Gregor Van (3:59)

Yeah, that's fascinating. I guess I'd never thought about kind of ML and comedy coming into the same space, and especially back in 2018, that clearly is very early to any of this kind of thing. So super interesting. What is your role at Runway today?

Joel Quartler (4:14)

Yeah, at Runway, I lead the product team. So I have the very exciting and very fun job of getting to work, really across every other team we have at Runway and getting to work with even folks outside Runway, like our users, our customers, the folks that were taking feedback and were trying this stuff and giving us feedback all the way to the researchers, the engineers, the designers, working on building into the product, making sure then we're communicating effectively via sales and marketing teams and our community teams. And so Runway is maybe like a traditional startup squared in that we have all the traditional teams, then we have all these additional very exciting teams, like our creative team. And our research team that you're not going to find maybe as an early stage startup, unless you're at a place like Runway.

Gregor Van (4:51)

And I mean, you're sitting in LA today. And I believe the company is based in la, is that correct?

Joel Quartler (4:56)

Runway is actually a remote first company based in New York. So we have an office in New York and then we also have an office in San Francisco. And then we have sort of. The remote first just means that folks, even if you're in New York or San Francisco, there's no days in the office requirement. You're welcome to work from home whenever you want. But it's been, it's fun. Once or twice a year we all get together at our office for our film festival or for our off site and sort of get to meet everyone and work together in person for a week or two.

Gregor Van (5:20)

Got it. I guess I was curious on the LA connection, in case ultimately a lot of film production, et cetera, happens out that way and whether there was sort of a strategic help there.

Joel Quartler (5:31)

Yes, it's definitely been useful living, I think. And I think we have a couple other folks who are in la and it was just again, sort of a natural, like people who are really interested in the space were in LA and they were also interested in the ML side. And so they joined Runway.

Gregor Van (5:44)

Awesome. So let's dive into the product, as you called out, it is not an LLM, it is Gen AI. Thank you for the correction there. Let's hear about Runway. Like, what is Runway?

Joel Quartler (5:54)

Yeah, Runway is sort of a rare company in that it's like a full stack applied AI research company. And so we both invent and build these AI models. And then we also invent and build the tools on top of them that really unlock the new forms of creativity and streamline the entire creative process from concept to finished product for really pretty much every use case you can imagine. And so it's a really unique place because those are I think, two of the maybe juiciest or most interesting areas to work on right now in technology in the world is the research side of what's possible. And then there's okay, if it's possible, we first interact with it. And the nice having both of those sort of in house. Runway being full stack is you don't even have to work on them separately, but they're both there. They actually can inform each other. And so we get to bring learnings from our product directly back to the research team. And likewise, we can bring sort of research experiments directly into new product experiments in ways that we couldn't if those were separate companies.

Gregor Van (6:47)

So, I mean, if I'm a user, I'm just sort of trying to paint the picture for our listeners. If I was to jump into Runway, what's the first thing I'll be doing? And what do the outputs kind of look like to me as a user?

Joel Quartler (6:57)

Yeah, great question. Often the first thing people do, they jump into Runway and they jump into our Gen 3 alpha model, which is the latest version of video generation models. And then you can start with either a quick text sentence or an image of, let's say, a dog running through a field made of balloons. And it will generate a video of that. Or often we see people taking images that are actual photos they took and then adding fun VFX to that that you'd never. So a photo of my kitchen filling up with balloons, and it basically creates the effect without needing a traditional pipeline. That would take a long time to do.

Gregor Van (7:32)

Yeah. And I think from what I read, one of my positions as tools for human imagination, and I think a lot of critique on anything in the Genai space, that is, for example, music or art, effectively. I think a lot of people have opinions around, well, who's doing the imagination bit now? So how do you guys look at that in terms of, I guess, assisting imagination without removing the human's need to think about things?

Joel Quartler (8:03)

Yeah. I think one of the nicest things about Runway is that was effectively a solved problem from the start because the co founders all met at this art tech program at nyu and they were all in both the art and tech worlds already. And so there was never a question of, oh, some technologists have this model that can do interesting things. How do you involve artists? It was like, from day one, the DNA of the company was artists and technologists together. We really see that as we grew, we hired a lot of people both naturally, they might be working as engineers, but they're visual artists on the side or our direct creative team, where we have a very sizable in house creative team. And so there was never. One of the things that I was evaluating when I was considering joining Runway was, is there ever a chance that the artist and tech needs diverge? And it was clear that was never going to happen at Runway because founded by Artists for artists effectively. And it was going to be focused on building tools for humans, as opposed to building tools where the humans are not involved.

Gregor Van (8:56)

Got it. Okay. And let's, I guess, look at how the output actually happens. In a sense, we're just talking about speed versus quality here. I guess which is one of the biggest considerations. Again, when people are using any kind of Genai tool, sure, you can get things fast, but does it feel like something incredible? How do you guys balance that from a product perspective?

Joel Quartler (9:20)

Yeah, great question. I think that even goes back to the question of how does it enhance human creativity? And the speed is a big part of it because it dramatically increases how fast you're able to iterate on your ideas. And when you see something that's real, it's very different than imagining how it might look. And I can spark new ideas. And so that really accelerates things. But likewise, the quality has to be really good for that to actually be interesting to go through all ideas, you've got to actually see and have a reaction to, like, oh, that one, really. So that shot is really not what I'm looking for. I'm not going to go in that direction. And so we really focus on both. Both are really important to the creative process and the way that sort of humans create. And so we do a good job, I think, collecting a lot of feedback from customers to make sure we're balancing those needs effectively. But ultimately, we've seen over the past year, year and a half of our research that both just improved dramatically.

Gregor Van (10:07)

So Runway produces content. If I just look at Runway's website, for example, and look at all the examples, to me, I haven't seen anything quite like that. At the same time, again, people listening today might think, oh, well, I already used this other tool for Genai, whether it's image or video space. How would you, I guess, start to really be able to describe the differentiation? I mean, I'm aware there's sort of some features that are kind of put forward, things like multi motion brush and camera control. Could you maybe speak a bit to those and then. Yeah. Anything else in terms of how you sort of position this?

Joel Quartler (10:43)

Yeah, good question. I'm happy to talk about the features. I think I would say, broadly, the features that are different are almost just like an effect of the cause that Runway is the most focused on sort of like building tools again for creatives. And so we work really, really closely with creatives to understand what they need and where their workflows are going. For example. And so we have some controls, like you mentioned, multi motion brush camera controls, which give you very direct, like, camera level control. And I want to zoom in while I'm moving to the right, or I want these three marbles to fall off the table, but I want these two marbles to float into the sky and sort of like Those types of granular controls that you need to really create interesting and unique content. But more broadly, Runway had a very stable vision the entire time that I've been here, since the company was founded, which is ultimately, we think the technology is going to enable anyone to tell any story they could imagine at the highest quality imaginable. You're not going to need $100 million VFX budget to tell the sci fi story that you envision or to commercial that you envision. And so as a result, that drives a lot of our research and a lot of our product updates. And so you see the effect of that as a user. You end up with all these features that are going to be very unique because we know you need those controls. But it also, I think, drives our research vision and it drives how we approach building products, which is like, we release stuff as fast as it's ready so that we can get it to the hands of users and learn what's it useful for and how should we continue to improve it.

Gregor Van (12:07)

Yeah, I mean, just so taking a sort of side off the pure product for a second, you've talked a couple of times now about users and customers and feedback. So who at the moment would you say in what sort of spaces and especially commercially, obviously you don't need names. Exactly. But commercially, who is kind of using this kind of tool?

Joel Quartler (12:26)

Yeah, just me, actually. I think I'm the only user we have. I just sort of spend all day on different machines trying to pretend to. I'm kidding. I think that what's amazing about Runway is we have a lot of users pretty much from every domain, every industry, every vertical. That's really led us to double down on our philosophy of, like, let's release this so we can discover the use cases we wouldn't have even thought about because we only have experience in this industry or that industry, or we're only talking to that customer this week. And so we really see Runways tools are used for everyone from Fortune 500 Global 2000 type companies to freelancers, to marketers, to film studios telling new types of stories, streamlining their workflows. But even beyond the traditional, okay, longer form video content, we have folks using it for previz and storyboarding to just explore all sorts of different directions much, much faster than you would be able to with traditional tools. We have editors who generate videos in Runway that they then composite into existing footage so they can do, like, that last mile of tricky VFX that really puts the sparkle and polish on something that otherwise would have taken them A long time. We even have artists like Madonna, asap, Rocky, creating music videos or visuals for their show with Runway. And so it's really sort of expanded everywhere, I would say. There's no. Like, these people use Runway. It's like everybody uses Runway.

Gregor Van (13:37)

Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. I like the examples, especially the music examples, where you realize actually a lot of what is on, I guess, on the screens behind them when they perform are kind of these looping visuals, which probably used to take a long time to figure out. And now I imagine a lot more creativity, effectively, where you can just see a whole bunch of ideas and actually almost finished product and pick one. Is that a good example?

Joel Quartler (14:06)

Yeah, that's in a way, which we see people use Runway.

Gregor Van (14:08)

Yeah. Away from the music example, I think you just mentioned things like storyboarding. And obviously, that traditionally has been something that people have really had careers around. Do you see there being a movement where people that have already been in that industry are actually transferring over to becoming masters of Runway? Maybe not today. Today, but is that a path?

Joel Quartler (14:34)

Yeah. I think what we see is there are a lot of folks in the traditional entertainment and VFX world who were some of the earliest and most excited adopters of Runway, because for them, it sped up the stuff that maybe felt slower about their workflows, or they would be working with someone who'd give them a little feedback on something that they have to change, and it would take a long time to make that change and sort of creative flow. And so I do think that we see and what we're excited by is sort of the ability to speed up the fun parts, which is like, the ideas, the stories you want to tell, getting into the details, creating your own vision and less worried about. Okay, now I've got to manually create this effect somehow using a particle editor or whatever that might be.

Gregor Van (15:14)

Yeah, that makes sense. So back to the product. First, let's stick on the features for a second. Then we might just go a little bit more into some of this technical side. So with the product feature, I'm just curious, from a roadmap perspective, how do you guys even figure out where you. I mean, what I'm thinking is that to develop a feature for something like Runway must just take a long time. And so it can't be this kind of maybe super fast iteration. It has to kind of be maybe more considered. But, yeah, you tell me, how do you guys figure out?

Joel Quartler (15:46)

I hear you say that, and in my head, I'm like, man, I can't imagine my life would Be very different if it was slow. It is very fast, actually. It's fast and it's very exciting as we grow. And then we have a bunch of fast things that are then stacked on top of each other. So it feels like there's always something big going out that week, which is great. I think what we found over time is that vision that I mentioned having this. We're building tools for humans so that anything you can imagine you can create and the end goal is top level, production level, quality for every possible thing you'd want to create, has been really helpful in actually allowing us to be a little more flexible with our short term roadmap, which I think is necessary given the types of stuff that we work on and the ways in which things maybe sometimes speed up or maybe sometimes don't. And so we are able to be a lot more flexible in the short term in terms of like, okay, what's the next thing that seems most valuable based on what we just last released, that we should be getting in the hands of users next. And sometimes that changes because it allows you to learn a lot from like, oh, we released this for example, like motion brush. Like suddenly it was a huge hit. People really liked that control and then they wanted more of it. And so, okay, well now we've got to develop more in that direction versus just assuming you got that one thing. And now let's get back to the roadmap that we planned at the beginning of the year, nine months ago. So I think that we approach things with a much more flexible opportunity focus that lets us move so quickly as a result.

Gregor Van (17:06)

Yeah, I think my question had come from I guess a place where at the end of the day, I don't work on Gen AI at all. I'm just a consumer. So I think to me it feels like how can it move fast? But I think it's great to hear. That sounds like the only way it can work. So that's kind of fun and fascinating.

Gregor Van (17:22)

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Gregor Van (18:08)

Let's go a bit more into just the technical side. I appreciate you're on the product side, but can you explain anything towards say just the technical architecture behind the models or just the platform in general?

Joel Quartler (18:22)

Yeah, I mean, I think that our approach in general comes from some of that product and research perspective on being user first, where we want to build very robust, very stable and very usable products. And so as a result, our approach is to make sure that the stuff that we're releasing fits into all those categories, that we're not going to have some spike on a release and then go down or we're not going to have an issue where people can't understand how to use the product. And so that's sort of our. I think our technical approach is to make it very accessible, I guess kind.

Gregor Van (18:56)

Of hand in hand. Technical and product is data privacy and security. I'm from the security side, which sometimes comes into privacy. Sometimes mostly comes into privacy as well. But you know, this has obviously been quite a sort of hot topic in the maybe more LLM space. But Genai, in general, how are you handling that? I mean in terms of the inputs from users, like maybe could you just kind of run through like what kind of inputs can a user even give and then like how is that sort of then considered from a privacy perspective?

Joel Quartler (19:27)

Yeah, and almost to reverse that order, you know, I think we were very early at Runway and sort of scaling up the maturity of our security and data infrastructure teams and tooling with the knowledge that if things continued to progress at the pace we expected we would want that already in place. And so in terms of what users can provide changes and it often grows as these models become more powerful. So initially with our first text to video model, it just was text. You could just provide some text and then after that you could provide text and an image either or together. And then after that you provide text and image in different directions, other style modifications on top of that. And so I think that as the models improved there's more things that you can provide. And as a result we wanted to make sure we were well ahead of the curve and turned into standard best practices for security and privacy and even some additional systems that we added that we felt like we wanted to have.

Gregor Van (20:18)

Yeah, I mean, so I don't know if I was to. When I use Runway. Can I upload photos, videos? Is that kind of an input I can give?

Joel Quartler (20:26)

Yeah, exactly. We have a video to video model that you can use as well. So you can give us photos, videos, text. Those are sort of the, the main categories. We have audio models where you can give us either transcripts or audio to sync to as well.

Gregor Van (20:39)

I guess. Yeah. So if I was to upload, call it a video, do I have controls after that to kind of, I guess remove that video off the platform? Not maybe as part of content I've created, but do I have the ability to then remove that?

Joel Quartler (20:53)

Exactly. We've got all of the sort of enterprise grade deletion, data protection, security things you'd expect as a user if you wanted to. Although I personally hope you wouldn't, especially now that we had this conversation. If you wanted to go delete your Runway account, you could do that as well.

Gregor Van (21:06)

Nice. It's just one of these considerations now that almost just comes hand in hand if anyone is going in the direction of producing a commercially available LLM or in the Genai space. It is something that just comes with the territory now and very difficult thing to still navigate around. But it's great to hear you. You guys sound like you had that baked in from the start. So it makes a ton of sense if we also look at how the content, I guess, continues. So I think one thing I'm quite intrigued about, both from the technical side and the product side, is if I have already created something and then I'm wanting to go back a week later and I want now five more of these things in exactly the same style, but just with some tweaks. How challenging is that?

Joel Quartler (21:54)

Yeah, it used to be, I would say a year ago, more challenging. And then we heard from users who brought up the same, like yourself, and so we made it very easy. And now there's just, I think it's literally one button. You can go back to a video that you've created with Runway and jump right back into reusing all the settings, all the inputs to create more. And then you can tweak those settings, you can tweak those inputs, you can extend it in different directions through time to build what you wanted to, but maybe didn't finish doing a week ago.

Gregor Van (22:21)

Can you sort of describe the process behind if I type words, how do those words, I guess, match up with something visual in layman basic terms for me?

Joel Quartler (22:32)

Yeah, sort of the overall concepts, you can almost think of it in terms of a new type of camera that you control differently than a traditional Camera, where you've got to be only what you can physically point to in the real world that you would see. And here it's much more like these models have an understanding of the world. They've got the world inside of them. And you're using maybe your image or maybe your video, depending on the model you're using, to direct that. And then it's effectively returning to you what you've directed. And so the difference is just instead of the camera only capturing the part of the world that you can show it at the moment, it actually has knowledge about the world, and you're just the director using text or motion brush or different controls that we have in the product to pull that content out and create it.

Gregor Van (23:18)

I found one example really interesting. On the front page of Runway, there's something, and it mentions, like, an ox. And actually the image is a. I'm from Scotland, and it's what we call a Highland cow. And so I'm really curious, like, how that sort of matches up. If I type Highland cow, would I get Highland cow? Or, like, I'm just curious, like, how where that kind of. Not exactly where the content comes from, because I know that can be a topic that's difficult to discuss. But, yeah, if you kind of see where I'm going with how words match up to images or say images, but the content.

Joel Quartler (23:49)

Yeah, you're right that there are still cases. These are still extremely early models. We expect many generations of improvement beyond where you can give it a distinction between an ox and a hylid cow. And get that every single time. I think what we see is part of that comes from just the models are still developing and building their understanding of the world. Sometimes working at Runway especially, and you're like, oh, this thing, it's not working. Why isn't it working yet? It's helpful to just take a step back and be like, two years ago, if we'd shown this to anyone, you would have run down the street screaming, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. You guys have to see this. And so it's fun to see, and it's exciting to see how people raise their standards or expectations, because, you know, they should ultimately, the vision that we're driving towards. But I think that it's helpful to remember that we're very early and this is the worst it's ever going to be.

Gregor Van (24:37)

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I wasn't in any way sort of criticizing the ox versus Highland cow. I was just. It is amazing when I saw the example, I just. I kind of had that reaction you just talked about, like kind of run down the street. Very excited. Yeah. I was just kind of curious how this sort of. I don't even want to call it library because like library is such a terrible word. But just how that sort of matches up with how does this system know if I was to type like mug, like where does that come from? I guess is what.

Joel Quartler (25:04)

Yeah, that sort of just comes from the understanding of the world that it's built. And I would say, especially for unique things, we work with a lot of enterprise customers who have many concepts that they've literally just invented, or even creators individually who just created something that isn't going to be in any understanding of the world. And that's where we see some of the customization tools and pipelines that we built in Runway and we work with our enterprise customers on especially sort of being helpful because then let's say you're doing a Sci Fi piece and you've got this sort of cow thing, but you just created it, there's no way that it would be in the world. And so being able to customize the models further then based on your creative vision, I think is a big important part that we focus on as well.

Gregor Van (25:47)

Got it. Yeah, that's super cool. That's very fun. I maybe should have touched on this, I guess, with the data privacy and the security piece. Probably one other question people have in that area is I guess the topic of deepfakes and what are you able to do to prevent that happening? Generating content that could be deemed deepfake?

Joel Quartler (26:08)

Yeah, for sure. We have a whole bunch of measures in the product and a whole bunch of dedicated folks who work on this. We have a couple of new and improved visual and text moderation systems that have automatic oversights on filtering what we deem to be inappropriate or harmful content. We have C2PA authentication, if you're familiar with that, which is sort of like a provenance certificates on showing you the media was created with Gen 3, in this case in our Gen 3 models. And it's always been the case that as the model capabilities and the ability to generate high fidelity content increased, we continue to invest ahead of that curve on our alignment and safety side. So that when you're back two years ago, when you're getting maybe smaller pixelated, jerkier footage, it's not as much of a concern. But knowing where things were going, which we had insight into, given that we're doing the research in house, we've always been able to get ahead of. Okay. Before we release this next model, we're going to need these new level of systems in place. So that's always been our approach to make sure that those are in place before we release.

Gregor Van (27:07)

Yeah. Great to hear. So, looking ahead, from what you can share, where's Runway going? What kind of things do you guys see on the horizon that would probably make it into Runway?

Joel Quartler (27:17)

Yeah, we're really focused on building general world models, which are effectively like systems that understand the whole visual world and its dynamics. And we just released about a month ago is a major step towards this goal, but it's still very early. We're still a couple steps, maybe many steps from that goal. And so this is the first and smallest of our upcoming models. It can still struggle with certain complexities, to your point, it can still confuse subspecies of. I don't know if they're subspecies. I shouldn't say that, but different types of cows. And so our approach is to basically build up to that full general world understanding. And we found, even with Gen 3 models, that building that up then teaches the models all sorts of other interesting properties. And so we've seen a lot of very fun physics and texture simulations that people have been doing with some of the models. The way it animates waters is a lot of fun to play with. And so those capabilities sort of naturally come from our goal on building models.

Gregor Van (28:17)

Yeah, very exciting. Yeah. A couple of questions I just tend to ask now at the end of episodes. One is just, what's a typical day for you as the PM at Runway? What is a typical day?

Joel Quartler (28:27)

Yeah, the sort of shabby answer to that is there's really no typical day, which is what makes the role so fun. And I think, yeah, the product team at Runway. But a lot of the teams at Runway get to be involved in so many cool, different areas, from working with creators who are professional creators, all the way down to hobbyist creators, to working with researchers or researching on these models. And so I would say for myself, the typical day, to the extent that it exists, is a mix of talking with users about both the use cases and the user experience and interfaces, working with our researchers to evaluate experiments or bring that user feedback back to the research team, working with our engineers and designers on the product side to actually these things into the product and make sure they're stable and ready for a big release, reviewing our metrics and sort of quantitative signals and making sure that we are releasing things that are valuable to people. So working with sort of our sales, finance, and marketing teams to make sure that we're telling the stories and building the business that we want to be building.

Gregor Van (29:24)

Yeah, Cool. Typically, yeah. The answer I get is there is no typical day.

Joel Quartler (29:28)

Sorry.

Gregor Van (29:29)

No. Of course. What's kind of fun about technology? But at the same time, when I talk to ctos, often, it's hiring, hiring, hiring, hiring. So it's always kind of fun to. Kind of fun to kind of get just a sort of theme on what actually someone is doing day to day. And I think our listeners really appreciate hearing that in terms of roles that they're probably thinking about wanting to go into as well. And kind of final question. Sort of the same track. Knowing what you know now, like, today, what advice would you give yourself starting out in this field whatsoever?

Joel Quartler (30:02)

Yeah, I mean, starting out in this field whatsoever, it would have been like, go join Runway. Whatever year this timeline starts in. They're up to some really cool things. They're a great group of people, I think, to go back to sort of like, realistically, when I first started at Runway, what would my advice be at that point? I think coming in, I was comfortable in having this background on the creative side and also this background on the sort of tech startup, SaaS tooling side, but felt just like an innate sense of, like, okay, I have this experience and building, you know, SaaS products, how the business models work, the best way to interact with users, the best way to sort of plan for releases and for roadmaps, and I think took months early on to just sort of adjust to, like. But Runway, you know, is of this new generation, different type of company where, like, having a research team in house, having a creative team in house, being able to, like, you know, total shatter expectations of what's possible, like, a couple of times a year, just very much changes traditional playbooks. And so I think learning to use them as certainly an input in deciding what's the best thing for us to be focused on, what's the best thing for myself to be doing on the product team at Runway, but being comfortable, jumping into, like, well, actually, let's just try this thing, because first principles will lead you to believe it might be an experiment that could pan out. I think we've done a good job building that culture across the company now to where people certainly bring in experiences from their other roles. But we try a lot of very interesting things, and a lot of them work, which is really exciting.

Gregor Van (31:25)

I think that's a really good point. I think fear of failure, I think today can mean that people don't experiment. And to quote, probably everybody knows who I'm quoting. Stay curious. So, yeah, I think that's a really good place to leave it, which is just that tools like Runway will never even be conceived if people are not able to just experiment. And that thing, that project, it might not go somewhere, but at the same time, project can be for yourself, it can be for many others, but having just that curiosity. And don't fear of failing, so to speak. It's not failure. It's just trying stuff out.

Joel Quartler (31:58)

Yeah, exactly.

Gregor Van (31:59)

So, Joel. Yeah. It's been great to have you here today. I really appreciate the time and sharing about Runway, and I definitely won't call it an LLM ever again. So I apologize about that.

Joel Quartler (32:10)

That's good. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. And I'm going to take that feedback on types of cows directly back. Make sure we're testing for that in the future.

Gregor Van (32:17)

Yeah, I want to see Highland cow on the website.

Joel Quartler (32:19)

All right, we'll see what I can do.

Gregor Van (32:22)

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the time and hope we can catch up again in the future.

Joel Quartler (32:26)

Of course.