DeepMind PM Quit to Make IP Programmable Like Money

A 25-year-old quit his "dream job" as the youngest PM at DeepMind to chase what seemed impossible: making intellectual property as programmable as money. Most would call it career suicide.

But Jason Zhao and his co-founder SY Park weren't just building another crypto startup. They were architecting Story Protocol—a $2 billion blockchain venture that's rewriting the rules of creativity in the age of AI. With three funding rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and hundreds of teams building on their platform, they're turning the internet into what SY calls an "IP Legoland."

This is the untold story of how two founders identified the collision between AI's infinite content creation and blockchain's digital scarcity, then built the infrastructure to solve what they call the attention monetization dilemma that's been plaguing creators for decades.

SY: Hello, this is SY. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Story. We're building the world's IP blockchain and with a particular focus on building the programmable intellectual property layer. We're one of the fastest growing ecosystem, IP media related, apps that actually leverage and generative AI. We were very fortunate enough to actually have raised great funding with a set of very supportive investors. The company got 3 rounds of funding, and every single round was led by Andreson Horowitz.

We have several hundreds of teams who are actually building on top of story with millions of total addressable users who are using the apps that are building on top of story. That's been very exciting. What's been most encouraging is, we have an incredible team. I previously found a consumer app that sold to Cacao for half a billion dollars. We have Jason Zhao, who was the youngest PM at DeepMind. We have a very unique mix of talents between IP media content, AI, and Web 3.

I'm a serial entrepreneur that's been focused on solving problems at the intersection of technology and content for more than a decade. I went to Oxford and I studied this degree called Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and I thought the two biggest levers around impacting society was one was actually going into politics, the second was actually going into media.

SY: So the first company that I built was a startup called Byline, which was a craft-funded journalism platform. The chief reason why I built the platform was that the advertising driven model for news and journalism was getting collapsed and all these independent journalists, content creators were actually getting unemployed and they cannot produce their quality journalism and investigative journalism to report on the biggest issues of the time 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-Substack and the company didn't scale in the way that I wanted to. Not many projects were getting funded, but I still kept my yearning and ambition for really fixing the business model around content, and I went to the opposite of journalism, which is a mobile serialized fiction platform.

SY: It was basically capitalizing on the fact that on the smartphone, people want stackable, bite-size episodic content with cliffhangers. Instead of reading a Kindle e-book, they want a serialized story that are gonna be released almost daily on your phone. It was not an easy journey. When I first started Byline I was 22, 23, and then when I started Radish, I was 25, and I was lucky and fortunate enough to have actually found an inflection point in the business and scaled up from 2018 and the startup ended up getting acquired by Kakao for almost a half a billion dollars in 2020, and I left.

It was a good run, but one of the chief reasons I ended up sold the company was that realizing the fact that I'm just one of many small fish in that content ecosystem. I was throwing a bunch of money on marketing to big tech companies to get my content noticed and discovered. I was spending a lot of money on content. I was fighting this zero-sum war against other content platforms to get more attention.

Jason: So I'm 25. When I was at Stanford, I actually spent almost all my time there in the AI department. I was doing AI research with PhDs and after graduation, I was actually the youngest PM at DeepMind. So I was just working there and it was a kind of a dream job in many ways. So what I was doing was taking the abstract research that came out of projects like AlphaGo and AlphaZero, these game playing reinforcement learning agents, and finding ways to translate this zero to one research into products that could actually commercialize that could actually help people rather than just being showcases.

It was a great role, but there were two reasons really that I found it almost unbearable, and I had to quit. Even though it was initially my dream job, so number one was around 2020, 2021 when I was at DeepMind, I started rereading the Bitcoin white paper, Ethereum white paper, and this was DeFi Summer. Started reading Uniswap white paper, Maker white paper, all these core DeFi protocols, and what struck me was that these are pieces of research published by anyone on the Internet.

Jason: It's not just five big companies that can do AI research in blockchain. It's very egalitarian. Anyone in the world can think about it because in AI you need economies of compute, of data, and of capital to do research, so only I at DeepMind or someone at OpenAI could do that, whereas in blockchain you have people all around the world publishing these white papers and then within months they would implement them in smart contracts and then months later there would be millions of dollars being transacted.

People would try to fork it. They would try to build apps on top of it. They would even try to hack it. And so that's just a very open evolutionary Darwinian grounds where research was translating to production in a very, very fast and exciting way. But what was even more exciting was the fact that you look around and there's not many mainstream use cases, especially outside of finance.

Jason: To be honest, if you look at the biggest businesses in the world, it's not JPMorgan, it's Facebook, it's Apple, it's Netflix, it's these consumer companies that create media and create culture and allow others to contribute and remix that culture. So ultimately that's what people spend their time doing. They're not on Charles Schwab for 10 hours a day managing their 401k or their finances. They're on TikTok, they're on Netflix, they're on Facebook.

So to me, the idea of blockchain as a source of digital property rights was extremely exciting and because I had worked in AI, I understood that AI was about to reshape creativity. AI was about to create infinite abundance of content. You and I from our bedrooms, we can create Hollywood level content, share it with the entire world, and that's a great thing, but how do you actually create incentives for people to create content?

That's gonna be a big problem and it can only be solved by blockchain because blockchains are digital scarcity, provable scarcity, and AIs are infinite abundance.

Jason: So my co-founder Jason Zhao, I met him two years ago. He was very special. He's a student of philosophy and computer science at Stanford. For me, the best crypto and Web3 blockchain entrepreneurs are first, a philosopher, and second, a technical visionary. If you look at Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, he's not just a computer scientist or technical visionary. His writing is incredibly thoughtful. He's a philosopher, he's a political thinker, he's an economic thinker.

So the way that I'm SY we were both in the same accelerator and we didn't know each other at the time, but then the next day we got coffee, we got to know each other, and it became very obvious that SY, he's a visionary and he's an experienced entrepreneur. He knows how to build a business and he knows all the real problems that people are facing in the world of entertainment, in the world of IP, in the world of media.

Jason: The fundamental thesis in this white paper is what does the world look like and what do we have to do in order to make intellectual property fully programmable. The fundamental principle behind the white paper is that just like blockchains made money programmable, we will also through story unlock an Internet where creativity or intellectual property, where ideas have property rights.

And not just property rights, but that those property rights can be programmed so that every piece of content on the Internet, whether it's on Netflix, whether it's on Twitter, whether it's on a decentralized application, it's registered on story and has an API for rights that anyone whether they're a developer, an individual or a creator can interact with that's the vision and it's really about the next era of creativity.

We really do think that building this infrastructure will lead to a renaissance where instead of having the same movie, 4 Avengers movies, 5 Spider-Man movies, 7 Harry Potters, and then many more sequels, what we want is a future where culture is more vibrant, culture is more bottoms up, and it's more owned by the creators and their communities.

A16Z Partner: So the big vision is that data and intellectual property become like Lego bricks. The idea would be someone could create a, let's say a superhero or fantasy character, the new Harry Potter or something character or a story. It could be a game object. It could be a piece of data used in an AI algorithm, any kind of intellectual property.

The vision would be that one person or a set of people can create some objects and then someone else can come along. I'll take your character and I'll write a story about it and then someone else comes along and creates a game about it and it becomes like Lego bricks in the sense of you think about Lego bricks, you have one piece and one piece and you recombine them in different ways, but each person that creates a brick has the control of setting the terms.

And so the beautiful idea here is that you create a really inclusive participatory creative economy and so anyone can come in and join no matter how big or small you are, you don't need to be big, a big company to be able to license your data.

A16Z Partner: If you look at these AI systems, they've basically sucked in all the data on the internet. So you think about Google, you search for something, you still click through and go to these websites, and those websites make money on advertising and paywalls and other things. In an AI world, you're not gonna need to go to the websites. So we're very clearly, quickly entering a world where a lot of these creators will not have an economic model anymore.

Why would I pay an illustrator when I can just go to Mid-Journey and create an illustration? And of course, Mid-Journey and all these services probably learned a lot of their AI from that data, but they're not paying them any money.

So what needs to happen on a first principle level is for users and content creators to declare, don't fuck with my data. I own this data. This is my sovereignty, my precious private property.

SY: What would have taken hundreds of pages of legal docs, actually we abstract away and we put that into a set of small number of parameters revenue share, geography, commercial or non-commercial usage. You actually set the parameter right configure your parameters around the usage of your IP and you program that into the IP and you put it on the blockchain now.

What would have taken hundreds of legal docs, an army of lawyers, you can do that permissionlessly, frictionlessly, without any intermediaries, and you can license an IP, you can interact with an IP. You can repurpose an IP. Ultimate goal for Story is that to the creator, to the developer, to anyone that interacts with the blockchain, they don't have to understand a single thing about how blockchain works.

Kaiser (Sekai demo): So there's a story opening there's a theme song here and then on the right side you have more information about the story you can expand it and then see more information here like different characters, location, the world, and theme song and here you can create the story right side you can see more of the story that you're creating in real time if you scroll down here these are all the characters, the branch, and then the world so you can choose between different worlds like Azuki is the garden here.

Or if you have like board apes or pudgy penguins, you can choose that too. And if you select the world, then you can import different characters from that world. And you can also create your character really easily with AI, create different locations and then here you can update dialogue here with AI and that's all AI generated voice, or you can upload your own voice.

Everything here is minted as a story protocol IP asset, and then once you create the story, then you can set licensing terms. You'll be able to say I wanna earn 50% commission if somebody else uses my story or uses a character.

SY: Just like with Kaiser, just like with Mahogen, they're doing something that they wanted to do but they couldn't do without story. So that's the most important thing is not the support we're giving them, but the fact that we're solving a problem that couldn't be solved otherwise.

And then on top of that, of course, as a company we really want to make sure that the builders succeed on story. So in the example of Sekai with Kaiser, the CEO and founder, he has key access to our office. He comes in multiple times a week to use our office. We've introduced him to all of our best investors and got him a seed rounds led by A16Z, and it's almost like we're helping him incubate the project.

So no other project cares as deeply, I think, about just making sure that these partners succeed because for us at Story, if our developers and our entrepreneurs that are using our software, they're not succeeding, then we're not succeeding.

SY: We're at a massive crossroad. 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. But at the same time, it's in a massively huge danger, and I think that for me that is actually turning the internet into an IP Legoland.

Give every creator an amazing set of IP Legos. Imagine that millions of characters created by your fellow creators, millions of games that are created by other fellow creators while giving them fair compensation attribution of provenance, and now you have this magic wand of generative AI. Combine these two things, we'll see explosion of creativity. We'll see a digital renaissance.

I above all feel extremely grateful because I've struggled for a long time for my last startup because I've had cash crunch issues. I've had team issues. I think I was a pretty immature entrepreneur. I fucked up on many things, so I struggled a lot in this kind of situation that I'm in with being able to partner with the world's best team.

SY: When I first came to Silicon Valley when I first came to America, all these type of employees that I'm actually partnering with, they were untouchable. And also this kind of investors like Andreessen Horowitz, like the world's top tier investor, they're untouchable to me, and I'm really grateful that I can have this massive ambitious vision, I've had this vision from the get-go, but AI is making it a lot more relevant, a lot more urgent, what we are building, and I feel like I've been waiting for this.

Usually startups take 8 to 10, for 12 years to actually start working. I know that because I've experienced it. I know how hard it is. I knew that was gonna happen. I feel like I've been waiting for this appointment for more than a decade right now I have this chance and this is a problem that I think needs urgent solving and also it's not just about solving that problem.

If we enable this primitive, we think we can actually open up a very empowering world for creators. That gets me that's very exciting because I struggled for a long time and now I'm finally getting the chance and life is long.