How Tim Shea and Ez Blaine Are Using AI to Build Million-Dollar Brands: Super Vision Studio | S2 Ep. 153
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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founders 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, changing the world for positive, maybe not

Who knows? And I'm going to talk to you too, 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. Before 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, him 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. So we're not interested in reverse engineering existing brands better, cheaper, and faster. We're designing and

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, you know, 20 some odd years after you've been an entrepreneur for long enough. They, I think they, they tattoo the letter E on your forehead. You get the, 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 he could go, go do your thing. So yeah, so that's my story. Yeah.

Oh, man, Tim, that makes me laugh. Nice to meet you, everyone. Daniel, thank you for this. My name's Ez Blaine. I'm, you know, CCO, co-founder of Supervision, and I'm excited to talk about AI with you. 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 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

like focused vision and going to 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 it can get stuff done in efficient ways.

um, find new ways to kind of do certain things. But also I've always had a knife 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, um,

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, 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 know, they're going to 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. 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. 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. 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, right? 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, right?

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. And 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 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, you know, 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,

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 with flash. We were tinkering with macro media. We were DVDs. We were always just trying to push the boundary. So it's the same thing. So for me, when we know we started talking about, you know, supervision and what we're trying to do is like this opportunity with AI is,

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 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. It's like we're supercharged 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. Wow. We really are like superhuman. I think we, we, 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, 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 1000 ideas and then I can't even decide which one to go with. I'm like, it's almost like, Oh,

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,

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. I was going to write a screenplay. I was going to 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 through the multi-agent system that taps into these different business signals. And it looks for what we call weak P&L models. So companies that have really thin margins or really traditionally poorly run industries where we know that AI can make an outsized difference.

We sort of put it through the gauntlet and 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. You know, then, you know, if 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 with the thing go. But that's, that's really the power of AI and multi-agent AI is that it gives you the option to explore lots of compute space and

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. 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, 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? It's a great question. I think a lot of people are kind of struggling with this, but, you know, 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 store in London where,

you've got like pens and all types of stuff and they would launch a new spray paint kit. I'm like, oh shit, that's dope. Sorry if we can't swear. Bleak that out. But I would see a new spray paint and I'd pick it up and I'm going to buy that or there's a new pen or cranks come out with a 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

the relationship is always just a bit about tools, right? I was a massive fan, I still am, of Joshua Davis. He 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 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 AOL is just another tool. So when I hear the kind of elitist views of how it could be done, I'm like, let's not get so, let's just be so myopic with it and let's understand that creativity 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 this 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 was magic potions it's like 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 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 quality if you're like oh no shit 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. And as I said, we're just going to get supercharged. So I think everyone should just embrace it, man. It's time to go.

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, 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?

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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, right?

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 explain it.

Right. You have to kind of show it, you know, so as an icon chat in the beginning, we're like, all right, we got to 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, right.

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 and

um, 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, exploreable 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, uh,

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 a house and we told 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 and realizing listen let's get out of theoretical here's what it is these sunglasses will

we're co-created everything you see here was co-created 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

No, 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 gonna, 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 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 AI co-created sunglasses. The sunglasses have a, what we call a deep fake camouflage buried in them. So if you're wearing the sunglasses around town, someone takes your picture, they're going to see you.

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 was just the tip of the iceberg.

Wow. I mean, I'm trying to wrap my head around that. I have to see it. Like you're saying, some of this stuff I feel like it's almost unbelievable. So 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 this deep fake. I mean, that's a whole nother 30 minute conversation we could have. Yeah, we got to do it.

This has been great. Tim and Ez, I'm very excited to see 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 endless. The great thing is 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.

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