Nicolai Amirzadeh built the operating system for the creator economys next chapter

Short-form videos have rewritten the rules for capturing an audience’s attention.Brands that once relied on traditional paid social media now compete for milliseconds of attention.

Meanwhile, an economy has been growing in the background where creators clip and post content on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and X for a fraction of the cost.The problem was the infrastructure.

Nicolai Amirzadeh found no reliable way to run that market at scale, so he built one. Clipping, or turning long-form content into short vertical clips, emerged as its own hustle alongside the rise of TikTok and Reels.Fan-made clips of streamers, shows, and content creators routinely outperformed creators’ official content.

Major entertainment companies took notice, and so did consumer and technology brands, who saw their paid social costs climb. However, the industry was running on informal arrangements in the DMs, private transfers, and no real way to track views across platforms.Fake and bot-inflated views were rampant on social platforms, leaving brand teams with huge budgets nowhere credible to post clips.

The upside of paid clipper distribution was obvious, but the operational layer to support it did not yet exist. Building on his first lessonsAmirzadeh is 22, entirely self-taught, and has been creating on the consumer internet since he was 11.His first real project was a website for a non-profit run by his mother’s friend.

He had barely written code at the time, but said he could do it anyway, and taught himself over three weeks.That hard-working, curious mentality became his approach for everything. At 15, he built and captained a competitive esports team that reached the first division of the Norwegian Counter-Strike and League of Legends leagues, which were featured on national television.

He later spent two years teaching coding to fourth graders, became CTO of a company acquired by the venture firm where he worked, and founded Servergen, the first Discord mar...