Meet the 21-year-old former MrBeast staffer building an AI startup to help creators make viral videos

• Jay Neo landed a dream job with MrBeast at the age of 18.
• Now 21, he is the cofounder of a new creator economy AI startup called Palo.
• Palo is launching out of stealth with $3.8 million in funding.

What actually makes a video go viral?

Jay Neo, the 21-year-old self-described "content nerd" who formerly worked for YouTube's most-followed creator, MrBeast, has been obsessed with finding the answer to that question since he was a teenager.

Neo spent his teen years running Discord servers for games like Minecraft and making short-form video content.

The key metric Neo had his eyes on was retention: Are people sticking around for the whole video? Or are they scrolling away?

Neo said he meticulously studied each video's retention graph to see where people were dropping off. Understanding how and why someone might scroll past a video can help creators course-correct for the next video.

This focus on retention helped land him his job with MrBeast at 18, Neo said, where he worked on short-form content strategy.

The goal post at MrBeast?

"You want to make a video that a billion people would want to watch," Neo told Business Insider.

One video Neo worked on — "Would You Fly To Paris For A Baguette?" — racked up over 1 billion views. In the short video, MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, asks someone if they'd fly to Paris to bring back a baguette for $100. After the first person said no, he upped the ante to $300.

The hook of escalating offers in that video is an example of "stair stepping," Neo explained, a format that he and the MrBeast team tweaked from similar videos popular on TikTok to "Beastify" it — meaning it had to be at least a little "absurd." Neo said this led to a new formula for the Beast team, where someone would travel far and bring something back.

"At Beast, and everything I've ever done, we found formulas," Neo said. Often, there were droves of data behind those winning video formulas.

After his stint at MrBeast and running other content accounts, Neo is launching a new AI startup for content creators called Palo.

Using AI to crack algorithms

For the past year and a half, Neo and his cofounders — Shivam Pankaj Kumar (who's held engineering roles at Microsoft and Palantir) and content creator Harry Jones — have been building Palo AI, a personalized toolkit for creators. Creators feed Palo's AI their entire content catalog, and the startup's AI then dissects that material.

Large-language AI models "are a perfect thing not for replacing the creator, but for analyzing every little thing," Neo said.

The platform analyzes elements like a video's "hook" — the first few seconds that need to convince the viewer to keep watching — and presents creators with patterns "in a simple way so that you can make better decisions, make tiny tweaks, get way more views," Neo said.

The creator economy startup is coming out of stealth with $3.8 million in funding from PeakXV, NFX, EdgeCase Capital, and several angel investors, including ex-MrBeast head of vertical platforms Rohan Kumar.

"The challenge today is that to keep up with the latest viral hooks and strategies to beat the algorithm, you have to spend hours per day getting brain-rotted consuming content," said Josh Constine, who invested in Palo via his fund Unexpected Investments. "Palo goes and does that research grunt work for you so creators can stay in flow and stick to their craft."

The funding is going toward overhead AI computing costs and hiring engineering talent, Neo said. Palo's team of eight works out of a house in Palo Alto, California.

The platform's technology is powered by a "cocktail" of AI models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini. The product has been available to creators with over 1 million followers, and Palo is expanding to include creators with 100,000 followers or more. The startup plans to introduce a subscription model that will cost $250 a month, Neo said.

Palo's AI assists creators in writing scripts for short-form videos and outlining content with storyboards.

The platform also has its own network, where creators can follow one another. Neo said the company plans to expand features there, such as connecting creators within similar niches, as well as adding tools to introduce creators to potential advertising partners.

While there are dozens of generative AI startups people can use to help make content, Neo wants established creators to use Palo to analyze their existing content so that their videos can break through.