Decoding Viral Trends with Chelsie Hall of ViralMoment

Chelsie Hall, CEO + Co-founder of AI startup ViralMoment, discusses the power of short-form video analytics with Joan. ViralMoment specializes in AI-powered, machine learning-driven B2B SaaS social intelligence, focusing on platforms like TikTok. They analyze video content beyond hashtags, uncovering its impact on audience beliefs, behaviors, and purchasing decisions.

Chelsie emphasizes the importance of addressing user needs with innovative technology, drawing from her background at Techstars, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon. ViralMoment's client roster includes Coca-Cola, Hulu, Disney, Warner Bros, NBC Universal, Widen + Kennedy, and Delta, benefiting from smarter social measurement tools. Joan is an investor in ViralMoment, who raised a $2.5M Seed Round.

Quotes
🤖 We have built a robot that can watch social videos.
🚫 We're going through a revolution where we used to consume information by reading text, but there's nothing that can understand video (until ViralMoment!)
💰 McDonald's saw a 15% boost in revenue in stores thanks to this. People move together. Every brand now has to be an entertainment company.
💸 Budweiser lost about $29 billion worth of market cap after things went viral there.
🛠️ You don't need a master's degree to build in this space.

Resources
Integrated Innovation Institute @ Carnegie Mellon
McDonald’s Grimace Campaign
Budweiser Market Cap Loss
Puppuccino 

Connect with Chelsie
Email: hello@viralmoment.com
Want to use ViralMoment?

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro & Background
• 5:16 Building ViralMoment
• 10:09 Understanding Social Videos
• 13:27 The Power of Video Virality
• 17:01 Examples of Viral Success and Failure
• 20:44 Metrics of Success for ViralMoment
• 22:13 The Future of Social Video and AI
• 25:07 Addressing Disinformation
• 26:00 Building a Team and Networking
• 29:55 Advice for Getting into the Field
• 32:36 Resources and Tools
• 33:34 Contact Information

Transcript

0:00

Hi, my name is Joan Palmiter Bajorek. I'm on a mission to decrease fluffy hype and talk about the people actually building in AI. Anyone can build in AI, including you. Whether you're terrified or excited, there's been no better time than today to dive in. Now is the time to be curious and future-proof your career, and ultimately, your income. This podcast isn't about white dudes patting themselves on the back. This is about you and me. and all the paths into cool projects around the world. So what's next on your AI roadmap? Let's figure it out together. You ready? This is Your AI Roadmap, the podcast. Hey folks, this is Joan popping in to say a little intro about this episode. This is an episode with Chelsie Hall, who's the CEO of ViralMoment. Disclaimer, I am an investor in this startup. Lucky me, because this startup is killing it. ViralMoment is all about short -form video and analytics and understanding that well and translating that into business opportunities for businesses. Really cool stuff. I met Chelsie Because of an intro, she was at Techstars LA with her co -founder and someone saw her and knows part of my investment thesis, which is about female founders, founders of color, founders who are working in AI, multimodal, it just, it ticks the boxes. So our mutual friend sent me a message, it was like, you have to meet Chelsie. I was like, okay, let's go. Met Chelsie, was so impressed with her ambition. with her professionalism, with how they were already getting customers, how she was translating things directly from the laboratory that she was like, this should be built. Why doesn't this exist yet? Directly to businesses and how it could help them, how it does help them, how she has already huge companies that they work with. So I'm so excited for you to hear this episode. And also I think Chelsie has an amazing perspective on, you could build this in a weekend. Like what is stopping you? Like, let's go! Like, today is one of the most lucky, democratized days ever. Like, so special. Like, go for it. Okay, that was a little bit of a long intro, but I'm super jazzed. Ready? Let's dive in. Hey Chelsie! Hey Joan, how are you doing today? Doing good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so delighted that you had you made the time for me. Would you mind we got some questions for you today? We're gonna talk about you your background project the future of you what you see if you're part of the field and then actual stuff For folks who are not in our field who are interested in joining, especially what you do Would you mind starting with who you are what you're doing? Yeah, definitely. So my name is Chelsie Hall. I am the founder and the CEO of ViralMoment. And we are a really exciting, fun AI startup. We're just headed into our third year now. So we jumped the AI away by just a little bit. And we have built a robot, if you will, that can watch social videos. We can watch millions of social videos every single day and understand what's going on in the world. So you can think if you watch one video and understand everything about it, the audio transcription, the objects on screen, the gestures, you can learn so much and really understand so much about the world. But then it's when you start watching millions of videos every single day and seeing how things change, how things move, you really understand what's happening in the world. And that's what the AI and the company that I've built do. That's awesome. Well, I have to disclaimer, I am an investor, a tiny, tiny investor in your company. So just have to say that about ViralMoment. Okay, so you are now the CEO and co-founder of ViralMoment. What was your path to getting into this type of work? Yeah, great question. Um, I started early career as a product manager. So I've been in technology for some time. Um, I was working in healthcare, helping, you know, just understand my product optimized operating rooms. And we got to help doctors move more efficiently through operating rooms. So it wasn't any kind of crazy AI. It was just a very standard, simple product, but it was important and meaningful. And there I really learned how to understand how we solve people's problems and just understand, you know, how can we build tech that can streamline and make people's lives easier? I went on to get a grad degree from Carnegie Mellon in innovation. So I've got a master's of integrated innovation from there. Again, reinforcing that like build stuff for people that will make people's lives better. I went to work for the Department of Defense and Department of State for a while. I was a subject matter expert with a think tank with them. And my job there was to help them find technologies and work with technologies where we could understand online conversations better. And that led me, I was doing that and I was like, wait a minute, why is every technology in the world look at text, but there's nothing that can understand video. It was driving me crazy. I was like searching and scouring the world for technologies that could make sense of video. And when I was so disappointed by what existed, so I built something and that's what's brought me here. That's awesome. Cool. I know the top of your CV headlines, but it's interesting to hear about the pivots. Could you mention at least, you mentioned your last one, the why statement, but why get the degree? Why, yeah, all those pieces. I think I've never, my whole career, I've like been hungry for more and hungry for the next thing. And that typically like drives me to keep jumping forward. Um, I loved my work when I was working at this healthcare company as a product manager. Um, I think I was just, I knew that I wanted to be building more complex. There was a lot of like, really just exciting stuff out there and exciting technologies that were moving in the world that I wasn't getting exposure to. So. I went to Carnegie Mellon in large part. I was like, I know that's one of the places in the world where they're building the best and the craziest stuff. And I wanted to see it. Um, one of the things I'd love to talk about during this though, is like, if someone's like, Oh, do I need to go get a master's degree to work in this stuff? My like, no, you don't. I think I feel so strongly that anyone in the world right now is like the golden age, you could be building an AI tool right now with, without a lot of the, you know, I think anyone can do it right now. And that's hasn't been possible until now. But. But I did that thing and really enjoyed it. Had a wonderful time. I've always had an entrepreneurial bug. So right out of CMU, I started a design thinking company. It was like a services firm where I was helping out big different companies learn how to innovate. I did a, I worked with Mattel. I worked with a lot of really fun brands, helping them understand how to run these processes. But that led me to my work with this think tank and with the state department, which made me go, oh my gosh, this technology just must exist. So I jumped forward to actually start building the thing that I just saw a gap in the world that needed to be filled. Yeah, well, let's dive into that. I mean, what I really hope for our listeners is that we hopefully get some really concrete details, as much as you can tell, don't tell the IP secrets, but really unpacking what you do, what ViralMoment does. Okay, so I'm assuming we're talking about ViralMoment in this context. Can you share what the company is, what it does, where it is currently and where you're headed, but functionally nuts and bolts? You mentioned this robot. analyzing all these videos, can you tell us more? Yeah, absolutely. Let's start just by imagining a video. Think about a video that you see on TikTok or YouTube shorts, whatever, as you're swiping. And someone just shared in that video. So let's just pretend it's a get ready with me video. And someone's showing their makeup and how they're doing their makeup. They might hold up a product and say, hey, I love this mascara. This is a great mascara. I recommend it. And put it back down and hold up another thing and say, I love this. This is the lipstick I used today. But think of all the places information is coming from. You get to understand, what does the person feel about the thing they're holding up? And if you can use computer vision to read the thing, this is a Sharpie I'm holding right here, you get to start to understand what are they talking about? What are they saying about it? How do they feel about it? What brands of things are they using? So there's all of this information across the video. And what our technology does at the end of the day is we break all of that down into little pieces that we can get meaning out of. So we know how many times in Get Ready With Me videos are people using this product versus that product. And what are the brands that show up the most on their vanity shelves? And what are the biggest trends? I love, that's one of the funnest parts of my job. We start to, maybe there's a new trend where everyone's doing, there's an eye makeup hack and they're using a spoon to do their eyeshadow. That was a thing a while back. We actually started to see with our computer vision, look, there's a lot of spoons in Get Ready With Me videos. And like we noticed. day over day that there were more and more and more with our computer vision just by picking up like, okay, there's another spoon, there's another spoon. Wow, there's a lot of spoons this morning. That tells us there's a trend. And so with our AI, we saw the thing in the video, we read a lot of videos and we start to understand are there more of this thing and is the rate of growth, are we seeing more and more of these things every day? And we use that to build out really fun like dashboards and information systems that just tell our users, hey. We just watched all these videos. These are the things we see trending. These are the trends we see picking up. These are the attitudes and opinions that are showing up alongside this trend. Go action on that. We really try to help big brands have this information so that they can help users do the things that they love and meet their customers where they are. That's awesome. Yeah, well, and I think you're quite humble. Do you want to mention at least a few of the companies that I think you can say publicly? What kind of companies are you? We work with incredible companies. We've worked with Coca-Cola and L'Oreal and Warner Brothers, some of the biggest companies in the world. And we work globally. So our tool works across almost a hundred languages and telling people around the world, what do people think? What are they saying? So yeah, we found a really powerful application where there's a deep need and people need to understand what's going on. And this is such a fun time. We're at the middle of like, we're going through a revolution where we used to consume information by reading text, but all of a sudden, you know, thanks to our smartphones, we're consuming our information by watching videos. And that's new in the world. And we're one of the first technologies that has been built to really help people see that at scale. Yeah, absolutely. When you talked about, you briefly mentioned computer vision. And I think some more people might know about natural language processing, or I'm a linguist, so my world, we're all in LP land. But these short form videos have super rich data sets. Like it's very complicated. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe how you made the product or how it uses different, leverages different data? So for the people who aren't familiar with natural language processing, it's really all about figuring out and Joan should probably share this, not me. She's the expert. But you can understand what's actually meant by a string of words. Like if I say, hey, I love to go on trips, but I hate packing my bag. We know that love applies to going on trips. So we can assume that user enjoys going on trips, but hates packing because of the proximity of the language. That's just a short example of some of the kind of intelligence that you can pull out of a string of words. And to a human that feels very natural, you don't even have to think twice about something like that. But we have to teach computers how to start to think like that and how to take that knowledge and do things with it and make sense of it. So there's already a huge industry and a field and brilliant people like Joan who have PhDs in understanding how to put words together to pull out meaning from it. But no one's done it for video. And no one's really made sense of that. for, you know, now all of a sudden we have the dimension, all these extra dimensions. We've got time and visual and audio transcripts and different things are happening at different time. And that's really what we're conquering and cracking at ViralMoment. Like to get technical and intense with it, we're really looking at like, what are all the different things being said in a video? What are all the different sources of meaning? So maybe, you know, I have a hand gesture that like thumbs up might mean I like something, or you know, you've got my tone or my tone of voice or my facial expressions. Each one of those things conveys meaning. And then there's objects in the videos too. So we're trying to put together, hey, this meaning, I had a great face expression and a happy tone in my voice when I was talking about this mascara that the computer vision read the mascara. So we kind of compile the meaning of all of these things and when they're happening in a video to make sense, to make all those pixels and sounds that a human would read and just feel like, yeah, I know what they're talking about. We're helping to translate that to a computer. Yeah, that's amazing. One, I certainly, I remember someone in my DMs, I'm not gonna say who, who pinged me about your company. It was like, hey, there's this tech store's company, they're doing AI, like you gotta talk to them. And I remember seeing, I think, very early version of ViralMoment. I believe it's a slide deck, I'm gonna say. But really the way my PhD research looks a lot at linguistics. But the future, the most powerful thing, which is exactly what you all are doing, is when you triangulate with different data sets and say, we learned this from this, you know, like text data, video is telling us this, actionable to this company, whoa, you know, here's all these different, you know, product prioritization and so forth. Those are like, that's a lot of like feature prioritization with a lot of my PhD. But really think about the future of how rich. big, complicated, multimodal, like different kind of modalities are being leveraged, like is the future? I think, as you mentioned, people are like consuming videos in a totally different way from just a few years ago, and who is to say what the next few years might even look like leveraging this type of stuff. That's cool. Do you want to mention, one of my favorite examples of you all is the puppuccinos? Would you mind sharing a little bit? Yeah, yeah. So here's a fun example. Let's think about puppuccinos on TikTok and on YouTube shorts. For those of you who don't know what it is, first, I'm sorry, go Google it. It's so delightful and joy-bringing. But people get a little whipped cream cup at Starbucks or whatever. It's a puppuccino. You can give it to your dog. And dogs just love puppuccinos. So with our tool, one of the things we did in our very early days, we said, hey, Go watch all the videos about Puppuccino. Consume them just like a human would. And there were thousands of hours of content. So you can imagine a human would have had to watch all of this to learn about it. He's all right. Now that our AI tool has watched it and grabbed all the intelligence from all those videos, what's going on? How many of those videos mention Starbucks versus Dunkin' Donuts? Is there more joy around a certain brand than the other? Are there other products that people use when they talk about Puppuccinos? Is there a certain breed of dog you see more frequently? So it's just like all of this really cool intelligence where you can learn about, you know, what's, it's a research tool. What are people doing and what's going on? And one of my favorite things is like, what's going viral? And that's another really fun part of it. Like puppuccinos, people are always having puppuccinos. There's not like a major trend there. It's pretty consistent, but we'll see things that are new or that no one's done before. Like we'll see these cultural trends start to pop up where, I don't know. There's some wonderful trends and some not so wonderful trends. Sometimes we're eating Tide Pods and sometimes, you know, we're donating money to ALS. But whatever the thing is, like society is moves in waves. And we're able to actually see that see that early and have a lot of data about it. Yeah, you all have some excellent visualizations. We'll have in the show notes some links so people can go check those out. You mentioned the word virality, and I think this word, I mean, it's ViralMoment, right? But like, when you think about, like, what does viral mean? I'd love to us to unpack that. Yeah, one of the coolest things is like, ideas are contagious. So, you know, one person gets sick. If you want to think about viral disease, we're just getting through the pandemic. One person gets sick and they share it with a couple of people. And then those people all share it with more people. And there's just a rate of growth that something can spread and move through the world. That's, you know, it just gets faster and faster and more and more people start to be a part of that thing. So when we think about ideas, especially these, you know, ideas that can be memes or ideas that can move quickly in a bite-sized piece, someone creates something and shares it. A couple other people might share it or watch it or engage with it. Their friends start to see it and watch it and engage with it. And before you know it, with a very, very rapid rate of growth, an idea has taken over the world. And there's a huge group of people that have like bought in on an idea or have tried something. So like I said, society moves in waves. It's not, you know, a lot of times once one person's in a herd of it, like you're early to the wave, but then pretty soon, like millions to billions of people are on boat doing something. And we're really seeing those patterns as they move. A lot of our favorite, like some of the CMOs and our customers at different big brands, they talk about us like their earthquake sensor. We're like an early detection earthquake sensor that says, hey. This thing's starting to go viral. It has something to do with your brand. You should know about it now. Find it before it's all over the news and on the front page of the New York Times or whatever. Oh, I love that earthquake detector. That's amazing. Well, and for folks who don't necessarily think as much about social media as you might, can you pick some examples of viral things that really helped a brand? Maybe viral things that hurt a brand? Some concrete examples. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest last year was just like a year of so much virality for good and bad. Budweiser lost about $29 billion worth of market cap after things went viral there. That's one of the, for those of them in the audience who don't know, which I think probably everyone is well aware of this, Budweiser sponsored an influencer, Dylan, and a lot of people in the country weren't. supportive of Dylan as a sponsor and a face of the brand. And so they boycotted the beer. And with that, the market cap just blew out there. And I think there's some people who became avid supporters of the brand and some people who decided they would never drink the brand again. But at the end of the day, it impacted that bottom line in such a powerful way for the company. And one of the hardest things to do is like, what's even the conversation about this? You can imagine Jonah just. close up, so many people are talking about it. They're saying such wildly different things. And as part of a comms team or a marketing team, how do you even know what's out there? There's just so much. So it's so hard to have a data backed strategy when you can't get your hands around the data. And that's what we do. Another example that's, I like to think it might be the most unhinged example of 2023, Grimace. Happy birthday, Grimace from McDonald's. I don't know if have you seen that one, Joan, is it something you've seen? No. Man, Google it after this, you're in for a treat. So Grimace is one of the mascots from Miss McDonald's. He's one of the classic mascots. He's that big purple, I don't even know what he is. Kind of looks like a chicken nugget if you ask me. It was his birthday and McDonald's released a shake in honor of Grimace's birthday. And it was the Happy Birthday Grimace shaking campaign and you know, the shake was fine, it was good. People started doing this very organically. They would take the shake, have a sip of it, and then... like start convulsing and paranormal things would start to happen. And this is in people's videos on TikTok. So this isn't, this wasn't actually happening to people, but they would, they would have, there was a whole scene and people had got really creative with it. They were tossing their shakes around parking lots and hanging over fences. And you'll, you'll have to just go on yourself. But basically it was, it was a meme. If you will, there was like a thing that people were doing with this shake. And it first started out, there were a couple of popular videos about it, but it just got massive and all like. billions of people like engaged with this content about Grimace and Hundreds of thousands of people made Grimace videos and McDonald's actually it's it was a totally wacky trend And I think there were probably some people at McDonald's when it was going on freaking out going. Oh my gosh What is this doing to my brand? McDonald's saw a 15% boost in revenue in stores Thanks to this. Yep, and in their earnings call they credited this with the you have the boost to this movement. So Here's the dynamic of the world right now. People move together and every brand, all of a sudden, thanks to social video, has to be an entertainment company. We're looking at, brands can't just be the brand. They all, look at the Duolingo Owl or Grimace is another great example. Brands are our entertainment. We're getting our entertainment from social video and the best brands give their customers the microphone. So it's such a fun thing to watch, but how do you understand it all? How do you see it all? That's what really, that's what our AI is helping brands to do. Oh yeah, I can imagine the McDonald's execs being overwhelmed every time they open up any screen, trying to pro- That does not sound like my happy place, frankly, but you all can help with that. That's amazing. Okay, well, I guess I've got a few more questions about ViralMoment. Are there some specific metrics of success you can share or kind of surprises along the way as you think about, you know, you all have been around for three years, you said? So really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. so specific metrics just around the company and building the company that we're looking at. I think like everything I do at the end of the day, I really try to focus on how do we help our customers and how do we help our users and what are we doing for them? So our North Star is the value we drive to them and I would say minutes saved is probably a massive one. Just the time that we save brands and having to just swipe and swipe is incredible. Our robots watching millions of hours of video a day. And so to be able to pass that onto our brands, say, hey, we've already distilled everything you would have learned from watching these millions of hours of videos. I'm really proud of how much time we save. So time is one hard metric. There's also some, we look at how early did we catch trends? How early did we help brands catch trends? So there's a lot of really cool stuff you can do there around, oh my gosh, you knew about this. 10 days before you would have known about it before and you were able to action on it. That one excites me. Also just the ROI, the money that brands make when they use our tool is something I'm really proud of. In terms of the business, I think there's just a ton of really cool metrics we look at. Our tool's getting bigger and better and faster all the time so we count the number of videos that we can process a day and that number keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger which is really fun until our tool as our tool gets more effective and efficient. I'd say those are probably a lot of. some of the most important metrics I use to run the business. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about where you see this part of the field going. Because we were just talking about, we are riding the AI wave. There's all this stuff that a few years ago didn't even exist and now is prevalent and continues racing forward. When you think about the future of this part of the field, where do you think that's going? Where do you see that headed? Yeah, you know, video is here to stay. And I'm so excited about the way that we're, as a world and as a society, using video. TikTok is becoming a bigger search tool than Google, which is really fun. Like, you used to search for something in Google. You look through all these pages, and you click and click. And now I search for something in TikTok. And I just very, very quickly get a couple videos that are very descriptive, very clear, give me so much rich information on how to do something. So I'm watching the internet. just get eaten by video and text melt away. And so I feel so confidently that like, this is here to stay, social video is here to stay and video as the medium that we communicate even right now, right? This podcast has video and a video element to it. The visuals matter and the visuals mean something and tell us something. So I feel more confident and excited than ever that like video is the feature and a lot of people are doing so many fun and exciting things to create video, but we need to be able to understand it. And one other thing I'll say, a flag or kind of a scary thing I see, especially with all the AI, anyone can make anything right now. Um, I used to filter on TikTok last night where I put Shada, my CTO's face on. It was like a face filter and it, it made it look like I was her talking. Um, there's a really big one right now. It's got Taylor Swift and everyone can make themselves look like Taylor Swift and see anything. And you know what? It looks really real. And there's some people that are using this filter and it literally looks like Taylor is talking to you. So between the filters and the voice changers and the ability to use generative video to just make a video, anyone can make a video of anything, whether it's a cockroach in a Starbucks or a airplane with a seed on fire. I'm very aware of how powerful this information is. Our information systems are becoming decentralized, so it's kind of harder to know where's truth coming from, what is true, what is not. Anyone can make anything. So I think another place where the world is going is we're gonna have so much information. So much of that information won't be real or will be generated by AI. How do we even know what's out there? How do you know there's not videos of you out there running around on the internet that you are saying something? And our tool can really help with that because we make things searchable. So Starbucks could use our tool to just search for every video of Starbucks and... a cockroach and then just say, has anyone made this? Is this going out there? Is this going viral? It's a really powerful application of our technology in the disinformation space that I'm very, very passionate about. Yeah, well, and you mentioned disinformation. I think a lot of these examples are related to brands and consumer goods and so forth. But I think earlier in your work, you worked on some disinformation related to kind of political or other work. we do work, we've worked with a couple groups and with a major political party, which is really exciting. So we have an email we support that goes to the White House actually every week that just kind of gives like some of the information about a certain space. And then we also do. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really powerful social good spaces. We've worked with Carnegie Mellon and a couple areas from there on hate speech and identifying hate speech. I'm very, very proud of that work and instances of that. There's a couple other groups across the world that we've helped to sort of understand what is the conversation around a political event or a social event. And people aren't always good to each other on the internet and we can shine a light on that with the tool that I've. Yeah, it's so cool and so powerful. I mean, honestly, that could be the only use case for the technology you've built. That's amazing. Well, and you also mentioned, Sheda, how did you two meet to build the company together? Oh, Shada's incredible. She and I both went to Carnegie Mellon's. We both have master's degrees from there. And she's actually got two master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon. She's a machine learning expert and an innovation expert, which is really, really powerful to put those two together. You can imagine the one-two punch. She's worked for NASA before helping them pilot drones with computer vision. So when I approached her and I said, Hey, you know, we, we had some mutual friends. We didn't, you know, We got on a call about ViralMoment and I was like, I wanna build this thing, I need to understand how to read video and she had the best answer. She said, you know what, Chelsie, I don't know how to do any of that stuff. I don't know how to build this, I don't know what it's gonna look like, but I can figure it out and I can Google a lot of things and I'm down for the ride. And that was when I just knew I was like, okay, let's go, let's do this because she didn't have necessarily every skill that you needed, but she recognized like, no one does, go figure it out. But you can, I think that's the, almost anything is figure outable. Yeah, you two are a very dynamic duo. Cool. I'd love to talk about, and we mentioned these master's programs, you mentioned different things. I think that's one of the things, it's called Your AI Roadmap. Really trying to be actionable and practical. So if someone listening is like, whoa, Chelsie's doing the coolest thing, how do I get into there? What recommendations would you have for folks? Yeah, I said this at the beginning and I don't know this might be against something other of your other guests say Joan, but you don't need a master's degree. You don't need a degree at all to be able to build in this space at this time. I think that's one of the reasons I love it so much. It's so fun. There are more no code tools, low code tools, plugins. I think like, you know, if you want to go into deep research for AI, like, okay, maybe you need to go get your PhD. But if you just want to build something and you want to build technology that's going to solve a problem and help people. More than the know-how of how to work with the AI, you actually need a deep understanding of the problem space that you're building in. Can you understand, like, what are you trying to do? How are you trying to help people? Are you passionate about a problem or a pain point that you can go try to fix? And then is AI a good way to solve for that problem? I think those are probably the two crucial things. And again, you don't need a master's degree for that. You just need to have some passion and to understand a problem. And that problem might be like, It's hard to go out to your mailbox to get the mail in the morning, or it's too cold when I go jump in my car. You know, it doesn't have to be a rocket science problem. Um, it just has to be a problem that people experience. And then I would just use a bunch of, even like go ask chat GPT, how do you start? Like what, what tools could I use to start working towards this? Um, I think if you have a hacking mentality and you're open to just getting something low, simple, easy off the ground, don't start with the hardest thing. Pick a really simple. thing you can do and just build it, get it off the ground, use a bunch of the tools and resources that are available to do like no code, low code, make a prototype and get it out there, get it out into the world. So I think the worst thing, a master's degree just makes you sit on your hands for longer while you go through your master's degree. And I think the best thing anyone interested in being in this space could do is just to start, go build something like pull an all-nighter tonight or like take the weekend. And just like push something out and like show it to some people and start moving with it and seeing if it can help people. Like that's the real way. So if you're trying to build a startup in the AI space, that's what I would do. Sounds like you're asking people to go do a personal hackathon. Honestly, let's get into what I did with ViralMoment I like kept prototyping it. I made like some mockups of it. I like, you just gotta like, you know, the more you sit and think about it, I think the harder it's getting to be to actually do something like action and hacking is a top priority. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think some people might hear you though and say, wait a minute, but you went to Carnegie Mellon. Like I have this as well, and as I make recommendations, I'm sure there's some amazing things that you got out of that degree. Are there, Carnegie Mellon folks, I respect you deeply, but would that be a program you might recommend to people if people do wanna pursue a master's? Are there other certificates or things you might recommend? Yeah, I mean, the innovation program there, it's the Masters of Integration, Masters in Integrated Innovation for Products and Services. That's what I did. And it was incredible. It was really fun. And really what I did, I took, I got an incredible opportunity and what a privilege that I had to be able to do that. And I said two things I got out of that have been invaluable to me. One is I just had an opportunity for a year while I was in the program to just build. I just took time and I pushed out projects and we pushed out a lot of projects. So kind of what I recommended to do with your personal hackathon or your weekend, I did that. But I did it with the guidance of professors who told me things were good or bad or gave me tools. I also would say the other thing I got out of that is an incredible privilege that I have is a network. So I really have people I can call on or ask for help. And that's been. Some of the investors in my company are from Carnegie Mellon. Carnegie Mellon is actually invested in my company. So that's, um, that's very, very cool and something that is absolutely comes out of a master's program. And if, you know, but again, that's really valuable and I get, I'm so privileged to have it, but I have other networks that I've gotten from. Um, the startup hackathon I went to, and there's a Slack group around it now. And some of the smartest people I know are still talking to each other from that startup hackathon. That's another incredible network that I'm a part of that didn't, you know, that one took me a weekend Not a whole master's degree. I'm a part of a couple like female Builders or female hacker slack groups that I really love and LinkedIn groups where same thing, you know, you can ask someone Hey, I'm trying to do this. I need help so I wouldn't know anyone here and that's really valuable, too So then I wouldn't undervalue the network But I would also say you can you can hack your own network by showing up to some hackathons, showing up to some happy hours. I've showed up to some things uninvited before, but it's always worked out really well for me and I've, not always, but a lot of the times some of the most valuable people I've ever met were doors that I wasn't invited into, but I just went in anyways. Excellent, excellent advice. And I think honestly, underutilized, the concept of people like show up to the thing, whether it's virtual or hybrid in real life and like, no business cards anymore, but follow up with the right people and networking and cultivating, or even knowing which resources to leverage to even post that, hey, I'm looking for a, that's a skill set a lot of people could grow in, I believe, some of the people around me. Okay, well we talked about advice in general. I swear there are gonna be people listening to this being like, whoa, I really wanna dive in. Are there other pieces of advice, takeaways, kind of action items or places you might point people, resources to learn more about? Yeah, I would say go play in the tools is one of my biggest pieces of advice. Like the best resources that the tools are open right now. Like go get in chat GPT, spend the 20 bucks and get the premium account or, um, there, you know, start building your own GPTs or go get into runway and start just like generating stuff. Um, and you know, If you get dirty, get in there, get your hands on it. I think the best education is like all these tools, especially right now are in this fun time where they're just releasing them and not a lot is locked up. It's very open and very accessible. So the best resource I see out there is take your time and go play in these tools and learn them and understand them and push the limits of them and get an idea about a pain point that you could solve or a problem that you could solve. Like go see if you can hack something together with them because I bet you can't. That's amazing. Absolutely. I agree. Well, and if people want to learn more about ViralMoment and you, where can they find you? Plug away. Yeah, yeah. Well, please everyone friend me on LinkedIn. I would love to talk to the people who are listening. You're also welcome to get in touch with ViralMoment at hello at ViralMoment.com. I'm always excited about people who are excited to build. awesome. Well, any last things Chelsie? I think that covers it. again, I'll just leave everyone with the, the recommendation that like, you can do this. You can build this. You can do it. Like if you have every confidence in the world, you don't have to have every resource in the world right now. Um, anyone can go and get something built and that has not been possible in the future. So I'm so excited for everyone to, to learn about the projects that everyone's working on and the beautiful, wonderful, brilliant genius things that your listeners build. Joan. Yeah, thank you. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise and Chelsie, it's amazing to see you. Cheers. Cheers. Oh gosh, was that fun. Did you enjoy that episode as much as I did? 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