2026 Agenda
Friday
July 17 · Industry Day
Industry Day Registration Opens
Reinventing the Creator / Production Stack
Video won the podcasting format debate. The question now is who builds the infrastructure for video production, including podcasting, clips and long-form. This session brings together two founders who saw the shift early and are shipping the tools: Paul Robert Cary of StarZero, whose AI handles video search, editing, and intelligent clip extraction at scale, and Rox Codes of Flightcast, building video podcasting production infrastructure alongside Steven Bartlett. This conversation explores where AI adds real benefit, where it breaks and what's next. Learn about tools that harness AI to help humans, creating content without a broadcast budget, the HLS / RSS debate for video podcasting, and how intelligent clipping beats lazy clip-farms in both speed and quality.
How to Keep AI From Crushing Your Hopes and Dreams
With a billion new "creators" coming online via AI, how do you compete? This session offers a survival guide for creators, producers and media execs. Learn how to thrive in the age of digital twins, synthetic creators, and the slop tsunami without losing your soul... or your revshare.
Where the Weird Things Are
An exploration of weird and wild deep tech. From biological hacking and orbital data centers to the frontiers of physical machines, this session looks at tech that will soon move from theoretical to practical. Discover where engineering and biology are headed and what the next breakthroughs will mean for builders, makers and creators.
Monetizing Nerd Culture
This session showcases how creators are turning expertise and community into repeatable algorithm-free revenue, including memberships, premium community, courses and cohorts, CAD files and toolkits, brand partnerships, and creator-led products. Learn how to package, price and retain fans and unexpected ways to expand beyond revshare.
AMA - The YouTube Algorithm 2026
YouTube's creator liaison and editor Rene Ritchie and YouTube product manager Todd Beaupre know more about building success on YouTube than just about anyone else. In this AMA they will answer YOUR burning questions about YouTube, the algorithm, success on the platform, why the algorithm doesn't hate you, numbers to pay attention to, and much more!
Networking Lunch Friday
Build Your Own Brain: How to Build and Run AI Models Locally
Privacy, control, and agency are the defining pillars of the next wave of AI. From hybrid systems like OpenClaw and Claude Code to fully offline models, this session explores how to deploy AI partially or entirely on your own hardware. We will break down the current state of the art and project where the price-to-performance curve is heading. You will discover exactly which local hardware delivers the best return on investment, covering memory thresholds, CPU vs. GPU trade-offs, and cost-efficient scaling strategies. Finally, we will share actionable blueprints for securely ingesting proprietary data into your local AI environment, orchestrating autonomous local agents, and locking down your infrastructure from prying eyes.
Building a Nimble Studio for Creators
The lone genius creator is becoming a small studio with a lab, a pipeline, and a product roadmap. This session provides hands-on advice for creators to help them build a cinematic hardware and software stack without spending a fortune and how to hire an effective team of production experts when needed. Learn how to optimize for creativity while digging a protective moat, preserving your humanity and scaling production without losing that weird spark that made you watchable.
LinkedIn Is Not What You Think
Most people still treat LinkedIn like a digital resume. That's a mistake. This fireside chat with Sam Corrao Clanon, who runs creator products at LinkedIn, covers what the platform actually is now: a publishing engine where the right creator or executive can build an audience that converts. If you're a creator who wants to think like a CEO, build real revenue, and eventually sell your channel or your products, LinkedIn is the place to be. We'll discuss what good LinkedIn content looks like in 2026, the formulaic posts dominating so many feeds, and what's coming on the product and monetization side. Whether you're a solo creator, an executive trying to build a personal brand, or a company figuring out how to show up without sounding like a press release, this one's for you.
Creators on the Cap Table
The next power move is equity: creators as founders, owners, investors, and co-builders. This session demystifies deal structures, risk, control, and how not to get dazzled into signing away your future for a short-term bag. Whether via acquisition, alignment or building together, this session identifies how to find co-founders, who's buying, and the best path to sustainable wealth.
How to Stop Being Invisible to AI Search
More than half of Google searches now end without a click, and ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are answering the question before anyone reaches your site, video, or brand. Those systems pull from a small pool of trusted sources, and you're probably not there. This session covers what Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is, why it's already costing you today, and what content, technical, and distribution changes you need to do now to move the needle. Then we go one step further. Within 18 months, AI agents will complete purchases, book services, and curate media on behalf of your customers and community. And without machine-readable authority, you will be invisible. Leave with a practical diagnostic framework and an action list you can put in place today.
Secrets of World Class Editing
A discussion with two of the best editors in the world on the art, science and future of video production. You'll learn about when to break pacing, how to rescue bad footage, the magic of great scoring, what automation can handle and what it can't, and what separates a good cut from one that goes viral. This session explores the secrets of world-class editing, where AI can help (and where it fails), and the tips, tricks and technique that separate the best from the rest. We’ll also talk about why “human taste” is still the bottleneck that matters.
How to Build a Community That Does Not Suck
Most communities fail. They overpromise, underdeliver, and slowly turn into ghost towns. This session brings together creators and operators who have built communities that members actually use, value, and renew. You will learn how to define real member value, choose the right platform, structure memberships, design programming that drives participation, and build systems that keep the experience fresh over time. Walk away with a clear framework for launching or fixing a community that generates buzz, loyalty and revenue instead of churn and regret.
The AI Showrunner: Creation, Formats and Collaboration
A look at the frontier of AI storytelling. How are creators using AI to build entire narrative series and movies? We explore tools that move beyond "slop" into genuine, funny, and engaging narrative formats.
From Viewers to Collaborators: Building the Community That Builds With You
A big audience and a real community are two very different things and most creators don't realize which one they have until they ask their audience to show up. This conversation brings together makers and creators who've figured out how to tell the difference: who in their audience is just watching, and who is genuinely invested. We'll talk about creative ownership, what community-driven product launches actually look like from the inside, and how some of the most interesting things being made right now started not with a solo vision — but with a creator and their most loyal people building something together.
The Changing Face of Fandom
Gen Z is leaving the public feed. This session explores the changing face of fandom, where "microfandoms" and private servers replace likes and followers. Find out why trust is the only metric that matters, and how smart brands, creators and platforms are building communities of value Featuring insights from Discord, Disney, Signal and more.
Save the World, Keep the Audience
"Hank Green built Complexly to make education a mission, not just a format. Matt Fitzgerald led the largest creator-driven fundraising campaigns ever made, most recently #TeamWater with Mark Rober and MrBeast. In this conversation they talk about how to move from content to cause and the rise of creator philanthropy. They'll explore what works, how you structure the org, and how to build something durable without losing the soul of your community.
AI in the Next 12 Months That You Will Actually Use
Forget rosy futures or dystopian doom'n'gloom. This session provides a roadmap focused on what will change in production, discovery, localization, agents, digital twins and personalization in the next year. We’ll separate “cool demo” from “repeatable workflow,” and hand you a short list of disruptive products and services, along with ground-breaking new capabilities... all coming in the next year.
