Knowledge Creators 🤝 Cool Stuff

The latest content + happenings from the creators we rep here at Smooth

The Wall Street Skinny takes the red carpet | Creator duo Jen & Kristen became obsessed with HBO’s Industry as the first show that dove into the world they lived and breathed: Wall Street. They turned that obsession into a special deep-dive series on their podcast, which caught HBO’s attention and led to an invite to the Season 4 premiere to interview the cast on the red carpet—very cool, very full-circle, and so fun to see them crush it. Read Jen’s LinkedIn post reflecting on it here.

Every brings together AI leaders for HQ dinner | At Every’s HQ, 20 tech leaders came together for dinner to talk about what comes next with AI models, sponsored by Shutterstock (and their work building AI with proprietary data and an ethical-first approach). Every Founder and CEO Dan Shipper led the conversation on favorite model drivers and real-world use cases, all over a family-style meal with cocktails flowing.

Breaking & Entering boys host trivia night | Trivia night at Air’s new HQ brought together some 75 leaders from across the advertising industry. Led by Jack & Geno, the room was buzzing—Peronis flowing and people loudly debating which agency was behind the first Got Milk? ad (reply if you know).

Tina Huang hosts a Builder Night | Tech creator and developer Tina Huang hosted Open Source Builder Night in Hong Kong, giving builders one hour to ship real, working projects using atoms.dev. From Git-powered games to productivity tools, Tina’s devoted community got to build and learn from each other side by side—and walk away with things they actually made.

Brand Campaigns Hot Off the Press 🗞️

Some of the fun partnerships our team’s been working on with creators + brands

Angelo x Oura Ring 💍 | Angelo brought his personal finance mindset to Oura, framing it as the ultimate investment: your health. The spot feels natural and lived-in, showing how he actually uses the ring day to day and connecting long-term wellness to his trademark money thinking.

Jerry Lee x Bolt ⚡️ | Known for his expertise on leveling up in your career, Jerry partnered with vibe-coding tool Bolt to showcase a smart, on-brand use case: using constant experimenting and building as a way to keep learning, even when you have a resume gap. It helped answer a question Jerry gets all the time in today’s job market.

Varun x Emergent 👨‍💻 | In this skit, comedy-meets-tech creator Varun Rana bravely took on the challenging role of tech bro addicted to vibe coding. 😞 He uses Emergent to build his own tool: Circly.ai, designed to help tech bros do what tech bros do best…circle back.

Thoughts for the Road 🛣️

A little something we’ve been chatting about here at Smooth HQ

Last week, my cofounder Josh was on The Information TV, hosted by Akash Pasricha, to talk about TikTok’s position within the broader creator industry.

Josh’s take (and unsurprisingly, mine too — we mostly just disagree on who the best Survivor winner is, and if I should let him microwave frozen chicken pot pie in the office) is that it’s… not great.

To be clear: TikTok was and still is incredible at driving reach, fast. There’s never been a platform that could put creators in front of massive audiences at this speed and scale. That part is genuinely amazing.

But what we’ve seen over time is that TikTok isn’t particularly conducive to building deeper relationships with an audience — the kind that actually lead to durable, long-term creator businesses. There’s a lack of staying power. As Devin Emery, President of Morning Brew, put it perfectly in the comments: “It’s a bad thing to scale reach faster than you are able to scale affinity if you want a sustainable creator brand.”

That’s still what TikTok optimizes for — which, again, can be great. But to parlay that into meaningful success, we’ve seen creators have to expand beyond the platform. Whereas YouTube creators still proudly call themselves YouTubers, we don’t see the same happening for TikTokers anymore — that identity just isn’t something creators are proudly claiming. And it stands out, given how much less time TikTok has been around, yet how quickly it lost that identity-defining allure — unlike YouTube, which has maintained a (relatively) positive position with creators for 20+ years.

As consumers, we love an occasional TikTok scroll. But as operators who wants to help build the creator industry into a healthy, growing ecosystem with many different types of winners, we don’t see TikTok in its current form as a meaningful, long-term home for professional creators.