Hi, everyone. I'm Jenny, and this is hyphenated, the podcast about living in the hyphen. And today, we have a very special guest. Ajay Kishore is the founder of Sterebel, the largest community of web series creators and fans building the future of television.

Welcome to the show, Aj.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

I am honestly so happy that Kevin, who is our producer on hyphenated and also a lot of people

know him because he's in a lot of my videos as Primo Kevin.

And he's worked the film festival circuit for a long time, especially back in Miami. And he's in a lot of my videos as Primo Kevin. And he's worked the film festival circuit for a long

time, especially back in Miami. And he's working your festival, which you created, that's going on

right now, which is why we hear all the people in the background and stuff like that. So I'm

glad that Kevin told me about this festival festival because it's something that I've always

kind of wished existed and the fact that it does is amazing. So I want to thank you for that

on behalf of content creators everywhere. It's our pleasure. I mean, I think that's always the

reaction we hope to get. And yeah, I mean, you can kind of hear the festival buzzing behind us. Like, that's, I think, you know, one of the rewarding things, like hearing that level of like enthusiasm and energy when we, when we hold events like this.

So how did this come about? How did you get to this point where you created such a wonderful festival for content creators to be seen by networks and creating that bridge?

I think the truth, when someone tries to build a startup, the truth is that it tends to be like a pretty windy and sometimes random road in that, you know, we've been building the company for like six years now, which is always

crazy to say out loud. But the orientation of the company has always been around this idea of

web series as independent television. And that similar to what's happening, what was happening

in other forms of digital content creation and in indie film, you know, when we talk about festivals, like, what do we think of?

We think of indie film. There must be some way to create support and structure and unlock the talent and creativity that's happening in this incredibly talented, diverse global community of web series and indie TV creators.

And so the very first iteration of the company six years ago, it was kind of during that

pivot to video moment when Facebook lied to everyone and said that their video engagement metrics

were incredible. And so we needed to make content for it.

And so our thing was, okay, well, how do we drive discovery around all this, yes, independent

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