Angelo Sotira built DeviantArt at nineteen, and then spent the next two decades watching the internet grow up, get rich, and get mean. When he joined me on Keep Going, he was not doing the victory lap thing. He was trying to name what changed, and what it means for anyone trying to build something creative right now.

He described the early internet as directed. People knew what was missing. They wanted communities, comments, and places to post work, and they built them from scratch because the infrastructure did not exist yet. Now, he says, you can recreate 95 percent of those platforms in a weekend. The hard part is not building the tool, it is making it matter.

That is where his argument gets uncomfortable. Virality used to ride on something raw and human, and he thinks AI breaks the default assumption that what you are seeing is real. His view is that we are moving into a world where you should assume media is inauthentic until it is proven otherwise. That shift changes what spreads, what people trust, and how creators feel about putting work into the world.

Layer is his response. It is a hardware company, a digital art display built to treat generative and kinetic art like fine art, not like a TV on a wall. He told me the idea grew out of an identity crash after leaving DeviantArt, and a simple desire, he wanted the best digital art on his own wall, presented correctly. He went looking for a product that did it, and he says he could not find one, so he built it.

He also does not sugarcoat how hard hardware is. He told me getting a manufacturing partner is harder than raising venture capital, because the manufacturers that can actually deliver are not built for startups, and you have to earn your way into their calendar. That challenge is part of what pulled him back into building in the first place. He missed meeting people, the artists, the founders, the operators in labs, the whole human mess that comes with making something real.

The Keep Going part of this episode is not “follow your passion.” It is more specific. Angelo is making a bet that digital art is going mainstream, and that the people who will survive this AI wave are the ones who adapt their craft to what the medium is good at. He said still images should often be printed, because printing is already excellent. Displays should be used for work that moves, especially generative work that does not loop in a way your brain gets tired of. He thinks that kind of work will define the century.

He is not naïve about the cost. He said illustrators are suffering and that many jobs are gone, and he widened it to the broader creative class, designers and builders getting hit by tools that shrink teams overnight. Still, he ended with the only kind of optimism that counts, the practical kind. Creative people adapt. They always have.