Let's meet in Manhattan tonight!
I’ll be holding an in-person mixer at Red Lion in Manhattan on Wednesday, May 6 at 7pm. This will be a getting-to-know-you meetup without a formal agenda, just a few drinks and lots of chats. If you’re interested in AI video, AI video ethics, or AI video production, I think this will be a great way to get up to speed and start some interesting conversations. You can RSVP here on Meetup and please consider joining our group so we can grow and network.
© 2026 John Biggs |
Vine returns as Divine, with a no-AI rule
Remember Vine, the OG video sharing app that basically paved the way for Instagram and the rest? Well, it’s back, or at least something close to it. The new version is called Divine, and it comes with a rule that feels quaint: the videos have to be made by people, not machines. Vine user meagancignoli once got 178 million views. Now she has 17 followers on Divine. Back in 2013, Vine helped define short video on the internet. The videos were about six seconds long and looped endlessly. Even given these constrains, however, Vine It moved fast and didn’t ask permission. At its peak it reached about 100 million users and turned unknown creators into minor celebrities, including Logan Paul. Then it stalled. Jack Dorsey sold it into Twitter and by 2017 it was gone. Now Dorsey is backing a return. Divine keeps the six second limit. It is actually adding about 500,000 old clips and letting users post new ones, but with a condition none of it be AI generated. If you want to post, you either shoot inside the app or prove you made it yourself. That rule is not random. Feeds are filling up with low grade AI video. One recent study suggests more than a fifth of what new users see on YouTube falls into that category. The result is a strange sameness, content that looks polished but feels empty. Divine started as a side project by Evan Henshaw-Plath aka Rabble as a place to store old Vines. The response pushed it further. Now it is live to the public, funded in part through Dorsey’s nonprofit work in open social media. There is also a second idea under this, however. Dorsey has said before that Vine never found a business model. This time, the pitch is that creators keep ownership of their work and their audience, and build their own revenue streams from there. It sounds good, but it runs into the same hard truth that killed Vine the first time. Attention is easy to get, money is not and selling advertising against six second fart videos is tough. Further, Vine is old news. TikTok has scale that Vine never reached. Meta pushes Reels across its apps. Shorts on YouTube pull in hundreds of billions of views each day. These systems reward volume, not restraint. Have 500,000 old Vines is a nice start but a service like Divine needs millions of views per day to compete at all with the incumbents. Obviously Divine is trying something different. It is betting that people are tired of synthetic content, and that a small, strict format can still matter. Maybe it works as a refuge. Maybe it stays a niche. There is a sense of regret hanging over this return. Vine was sold too early. It lost its shape inside a larger company. Now the same people are trying again, but the internet has changed. The question is whether anyone still wants six seconds of something real, when everything else is louder, longer, and easier to fake.
© 2026 John Biggs |






The Innovators: This agriculture start up brings water where plants need it most
“When you're going through hell, keep going." This podcast is about failure and how it breeds success. Every week, we talk to remarkable people who have accomplished great things but have also faced failure along the way. By exploring their experiences, we can learn how to build, succeed, and stay humble. The podcast is hosted by author and former TechCrunch and New York Times journalist John Biggs.
He also hosts The Innovators, a podcast focused on brand new startups and C-Level Executives and Creators.
If you’d like to appear on either show, email john@biggs.cc.
Our theme music is by Policy, AKA Mark Buchwald. (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/policy/)
The Innovators: This agriculture start up brings water where plants need it most
Arthur Chen is trying to do something boring on purpose.
Chen is the co founder and CEO of Verdi Agriculture, and he describes the company as “physical AI for farm infrastructure,” starting with irrigation. The pitch is not about tractors or drones. It is about the pipes, valves, pumps, and filter stations that farms rely on every day, and that most farms still run by hand. Chen says about 95 percent of farms still operate this stuff manually, with workers walking fields to check equipment and turn things on and off.
Verdi’s approach is retrofit. Instead of asking a farm to rip out infrastructure and install a bespoke automation system, Chen says Verdi builds modular devices that sit on top of what is already there and make it “smart.” The same core idea can be applied across equipment, from pipes and valves to filter stations and even sulfur burners. The benefit is not just efficiency. It is reducing repetitive field work that eats time and labor.
I asked what makes this hard, because the parts sound like commodity hardware. Chen’s answer was that the hardware is only half the story. The real complexity is in the software and firmware that lets devices act as a fleet. Irrigation is not as simple as flipping a valve. He pointed to hydraulic constraints, open a valve too early or too late and you can run out of water, or blow something up. Verdi’s system coordinates sequences so farms can automate without breaking infrastructure.
The reason he cares is personal. Chen said the founding team comes from farming families, and that the work is driven by what they have seen up close, rising labor costs, water scarcity, and extreme weather that makes farming less predictable. His view is that the point of better infrastructure is resilience, keeping food production stable even as conditions get worse.
Hardware is also a fundraising problem, so I asked how they raised. Chen framed the product as “digital labor,” a substitute for human labor on repetitive operational tasks. He said Verdi has shown enough adoption in a tough market to bring in investors, including hard tech and climate focused funds.
Verdi is working in a corner of agriculture that Chen says has been overlooked. John Deere and others are heavily digitized, but in mobile machinery. Irrigation infrastructure is still mostly analog, and even where automation exists it has tended to be expensive and custom, which is why adoption is low. Chen said there are a couple of companies building into this segment, but he sees the 95 percent of farms that are not automated as the real market.
A big part of the strategy is usability. Farmers and farm operators are not sitting in front of spreadsheets all day. They are dealing with immediate problems in the field. Chen said Verdi is built for the everyday operator, not the farm engineer. The product is meant to offload the constant equipment checking and troubleshooting so people can focus on the work that actually needs human judgment.
On go to market, Chen said agriculture is still relationship driven, but door to door selling and trade shows do not scale. Verdi uses outbound sales built around registries and databases to target the growers where they can have the most impact. He also said they use satellite data to enrich lead targeting and understand needs by region. At the same time, he said inbound demand matters because growers want agency, they want to choose tools, not be shoved into them.
When I asked what success looks like, Chen said he expects farms to look different in ten years. Not just irrigation, but every piece of infrastructure, processing buildings, power systems, and basic plumbing, will be smart in some way. He pointed to the size of the agricultural equipment market to make the case that infrastructure can support a very large company, and he wants Verdi to be that company on the infrastructure side.
He also has a second obsession, finance. Chen said agriculture lacks the kind of project finance and structured financing instruments that helped scale clean energy. He thinks there is room for fintech built specifically for agriculture, to finance the upgrade cycle that resilience requires.
Verdi is currently focused on the west coast of North America, the US and Canada, and is expanding across the continent, into Mexico, and into Latin America later this year. Chen said sales grew about 16x over the past year. He said the company is not raising right now and expects to raise a Series A in early 2027.
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© 2026 John Biggs
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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