Notable Capital's Glenn Solomon: generative media is early innings — 300-person conference today could be 5,000 in four years

Summary

Glenn Solomon of Notable Capital sees generative media at roughly the same inflection point developer tooling occupied in 2016. Speaking at Fal's inaugural generative media user conference, which drew approximately 300 attendees, Solomon draws a direct parallel to HashiCorp's first user conference in Portland that year, where 150 people showed up. Four to five years later, HashiCorp's event in San Francisco filled 5,000 seats. Solomon expects a similar trajectory for generative media conferences and the broader industry.

The sectors Solomon flags as immediate targets for disruption include advertising, marketing, social media feeds, entertainment, and education. Collectively, these industries spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually on traditional content production, and generative media's speed, cost, and targeting advantages make that spend vulnerable to displacement.

Beyond replacement, Solomon points to net-new applications as a second, potentially larger wave. He cites the Sphere in Las Vegas as a concrete example of an immersive experience that traditional media tools could not have created, arguing that generative media unlocks formats and use cases that simply did not exist before.

Solomon characterizes advertising, marketing, and entertainment as sitting in the first or second inning of adoption, still largely in experimentation mode. His HashiCorp investment in February 2016 anchors the analogy with a specific outcome, one where a small, energized early community scaled into a major commercial ecosystem within half a decade.