Why Getting an AI ‘Selfie’ Is the Smartest Move You Can Make Right Now (Before Everyone Else Does)

 

Why Getting an AI ‘Selfie’ Is the Smartest Move You Can Make Right Now (Before Everyone Else Does)

Mark Zuckerberg said ‘Nothing is the future forever.’ This new tech trend is proving him right.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jun 1, 2026

 

Those of us who remember the 70s may recall the famous quote from Jon Landau that appeared in Boston’s The Real Paper about Bruce Springsteen. In May of 1974, after watching a show where Bruce opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theater, Landau wrote “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Apart from his grammar, which left a bit to be desired, he was—as we used to say back then—“Right on.” Jon jumped right on the Bruce train and a couple of years thereafter became his lifelong manager. Right place, right time.

I realize that our culture today is overly obsessed with the constant search for the next new thing and that, as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), is fond of saying, nothing is the future forever. But there are in fact moments when you do see and feel something that makes you wonder if, in fact, the Earth hadn’t just moved for a moment and in that instant changed the future forever. It seems to me that we might just be on the cusp of seeing the next new thing and that nobody who’s anybody is going to want to miss the chance to get in on the ground floor while the gettin’ s still good. FOMO is a very powerful force, and no one wants to miss the moment or be left behind. Plus, if you don’t get yours while it’s available, it may soon be gone.

Of course, timing is everything, and the conditions and the context have to be just right to trigger a substantial shift in the way that the world does things. Sad to say, for all of Zuck’s grand schemes and dreams, Meta is very old news for the kids and, as Yogi Berra once said: “the place is so busy that no one goes there anymore.” Snap might be a resurrected distant second and X is always going to be a cross between a toilet and a sewer where it’s all about enragement rather than engagement. All the other players aren’t even also-rans, they’re “whatever became of” has beens.

For the next couple of generations, the only social channels that matter are Instagram, Tik-Tok and maybe YouTube. These are the most powerful communication tools that we have today for our youth, but—given the enormous volume of activity and the number of participants—they’re largely overwhelming, even for the most active posters and, as a result, they’re rapidly becoming a second day job that no one wants.

The truth is that even the most dedicated and well-intentioned creators on any of these platforms couldn’t possibly read, much less personally respond to, the zillions of posts that they receive constantly. The bad news is that, increasingly, even the most ardent fans are starting to notice. Fans are fickle and flighty and loyalty today only means that they haven’t seen anything better yet. Every entrepreneur’s job is exactly the same—find the next wave, race to the front, ride it for all it’s worth, and then move on before the inevitable crash.

Perhaps more important is the fact that these days, the true qualitative metrics of value and longevity aren’t about gross numbers, fans, followers or traffic volume. They’re about the artist’s ability to create and manage authentic and intentional sharing that drives caring and connection. As I wrote recently, the smart players want to own their own platforms and their content, connect and transact directly with their fans, ditch the gatekeepers, and cut out all the other layers and intermediaries that get in the way of direct and “personal” communication. For sure, this desire is based in no small part on economics, but it’s also about emotion.

Our early social technologies helped to manufacture thinly-related “friends” and the artificial impression of intimacy, but any real communicator, performer or other talent would tell you that mass means nothing and that meaning means everything. They’d all rather have a smaller collection of real and sincere fans than millions of nobodies that they’ll never meet. Those are the kinds of relationships that are still manageable and which pay off in multiple ways. And they provide demonstrable psychic benefits to the performers and help avoid burning out.

It turns out that an essential part of any artist’s preserving their own talent and humanity is their feeling and ability to believe and demonstrate that they’re not simply talented robots on the stage replicating the same performances night after night, albeit all over the world, but instead that they’re caring and committed professionals with the time, talent and artistry to do and share what they love doing. The last thing they want is to be chained to a desk or a phone feeding the social media beast all day long instead of doing what they wanted to do all along. It could be singing, dancing, teaching, or painting, but, for sure, they didn’t sign up to be posting all day.

So, the challenge for all these artists and performers is how do you create and deliver these kinds of experiences and connections at scale. The fact is that we’re all stretched and pulled in many directions all day long and, in addition to being weary and close to shutting down, if an artist is honest with himself or herself, they’re likely to acknowledge that sometimes they feel that they’re doing a halfway job and not delivering what was promised to their fans and followers. It’s far too easy to get spread a mile wide and an inch deep and disappoint everyone including yourself.

That’s why I think that, for anyone with an active and expanding social audience, getting yourself a Selfie—a digital twin that you can build in minutes—is the smartest thing you can do right now. I think of this as an investment in the future rather than in the present, and if you don’t start taking steps to invest in the future, it’s highly likely that you won’t have one.

And honestly, since we haven’t figured out how to physically clone ourselves, it’s pretty clear to me that soon everyone will have a personal digital twin like Selfie to write, post, comment and respond for them automatically and on a 24/7 basis in a manner that accurately reflects their intelligence, use of language and slang, writing style and conversational phrasing. I’m not talking about some business bot or shopping widget—that’s boring, already overdone, and mostly disappointing.  

I’m talking about a highly personal and social online twin (what better name for it than Selfie) that—solely on demand—automatically ingests all your social feeds, all your photos and videos, and anything and everything else that you supply it and builds a “brain” that thinks like you, writes like you, reflects your typical style and tone, and can answer questions from your fans, followers, family, friends or anyone else based on everything that it knows about you and on nothing else. No hallucinations, no out-to-lunch responses, and polite enough to say from time to time that it simply doesn’t know.  

You are always totally in control of your Selfie and can edit anything it writes, improve or add to its suggestions and responses, and/or decide to simply trash any post or comment or answer that it makes for you. Your Selfie gets smarter all the time based on your actions and also by virtue of additional information and material that you add to its content base over time. Plus, it regularly polls all your authorized social feeds and adds all your activity in those channels into its knowledge base as well.

Bottom line: nothing in our lives is a scarcer resource than our time. Agents are already all over the business world, for better or worse, but the Selfie is the first substantial attempt to create a personal agent/digital twin that fully and fairly represents you in social interactions at scale without taking more than five minutes to launch a Selfie and without spending more than an hour or two adding content to really make it your own. It’s easy to predict what the future will eventually look like; it’s just hard to determine when it will be here. But the Selfie is here—up and running today—and just waiting for you to get yours before someone else does.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Retail Is Boring. Resale Is Booming. Inside the Consumer Shift Reshaping Apparel

Companies hate markdowns and shoppers hate full price. Resale startups are solving both problems.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

Mar 10, 2026

 

It’s no secret that during the last 15 years, growth in retail apparel sales has cratered while the resale market for secondhand clothes—both brick-and-mortar and online—has exploded. Resale growth is scaling at five or six times retail’s growth rate and should double by 2028. Most estimates expect that global sales of “previously owned” clothing will grow by more than 10 percent annually, while traditional retail results will be flat or even down. The truth is that virtually no one these days has any interest in paying full price for anything, and especially for costly items that they’re likely to wear a couple of times and then forget about.  

The rise of the “fast fashion” industry and its messaging didn’t do any favors to the old-line brands and manufacturers when they taught several generations of upcoming kids, mini fashionistas, and social media influencers that all these products were quickly and cheaply made, likely to last for a single season, and imminently disposable. They’re hot for a moment and then they’re not. Prices are up while quality is down in flimsy fast fashion items. 

No one under 35 (40 percent of all used apparel shoppers) thinks of clothing as classic anymore. Multi-generational hand-me-downs and well-made garments that can last for years to come seems to be a thing of the past. Looking like a slob can be a strong social statement that you’re socially responsible and don’t really care about material things.  

An under-appreciated aspect of the whole resale revolution is how social the entire shopping experience has become with direct links, rewards and incentives being pushed by TikTok and Instagram. Retail is boring and mass; resale is an adventure in personal branding and an opportunity to discover unique items and stand out from the herd. 

The broader explanations offered for this shift in demand, desire and taste are several and typically fall into four areas: affordability/budget consciousness, sustainability/eco-friendly action, thrifting as an adventure/social signaling, and uniqueness/non-mass market. One of the modest ironies with respect to this desire for non-mass market goods is, of course, that most of the apparel now available for resale was in fact mass produced back in the day when it was new. But now it’s chic and charming. Smart young shoppers are also aspirational and appreciate the opportunity to acquire upscale brand apparel at a discount. Another curious consideration is that if the goods weren’t well made initially, they probably wouldn’t have lasted and been available for the secondary market. 

In any event the main driver of the exponential resale expansion has been internet connectivity, technology advances in management of large scale data and images along with the emergence and popularity of online resale sites like Depop, Poshmark, and ThredUp. At the higher and more expensive end, The RealReal sets the price and luxury curve. The RealReal management has also experimented with brick-and-mortar stores, but with only limited success.  

Much like the car business, no one calls these clothes “used” however. The big brand chains have slowly started to respond to the resale trend by offering their own versions – they’ve all come up with clever names like Worn Wear (Patagonia), Athleta Preloved, Hanna-Me-Downs, Rejuiced, and Madewell Forever. In many cases, this response is accelerating because, aside from the obvious pressure from the resellers, the big brands hate the embarrassment of mark-downs, don’t like to see their goods sold in discount and outlet chains, and like to avoid all of the problems disposing of excess inventory. As a result, a fair amount of the goods moving through these channels may, in fact, be virtually brand new, in colors and styles that simply didn’t sell, or returned goods. Resale companies like Archive are pitching brands every day to help them increase their profits by more efficiently and quickly disposing of unwanted inventory.  

As exciting as the rapid growth has been, there’s an enormous remaining volume of resalable goods (including adjacent markets such as shoes, toys, outdoor and sports gear and baby products) which all share similar ownership and behavioral characteristics. No one outgrows and ages out of expensive infant products faster than sprouting little kids. And no one abandons running shoes, pickleball racquets and other exercise gear more quickly than Millennials.

But it’s not as easy as it may seem to enter these spaces and to cost-effectively attract, aggregate and market millions of these items, especially when the vast majority of the amateur “sellers” are “one of one” cases. It sounds like a great idea to sell your stuff until you actually set out to sort, take pictures of, write descriptions for, and then “list” those everyday items, which might ultimately not be worth the time and effort. But it’s a great green space for enterprising entrepreneurs. 

Two-way consumer-targeted markets are ridiculously expensive to build and grow unless you can figure out a way to work with the existing players and “ride their rails” so your business can avoid the vast majority of costs on both sides of the process. Let existing vendors expand, aggregate, and organize all the inventory on one side and find partners and affiliates who are already attracting millions of shoppers on the other side and figure out a win-win way to work with both groups.  

That’s what is so interesting about Beni, which permits retail online shoppers to quickly and painlessly search for second-hand items, matching their searches through over 300 million apparel and accessory offers from more than 40 different resale sites in a one-stop online location and/or through its own app. Visitors can search by image, text or URL. Beni’s browser extension overlays other vendors stores and “tags along” essentially as an intelligent assistant that accompanies and interrupts a typical retail search with suggestions of comparable (and less expensive) secondhand goods available at any of its affiliates’ sites. It’s already so effective that in some cases the company is working directly with brand sites like Patagonia to offer their own secondhand items so that the brands don’t have to build out and maintain their own systems. While we’re clearly well past the “peak apps” point in our lives and our phones, the truth is that a simple Chrome browser extension is a pretty simple and painless ask for all the search power and access that Beni provides.  

And, of course, the Beni enabling technology strategy avoids virtually all of the marketing and acquisition costs on both sides of the resale search marketplace. Their offerings are expanding and improving at a rapid pace with photo management tools (Beni Lens), real-time alerts, and wish lists all in one place. They have a good shot at becoming the secondhand search engine for the entire resale marketplace.