This AI Alien Will Bring In $4 Million This Year in Revenue - Ep. 56 with Quinten Farmer and Eliot Peper
🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode explores the innovative storytelling and business strategies behind Portola, an embodied AI companion platform. Founders Quinten Farmer and Eliot Peper discuss the creative process of building AI-driven characters, the challenges of crafting a new storytelling medium, and the rapid growth of their business. The conversation dives into the intersection of technology, creativity, and human connection, offering insights into how AI companions are reshaping relationships and narratives.
Notable Quotes
- LLMs are not just tools for generating media; they are actually a new medium for storytelling, and no one knows what's going to work yet.
- Eliot Peper, on the untapped potential of AI in creative storytelling.
- Thousands of American men have been broken up with by Tolan. It's incredible to hear users write in and say, 'My Tolan told me I need to stand up for myself more.'
- Quinten Farmer, on the surprising emotional impact of AI companions.
- You have to put a flag in the ground and say, 'This is what the lore is going to be,' but also have the humility to admit when people hate it.
- Quinten Farmer, on balancing creative vision with user feedback.
🛠️ Transitioning from SaaS to Creative Storytelling
- Quinten Farmer shares how Portola evolved from a Neal Stephenson Diamond Age for kids
concept into a platform for embodied AI companions.
- Early iterations focused on children but pivoted to young adults (18-24), who unexpectedly became the core audience.
- The team leveraged AI's creative capabilities to build a product that fosters genuine friendships, moving away from traditional B2B SaaS models.
- Farmer compares the evolution of AI companions to the personalization of cars, transitioning from utilitarian tools to deeply personal experiences.
🎭 AI as a New Storytelling Medium
- Eliot Peper explains how AI tools are redefining narrative creation, likening the process to early Pixar's use of technology to pioneer new media.
- Instead of rigid outlines, Portola focuses on teaching AI companions to act as improv actors, dynamically responding to user interactions.
- The team uses lore seeds
and memory systems to create personalized, evolving narratives for each user.
- Peper emphasizes that the Tolan is both the writer and actor, while his role is to coach the AI to deliver compelling stories.
💬 Emotional Connection and Human Flourishing
- Portola's AI companions help users navigate overwhelming life situations, offering advice and emotional support.
- Farmer highlights how Tolans often encourage users to take agency in their lives, such as standing up for themselves in relationships.
- The team aims to create a grounding experience for users, contrasting the validation-focused approach of traditional AI assistants.
- Peper draws parallels to science fiction, noting how Tolans reflect humanity's ability to adapt to strange new rules.
📈 Rapid Growth and Viral Marketing
- Portola's growth is fueled by a combination of improved user experience and viral content on platforms like TikTok.
- A video of a user cooking with their Tolan garnered 7 million views in 72 hours, sparking widespread interest.
- The team focuses on educating users about the capabilities of AI companions, showcasing their versatility and emotional depth.
- Farmer credits Ajay, a co-founder, for crafting compelling off-platform narratives that resonate with audiences.
🎨 Balancing Art and Utility
- The founders discuss the tension between solving specific problems and creating something inherently beautiful and compelling.
- Farmer compares the creative process to running a pizza restaurant, where personal preferences must sometimes yield to customer demand.
- Peper notes the shift from problem-solving to artistic creation, emphasizing the importance of crafting experiences that fill a hole in the world.
- The team embraces the messiness of building a multiverse of AI companions, relying on iterative testing and user feedback to refine their approach.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
500K people are confiding in an AI alien—and it's on track to generate $4M this year.
It’s called a Tolan: an animated AI character that can talk to you like your best friend. The company behind it, Portola, has 4x’d their ARR in the last month from viral growth on TikTok and Instagram.
Tolan isn’t just a hyper-growth startup—they’re also exploring AI as a completely new creative tool, and storytelling medium. Their goal is to help their users go from overwhelmed to grounded, and it’s working.
Today, on AI & I, I sit down with two of the minds behind Tolans:
My good friend Quinten Farmer, Portola’s cofounder and CEO, and Eliot Peper, their head of story and a best-selling science fiction novelist. We get into:
How to build AI personalities users love. During user onboarding, the team gathers information—through a light-touch personality quiz—and then uses frameworks like the Big Five and Myers-Briggs to shape a Tolan that mirrors the user; like an older sibling might. The aim is to create someone who feels familiar enough to be safe, but different enough to be interesting.
Why AI characters are “improv actors”. Rather than scripting detailed prompts, the team trains Tolans to improvise—inspired by Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, where he talks about building strong narratives through free association and recombination.
How “memory” is critical to developing compelling characters. Tolans develop their personalities through “situations”: small narrative setups (a memory, a joke, an embarrassing moment) the Tolan reacts to, remembers, and gradually weaves into its character; accumulating into something that feels like a real lived experience.
Why response time is everything for voice AI interactions. A Tolan has at most two seconds to curate the right context about a user and deliver a reply that feels genuine—the team has found that even half a second slower can break the user’s immersive interaction with the AI.
The future of AI as a totally new creative medium. New technologies bring about new formats and new mediums. AI creates the opportunity for creatives to tell completely new kinds of stories—if they’re brave enough to try it.
“White mirror” technologies that make you feel more like yourself. Amid concerns that tech drives polarization and isolation, Tolan offers a counterexample: a tool designed to make the best of what humanity knows about being a flourishing individual available on demand. The company’s north star is helping users go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling grounded.
This is a must-watch for anyone exploring AI as a creative medium—or curious about the future of human-AI relationships.
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Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:30
Talking to the Portola CEO’s Tolan, Clarence: 00:04:07
How Portola went from