Alan Lepofsky

Coming Soon | OUTCREATE A new article and video series exploring the intersection of AI, human creativity, and the future of media and entertainment. Fresh perspectives. Bold ideas. New possibilities. The next chapter of intelligent transformation is just beginning. Stay tuned… #OUTCREATE #LTM #AI #MediaAndEntertainment #CreativeIntelligence

What you do at your Big Tech job probably doesn't matter that much. Most Big Tech employees work on a tiny part of a product within a corporate hierarchy. What they work on might be used by millions of people, but the impact they have on user experience is likely negligible. Big Tech structurally caps the marginal returns each employee can provide. Company, product, and distribution already exist. Each person's job is to work with thousands of others to preserve what works and make small additions. At a startup, the marginal impact of one person is uncapped. One person can build anything, shape the company, and materially affect whether it succeeds. AI coding tools increase that leverage. One person can now build a product and scale it to millions of people within months. Big Tech has merits. It provides stability, strong benefits, and the chance to work on products used by a wide audience. But it is terrible for maximizing your individual impact. If you believe the chance to build something great outweighs the risk of failure, join something early-stage. If you want stability, Big Tech is the better bet.

Global marketing influencer Seth Matlins is hosting the inaugural The Create or Destroy Sessions, October 26-28 in Napa Valley. With the singular objective that everyone leave better able to do better work because they were there, the invitation-only 2026 Sessions will convene an intimate community of the most influential and interesting business leaders and thinkers for essential conversations about what creates meaning and value and what destroys it. Confirmed speakers include David Droga, Vice Chair, Accenture; Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast; William White, Walmart CMO; Amanda Rubin, Citadel CMO; Colin Fleming, OpenAI’s Business CMO; Katie Welch, Chanel CMO; Suzanne Philion, Waymo CMO; Tim Ellis, the NFL’s EVP Chief Marketing Officer; Zach Kitschke, Canva CMO; Russell Wallach, Global President, Live Nation Media & Sponsorship; Astead W. Herndon, political journalist, podcast host & editorial director, Vox; Shanta Thake, Executive Vice President, Ehrenkranz Chief Artistic Officer, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; and dozens more of the most influential marketers in the world. Thank you to our sponsors, including Presenting Sponsor Live Nation Entertainment; Premier Sponsors Canva and Netomi; Official Sponsors Adobe, GALE, Hightouch, and Rokt; and Supporting Sponsors Knit and The Lighthouse, part of Whalar Group. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g2V9JKrY

The chatbot era is ending - this is one theme that came through again and again at the Thoughtworks Technology Leaders Forum, co-hosted with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in NYC last week. The room was full of CIOs, CTOs and senior technology leaders who agreed that the real work is now building organizations that can run on autonomous agents, not just experiment with them. A few takeaways that stuck with me: - Allie K. Miller's keynote reframed the real risk: its not picking the wrong model, its failing to keep pace as compute costs keep falling nine to 13x a year. - Thoughtworks own Alexander Moore made the case that cheaper tokens wont fix a flawed ROI model. Lasting returns come from owning the action layer and protecting human judgment, not removing it. - The SaaS panel, featuring leaders from Anthropic, NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Teneo and Kernel Foods, got refreshingly honest about build-vs-buy in an agentic world, including a sharp case study from Kernel’s Tom Cortese. Thanks to everyone who joined and pushed the conversation forward.

Stop staring at my belly. I'm becoming a big fan of events as a GTM strategy. People are over the AI outreach and want to connect on a personal basis. I've hit a lot of events this year and I've been thinking about how the experience can be better for most of the attendees. Here goes, but want to hear your thoughts too. 1.) Lanyards suck. First, the snap judgment call. Instead of looking each other in the eye, we are looking at peoples belly's (or worse for women). There is supposed to be a connection at these events, but if the person doesn't want to talk with you, they give you a look like you farted in church. We've all seen and felt it. Second, they flip the wrong way. No amount of flipping and flopping changes that. Unless the conference provider gets names printed on both sides, 50% of your attendees are going to be anonymous because of the 'flip'. A solution? Just print first names in a huge font. No company, no surname, just your first name - SCOTT. Force people to make the connection with everyone. Don't like that, hats work too. Get your first name in large font on the hat. Hate hats, what about caddie bibs? Big letters on your back. "There goes Schnaars, I want to talk to him." 2.) You can't have enough Purell. Put that everywhere. Lot of hand shaking, lot of sneezing, just let the Purell flow. 3.) Phone booths. I think that this is a big sponsor opportunity. It's always difficult at a conference to find a quiet place to chat. Get a company like Nooks to sponsor it. Have about 15 - 20 of them. Have someone manage it and dole out 30-min blocks on a first come, first serve basis. Want to reserve a slot, have to hear a pitch. I had to bribe an employee to let me take a call in a supply room. 4.) Match Making. Conferences have a lot of breaks and downtime (breakfast, cocktails, breaks, etc.). Prior to the event, help attendees find a buddy at each of these. They aren't all going to hit, but it would be cool to have some pre-defined meetings set up with people that seem like good matches based on profiles that are set up. 5.) Do something related to the city. I was at a conference in Napa and there was no wine tasting. In a conference in NY with no pizza. Feels like a big miss. In fact, I've only been to a single conference that does this and that was in Zurs, Austria where they encouraged us to go skiing and even did lessons. 6.) Start later. This was something that the above mentioned event did. We started at 1PM and went until 8PM. The organizers encouraged people to ski in the morning, get work done, or sleep in. They wanted people to be focused during conference time. It was awesome. All of the people at your conference have day jobs and having an event that runs 8 - 6 forces people to leave talks, skip sessions, and generally pay less attention. Start later, end later, and you'll get more engagement. What would you love to see in future conferences you go to?