Today I walk with Coco Mao (@cocokechun), CEO and co-founder of OpenArt (@openart_ai), an AI visual storytelling platform. Coco spent years as an engineer at Google (@Google), ran her own startup inside Google's internal startup incubator, and built OpenArt through six months of weekly pivots until a prototype built in under three days went viral on Hacker News (@hackernews), and now she's betting the entire company on a new category she calls vibe directing. We get into: - Why she quit her Google side-hustle instincts, including the Amazon fidget-toy business she overstocked right before founding OpenArt - The six months of weekly pivots that ended with a three-day prototype going viral on Hacker News - OpenArt's bet on "vibe directing," the video-agent category she compares directly to vibe coding - What actually separates good AI-generated work from "total slop": idea and taste, not the tools - Launching the AI Personality Awards with Fanvue, and why she thinks AI influencers will make human creators more valuable, not less So much more! Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (00:54) Coco Mao, CEO & Co-Founder, OpenArt (03:11) Selling fidget toys on Amazon before quitting Google (04:56) Meeting co-founder Jon inside Google’s startup incubator (08:01) Betting on AI art in 2022, a non-consensus space (08:18) The weekly pivot that led to a Hacker News-viral prototype (14:09) Naming OpenArt and getting mistaken for OpenAI (14:56) Raising a seed round on speed, not metrics (19:11) Hire fast, fire very fast (20:01) Why OpenArt survived while image-gen rivals disappeared (23:00) Vibe directing: the next category after vibe coding (28:08) What separates good AI work from total slop (39:40) Launching the AI Personality Awards with Fanvue (43:46) The hardest part of scaling: reinventing yourself (50:22) The one founder belief she now thinks is wrong (51:20) Outro Hope you enjoy this one!!