How 700,000 Creators Get Paid to Train AI | Mikayel Khachatryan | Coffeez Ep. 325

Joseph Shalaby (0:13)

Welcome to Coffeez with Joe.

Mikayel Khachatryan (0:15)

Hey, how's it going?

Joseph Shalaby (0:16)

Good. Any coffee preference you'd like today?

Mikayel Khachatryan (0:20)

Just get a Americano. Americano.

Joseph Shalaby (0:22)

Got it. So I hear you do AI.

That's right. Do you think we could replace Joe some AI?

Mikayel Khachatryan (0:29)

Don't tell him. You know what? I don't think that's possible. No one's replacing Joe, including AI. Okay.

Joseph Shalaby (0:35)

All right.

Mikayel Khachatryan (0:36)

I guess I'll show you to him then.

Joseph Shalaby (0:39)

Mikayel, if you could solve the student loan dilemma, you'd be richer than Elon. Thank you so much.

Mikayel Khachatryan (0:45)

Well, let's talk about it.

Joseph Shalaby (0:46)

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming.

Mikayel Khachatryan (0:47)

No, thanks for having me.

Joseph Shalaby (0:49)

All right. Let's get into it. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Coffeez. I am your host, Joe Shalaby. And today we are sitting with Mikayel, the founder and CEO of Wirestock, a company that has revolutionized the AI economy and is bringing innovations that surpass any AI modeling I've ever seen in my life. Please welcome the one, the only Mikayel. Thanks for coming on today's show, brother. I appreciate you coming down all the way from San Francisco for this show. It's an honor. And while doing the research on your company, you know, I'm pretty blown away by number one, your ability to pivot into a completely new business when you thought that they thought they said that your business was done for.

And then just like the idea of it itself, because I think it's like it's brilliant for big companies. But before I get into all that, I'm going to ask you, what's your morning routine?

Mikayel Khachatryan (1:49)

Man, I don't think I have a routine.

I just, I have these teams. We have, you know, higher teams in all parts of the world. We have people in Europe and Asia. So when I wake up, it's like, I already have my Slack full of like new messages and stuff. So I quickly, yeah, just to shower coffee, of course coffee. And then I'm going straight into my email and Slack routine. And that's like how my morning start. It's kind of crazy.

Joseph Shalaby (2:24)

You hit the track, Ryan.

Mikayel Khachatryan (2:25)

I know it's not the most amazing, inspiring morning routine, but it is what it is. It's a morning routine. It is what it is.

Joseph Shalaby (2:34)

Well, before we start, let me ask you, how did you start or even get interested in the AI industry itself? Was it a forced call? Was it, you know, something that just inspired the evolution of your company?

Mikayel Khachatryan (2:51)

Well, we always saw a lot of utility. And, you know, we always when we initially started the business, when we launched Wirestock, it was the business was the product we launched was basically helping photographers sell their content more easily and faster. And we were operating in the stock photography space industry. And back then, in order to sell photos, you had to like annotate them or caption them and label them. So we realized pretty early in the journey that creators and photographers and creative people in general really don't like doing mundane work like that, like writing long descriptions and adding keywords to content. So we started using AI very early in the journey because of that, to automate all those steps. This is like before generative AI became a thing. This is like sort of like conventional or pre-generative AI models we were using. What year was this? It was 2019, 2020 So our adoption of AI happened pretty early as a reaction to what our customers were asking us to do.

And so that's kind of how we got into it. I mean, it's always been just a fascinating topic and an area of interest for me. And something that was always really, really, I was always really curious about it.

But what happened afterwards got us really, really changed our business and had direct impact on Wirestock.

And I know you talked about that a little bit, and I'm happy to share.

Joseph Shalaby (5:02)

Let's talk about how your company started.

Mikayel Khachatryan (5:04)

So what we were doing is we were focusing on the supply side. So we worked directly with individual photographers or small teams, production teams to help them list and place their content on existing marketplaces.

So essentially, we would source the content, curated, annotated, add a bunch of labels and tags to help get that content discovered. And then we would just deliver it to or distribute it through these marketplaces that we're operating and selling to customers directly.