Most startups treat content as something to sort out later. Tilen Kegl has spent his career inside companies that couldn't afford that mistake, and he knows exactly what it costs.

He now joins Earlybird's Catalyst Program alongside Samantha Wessels and Siobhán O’Reilly. Catalysts are senior operators who work directly with portfolio companies, hands-on, focused on the problems that can get expensive if left unaddressed. Tilen's domain is content growth and community. At Earlybird, that expertise is now accessible to every founder in our portfolio.

Two unicorns, one through-line

Tilen is Slovenian-born, Vienna-based, and currently leading Content and Community at Synthesia, the AI video platform for business. Before Synthesia, he was at Bitpanda and LimeWire. Both Bitpanda and Synthesia crossed unicorn and multi-unicorn valuations during his tenure. He also helped projects raise 30M+ through crowdfunding and now also invests as an angel.

Across it all, the variable that moved first was never the budget. It was the narrative. His LimeWire story makes that concrete. Tilen grew a community from zero to 70,000 members before the product launched, then scaled it past two million. The entire first phase ran without a working product. What he had was a clear sense of who the community was for, a consistent creative output, and the discipline to maintain both.

"The importance of a clear narrative. If you're unsure who you are and what you do, your audience will have no clue what's going on and therefore ignore you. On the other hand, if you nail the narrative, the right audiences will start to gravitate towards you and engage."

Content as a growth engine, not as a marketing to-do item

Tilen's framework for any early-stage company is two-fold: find what content works, build a machine around it, then use community to turn that audience into a structural advantage.

"Figure out what content works for them and turn it into a fully fledged content machine that not only creates marketing value, but also contributes to overall company growth. Learn how to build a community around a brand, turning it into a growth engine and most importantly, a moat."

“Content should start at day zero”, he highlights. The founders who wait until after product-market fit are already behind. Organic reach builds slowly. The companies that start early end up with audiences, trust, and distribution that later-stage competitors cannot buy. That accumulation of trust is something only time can achieve.

For most founders, content production seems like a huge lever to pull, but Tilen has demonstrated that even with zero budget, content can make a difference. During his first weeks at Synthesia, he ghostwrote a LinkedIn post for the CEO. It became the most impactful post the CEO had ever published until that point.The budget was zero.

Too proud to use? The channel founders avoid.

Tilen is specific about where most early-stage AI founders leave growth on the table.

"On average, lots of founders still sleep on TikTok because of the notion that it's just a bunch of dancing teenagers. But if used right, it's a super powerful organic and established channel and a shortcut to virality with basically no budget required."

For devtech and prosumer products, the distribution logic is inevitable. Short-form video reaches audiences that neither SEO nor LinkedIn touches. Founders who ignore it are making an assumption about their audience that is often wrong.

The rarest thing to find in a room

Tilen has worked across virtually every marketing function: content, community, affiliates, influencers, product launches, and founder branding. That breadth matters at the early stage, where the problem is rarely one-dimensional, and the founding team lacks bandwidth to diagnose it clearly.

He has created content that drove measurable impact for the US Embassy, Bitpanda, LimeWire, and Synthesia. The contexts are different, yet he has identified an underlying method that is consistent.

Founders who partner with Earlybird get access to that experience directly, applied to their specific stage, their specific audience, and their specific growth problem.

Tilen has a thing for unicorns. And our portfolio is a good place to pursue that interest.

Stay tuned as we share stories from the portfolio and the people helping build them.