This week I went from figuring out programmes we’re building across the region, to making cartoons about Kuwait’s relationship with Porsche, to working out how to get inside a rocket factory in India, plus several other things I have exercised the extremely rare good judgement not to put in writing just yet.

Somewhere along the way, the question of how ambitious I’m allowed to make things at THIRD appears to have stopped being asked.

Nobody has intervened, yet. So here we are, a perfectly normal range of activities for one human brain.

Apparently though, this all counts as one job.

One part of my brain has also been occupied by Creator Games. Salil published another issue this week, which you can read here, and we’re now working on taking Creator Games live.

At approximately the same time, I discovered that Kuwait was one of the earliest places in the world where you could buy a Porsche.

Obviously, everything else had to stop.

In 1954, Kuwaiti businessman Morad Behbehani visited Volkswagen’s factory in Germany and met Ferry Porsche. Two years later, he became the Porsche importer in Kuwait.

I love stories like this because they disrupt the version of globalisation we inherit. You imagine Porsche expanding out of post-war Germany into the obvious European capitals.

And then there is Kuwait.

Which brings me to another slightly unhinged experiment.

We’re trialling a new series called Funny Business: very short animated stories about genuinely interesting moments in business history, told with considerably less reverence than business history normally receives.

And apparently cartoons about Kuwaiti businessmen meeting German industrialists were not enough range for one week, because we’re also preparing to go to India to film space companies.

These two things have almost nothing in common, except that for reasons probably best explained by workload-induced delirium, I made both teasers.

I should clarify that I can take almost no credit for how most things at THIRD actually end up looking. Writing I guard with a slightly unreasonable level of possessiveness, but visually, I usually have an idea, explain it with an alarming number of references, and then hand it to people who possess the actual skills required to make it real.

So please enjoy this brief creative detour. I’ll return to bothering everyone with references shortly.

Anyway, I’m not entirely convinced the human brain was designed for this range. Mine certainly seems to be approaching its recommended operating limits.

But at the end of the day, I’m incredibly grateful that I somehow ended up with a job that accommodates my slightly deranged intellectual and very non-intellectual interests.

There are probably more sensible ways to make a living.

I’m very glad this is mine.

See you next week,

Chaymae

Good afternoon, and welcome to the eighth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Samay Raina’s $0.60 memberships are turning Latent into a fan-funded OTT

• One 56-second ad unravelled Good Good, the $45M-backed golf creator group

• A Korean YouTube show made kimchi on camera and sold out three pre-order rounds

Samay Raina’s $0.60 memberships are turning Latent into a fan-funded OTT

Season 2 of India’s Got Latent streams on Netflix and free on YouTube at the same time.

The extras don’t. Four bonus episodes, the latest with Ayushmann Khurrana, now sit behind a button on Samay Raina’s own channel and that’s telling you a unique feature that’s playing out in creator economy.

The Business Case →

On 27 September, Samay dropped the fourth members-only bonus episode of Latent Season 2, India TV reported.

Ayushmann Khurrana joins Suhani Shah, Kullu and Rajat Sood on the panel. 34 minutes. Members only.

The main show works differently. Season 2 premiered on 20 June 2026 as a simulcast on Netflix and YouTube, with a new episode every two weeks, according to The Hindu.

Samay’s promise was “same to same”. Netflix viewers just don’t get ads or a comment section.

The paid layer sits on YouTube. Bonus episodes and BTS specials need a channel membership, and the entry tier is $0.60 a month, per Business Upturn. Two higher tiers cost $6.20 and $21.

Members also get a members-only live chat, a Discord channel and unlisted streams.

Put together, it works like a small OTT. Free episodes for reach. Netflix for distribution. A tier for the fans who want more.

It’s also a comeback. Season 1 got caught in controversy in February 2025, when a remark by Ranveer Allahbadia led to multiple FIRs.

Neither Samay nor YouTube has shared how many people have signed up.

One 56-second ad unravelled Good Good, the $45M-backed golf creator group

Good Good started as a group of friends playing golf on YouTube. Then, in about two weeks, one ad cost them Callaway, its shelf space at Dick’s and its CEO.

The Business Case →

Good Good partnered with Callaway, one of golf’s best-known equipment makers, in 2023.

In March 2025 it raised $45M in its first outside round, led by Creator Sports Capital with Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions among the investors, per Variety.

On 21 August 2026, Good Good posted “The Driver”, a 56-second ad for its co-branded Callaway driver.

Co-founder Garrett Clark tackles fellow creator Alexis Miestowski and says, “Do not touch my new driver.” It was meant to riff on the horror film “Obsession”.

Many viewers saw it as making light of violence against women. It came down the next day.

Then the dominoes fell, as Business Insider lays out:

• Callaway ended the partnership, said its review process had been inadequate and donated $1M to groups fighting violence against women

• Dick’s Sporting Goods pulled Good Good products, as did Target and PGA Tour Superstore, per GOLF.com

• Good Good pulled out as title sponsor of a PGA Tour event, and Golf Channel scrapped its “Big Break” season

• CEO Matt Kendrick attacked Callaway in a string of early-morning posts on X, then stepped down on 2 September, along with new president Joe Flannery

The company is still running. Co-founder and early investor Nahid Giga is interim CEO, and Good Good says retail sales and followings have grown since. It didn’t share numbers.

A Korean YouTube show made kimchi on camera and sold out three pre-order rounds

Five creators. One kimchi master. A show that filmed every step of making a product, then sold it.

Pajimchi Gang’s first three episodes pulled 2M views, and the pre-orders sold out three times before the live sale even started.

The Business Case →

Pajimchi Gang is a YouTube variety show produced by CJ ENM’s entertainment division, starring Kim Pung, Chimchakman, Ppanibottle, Gwak Tube and Kid Milli.

CJ OnStyle, the shopping platform run by CJ ENM’s commerce division, turned the show’s kimchi project into a real product, The Herald Business reported.

The members built the recipe with Park Mi-hee, a certified kimchi master and head of Domisol Food.

On camera, they tried curry powder, mala sauce, Buldak sauce and truffle oil before picking a two-year-aged horse mackerel jeotgal.

Horse mackerel is “jeongaengi” in Korean, a nod to the “gang” in the show’s name, per The Power News.

The numbers:

• 2M cumulative views across the first three episodes, with views roughly doubling from episode 2, when the product work was shown in full

• Pre-orders opened on 8 September. Round one sold out, then rounds two and three

• A Family Package of 2kg green onion kimchi and 4kg whole-cabbage kimchi, priced at ~$44)

The live sale on 18 September ran on CJ OnStyle TV, YouTube and TVING at once, with the whole cast on air.

All 5,000 sets sold out 13 minutes before the scheduled end.

Add 600 pre-order sets and that’s 5,600 in total. About 42% of buyers were new to CJ OnStyle.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• MrBeast appears to be moving into wearables, with a “Beast Band” trademark filing suggesting creator brands are expanding beyond consumable products into hardware and fitness.

• TED is launching a new podcast with Answer in Progress, showing how creator-led formats are increasingly crossing into established media brands.

• YouTube is going big on micro dramas, expanding short-form scripted series beyond phones and into TVs, signalling a bigger push to make vertical-native storytelling a mainstream entertainment format.

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I discovered this week that Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya once owned around 15 per cent of Fiat.

This is exactly the kind of information that makes it difficult for me to accomplish whatever I was supposed to be doing before I learnt it.

In December 1973, La Stampa, the Turin newspaper owned by Fiat, published a satire about Gaddafi. He was not amused and threatened to put Fiat on an Arab boycott list unless the paper’s editor, Arrigo Levi, was fired. Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli refused.

Three years later, they became business partners.

Fiat needed money. The oil shock had been unkind to the car industry and Libya, having oil, had rather a lot of it. In December 1976, Libya put roughly $415 million into Fiat through shares, bonds and a loan, initially taking about a tenth of the company and two seats on its board. Its position eventually grew to around 15 per cent.

So one of the great symbols of Italian capitalism spent roughly a decade with Gaddafi’s Libya as its second-largest shareholder.

There is something wonderfully 1970s about the whole arrangement. An oil-rich revolutionary government and an aristocratic Italian industrial dynasty, separated by ideology but united by that most enduring basis for international cooperation: one had money and the other needed it.

And for a while, it worked.

By 1986, however, having Libya on the shareholder register had become considerably less convenient. Fiat was pursuing American defence business, the Reagan administration had blocked a Pentagon contract involving the company because of the Libyan stake, and Agnelli wanted the shares back. Libya eventually sold its holding for about $3 billion.

Not a terrible outcome for a relationship that began with an insult in a newspaper.

I like corporate histories like this because they ruin the neatness we impose on companies after the fact. Once a business survives, its history becomes a sequence of apparently sensible decisions leading inevitably towards the company we recognise today. Emergency financing becomes strategic capital, improbable partnerships become international expansion and decisions made under considerable uncertainty eventually acquire arrows and boxes in business school case studies. I had the bright idea of attending business school, so thankfully my scholarship paid for me to look at some of these arrows.

Living through it is considerably less tidy, as I have been thinking about that this week because something we had spent time preparing fell apart almost immediately. There had been research, schedules, travel and a number of documents suggesting a plan existed. Roughly 24 hours later, I was back home.

There is probably a version of this paragraph in which I extract seven lessons about resilience, but I’m no LinkedIn creator. Mostly it reminded me that the sunk-cost fallacy is considerably easier to understand when the sunk costs belong to somebody else.

Then Monday arrives anyway, which is perhaps the least glamorous but most accurate thing I have learnt about running a company. Whatever happened last week, there is still a company to build this week.

Somewhere in the middle of doing that, I also put myself inside my own brain and staged an Al Baik heist, albeit entirely with AI.

I’ve been experimenting rather obsessively with generative AI lately, partly because it makes ideas possible that would previously have required a crew, locations, VFX and a budget large enough to discourage me from having them in the first place.

What interests me is what happens when imagination becomes cheaper to execute. I can now spend an evening directing a computer through my own eyeball or stealing fried chicken from the back of a vintage Land Cruiser. This will undoubtedly produce an extraordinary quantity of rubbish, but it also gives strange ideas considerably more room to become good ones.

Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to the Fiat story.

We have a tendency to look backwards and mistake outcomes for plans, as though the strange turns were always part of the strategy because eventually somebody found a coherent way to explain them.

Fiat presumably did not begin the decade planning to put Gaddafi on its cap table. Very little of 2026 has unfolded the way I expected it to either.

The plans change, the sensible thing occasionally fails and the ridiculous thing occasionally works. Then enough time passes and somebody draws an arrow between the two.

I find that oddly comforting this week.

See you next week,

Chaymae

Every day, more than 40 million bottles of Yakult are consumed around the world.

Founded in Japan in 1935 by Dr. Minoru Shirota, what began as a tiny fermented milk drink grew into a multibillion-dollar global business with one of the most distinctive distribution models in the world.

This is the story of how a Japanese doctor turned a 65ml bottle into a global phenomenon.

The Blueprint is an entrepreneurial-focused series digging into the origin stories and strategies behind the most successful companies in the world.

You can watch the full episode here.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the seventh issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Virgin Voyages hosted a party at sea for 1,000 creators to document.

• Ba Thức Food used TikTok LIVE Shopping Ads to achieve 23.7x ROAS.

• Bilibili relaunches globally to attract Western creators.

Virgin Voyages hosted a party at sea for 1,000 creators to document.

Continuing with my Vietnam series, this is a really cool story that I read about which made me go like I should share this one with you guys.

The Business Case →

The cruise line partnered with TikTok to pull off what they’re calling a Creator Voyage mobilizing over 1,000 nano, micro, macro, and VIP creators to sail with the brand and post from onboard in real time.

It was all done just to make content that feels native to TikTok.

The results were hard to ignore. The campaign generated over 20M+ video views, triggered over 3000+ organic posts from the broader community, and drove almost 700% increase in TikTok-referred traffic to the Virgin Voyages website.

The infrastructure behind it matters too. Virgin worked with TikTok Creative Exchange partner to build a custom Creator-led package, handling onboarding, contracts, and content deliverables for 1,000+ creators at scale.

They also locked in 180-day usage rights through TikTok’s Branded Buzz solution, which let them take the highest-performing creator videos and push them through paid amplification without losing the authentic, creator-first feel that made them work in the first place.

My POV: In the previous edition I had covered how authenticity is winning over the internet, backing the story with proof. This is an example of why that’s the case. What once paid ads did for brands, creator-led GTM is doing at the moment.

Ba Thức Food used TikTok LIVE Shopping Ads to achieve 23.7x ROAS.

Ba Thức Food is a Vietnamese dried beef snack brand, and their TikTok story is one of the cleanest small-business turnarounds I’ve come across. Think of it as a business turning itself into a creator.

The Business Case →

The offline sales of the brand were dropping. So Ba Thức Food did what more and more Vietnamese brands are doing, they moved the store to TikTok.

They started by making high-quality self-produced videos that pulled in millions of views and built a loyal following. To get the money in they layered in two tools: Video Shopping Ads (VSA), which put shoppable product cards directly inside their best-performing videos on the For You feed, and LIVE Shopping Ads (LSA), which pushed their livestreams out to users who hadn’t found them yet.

The livestream piece is worth slowing down on. Once a viewer clicked in, they could browse products, ask questions in the live comments, and buy all without leaving the app. It’s basically a virtual store, running in real time, with a host who can answer any objection on the spot.

The numbers that came out of this were crazy.

• 23.7x ROAS on live shopping ads

• 10.4x ROAS on video shopping ads

• 15% on-site complete payment rate, and

• Over 2,000+ completed purchase events.

Their videos also hit the trending leaderboard in Vietnam, which compounded the organic reach on top of everything else.

My POV: Ba Thức Food is a masterclass in sequencing. First earn attention organically, then amplify what’s already working with paid. Most small brands do it backwards, they pay before they’ve proved anything. These guys proved it first, then put money behind the proof.

Bilibili relaunches globally to attract Western creators.

This one is big and honestly, not enough people in the creator world are talking about it yet.

The Business Case →

Bilibili, China’s answer to YouTube, just went global. The Shanghai-based platform has more than 300 million monthly active users, and until recently, it was almost impossible to use if you weren’t in China.

Uploading required government ID verification, a passport, a national ID card. Most international creators didn’t even bother. That wall is now gone. The relaunched international app only needs an email address or phone number to sign up. It’s live on Android, with iOS coming soon. And according to Bilibili themselves, the Chinese and global versions of the platform carry the same content library.

Here’s what makes it genuinely interesting for creators. Bilibili Studio, their creator services hub, automatically translates uploaded videos into Chinese for the domestic audience.

You upload once, in English, and the platform handles the localization into a market that YouTube can’t even reach.

YouTube is blocked in mainland China. That’s a billion-person audience that most creators have had zero access to.

My POV: I first discovered the platform when Varun Maya’s team put their game trailer on it and it was received really well. The same opportunity could exist for creators outside China. In return, the world could discover entirely new ways of creating content emerging from China.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Adidas and Puma are both reviving their iconic originals, tapping nostalgia and heritage to make classic designs feel culturally relevant again.

• Chicken Shop Date is coming to a close, marking the end of one of YouTube’s most distinctive creator-led interview formats.

• Media investment firm WTSL just invested in the world’s most valuable female creator, highlighting how female-led creator businesses are becoming major forces in the global media economy.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the sixth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Vietnam’s creative economy is turning into a $95B beast.

• How a small Independent newspaper still manages to find its readers.

• Why are tech companies & VCs wanting to own a piece of the creator economy.

Vietnam’s creative economy is turning into a $95B beast.

I’m in Vietnam right now, and as I write this edition of Creator Games, I wondered what the creator economy looks like here. So, I read up a few articles, understood the sectors that are booming, and creators that have benefited the most. So here’s a brief breakdown.

The Business Case →

According to The Art and Science of Authenticity report, Vietnam’s creator economy is on track to generate $95 billion in commercial value by 2030. The report argued that polished content is losing, 3 in 4 people skip content that appears overly polished or inauthentic.

In Vietnam specifically, the pull toward raw, real content is even stronger than the regional average. 95% of Vietnamese consumers say authentic content directly influences their purchase decisions and Vietnamese audiences are 1.3x more influenced by livestream content than the APAC average.

The case study TikTok leads with for Vietnam is about Jayni (@Jaynitravel), who transformed a career setback into a cultural storytelling platform, driving 87x revenue growth and 94x commission volume between 2024 and 2025.

And the other story is about PewPew. He built his name as one of Vietnam’s early gaming streamers before turning to TikTok Shop in 2023. His “Tạp hóa PewPew” (Pewpew’s General Store) channel quickly took off, mixing livestream commerce with his trademark humour and no-nonsense style, reaching 1 million followers within a year.

In the broader scheme of things, creator-led marketing is also expanding well beyond lifestyle. Gaming, financial services, consumer electronics, and mobile apps are emerging as the next wave, with brands in these categories using creators not just for awareness but to drive direct purchase decisions.

On the supply side, the platform’s monetized creator base has grown significantly. The number of monetized creators on TikTok grew 1,267% year-on-year as of Q3 2025.

The AI layer is also accelerating output. TikTok’s Symphony tool let Unilever’s Vaseline campaign generate 2,000 images and 300+ creator-ready videos in just three days. Two in three consumers across APAC now say they want brands and creators to use AI-generated content and TikTok users show 1.5x more interest in AI-enhanced content than users on other platforms.

My POV: The biggest takeaway after reading the report is to be “Flawsome”, that is to be awesome despite your flaws and that’s what’s attracting the viewers the most.

How a small Independent newspaper still manages to find its readers.

So, the next story is really interesting. Perhaps the times we live in make it even more relevant. When Chaymae shared this with me a few weeks ago, I knew I had to share it with you.

Newspapers have been an integral part of my life. I’ve run for them, fought with my friends over them, skipped morning school assemblies just to get my hands on them, scrolled through the sports section, and been the first to know what was happening in the world of sports.

For me, newspapers were the only source of information before I got access to the internet at school. So, when I read the story about the Chronicle, I just wanted to write about it. Because, in some sense, they were the creators of the century before the ones we’re so familiar with today.

The Business Case →

Mark Frost founded The Chronicle in Glens Falls, New York in 1980 on a $1,700 investment. It took nine years to turn a profit. Today it’s still running, free, weekly, print in a media landscape that has swallowed nearly 3,500 newspapers since the mid-2000s.

The Chronicle prints 20,000 copies a week and blasts a digital replica to another 20,000 email subscribers every Thursday. It covers town hall meetings, school board decisions, restaurant openings, parking disputes, and the occasional rattlesnake attack.

Frost, now 75, does most of the work himself. Every Thursday morning he loads bundles into a Subaru Forester and drives them to drop-off points across the region.

At one Hannaford grocery store, a 74-year-old named William Norton waits in his truck to collect 40 copies for his neighbors in Stony Creek, a town so isolated that, as Norton put it, “that’s all they got to read over there.”

The model is free-to-reader, ad-supported, and deeply local. Frost has turned down multiple overtures to replicate it in other communities. His stated ambition: build one great newspaper.

That clarity of purpose has made it resilient. According to Northwestern University’s local news project, independent weeklies like The Chronicle have been “relatively resilient” precisely because large newspaper chains can’t be bothered with them.

The pandemic nearly finished it. The Chronicle went from a staff of 12 to four. But it has since been rebuilt to seven. A 44-page graduation issue in June 2026 was the biggest in six years.

But another challenge looms, as Frost grows older, succession planning is becoming a pressing question. His son has been contributing significantly to the business since his comedy career came to a stop. But I’m sure the Chronicle will handle this challenge just as it has handled the others over the years.

My POV: I love how community-led-infrastructure can turn content into personalised experience instead of just chasing scale.

Why are VCs wanting to own a piece of the social economy.

The recent Business Insider’s third annual list of VCs backing social startups showed interesting trends. For one, they are trying to make the internet social again. Here’s how:

The Business Case →

The original social media giants had a simple premise. Connect people. Then they got big, discovered advertising, and became media companies. All of them optimized for attention over connection.

That pivot left a gap. And now venture capital wants to fill it.

The thesis is simple: helping people connect with other people. And a lot VC firms including Menlo Ventures, Forerunner, A16z, Verdict Capital, and Premise are venturing into these five categories right now:

1. Vibe coding as social: Wabi and Sekai let people build, share and remix mini apps with AI. The idea is simple: people don’t just want to watch, they want to create.

2. Dating, rebuilt: AI dating startups like Overtone, Sitch and Known are trying to rethink matchmaking, rather than just build another dating app.

3. IRL social: Posh, Corner and others are using technology to get people off their screens and into real-world experiences.

4. AI as a social assistant: Startups like Town and Eigen are exploring whether AI can help us manage relationships and even discover new ones.

5. AI-powered entertainment: Suno, Lore and Status are making entertainment more participatory, letting people create, play and engage rather than just consume.

My POV: The internet was all about creating content, distributing and gaining followers, but now what VCs are betting on is participation, with AI making it possible to build for individuals, not just audiences.

And that could reshape the creator economy. It was built on one-to-many: creators broadcast, audiences consume. But if everyone can create, remix and build, where does the creator end and the audience begin?

🗞 Creator Gossip

• This creator surpassed a million followers after 17 years of creating content. Talk about playing the long game.

• Paramount is getting into microdramas, bringing short, TikTok-style shows to mobile streaming as Hollywood chases the next big way to keep audiences hooked.

• Another week, and celebrities deciding they want their own corner of YouTube. Hollywood is increasingly realizing that owning the audience beats renting it from traditional media.

• Ted Lasso is using fashion in a surprisingly clever way and turning what characters wear into part of the storytelling. Apparently, the wardrobe department has entered the content strategy chat.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the fifth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• This founder turned Cursor into an AI buddy that teaches you

• This founder built a global creator army for Korean brands

• Brands are handing creators the brief

This founder turned Cursor into an AI buddy that teaches you

I was introduced to Farza during his buildspace days. He struck me as a founder who is cool, deeply online, and understands content and community really well. And that’s what makes him really special.

So this issue, we chat with a creator-founder whose curiosity has taken him from childhood side hustles to building Clicky. And what his journey tells us more about creator founders.

The Business Case →

Farza grew up in Florida, and as a teenager, he was already experimenting with ways to make money online like selling games and other products on ebay.

He built Zip School, as a tool to help parents navigate homeschooling. Post pandemic, changed into live online classes for kids. That’s when he was admitted to Y-combinator in 2020.

Later, in Dec 2021 he launched buildspace, and in Nov 2022 that caught a16z’ attention.

After successfully growing buildspace to 120,000 builders at its peak, raised $10M led by a16z, he shut down in August 2024. It was kind of a shock to me personally, because it felt like he was onto something big.

Later, he started shipping small experiments again. To be honest, I remember watching his first YouTube video when he was back, it kind of got me excited on what he was building next.

So finally, in April 2026, he posted a demo on X. It showed a tiny animated blue companion sitting next to his cursor on his Mac screen. The companion moved with the cursor, could see the screen in real time, listened to voice commands, and talked back.

When it needed to show him where a button was, it physically pointed at it, an animated cursor flying to the exact pixel. He’d been using it to learn DaVinci Resolve. He called it Clicky.

The demo hit roughly 3 million views. The open-source repo crossed 6,300 GitHub stars almost immediately.

The whole thing started as a weekend project. Within weeks, it became HeyClicky and Farza was back in Y Combinator, his second batch, this time without even applying.

The experience is what makes it stand out. Most AI tools ask you to switch contexts, open a chatbox, describe what’s on your screen, paste in the error. Clicky skips all of that.

It’s already looking at what you’re looking at. The burden of communication drops. You don’t explain the problem, you just ask what to do next.

My POV: You know what’s best about creator products is that you are somehow attached to that creator without even knowing them personally. They trust their taste, follow their journey and want to see what they build next.

That gives creators a huge advantage. They already have people who can test the product, validate the idea and speed up the feedback loop.

The startup still has to go through the difficult 0 to 1 journey, of course. But solving for the first 1,000 true fans the hardest part for most startups becomes a little easier.

And that’s why I think creator-founders will continue to have an edge in the product race. It’s not just about having an audience. It’s about having distribution, trust and a community they can build with from day one.

This founder built a global creator army for Korean brands

So, a few years ago, my friend’s sister started a Korean beauty brand. It never really took off in India, for whatever reason, but it was my introduction to Korean beauty products.

So when I came across Aram Baek’s story, I was immediately curious. Here was someone who had spent years building his own company and K-beauty brands, only to start a new chapter building the infrastructure layer connecting Korean brands with creators through Nurilounge.

The Business Case →

At first glance, you could call it a creator marketing platform. But I think that undersells what Aram is actually trying to build.

Nurilounge is essentially building the infrastructure that sits between brands and creators.

On one side, it has built a network of more than 1.5 million creators across 100+ countries.

On the other, it has worked with 400+ brands and run more than 2,600 campaigns. But what is interesting is that the company isn’t just matching a brand with someone who has a large following.

The matching is based on the data Nurilounge has collected from years of running campaigns: things like campaign completion rates, views, category expertise and content quality.

In other words, follower count is only one signal.

A brand comes in with a goal, target market and budget. Nurilounge helps build the campaign strategy, identifies the right mix of creators, manages outreach and coordination, oversees the content and then measures the results.

That ability to scale is probably one of the more interesting parts of the model.

The company says its infrastructure can support campaigns involving a handful of creators or thousands of them, while its current database spans creators from nano to mega influencers. Its reported average campaign content completion rate is over 70%.

But Nurilounge isn’t only building software or a database. It is also building a creator network. Creators can access brand campaigns, paid collaborations, products and offline events.

Nurilounge has been running creator-focused events since 2023, with activations across Seoul and New York designed to bring creators and K-beauty brands together in person.

My POV: The biggest companies often build infrastructure that helps others grow. Amazon did it for sellers, Uber did it for drivers and Nurilounge is doing it for brands and creators.

Build the rails, and as the ecosystem grows, you grow with it.

Brands are handing creators the brief

The recent Colin and Samir partnership with Lexus is a good example of how authenticity is winning on the internet. And if you haven’t read about the campaign yet, you should definitely check it out.

The Business Case →

Colin & Samir Start Over is a four-part series where the duo travels across the U.S. in Lexus cars while taking on different creative projects. But what makes this partnership interesting is that it didn’t start with Lexus handing Colin and Samir a brief.

The campaign came from a deeply personal place. After losing their homes in the Los Angeles wildfires and dealing with creative burnout, they wanted to leave L.A. and rediscover their creative spark.

They turned that feeling into an idea, pitched it to Lexus, developed the creative strategy and produced the campaign themselves. And this wasn’t simply Lexus giving creators a budget and asking them to make a few sponsored posts.

Colin and Samir say they developed the campaign with Google Creative Works, Google’s internal creative consultancy, and then worked with Portal A to produce the larger campaign assets.

We’ve seen this shift elsewhere too. YouTube has highlighted Toyota’s partnership with creator Zach King, where he was given the freedom to create, star in and direct his own Indiana Jones-inspired short film for the brand.

And the infrastructure is beginning to catch up to this idea.

Google now allows brands to take creator-made YouTube videos and turn them into paid campaigns, meaning the same piece of content can work organically on a creator’s channel and then be amplified through paid media.

My POV: The creator is no longer just the distribution channel. They’re increasingly becoming the creative agency, the talent and the media channel, all at once.

The real shift is bringing creators in at the idea stage, combining their creative instincts, audience relationship and distribution into a new advertising model.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Influencers are becoming a bigger force behind what people buy globally. And in Brazil, India & South Africa, their influence is only getting stronger.

• Jimmy Fallon’s 20 million views might be the moment micro-dramas officially went mainstream. What started as bite-sized, mobile-first entertainment is now catching the attention of major networks and late-night TV.

• Hollywood is starting to compete for the people who understand internet-native audiences, creators, algorithms, and monetisation. The “YouTube person” is becoming a C-suite-level hire.

• OpenAI flew a group of influencers to a luxury retreat. The internet had thoughts. What was meant to be a creator getaway quickly turned into a backlash, with people questioning why influencers were being courted while concerns around AI’s impact continue to grow.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Lebanon’s media group has a new hire and it’s not human.

• This Lebanese founder thinks he can crack the creator economy in the UAE.

• Is Jordan quietly becoming a creator economy hub.

Lebanon’s media group has a new hire and it’s not human

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised when I read the headline. Because the first time I read about it, I thought we’re going to have an AI reporter like we have on Instagram, that’d just share news 24x7, removing the human element out of the journalism. But that’s not what it is, so let’s get into it.

The Business Case →

Annahar Media Group introduced an AI-powered news correspondent this month, called Nahar. Its job is to read thousands of sources in seconds, monitor global developments, translate content, summarise reports, and cross-references information across languages and geographies.

The group was founded in 1993, and is now run by editor-in-chief Nayla Tueni, whose father is Gibran Tueni, also a former editor. It’s a move to make the group tech savvy with the objective of not replacing journalists.

The goal would be to handle volume work so that human editors can focus on verification and storytelling.

My POV: I feel most media houses run on thin margins. This move helps them bring about structural changes. However, if AI handles the throughput and humans handle the judgment, what happens to the junior journalists who were supposed to develop that judgment by doing the throughput first?

This Lebanese founder thinks he can crack the creator economy in the UAE

This story reminds me of two Indian founders, who went through somewhat similar problem statements years ago, and made One Impression, one of the coolest influencer marketing company. So, as they say if a problem statement works for one market, there’s an opportunity for it to work in another. So it did! Let’s just find it how he did it.

The Business Case →

Ali Younes wanted to run influencer campaigns for a brand in Lebanon. There was no platform to do it. Just Discord servers full of Excel sheets and cold DMs going nowhere.

So in 2026, he built Collabfront. It’s the first Lebanese app connecting brands with local creators for paid campaigns and barter activations, where creators take product instead of cash. Three months in, the platform has over 500 creators and 100 registered brands. It’s live on iOS and Android.

The company is incorporated in Dubai, which isn’t incidental. Lebanon was always the proof of concept and MENA the wider market.

My POV: There’s a lot of untapped potential in the markets that don’t make the news. And Lebanon is one of them. But the transition to Dubai and the wider MENA region introduces them to competitors who have been building in this space before them. So, what would differentiate them? One could draw an idea from One Impression’s pivot to deeper levers of creator economy.

Is Jordan quietly becoming a creator economy hub?

There’s something about communities that gets me excited. Think about communities like Hyrox or startup accelerators. They give a sense of collectiveness about doing something creative that makes the world a little more colourful. So, in this edition I thought about Jordan Create.

The Business Case →

Jordan Create is an annual creator economy conference held in Jordan, the first and largest of its kind in the Levant. It brings together content creators, musicians, marketers, brands, and agencies for a single-day event built around panels, keynotes, and networking.

The first edition drew 350+ attendees. Speakers included Mohanad Syoof (1.6M followers), Yazan Abuajweh (2.7M), Rozzah (13.9M), and Saba Sham’a (12M), a combined speaker reach of over 70 million followers.

The event runs three tracks: learning from top creators and marketers, meeting collaborators and commercial partners, and live music and entertainment. The pitch to brands is direct, if you want to reach Jordanian creators in one room, this is where they are.

My POV: Jordan Create solves for accessibility and infrastructure gaps. But what stands out most about community-driven events like this is the opportunity they create for creators to see how others think, discover new possibilities and monetise their work. Being a creator can often be a lonely journey. Spaces like these bring together people from across the ecosystem, spark new conversations and open up opportunities for collective growth.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Disney and TikTok just made the crossover nobody saw coming. Disney is bringing fan-made TikToks featuring its biggest franchises, from Marvel to Star Wars, onto Disney+, while creators get access to Disney’s content library and a new ambassador programme. Basically, your TikTok fandom might now have a seat on Disney+

• Hasan Minhaj, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia are bringing Bollywood vibes to Netflix with Best of the Best. The coming-of-age comedy follows two childhood best friends as they enter the cut throat world of collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance, where friendship, ambition and competition collide. With a story rooted in South Asian culture but made for global audiences, Best of the Best hits Netflix on September 18.

• YouTube is making views easier to get. Starting August 24, simply starting a video will count as a view across long-form and live content too. The catch? Your shiny new view count might go up, but YouTube will still be keeping the real tea “engaged views” separately.

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A family trading business founded in 1897 became the distribution network behind some of the world’s biggest brands across the Middle East.

Four generations later, Fattal had grown to more than 3,000 employees, 500 suppliers and 35,000 customers across 15 countries, spanning FMCG, healthcare, beauty, appliances and more. It survived wars, expanded beyond Lebanon and professionalised its leadership without losing the family behind it.

Then, in 2026, after almost 130 years of family ownership, global shipping giant CMA CGM agreed to acquire 100% of the group.

So how do you build a family business that survives four generations, and becomes strategically valuable to one of the world’s biggest logistics companies?

Watch the full episode here.

There is something wonderfully strange about imagining Frank Lloyd Wright in Baghdad.

He was almost 90 years old when he arrived in 1957, already one of the most famous architects in the world, and had technically been invited to design an opera house. This apparently felt insufficiently ambitious, so Wright did what Wright tended to do and expanded the assignment considerably.

His eventual Plan for Greater Baghdad imagined an entire cultural complex on an island in the Tigris: an opera house, museums, gardens, fountains and a giant monument to the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid.

He wasn’t the only one.

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Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, was working on the University of Baghdad. Le Corbusier had been commissioned to design a 50,000-seat stadium and sports complex. Italian architect Gio Ponti was designing government offices. Alvar Aalto had been approached for a cultural centre. For a brief period in the 1950s, Iraq had assembled something approaching an architectural Avengers. Ponti’s own archive records the Iraqi government’s extraordinary roster of commissions.

To me though, the more interesting question was why Baghdad thought they should come.

Because Iraq was not commissioning famous foreigners to sprinkle some Western sophistication over an otherwise static city. It was in the middle of an enormous attempt to decide what an Iraqi version of modernity might actually look like.

In 1950, Iraq established the Development Board to turn rapidly growing oil revenues into the infrastructure of a modern economy. Two years later, Iraq renegotiated its agreement with the Iraq Petroleum Company, securing a 50–50 profit-sharing arrangement that dramatically increased government oil revenues. Of the oil income flowing to the state, 70 per cent was then allocated to the Development Board for capital development.

The architects were arriving inside something much larger than an architectural experiment.

Iraq was investing in flood control, irrigation, roads, housing and public institutions. It was trying to take wealth generated by something it happened to have beneath its soil and convert it into productive capacity above it.

Today we would call this diversification, give it a 2030 deadline and produce a very expensive deck about it. In the 1950s, apparently, they just got on with it.

And architecture mattered because buildings were not just containers for this new economy. They were statements about the kind of country Iraq believed it was becoming.

Perhaps this is why old photographs of Baghdad can feel so disorienting now.

We have become accustomed to seeing Iraq through the narrowest period of its recent history. Saddam Hussein, war, sanctions, invasion, occupation, ISIS. These events matter but they have become so dominant in the global imagination that everything preceding them can appear almost fictional.

A photograph of 1950s Baghdad therefore circulates online as a revelation.

Look, women wearing skirts at universities. Look, cinemas, modern buildings, cafés.

The implication is always the same: can you believe this was Iraq?

See, we do something peculiar to places that experience catastrophe: we allow the catastrophe to travel backwards.

The Iraq before war becomes merely the prelude to war. Afghanistan before the Taliban becomes an assortment of photographs of women in skirts. Beirut before the civil war becomes the “Paris of the Middle East,” as though a Middle Eastern city requires comparison with a European one before its former cosmopolitanism becomes comprehensible.

Granted, the Iraq of the 1950s was not an idyll. Much of the country remained poor and rural, inequality was severe and political tensions were profound. Modernity was arriving unevenly, as it tends to. The elegant photographs do not tell the whole story any more than photographs of Mayfair tell us everything about Britain.

But neither does what happened later invalidate what was being attempted.

Imagine being 25 that year.

You do not know about the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Kuwait, sanctions, 2003 or ISIS. Those events are as inaccessible to you as 2095 is to us.

What you see is a country earning more from its natural resources and investing much of that money into development. You see new infrastructure. You see Iraqi architects returning from abroad. You hear that Walter Gropius is designing your university and Le Corbusier your stadium.

You might reasonably believe the future was arriving in Baghdad.

And in a sense, it was.

Maybe this is why I like Wright’s drawings so much. They capture ambition before history had the opportunity to label it.

We spend a lot of time asking whether the enormous things being built today are visionary or ridiculous. I suspect this is mostly the wrong question. The uncomfortable thing about ambition is that, at the moment you need it most, it looks remarkably similar to delusion.

Baghdad didn’t know which one it was and neither does anyone building the future now.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the third issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Japan’s Virtual YouTubers are taking over the world and nobody saw it coming

• Netflix is investing in India’s creative ecosystem. The real play is the talent pipeline.

• VHS Dates recreated a dating show that never existed.

Japan’s Virtual YouTubers are taking over the world and nobody saw it coming

Vee, a five-member VTuber project, was launched by Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) in May.

VTubing started in Japan in the 2010s as a niche corner of the internet: anime-aesthetic avatars, motion capture suits, voice modulators, livestreams. The word itself is a portmanteau: virtual + YouTuber. Nobody predicted it would become one of Japan’s most serious cultural exports.

The Business Case →

Today, major talent agencies manage VTubers the way labels manage musicians: custom avatars, multilingual content, global distribution. KAF sold out Nippon Budokan. 7,000 seats. The same hall where the Beatles played in 1966. Sony Music Entertainment Japan is now in the game too. It launched Vee, a project backing five VTubers across streaming, music, and voice acting, calling it the largest virtual talent development project in its history.

The bet is explicit, VTubers as Japan’s next great cultural export after anime and manga. “VTuber” now ranks among the top dream jobs for Japanese schoolchildren.

But the more interesting story isn’t the entertainment. It’s what happens when governments, fire departments, and universities start hiring virtual avatars instead of spokespeople.

Sakai City has a dog detective mascot doing public outreach. Nagoya’s Minami Fire Department uses a VTuber to teach earthquake preparedness. Saitama Prefecture’s virtual tourism ambassador is pulling audiences that a press release never could. Institutions that couldn’t crack younger demographics are routing around the problem entirely, building characters instead of campaigns.

The education angle is where it gets structurally significant. VTubers with academic credentials are running livestreamed lessons on mathematics, politics, Japanese language. Students who disengage in classrooms are staying on for hours.

My POV: The VTuber story gets covered as pop culture. It should be covered as infrastructure.

Japan took an entertainment format built on anonymity and aesthetic pleasure and discovered it solves a distribution problem that governments, schools, and brands have been failing at for years: how do you reach people who’ve already opted out of official channels?

The avatar isn’t the product but trust is

Netflix is investing in India’s creative ecosystem. The real play is the talent pipeline

Ted Sarandos flew to Delhi, met the Prime Minister, and announced a supply chain investment. Here’s all that you need to know.

The Business Case →

Netflix has been in India for a decade. It has done over 200+ originals, filmed across 100+ locations and has estimated 20-25 million paid subscribers against a global base of 325 million.

So, potentially there could be no Netflix globally without India, that’s what he said. And the meeting with the Prime Minister, followed by an announcement that could share the AVGC sector in India.

They have launched two partnership initiatives, one with the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies to co-develop curriculum in visual effects and media technology workflows, and the other with the National Film Development Corporation to train audio description writers and voice-over artists. Disciplines spanning character animation, e-sports management, interactive comics, virtual art department creation.

Think of this like Netflix building the factory floor from ground up, not just buying what the factory makes.

The context goes even deeper. India’s AVGC sector, animation, visual effects, gaming, comics is a stated national priority under the Viksit Bharat 2047 agenda. The talent gap is real and well-documented.

Even before this, Netflix first launched its mobile-only subscription plan in India in 2019, after testing lower-priced mobile plans in India and other Asian markets. The successful Indian launch subsequently led Netflix to test the mobile-only offering in other countries.

My POV: Every major streaming platform is in India. So, the next logical step in building this infrastructure is owning the talent. It’s like how Adobe became the center piece to the creator economy. Think of editors, designers, and animators, all confined to Adobe’s workflow.

Same is the case here.

Sarandos said Netflix wants to be “the first place you check and the last service you cancel.”

VHS Dates recreated a dating show that never existed

The Instagram account VHS Dates has been going viral for resurfacing lost dating service videotapes from the 1980s.

Think of the grainy footage, awkward men in polo shirts and women with big hair selling themselves to a camera.

But the story gets interesting when a New York Times reported, Sopan Deb, flew to Los Angeles to meet the creators. He asked the obvious question: where do you find these tapes?

The Business Case →

The VHS Dates was created by filmmakers Lee Citron and Trevor Worley. They describe the origin story when a box of VHS tapes was found in the basement of an office in Downtown Los Angeles.

Estimated to be from the mid-80s to the early 90s. From a dating company called VHS Dates that once operated out of Van Nuys, California.

That’s when they started VHS Dates, an Instagram account staging fake 1980s video dating tapes, now has nearly 900,000 followers, a merchandise line, and a Tribeca Festival appearance.

They made the whole thing with actors, a green screen, a vintage Ikegami tube camera, and old Sears catalogs for costume research.

When the NYT revealed the truth, one woman said she was “heartbroken.” Another said “I hate that.” A man who’d recorded his own real tape in the 80s said: “They look just like the real thing.”

And yet, they’ll probably keep watching.

A Syracuse professor who studies media and identity put it plainly: audiences don’t connect to the format, they connect to loneliness. To people putting themselves out there and hoping someone picks them.

My POV: Authenticity as a strategy is less about whether something is real, and more about whether it lands as real. The craft is in making the emotional core feel true, even inside something that’s clearly constructed.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Sony Pictures Networks India dropped its festive slate: KBC Season 18, Rohit Sharma’s entertainment debut, Ajay Devgn hosting Crime Patrol, Madhuri Dixit fronting Marathi KBC, and AR Rahman-backed Tamil Idol. Sony LIV is rebranding under It All LIVs Here to anchor it all digitally.

• Ted Lasso is back on Apple TV after three years and this time Ted’s coaching a women’s second-division side in Richmond. 10 episodes, running through October 7, with the full original cast returning and Apple already planning two more seasons after this.

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I turned 33 this week, which is strange because I’m fairly certain I was 27 about three months ago.

Birthdays have always felt like slightly arbitrary accounting periods to me. There is no meaningful difference between 11:59pm on August 5th and 12:01am on August 6th, and yet suddenly you’re expected to conduct an annual review of your existence.

So I did.

The conclusion is that very little of my life looks the way I once imagined 33 would look.

Some of it is considerably better. Some of it is considerably more complicated. And some of it is still very much under construction.

THIRD, conveniently, falls into all three categories.

I started it with a relatively simple frustration: I didn’t understand why so much of the world I came from, travelled through and was curious about appeared mostly as a footnote in global business media.

A company building something extraordinary in Riyadh, Jakarta or Almaty was apparently an “emerging markets” story. Emerging into what, exactly? So we pointed the camera in the other direction, that was the thesis, though the reality of building it has been considerably less elegant.

For most of my career, media has been measured by audience: how many people watched, followed or opened the newsletter. Those numbers matter, and I would be lying if I pretended I don’t refresh them, but reach is a remarkably crude measure of influence. We’ve had founders raise through our Dealflow newsletter and companies raise more than $2 million after an investor discovered them through a 60-second video on our platforms.

Ten million people can watch something and nothing happens. Sometimes the right person watches and a company gets funded. The internet made distribution abundant. What remains scarce is consequential attention: reaching the right person, at the right moment, with enough context to act.

I suspect that distinction will define the next generation of media companies.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in Saudi Arabia recently, which has sent me down an unreasonable number of rabbit holes: why Land Cruisers became ubiquitous in the Kingdom, how Saudi scholarships helped shape its modern economy, the history of Aramco compounds, the Red Sea’s transformation, the story of the Arab Maradona, and honestly so much more.

There are worse hobbies, although arguably more sociable ones.

But Saudi Arabia is particularly interesting to me because so much is changing at once, which makes it possible to see the normally invisible machinery of an economy, capital, policy, culture, technology and people, moving in real time. That is at its core what my show In Plain Sight is about: starting with something ordinary and following it until you understand something much bigger about how the world works.

That curiosity is increasingly taking us into places beyond traditional business, too.

Last week we launched Creator Games, our bet on the next generation of creator-entrepreneurs. I think we still talk about creators as people who monetise attention, when the more interesting shift is people using that attention to build actual companies, effectively starting with distribution and working backwards. Issue two is out this week, looking at the people, platforms and businesses emerging around that shift. You’ll get to meet our first cohort very soon, so make sure you’re signed up.

And because apparently I’m incapable of staying in one intellectual lane, I also made something this week that doesn’t quite fit neatly into any THIRD category. It asks a question I’ve been thinking about for a while: did the internet kill elsewhere?

I’m interested in these questions even when they don’t have an obvious business lesson attached. Maybe especially then. I’m still figuring out exactly where they belong, which seems appropriate given the rest of this letter.

Perhaps that is my actual conclusion from this year’s arbitrary annual review.

At 33, I have fewer answers than I thought I would. THIRD has a bigger impact and is stranger than the company I originally imagined.

But there is something reassuring about that. We spend so much of our twenties trying to construct a coherent life: the career should make sense, the company should have a clear roadmap, the milestones should arrive roughly when expected. Then you get a little older and realise that most interesting things are built considerably less neatly.

Companies pivot, countries reinvent themselves and people do too.

Some of it is considerably better. Some of it is considerably more complicated. And some of it is still very much under construction.

And I think I’m okay with that.

See you next week,

Chaymae

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the second issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Indonesia’s creator platforms are gearing up for a breakout year

• Two Indian farmers used content to make agriculture aspirational again

• The UAE’s newest brand strategy looks more like Netflix than advertising

Indonesia’s creator platforms are gearing up for a breakout year

Indonesia has 180 million young people entering the workforce by 2030. Most of them want to be creators. Nobody built the infrastructure for that. Until now.

The Business Case →

Oktorika Mandasari started at 16, walking the streets of south Jakarta looking for work because her parents didn’t think education was worth it for a girl. She didn’t end up married at 17. She ended up running a tech agency.

In 2021, she partnered with Jason Lee, co-founder of co-working startup Cohive, to build BintangGO, a platform connecting nano creators with brands. Today it has 10,000 creators. 80 per cent women. 70 per cent under 30.

The model is simple and deliberately unglamorous. These aren’t mega-influencers. They’re first-time earners learning to make videos for brands, going from ~$18 a month to over $60. BintangGO takes 5 to 25 per cent of what they earn.

The company has raised $2.5M and is now exploring debt financing to front creators cash before brand payments clear. Lee’s framing: “The creators are like Gojek drivers. We can be the Gojek for the creator space.”

On the other end of the creator stack, Ario Tamat built KaryaKarsa for a different overlooked group: writers. He started it in 2019 with $14,000 borrowed from family.

The logic was simple: writers do 75 per cent of the platform’s GMV while making up only 40 per cent of creators. They were underpriced and underserved. KaryaKarsa gives them 90 per cent of revenue, lets them own their IP, and sets their own fees. 99,000 creators. 600,000 users. GMV already exceeds 2021 figures by May 2022.

My POV: The creator economy conversation is dominated by the US and Southeast Asia always gets footnoted. Indonesia shouldn’t be. 180 million young people, a creative economy worth $130M, and a domestic appetite for locally produced content that’s already generating hundreds of millions in ticket sales and streaming revenue.

What BintangGO and KaryaKarsa are building isn’t just startup infrastructure, it’s the economic layer that turns aspiration into income at scale.

The West built creator monetisation for creators who already had audiences. These platforms are building it for people who are still finding their voice. That’s a harder problem, and a much bigger market.

Two Indian farmers used content to make agriculture aspirational again

I’ll tell you one thing, content can change your life. And this isn’t me just rambling.

One of the stories I was fortunate enough to discover was about two Indian farmers who used content to educate, transform, and empower other farmers to do better.

We all know India, or Bharat, as they say, is an agrarian economy. I come from an area that is heavily dependent on agriculture. In fact, my dad’s business is dependent on it too.

So this story isn’t just significant to me, it’s personal. And that’s what makes it so meaningful to share.

The Business Case →

Indian agriculture has a content problem. The sector feeds a billion people and employs half the workforce,but for decades, its knowledge lived in government pamphlets, agronomist visits, and word of mouth passed between fields. Nobody made it watchable.

Santosh Jadhav and Akash Jadhav changed that calculus. Santosh walked away from a family business in Prayagraj in 2015 to return to Maharashtra and farm high-value crops like capsicum andgrapes. Akash came in with mechanical engineering training and a filmmaking instinct. In 2017, they co-founded Indian Farmer with one idea: teach farmers something new, on camera.

The first YouTube video went up in 2018 with no production budget and no audience. By 2019, they were travelling across the country,agricultural markets, apple orchards in Himachal, paddy fields in the south, documenting what actually works at ground level. By 2020, the content had gone viral. They expanded into Marathi and Kannada to reach farmers the English internet had never spoken to.

By 2021, BBC, NatGeo, and Times of India were paying attention. By 2024, Indian Farmer had a community of over 10 million farmers. The content library now sits at 5,000 educational videos.

My POV: Most agri-tech startups went after the supply chain like logistics, lending, and market access. Santosh and Akash bet on something less obvious: that information was the real bottleneck.

Agriculture isn’t a sexy business. Nobody was lining up to make farming content in 2018. They chose education, consistency, vernacular languages and turned it into a 10 million farmer community that took seven years to build and would take most consumer startups a decade to replicate.

Content opens markets that capital alone couldn’t unlock, demographics that were invisible to brands, sectors that were too fragmented to reach, communities that nobody thought were worth talking to.

The UAE’s newest brand strategy looks more like Netflix than advertising

For decades, UAE brands ran on influencer logic: pay someone with the following to hold your product. That model is being replaced by something more expensive, more structured, and harder to copy.

The Business Case →

Layal Hamdeh is currently the lead in a 30-episode scripted micro-series called Stories After Sunset built with UAE fashion label Numi & Co.

Each episode runs under a minute, pulls from Middle Eastern folklore and cultural history, and weaves the brand’s luxury silk scarves into the narrative so naturally you almost miss them. The product is never the story. The story is the story.

The series drops daily across social platforms with the architecture of a TV show, running at 60 seconds a chapter.

Hamdeh didn’t arrive at this format by accident. Eight years in New York: CBS, the UN, the BBC, followed by a move to Dubai where she joined blinx, a digital media platform covering politics, fashion, sports, and entertainment. Eventually she earned Gulf News’s Best Content Creator award in 2025. She understands both how stories are made and how they travel.

My POV: UAE brands spent years borrowing credibility from creators. Numi & Co. is doing something structurally different, they’re not renting Hamdeh’s audience, they’re building shared IP.

Brands are now thinking like studios: investing in narrative depth, episodic tension, and characters audiences return to, not ads they skip.

When marketing is built like a TV show, the line between brand and entertainment stops being visible. The harder question is whether UAE-born labels can take this format global, or whether it stays a regional advantage that international brands eventually show up to copy.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• A new BCG report maps India’s creator economy at 2–2.5 million monetised creators influencing $350-400 billion in consumer spend with that figure projected to cross $1 trillion by 2030. The catch: only 8–10% of creators currently monetise, making India one of the biggest untapped creator markets on the planet.
  

• Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day landed $355 million domestically in its opening weekend, the second-biggest debut in box office history. Globally, it crossed $927 million. China led international markets with $121 million, India set a new record at $31.8 million, and the Middle East posted its biggest opening of all YouTube has banned a wave of ASMR creators citing violations. Creators say the bans wiped out years of archived content and income without warning.

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If you’re new here, welcome to THIRD’s dealflow newsletter. Each week, we’ll highlight one opportunity featuring global startups raising at the angel, pre-seed and seed level 👼

If you want to get in touch with the founders, just reply back to this email and we’ll introduce you.

You can view past deals here - just make sure to enter your email for access and be a paid subscriber!

The Problem 🚨

Today’s AI agents rely on RAG pipelines and vector databases to retrieve information. But retrieval isn’t memory.

As agents become responsible for handling customer conversations, legal documents, healthcare records and financial workflows, developers are running into the same issues:

• Vector search returns similar information, not exact facts.

• Large context windows still aren’t enough for long-term memory.

• Memory infrastructure is expensive, slow to maintain and introduces privacy and reliability risks.

The result? AI agents that still hallucinate, forget previous interactions and require complex backend infrastructure to function.

The Solution💡

Memvid is building a new memory layer for AI.

Instead of relying on vector databases and RAG pipelines, Memvid packages everything an AI agent needs into a single portable memory file.

That means:

• Persistent long-term memory in one portable file

• Instant retrieval without vector databases or servers

• Time-aware memory that lets agents recall information exactly as it existed at a specific point in time

• Up to 93% lower infrastructure costs while simplifying deployment

The Team 👥

Memvid is founded by repeat entrepreneurs who have spent years building AI products and infrastructure.

• Mohamed (CEO) previously led marketing for a media company acquired by Morning Brew before co-founding a B2B growth agency helping AI startups land enterprise customers.

• Saleban (CTO) holds dual Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Machine Learning, with more than a decade building AI systems across enterprise and consumer applications.

The founders first experienced the problem while building their previous healthtech company, where AI systems needed to securely remember precise patient information without relying on complex memory infrastructure.

Traction 📈

Despite launching recently, Memvid has already built strong developer momentum.

• 40,000+ developer users

• 12,000+ GitHub stars

• #1 Trending GitHub repository

• Paying customers today

• Enterprise pipeline across fintech, legal and private equity

• $20K ARR with a target of $1M ARR by year-end

Independent benchmarks also show Memvid outperforming leading memory systems, including Mem0 and OpenAI’s memory implementations on the LOCOMO benchmark.

Current Raise 💰

Pre-Seed: $800,000

The company is raising to accelerate product development, launch Memvid Cloud, expand enterprise security features, grow to 250 enterprise customers and reach $1M ARR.

Pitch Deck 📄

Upgrade to access the full deck.

Please respond directly to this email to request an introduction to the Memvid team.

Investing in early stage startups is inherently risky. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. No communication through this newsletter or in any other medium should be construed as a recommendation for any security offered on or off this site. Investment opportunities offered by companies and founders you may connect with on this newsletter are private placements of securities that are not publicly traded, involve a high degree of risk, may lose value, are subject to holding period requirements and are intended for investors who do not need a liquid investment.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the first issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• A cricket legend’s shoe brand just outsold the athletes who wear it

• Idris Elba and Google bet $1M on Africa’s creator infrastructure gap

• The UAE just wrote checks to its first cohort of Arabic-language creators

A Cricket Legend’s Shoe Brand Just Outsold the Athletes Who Wear It

For eight years, Virat Kohli was Puma’s biggest face in India. On June 21, he opened a store that competes with it.

The Business Case →

Kohli signed an eight-year, ₹110 crore (~$12.8M) endorsement deal with Puma in 2017, one of the largest in Indian sports history. When it expired this year, Puma offered ₹300 crore (~$35M) to renew it. Kohli said no, and instead took an equity stake in Agilitas Sports, an Indian sportswear startup run by Abhishek Ganguly, Puma India’s former managing director.

That stake became One8: a sportswear label that launched its first independent footwear collection at Delhi’s Yashobhoomi Convention Centre in front of 5,000 fans, athletes, and industry leaders.

The flagship sneaker, the Seam XVIII Signature Test Red, was priced at ₹9,230 (~$96), a number chosen to match Kohli’s 9,230 career Test runs. The full collection spans three lines: Seam and Cover Drive, both cricket-inspired footwear, and Boom Rush, a multi-activity training shoe.

Pre-bookings on District by Zomato sold out within minutes when they opened on June 6. By the time the Delhi premiere wrapped, One8 had reportedly sold more than 150,000 pairs, generating an estimated ₹138 crore (~$16M) in first-day revenue.

My POV: India’s sportswear market has belonged to Nike, Adidas, and Puma for decades. Kohli spent eight years building Puma’s business in that market before turning around and building his own. The launch numbers answer the first question, whether an athlete-owned brand can move product in India. The harder one is whether One8 can do what no Indian sports brand has done yet: go global, and stay there.

Idris Elba and Google Bet $1M on Africa’s Creator Infrastructure Gap

Africa doesn’t have a shortage of creator talent. It has a shortage of studio budgets. Idris Elba and Google are betting AI can close that gap faster than money alone.

The Business Case →

At Google’s inaugural Africa Cloud Summit in Johannesburg, the company and Elba’s Akuna Group announced a $1M program giving roughly 100,000 creators in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Sierra Leone free access to Gemini and other AI production tools. The program is funded jointly by Google and the Elba Hope Foundation.

It’s not just software. Akuna’s own digital wallet will handle cross-border payments for creators in the program, a persistent bottleneck for African creators trying to get paid by brands and platforms outside their home currency.

The announcement landed alongside a bigger milestone: Google confirmed it has now fulfilled its five-year, $1B investment pledge in African economies, and unveiled a new applied AI lab in Ghana and a planned connectivity hub in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

My POV: Google framed the initiative around cost, not talent. The same production tools a major studio takes for granted, handed to creators who’ve never had a budget line for them. Pair that with Akuna’s payment rails, and the pitch isn’t just “make better videos.” It’s remove the two things, equipment and getting paid, that have kept African creators dependent on foreign platforms and foreign gatekeepers.

The UAE Just Wrote Checks to Its First Cohort of Arabic-Language Creators

Dubai has spent the past two years building creator infrastructure, a hub, a summit, now a fund. This month it started cutting checks.

The Business Case →

Creators HQ, the UAE’s dedicated creators’ hub, and content platform Alfan opened applications for the Social Content Fund: a $1.36M (AED 5M) program backing creators who make family-friendly, educational, and socially impactful Arabic-language content. The partnership was signed at the 1 Billion Followers Summit in January and formally launched at Creators Gathering, an event at Atlantis, The Palm that drew over 1,000 content creators and media professionals.

Want the numbers behind Alfan’s own raise? We shared their pitch deck in our newsletter Dealflow. Get access here.

To qualify, applicants need at least 100,000 YouTube followers, a consistent output of positive content, and a credible production plan. Selected creators get financial support, personal-branding workshops, and a year of access to the Alfan.io platform.

It’s part of a wider build-out: Wio Bank recently launched a UAE account built specifically for creator income, and the government has said YouTube creators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are increasingly earning seven-figure sums.

My POV: Most creator funds reward reach. This one is explicitly filtering for values: family content, education, “socially responsible storytelling,” in the fund’s own language. That’s a narrower bet than a typical creator fund, but it’s also a clearer one: the UAE isn’t just trying to grow its creator numbers, it’s trying to shape what a national content industry looks like before it scales.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• IAB Global Network launches Global Creator Week, bringing together 17 markets, including South Africa and MENA, to establish industry standards and best practices for creator marketing, and taking place from September 14-18.

• Africa’s creator economy is projected to grow from $3.08 billion today to $17.84 billion by 2030, with South Africa and Nigeria leading the market and Egypt and Kenya among the continent’s fastest-growing creator ecosystems.

• The Philippines hosts the third edition of the &FRIENDS Festival, bringing together creators, musicians and gaming communities as creator-led entertainment continues expanding across Southeast Asia.

• Creator startup funding remains concentrated around AI, with late-stage companies attracting more than 80% of disclosed capital over the past year as investors back creator tools over consumer social apps.

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Eighty-seven years ago this month, King Abdulaziz crossed the Dahna Desert in a convoy of 400 cars to watch oil flow for the first time, arriving at Ras Tanura on the Arabian Gulf coast where a tanker called the D.G. Scofield sat waiting. He opened the valve himself, Saudi oil entered the global economy, and the story the West prefers, of American ingenuity unlocking a sleeping desert, began writing over the one that was actually unfolding.

The 1930s are, in a narrow sense, an American story, one of concession, geology and drilling. But the 1980s are an Arab one, and the distance between those two chapters is the real history of Aramco.

How the sons and grandsons of a tribal society went from handing foreigners a concession for £35,000 in gold to running one the most profitable company in human history, in a single generation, is not a footnote. It is the whole point.

The deal that started it all

Before any of this, there was an imperial contest, as there always is when large quantities of valuable resources are discovered somewhere the great powers have decided it cannot do without.

The 1930s Gulf was a battleground between two visions of how the world’s resources should be controlled. Britain had already cornered oil in Iran and Iraq, its companies held the concessions, its navy kept the shipping lanes open, and its diplomats made sure the terms stayed favorable to London, as they had a talent for doing. The Americans were the insurgents: commercially ambitious, unencumbered by the administrative overhead of empire, and very much aware that the British had gotten there first.

Fred Davies was one of those Americans, a Minnesotan who had spent most of the 1930s foraging around the Middle East for oil on behalf of the Standard Oil Company of California, better known as SOCAL. He found some in Bahrain, and then, standing on oil-bearing ground there and looking across the Gulf toward the newly founded Saudi Arabia, concluded that the geological formations he could make out looked remarkably similar to the Bahrain dome beneath his feet. It was, as these moments of historical consequence tend to be, equal parts rigorous science and borderline reckless instinct.

In 1933, the concession SOCAL secured, brokered by an American named Lloyd Hamilton and the king’s advisor Abdullah Sulaiman, now reads like a document from a parallel universe. SOCAL paid £35,000 in gold upfront, another £20,000 eighteen months later, £5,000 per year in rent, and royalties only if oil was discovered in meaningful quantities.

Saudi Aramco’s profit at some point was $111 billion. The Americans beat the British not with gunboats but with a handshake and a contract that, at the time, probably looked like a speculative punt on an empty desert and, in retrospect, was the most consequential commercial transaction of the twentieth century.

The telegram nobody obeyed

The contract was worth nothing without oil, and for five years, there was none to speak of.

By 1938, SOCAL had sunk millions into eastern Saudi Arabia, drilled six dry wells across the rocky terrain around Dammam, and exhausted whatever patience American corporate boards have for geological optimism in foreign deserts.

They sent a telegram to the two geologists they had stationed out there, Tom Barger and Max Steineke, instructing them to stop drilling.

Barger and Steineke had been at it for three years, led through the landscape by a Saudi guide named Khamis ibn Rimthan, a man who appeared to possess some intuitive understanding of the terrain that no amount of formal geological survey had managed to replicate, and they had precisely nothing to show for it.

Steineke ignored the telegram and drilled another 200 feet into Well No. 7, which is either the most consequential act of professional insubordination in the history of capitalism or a reminder that the people closest to a problem often understand it better than the people signing the memos.

The well produced 1,500 barrels on its first day, 4,000 a few days later, and went on to pump more than 32 million barrels over 45 years before it was finally shut down in 1982, by which point the company it had created was already one of the most powerful economic entities on the planet.

That single decision, one geologist defying one corporate order in the middle of the Arabian desert, is the founding act of Saudi Aramco.

The part that gets left out

The standard telling of the Aramco story ends somewhere around here: Americans find oil, king opens the valve, empire is born, fade to credits. It is a satisfying arc, and it has the additional virtue of being roughly accurate as far as it goes, which is not very far at all.

The Americans found the oil, but the Saudis built the company. From almost the beginning, Aramco ran training programs for Saudi workers, opening its first school in Al-Khobar in 1940 in a rented house with nineteen students and furniture assembled from whatever was available, expanding to a second location within two months because demand outpaced the space.

By the 1950s, Aramco had adapted an American wartime industrial training model, setting aside one eighth of all production time for worker education, and the results were striking enough that when the company brought in outside consultants to evaluate the program, they were reportedly told there was nothing to improve.

By 1957, Saudi Arabs made up 70 percent of Aramco’s 18,000-person workforce. By 1967, they held 57 percent of management and supervisory positions, which is not the profile of a company treating its host nation as a labor source rather than a talent pipeline.

The most compressed version of this entire story is Ali Naimi, who joined Aramco as an office boy at around age eleven after lying to the company doctor about his age. The doctor wrote down seventeen, apparently persuaded by a story about family hardship and Bedouin genetics, taught himself to type well enough to reach a hundred words per minute, then decided he wanted to be a geologist because, as he told an interviewer, he thought it might help him become president of the company.

The assistant general manager he said this to reportedly replied that it was as good a reason as any and assigned him to an exploration rig. Naimi went on to earn a geology degree from Lehigh University, a master’s from Stanford, and became Aramco’s first Saudi president in 1984.

His biography is perhaps Saudi Arabia’s transformation compressed into a single career: a boy from the Eastern Province who talked his way into a clerical job at eleven and retired as president of the world’s biggest company after IPO.

How power actually transfers

By the 1970s, the arithmetic of the global oil market had shifted decisively in favor of the producers, and the region’s governments knew it. Most nationalizations of the era happened through rupture: seizures, expulsions, the cancellation of contracts and the burning of goodwill accumulated over decades. Saudi Arabia, characteristically, took a different approach.

Between 1973 and 1980, the kingdom negotiated its way to full ownership of Aramco, acquiring a 25 percent stake in 1973, increasing it to 60 percent by 1974, and reaching 100 percent on April 15, 1980, with retroactive financial effect to January 1, 1976, a detail that suggests the Saudis had a reasonably clear sense of what they were doing and when.

No assets were seized, no executives were expelled, and no dramatic rupture was manufactured for domestic political audiences. What happened instead was a methodical transfer of ownership through the same instrument that had governed the relationship from the beginning: negotiation, conducted by people who understood that control without operational continuity was a hollow prize.

See, Saudi Arabia wanted to own Aramco, but it also did not want to lose forty years of accumulated American expertise and institutional knowledge, so it structured a handover that preserved both, which is exactly the kind of strategic patience that tends to look obvious in retrospect and nearly impossible to execute in real time.

By 1984, Saudi nationals held nearly 62 percent of Aramco’s supervisory positions, and the company that had once been run by Americans building a little piece of suburban California in the desert, was now run by Saudis operating one of the most technically sophisticated energy companies in the world, because they had spent four decades making sure they understood how.

What a badge number actually tells you

The Naimi biography is the most compressed version of this story, but it is not the only one. For that, you need a badge number.

Abd al-Aziz Shalfan’s badge number was 4, meaning there were exactly three Aramco employees before him. He earned it in 1934 after spotting two foreign geologists in a Bahrain market, talking his way through their interpreter, and asking if he could come along to look for oil on the Saudi mainland. They said yes on the spot, which says something about either their judgment or their hiring process, possibly both.

What made Shalfan unusual was how far he had already traveled before any of this. Most young men from the Najd had never seen a foreigner, let alone left the peninsula, but Shalfan had made the journey to Kuwait at nine years old, fourteen days by camel caravan with his merchant uncles, where he attended a regular school alongside his Koranic studies. He ended up in Bahrain working a shopkeeper’s stall in the Manama suq, and from that single interaction, went on to work at Aramco for almost half a century, long past any reasonable retirement age, reportedly because he found the prospect of leaving difficult to contemplate.

Shortly before he died, someone asked Shalfan what the discovery of oil had meant for Saudi Arabia, and he said: “We have gone from nothing to everything.” It reads like a line someone wrote for him, but it wasn’t, it is a precise account of a transformation that happened within a single lifetime, delivered by someone who had watched it from the inside since the beginning.

The pipelines, the refineries, the Master Gas System, the $12 billion bond that attracted $100 billion in investor interest, the $111 billion in annual profit at one point: all of it traces back to a geologist who ignored a corporate telegram and drilled 200 more feet into the desert, and a twelve-year-old who asked a stranger if he could come along.

The frontier story is real, and it has genuine drama. But the more consequential one is what came after it, a region that decided it would not simply be the site of someone else’s extraction, that absorbed the knowledge on offer, built the institutions from scratch, and eventually ran the whole operation itself.

That is not a footnote to the Aramco story. It is, depending on what you think the story is actually about, the only part that matters.

Worth a watch from THIRD

• I Spent 72H with Pakistan's Best Tech Founders (It Was Nothing Like I Expected!)

• How A Syrian Immigrant Built a $5B Industrial Empire

• How A $6B Noodle Brand From Indonesia Became Nigeria’s National Dish

There is something almost satisfying about watching a glossy narrative crack. The borrowed Maseratis, the rented helicopters, the influencers blinking into a reality they had insisted didn’t exist. It makes for a neat story: illusion meets consequence, fantasy dissolves into truth.

Except it isn’t quite that simple, though a recent British newspaper feature on Dubai’s expat influencers would prefer it were.

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For decades, the world admired Paris without interrogating Haussmann’s mass displacement of the poor. We romanticised New York without reckoning with the structural inequality built into its foundations. We built London into a global brand on the quiet understanding that empire was best left out of the brochure. And yet some are positioning themselves as judges of who controls Dubai’s narrative.

Britain’s own record invites pause. The D-Notice system has suppressed British journalism for over a century. The government that lectures Dubai on press freedom is the same one that prosecuted a war crimes whistleblower and let Rupert Murdoch shape three decades of public opinion. The Canary Wharf banker with food banks visible from his office window is not morally troubled by the view. The progressive media reader does not cancel their next-day delivery subscription in solidarity with warehouse workers. To demand that Dubai residents uniquely account for the inequality around them is not a moral argument. It is geography dressed as ethics.

When I shared a video on this subject, the comments arrived on cue. Dubai has no culture, a manufactured city, a theme park built on oil and imported labour, with no authentic history to speak of.

It is a strange charge, and one that is never applied evenly. I have lived across Asia, Latin America, and North Africa, but also in places that sit comfortably within the West’s own conception of wealth, Geneva, the South of France, New York, London. In none of those places was I ever asked whether the city had real history. Nobody ever questioned me on Monaco’s cultural credentials. Nobody writes anxious columns about Geneva’s authenticity. The difference is not scale, or age, or depth of tradition. It is legibility. Those cities exist within a Western cultural frame and Dubai does not. What is really an unfamiliarity with the format gets repackaged as an absence of substance.

What is actually being said, when people say Dubai has no culture, is that its culture has not been made accessible to them. The pearl diving traditions, the Bedouin poetry, the architecture of the wind towers, the oral histories carried across the Gulf for generations, none of this registers, because it was never translated into the formats the West uses to decide what counts. A city’s history does not cease to exist because it has not been packaged for export.

There is a related trap, one I noticed repeatedly living in what we politely call emerging markets: the demand for folkloric authenticity. At its worst, it shades into poverty porn, the expectation that a place is only legible, only real, when it confirms the backward image the visitor already carried.

India is a particular target of this. And, perhaps surprisingly to some, so is Dubai. Because it does not present itself in the pre-modern register that Western consumers have come to expect of the region, its modernity gets read as inauthenticity, as if growth were a form of erasure, and history could only be valid if it stayed still. The expectation is not culture. It is a museum, and preferably an open-air, dilapidated one.

Nobody arrives in London insisting the city is inauthentic because it no longer resembles the Industrial Revolution. London’s poverty is permitted to coexist with its glamour. That same coexistence, in Dubai, becomes evidence of moral failure.

Which makes the next objection particularly rich. These same visitors demanded the glitzy hotels, the luxury brunches, the spectacular skylines, and when their wish was granted, declared the result fake. Dare these arbiters of real culture visit somewhere that does not already agree with them, they might find the world does not begin and end at their local supermarket’s world foods aisle.

And still, influencers get cast as the architects of that fakeness, which makes me question the framing of them as the primary storytellers of Dubai in the first place, because they are not the ones building logistics networks, structuring billion-dollar funds, or designing the policies that turned the city into what it is today. They are downstream of the real story, and the real story is far more interesting.

It is about a region that decided it would no longer wait for validation from Western capital or media to define its relevance. About governments that understood narrative is not just perception but infrastructure, something that can attract or repel billions in investment. About a rebalancing of where opportunity lives. To reduce all of that to influencers selling a fantasy is not just incomplete. It is convenient. It allows us to dismiss what is happening rather than engage with it.

Of course, there is precarity in being an economic migrant, there always has been. Whether you are moving from South Asia to the Gulf or from Britain to Dubai, the trade-off is the same: stability exchanged for possibility. That is not a uniquely Gulf phenomenon. That is the global economy. The difference is that for decades this trade-off was largely invisible to those in the West, because opportunity was local and risk was externalised. Now, as more people move outward towards new centres of growth, that trade-off is becoming visible again. And uncomfortable.

So yes, this moment should prompt reflection but not on whether Dubai was ever a fantasy, but on why that framing feels so compelling in the first place.

Because if a city outside the traditional centres of power can attract capital, talent, and ambition at this scale, then perhaps the illusion wasn’t Dubai. Perhaps it was the idea that opportunity only ever lived in one part of the world.

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Worth a watch from THIRD

• The West has no idea what’s happening in Kazakhstan

• The $30B mega city you’ve never heard of

• The rise and fall of empires, according to Glubb

No one’s really watching Uzbekistan right now.

They’re building a $30B city from scratch, not just to “look modern”, but to pull capital, talent, and opportunity back into the country.

New Tashkent is a bet: build at global standard and the world starts paying attention again. Think Dubai’s tallest-tower playbook meets Amsterdam-style canals or visibility by design.

And it’s not just scale…it’s planning, renewable energy, and a system designed to create jobs at speed.

This is what it looks like when a country decides to re-enter the global economy on its own terms. Most people will notice late, but you don’t have to.

You can watch the full episode here.

In this episode of In Plain Sight, we went down a rabbit hole to trace where venture capital actually comes from…

And it turns out, the story starts long before Silicon Valley, and explains far more about today’s startup world than you’d expect.

You can watch the full episode here.

When Stripe acquired Paystack for over $200 million, most people saw it as a successful exit, but the more important story is what happened after.

Because just like PayPal in the early 2000s, Paystack didn’t just build a company, it built founders. Former employees went on to launch a new wave of startups across payments, banking, logistics, and infrastructure, raising millions and expanding across Africa.

What we’re witnessing looks strikingly similar to the PayPal Mafia, a network of operators who go on to shape entire industries after leaving one company.

We dug deep into this network, who left, what they built, how they’re connected, and what makes this pattern repeat, and what we uncovered might be the blueprint for how entire ecosystems are actually formed.

Watch the full episode here.