Co-founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Tally Labs
Anonymously Changing Entertainment
Blake Chasen (TPR 2016) is the creator of Jenkins the Valet, an internet personality and NFT character in the form of a cartoon ape avatar. Posting as Jenkins in content communities and later social media channels, Blake has attracted thousands of followers. Those who held part of the character’s NFT have input into his storylines and destinies that unfold online, through a budding form of entertainment that melds fan fiction with interactivity.
Blake’s role in the entire venture is “incredibly anonymous.”
If you search for him there’s virtually no tie to his hallmark creation, only mentions of his prior role as director of product management at Peloton. The company behind Jenkins is Tally Labs, also co-founded anonymously by Blake under the pseudonym “Valet Jones.”
“Even when I was creating this character and building this audience, I was thinking about ways that I could use software to better involve the fans, so it was really easy for me to not attach myself,” Blake says of the driver behind the anonymity. “I ran the whole thing as a character, which was an interesting little experiment.”
The Jenkins experiment is also something truly new: He’s not just a fictional character on a social media account, he is a celebrity in his own right.
Jenkins is the first NFT to have an agent. In fact, he is with Beyoncé's agent, and is represented by Creative Artists Agency for books, TV, film and podcast deals. A 2022 digital novel that’s a “tell-all biography” of Jenkins was written by 10-time New York Times-bestselling author Neil Strauss with a plot guided by fans and retailed entirely on NFT platforms.
Jenkins’ success evolved into Tally Labs, a company that exists to take a beloved character and put the community around him in charge of his adventures. Using his undergrad training in both business and creative writing at CMU, Blake sees potential for an entirely new sector of the entertainment industry to grow up around online interactivity.
Tally Labs is at work on a new version of “The Writer’s Room” that fuses Jenkins content with AI to create an immersive storytelling world. The technology and the content mean that a fan doesn’t just watch a movie about their favorite characters, they direct their own version and share it online.
It’s a wild concept that’s currently very much untested.
“The best-case scenario would be to partner with someone who has a beloved library of IP,” he says.
Think along the lines of Harry Potter, Disney, comics or Star Wars. The idea is to marry a well-known canon of content with interactive creative freedom to explore it. AI digests the content and creates video game-like experiences for fans to immerse in their favorite worlds. That brings the IP holders together with their fans in a relationship that’s dynamically evolving and mutually beneficial.
The testing for the technology behind this innovation is currently underway with the forthcoming iteration of the “The Writer’s Room,” where the canon is Jenkins the Valet.
“As a reader and a writer, getting to play with this is a joy,” Blake says. “Hopefully Tally Labs will be the company that figures out how to distribute this experience. If we're going to be completely honest, I would say either it's a game-changer, or it's absolutely nothing, and nothing in between.”
Story by Elizabeth Speed