Can social media be fun (and sexy) again?

**Laurie Segall** (0:00)
It's just, it's like Thirst Trap kind of content.

**Ami Gan** (0:02)
We love the Thirst Trap at Vylit. Right?

**Laurie Segall** (0:05)
I'm trying to explain it to people.

**Ami Gan** (0:07)
We embrace it, look, we're 18 and over, we can be a little edgy and risque, so why not?

**Laurie Segall** (0:13)
Yeah, like, cause what I just looked at, I mean, you look hot, you're AIs.

**Ami Gan** (0:16)
My AI is definitely like... Yeah, I mean, you're AIs. I mean, I see other people's AIs, I'm just like, wow, it's so good. But it's not that it doesn't look like them. It's just this kind of like a bit more polished, like, oh, what I look like when I do my hair and wear makeup. For me, it's like before kids, before having a child.

**Laurie Segall** (0:39)
I'm Laurie Segall, and you're listening to Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
Ami, I'm so happy to have you here. And like full disclosure, we are friends.

**Ami Gan** (0:50)
Yes.

**Laurie Segall** (0:50)
And how we became friends is we met at, was it, it was in Lisbon, right? At a tech conference, was it today?

**Ami Gan** (0:58)
I think it might have been in London.

**Laurie Segall** (1:00)
Yes. I feel like you are my person at tech conferences, where I always need a safe space and someone in a corner who can be like a breath of fresh air with all the tech bros. And honestly, that is you. And I feel like it kind of says something about you.

**Ami Gan** (1:17)
That's very sweet. I appreciate that. I feel the same way where you just have this kind of like, I feel like we just met and just immediately clicked as friends. And I mean, your background is also fascinating. So we just had a lot to chat about when it came to just the tech world in general.

**Laurie Segall** (1:36)
Well, you go into these tech circles, and oftentimes, not to be cliché, it's just like all dudes talking about dude things and not really the human way into things.
And we initially always just had interesting conversations about the state of technology, about all the things kind of happening, and it always just felt a little bit different. So I'm glad to have you here, especially we've been doing so much dark stuff on artificial intelligence and what happens when you lose consent online and how AI can be misused. And so to think about how it can actually be used to benefit and how we can have more ownership, seems like you're like our perfect guest for this.

**Ami Gan** (2:14)
Thank you.

**Laurie Segall** (2:15)
So, okay. So you have such an interesting background, which we're going to get into, but I want to just start to talk by talking about Vylit. This is your new venture. I know you're kind of the tagline for it is it's like the HBO of social media.
Tell us a little bit about it.

**Ami Gan** (2:31)
Yeah. So Vylit, I co-founded with my business partner, Kaylee Magder. We've been working on it, honestly, since end of 2024, 2025 It was our full-time venture when we raised money, did the whole thing, and then we just launched in April of this year. And Vylit's an 18 and over platform where anyone can monetize content, build a community. We really took the best parts of social media and creator platforms and put them into one new experience. So I grew up to date myself a little bit in the Myspace era, where social media was much more social and fun, and as did my business partner. And as we were kind of ideating, oh, should we do something in this space?
It really came down to our own frustrations with how the current state of social media is, meaning there's a lot of doom scrolling, there's a lot of seeing content that minors shouldn't see or even we shouldn't see, that we don't know what's going to always be shown to us. And we wanted something fun. We wanted to see content from people we care about. We wanted to have that surprise and delight of discovery back into social media.
We're 18 and over, so we do allow for topless content. So that's where we've been dubbed the HBO of social media. But there's nothing fully new. There's nothing explicit. We take the stance that social media, especially when monetization's involved, should be for adults.

**Laurie Segall** (4:12)
I love that you just mentioned MySpace, and I'm also, I guess, going to date myself because I loved MySpace. I was like the girl that wrote poems on MySpace, and of course, like, Emo Laurie. I had just... It was such a cool community, but it's actually MySpace predated Facebook and all. It was really kind of how we grew up with social media. It felt really different.