Two Climbers, One Summit: What an AI-Native Studio Actually Looks Like
Posted on May 5, 2026 June 17th Meetup — Marin County
Some patterns you only see when two people stand on the same stage from opposite directions.
For our June meetup, we’re heading north to Marin to host two builders working the same problem from very different sides: what does an AI-native entertainment studio actually look like, and who gets to build it?
Steve Newcomb (SNUK3M) spent twenty years building infrastructure. Powerset (which became the foundation of Bing). The team that put the first email on a mobile phone. Modern speech recognition at Stanford. Quiet hands behind GitHub and Node.js. Most recently, a 1,100-person effort to rebuild Adobe’s Creative Cloud around AI. He left Adobe to start JUMP//CUT, bringing together Hollywood writers, editors, and cinematographers alongside AI researchers and agent orchestrators. The pitch: become the next Disney — and open-source the worlds and the studio that makes them.
Jason Zada approached from the other end. Twenty-five years of storytelling that lives in your head years later — Take This Lollipop, Elf Yourself, The Forest. Twenty-six Cannes Lions. Billions of views. Now founder of Secret Level, an AI-native entertainment studio building at the seam of AI, story, and film.
One climbed from systems toward stories. The other from stories toward systems. They’re converging on the same middle, and that middle is the thing I keep wanting to look at directly.
Wednesday, June 17. 6:00 to 8:30 PM. Marin County — venue details soon. Demos, then dinner-table conversations, then Discord afterward if the night earns it.
Join Us
We are a curated community of senior creatives, technologists, and founders. Attendance is limited and by invitation — if this sounds like your kind of room, request access here.