ZM happy floral Friday. Today marks the start of something new. The first BetterCallZaal Yaps episode is live, and it feels like planting a seed that has the potential to grow into an ongoing dialogue with founders, builders, and artists who are reshaping the creative economy.

In this first episode, I sit down with Deepa, the founder of GrantOrb. Her work is focused on rethinking how artists access funding. Traditional grant writing has been a maze of bureaucracy and paperwork that often shuts out the very people it claims to support. With GrantOrb, Deepa is using AI and Web3 to make the process more efficient, more transparent, and more accessible.

What struck me in our conversation is how personal her journey into Web3 has been. Like many of us, she saw both the promise and the shortcomings of the systems we inherited. Instead of waiting for change, she built a tool to make things better. It reminded me of how The ZAO community has always worked: we see a gap, and we move to fill it.

This episode is not only about her story. It is also about the broader question of how we, as artists and communities, design the structures that will carry us forward. How do we make sure that creativity is not strangled by outdated processes? How do we build tools that respect time, energy, and imagination?

Today’s release also signals the next stage for our community. BCZ Yaps will become a space to highlight not just big names but also the overlooked builders and thinkers who are pushing culture forward in ways that often go unseen. For The ZAO, this is part of our ongoing mission: to document, share, and connect.

Check out the episode here: https://youtu.be/3vUAFwXqdeo

– BetterCallZaal on behalf of the ZAO Team