AI + Creativity: Startup Interview with Olof Lindh, Kive.ai Founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’ve been in the creative industries for about a decade, working with film as a director before I founded Kive. I did anything from tiny music videos on a shoe-string to commercials for Nike, Spotify, and the Swedish Armed Forces.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

It’s called Kive, and it’s a smarter way for creatives to automatically organize their libraries and collaborate on the creative process.

What is the origin story?

I started building Kive between film shoots and on weekends and nights about three years ago to solve this really frustrating problem I had of creative assets and references being scattered across multiple places and never being able to find them when I needed to. I thought it would be pretty cool to let machine vision solve this problem of image organization that I was constantly fighting with and built a prototype that worked surprisingly well. It sort of started as a fun side project and snowballed as I realized a lot of creatives were having the same problem. In 2020 we got funded by Creandum and EQT Ventures, and now we’re rapidly growing the team and onboarding users from the waitlist.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I think the problem with products like this in the past has been that they are built for creatives by people who don’t really understand creativity or the creative process. At Kive, many of us have worked creative jobs and care deeply about creativity and elevating the creative process. I think that’s kind of a big deal, and it also helps that the team is made up of genuinely curious human beings with a great appetite for learning and building.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Probably something foolish on set.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We’re trying to get people to migrate and build their creative libraries in Kive, so we look closely at library size and how people extract value from their libraries.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We’re still in private beta, but there’s an overwhelming amount of excitement about the platform, which is amazing, and the engagement among early users is very promising!

What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why?

I’m incredibly excited about the potential of AI for creativity. The intersection of creativity and technology has, in my opinion, always been a fascinating space to work in. New technologies push the boundaries of creativity and culture forward, like when technicolor and multi-plane cameras enabled completely new stories for Disney, or rocket science lit the imagination of a new generation of science fiction writers in the 40s and 50s, which in turn inspired new technology and spurred humanity on in its pursuit of space. It’s obvious AI can unlock creativity in directions we can’t even imagine right now, and as a creative, that makes me excited. On the flip side, I worry about an AI arms race, deep-fakes, and GPT-3-content flooding the web and, of course, the planet turning into a giant paper clip factory.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Great place for engineers and tech news!

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Don’t worry :)

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

So many things all the time … but to mention one thing, I’m currently reading Think Again by Adam Grant, and it’s delightfully surprising and illuminating in terms of how hard it is to evolve your own thinking and how even the smartest people fail to reconsider their own beliefs.

What now?

If you think creativity and AI are exciting together 👩‍🎨🧠, please consider voting for us in the Startup of the Year award!! Go to Stockholm and find Kive in the list. Thanks!