Chasing a new puck

I formally stepped away from my day-to-day role at Animoto last February, leaving it in the incredibly capable hands of Beth Forester , who became CEO. After nearly a decade at the company, Beth was more than ready for the role, and over the past year, I’ve been thrilled to see her leadership in action. Animoto is in excellent hands, and as both a proud co-founder and an avid user, I’m excited to see what the future holds for the company and product.

This past year has given me time to reflect on my journey at Animoto and I’m proud for many reasons. One of the things I find myself most proud of was working with my co-founders in the early days to will something into existence that hadn’t been done before, but was clearly something that should exist. Online video creation seems so obvious now, but it wasn’t back in 2006 when we founded Animoto.

We had an awesome opportunity to invent the future we wanted to see.

Reminds me of a line from one of my favorite Shel Silverstein poems:

“Just 'cause somethin' ain't been done, don't mean it can't be did.”

At TED last year, Chris Anderson closed the conference by raising a question that I haven’t been able to get out of my head ever since: what does it mean to be human in a post-AI world?

AI clearly has awesome potential to improve our lives, but it also risks accelerating some concerning trends, like rising inactivity, increasing screen time, and declining happiness.

It’s a question I’ve decided to tackle head-on.

My Animoto co-founder, Jason Hsiao , and I are teaming up again to try to help create the post-AI world we want to see, where technology empowers us to live healthier lives and better embrace our humanity.

The name of our company is HumanUp and I look forward to sharing more about what we’re building in the coming months.