The creative industry has been gatekept for a hundred years. AI is the first thing that's ever threatened that. That's why everyone's scared, and why most of them are scared of the wrong thing.

Let me tell you how I got here.

I've been making movies since I was 15, a high school kid trying to impress a girl. I remember standing on the stairs at the Dolby Theatre in LA, where the Oscars are held every year, looking up at the names of the greatest filmmakers who'd walked up those stairs before me. I told my mother my name would be on one of those columns in 15 years.

So at 18, I bet my entire career on it. I spent four years at NYU Tisch, the best film school in the world.

What's unexpected about film school is how militarized the industry actually is.

A film set is a social contract: a hundred people agreeing to make one person's movie. You start at the bottom as a PA, bringing snacks and blocking off roads during takes. You move up to Grip, lifting sandbags. Then Gaffer, adjusting light levels. And so on.

Over 95% of the people on a film set have zero creative input.

If you spend enough time with them, you learn something that breaks your heart. Almost every one of them entered this industry with the same dream I had at 18. They wanted to create. And somewhere along the way, most of them stopped wanting it.

Not because they gave up, because the industry wires that out of you.

The director's chair has always been reserved for the people who could afford it, in capital or social capital.

I thought I'd be different. So I started companies instead, to fund my way in.

As a junior at Tisch, I co-founded a virtual production studio with a few friends, we built LED wall stages that let filmmakers shoot any location, any time, for a fraction of the cost.

We were trying to bend the creative-to-non-creative ratio of a film set. That company was acquired two years ago.

And I don't just mean film crews. I mean the copywriter at an ad agency dreaming of becoming a CCO. The camera assistant who wants to shoot as a DP. The kid, like young me, in their bedroom who believes they're the next Nolan. Every creative who's been told to wait their turn.

This technology will get you there. But only if you move faster than the people guarding the gate.

Yes, there will be layoffs at the big studios. Yes, there will be fewer traditional opportunities. That's guaranteed. But zoom out: there are now infinite ways to carve your own path. That trade has never been on the table before in the history of creative work.

"Disrupting Hollywood" can feel like a dirty phrase. To me, it's the whole point.

No. Ponder exists to do the opposite: to put the tools that have always been gatekept into the hands of the people who actually want to make something.

Ponder is the tool I wish I'd had at 18. The tool every creative I met at Tisch should have had. We're starting by reinventing post-production. And soon, we want to allow professional creatives direct freely, without permission, without a million dollars between them and the work.

Only filmmakers can build a tool that makes filmmakers feel understood. The team at Ponder is building for creatives who care about craft. For the ones pushing their work to the edge of what's possible. For the ones who refuse to sacrifice quality for ease.

AI is coming. The question isn't whether, it's who it's coming for. The studios are betting it's coming for you. We're betting it's coming for the 95% who were never let in.

Ponder it. Create something they can't gate.