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Jimmy's Jobs of the Future
Synthesia Co-Founder | The Future of Hollywood, YouTube & AI Content
01:13:27
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- [00:01]
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- [00:55]
Jimmy Carr
specialoffer welcome to today's episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I'm joined by Victor, the founder of Synthesia. It's a fascinating company that was first put on my radar about five years ago by MMC Ventures. They have been on a tear since then, doing incredibly well. The idea that they have is behind automating video creation, which obviously, as a podcaster and YouTuber had me a little bit nervous. But we spoke about that. It's an incredible story. Victor's got a really interesting background, having been born in Denmark and studying at Stanford as well. So we got into all of that as well.
- [01:34]
Victor Riparbelli
But why?
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Jimmy Carr
He is confident about building an AI company here in London. I really hope you enjoy today's episode. We have lots of exciting things coming up for you this year, so please do subscribe or send this to a friend. Thank you. Make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests. Victor, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. You're here to celebrate some big news. The fact that Jimmy's Jobs of the Future has gone past 100,000 subscribers. I'm sure you're delighted.
- [02:08]
Victor Riparbelli
I'm honored.
- [02:10]
Jimmy Carr
Well, you are like, yeah, quite big. Quite a big moment. You are the fastest growing unicorn in the United Kingdom, as according to the Sunday Times list. But that news is just about to get a bit bigger, right?
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Victor Riparbelli
It is. We're very excited to announce our series E raising $200 million at a 4 billion dollar valuation and, you know, doubling down on what's been a fantastic couple of years and a huge opportunity in AI video.
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Jimmy Carr
Who's backing you this time the round
- [02:37]
Victor Riparbelli
is led by GV Google Ventures. It's one of our early investors. They invested first time in the Series B and we're grateful for their support. A lot of the existing investors are investing as well. And then we're bringing in two new funds, Evantic that buy Matt Miller and head of Sophia.
- [02:52]
Jimmy Carr
What's the difference between raising a Series E compared to that first round 10 years ago?
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Victor Riparbelli
I think that all depends on the traction, right. I think when you race, the first two rounds for us was incredibly difficult to raise. The first round was basically me and Stefan, my co founder and Matthias And Ludus, my two other co founders with a PowerPoint what we thought was a good idea and turned out to be at least somewhat of a good idea, but back then was completely non consensus. You know, we were telling people in 2017, AI is going to be able to not just analyze data and find patterns for us, which was mainly like machine learning back then. It's going to be able to actually generate data and content and in 10 years you're going to be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop with nothing but your imagination. Right. When you look at that statement today, that seems very obvious. You know, that's if it hasn't already happened, then it's very close to happening. But back then it's very, very difficult for investors to draw the line between the tech we were showing them and where it could eventually go. Which I think is very natural when you're investing ahead of the curve and you're building ahead of the curve. But those two rounds are very difficult because we had to find people who truly were believers and pioneers. And I think it's one of the areas where being in Europe is a lot harder in the Valley, easier to find people who are tech optimists and want to believe and think ahead of the curve. In Europe, unfortunately, I think it's gotten a lot better since 2017, but it's very difficult to raise those rounds back then. But we're very lucky that we found some people who believed in us. Raising a Series E is very different. Right. We've gone a long way from a PowerPoint deck. And the way you evaluate the business today is of course still based on the vision and what we want to do and what we want to build. But now it's also a very real business. Way past $100 million of AI and revenue. And so you kind of move from the first round being pure story almost to getting closer and closer to being evaluated, like how you would Evaluate a public company. Right. But interestingly, because things were going really well, the later stage rounds have actually been almost easier to raise than some of the earlier stage rounds. Which makes no sense from the outside that raising a million dollars back in 2017 took us 10 times as long as it took us to raise the latest $200 million round. But that's some of those like, weird mechanics that you see in this industry.
- [05:15]
Jimmy Carr
You always get time. Who wrote your, who wrote the first check?
- [05:19]
Victor Riparbelli
Do you remember Mark Cuban? Did Mark Cuban invested a million dollars at $5 million post.
- [05:24]
Jimmy Carr
Wow.
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Victor Riparbelli
So I think I'm pretty sure we're his best angel investment he's ever made. Yeah, I've been. Yeah. I think this is a Dragon's Den
- [05:33]
Jimmy Carr
US Dragon's Den guy.
- [05:34]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
- [05:34]
Jimmy Carr
For those that might not know.
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Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, exactly. I think the backstory on Mark Cuban is, is pretty interesting because obviously he's mainly known as being the guy in, in, in, in Dragon Shark Tank, it's called us.
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Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [05:45]
Victor Riparbelli
But actually before that he built and sold a company to that he sold to Yahoo for three point something billion dollars. And he was the first person who brought radio to the Internet, which today seems like, you know, I mean, it's kind of like what we do. But back then that was a completely ludicrous idea. And I think when he, he, he saw us and he heard about what we're, what we're trying to do, he saw a lot of parallels back when he was saying, hey, I want to bring radio. Then some people like, that's completely ridiculous. The tech's not going to be able to support, it's going to be way too expensive. Yeah, we'd want to listen to radio on their computer. Right. You have a radio right there. Why would you need that? Yeah, and so Mark's actually incredibly visionary in terms of, of tech. And so these are as a, as a company stems from a research paper that my co founder Matthias Niesl did when he was a professor at Stanford. And when we messaged Mark Cuban and sent him a cold email, we quickly found that he actually implemented this paper himself at home with a lecture. So I think my kind of entrepreneurship lesson from raising that round was that we talked to, I mean, way more than 100 people who all said no because we were trying to both convince them that the world is going to look like this in 10 years, which was a hard sell. And we were the right team to tackle that opportunity. And with Mark Cuban and some of the other early investors, we didn't have to convince them of the vision. He already was completely sold in the idea that AI is going to be able to generate film, movies, speech, whatever. He was only validating us as the team to tackle that opportunity. Right. And it's just generally much easier to find people who already believe in your vision and their value as a team as opposed to having to both convince someone on a non consensus vision and the team. Right. Like back in those days everybody wanted to invest in fintech. Yeah. Like that was. Everyone believed in that. So if you went out and want to start a fintech company, they'd evaluate you as a team and of course the idea you had, but you wouldn't have to convince them that like this is a market that's going to exist eventually.
- [07:33]
Jimmy Carr
So how did you go about getting the kind of like cold email? Like how did that, what was that process like and how did he agree to kind of invest? Because that's a heck of a first check investor.
- [07:42]
Victor Riparbelli
So we are. Yeah, I mean it was, we were pretty young, me and Stefan my, my other operational co founder and we were just hustling to try and get this thing off the ground. We obviously were young, had a lot of belief in the idea, but we also needed money. Right. And so we had this long list of people who we thought could be interesting and we got turned down by almost everyone. We ended up with Mark Cuban's email because Sony got hacked a few years prior and you could actually download that data dump on the Internet and in that data dump there was a lot of emails from Mark Cuban talking about the Shark Tank production. And so we found his email in there, we sent him the email and he responded back within like five minutes just asking us like a bunch of questions around. We sent him like a demo and a few words more returnable and then we had this 14 hour email conversation with him. Mark Cuban doesn't do video calls and he doesn't do phone calls, only email. So we had this like 14 hour conversation with him over email and at like 4 or 5am in the morning UK time he was basically like, you know, I'll do a million dollars if the diligence checks out.
- [08:46]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
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Victor Riparbelli
And you know, the diligence checked out. We went to LA to visit him and spent a day with him on the set of Shark Tank which was really fun. Had lunch with him.
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Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
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Victor Riparbelli
And that was the official start of
- [08:57]
Jimmy Carr
the company there, back and forth. I mean that must have been. I wonder what that's like now in a sort of chat GPT world as well. Like it's quite interesting in that because of course, that's one of the great advantages that you've got, right, is that everyone wants to invest in AI companies now, whereas you've been doing your series A, B, C rounds before that chat GPT even existed, right?
- [09:18]
Victor Riparbelli
Well, yeah, I think there's like three stages of synthesis. There was like the kind of, I mean, let's call it pre generative AI era, which is from 2017 to around, you know, 2020, where, I mean, the tech didn't really work. We're doing some demos. We, we had this technology where we could kind of like translate a video, take an advertisement that was shot in English and give you a French version of it by reanimating the face to match a different voiceover. And it was, I mean, we did make some money off it and it did sort of work, but it was just clear, not like a very scalable business. That part of the company was very, very difficult. Then the next phase was we actually built something that worked. It started to scale. It was a web app, very easy to use. We essentially went from trying to build technology for Hollywood studios and video production companies and video experts, through your average office worker can generate a video in just a few seconds. That started working and the company started getting traction. So we went from, from zero to a million dollars in AR in something like three or four months, which is, I mean, today that's like less special. But back then was very special. Right. And so we started growing really quickly. And of course as soon as we started growing really quickly, investors took note and became a lot easier to raise money. And then, so then the company started growing really quickly. And then when ChatGPT was released and all of a sudden AI was just the thing everybody talked talks about, still is today. Right. That was one more accelerant to the business. So it's been kind of interesting, like those three stages of like, you know, nothing is working, no traction at all to the business is working. People weren't talking about AI yet, but the business working really fast. And then once AI really started taking off, just the kind of, the kind of macro effect that happens on the business, right?
- [10:56]
Jimmy Carr
Because then, because people can see like, okay, well, we can generate screen scripts, like, and then we can turn scripts into video. With me just sort of seeing.
- [11:02]
Victor Riparbelli
But it's also just all of a sudden everyone is like googling AI tools. There's the, you know, watching the TikTok everybody's talking about like AI tool, Synthesia, ChatGPT, Lovable, all these other things. Right. Everyone is constantly talking about AI tools.
- [11:16]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
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Victor Riparbelli
Which meant that. And we were one of the. We were actually. I wouldn't say we were mature product, but by the time ChatGPT got got released. Right. We've been building our product for a couple of years.
- [11:26]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
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Victor Riparbelli
Which means that we were actually one of the few companies that had an offering that wasn't just like a demo SL together. In two weeks, we had something real, we had something that was pretty unique. So just the fact that the world was like. And every business in the world was like, how's AI going to change my business? How do I make sure that I don't miss the wave? Like all that, you know, is just like a massive accelerant in terms of customer acquisition and general interest and willingness from budget holders to spend budget on AI tools. So I think there's, in some sense you could say we were too early because the very first years of the company was not very fun and things didn't work. But on the other hand, you could also say we were right on time. Right. We just had to endure those like three or four years of like, very painful training.
- [12:05]
Jimmy Carr
Right.
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Victor Riparbelli
You know, kind of running against the wall. But once everything started taking off, we were really well positioned.
- [12:12]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, no, I can see that. And so what are you going to do with the 200 million then?
- [12:18]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
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Jimmy Carr
Like, what are you going to deploy that in?
- [12:21]
Victor Riparbelli
So, I mean, it's going to go into what you'd expect. Product development, customer acquisition. The big thing for us is when we found the company, we founded it based on basically two big ideas. The first one being that AI is going to reduce the marginal cost of creating content to basically zero, meaning that you can generate anything from your computer without doing anything else than just your imagination. I think that's kind of happening right now. In a couple of years, you will be able to see cinematic content, I think generative AI to the point where you cannot tell that it's being. Being AI generated. That's a huge business opportunity because it's kind of like going from a printing press to typing on a keyboard. Right. In terms of the scale of content production. And I think that's very much the business opportunity we've tackled up until now. The second big idea is that when we invent new media technology as humans, the first phase of it is always that we use new technology to create old media formats, which is what we're doing today. We're creating video as we've always known it. Right. You create one video, everybody watches exactly the same version of the video, it's a broadcast, it's from A to B and so on and so forth. But when we invent new media technologies, we always invent new media formats. So the $100 billion question in our market, right. Is like, what does truly AI native video look like? It doesn't look like a broadcast, it's probably much more. Every video is tailored to the person who's watching it, Right. If you're watching an educational video about something and there's something you don't understand, you can ask that video a question which obviously can't do on YouTube, right?
- [13:50]
Jimmy Carr
Yes.
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Victor Riparbelli
If you're doing a corporate training thing like what we're doing a sales training rather than just having people watch a video passively and hoping they understand the content, the video could go into a conversational mode where the video pretends to be a customer and you have, as a salesperson, you have to overcome objections, prove you've actually understood the content in the same way you would role play with your manager, for example. There's lots of different avenues that this can go, and that's the chapter we're moving into now. We're launching our first product. It's in beta right now with 25 customers. It's going to go into GA in a couple of months. And that is essentially AI native video. Right? And I think the easiest way of thinking about it is like video you can talk to and video you can interact with. It could be that you do the sales training thing, which is the first product we're launching, where you're actually being examined by the AI. The AI helps you like a tutor or your manager would, to understand the content you're consuming. It could be that you're, as a candidate, you're watching a video about the job role that you're taking. But the video is also going to give you a live case study on the call so you can prove your skill set beyond just uploading your cv, for example. And there's a gasillion other examples of how you could use these things. And that's essentially what we're moving into now. Right? And I think if you look at kind of like what is the opportunity in this segment, I think whoever managed to nail those use cases becomes very, very big because it takes video as we're doing it today, from being purely around communication to actually being some degree of lightweight, like process automation. Right. You can have these videos actually teach your sales team, not just like communicate something to them. You can have them help with onboarding instead of Having a person onboarding everyone in the company with the same slides, the same, you know, two hours every single week, you can do that with one of these like video agents instead.
- [15:31]
Jimmy Carr
Do you think that there's a danger, as you were talking about, that? I sometimes think about technology and it doesn't actually end up at times making us more productive. So if you can ask a salesperson 25 questions, you'll just end up doing it. As you were talking there about it, it just made me think like, okay, we're going to create all this content, more and more content, but actually, aren't we going to lose some of the human skills in terms of like, well, risk taking? I suppose
- [16:05]
Victor Riparbelli
you could argue that in some cases it will probably change like our behavior and maybe there's going to be some things that makes us less productive. But I think in the case of this, I think what we're seeing so far, and this is not just in Synthesia, but also when you look at like education with kids, for example, that when you have a space where, you know, kind of no one is watching. Yeah, you're a lot more vulnerable and you're much more, okay asking stupid questions, for example, or doing 10 practice runs because you're not. So role playing is, is a, is a, in most sales teams is an integral part of being a manager. Right. You role play with your, your team members. So, you know, maybe I feel like you're not 10 out of 10 in product knowledge. So we'll sit down and I'll tend to be a customer and we'll kind of do a few role plays to make sure you've understood the content. That's a very normal way of teaching salespeople how to, how to sell. And so with this, what you can do is you can have that available in any language 24, 7. It has a memory of all the previous interactions you've had. So you can actually begin to, to build a data set of like, what are you good at, what are you less good at? Which helps you get better at your job. Right? Yeah, of course. I think there is like, you don't want to be just sitting and like role playing all the time instead of actually going on sales calls. That's not going to be very much productive. But I do think that one of the biggest and most interesting use case with AI is actually education as a general theme. Right. This is education in a corporate context with a sales team. But looking at myself and like how I learn things now, you know, if you like three or four years Ago, I would always say, you know, I love reading.
- [17:38]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
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Victor Riparbelli
And I still do read, but I mostly read fiction today because of the art form. If I want to learn something, it's at least like five, six years ago I started going on YouTube instead, right? Because like rather than buying the book on Amazon, waiting for it to arrive, reading 200 pages, of which most of it is probably outdated by the time I read it, a 20 minute video on YouTube can teach you much more, right? So video is like the easiest way of learning. And I think what's happening now is that increasingly it's going to be a mix of video, but also these like using LLMs, right? Like when I want to learn something today. I know if you've had any experience with this, but it's just phenomenal. Putting together like curriculum, asking you questions, explaining it in is like, give me an analogy that's close to another topic that I'm really good at understanding. It's just extremely powerful to have this like AI tutor that can help you understand things really quickly.
- [18:27]
Jimmy Carr
I know what you mean about asking the basic questions as well. I was doing some stuff for my pension the other day and like pensions is one of these things that everyone sort of pretends they understand and whatever, but only thinks about it once every three or four years. And it was like a ma, like, you know, I basically spent and I was like, oh, okay, I kind of like, I get, I get it all now and whatever and even like comparing what your pension pot is, the national average and all that kind of stuff. It was like, yeah, it was just sort of really, it's really interesting. And it was, I was asking probably quite a lot of dumb questions really, but you know, you just get clarity on it, etc.
- [18:59]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah. What have you used it for? I mean, I use it for, I just bought an apartment, for example. Right. And it's, it's also like one of those things you do a few times throughout your life. You're talking to a solicitor and like all these like, you know, old English documents that I have gazillions of pages and you. Everyone has the feeling I should probably sit down and read this and make sure I'm not like signing on to something that I disagree with that's bad. But it's just the language is tough, right? And then you have to call your lawyer that they also, they have like, they can't say some things, they can't advise you or something, which is kind of annoying. Just slap them into chatgpt, like dumb this down for me. Summarize the key points. Anything here that's out of the ordinary, right? And it's interesting because that actually teaches you so much about the process just by like dumbing down the language, giving you the summarized version of like a 15 page document. And so I think it's not just that you can say, at least for my own personal thing, it's not just that I'm like, hey, is this okay? And I just follow blindly what the GPT tells me. It's actually that I learned something about like, what are these things in a way that I probably wouldn't if I just. It would take me a very long time to sit down and read all these documents. Right? So I think it helps. It can also dumb us down if you're just blindly asking it and just going whatever it says. But used in the right way, I think it's an amazing tool to learn.
- [20:17]
Jimmy Carr
Again, the house thing, you know, property purchase is one of those things where I often think about like how anyone bought it before email is beyond me.
- [20:26]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
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Jimmy Carr
Like, it's one of these things where technology slightly ends up creating more work and makes the process like longer and longer. But that is a really useful. That is a useful case study on it. Why did you. Where did the name Synthesia come from?
- [20:44]
Victor Riparbelli
If I could change it, I probably would. So it actually comes from. So my big passion outside of work is music. And in music, especially electronic music, you use synthesizers, right? Which is essentially digital instruments that originally were made to emulate physical instruments. So instead of having to travel around like all the music in the world, you could just have a keyboard and you could play like the guitar, like whatever. And of course, synthesizers today is a very big part of producing music. And I think there's a very obvious link to what we're doing with video. Synthesizing video. Instead of filming in the real world, we're using digital technology to recreate something that looks and feels entirely real. And then one of my favorite films is Fantasia, which is, you know, Disney cartoon. And it started as this like a code word for the project. And then it just kind of like stuck on. I think there's a lot of things I like about it, but it's very difficult to pronounce, which is a problem, as we just saw before.
- [21:41]
Jimmy Carr
Quite. I think that's. Yeah, okay, that's. That's interesting. It's a lovely question to ask people because it's obviously like takes people back to those core moments of where they were kind of like sitting at the kitchen table, etcetera. Were there any other names that you considered?
- [21:57]
Victor Riparbelli
Not really, because it was more like a code. It was just like, you know, it was exactly that. I was sitting in my room and I was like, I'm making this deck, I gotta call it something. And then that just came to mind.
- [22:08]
Jimmy Carr
What's it been like? You're now almost 600 people, right? You'll probably be maybe hiring a couple hundred more as well. Like what's, what has the hiring process been like and where have the kind of like step change moments been on that journey?
- [22:22]
Victor Riparbelli
So early days when we had nothing and you know, we were both 25, 26 years old, it's very difficult time. You always get this advice of just like, just only hire like rock stars. Like the first people you hire are the most important. And that's great advice. You should definitely hire all the rock stars you can get. But in the early days of a company, right, it's, it's hard because you can't for most people at least, very difficult to go to someone who works at like a meta or Google and say, hey, I think you are absolute rock star. Why don't you come join my company? Because you probably can't afford their salary. And at this point in time, right, you're just a person with a PowerPoint or maybe like a very early version of the technology. So in the early days, it's all about finding kind of diamonds in the dirt, I think is one way of putting it, right? Which are these people that are truly great, but they haven't necessarily, they don't have the CV to demonstrate it yet, or they live in some random town where for some reason there's just not like a meta or like a Google that's gonna snap them out. They didn't go to like a Stanford or like some big important university. And the way you find those people, right, is by interviewing a lot of people and trying to figure out like, what are the signals, what characterizes like this type of person who has a lot of potential but maybe hasn't sort of outlifted yet, right? And those are the people you want to find a lot of. We were also fortunate that two of our co founders were professors, so they had some PhD students, which was an easier inning. We obviously need the AI researchers to actually build the initial version of the product. And we were very lucky to get a bunch of like truly great people who straight off their PhDs that they were young, they're very good and they're excited about the space that we were working in and of course we gave them, you know, obviously you want to give them equity and options and give them like, great upside in the company, then it changes over time. You know, I think you.
- [24:10]
Jimmy Carr
For us, just before we. Let's go. But just. This is almost a sidebar on this, but who. A couple of those people. I think there's a fascinating series to be done in terms of like, people that join companies like in the first 20 or so, because I think we lionize founders, rightly so. But actually there's people that join early are almost kind of like doing a lot of the risk as well with less of the upside. Right. I'd be fascinated. And maybe tell me after a couple of people like early on that were particularly good because it'd be great to interview them as well.
- [24:39]
Victor Riparbelli
But a lot of those, I think we're.
- [24:43]
Jimmy Carr
I bet. But sorry. Then you hit 50 people, et cetera.
- [24:46]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah. I mean, then you start growing and then, you know, the company obviously starts working, which means you get a little bit more leverage when you're talking to candidates. But, you know, I think even up until, you know, a couple of hundred people, we were mostly hiring people that I would call. I mean, underdogs is a strong word, but I think almost on purpose, actually, like not trying to hire people from, you know, big name brand logos, but trying to really find people where they're most like. Hiring people that are truly hungry, you know, very smart, have something to prove, want to put the work in, are humble about the fact that, like, no one knows anything and. And you get this feeling that they will like, you know, they will put in the work and they'll have to have the raw intelligence to really kind of perform very well. I think those people are so important. Those early days, the thing that can happen, and of course this is like a very broad generalization, is that you go out and you're like, oh my God, I need this person from Dropbox or Figma. Pick your. Your name brand. Right. You talk to these people like, yeah, I was, I was responsible for growing from, you know, 50 million AR to 300 million AR. And of course there are some absolute rock stars in these companies and if you hire them, you're very lucky and they can come in and they hopefully have enough like, mental plasticity to not just apply the same playbook because every company is very different and they may be worth the money. Right. But there's also a lot of people who are great, but whose ego is maybe a bit out of touch with what their actual impact was. Right. Like Would Dropbox have grown from 300 to $800 million of AR if you weren't there?
- [26:25]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [26:26]
Victor Riparbelli
The answer to that is that for 90% of the people who worked in growth and marketing there, the answer is probably yes. And that doesn't mean that you're not great, but it means that some people, if they've been on this sort of rapid journey sometimes, I think, have a kind of an incongruence in terms of, like, yeah, what. What they should. What they can bring to the table. And that could be very toxic. Right. Because you, as a founder, if you're young, you'll come in and be like, I should listen to this person who's seen it before. They know what truly great looks like. And then you end up applying a lot of playbooks that maybe worked at that point in time for that company, but doesn't work for your own company. Right. So the, the allure of, like, hiring people with great CVs, that can just solve the problem for you because they've seen it before, is generally a trap when you get to some level of scale in the business, like the scale right now, it applies much more, but it is a mistake. I see a lot of people do early on, right, which is like, you hire people with fancy CVs because they have fancy CVs and that could be, that could be dangerous. So our strategy was always like, hire people with, you know, raw ambition, raw talent, raw intelligence. Especially when you're building a company like ours where there is no playbook. Right. We run the first, like, AI native companies to emerge. We had to figure out, like, how to grow. We had to learn that for the first couple of years, the best way to attract enterprise clients was TikTok. There's no growth marketer from the previous generation, SAS companies, who would have told us that. Right. And that only worked because our technology was an enterprise technology. But it also had a huge wow factor. It was jaw dropping. Right. So you could drive that, like, viral interest. And it's like all these lessons you have to learn for the first time, especially if you're doing something that's sort of like highly innovative.
- [28:05]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [28:05]
Victor Riparbelli
And then of course, as you, as you progress through. Right. I think, you know, now we hire a lot of people that are great and are much more senior and have, you know, seen stuff and, you know, we can afford them, we compete more with, like, the big tech companies. So the profile of people you hire throughout the journey of the company. Right. Does change over time, but I think
- [28:22]
Jimmy Carr
the point about how changes and particularly with an AI world as well. Like, how quickly it is. Because we're often looking at, like, people that we might be able to recruit more, whatever. And we speak to plenty of people who've worked at Diary of a CEO and whatever. But it's like, you know, what got Stephen Bartlett From 100,000 subscribers to half a million was three years ago. Now is going to look quite different actually. Like, plus the content's different. Like, there's actually, like, so many variables. But it can be very easy to kind of cling on to that, like, as a founder and be like. Because actually most of the time you're making decisions. You know, I think when it comes to hiring, like, quite often on instinct.
- [28:57]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
- [28:57]
Jimmy Carr
Raw intelligence, raw adaptability and so on.
- [29:00]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah. But I think it's also just because it's. It's really fucking hard to be a founder. Right. Like, you have a lot of problems on your plate all the time. You're always hoping that you can get someone in who can just fix it for you. Yeah. And you can sometimes get people who can fix it for you, which is great. But it's. It's unfortunately not as easy as just for you hiring someone who's been on a podcast that was growing really quickly.
- [29:24]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [29:24]
Victor Riparbelli
Like, that's not a guarantee that that person understood the lessons and that it's the same lessons that still apply and so on and so forth. But I think it's. It's probably. It's a very human thing. Right. Just you look at someone like, okay, this happened over here. This person will probably know how to do it. And sometimes it does apply. But I think especially with things like growth marketing and, well, actually in everything. Right. Product growth, marketing, whatever. Just the playbooks change. If. If you want to be a top 1% company, you have to pave the way, Right?
- [29:52]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [29:52]
Victor Riparbelli
By the time it's common sense to do specific growth tactic, everyone is doing it. Right. And all these, like, growth tactics, they have such a quick, like, decay. So you want to be the ones who discover them before people start writing blog posts about them.
- [30:07]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [30:08]
Victor Riparbelli
I'm talking about on podcasts.
- [30:10]
Sunny (Producer)
Are you a fan of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future? Hi, I'm Sunny, one of the producers behind the show. And we don't just make this podcast. We produce some of the best business content out there, working with global brands and founders. Over the past year, we've flown around the world and demand keeps growing. And with four prime ministers trusting us with their appearances on this show, you're in safe Hands. So if you're already in the market for a podcast or standout business content, why not start with us? Drop me a line at SunnyOxlightIO, try our podcast calculator, or book a meeting at Boxlight IO. That's Boxlight IO. Now back to Jimmy and let's talk
- [30:50]
Jimmy Carr
a bit about like the sort of cultural differences. Because you spend a bit of time at Stanford and so on, and uk, Denmark, Europe as well. Because you are very like, you believe that you can build a world leading top 1% AI company from Europe, right?
- [31:05]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, well, I think it's, I think it, it definitely there's pros and cons, right? I think the cons I think is very well known, but I think there are also some, some pros.
- [31:14]
Jimmy Carr
So what are the pros then?
- [31:15]
Victor Riparbelli
I think the, the, the most important pros actually on talent, which a lot of people don't expect me to say. But what people forget is that if you're in the Bay Area, yes, there's a lot of amazing people who are very good at what they do, but there's also a lot of amazing companies with a lot of money who are also trying to hire people at the same scale that you are. Right. So what's happening in the Valley is very high concentration of great people. But if you look at the average tenure in the Bay Area versus in Europe, for example, it's much shorter. Right. Because there's always like the company next door is growing faster. It just hired like an even cooler AI researcher than you have. This is sort of constant, you know, people switching jobs and going to building their own kind of personal stock portfolio and so on. And there's a lot of positive things about that as well. But it is a lot harder to compete on talent if you're in the Bay Area because there's just so many options, right?
- [32:06]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [32:06]
Victor Riparbelli
In Europe we don't have like that many great companies. And I think especially if you're like a top 5% or top 1% company in Europe, you have something that's pretty unique. Right. And there's a lot of great talent in Europe. I don't buy this idea that developers in the Bay Area is like three times as good as they are in Europe. I think that's absolutely bs. People in Europe in general, I think are more loyal, which has a good side to it and a bad side to it. The other good side to it, as an employer, most people care about, of course, a good salary. They care about a job that they like with colleagues that they like in The US A lot of people think of it more as like building their own personal stock portfolio. In Europe, people don't care so much about that. And that maybe means that there's some edge of ambition that's like taking off or taken off. But I think as an employer, I think there's so many great people in Europe and if you are top 5%, 1% company, it's much easier to hoover up that talent and build a really strong company. Whereas in the Bay Area, again, you're just competing much more with more people. Where it does get harder on talent is in more senior roles. Because Europe don't have that many big tech companies. We've seen hundreds of millions of architects. Hyper growth, you know, tier one products. It becomes more difficult because, I mean, we have an office in New York as well, right. So we have a big team there. But you generally try and have to find those people in the US and either move them to Europe or maybe to New York, which is, which is obviously harder. Right. You already have like a strong filter and you need to find people that are willing to relocate most of the time.
- [33:39]
Jimmy Carr
How did you find your time at Stanford? Because I did a couple of months there on an exact course as well and yeah, found it like it was very useful.
- [33:46]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, I was there for like one semester basically on my bachelor's and I think I. Prior to that I was, I was living in Copenhagen in Denmark and I was working in the Danish kind of startup ecosystem. I was loving it. I knew I wanted to build a company and I was like, I want to go to Stanford, to Silicon Valley and see what it's. It's all about, right? And I think I left with two impressions. The first one, absolutely amazing. The people you met there, the level of conversations that were had are just completely different, right? You're at a party and someone is talking about how they're gonna like cure cancer, right? Another person's talking about this. Their new company they started just raised $5 million. But it's like the level of ambition and the celebration of ambition and drive just so different than Denmark, which is a very great country, but the complete opposite. A lot of like tall poppy syndrome in Denmark, right? And I think that was just amazing, you know, feeling that energy, the ambition and the fact that everyone like wanted other people to succeed as well. That was absolutely magical and was definitely transformative for me. I think it helped me think bigger. Also in Denmark, when I was working in startups, I was, I did a lot of interesting Projects, but it was like building a bookkeeping system, Danish companies, right, or doing some other like business process tooling thing. And a lot of that I think were interesting. But what I definitely learned at Stanford was I love these like weird fringe ideas, sci fi stuff. And you know, if you weren't in Denmark, if you were over there, that was like, no one looked weird at you if you said, I want to build like an AI video company, right? At a time where that seemed crazy. So I absolutely loved that. And it was very transformative period in my life for sure. The other part of it, which I thought was kind of interesting was I think I came over there and obviously being very immersed from a distance in the whole community and the content and the people and so on. You come to Silicon Valley, right, and you expect something that looks like a Silicon Valley, right, With like lots of cool tech and flying cars and whatever. And Palo Alto is like, if you don't know that you're in Silicon Valley, you'd be like, I'm in this like random small American city with like a bunch of restaurants and a few shops and that's it, right? It's pretty rudimentary. It's a very, I mean Stanford is a beautiful place, but the area around it, I was just remember just like being completely shocked that like is this Silicon Valley. But it is. And I mean it's part of the culture. The appeal, right, that it's like very,
- [36:04]
Jimmy Carr
I guess there's nothing to distract.
- [36:05]
Victor Riparbelli
There's definitely nothing to distract you, right? There's like one bar in town or something.
- [36:08]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, yeah. And, and what's great about London specifically as well, right? Let's sort of like big London up a bit like, because it sometimes gets a bit of shade phone at the moment by lots of places. What do you think is great about London and growing AI Unicorn company?
- [36:24]
Victor Riparbelli
I mean, I think if you're in Europe, I think it's the only, like real place to build a big global company. I think it has, it's, it's. I think it is like, you know, by far the best city in the uk, in the, in Europe in terms of being a melting pot and a magnet for ambitious, driven people. Right. I think you, I mean you see that everywhere. People come to London from all over. Some come here just like work in banking in four years. But even those people also decided to leave their home country. They, you know, they made it through the application process and they got here and they stayed for four years. We have so many people who come here because they have A dream or an ambition in the same way that you see in like New York or San Francisco, other like big metropolitan cities. I think outside of just obviously, you know, meeting the people, which could be your co founder, it could be your colleagues, could be your employees. I think it also gives an energy to the city that's very different from most other European cities. On top of that, of course, you have the capital markets here, which I think is much better. I think today it probably matters a bit less. But back in 2017, I'd say VC wasn't as global as it is today. And then I think culturally it's the closest we have to the us. Easy to travel to the US and so I think London is, I think it is the best city.
- [37:43]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, London, New York is the world's international most commonly common flight, isn't it?
- [37:48]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, exactly. So I, I think is there a challenge in the uk for sure, it's a challenge in London, absolutely. But I even think from things like, I mean, tax, wealth perspective.
- [37:59]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [38:00]
Victor Riparbelli
I mean I'm from Denmark. Right. So for me the UK is still like a pretty good place to reside and let's hope the, the government doesn't,
- [38:08]
Jimmy Carr
you know, bring in the exit tax.
- [38:10]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, exactly.
- [38:10]
Jimmy Carr
I don't think they're gonna do that after the problems, of course, last time. I want to ask a bit about Denmark. So obviously Denmark is in the kind of like geopolitical news more than ever at the moment with Greenland, etc. Like what, what's the kind of relationship like when you're at school, like how much you taught about Greenland? Like just what is the kind of
- [38:29]
Victor Riparbelli
relationship like, I mean you learn about Greenland. Right. And the history of the two countries, which is, I think in it has been kind of like challenging throughout the years. Obviously it is, I mean Greenland is like a huge, it's a huge country, but it has a very small population and there is this like sister, brother kind of relationship. Right. But I think for, I think for most Danish people, I think don't think Greenland is like now obviously it's on everyone's mind because of everything that's going on, but I wouldn't say it's been. It's a, like a, it's not something that you, you don't sort of go
- [39:14]
Jimmy Carr
down a trip there aged 11, sort of funded by the government or whatever.
- [39:17]
Victor Riparbelli
No, no, not really. So. But it's very, it's very interesting that Denmark, being a very small country in the world with Greenland as a population size now is at the center of like maybe one of the biggest duplical conflicts in NATO we've seen in a while.
- [39:33]
Jimmy Carr
But Denmark as well, just generally is often held up as a, as an example, I mean, in public policy. When I was in government as well, and I know you spent a bit of time in government as well, but it's like, you know, the Nordic countries were often sort of held up as like, had done very well on child care or done very well on this. And, you know, why do you think that is in particular? Is it because they're quite sort of small nations, so things. But, but also of a scale that things can be experimented with?
- [39:57]
Victor Riparbelli
I mean, look, I think Scandinavian countries and I think Denmark is an amazing country. And I usually say, I think for the average citizen, it's probably the best place in the world you can live.
- [40:05]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [40:07]
Victor Riparbelli
Because of all those things. Right. I think some of the things that I don't think works very well is, is again those things around Tall Poppy syndrome, you know, celebrating drive and ambition. There's this very kind of strange stat, which is like amount of unicorn founders per capita. And if I remember correctly, Denmark is actually one of the first countries on the list. The issue is that no one does it in Denmark. There's lots of great big tech companies that are founded by Danish people. I know most of them. And no one does it in Denmark. That's a problem because in Denmark we haven't produced any. I think maybe one now, but we haven't produced a company with more than 1,000 employees in more than 15 years. So we're living off old industries and we have a lot of great companies. Lego, Bestseller, Novo Nordisk, etc. So I think, I think they're amazing countries. I think there's so much that we should learn from those in the rest of the world. I do think the but though is that Denmark is 5 million people is an extremely homogenous population. Right. There's basically very little religion, there's very little immigration, and that just makes it a lot easier to build these kind of societies. It's very hard to just take that model of society and then apply it to like the US or to, to the UK or like anywhere else. But I think from a values perspective, and I think in terms of how the societies work, they're amazing places and I'm very proud to be from Denmark.
- [41:24]
Jimmy Carr
How many people do you think you will get to in terms like what's the ambition on that side? So let me sort of give a bit of context to that. Your stat there about denmark only creating one company, over a thousand people in the last 50 years. I mean it's really interesting because if you look at the companies in the United Kingdom, the biggest over the last 10, 15 years that have been created, basically looking at Octopus Energy and very few others, have created over 10,000 people. And it's one of my worries for jobs of the future, right, is that actually, you know, we're not going to see those big companies being created anymore. And you know, look at you guys, you know, reaching 4 billion valuation with 600 people. Pretty incredible actually. If you look at, in the context of history, like what size do you think you might grow to if, if you achieved everything that you wanted to do and listed, what would.
- [42:15]
Victor Riparbelli
I mean that's very hard to say, right. I think, I think there is of course like one force, right, which is that with AI, people can do more with less. So there's a lot of people who, there's, you know, the people talking about like the one person billion dollar startup or yeah, like a 10 person, you know, $10 billion startup, whatever. And directly I think there's a lot of things that's true about that. Definitely you can do more with less, but I think, I tend to think this idea that AI is just going to replace everyone with agents and that there's not going to be a lot of jobs left, it's not going to pan out that way. Jobs will definitely change. It'll probably change very quickly. But I think in 10 years time, if you look at a company with 500 employees who are all extremely good at using agents and automations and so on and so forth, I think they can still do more than a 10 person company who's also really good at using agents and so on. I think humans still will be the most important part of companies in the future, but you can definitely do more with less, right? So probably what we will see is just that way more software will be created, software will get much more personalized and there'll be a whole bunch of new roles and definitions that will come. But if you look at all the big AI companies, we're all espousing this idea that know AI can, can take up, you know, roles. They're all the company in the world that are hiring the most, right? So I think that, yeah, and I
- [43:37]
Jimmy Carr
just don't see how one person, because I see that argument about the one person creating a billion dollar startup, but I, I don't see how it actually works like in terms of, you know, if somebody does that, there'll just be competitors that Move into that space. Right. We just talk about, you know, growth, hacking and whatever. Right, exactly.
- [43:57]
Victor Riparbelli
I mean, I think, I don't know, maybe can it happen at some point? Maybe it can. I mean we are seeing very small teams do a lot, but I think we're also very early in the AI economy. I think no one knows how this stuff's going to play out over the long term. And I think what a lot of companies, including my own, were at the first mover advantage of figuring out like these new products early on. There's many chapters to be written still around like how do you build truly defensible businesses, what are the modes in AI? And often those turn out to be less about the tech and more about the distribution, for example. Right. The customer base that you manage to drive. The fact that if you look at true enterprise software that is so driven by humans, which I think a lot of tech people often underestimate, but this is like executives and salespeople and selling things, which is so far removed from evaluating the actual piece of tech. And it's much more about the relationships between those companies. Right. That that ends up like truly mattering. And of course that's all that stuff's going to change. But yeah, I think I'm also skeptical that we're just going to see a bunch of like, you know, one person billion dollar startups emerge. I think we'll see that one person can definitely create a much bigger business today and in five years than they could 10 years ago. That I have no doubt about completely. But I still think we'll see very big companies. I think a lot of those companies will be. The human element will still be very important.
- [45:22]
Jimmy Carr
But it did used to be such a thing I always think of, particularly in the startup world was how much have you raised and who have you raised from. But also how many people do you employ? It was a real kind of status marker to be able to say those two things. And that in the last couple of years has changed big time. Right. Much more about revenue per employee now, etc. Right.
- [45:43]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, no, I agree for sure. It's. It's definitely become like a. And for good reason. Right. Like obviously if you, if you're doing 500 million AR with 100 people, that's, that's very impressive. Right?
- [45:55]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [45:56]
Victor Riparbelli
But I just think as with anything in life, there's not like a single answer to that. For some companies maybe that's amazing. I think if you're building a company that sales led, which we are enterprise sales is, is most of our revenue from where we are right now in 2026. Still very hard to close multimillion dollar contracts and asking people to put down a credit card or just like self service their way to that. Right. And that will probably also change over time. But I still think there'll probably still be humans signing off on like million dollar budgets even in three or four or five years time.
- [46:29]
Jimmy Carr
But let's talk about some of the other jobs that you might disrupt.
- [46:32]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah.
- [46:33]
Jimmy Carr
That being podcasters and YouTubers.
- [46:35]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
- [46:37]
Jimmy Carr
It's a big thing, right? Like in terms of this, because I was like, it wouldn't be that hard. Both you and I have created plenty of content, whatever put into chat GPT generate a conversation between two of us. You could have been here for five minutes. Yeah. We could have done it, then dubbed it and then kind of created a sort of hour long thing. Right. Like that is really not that far away.
- [46:57]
Victor Riparbelli
Well, I think, I think there's so many different types of content and I think that the end consumer will evaluate different types of content in different ways. Right. So if you're making a video about how to change your password on your ChatGPT account, for example, no one is going to care that that's an AI voiceover or an AI avatar, whatever that's showing you how to do that. It's a very like practical, utilitarian thing. Right. On the other hand, If you get a birthday message from a friend or your boss, you'll probably care. Or you have to deliver a really difficult message as a CEO to your company and you send that as your AI avatar doing that, that'll probably be received pretty negatively. They probably want to have a real person in front of it. I think every type of content will just be evaluated differently. And I think things like podcasts, for example, like if our conversation was just generated by the two GPTs of us having a conversation and then we rendered it out, I mean, we don't know of course what that would look like. Maybe that would be like a very interesting conversation. But I think people want like the real conversation between us. Right. And I think we will care a lot about how content is made in real video or not real video, Even as AI could begin to replace a lot of the actual kind of like production process.
- [48:24]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, because that's it.
- [48:24]
Victor Riparbelli
Right?
- [48:25]
Jimmy Carr
Because I see like, and it's interesting, right? Because the way that we've built out a sustainable business model for this partly is spinning out a production company that helps entrepreneurship, companies, ecosystem make really interesting video and podcasts. But I can totally see that that might only be a viable business model for three or four years with everything that you guys are, are doing. Right. Making it so much more kind of accessible to people. But then there still needs to be like a slight human understanding. It's like when people say, oh, well, we, we're not going to, we're not going to need coders anymore. It's like, well, I can't code and the AI is not going to be able to do it for me or unless I put in decent instructions. Right. Like, you're going to have to have lots of kind of like baseline knowledge in lots of areas, I think is the way it's kind of like going forward.
- [49:10]
Victor Riparbelli
I also just think that in the attention economy. Right. Which is what, what you're a part of. Right. It's. The problem is not that there's not enough content out there. There's so much content even pre AI. Right? Yeah, yeah. The, the issue with like the way that you win in podcasting, for example, is by making a really, truly great product. Right. And that is, you know, the last 10% and 5%. Like, like, yeah, yeah. Actually being a top 1% podcast is really, really hard. That's not because it's difficult to set up cameras. Right. It's because it's really hard to get the right guests in to have a good conversation to keep people entertained. And so I think what you are seeing, right, is that the creation will just a lot of the slop content, like badly produced content today even. No AI. Right. Well, just, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't funnel to the top and no one wants to listen to it. And so I think with this stuff, I'm pretty sure if we did this podcast as being like an AI generated thing, not a lot of people would. Would listen to it. And maybe there's a world in which you cannot tell the difference and it's truly just is as good. And maybe I'll have to eat my words, but I still think that the way that you, you know, decide to hold this conversation, the questions that you ask me is that, I mean, you're not just asking me 10 questions that, yeah, a GPT could have written. Right. You've done a lot of research and you're. I'm presuming changing your questions depending on my answers.
- [50:24]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [50:25]
Victor Riparbelli
I think though, the skill in that is still going to be really, really important. Right. That even if there is a world in which we maybe don't have to sit here and record it, but we can generate That I still think the conversation we'd have would still have to be guided and directed by you.
- [50:40]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, I think it's interesting and I think it will raise the bar, essentially.
- [50:43]
Victor Riparbelli
Right, because it will raise the bar.
- [50:44]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah. Right. It makes a research, like I'm able to research you and basically like everything you've ever said, like much kind of like quicker than a couple of years ago and so on. And I think it will sort of. And I often think about you guys as an example of video production. It's going to be a bit like the Airbnb and Uber thing, right. Of where they came into the marketplace, they disrupted it, but actually private hire vehicles rose and journeys taken across the board and the amount of holidays, you know, hotels are up as well as Airbnb.
- [51:14]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
- [51:14]
Jimmy Carr
Like, and I think that's essentially what you're going to end up doing for video production a lot for sure.
- [51:20]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
- [51:20]
Jimmy Carr
It's.
- [51:21]
Victor Riparbelli
It's a market expansion.
- [51:22]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [51:23]
Victor Riparbelli
Exercise as much as it. Even today, I'd say, you know, there's definitely like content people would have otherwise filmed with a camera that they now make in Synthesia, but the majority of the content that people make with Synthesia would just not have been a video before because it would have been too, too, too cumbersome. Right.
- [51:39]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [51:39]
Victor Riparbelli
So I think the production process will change a lot, obviously. But I think, I mean, if you look at text, right, There is a time in which if you wanted to create something and distribute something in text, right, that was a very expensive and very time consuming process because you need to get a printing press. Now we have a bunch of like newspapers or whatever and you have to distribute it to people all around the world. And that takes a lot of time and effort. Then when computers arrived and you know, we started to create websites and things like that also everyone could create anything. And so we got flooded by like a gazillion times more content, but we also became much more critical of what we actually want to spend our time on. Right. Yeah. So I think the. I think the quality bar will continue to go up. And I think, for example, in a conversation like this, what AI maybe we can do in the future is like, as we're talking about things, it'll pull in like, you know, relevant images, like there'll be a map of Greenland or some fact about Greenland where we're. When we're discussing that, like there'll be a lot of that stuff which can kind of augment and make easier, but it'll probably still be doing the job of like a video editor, a really good video editor. And you probably still want someone who understands the language of video. Right. If you just take a random person off to someone street, I'm still skeptical that they'll be able to create like top 1% content even within the foreseeable future. But not all kind of needs to be top 1%. If you get a lot of content we make for our customers. Yeah, it doesn't need to be, you know, amazingly well produced tier one Spielberg level videos. Right? That's, that's a big part of the reason that it works really well. Because for some content it's okay that it's not the best in the world as long as it serves the purpose right.
- [53:09]
Jimmy Carr
Exactly. That context piece is so important. I mean I. When we're looking at hiring people, right, like they need to be interested in economics, but politics, entrepreneurship, but they also need to be able to know how to, how to video stuff and edit. Like it's actually really quite rare skill set for like those five things and lots of others things as well. So it's particularly interesting. What, well, what are the kind of like status markers when you get to like a series E fundraise? Like what is it now? Like what keeps you going? What keeps you driven? Like what's the motivation? Like it's done so well in the last 10 years. What keeps you driven?
- [53:50]
Victor Riparbelli
I mean, I think what at least for me, and I would guess for most founders, is that you still find
- [53:59]
Jimmy Carr
most founders don't get to a series either.
- [54:01]
Victor Riparbelli
Right? That's true. But I think interest in what you're doing and still feeling intellectually challenged, right. I think ultimately I think what I am good at is I'm very curious and I'm very creative and as long as I get to use those things in my daily job, then you know, I think I'm still. That's what gives me ambition and drive and motivation. And I think for us there's just still so much left to do. We talked a bit earlier about those two big ideas, right? Like the first one being just video as we know it, but made with AI as a big opportunity. The second part of it has always been a thing we found the company that I found the most intellectually interesting, which is like, what does AI native video actually look like? There's so many questions to answer within that, right? There's like, what do people actually want? How do you actually build it? What does the UX look like? Does the button need to be blue or red? There's so many Questions that's like scaffolded under that question. And that for me is something that is deeply interesting. And there's still a lot of open ended uncertainty on how you actually build this. I'm very lucky that I have a great executive team around me that can help me with a lot of the other parts of the business, which is not where I think I'm the best. And it's also not the things that give me the most motivation. Right. But for example, my co founder Stefan, you know, we always joked about like, I wake up in the morning excited to ship a new feature or think about a new part of the product. And Stefan wakes up in the morning excited to sign a new 100k contract with a customer. Right. That that gives him drive and energy. And so in that way we're all like different. I think that that's what constitutes a good team.
- [55:32]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, yeah. What, what is, what do you find intellectually interesting about it? And I suppose it's only become more interesting in the last couple of years actually. Like it's probably increasing in because more people are talking about it, you know, James Marriott in the Times often talking about, you know, heading into a post literate society, etc. Like, what are some of those big intellectual questions that you're posing?
- [55:58]
Victor Riparbelli
I think for me, I'm generally outside of work as well, very interested in culture, trends, the side guys, politics, economics. I have a lot of interest. Right. And I think what's fun about doing this is that it kind of combines all of those into one thing.
- [56:15]
Jimmy Carr
Right.
- [56:16]
Victor Riparbelli
Like there's questions around. When you think about what does ANA2 video look like, it's not just like what's technically possible, like what do people want, do people actually want to watch AI videos? Which kind of AI videos do they want to watch? Right. There's so many questions and I think just that level of like finding a solution to a problem drives me. You know, when I was a kid, played lots of computer games and I think there you also, you train that muscle of like you have a problem, you're trying to solve it, and when you solve it, you get a reward for it, which is fun. Right. I think the other part of it that has always driven me is there's a level of less so now, but especially in early days, there's definitely a level of like controversy around the technology we're building. Right. Because most people saw this AI video thing and they were like deepfakes, this is going to be the end of the world.
- [57:00]
Jimmy Carr
And there are lots of, you Spoke so much about that, though, I didn't
- [57:03]
Victor Riparbelli
want to head down for the first, like seven years. It's like basically every interview, 10 interviews on that. And I mean, it made sense and I understood why. And there are lots of challenges. Technology is going to be misused and so on and so forth. I've spoken at length about that. But what I always liked about it was that I always had this thing of like, people say this about every new technology, right. There's always a moral panic about it. And as you know, we progress through time. Some of those things turn out to be true. But, and that's my opinion, of course, most technologies end up being, you know, by far a force for good. Right. Like, yes, cars are used by bad people to do bad things, but they're also mainly used for good things. And so I always had that feeling. I'm like, I'm going to prove to the world that this is true. And it gives me energy, actually, that a lot of people, I think it's always give me energy. But a lot of people kind of disagree with me. But there's a few very smart people that I truly admire that agree with me. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's a different type of thing here, but it's like that it has a bit of an element of the same thing of like, well, why do people want to interact with these things? How are they going to interact with it? Right. And so there's a level of like, I think proving myself right that I can figure out. I can see around corners and that I can't be the one who can find the solution to what it's going to look like. That definitely gives me energy. That gives me much more energy than kind of maintaining status quo or, you know, just. I don't think I ever would be a great founder of going back to like the first stage of my career, like a bookkeeping company where like, I think bookkeeping is broken. I can build a product which I can make bookkeeping 20% more efficient and I can figure out how to be the best in the world at executing a go to market function. They can capture the market and sell it to someone. There's a lot of intellectual challenges in that and there's a lot of also creative questions in that. But compared to, I think what we set out to do in the early days and what we're still doing, it's a very different scale and kind of level of, of challenge and uncertainty to some extent.
- [59:03]
Jimmy Carr
What do you. What do you.
- [59:05]
Victor Riparbelli
And I think maybe the Last thing on this is like just, I love science fiction and have since I was a kid. I was eating up science fiction books. And I think what this company gives me and still gives me is the sense that I'm actually, I get to build science fiction, you know, and it's weird because as humans, we get very used to technologies very quickly. Like the fact we have ChatGPT in our pockets, which can literally answer any question you can think of in less than five seconds is like mind blowing. Right. But I was used to that. But I feel very, very grateful that I get to have a front row seat to building technologies that I mean, we would all think is like completely totally sci fi 10 years ago, right?
- [59:46]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah. Until it's it. What do you consume? Be it books, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, like, what do you find that like peaks your intellectual curiosity?
- [59:58]
Victor Riparbelli
So for books, I still read a lot, but I think for books I've gone away from reading. I feel like I rarely read business books. I feel like Once you've read 50 business books, you've kind of read them all. It's just like the same. There is like really 15 big ideas or something like that. 15 big ideas in business. Right. And then people keep taking the same idea, renaming it, coming with like 20 different examples. And I feel like most business people and great entrepreneurs I know kind of come to that realization.
- [60:24]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [60:25]
Victor Riparbelli
At some point in time that, you know, they're not like that interesting anymore. And the kind of books I like actually like reading older books that are less about like, you know, trends that are happening right now or AI or something like that. Because those books, I think, often end up being out of date and I think I get better information online. What I do find very interesting is actually reading books that are 10, 20, 30 years old, even if it's books about technology or business. Because it's very interesting to see what people were thinking back then and how the world actually panned out.
- [60:56]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [60:57]
Victor Riparbelli
Then there's things like philosophy and I think science. Right. Ideas that will stand the test of time because it's science or it's philosophical ideas that's general enough that they're not, you know, trend based. So I like that kind, those kind of books. I think that's really interesting in terms of my more kind of keeping up to date what's happening. I think obviously, actually I love TikTok. I think a great, a well created TikTok feed.
- [61:23]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [61:24]
Victor Riparbelli
Is incredibly good. I think the, the bandwidth of information you can get from short form videos is crazy. Yeah, There is. Used to be this article many years ago when I was kind of growing up in tech, which is that a book should have been a blog article. Right. I think by now it's like a book could have been a blog article, which could have been a YouTube video, which could have been a TikTok video.
- [61:45]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [61:45]
Victor Riparbelli
And I think it's truly incredible. Speaking of that idea of new formats, how good people are at actually compressing a lot of information in very short videos.
- [61:52]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [61:54]
Victor Riparbelli
Then of course, I'm on, I'm on, I'm on X. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And then I also just love surfing the web. I have since I was very young, you know, reading things on Wikipedia, going deep on Reddit, finding fringe ideas. As I said, music is my big passion. Spent a lot of time, like finding music, discovering new music. I really just think, like being on the Internet is like, it's amazing, right? It's a dangerous rabbit hole as well.
- [62:20]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:21]
Victor Riparbelli
But I'm truly a believer in. There's a lot of like, in business, for example, of course, like learning the lessons of business, reading those business books. Great. But I actually think what makes truly great people truly great is often that you connect a lot of like random information that individually probably wouldn't have been, in theory, very interesting. Right. Like when I look at, for example, building the product I built today, I think a lot of the reason that I ended up being, you know, I think the right person to build a tool for people to make AI videos, because throughout my entire childhood I've dabbled in content creation. I created like, I did 3D rendering for a couple of years and I'm not very good at it.
- [63:01]
Jimmy Carr
Right.
- [63:01]
Victor Riparbelli
But I was like making maps for Counter Strike back in the day when I was playing that. I make music in my spare time. So I know how does a synthesizer work? Right. How does sampling work? And like, is that relevant for the stuff that we ended up doing directly? No, but it teaches you all these patterns in terms of like ux, in terms of how do people thought about, well, how do we emulate instruments? Right. I'm trying to emulate a camera. I think there's so many of like these random things that you learn and do that ends up being very good. And that's why I think most great entrepreneurs generally are very curious people. I can get sucked into like some topic and I'll be obsessed with it for a couple of weeks and I'll come out of it with again learning about some like, weird philosophy that probably has nothing to do with business. But at some point, there's like some point in my decision making where my brain probably pulls out something I learned about that and uses that. And so I think that if you really want to grow, like grow your intellectual kind of capacity, I think it's actually very important to learn a lot of random things because it all sets you apart. Right. If you're just reading the same newspapers, you listen to the same podcast, you follow the same X accounts, you have all the same information as everyone else, which means your decision making is going to probably converge to the mean. And the most successful people in life, right, are not the people who converge to the mean, it's the people who, who think independently. And so I think you want to actively think about putting information into your brain that's weird or odd outside of the.
- [64:27]
Jimmy Carr
And that's sometimes the point of AI as well, is that actually like what it does is take people to the mean quite often.
- [64:33]
Victor Riparbelli
Right.
- [64:33]
Jimmy Carr
So it's like trying to think about how to become an outlier and so on.
- [64:36]
Victor Riparbelli
Exactly. And I think that's a big danger of it. I think that's hitting the nail on the head there. Right. Even. Cause I use it a lot also for riffing on like business ideas today. Right. Like I'll go like, hey, can you give me an example of like some companies that had the same kind of challenges, now they solve it and it's amazing. But you also have to be very cognizant of the fact that it is a reversion to the meme. Right?
- [64:57]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [64:58]
Victor Riparbelli
And it can sound very convincing even if it maybe shouldn't sound as convincing as it sounds.
- [65:04]
Jimmy Carr
It was actually pretty crap today for the prep for 20 minutes questions review. I will send them to you afterwards because you'll probably find it quite into. But it wasn't actually that sort of good on it. I, I thought it was, it was too rudimentary. What do you think the future of YouTube will be? Bearing in mind this will go out on YouTube as well. Like it will be quite interesting for you to sort of like say. I mean, I know you've talked about tick tock and whatever, but. Yeah, what does the future of YouTube look like?
- [65:31]
Victor Riparbelli
It's a good question. I mean I definitely think that like video as we know it today is, I mean, gonna be around for long. I don't think it's going to be like replaced by AI video, but I do think we'll see these new formats pop up. Right. We've kind of seen much smaller iterations of this already. So one example I often pull out is Twitch. So yeah, you know, we figured out like how to broadcast video and audio on the Internet at a very low cost from the browser and you can do it from home. Super cool technology. And the question is then like, okay, what's people gonna do with it? And probably if you ask McKinsey consultants back then, they'll say people are gonna be starting TV stations. We're going to see so many news stations and like the most like obvious use of that. Yeah, yeah.
- [66:11]
Jimmy Carr
Replacing what was already.
- [66:12]
Victor Riparbelli
Exactly. And obviously for most new technologies, you know, it's rarely the most obvious thing that ends up taking off first. It, it, it usually is some sort of strange amalgation of something else. Right. And so what we saw here was that people were doing all sorts of like live tv. I saw live, live streaming things from home. But the one thing that took off right, was watching other people play computer games. It was completely non obvious. And they ended up selling Twitch for a billion dollars to Amazon. And of course today it's a massive business and streaming is a format now, right? Yeah. Of like, I'm just like sitting at my computer and I'm just doing random things and like playing a game, doing something else and just like chatting. No one would have predicted that back in the day. And I think AI is going to have a similar kind of thing that's going to happen where it's not going to be just these linear videos. It's probably going to be these videos you can talk to to. As I've kind of described a bit before, it's going to be interactive. Exactly. How it's going to pan out is hard to say. We're seeing early inklings. There was a company called. Oh, I forgot what it's called. Anyway, name escapes me, but someone built a platform where essentially you could just chat to LLMs, but with the goal of like entertainment. Right. So people would go in and it's like one of the things where if you said that to your mom and dad, they'd be like, who the hell would do that? Right. But it turns out that there's a lot of people. I think the average session length was like two hours or something of people sitting and chatting to like a fictional character. Some of it is like the virtual girlfriend boyfriend, which gets into like a little bit of a weird tone. But there's also others, like people generally you would chat a text with a friend, chatting with these things. Right. That is again, a new entertainment. It's not really a Game. It's not really a website either, but it's like a new thing, right?
- [67:58]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [67:58]
Victor Riparbelli
We're gonna see lots of these things that. That starts to pop up. There's a company called Born. It is this app where you basically are two people and it's a kind of a game. You're two people and then an LLM which is like up. This is like a kind of game thing. It's a penguin and then it's kind of like a Tamagotchi. Yeah, but the Tamagotchi is like talking through an LLM and you are two people who are taking care of the Tamagotchi together. Right. It's like a new game format which is enabled by AI. Like, you wouldn't be able to do this without LLMs.
- [68:27]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [68:28]
Victor Riparbelli
And it again is like an early experiment, but that's actually like that. That's working really well. It's an early experiment. Like what does these AI native formats look like? That's probably more like the gaming sector than in the video. But I think with video, we are going to see this stuff as well. I'm very curious what it's going to be. You know, I'm spending most of my time figuring out like what is the enterprise, the corporate version, the business version of these things too.
- [68:46]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah.
- [68:46]
Victor Riparbelli
But I think we will start to see these platforms that. That will look different. I think what's going to be interesting is like how much is it going to look like video and how much is going to look more like a computer game? I don't know. Right. But it's kind of like those two things is in some sense kind of like melting or merging together.
- [69:03]
Jimmy Carr
The mountain part of it is really interesting. What were your favorite couple of games growing up, what you play now?
- [69:10]
Victor Riparbelli
Roller coaster tycoons. But one of my favorite games, actually, I still download an emulator sometimes. I have a couple of games from my childhood, like Rollercoaster, Tycoon, Zelda, Ocarina of Time. Download these emulators, you can play them, which is great fun. I play a lot of World of Warcraft as well. Way too much for my parents liking. But actually another good example of. I was speaking about this in other podcasts as well. I ran like a really big guild, like a clan when I was like, I don't know, 12, 13 years old. Obviously we're playing a game and we're killing dragons virtually together. But I. It's kind of like running a company in some sense. Right. Like you have.
- [69:45]
Jimmy Carr
Yeah. Community building. Right, Community building.
- [69:48]
Victor Riparbelli
You have People like internal politics, you have to like kill the dragon, figure out like who gets the loot. How do you distribute it? Like a lot of those lessons, there's internal economy in World of Warcraft where you buy and sell things. And I was like, I made like real life money off trading items and characters inside these games. Right. So it's like one of those things where like in the moment obviously didn't think about, oh, this is going to be great for my business career later on. And my parents definitely didn't think this was going to be great for my business career later on. But it's probably a big part of like why I played a part in like how I ended up like growing up. Right. So those are some of my favorite games today. I don't really have that much time to gain, to be completely honest with you. So when I have free time, I prefer making music. Yeah, but how old are you? 34.
- [70:34]
Jimmy Carr
Final question. I know you do quite a bit of angel investing. Yeah. If you were to sort of like pass the mic to somebody that we should go and have a chat with who's doing something interesting, who should we, who should we get on next?
- [70:47]
Victor Riparbelli
I think the fixer guys, FY S E R AI guys, they're doing really well. I think just like I can hear
- [70:54]
Jimmy Carr
Sunny punching the air because he's using that so much at the moment.
- [70:59]
Victor Riparbelli
They're doing well. They're super hustlers. And I love the story of like they built this agency for virtual assistants, like real, virtual human virtual assistants for a long time, which I think kind of like didn't really work. But they learned so much about the workflow that they were the right ones to build the system for everyone's emails. Which is, which is really great, I think. Alan from Fuse. Yes, obviously also, you know, amazing entrepreneur, was a revolut for many years and I think is going to build a generational company in Europe.
- [71:28]
Jimmy Carr
He can also double up as one of those first employee interviews at Revolution.
- [71:33]
Victor Riparbelli
Exactly. He's a total legend. And then actually Fabian from comic called Bourne, which is the company that developed this, this game with the penguins. I mean they're ripping. And I think he is, he's going to be one of the pioneers of figuring out like what are these new media formats. Super creative guy. But comes from a background in gaming and apps and I think it. Yeah, I think, I mean as you can probably tell, I'm so curious what, in 10 years time, what's gaming going to look like? What's video going to look like, how we're going to learn things at work, how we're going to interact with customer service. Are we going to, like, all those things are going to change, like, very significantly. And I think that's, like, the. That's just so interesting. And so I love people who are exploring.
- [72:20]
Jimmy Carr
Shop your own podcast or YouTube series. I'm serious. Thanks for coming on. It's been brilliant.
- [72:25]
Victor Riparbelli
Well done on everything.
- [72:26]
Jimmy Carr
Can't wait to see where it all goes next.
- [72:28]
Victor Riparbelli
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. It was fun. Sam.