The Cartoonist Who Keeps Reinventing the Internet
In 2004, a Wharton MBA and his animator brother put George W. Bush and John Kerry's heads on dancing bodies set to a Woody Guthrie song - and 80 million people watched it before YouTube existed. NASA asked if they could beam it to astronauts. Peter Jennings named the brothers his People of the Year. And Gregg Spiridellis, who had been quietly starving through the dot-com crash with his brother Evan, found himself on The Tonight Show.
That is a particular kind of story - the kind where the leap of faith is rewarded spectacularly, and the guy who took it looks prescient in retrospect. What makes Gregg Spiridellis interesting is that he has done it four more times since.
He co-founded StoryBots with Evan in 2012, the same year everyone was convinced the future of children's media was settled. It was not. They built an educational franchise around curious robots who wanted to know how the world worked, attracted guest educators including Snoop Dogg, John Legend, and Jennifer Garner, won 11 Emmy Awards, and sold the whole thing to Netflix in 2019. Gregg voiced a character called Boop. He seemed to be having fun.
By 2023 he had founded Moments Journal, an AI-driven clinical documentation tool for therapists - a pivot so sharp it looked like a different person's resume. Then in October 2025, the Spiridellis brothers were back with Spiridellis Bros. Studios, an AI-powered animation company backed by Google's AI Futures Fund, Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss, Chris and Crystal Sacca, and Guy Oseary. Their first original project was already slated for 2026.
The Goldman Sachs Man in the Brooklyn Garage
Gregg grew up in Marlboro, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers magna cum laude with a finance degree in 1993, and spent four years as an investment banker at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. These are not the credentials you'd expect to find stapled to a career in internet cartoons. But while pursuing his Wharton MBA, he watched production costs for digital animation collapsing in real-time and made a calculation. His brother Evan was studying animation at Parsons. The variables were obvious.
In 1999 - the peak of the dot-com bubble - they launched JibJab from a Brooklyn garage with $50,000 raised from friends and family. The internet was already crowded with people who thought the future was online. Most of them were wrong. Gregg and Evan were not wrong, but they were very early, which at the time felt like the same thing.
The crash hit hard. By 2001, JibJab went from 13 employees to two. The brothers kept the lights on through sheer stubbornness and a genuine love of the work. "We just loved it. We were passionate about it," Gregg would later recall - a line that sounds like a bumper sticker until you understand it was said by someone who had just watched his company shrink by 85 percent in a year.
AI isn't just another wave; it's a tsunami that will transform the way entertainment is created, produced, and distributed, and we couldn't be more excited to build what comes next.
The Year the Internet Laughed at Washington
The 2004 election cycle handed JibJab a canvas. "This Land Is Your Land" - their animated parody of Bush and Kerry set to Woody Guthrie's melody - spread without social media, without the algorithm, without any of the infrastructure we now assume is necessary for virality. It spread because people emailed it to each other. 80 million times, across every continent. Antarctica included.
The legal establishment took notice first. The copyright holders of Guthrie's song objected. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in to defend JibJab - and won. The cultural establishment noticed shortly after. ABC News, The Tonight Show, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News: the brothers were everywhere. It was the kind of attention that validates a hypothesis, not just a video.
That hypothesis: production costs are falling, distribution is opening, and anyone willing to build something genuinely funny can reach the whole country from a garage. Gregg had seen it in the spreadsheets first, and now he had the proof. JibJab pivoted hard toward sustainable revenue - personalized greeting cards, brand partnerships with Disney, OfficeMax, Anheuser-Busch. ElfYourself, produced for OfficeMax, became one of the most widely-shared holiday campaigns in internet history.
Building a Children's Franchise From Scratch
The jump from political satire to children's education seems illogical until you map it against Gregg's pattern. He doesn't move toward what's popular; he moves toward what's opening. In 2012, what was opening was on-demand children's content, YouTube channels, and the early signals that parents would pay for something that was genuinely good for their kids and genuinely entertaining to watch.
StoryBots launched as a YouTube-first educational brand built around five robot characters desperate to understand how the world works. The conceit was simple: every episode, they sought out a human expert - or a celebrity willing to behave like one - to answer a kid's question. How does the sun work? Why do we sleep? What is music? Snoop Dogg agreed to explain music. John Legend taught about kindness. Jennifer Garner showed up. The show worked because it treated children like people who deserved real answers, not cartoon approximations of answers.
Netflix came calling in 2016 for the original series "Ask the StoryBots." Three years later, they came back to buy the whole thing. Gregg stayed on as writer and producer, guided the franchise to 11 Emmy Awards and a Peabody nomination, and kept voicing Boop - the robot whose name, if you have spent any time around a five-year-old who watches StoryBots, you recognize immediately.
People will pay if you're giving them content with utility they can use to express themselves in their lives.
The AI Bet
The launch of Spiridellis Bros. Studios in October 2025 is not a nostalgia play. Gregg and Evan have positioned it explicitly as the anti-legacy-studio: a company that will use generative AI not as a cost-cutting mechanism but as what Gregg calls "a new creative canvas." The backing list reads like a Silicon Valley dinner party - Google's AI Futures Fund, Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss, Guy Oseary, Chris and Crystal Sacca - and the ambition matches the checkbook. They want original franchises across film, television, digital shorts, games, and toys.
The brothers have been here before, technically. JibJab rode the first broadband wave. StoryBots rode the streaming wave. The pattern is legible: find the technology shift that changes what's possible, build the creative product that proves it, find the distribution partner, sell, repeat. Whether generative AI represents the same kind of inflection point as broadband or streaming is the $50 million question. Gregg has a track record of being right about these calls, which is partly why the investors showed up.
He runs the company from Boulder, Colorado, where he has lived for several years - a useful distance from the Hollywood infrastructure that Spiridellis Bros. Studios is explicitly trying to disrupt. The first project arrives in 2026. The pitch, at its core, is the same one he's been making since 1999: things are changing faster than the incumbents realize. Here's what comes next.