--- title: "An AI Startup That Made a Butter Man Melt Is Hiring Its Way to Household Name" description: "OpenArt, near $250 million in recurring revenue, has hired a Salesforce and Meta veteran to make ‘vibe directing’ a thing" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-21T11:00:01Z modified: 2026-10-21T15:30:38Z url: https://rews.cc/a/an-ai-startup-that-made-a-butter-man-melt-is-hiring-its-way--adf0f1 language: en tags: ["openai", "marketing", "startups", "ai", "video", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # An AI Startup That Made a Butter Man Melt Is Hiring Its Way to Household Name *OpenArt, near $250 million in recurring revenue, has hired a Salesforce and Meta veteran to make ‘vibe directing’ a thing* By Nate Ledger · October 21, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/an-ai-startup-that-made-a-butter-man-melt-is-hiring-its-way--adf0f1 ## In brief - OpenArt hired ex-Salesforce SVP and former Meta creative chief Scott Larson as VP of brand marketing - The company says it’s on track to pass $250 million in ARR by end-2026, with staff up from 20 to 80 and 8 million monthly users - Its new Director product makes videos up to 5 minutes from described ideas, launched with a “vibe directing” campaign - Larson tested the tool by making “Life is Short,” a three-cut film about a butter man by a pool - OpenArt earlier hired former Google executive Raj Gajwani as chief business officer There is a moment in every AI startup’s life when it has enough users and enough revenue to discover its real problem, which is that nobody can explain what it is. OpenArt, a text-to-video generator, says it is on track to pass $250 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026. It has grown from 20 employees to 80 over the past year and now claims 8 million monthly users. And this week it hired Scott Larson — an ad-agency veteran who worked on Nike, Levi’s and Gatorade, then became global executive creative director at the company then known as Facebook, then an SVP at Salesforce, where he shaped the Dreamforce branding and put Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in ads — as vice president of brand marketing, as [Business Insider’s CMO Insider newsletter exclusively reported](https://www.businessinsider.com/openart-ai-hires-scott-larson-vp-brand-marketing-salesforce-meta-2026-10). Larson’s mission, in his own words, is to make OpenArt “as close to a household name as a creative AI can be.” The obstacle is that the product is a bit of everything. The platform whips up short videos, arty images and music from typed prompts. Its new product, Director, takes a described idea, visual style and narrative arc and turns it into videos up to 5 minutes long — a launch OpenArt promoted with a cinema and billboard campaign aimed at sparking what it hopes will be a “vibe directing” craze. Other users are on the platform making social posts, AI voiceovers or lyric videos. There is also, somewhat randomly, an AI model leaderboard so users can benchmark different video and image models. Wrapping all of that into one story — Larson calls it a “North Star” — is the whole job. “Whiz up anything with vibes” is a feature list, not a brand, which is presumably why you hire the guy who branded Dreamforce. ![An orange director’s chair with cream fabric casts a dark, house-shaped shadow on a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/ec3a7c26cf20f01015edb1ac4632318f9c0bdcb2.webp) The way Larson got the job, or at least the way the story is told, is that two months ago he experimented with OpenArt and made a very short film with three cuts called “Life is Short.” It shows a man made out of a stick of butter walking alongside a swimming pool. The butter man looks up at the scorching sun. Cut to an old-school title card: “The End.” You can see the pitch meeting write itself: this is either a devastating short film about mortality or a proof of concept that AI can now do a 30-second insurance commercial in an afternoon, and the distinction may not matter for revenue purposes. “Had I had this tool starting back when I was a little creative junkie up until today, I’d be making everything all the time,” Larson said. This is the standard testimonial of the converted, but note the economics underneath it. The pitch for tools like OpenArt is that the constraint on video production was never ideas — it was the cost of execution. Directors, crews, render farms, edits. If the cost of execution collapses to typing, then the market shifts to whoever can supply taste and distribution, and a guy who spent decades making expensive things for Nike and Salesforce suddenly owns a machine that makes cheap things infinitely. That is, at minimum, a coherent reason for an 80-person startup to employ a brand chief. OpenArt has been collecting big-company alumni generally: earlier this year it hired former Google executive Raj Gajwani as chief business officer. The pattern is familiar — a startup with real revenue and a confusable product buys itself grown-ups from Meta, Google and Salesforce and asks them to make it legible. Whether “vibe directing” enters the lexicon is out of anyone’s hands; crazes cannot be purchased, only proposed. But $250 million of recurring revenue buys a very nice proposal. The butter man, one suspects, would appreciate the brevity of it all.