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

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

In this episode of Founder's Story, host Daniel Robbins welcomes Tim Shea and Ez Blaine, the visionary co-founders of Super Vision Studio. Together, they explore the transformative role of AI in reimagining brand creation and innovation, with a focus on luxury streetwear and beyond.Key Highlights:Super Vision Studio’s Mission: Tim and Ez discuss how their AI-driven venture studio is co-creating brands that push the boundaries of what was once possible, delivering new consumer experiences that redefine industries.Luxury Streetwear Meets AI: The duo shares the story behind their groundbreaking product—AI co-created sunglasses under the brand NeuThrone. These sunglasses feature "deepfake camouflage," designed to protect wearers from facial recognition systems, showcasing how AI intersects with fashion and privacy.AI as a Creative Partner: Ez reflects on AI as a tool for amplifying creativity, challenging traditional notions of art and design, and empowering creators to think and work in entirely new ways.The Power of Venture Studios: Tim explains their approach to using AI-driven insights to incubate and launch brands, creating a model that is agile, scalable, and future-focused.Expanding Horizons: From retail to technology, Tim and Ez reveal their plans to disrupt multiple industries, leveraging AI to create products and brands that stand out in a crowded market.Takeaways:AI is not a replacement for creativity—it’s a catalyst for innovation.Personalization and customization will shape the future of consumer products, with AI enabling unique, tailored experiences.The possibilities for AI-driven brand creation are endless, opening doors for creators around the world to innovate with fewer barriers.Connect with Super Vision Studio:Website: supervision.studioExplore their AI-powered sunglasses: NeuThrone.comAbout the Guests:Tim Shea and Ez Blaine, the co-founders of Super Vision Studio, bring years of entrepreneurial and creative expertise to their mission of redefining branding and consumer experiences through the power of AI.Don’t miss this inspiring conversation on the future of creativity, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence!Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/FOUNDERSAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Gambling problem? Visit connectsontario.ca. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have two guests. I always like to have two guests because it's just an added head of talking information than just a one-on-one conversation because I feel like sometimes two people

don't even have the exact same thoughts and that's why we have two partners here, Tim Shea and Ez 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, you know changing the world for positive maybe not who knows and I'm gonna talk to you

too because I'm curious about not only what you're doing with your funds, 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. Before we dive so deep into this conversation, because we're gonna 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 wanna 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, there's 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. So 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 in the big buildings anymore. They're like, this guy's an entrepreneur, he's going to go change the world. So go do your thing. So yeah, that's my story. Tim, that makes me laugh. Nice to meet you everyone. Daniel, thank you for this. My name is Ez Blaine. I'm a CCO, co-founder of Supervision and I'm excited to talk about AI with you. For me, I've always been that, 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 just 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 you're 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, 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. Me and Tim, we've got like 15 years of us doing a whole bunch of side projects. And 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 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, like 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. Well, I think there's a lot of people that are entrepreneurs that 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 curious there's a lot of talks and now that you're a fund and you're obviously gonna be funding other people and I'm sure you know they're gonna you're gonna 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 you know hundreds of employees to get to unicorn status or really high valuations. And 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're building and incubating brands in-house. We're spinning off brands ourselves. We're betting on ourselves. 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. I 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. You need servers, you need people, you need designers, you need a whole bunch of things. 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 an infinite compute space to sort of argue with each other about what to do and what options are. And I see that future in the sort of near to medium term where you can have AI agents figuring out a lot of really hard problems for you, or at least where Ez 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. You know, 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 to destroy the world

and how it's going to attack in people's jobs and stuff, we were just like, listen, there's been so many shifts on 42. So I've seen black and white TVs, CDs, records, mini discs, MP3, 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 in this tinker. Right. Something new came out, we were tinkering with Flash, we were

tinkering with Macromedia. We were DVDs, we were always just trying to push the boundary. So it's the same thing. So for me, when we started talking about supervision and what we're trying to do was like, this opportunity with AI is essentially super charging what we could do. Like back in the day, I would spend like 15 hours

trying to figure out how to do codes on 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 like we're supercharged and I think for us it's 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 to the sands. Let's understand this technology is transformative

and let's be in the first wave. Wow, we really are like superhuman. I think we always think about like ships in our brain is when we merge humans and machines, but you're right as we've kind of already merged 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 it's like AI gives me 1,000 ideas and then I can't even decide which one to go with. I'm like, it's almost like overload, like unlimited possibilities are creating like overload of options. How do 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. I always think like, 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 gonna write a book for me, I was gonna write a screenplay, I was gonna write an email. And now we know 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

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And then we give some of those ideas a small amount of breathing room. We give it a small leash to see if that sprouts green shoots. And if it does, then we go full blown with it. Then if it really takes off, then we'll spin it off. We'll create its own corporation. We'll create its own operational leadership with the thing go. will create its own operational leadership with 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. And 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, 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, the number one art chosen for a competition was AI generated. Is that legit art? Or if somebody uses AI to create something, what does that say about them being a creative

or an artist? What are your thoughts there? It's a great question. I think a lot of people are kind of struggling with this, but you know, from my perspective, when I would go into like, the London Graph design center, 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 be like, oh shit, that's dope. Sorry, if we can't swear, bleep that out. But I would see a new spray paint and I'll pick it up and I'm gonna buy that or there's a new pen or cranks come out with a new tool 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 am, of Joshua Davis, who was a computational designer. So he would use code to make art. And I think that's a very similar thing, that was shown in MoMo, shown in different places, right?

And we appreciate it. You see some of the computational art on, you know, your Apple screen when you got the screensaver. People love that screensaver. That's computational art So for me it was like that's just another form and a I was 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 Like let's just be so myopic with it and let's understand that creativity it knows no bounds. As humans, we continue to expand our creativity and how we use 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 gonna be next? Some magic potions, back in be next. Some magic potions back in the day was magic potions. People putting herbs together and you know all that kind of stuff they were 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 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 you're, you as an artist, I think is 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 gonna 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 quality, if you're like, oh no, shit, let's just go. I know what that is. I know people are gonna resonate with that. So there's, I think we're gonna continue to have this relationship where machine and humans always gonna be interconnected And I said we're just gonna be get super charged. So I think everyone should just embrace it man. It's time to go

Like that can't wait for my humanoid that can paint me a painting. I feel like that's gonna be very interesting It's like new technology with old technology. I'm curious in the future, 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. But 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. We've got our eyes on technology. I mean, this, you know, these, entertainment content. We've got our eyes on technology. I mean, this, you know, these AI can build other AIs, right? I mean, there's so much that we can do. So yeah, we have no trepidations about how big we're going to go. But yeah, we chose retail first.

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 that pitching, right? It 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. So as an icon, Chad, in the beginning, we're like, all right, we gotta go, let's pick the hardest one first

and let's show people 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 high row as opposed to a lot of the misconceptions about AI around it being, it always regresses to the mediocre. It regresses to the silly. And 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. Yeah. Wow. Did you want to, did you want to add? No, no, I think, I 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 is 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 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 told the story

The law is 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 and realizing, listen, let's get out of theoretical, here's what is these sunglasses were co created, everything you see here was co created AI. It's just to us is oh, you see people's eyes 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. That'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 wanna get in touch with you

and they wanna find out more about these launches and everything that you're doing, how can they do that? Absolutely. Check us out on supervision.studio. That's the studio's website. I would definitely encourage folks to check out Newthrone. It's N-E-U-T-H-R-O-N-E.com. So newthrone.com. Sign up. We just launched a pair of these AI co-created sunglasses. The sunglasses have a, we call it 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. So go to newthrone.com, put in your email address, be part of the squad. There's tons of stuff coming out. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Wow, I mean that I'm trying to wrap my head around that. Like I gotta, I have to see it. Like you're saying some of this stuff I feel like is it's almost like unbelievable.

So you like you said, 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. I mean, that's a whole nother 30 minute conversation we could have but this is Yeah, we gotta do it. This is 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. I love how you even put that like co-created with AI

I mean the future is like the possibilities are. People from any, the great thing is, people from anywhere around the world can create, even if they have like limited resources, which to me is like even more exciting. But thank you so much for joining us today on Founder's Story. 100%, Daniel, we had a great time. Thank you so much.