Build vs Buy Case Study: Media Asset Management

When I joined 776, our photos, videos, and media assets lived in an external media service. But in early summer, we got a yearly renewal notice and our price was about to double. My boss asked, “Can we rebuild this ourselves with AI?” Of course, I’m a fairly confident developer. The answer was going to be YES.

Storage

Okay - so storage is cheap. I don’t think people realize how cheap S3 and similar functionality on other cloud providers is. Also you can buy an external hard drive. The main value of a lot of these softwares is in the collaboration features or “governance features” or other UI niceties. However we have a robust internal tool at 776 called Cerebro. The more we add to that tool the more its AI gets smarter. This is a place where building more within Cerebro has other added benefits.

Migration

The part where AI came in clutch was in the migration process. We were running against the clock and I had to get the files off of our external media service. There were ~20K files, > 3 TBs of data, and a June 30 renewal. The conventional method would be to write a script and run the script. I do not like that method. I am afraid of running into rate limits or some other nonsense issue. AI is fantastic at doing these types of straightforward migrations. You can have it run the script but also code it in a way that it can check on the progress of the script with an additional monitor. I essentially had AI babysit this process, checking in every 10 minutes (and alerting me via Slack if something went wrong).

The migration overall took two weeks, and one of the weeks was Summer Half Time, when the whole firm is off. This was the week I learned how effective Claude Remote Control could be. I ran most of it from my phone. Also this ended up being a fresh data model, new API, and new UI. So I had AI code everything with browser e2e tests so it could assess the whole flow. Once I got all the files downloaded to beat the clock - I was able to upload them to S3 and build our own media management software. The one-time backfill ran on open source models, on a spare machine I keep plugged in. I was able to have to leverage two laptops here - one for coding and one for running models on the backfill.

The Actual UI

I built cerebro.ai/media to feel like the photos app on your phone.

• Search by description. Just describe in plain text what’s in the image or video, and search matches what’s in the picture.
• Search inside videos. Every video is transcribed, so you can find a phrase and jump to the second when it was said.
• Watch with a transcript. Seek anywhere in a video, read and copy the transcript beside it, or share a link to an exact moment.
• Preview on hover. Move across a video’s frames to scrub through it before opening it.
• Albums and a timeline. Group photos into albums and browse from a whole year down to a single day.
• Find similar photos. Open a photo and pull up more that look like it.
• Upload a folder. Drag in files and they’re indexed automatically, ready to search within minutes.

Here is an example.

Transcript

1. 0:00Oh, by the way, I bought a trading card company. When you're the biggest LP in the VC firm, you get to kind of do what you want to do. We have amazing institutional LPs, don't get me wrong, but...
2. 0:17I sign off on every deal we do at 776. When I'm hitting send, I'm thinking of my kids' inheritance. This is my money more than anyone else's. So with trading cards, this was a modest-sized company specializing in college sports. Obviously NIL has changed the landscape of that.
3. 0:36There's this long tail of college athletes. A guy like Mendoza gets a card deal with us, and he doesn't just get his rookie card, his left tackle gets a card. The guy protecting him, who may never play in the NFL, may never get a card, is getting one. And we have more women college athlete cards...
4. 0:56...in the last year than every other card company combined. University of Nebraska women's volleyball sells more cards than the men's football team. It's focused on a part of sports I love, and these companies all need software now.

That’s Alexis on TBPN, pulled straight from the library, transcript and all.

Confident in BUILD

We have all seen the trend. Build is going to win in a lot more cases now. You can often get a cheaper and a high quality product. There are still going to be different products/services a company buys - but they really have to prove themselves. A year ago, this would have been a foolish low priority task. But for this summer in 2026 it was two weeks, one person, half of it from a phone.