The new workflow for digital media
Bolbi Liu and Young Zhao are empowering creators to spend less time on tedious tasks and more time doing what they love
What used to require big budgets and large teams for media and ad creation can now be done by anyone — Bolbi Liu and Young Zhao are making sure of that. Their startups are shaping the new era of digital media, transforming the tools they once built for the top 1% of creators and companies into platforms anyone can use.
Today is day 4 of our week-long deep dive covering next week’s startup showcase founders. We’re less than a week away from our Founders You Should Know show, and seats are filling fast. Apply now to meet Bolbi, Young, and 9 other breakout founders to learn more about what they’re building and why you should join their teams.
Bolbi Liu, founder of Adsgency
Bolbi Liu is unforgettable. When asked last week to describe herself in a single sentence, she replied, “It’s not possible. There’s too much about me to say.” With two full-sleeve tattoos, a penchant for hiring unconventional talent (including the team’s DJ turned GTM lead), and plans to start a hacker house for the team, she’s a force of motion.
“When I promise something, I deliver,” she said last week during an intimate tech panel. “When I tell my investors and team we’ll double ARR by year’s end, I mean it.”
Her first major feat was building Chinese mobility tech company Didi Global’s all-in-one ad platform, driving over $200M in ad revenue with her tool. She then repeated the achievement at AWS where she built a similar in-house platform, driving $500M in revenue. While building these tools in-house for large companies, she recognized a bigger need: every company, no matter its size, needs a tool to manage and scale ad campaigns.
With Adsgency, she’s bringing the power of the tools she built for large tech companies to businesses of every size, enabling them to act faster and smarter with their ad campaigns. The platform serves as the all-in-one platform for advertisers, housing AI-powered ad creation, precise customer targeting, campaign automation, and real-time analytics and optimization. Since its launch, Adsgency has grown rapidly, attracting clients across all industries and serving the demand for smarter ad tools.
Bolbi is the type of person you want to meet face-to-face. Hear more of her story next Wednesday at our startup showcase.
Young Zhao, founder of OpusClip
OpusClip is not Young’s first entrepreneurial endeavor…or second, or third, for that matter. Before OpusClip, Young founded an Asia-based talent agency representing 150 food influencers at the height of the region’s digital food content boom. His team of 500+ creatives managed everything from editing to media management, giving Young a rare inside look at how top creators build and sustain their audiences.
While running his agency, he noticed a pattern: many of his top creatives were peeling off to launch their own media ventures. Rather than trying to pull them back, he recognized an opportunity for something new. Media creatives naturally want to branch out and make their own content, so there was little point trying to hold them back. Instead, he saw an opportunity to support them with a tool that handled the tedious parts of production and gave them more time to create.
That’s what led him to start OpusClip, the go-to platform for over 10M creators and businesses to turn long videos into shorts and enhance performance analytics. If you’ve watched some short-form video content lately, odds are it was produced with Young’s platform. As they grow, they’re expanding their product suite with OpusSearch, enabling creatives to manage and reuse their media, and Agent Opus, an AI agent that turns written text into finished videos.
Hear more about the millions of creatives that love OpusClip and how you can help build their next suite of products next week at our startup showcase.
Want to hear more of their stories? Apply now to claim your seat at the showcase and meet these two breakout founders.