the z list 💥🧿✨ 6 months as a founder

Hi dear friends! Welcome back to the Z List

• Waitlist: 110K+ people (we’ve more than doubled in just 3 months 🚀)

• Discord: 13K+ obsessed fans spiraling every day

• TikTok: Nearly 200M views across organic and paid

• MVP: Early users are obsessed, one user logged 5+ hours on Lore Spirals in 6 days, another went down 25 spirals in one night

• Coming out of stealth soon 👀… you’ll get a preview here before the rest of the world

• If you haven’t already, you can claim your Lore username here.

I wanna chat with you if you’re any of the following (email me [email protected])

• building in consumer tech

• work in entertainment, sports, media

• are a FAN (of literally anything)

Lore’s Team

Lore is now three of us full-time locked in:

• Sid joined as our founding engineer (NYU → building spirals → shipping daily). He’s already made it possible for fans to do things on Lore in a day that used to take hours of opening tabs. We met at a hackathon Lore sponsored + I judged! Sid created a version of Lore in a mere few hours…and the rest is history.

• Shoutout to Evan (our CMO mastermind) and me (Z) for keeping the chaos alive

Bringing Back the “Old Internet”

A Surreal Summer Moment: I pitched Lore to Bob Iger

This was truly a surreal moment and I can’t emphasize that enough! Disney’s IP has been a major part of my life from Finding Nemo being my first movie in theatres to High School Musical, Star Wars, the MCU, and beyond. Can’t thank Village Global enough for this incredible opportunity and introduction!

Founder Reflections

What building in stealth as a marketing and distribution girlie has taught me

• This year VCs finally realized how important distribution is, but they still don’t index heavily enough on the fact that it’s not a science

• True masters of distribution know it’s an art. You can’t just replicate a formula you saw online and expect identical results

• Distribution is being chronically online. It’s knowing what will resonate before everyone else catches on

• Example: I noticed a sound trending, I love Spider-Man, so we had Leo use it in a quick edit. It got ~850K organic views. That’s distribution as instinct

@leov.lore

This is about to break the internet and I need the @Lore #lore #obsessed #mcu #marvel #spiderman

Labubu’s, Pop Mart, and the Economics of Obsession

I love Labubus. They’re trinkets, yes, but they’re also proof that consumer runs the world.

Pop Mart’s 38-year-old founder briefly surpassed Alibaba’s Jack Ma on Forbes’ ranking of the world’s richest. Think about that: a fandom-fueled toy company outpacing one of the most famous B2B2C giants in the world. That’s not an anomaly, that’s the power of obsession

Consumer has always been high risk, high reward, but the “risk” comes from trusting founders who can read culture, psychology, and fandom. That’s exactly what Pop Mart’s CEO did. Distribution plus fandom > technology. Obsession is the moat.

For me personally, collecting Labubus is emotional. Trinket collecting is in our DNA, we collect because we care, because ownership defines us. Shoutout Los’ app Performative for nailing this exact insight.

On Lore (once we officially launch our product into the world), you’ll be able to track the Labubu craze in real time: pinpointing Lisa from Blackpink’s Vanity Fair interview where she called them her must-have, then watching the memes spiral from there. On Lore, this wouldn’t be scattered, it would be mapped, celebrated, archived.

And yes, as a Hong Kong–raised founder, I love that Pop Mart is Cantonese, and the artist who invented Labubu is also Cantonese. Supporting a fellow Hong Kong bred icon!

Consumer is not a side niche, it is the driver of global economies. Never forget it.

One Last Personal Note

Half a year in, here’s what I’ve learned about fandom, building, and obsession:

• Fandom is mainstream. People tell me “I’m not in a fandom” — red flag. The truth: everyone’s obsessed with something. Art, fashion, matcha, cars, your “Roman Empire”. Loving something for an extended period of time is the most human thing of all.

• The hardest part of building Lore: unwavering, delusional belief in yourself. It’s the only key

• My “Lore has to exist” moment: pitching Lore to an 80-year-old woman this summer and watching her get it instantly

• How I’ve changed in 6 months: Building Lore feels like the culmination of everything I’ve ever done, running a clothing brand as a teen, writing fanfiction on Tumblr, obsessing with anon fan accounts on Twitter, begging to get into Columbia’s “Venturing to Change the World” class as the youngest student. Seven years later, I’ve now been invited back to speak to that class, this time as a founder of a VC-backed company I’m obsessed with

I’ve grown more in the past six months than in all the years of working at startups and VC combined (13 years). Lore has transformed me. And we’re just getting started.

✨ As always, thanks for being here. Lore is a home for the obsessed, and I’m so grateful you’re on this journey with me. If you made it this far, I have a secret for you: we’re coming out of stealth at the end of this month. Lots of building in public soon!