YouSaid · the spoken record

Victor Riparbelli

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-01-15
most recent: 2025-01-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think this is the content that Suck is talking about here where he's going to let off controls. This is essentially like you're making cryptocurrency content, for example. When is it a really enthusiastic entrepreneur who just started a new coin that he or she definitely thinks got to change the world? When is it an outright fraud of like trying to get well-meaning people to dump their money into something they think is going to go up 10x? Those lines are very difficult to draw, right?”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have the actual details of it, but I think it is directionally correct that having humans sitting down and evaluating content is not the right way of doing it. I think what we've seen with products like Wikipedia, for example, is that the collective power of people working together to arrive at some sort of truth is really, really powerful. And I think community notes is kind of like taking that Wikipedia way of thinking about the world and trying to implement that into every single piece of content. And it's not easy and it's not solved yet, but I do think that is the right way for us to have some degree of control over what people do and say, where it gets really messy is this kind of gray content. We have the problem as enthusiastic as well, right? You know, we have basically a product internally for content moderation. The hard thing is you have what we call the green content. The content that everyone agrees is great. That's 99.9% of the content. You have the red content, hate speech, violence. Most people will agree that that's bad as well. Then you have all the gray middle. And that's where it gets difficult.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there's control of like content moderation, and then there's controlling the output, right? So the thing that I'm talking about here is like the slot machine kind of thing. You type something in, you get something out. Then you try and change the problem, but you pull the slot machine again, right? And it's very frustrating for trying to get to something specific because the model just doesn't really put it out. You want to have some degree of control in there. I think on the moderation, that'll be interesting to see how it's going to pan out, right? I think we're definitely in the middle of like a vipe shift with SockerBreg also pulling back moderation, which I think in general, I'm in favor of that. I don't think that humans moderating content is the right way forward. I think community notes.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really be able to use this. You have to be able to say, I want this same character in a different scene. I want the character to say this particular, like there's so many layers of control, and those are very hard to build in because every time we try to build them in, it decreases the overall fidelity because all of a sudden you're trying to make the model do what you want it to do rather than just replicate whatever it really looks like. And so I think getting those layers of control in is going to be difficult. I think that is going to be a lot of algorithms figuring out like.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there will continue, but I don't think it's just going to be linear, like whoever has the most compute is going to win. The World Rally works in those ways. Something will happen, right? Someone will come up with an algorithm that is like 10, 100 times as efficient as what it is today. I think computer is important, but I actually also think data is actually I would say compute algorithms and data maybe. I think in algorithms, what everyone is trying to build into more or less in AI system today is control, right? We've proven these things extremely capable at replicating the real world, producing video that looks real, audio that looks real, text that sounds real. But what we all really want to do is get a deeper level of control over these things. In my world, right? It's like you have some of the big video generation models. I kind of delineate what we do versus what Sara does at Runway or something like that. Sora and runway, these models extremely capable, extremely powerful, right? You type something in. Basically anything you type in, it'll actually spit out. And that's really, really powerful. And it's a great demo.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, there are still gains to be made from scaling, I think, especially if you look outside the text domain, but like in video, audio, et cetera, 3D.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would do X because I think there's the most asymmetric upside if Elon delivers what he usually does. We've all heard of some of that data center that he built like 10 days or something, right? I think I would just never bet against Elon. And I think the upside potential there is huge. And also think that I think the fact that he owns X is really, really powerful. OpenAI clearly managed to capture the consumer as in the distination that you go to to use an LLM. I think we'll see LLMs being a part of many different apps. And I think owning X along with building the LLMs is actually really powerful, especially for the real time information that will be able to feed into the models directly from X and the fact that X, of course, already has hundreds of millions of users that in theory at least could start using their LLMs rather than going to OpenAir.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. I think what I'll come back to as it always does, like distribution is king and great products are king. And of course, there will be new LLMs that will be better, more powerful, as everyone else excited to see what GPT-5 kind of has in store. But I do think we are seeing the commonization of the text generation layer, right? For most of the use cases that we'll see LLMs transform the worlds we know today, I think the current generation technology is good enough. It's about, of course, improving the base models, but it's not about building the product, the scaffolding around it. I definitely think we are seeing that, right? Like if we're seeing X and Elon Musk catching up pretty quickly and Frobik has a really great product, a lot of people prefer those models over OpenAIs. OpenAI has a huge distribution mode, and I think they've really managed to capture the consumer version of the world here. And that's definitely going to be really valuable. But I think it's a lot of distribution of product we're on.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in general the tech industry, you're very good at setting really high expectations and then not always meeting them. I always try with these like hype cycles to stay positive but rational. What does that mean? Well, it means like, yeah, sure, probably at some point that will happen. I care most about what I know to be true today. And in the next couple of quarters, and I'll kind of like adjust our strategy based off of that. I think it's very clear we're going to have very capable AIs that can produce software. I also think when I speak to a lot of developers that, I mean, we're not at the point yet, right, where you just sit down and say, hey, build me, like get the next social network.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buzzwords always kind of like take me out. People say they're like building AI agents to do all sorts of different things. That always lights up my bullshit detector a little bit. But I just feel like when you're overly obsessed about the technology and the latest buzzword, that's usually like a yellow flag for me. Maybe I'll give you one concrete example. I really, really hate it when people go like AI employees. I think it's so dumb. I think it's not helpful to build useful technologies that people want to adopt. And I just think it's the wrong way of thinking about that you're going to have like AI employees doing all sorts of different things for you. These are algorithms. It's a piece of software like you wouldn't say that Miro or Figma is like an AI employee that sits and takes people's design and put it onto something, right? I understand that it's because people think these things are going to be making decisions autonomously, but I just don't think it's that different from software that we already know.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble, right? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's how capitalism works, right? For a lot of money, a lot of products at the world, and you try to do like a million different things at once and you kind of see what sticks. And that's the right way to innovate, right? That's Darvinistic by nature. But I think there's a lot of money that's going to go up in flames, in AI products that either just aren't that valuable or things that eventually become features in some of the big cloud providers.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of companies are seeing that big time, right? And I think what's very unique about AI the last couple of years is that people are extremely willing to part ways with their money. People don't mind paying on a consumer level like $30 a month to try out something that looks cool. Enterprise level, like sign for 50K pilot to do something. But the real signal is not that you sign a contract. The real signal is renewal. And I think there's too many AI startups who optimize or have optimized too much for like closing new contracts, not for the renewal, right? If you optimize for the new contracts, not the renewals, unless you've hit the right thing, which of course some people do, then you're in for a whole bunch of trouble.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That wall of churn where all your 12 month contracts begin to phase out because you're not actually delivering value, right?”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the problem is that to be successful today as an AI company, I think you need to be extremely customer centric. You need to deeply understand your customers, what are their problems, how can your product help solve whatever specific problem that they have. Now, that sounds like pretty obvious, right? That's not like AI specific. But the issue is that today there's a lot of companies who do a lot of cool technologies and they go out and they kind of convince the customers that whatever they're building is the right thing. It'll help solve a big problem for them. But maybe it doesn't really work or they haven't understood the customer's problem deep enough. And so now you have this thing where the AI startup kind of thinks that they're delivering real value, but actually it's not a good signal because on the other side, you have a buyer who's like, just spend a lot of money on doing something. And they'll like say, yeah, it works really well because they just spend $100,000 in doing it. But eventually they will churn, right? Because it doesn't actually work or doesn't actually do the thing that you wanted to do. And so that's a problem because the AI startups think they're doing the right thing. They think they're delivering value. But at some point, you're going to be hit.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's pretty spot on. What I see a lot in the enterprise is buyers don't really know what they want. A lot of people have been told that they need to have an AI strategy, they need to execute an AI strategy, which means they're very willing to have conversations. They're also very willing to spend their innovation budgets on doing things. But they don't really know what they actually need and want. They don't understand the technologies well enough to kind of themselves figure out what do they need for their business. And that is both an opportunity, but I think it's also a problem for a lot of AI startups that doesn't have that customer obsession. It's great because you have a lot of budget available and people are extremely willing to do things and sign up for pilots and POCs because they want to deliver to their boss that AI strategy. But when they don't know what they actually want, it's very difficult to prove the RIs for them, right?”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around you, but it's much more fun, and I think it helps you get to the right answer for your customers much faster, which ultimately is the most important thing.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They know who they are. But they covered everything that we do from the way we talk about the product, talk about the market. And of course, that's annoying, right? But that's capitalism. That's good. And then eventually you start to learn from your competitors, they do something right. They do something wrong. And it's actually very helpful. It's really difficult to pioneer space because you have no feedback loop except for whatever you do and how the market reacts to that, right? And seeing what competitors are doing and seeing what works and what doesn't work is extremely powerful. I think for us at least that's been a very powerful thing for us the last 12 months. I think the reason that we had a massive re-acceleration kind of second half of the year. And a big part of that is actually because our competitors did a whole bunch of marketing for the category. We clearly had the superior product. So that actually helped us quite significantly. I don't think you always have to be the first to do something. If you're good at being a fast follower, that's also very powerful. It's a different way of running the company when you have a lot of feedback signals into market.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contrary to competitors. And now we have lots of them, right? I think it's great to have someone to kind of play ball against to some extent. One of the interesting things about Synthesia is that when we raised our A to B to C round, it was very much a secret how fast we were growing and how much people loved the product. A lot of people looked at us from the outside like, oh, yeah, there's like a few people in learning and development and training that thinks it's like a cool thing to spend time on making these AI videos, right? And what we actually saw from the inside was, holy shit, this is huge. And training and learning was the first market we targeted, but this is clearly just the beginning. But from the outside, it looked like, oh, it's this like cute UK company doing these avatars, kind of fun, but like most people probably don't use anything else than just making a fun video for their mom. And so for many years, we had the market to ourselves. And then slowly people started to realize that, okay, actually, this is maybe not just like a flash in the pan cool demo. Maybe there's something real under the hood. And so we started getting a lot of competitors. We have one particular competitor that, I mean, literally Verbertim copied.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, sure, it's a part of it, right? But I think more than anything, this round is raising the capital to build the best product in the category. So, I mean, every time you raise the signal, like hiring people, you send a signal to competitors and to VCs, et cetera. But that's not the, I've never made a decision to Theseia based off what our competitors do or don't. I think that's a bad way to run a company.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it can backfire if you don't know what to use the capital for you start doing stupid things, right? Is this”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we still know it's a very important part of our thesis is that our market is not video production because all video production today, that's an interesting market, but all of our market is text. Text and slides is the market that we're targeting. And that market is infinitely big. And if you manage to capture just 5% of all the world's text communications and turn that into video, I think you have probably more than $100 million company.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do exactly the same thing. I think TikTok is a great example of how video truly can be the default of how we consume information, right? There's almost no text left in the interface. Even comments, people respond to comments with videos. And so they've really started to build out this graph of like how we communicate with video as a default video. There's still a long way to go. But if you believe that that is true and that not just your TikTok scrolling at night, but if you're trying to buy a software product, you actually don't want to read a whole bunch of stuff and jump on calls for people. You want to watch a video. And at some point, you probably want to watch an interactive video, right? Where you just, with your voice, say, hey, can you show me how this functionality works over here? And the video will just switch over to that. When you do custom support, right? You're not on the phone. You're not reading long knowledge articles. You're watching videos again, probably they'll be interactive. Then all the world's communication is the market, right? And so when we started the company, we always talked about”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more we can get video creation auditions, be as scalable as text. And once that happens, there isn't really any reason for us to use text anymore. This sounds a bit crazy, but I actually do think that maybe not us, but maybe our kids' kids are going to be one of the last generations that will read and write as like the default way of communication. I think we'll increasingly just consume everything via video and audio. I think you have all the trends that like you look at TikTok, right? I don't know if you're on TikTok, but.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we're the early stages of a shift in how we communicate. If you think of most communication today, it's text based, right? Emails, text, we read things. And text is a great technology. Build the world up to where it is today. But it's actually like a pretty bad way of compressing information. You lose a lot of context when you transform your thoughts into something that's written down in a document, right? As humans, we're much better at consuming visual content. We like to hear things. We like to see things. We like to feel things in a physical world. Can't do that yet. But it's very clear that high fidelity content, like video and audio, is a better way of training, informing, and entertaining people. The reason that we're using that much text today is because text is the only scalable way we have of essentially storing information and sharing information, right? But that's changing now because the more we don't need cameras and microphones and capture and things in the physical world around us.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think when you have the money, you do spend it, right? I think for us, it's been more a matter of just we've always been obsessed about actually building a business, having great unit economics, making sure that we're a business that generates money and revenue and that we're always in control of our own destiny rather than being tied to like a VC parachute. And so I think we've always just spent conservatively. But it's also very clear, right, that if you know where to spend the capital, it is an amazing asset, right? So building a great go-to-market team, for example, I mean, that does cost money. And there's like a cash flow thing of like you have to hire a bunch of people that are really great. They have to train. They take nine months before they wrap up. And then the investment is worth it. You want to have capital, right? You want to have a really healthy balance sheet so that you can chase any opportunity that comes ahead of you. For us, we want to build a really, really big company. I think there is easily a $50, $100 billion company to be built in this space that we're in. And we want to win that. You're not going to win that by bootstrapping all the way, right? I think that's a myth.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those, I think you can hire super smart people that can run with it, make it great lines of businesses, make it great products. But I think pushing to those next product markets and like where the company needs to be in two or three years, I think that remains to be the founder's job.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree with you, and I think a successful company is a long series of product market fits, but you need that initial spark, right? Once you have that, you have something to build on. The bigger you get, the more bigger company you're building. You need new product, new product market fit, essentially. And I actually do think that that's one of the things as a founder that you should always be focusing on. What is the next market? What is the next product you're targeting, right? But in our case, we have, I would say we have like a bunch of product market fits already.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From first principles. And I think people try and then you hire like a product manager to help you fix the product market fit problem because they're a product person or you hire like a salesperson because you think you have product market fit and you just need to be someone who's better at selling it unless you have product market fit like you shouldn't have product managers and salespeople. That is your job as a founder.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too much money too early is not healthy. Maybe some people are good at really having that discipline, maybe like second time founders, but it's very tempting to spend on things that you shouldn't be spending money on, especially when things are not working, right? I think once you clearly have product market fit, then a lot of things, a lot of decisions becomes a lot easier because they're more obvious. But before product market fit, it's really dangerous, I think, to be developing two, three, four things at a time, having 15 people working on your team when you're still at ideal stage. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of raising the money and then using it too quickly. One thing you cannot use money for a buyer away with is product market, right? I think learning about your market, about your customers, it just takes time. And having a team of 20 people instead of five people trying to learn that, I think actually slows you down. You have to own that as a founder. I don't think we could have learned the same amount about our customers faster with more money back then. It really did take us like two years to just get into the minds of customers, understand video.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was the later round. So that was back in 2017. We did a million at five. That kind of got us started. We went like 12, 18 months, as you do. Went out to the market, felt like now we had a working technology. We were back then focused in on AI dubbing, not the kind of avatar tech that we mostly have today. Again, learned a hard lesson. We went out and we're like, okay, we've built this great technology. We're a great team. Let's raise 8 million. That completely failed. And for like nine months, which is like dragging our feet. I made all the mistakes you can make as a founder, right? Dragged out the funding process over nine months, like different data points with different investors. It was a big shit show. And we eventually had to rewind because we're running out of money. And we ended up raising 3.1. And that kind of took us through to the series A, which is when we had actually found product market fit and had like a sustainable business. But those two first rounds were very much rounds we raised based on story. And there was a story back then that just didn't resonate that much because it was very hard for people to see what we had, how that could extrapolate that into everything that we came today.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think in Europe, the VC industry still dominated by people who used to work in private equity. And that's a very different mindset than technologists, right? So when you use working private equity, you're like a financier more than you're a technologist. And this was not a pitch you could understand for an Excel sheet. So we got turned down by, I mean, basically everyone, I think like 80, 90 investors, something like that. Including.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is back in 17, so that's a long time ago now. And the very short story is that we're a bunch of people, and we had this sort of idea that generators of AI, which back then wasn't really a term that most people thought about. But Generative AI would change how we create content. And the big shift was that back in 2017, when most people thought about AI was about analyzing data, right, making decisions. That's kind of like that era of AI. But there was these early kind of GANs, which was basically a neural network that could kind of produce new data instead of just analyzing existing data. We thought that this was going to be a world-changing technology. We thought it was going to change everything we know about how we create content from video, speech, audio, music, whatever, but we were focusing on video. I went out to the world with a great PowerPoint deck, and we think a great vision. But I think understandably, most people thought we're pretty crazy, right? We basically went out and said, look, in 10 years, you're going to be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop, needing nothing else than your imagination. That wasn't a pitch that landed particularly well, especially not in Europe.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just raised a series D, which is super exciting. Big milestone for us. We raised $100 million led by NEA with participation from all of our existing investors. So we're very excited to get it to 25 with a big war chest and, you know, just get to escape velocity, shut down the category that we're in, and win.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we're definitely a bubble, right? There's a lot of money that's going to go up in flames, in AI products. What I see a lot in the enterprise is buyers don't really know what they want. The real signal is not that you sign a contract. The real signal is renewal.”
2025-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source