories. What was the spark for the two of you, Tim and Ez, that you said, I want to be an entrepreneur? No, I appreciate that. Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for having us on the show. So me personally, so I'm Tim Shea. I'm the founder and CEO of Supervision studio. We are an AI driven venture studio focused on building future brands. So future brands has a couple of wrinkles to it. Basically, we are co-creating new brands from scratch with AI. We're co-creating new brands that have some nuance or some new attribute that would not have been possible pre-AI.

1:27So we're not interested in reverse engineering existing brands, better, cheaper and faster. We're designing brands that could not have been possible pre-AI. We recognize that AI creates new experiences, new ways of interacting with consumers, a whole slate of things. And so we're interested in writing the future in that way. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 some odd years. After you've been an entrepreneur for long enough, I think they tattoo the letter E on your forehead. You get the starlet letter and they don't let you into big buildings anymore they're like this guy's an entrepreneur he's gonna go change the world so uh you go go do your thing so yeah so that's my story oh man tim that makes me laugh nice to meet you everyone daniel thank you for this um my name is blaine i'm um you know cco co-founder of um of supervision and um i'm excited to talk about um ai with you um for me i've always been that you know I started out in graffiti art so my thing was like always a little bit left and a little bit sub and always looking to cut some corners and to me that's that's 100 % where entrepreneurship lies it lies in the idea of like let me get something done and there's a big vision a very kind of like focused vision and gonna go and execute and that's what I love about the entrepreneur and you know I've been in industry and advertising and creative industry for like 25 years but I've always been focused on even within it having that entrepreneurial mindset so we can get stuff done in efficient ways um find new ways to kind of do certain things but also I've always had an eye for making stuff happen and always been doing projects so me and Tim have we've got we've got like 15 years of us doing a whole bunch of side projects and and you know I think this is must be like our sixth business that we've started but um it's all about you know keeping it going And entrepreneurship for me is kind of like where as an artist, I feel most at home.

3:30Like when it's set in stone and it's very structured, I'm not comfortable. I like the ambiguity. I like searching for something new and creating something super fresh. I think there's a lot of people that are entrepreneurs, I would say they find comfort in being uncomfortable or in the uncomfort. I'm curious, there's a lot of talks and now that you're a fund and you're obviously going to be funding other people, and I'm sure you're going to want a return on that investment eventually. And as a fund, I'm curious, there's a lot of talks around like the one person billion dollar company. It used to be you needed hundreds of employees to get to unicorn status or really high valuations.

4:15And now with AI, you can have so many AI agents or the ability to have much less employees, but drive significant larger amounts of revenue. How are you seeing this? I love that. I love that. So one quick thing. So we're going with a venture studio model. So what we're doing is we are building and incubating brands in-house. We're spinning off brands ourselves. We're betting on ourselves. So we have a combination of technology, capital, and domain expertise. And we're using that to fuel the inception of brand new brands that we spin off. I love your comment about AI agents and the sort of company of one.

4:59I think it was a gentleman from Sequoia that has a bunch of great quotes about this, about like, look, you used to be 25 years ago, you would need$2 million to build a website. right? You need servers, you need people, you need designers, you need a whole bunch of things. You know, fast forward 20 some odd years, you need a really smart group of folks that know how to get things done. They've seen all the chess games played and they kind of see how things come together. And they can use AI agents who have been trained as certain types of personas, right? CEO, CFO, CMO, VC, customer, and you can feed them problems and you can give them, you know, an infinite compute space to sort of argue with each other about, you know, what to do and what options are.

5:52And I see that future in the sort of, you know, near to medium term where you can have AI agents figuring out a lot of really hard problems for you, or at least where Es and I can say, hey, AI agents, we're going to run to lunch real quick. Can you use this infinite compute space to debate a little bit? We'll be back in about an hour. We want to see a couple hundred options and we'll make some decisions that way. So we've kind of woven that idea into our DNA and are super excited about how this kind of like shakes out in the near future. Yeah. I think for me, it's like we realized AI was rather than us talking about how it's going destroy the world and you know how it's going to attack in people's jobs and stuff we were just like listen there's been so many shifts you know i'm 42 so i've seen you know black and white tvs you know cds records mini discs mp3s you know downloaded stuff cracked software i've seen it all right and so for me it was it was another thing and especially through when i kind of like was definitely honing my craft in the early 2000s there was this idea of like let's get stuff and let's tinker right something new came out we were tinkering in flash we'll be taking in macromedia we would dvds we're always just trying to push the boundary so it's the same thing so for me when we know we start talking about you know supervision and what we're trying to do is like this opportunity with ai is essentially like supercharging what we can do like back in the day I would spend like 15 hours trying to figure out how to do code some CSS and it would take me two seconds now I'm building websites in Framer in like 30 seconds so for us it's like now we're superhuman and that's where kind of the supervision idea came from is it's like we're super charged and I think for us it was really just about adopting that and it's being really bullish on it let's not let's not let's not be fearful let's take our head out the sands Let's understand this technology is transformative and let's be in the first wave.

7:57We really are like superhuman. I think we always think about like chips in our brain is when we merge humans and machines. But you're right, as we've kind of already merged humans and machines, it's just we work together in a different way. I know you have New Throne and I know you're disrupting and you're really first to market with things. I'm curious with the ability to come up with, like you said, Tim, like hundreds of ideas. How do you even choose one? I find like that's where I might, you know, I fall sometimes is like AI gives me 1000 ideas. And then I can't even decide which one to go with.

8:36I'm like, it's almost like overload, like unlimited possibilities are creating like overload of options. How did you say, you know what, this is what we want to move forward with this company. and then how do you go from there? Yeah. Yeah. No, look, I think first of all, you're the smart person that knows which of the options are the right one. You're the smart one that knows which one to choose and then iterate on. And that's why I think that there's this misconception that AI fully replaces people, right? It doesn't necessarily replace people. You can't just bolt a chatbot onto a website and expect magic to happen.

9:16I always think like, you know, what was the first thing you asked ChatGPT to do versus what you now know is possible? It's sort of laughable to think about like, you know, I can't believe I was going to write a book for me. It was going to write a screenplay. It was going to write an email. And now we know it's there's a bit of a learning curve to become a power user with these tools. Yeah. So we knew that the AI creates new dimensions for you to explore. So what we do is we tap these AI agents through the multi-agent system that taps into these different business signals. And it looks for what we call weak P &L models.

10:00So companies that have really thin margins or really poorly, traditionally poorly run industries, where we know that AI can make an outsized difference. We sort of put it through the gauntlet. We let it come up with different options. And then we give some of those ideas a small amount of breathing room. We give it a small leash to see if it sprouts green shoots. And if it does, then we go full blown with it. If it really takes off, then we'll spin it off. We'll create its own corporation. We'll create its own operational leadership and let the thing go. But that's really the power of AI, multi-agent AI, is that it gives you the option to explore lots of compute space, pick ideas, try them and iterate really fast.

10:48And, you know, we've kind of woven AI into all those processes coming up with the brand ethos, the logo, the website, the socials, the viral marketing playbook, the product design. You know, it really, really helps us move much, much faster. So as I'm curious, from the creator's perspective, it seems like you're very creative and you've been a creator, not just creating, but you're also like you said, you were into art many years ago and you've been big on the creative side. there's a huge discussion around like uh you know the number one art chosen for a competition was ai generated you know is that legit art or if somebody uses ai to create something like what does that say about them being a creative or an artist what are your thoughts there um it's a great question i think a lot of people are kind of struggling with this but you know um you know from my perspective like when i would go in i would go into like you know the london graphic design center it's like a it's a store in london where you've got like pens and all types of stuff and they would launch a new spray paint kit and oh shit that's dope but i would i would see a new a new a new um a spray paint and i'll pick it up and i'll go buying that or there's a new pen or crinks come out with a new um new tool or there's this new whatever it is but i always saw it as a way to kind of further continue exploring right so i think as artists our nature is to kind of continue to explore our mediums different mediums and kind of search for something new and novel and that's kind of like where i've always been so to me ai and the fact that it's weaving its way into society and different worlds that have been traditionally kind of been you know only you know done by hand i think that's perfect because to me the relationship is always just a bit about tools right i was a massive fan i still one of joshua davis who was a it was a computational designer so he would use code to make art and i think that's a very similar thing that that was shown in momo shown in different places right and we we appreciate it you see some of the computational art on you know your apple screen when you got the the screensaver people love that screensaver that's computational art so for me it was like that's just another form and al is another tool so when i hear the kind of kind of elitist views of how it could be done i'm like let's not get so um like let's don't be so myopic with it and let's understand that creativity it knows no bounds as we as humans we continue to expand our creativity and how we how um how we use our our minds to kind of create things and those things that we could create are what we're supposed to do i think innately as humans we're supposed to be creating so when new tools come it's ai now who knows what it's going to be next you know some magic potions back in the day it was magic potions people putting herbs together and you know all that kind of stuff they've probably seen the same way so for me it's just like let's not let's not let's not get so kind of strict structured i can still appreciate something that's done by fully by hand but at the end of the day that's gone through someone's eyes they've researched that they've looked at something and then they've kind of they've created an output right it's the same thing with me in ai it's just doing it rapidly it's just doing it really quickly so your you as an artist i think it's about being curatorial right how making a decision on what you see that moves you and then you having the domain expertise to understand oh i feel like that's also going to move someone else so that's how you know we start to make decisions when we see something's hot it's hot sometimes it's like very kind of like qualitative you're like oh no that's let's just go i know what that is i know people are going to resonate with that so there's I think we're going to continue to have this relationship where machine and humans are always going to be interconnected.

14:58And as I said, we're just going to be super, super charged. So I think everyone should just embrace it, man. It's time to go. I like that. I can't wait for my humanoid that can paint me a painting. I feel like that's going to be very interesting. It's like new technology with old technology. I'm curious in the future, of your company and your venture studio? What other industries do you have the clothing? What other industries are you looking at in terms of the future? I think the world is our oyster in this regard. We chose to go after retail first. We thought retail would be the most challenging, the most analog business.

15:39But we've got our eyes on you know cpg ai design food we've got our eyes on print we've got our eyes on entertainment content um we've got our eyes on technology i mean this you know these ai can build other ais right i mean there's there's there's so much that we can do um so yeah we have no uh trepidations about how big we're we're gonna go but yeah we we chose we chose retail first um i think one of the hardest things when you're starting something brand new is that pitching, right, is really frustrating. It's hard when you have a vision, you can't really explain it, right? You have to kind of show it, you know?

16:19So as I kind of chatted in the beginning, we're like, all right, we got to go. Let's pick the hardest one first and let's show people what we're talking about. When we say, you know, it's really efficient and when we say it increases dimensionality, this is what we mean. We mean a luxury streetwear brand that is very considered and highbrow, as opposed to a lot of the misconceptions about AI around it being, you know, it always regresses to the mediocre. It regresses to the silly. And, you know, as always had a great way of putting it, this mantra of like, you know, think about how we can show people a considered brand with a dazzling brand universe in a way that was not possible before.

17:03I think that's what it is. And I think even for me, like, as an artist right the page has always been you know explorable space and things there's always that kind of next level of art you know you've got some of your sculptures in your background right you've got certain things in your house that three-dimensional like form is always kind of like coveted and and and looked at in a slight different way so that's why we went with us with our sunglasses because we knew that when people get in their hands and we tell the story the law it's just totally different right so it goes beyond it feeling like this digital very kind of ubiquitous thing it's a tangible thing and i think when we start explaining that to people realizing listen let's get out the theoretical here's here's what it is these sunglasses were co-created everything you see here was co-created with ai it's just to us it's oh you see people's eyes just light up and they get super intrigued so that's kind of one thing i think about for us is why we kind of went with the luxury fashion approach.

18:07No, it's very, I can't wait till it comes out. I can't wait to see it. I think we're running into this world of customization. Like who knows how this is going to, you know, how this will even go in the future and how that'll change. Like does every product look different because it's the product of you? I mean, there's so many avenues. I imagine your venture studio could be busy for the next lifetime and things that you could come out and create. But if people want to get in touch with you and they want to find out more about these launches and everything that you're doing, how can they do that?

18:38Absolutely. Check us out on supervision.studio. That's the studio's website. I would definitely encourage folks to check out New Throne. It's N-E-U-T-H-R-O-N-E.com. So newthrone.com. Sign up. We just launched a pair of these guy co-created sunglasses. The sunglasses have what we call a deep fake camouflage buried in them. So if you're wearing the sunglasses around town, someone takes your picture, the sunglasses hack AI systems and prevent AIs from being able to copy your face. And so we're sort of welcoming a new guard of creatives to come in and sort of opt out. Right. They're opting out and they're creating this sort of like new throne of their own.

19:20So go to newthrone.com, put on your email address, be part of the squad. There's tons of stuff coming out. It's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to wrap my head around that. Like I got it. I have to see it. Like you're saying some of this stuff, I feel like it's almost like unbelievable. So you have to hold it in your hand. You have to see it to even understand it. It sounds amazing. I love that. Like this deep fake. That's a whole nother 30 minute conversation we can have. But we got to do it. This has been great. Tim and as I'm very excited to see, you know, the future of your venture studio and all this co-creation with AI.

19:54I love how you even put that like co-created with AI. I mean, the future is like the possibilities are endless. people from anywhere around the world can create, even if they have limited resources, which to me is even more exciting. But thank you so much for joining us today on Founder Story. 100 % Daniel. We had a great time. Thank you so much.