<The Next Chapter Begins: Welcoming Sandeep Chinchali as Chief AI Officer> Last week, we shared Story’s Chapter 2. Our vision is to build the AI-native infrastructure for the seventy trillion dollar IP economy. Today, that vision moves forward. I’m excited to welcome @SPChinchali as our Chief AI Officer. When I first saw Sandeep’s background (Stanford PhD, NASA JPL, UT Austin professor, early engineer at a startup acquired by VMware), I expected an interdeeply technical, academic profile. What stood out was how clearly he connected his expertise to what actually needs to be built. He has spent over a decade working on one of AI’s hardest problems: how to capture and structure the right real-world data to train intelligent systems. He has collected and labeled long-tail data, trained models on edge devices, and faced the same limitations AI labs now encounter. His belief in crypto came from firsthand experience. He saw it as the only viable foundation for incentives, provenance, and coordination at scale. Over time, that conviction became sharper. After years of working on these problems in robotics labs, in classrooms, and at startups, Sandeep came to a clear conclusion: solving them requires something purpose built. When he saw what we had built at Story, it clicked instantly. This was the missing piece. And he brings people with him. One of the things I noticed early on in our conversations is how often he talks about his students. Not just in passing, but with real pride and curiosity. He references what they’re building, what excites them, what questions they’re asking. And somehow, those stories always loop back to what we’re working on at Story. That habit of weaving ideas across people and disciplines isn’t performative. It’s just how he thinks. That curiosity and openness are part of what make him such a powerful communicator. He doesn’t reduce complexity for the sake of accessibility. He builds bridges. Whether he’s talking to researchers, builders, or partners, he meets people where they are and brings them forward. It’s exactly the kind of mindset that fits the moment. The direction of AI is increasingly clear. The competition is no longer about compute or model design. Compute is concentrated. Models are cloned within weeks. What remains scarce is data: especially IP-cleared, real-world data that cannot be scraped or simulated. In the past few months, leading AI teams have come to us looking for infrastructure that makes this kind of data usable. They want systems where provenance, permissions, and royalty flows are embedded from the start. Story is the only infrastructure specifically designed to enable this at scale. We register real-world data as IP, track its full lifecycle from capture to annotation to synthetic generation, and route royalties across all contributors. To lead this effort, we needed more than technical expertise. We needed someone who could match the scale and ambition of what we’re building: someone with the rare combination of deep systems thinking, hands-on experience, and genuine curiosity. That is Sandeep. He has built across robotics, machine learning, and decentralized infrastructure. Just as importantly, he brings openness and intellectual generosity that makes him a connector. He listens closely, draws insights across domains, and grounds everything in the bigger picture. That combination of rigor, clarity, and purpose is exactly what this moment calls for. Sandeep will lead Story’s AI strategy across research, product, and ecosystem development, including the launch of new primitives for decentralized data and training. This is an important step forward for Story. We believe data IP will define the next era of AI. With Sandeep on board, that future is within reach. Let’s build. More to come next week.