Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
From fixing chairs to Cal AI
Reaching out
Alfie Dickens had never held a full-time job. He worked part time on the stadium ops crew and took commission for getting brand deals for a couple of influencers. He reached out to Jake, the founder of Cal AI, about working with an influencer.
The trial
The two got to talking about soccer, which Jake loved, and got along well. Cal AI was brand new then, and he had never heard of it. When he asked whether the team was hiring, the answer was no, so he sent over his resume anyway and asked to be kept in mind. He landed a two-week trial, and from that trial came the job.
What he built
He joined a month or two after the app got started, when it had 20 or 30 creators. From scratch, he helped grow the influencer program until more than 200 creators were working with the app at once, each posting four videos a month. At its peak, Cal AI was making about $60 million a year.
Why do brands pay influencers on commission?
Commission pays an influencer only when sales or sign-ups arrive, which moves the risk of a failed campaign from the brand to the creator. The model descends from affiliate marketing, which took off after Amazon launched its Associates program in 1996. Tracking links and promo codes are what make those results countable.
Why do short trials beat resumes for hiring?
A trial shows how someone really works, which a resume cannot. Many small companies run paid trial periods for that reason. A 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, covering decades of hiring research, ranked work-sample tests among the strongest predictors of job performance.
How do calorie apps estimate food from a photo?
Photo-based trackers use image-recognition models trained on large sets of labeled food pictures. One widely used research set, Food-101, was released in 2014 and holds 101,000 images across 101 dishes. A model first names the dish, then estimates portion size from what it sees. The calorie count comes from matching that dish and portion against a nutrition database.
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