Rob McCarty

Rob's parents get the first shoutout — for letting him focus his short attention span on school long enough to reach college and get exposed to entrepreneurship. But the real first break came out of college, building Pop Shorts, an influencer agency for popular short-form content. He and his co-founders didn't know the space well yet, and their break came from a stranger: Mark Symons at Giant Spoon, a major advertising agency, who saw something in them and connected the dots to a campaign with NBC Universal.

That campaign sent Rob down a real trajectory — tracking where the "media puck" was actually going. It moved from Vine to short-form content, and by 2015, 360 cameras arrived as a medium almost nobody knew how to tell stories in yet. Rob saw the gap and jumped, which is what pulled him into immersive technologies in the first place — years before Illust existed.

Rob pushes back directly on the X-discourse line that "distribution is the last moat." His frame: it's a pyramid, not a single point — trust assets (well-designed work, well-designed media) form the base, development has to actually function, and distribution sits at the tip on top of both. Skip the base and you get a dead internet: bots sharing content with no real trust underneath it.

That's where he sees blockchain actually earning its keep — not as a panacea, but specifically for attribution rights, IP, and creator rights, the exact problem that pushed him out of Meta's ecosystem and into building his own. He's also spending real time educating creators who are 3D-native or fluent in Adobe's tools to give AR a real try, and helping them find the organizations where that work can actually land.