20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia

Summary

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Episode Summary: Victor Riparbelli on Scaling AI, Content Creation, and the Future of Models

Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Victor Riparbelli, CEO and Co-founder of Synthesia
Release Date: January 15, 2025
Podcast: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) – Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

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1. Introduction

Harry Stebbings welcomes Victor Riparbelli, CEO and Co-founder of Synthesia, an AI video communications platform for enterprises. Victor has successfully raised over $250 million from prominent investors like Excel, GV, and NEA, and Synthesia boasts over a million users and 55,000 businesses worldwide.

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2. Funding Journey: Seed Round and Lessons Learned

Victor recounts Synthesia's early funding challenges:

• Initial Pitch Challenges: In 2017, Victor and his team presented a vision centered around generative AI for content creation. Despite their innovative approach, they faced skepticism, especially in Europe where the VC landscape was dominated by private equity professionals unfamiliar with technological innovations.

  "We think a great vision. But I think understandably, most people thought we were pretty crazy, right?" ([06:00])

• Seed Round Success: After facing rejections from approximately 80-90 investors, Synthesia secured a $1 million seed round at a $5 million post-money valuation, led by Mark Cuban.

  "We ended up doing it at the 5 million post with Mark Cuban." ([06:29])

• Subsequent Challenges: Attempting to raise $8 million proved unsuccessful, leading to a prolonged nine-month funding struggle. Ultimately, Synthesia raised $3.1 million, which sustained them until achieving product-market fit with their Series A.

  "We had to rewind because we're running out of money." ([07:42])

Key Takeaway: Victor emphasizes the importance of raising capital based on a strong product and customer focus rather than an optimistic story alone.

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3. Product-Market Fit and Scaling

Victor discusses the concept of continuous product-market fit as Synthesia scales:

• Initial Constraints Benefited Focus: Operating with limited funds forced Synthesia to concentrate on customer needs and disciplined spending, aiding in achieving product-market fit.

  "I think that focus and work on those constraints definitely helped us to get to the point where I actually found product market fit." ([08:58])

• Multiple Product-Market Fits: As the company grows, it undergoes successive product-market fits across different customer segments, such as creators, SMBs, and enterprises.

  "A successful company is a long series of like product market fits." ([10:23])

• Caution Against Early Excessive Funding: Victor warns that raising too much capital too early can lead to unfocused spending and hindered learning about customer needs.

  "Too much money too early is not healthy." ([09:11])

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4. Current AI Landscape and Challenges

Victor offers insights into the current state of AI in enterprises:

• AI Bubble: He acknowledges a bubble in AI investments, with many startups failing to deliver sustained value, leading to potential high churn rates.

  "I think we're definitely in a bubble... a lot of money that's going to go up in flames in AI products." ([21:05])

• Enterprise Adoption Issues: Many enterprise buyers are eager to adopt AI but lack a clear understanding of their specific needs, making it difficult for AI startups to prove ROI.

  "Buyers don't really know what they want... The real signal is renewal." ([19:20], [20:24])

• Customer-Centric Approach: Success in the AI domain hinges on deeply understanding and solving genuine customer problems rather than chasing technological trends.

  "You need to be extremely customer centric." ([19:20])

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5. Scaling Laws and Future of Model Providers

The discussion shifts to the future of AI models and scaling laws:

• Continued Importance of Scale: Victor believes that scaling laws will persist but not in a purely linear fashion based on compute power alone.

  "I think scaling rules will continue, but I don't think it's just going to be linear." ([26:36])

• Algorithmic Efficiency and Data: Advances in algorithms and access to quality data are equally crucial, potentially allowing smaller players to compete against giants like OpenAI.

  "Algorithms, what everyone is trying to build into more or less any AI system today is control." ([26:43])

• Specialized vs. Generalized Models: Victor foresees a future with numerous specialized models tailored to specific workflows rather than a few generalized ones.

  "I think we'll see a lot of specialized models." ([34:41])

• Distribution as a Key Factor: He emphasizes that distribution capabilities will play a significant role in determining market leaders.

  "Distribution is king and great products are king." ([24:32])

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6. Future of Content Creation

Victor paints a transformative vision for content creation:

• Democratization of Content Creation: Similar to how the internet democratized distribution, AI will democratize creation, enabling anyone to produce high-quality video and audio content with minimal technical barriers.

  "We're going to truly democratize content creation." ([37:09])

• Shift from Text to Video and Audio: He predicts a decline in text-based communication as video and audio become the primary mediums, offering richer information transmission.

  "There isn't really any reason for us to use text anymore." ([14:02])

• Proliferation of Content: With creation costs approaching zero, there will be an explosion of content, emphasizing the importance of quality and storytelling over production-heavy approaches.

  "The price of creating content is going to go to zero." ([39:03])

• Quality Over Quantity: Victor believes that the inundation of content will make high-quality storytelling more valuable.

  "The best ideas and the best content is going to win." ([39:59])

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7. Content Moderation and Identity Verification

The conversation delves into challenges around content moderation and verifying content authenticity:

• Synthesia's Approach: Synthesia adopts strict content moderation to ensure their avatars are not associated with harmful or misleading content, aligning with their enterprise clients' brand requirements.

  "We have actually taken a very strict approach which means that we are actually going and being the arbiters of truth." ([30:17])

• Future of Verification: Victor envisions a system where every piece of content has a verified provenance, possibly leveraging blockchain technology, to combat misinformation and ensure authenticity.

  "If you could say these particular topics just don't show it to me... you could build a chain of where was content originally created." ([47:28])

• Challenges with Gray Areas: He acknowledges the difficulty in moderating nuanced content that doesn't fit neatly into "good" or "bad" categories.

  "You have the problem at Synthesia as well... the green content, the red content, and all the gray middle." ([30:02])

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8. Building Synthesia in London

Victor explains the strategic decision to base Synthesia in London:

• Challenges in the US: Limited prior success and visa sponsorship issues made establishing the company in the US impractical at the time.

  "I couldn't get to the US... I couldn't really get that." ([53:40])

• Advantages of London: Despite recognizing the benefits of the US ecosystem, Victor highlights London's growing talent pool, cultural diversity, and emerging status as a hub for global leaders in AI.

  "You have all the talent... London is open for business." ([54:17], [55:19])

• Contending with Taxation and Brand Issues: He emphasizes the need for favorable tax policies and improving London's global brand to attract top talent and founders.

  "Don't screw up the fundamentals, don't raise the taxes too much." ([56:44])

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9. Rapid Fire: Personal Insights and Reflections

Q: “What trait are you slightly ashamed of, but that has contributed to your success?”
A: "I am a generalist... I have a lot of random things. My power is being decent at a lot of things." ([63:26])

Q: “What unmade decision weighs on you most?”
A: "I should have taken a pure CS or math degree instead of a split between computer science and business." ([64:43])

Q: “What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?”
A: "Stop overloading on what other companies are doing; focus on customer needs." ([65:04])

Q: “In building startups, you can only choose one investor from your cap table for your next company. Who would you take?”
A: "Mark Cuban again because he believed in us when no one else did." ([66:11])

Q: “Would you do something differently with how your parents raised you or with future kids?”
A: "Encourage my kids to play computer games as they develop decision-making and strategic skills." ([66:32])

Q: “Has having secondaries had a mentally freeing effect on you?”
A: "Yes, it removes financial stress and allows for better decision-making." ([67:22])

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10. Conclusion

Harry reflects on the episode, expressing admiration for Victor's journey and insights. The discussion underscores the significance of customer-centric approaches, disciplined spending, and strategic focus in navigating the competitive and rapidly evolving AI landscape.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Too much money too early is not healthy." — Victor Riparbelli ([09:11])

• "You cannot use money for or buy away with product market fit." — Victor Riparbelli ([10:22])

• "Distribution is king and great products are king." — Victor Riparbelli ([24:32])

• "We're going to change the world of making content from something that you need to where we capture things with sensors in the physical world being able to generate everything digital." — Victor Riparbelli ([37:09])

• "I think TikTok is a really great product... they built the graph based on your interest, not on your kind of social connections." — Victor Riparbelli ([42:12])

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This episode provides a deep dive into Synthesia's journey, the broader AI startup ecosystem, and visionary perspectives on the future of content creation and AI models. Victor Riparbelli's experiences and insights offer valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and VCs navigating the complexities of scaling AI-driven businesses.

Transcript

[Victor Ripabelli]

I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble, right? There's a lot of money that's going to go up in flames in AI products. What I see a lot in the enterprise is buyers don't really know what they want. The real signal is not that you sign a contract. The real signal is renewal.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

[Unknown]

Now.

[Harry Stebbings]

Six or seven years ago, this Danish entrepreneur walked into my office and presented his vision for the future. I did not invest and it keeps me up at night. It is one of my greatest mistakes. Today, that same entrepreneur joins me in the hot seat. His company is worth billions of dollars. Welcoming Victor Ripabelli, CEO and co founder of Synthesia, the world's leading AI video communications platform for enterprises. And to date, Victor has raised over $250 million from Excel, GV, NEA and more. And check this out. More than a million users and 55,000 businesses love and use Synthesia today. But before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective 8 billion DOL in total revenue.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Harry Stebbings]

Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator commerce platform with an all in one suite of tools including websites, email marketing, digital products, payment processing and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a private community, write a paid newsletter, or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and grow business without taking a cut of your revenue. 20VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi.com 20VC. That's kajabi.com K-A-A-A-B-I.com 20VC once you've built your creator empire with Kajabi, take your insights and decision making to the next level with AlphaSense, the ultimate platform for uncovering trusted research and expert perspectives. As an investor, I'm always on the lookout for tools that really transform how I work. Tools that don't just save time, but fundamentally change how I uncover insights. That's exactly what AlphaSense does. With the acquisition of Tagus, AlphaSense is now the ultimate research platform built for professionals who need insights they can trust fast. I've used Teagus before for company deep dives right here on the podcast. It's been an incredible resource for expert insights. But now, with AlphaSense leading the way, it combines those insights with premium content, top broker research and cutting edge generative AI. The result? A platform that works like a supercharged junior analyst, delivering trusted insights and analysis on demand. AlphaSense has completely reimagined fundamental research, helping you uncover opportunities from perspectives you didn't even know how they existed. It's faster, it's smarter, and it's built to give you the edge in every decision you make to any VC listeners. Don't miss your chance to try AlphaSense for free. Visit AlphaSense.com 20 to unlock your trial. That's AlphaSense.com 20. And speaking of incredible products, what comes to mind when you think about business banking? Probably not speed, ease or growth. I'm willing to bet that's because you're not using Mercury. With Mercury, you can quickly send wires and pay bills, get access to credit sooner to hit the ground, running faster, unlock capital that's designed for scaling, and see all these money moves all in one place. I speak to dozens of founders every week and most of them are using Mercury because they're super smart and that's what you have to be using. Visit mercury.com to experience it for yourself. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N A and Evolve bank and Trust members of fdic.

[Unknown]

You have now arrived at your destination.

Victor, dude, we met like six, seven years ago when I was very, very young and, you know, very naive. I can't believe it's been that long. But thank you so much for joining me.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Dude, I'm glad to be here, man.

[Unknown]

I'm still.

[Victor Ripabelli]

We said before, I'm sorry for you that we're meeting under these circumstances.

[Harry Stebbings]

So am I. I said I would.

[Unknown]

Have done better if I'd invested in every single company I'd ever met because it would have been you. Deal. Vanta 11 Labs. I mean, oh God.

[Harry Stebbings]

But I want to start today on.

[Unknown]

Some really exciting news that you have.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what is the exciting news you.

[Unknown]

Have for us today as we just.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Raised a Series D which is super exciting. Big milestone for us. We raised $100 million led by NEA with participation from all of our existing investors. So we're very excited to get it to 25 with a big wall chest and just get to Escape Velocity, shut down the category that we're in and win.

[Unknown]

First amazing news. Congratulations. Thank you again for rubbing it in my face. My question to you is we were talking beforehand Actually about the kind of funding story of the business. Can you take me? I know it's not the schedule, but I so enjoyed this. Can you take me to the seed round? People didn't get it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just what happened and how was that?

[Victor Ripabelli]

So this is back in 17, so it's a long time ago now. And the very short story is that we're a bunch of people. We had this sort of idea that generative AI, which back then wasn't really a term that most people thought about, but generative AI would change how we create content. And the big shift was that back in 2017, when most people thought about AI, it was about analyzing data, right? Making decisions. That's kind of like that era of AI, but there was these early kind of GANs, which was basically a neural network that could kind of produce new data instead of just analyzing existing data. We thought that this was going to be a world changing technology. We thought it was going to change everything we know about how we create content from video, speech, audio, music, whatever. But we were focusing on video and went out to the world with a great PowerPoint deck and we think a great vision. But I think understandably, most people thought we were pretty crazy, right? We basically went out and said, look, in 10 years you're going to be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop needing nothing else than your imagination. That wasn't a pitch that landed particularly well, especially not in Europe. We were based in London at the time.

[Unknown]

Why do you think that was?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Because I think in Europe the VC industry is still dominated by people who used to work in private equity. And that's a very different mindset than technologists.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

So when you used to work in private equity, you're like a financier more than you're a technologist. And this was not a pitch you could understand for an Excel sheet. So we got turned down by, I mean, basically everyone, I think like 80, 90 investors, something like that, including podcasters.

[Unknown]

Including who weren't in private equity and don't have that as an excuse, but yeah, sure. And how much were you raising then?

[Victor Ripabelli]

The first round was a million dollars. And we ended up doing it at the 5 million post with Mark Cuban, who we sent.

[Unknown]

Mark did one on five.

[Victor Ripabelli]

One on five, yeah. And with today's valuation, 2.1 billion. That's pretty.

[Unknown]

He has like 15% today, something in that range. Wow. And then you went out and wanted.

[Harry Stebbings]

To raise like seven.

[Victor Ripabelli]

No, so that was the later round. So that was back in 2017. We did a million at five. That kind of got us started. We went like 12, 18 months, as you do, went out to the market for like now we had a working technology. We were back then focused on AI dubbing, not the kind of avatar tech that we mostly have today. Again, learned a hard lesson. We went out and we're like, okay, we built this great technology, we have a great team. Let's raise 8 million. That completely failed. And for like nine months, which is like dragging our feet. I made all the mistakes you can make as a founder. I dragged out the funding process over nine months. Like different data points with different investors. It was a big shit show. And we eventually had to rewind because we're running out of money. And we ended up raising 3.1. And that kind of took us through to the Series A, which is when we had actually found product market fit and had like a sustainable business. But those two first rounds were very much rounds we raised based on story. And it was a story back then that just didn't resonate that much because it was very hard for people to see what we had, how that could extrapolate that into everything that became today.

[Unknown]

Today, that would have been a 5 to 10 million round on a 40 to 50 given team and given vision. Would you have been as successful you have been had you raised that round instead of the ones that you raised, which were leaner and smaller?

[Victor Ripabelli]

So we talk a lot about this and I don't think we would. I think if we'd raised eight, we could have done a lot more things, right? And we would have done more things. We would have built deepfake detection, which everybody wanted us to build. Remember, this is like in 2018, right? At this point, AI video, to everyone outside of Synthesia, it was just deep fakes. People thought that that was going to be like the big thing. And that is, of course it's a problem and it's a real thing, but we always thought this is a subset of AI video. Most people are going to use these technolog to create awesome creative content. But if we got that money, I think we would have built a team to do that. And that would have meant we've lost our focus. And I actually think that operating under the constraints that we had at the time really just focused us on our customers and selling the product. We were like ferocious about charging people from day one, even if it's like £500, right? And I think that focus and work on those constraints definitely helped us to get to the point where I actually found product market fit. I'm a big fan of working under constraints. I really do think it forces a lot of discipline that easily gets lost the more money you have. Because you have more options.

[Unknown]

Right.

You're also an angel investor now.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you feel about the 5.

[Unknown]

On 25, 10 on 50 rounds with pedigreed founders coming from your massive names, how do you feel about them? And have you seen a trend in terms of how they perform?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Too much money too early is not healthy. Maybe some people are good at really having that discipline, maybe like second time founders. But it's very tempting to spend on things that you shouldn't be spending money on, especially when things are not working right. I think once you clearly have product market fit, then a lot of things, a lot of decisions become a lot easier because they're more obvious. But before product market fit, it's really dangerous, I think to be developing two, three, four things at a time. Having 15 people working on your team when you're still at idea stage. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of raising the money and then using it too quickly. One thing you cannot use money for or buy away with is product market fit. Right. I think learning about your market, about your customers, it just takes time. And having a team of 20 people instead of five people trying to learn that I think actually slows you down. You have to own that. As a founder, I don't think we could have learned the same amount about our customers faster if we had more money back then. It really did take us like two years to just get into the minds of customers. Understand video from first principles. I think people try and then you hire a product manager to help you fix the product market fit problem because they're a product person. Or you hire a salesperson because you think you have product market fit and you just need to be someone who's better at selling it. Unless you have product market fit, you shouldn't have product managers and salespeople. That is your job as a founder.

[Unknown]

Do you think that journey is ever done? Because I don't believe in product market fit being this, that we have product market fit. You have product market fit with creators. Tick say I'm just. And then suddenly you need to move into SMBs. Well, you don't have product market fit with them. You have it with creators who are independent and then you need it with enterprise. And so I just see product market fit as this like ever moving chapter book, which is different. And so actually can you ever afford to move away from customers and does it not always become more impossible with bigger teams.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I totally agree with you. And I think a successful company is a long series of like product market fits. But you need that initial spark, right? Once you have that, you have something to build on. The bigger you get, the more bigger company you're building. You need new product, new product market fit, essentially. And I actually do think that that's one of the things as a founder that you should always be focusing on what is the next market, what is the next product you're targeting. But in our case, I would say we have a bunch of product market fits already. And those I think you can hire super smart people that can run with it, make it great lines of businesses, make it great products. But I think pushing to those next product market fits. And where the company needs to be in tool years, I think that remains to be the founder's job.

[Unknown]

You said about kind of the importance of capital constraints. Cockroach mode. I think you hadn't touched your A when you raised your B. You hadn't touched your B when you raised your C. And now you haven't touched your C when you've raised your D. Well, then why raise it?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Well, I think when you have the money, you do spend it, right? I think for us it's been more a matter of just we've always been obsessed about actually building a business, having great unit economics and making sure that we're a business that generates money and revenue and that we're always in control of our own destiny rather than being tied to a VC parachute. And so I think we've always just spent conservatively. But it's also very clear that if you know where to spend the capital, it is an amazing asset. So building a great go to market team, for example, I mean that does cost money and that there's like a cash flow thing of like you have to hire a bunch of people that are really great, they have to train, they take nine months before they ramp up and then the investment is worth it. You want to have capital, right? You want to have a really healthy balance sheet so that you can chase any opportunity that comes ahead of you.

[Unknown]

You.

[Victor Ripabelli]

For us, we want to build like a really, really big company. I think there is easily a 50, $100 billion company can be built in the space that we're in. And we want to win that. You're not going to win that by bootstrapping all the way, right? I think that's a myth.

[Unknown]

How does Synthesia become a 50 to $100 billion company? Can you just paint that picture for me.

[Victor Ripabelli]

So I think we're the early stages of a shift in how we communicate. If you think of most communication today, it's text based, right? Send emails, texts, we read things. And text is a great technology, built the world up to where it is today. But it's actually like a pretty bad way of compressing information. You lose a lot of context when you transform your thoughts into something that's written down in a document. As humans, we're much better at consuming visual content. We like to hear things, we like to see things, we like to feel things. In the physical world, we can't do that yet, but it's very clear that higher fidelity content like video and audio is a better way of training, informing and entertaining people. The reason that we're using that much text today is because text is the only scalable way we have of essentially storing information and sharing information, right? But that's changing now because the more we don't need cameras and microphones and capturing things in the physical world around us, the more we can get video creation, audio creation to be as scalable as text. And once that happens, there isn't really any reason for us to use text anymore. This sounds a bit crazy, but I actually do think that that maybe not us, but maybe our kids. Kids going to be one of the last generations that will read and write as like the default way of communication, I think will increasingly just consume everything by video and audio. I think you have all the trends like you look at TikTok, right? I don't know if you're on TikTok.

[Unknown]

But every night I actually watch it from 12 till 12:30. And then I send my team notes on what I think works and doesn't in transitions, fades, music.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yes, I do exactly the same thing. I think TikTok is a great example of how video truly can be the default of how we consume information. There's almost no text left in the interface, even comments. People respond to comments with videos. And so they've really started to build out this graph of how we communicate with video as a default video. There's still a long way to go. But if you believe that that is true and that not just your TikTok scrolling at night, but if you're trying to buy a software product, you actually don't want to read a whole bunch of stuff and jump on calls with people. You want to watch a video and at some point you probably want to watch an interactive video where you just, just with your voice say, hey, can you show me how this functionality works over here. And the video will just switch over to that. When you do custom support, right, you're not on the phone, you're reading long knowledge articles, you're watching videos again. Probably they'll be interactive then. All of the world's communication is the market, right? And so when we started the company we always talked about and we still. It's a very important part of our thesis is that our market is not video production, because all video production today, that's an interesting market, but all of our market is text. Text and slides is the market that we are targeting. And that market is infinitely big. And if you manage to capture just 5% of all the world's text communications and turn that into video, I think you have probably more than $100 billion company.

[Unknown]

We're going to go into future and how we see the future. I do just want to remain on the actual funding. Is it bad to raise money to dissuade competitors to win a market and use capital as a weapon?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I mean, I think it can backfire. If you don't know what to use the capital for, you start doing stupid things.

[Unknown]

Right, but is this around a signal other people don't fucking come here?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I mean, sure, it's a part of it, right? But I think more than anything this round is raising the capital to build the best product in the category. So I mean, every time you raise the signal, like hiring people, you send a signal to competitors and VCs, et cetera. But that's not the. I've never made decisions with these here based off what our competitors do or don't. I think that's a bad way to run a company.

[Unknown]

Do you not pay attention to competitors?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Pay attention to competitors. And now we have lots of them, right? I think it's great to have someone to kind of play ball against to some extent then. One of the interesting things about Synthesia is that when we raised our A to B to C round, it was very much a secret how fast we were growing and how much people love the product. A lot of people looked at us from the outside like, oh yeah, there's like a few people in like learning and development and training that thinks it's like a cool thing to spend time on making these AI videos, right? And what we actually saw from the inside was, holy shit, this is huge. And training and learning was the first market we targeted. But this is clearly just the beginning. But from the outside it looked like, oh, it's just like cute UK company doing These avatars kind of fun, but like most people probably don't use if anything else than just like making a fun video for their mom. And so for many years we had to market to ourselves. And then slowly people started to realize that, okay, actually this is maybe not just like a flash in the pan cool demo, maybe there's something real under the hood. And so we started getting a lot of competitors. We have one particular competitor that I mean literally verbatim copied our mission statement. Like everything. They just copy everything that we do.

[Unknown]

Who is that?

[Victor Ripabelli]

They know who they are, but they copied everything that we do from the way we talk about the product, we talk about the market. And of course that's annoying, right? But that's capture capitalism. That's good. And then eventually you start to learn from your competitors. They do something right, they do something wrong. And it's actually very helpful. It's really difficult to pioneer a space because you have no feedback loop except for whatever you do and how the market reacts to that. And seeing what competitors are doing and seeing what works and what doesn't work is extremely powerful. I think for us at least that's been a very powerful thing for us the last 12 months. I think the reason that we had a massive reacceleration the second half of the year and a big part of that is actually because our competitors did a whole bunch of marketing for the category. We clearly had the superior product. So that actually helped us quite significantly. I don't think you always have to be the first to do something if you're good at being a fast follower. That's also very powerful. It's a different way of running the company when you have a lot of feedback signals in the market around you, but it's much more fun and I think it helps you get to the right answer for your customers much faster, which ultimately is the most important thing.

[Unknown]

Dude, before we kind of dive into kind of journey and elements there, I do just want to discuss AI landscape today.

[Harry Stebbings]

A lot of I speak to so.

[Unknown]

Many CEOs and they're like, Harry, you and your tech bros, you sell me the ROI to enterprise. We're still kind of waiting. Where are we at in the AI hype cycle cycle today?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think that's pretty spot on. What I see a lot in the enterprise is buyers don't really know what they want. A lot of people have been told that they need to have an AI strategy. They need to execute on AI strategy, which means they are very willing to have conversations. They're also very willing to spend their innovation budgets on doing things, but they don't really know what they actually need and want. They don't understand the technologies well enough to kind of themselves figure out what do they need for their business. And that is both an opportunity, but I think it's also a problem for a lot of AI startups that doesn't have that customer obsession. It's great because you have a lot of budget available and people are extremely willing to do things and, and sign up for pilots and POCs because they want to deliver to their boss that AI strategy. But when they don't know what they actually want, it's very difficult to prove the ROI to them.

[Unknown]

Right, so what's the problem is the implementation?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think the problem is that to be successful today as an AI company, I think you need to be extremely customer centric. You need to deeply understand your customers, what are their problems, how can your product help solve whatever specific problem that they have? Now that sounds pretty obvious, right? That's not AI specific, but the issue is that today there's a lot of companies who do a lot of cool technologies and they go out and they kind of convince the customers that whatever they're building is the right thing. It'll help solve some big problem for them. But maybe it doesn't really work or they haven't understood the customer's problem deep enough. So now you have this thing where the AI startup kind of thinks that they're delivering real value, but actually it's not a good signal because on the other side you have a buyer who's just spent a lot of money on doing something and they'll say, yeah, it works really well because they just spent $100,000 on doing it. But eventually they will churn. Right, because it doesn't actually work or doesn't actually do the thing that you wanted to do. And so that's a problem because the AI startup think they're doing the right thing, they think they're delivering value. But at some point you're going to be hit by that wall of churn where all your 12 month contracts begin to phase out because you're not actually delivering, delivering value.

[Unknown]

Right.

Are we seeing that wall of churn moment now?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think a lot of companies are seeing that big time.

[Unknown]

Right?

[Victor Ripabelli]

And I think what's very unique about AI the last couple of years is that people are extremely willing to part ways with their money. People don't mind like paying on a consumer level like $30 a month to try out something that looks cool. Enterprise level, like sign for 50k pilot to do something. Something. But the real signal is not that you sign a contract. The real signal is renewal. And I think there's too many AI startups who optimize or have optimized too much for closing new contracts, not for the renewal.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

If you optimize for the new contracts, not the renewals, unless you've hit the right thing, which of course some people do, then you're in for a whole bunch of trouble.

[Unknown]

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about where we are today versus where we really are?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's how capitalism works. You throw a lot of money, a lot of products at the world and you try to do a million different things at once and you kind of see what sticks. And that's the right way to innovate.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

That's Darwinistic by nature. But I think there's a lot of money that's going to go up in flames in AI products that either just aren't that valuable or things that eventually become features in some of the big cloud providers.

[Unknown]

What is getting money today that people think will be very valuable, that you don't think will be be.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Buzzwords always kind of take me out when people say they're building AI agents to do all sorts of different things. That always lights up my bullshit detector a little bit. But I just feel like when you're overly obsessed about the technology and the latest buzzword, that's usually like a yellow flag for me. Maybe I'll give you one concrete example. I really, really hate it when people go like AI employees. I think it's so dumb. I think it's not helpful to build useful technologies that people want to adopt. And I just think it's the wrong way of thinking about that. You're going to have AI employees doing all sorts of different things for you. These are algorithms. It's a piece of software. Like, you wouldn't say that like Miro or Figma is like an AI employee that like sits and takes people's design and put it onto something.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I understand that it's because people think these things are going to be making decisions autonomously, but I just don't think it's that different from software that we already know.

[Unknown]

Did you agree with Zuck in his Rogan episode when he said, by mid this year we're going to have AIs that will be as capable as mid level software engineers.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think in general in the tech industry you're very good at like setting really high expectations and then not always meeting them. I always try with these hype cycles to stay positive but rational. What does that mean? Well, it means yeah, sure, probably at some point that will happen. I care most about what I know to be true today and in the next couple of quarters and I'll kind of adjust our strategy based off that. I think it's very clear we're going to have very capable AIs that can produce software. I also think when I speak to a lot of developers that we're not at the point yet, right. Where you just sit down and say, hey, build me the next social network with these functionalities and just, just comes up with it. I think building software is a lot harder than that. And I think what we see a lot with, I have seen the last two years, a lot of cool demos and that's great, that's a good start, right? But what we really want to see is this applied mass scale in production because you can prompt like a Tetris game, the browser or something like that. That's great. But if you look at most software out there today, it's very complex. And it's not just technology, right? A lot of humans, it's customers, it's feedback loops and I don't think we're anywhere near being able to, to automate those things. But I definitely think that a great software engineer will be way more productive the next six 12 to 18 months. But there's some podcast on point, especially 12 months ago, all software is dead, right? In the future you're just going to go on to whatever LLM. You're just going to say, make me a copy of Monday.com, you're going to deploy it, you're going to sell at 1/10 of the price. It's going to be great. And all the existing companies of that. And I think that's a really naive view of what it's like to build a business. Technology and lines of code is super important, but as you know, you've built your company yourself. It goes way deeper than that. And I think it really for me that thinks that people who've never built operate a company, but it also assumes.

[Unknown]

That you're going to continuously upgrade and improve them yourself. Can you imagine having to continuously Upgrade and improve 150 different internal tools?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Oh, totally agree.

[Unknown]

Unbelievable. Speaking of kind of rational and clear mindset around where we are today, I think everyone acknowledges that we're seeing the complete commoditization of foundation models. Do you agree with that? From what you see and how do you see the foundation model landscape evolving?

[Victor Ripabelli]

For sure, I think what it'll come back to, as it always does, like distribution is king and great products are king. And of course there will be new LLMs that will be better, more powerful as everyone else excited to see what GPT5 kind of has in store. But I do think we are seeing the commoditization of the text generation layer.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

For most of the use cases that that we'll see LLMs transform the worlds we know today. I think the current generation technologies are good enough. It's about of course improving the base models, but it's a lot about building the product, the scaffolding around it. I definitely think we are seeing that. Right. If we're seeing X and Elon Musk catching up pretty quickly and Frobik has a really great product, a lot of people prefer those models over OpenAI's. OpenAI has a huge distribution mode and I think they've really managed to capture the consumer version of the world here and that's definitely going to be really valuable. But I think it's a lot of distribution of product from Iran.

[Unknown]

So you've got $10 million. Okay. And you can put it in OpenAI at 160, Anthropic at 60 or Axe at 50. Which one would you do?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I would do X because I think there, there's the most asymmetric upside if Elon delivers what he usually does. We've all heard of some of that data set that he built like 10 days or something.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think I would just never bet against Elon and I think the upside potential there is huge. And also I think the fact owns X is really, really powerful. OpenAI clearly managed to capture the consumer as in the destination that you go to use an LLM. I think we'll see LLMs being a part of many different apps and I think owning X along with building the LLMs is actually really powerful, especially for the real time information that we'll be able to feed into the models directly from X. And the fact that X of course already has hundreds of million users that in theory at least could start using their LLMs rather than going to what.

[Unknown]

Is the differentiator that will create the winner? Is it data? Is it? A lot of people said to me X because of Elon's access to compute. Is it distribution where OpenAI would win? Is it data where you could say OpenAI or X would win. Which one is it?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Clearly there are still gains to be made from scaling, I think, especially if you look outside the text domain, but like in video, audio, et cetera, 3D.

[Unknown]

So you agree that scaling rules will continue?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think they will continue, but I don't think it's just going to be linear. Like whoever has the most compute is going to win. The world rarely works in those ways. Something will happen, right? Someone will come up with an algorithm that is like 10, 100 times as efficient as what it is today. I think compute is important, but I actually also think data is actually, I would say compute, algorithms and data maybe. I think in algorithms, what everyone is trying to build into more or less any AI system today is control. We've proven these things are extremely capable at replicating the real world, producing video that looks real, audio that looks real, text that sounds real. But what we all really want to do is get a deeper level of control over these things. In my world, it's like you have some of the big video generation models. I kind of delineate what we do versus what SORA does or Runway or something like that. Take Sara and Runway. These models, extremely capable, extremely powerful. You type something in, basically anything you type in, it'll actually spit out. And that's really, really powerful. And it's a great demo. But to really be able to use this, you have to be able to say, I want this same character in a different scene. I want the character to say this particular. There's so many layers of control, and those are very hard to build in because every time we try to build them in, it decreases the overall fidelity because all of a sudden you're trying to make the model do what you want it to do rather than just replicate whatever real kind of looks like. And so I think getting those layers of control in is going to be difficult. I think that is going to be a lot of algorithms figuring out, like.

[Unknown]

To what extent is grok's lack of layers of control a problem or a benefit?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Well, so there's control like content moderation and then there's controlling the output.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

So the thing that I'm talking about here is like the slot machine control of thing. You type something in, you get something out, then you try and change the problem, but you pull the slot machine again.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And it's very frustrating for trying to get to something specific because the model just doesn't really put it out. So you want to have some degree of control in there. I think on the Moderation. That'll be interesting to see how it's going to pan out. Right. I think we're definitely in the middle of a vibe shift with Zuckerberg also pulling back moderation, which I think in general I'm in favor of that. I don't think that humans moderating content is the right way forward. I think Community knows.

[Unknown]

Do you think Zuck made the right decision to pull back on moderation?

[Victor Ripabelli]

We've all seen the statement. I don't have the actual details of it, but I think it is directionally correct that having humans sitting down and evaluating content is not the right way of doing it. I think what we've seen with products like Wikipedia, for example, is that the collective power of people working together to arrive at some sort of truth is really, really powerful. And I think Community Notes is kind of like taking that Wikipedia way of thinking about the world and trying to implement that into every single piece of content. And it's not easy and it's not solved yet. But I do think that is the right way for us to have some degree of control over what people do and say. Where it gets really messy is this kind of like gray content. We have the problem at Synthesia as well, right? We have basically a product internally for content moderation. The hard thing is you have what we call the green content, the content that everyone agrees is great. That's 99.9% of the content. You have the red content, hate speech, violence. Most people will agree that that's bad as well. Then you have all the gray middle. And that's where it gets difficult. I think this is the content that Soc is talking about here, where he's going to let off controls. This is essentially like you're making cryptocurrency content. For example, when is it a really enthusiastic entrepreneur who just started a new coin that he or she definitely thinks going to change the world? When is it an outright fraud of trying to get well meaning people to dump their money into something they think is going to go up 10x? Those lines are very difficult to draw.

[Unknown]

Right.

And bluntly, is Synthesia liable? Are you the arbiter of justice on what is good or isn't? Also, if something is an opinionated rant that I put out there, maybe it's right and fair, but it upsets a lot of people. Do you see what I mean? Are you the arbiter of right and wrong?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yeah. So today we are. And that's a decision that we have made. We had a lot of discussion about this in terms of like, how do you. What's our approach to this problem? And for me again comes back to the customers, right? We're an enterprise product. It's important that the avatars that we have are not seen to be used in all sorts of like wacky content online. We don't as a company have. We don't see ourselves as having to uphold any kind of right of free speech. And frankly, from a business perspective, having someone pay me $30 a month to create very questionable conspiracy content is just not good business. So for me, all of those things kind of lined up, right? Our enterprise clients, they don't want avatars to be affiliated with content that doesn't kind of match their brand and economically it just doesn't make sense. So we've taken a very strict approach which means that we are actually going and being the arbiters of truth and we definitely have people who are unhappy.

[Unknown]

With that staying on models before we go down this rabbit hole, just in terms of models obviously speak to many investors over the last 18 months and when Synthesia's come up bluntly, they've said like amazing and amazing what they've done. But OpenAI are going to move into this. This is the most obvious play for OpenAI to move into this. And customer service is always kind of the two. How far do you think model providers go into the application layer and how do you assess that?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think this is like classical VC brain. Too much focus on the technologies, right? Like, you know, you speak to a. I think there's a big misconception about Synthesia is that we're like an avatar company and it's kind of a fair assumption to make. If you go to our website, if you like, you know, see about us online or like Avatar is a headline feature for the company.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

It's one of the things that made us where we are today. If you go and talk to our customers, they don't buy us with the Avatar model, they buy us for the workflow. Like the way we've taken the entire video value chain. You get an idea so you make a draft for that video. You don't have to use a camera or a voiceover artist because we have the AI model to that. We give you a great editor like using PowerPoint or Canva. We give you a distribution mechanic with an AI video player that's made to serve multilingual content. List could go on and on. You talk to our customers today, the reason we have million dollar plus contracts is not because people Go, oh, I want to make an avatar video. It's because they want to convey a message to someone and they want to do that with the highest efficiency and engagement and in the best workflow, frankly speaking. And that is so much more than just the models. So, of course we want to win on the models, and we are going to win on the models. And our specific niche here is humans presenting content.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Whereas all the other companies, yes, Sora Runway, all these guys are doing amazing AI video things, but they have a much, much kind of wider merit of what they're doing. They're trying to build true foundation model video models, and maybe we'll be customers of those one day. Maybe we'll be partners. The only thing I care about right now is voiceovers and humans presenting to the camera. And I think in that niche and. And if you take the entire platform as a whole, that's how we win. I think that's something we're going to see the next couple of years, is that the winning companies are going to be the ones that are not overly obsessed about the AI component of their platforms, but who build for workflow. And I think as I move into going to 2025 models, super important for us, but expanding across the value chain, increasingly the publisher of videos for our customers as well. Which means that instead of using YouTube or another kind of enterprise video hosting platform, they use us directly. And I think that's where you're going to see a lot of the value being created. There's going to be a few foundational companies. They'll be very big. They already power us with. Of course, we use OpenAI, we use anthropic.

[Unknown]

What do you use most? And has that changed over time?

[Victor Ripabelli]

We're most using OpenAI.

[Unknown]

Is that shifting more to anthropic?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yeah, we shift some workloads to anthropic. We're also using Gemini, actually. I think in general sense is that it's a lot about pricing. Some models are definitely better at things than others, but we have a lot of workloads that big workloads, moderation, for example, is one of them. So I think pricing is important and again, like the scaffolding infrastructure around it.

[Unknown]

How did you think about the question of whether to build your own models? How do you think about that?

[Victor Ripabelli]

We only want to build models if we think we can be the best in the world at it, which in general for us means that it's a narrow domain and that it is directly tied to a bigger workflow. And so we always work backwards. From what our customers are trying to do, if we think we'd be the best in the world at it, and we think they're are compounding advantages of building that model, then it's great for us. And what that means very specifically is that for humans presenting to camera to dialogue driven content, that's what we want to be the best in the world.

[Unknown]

Do you think in the future we will have a world of many smaller models that are specialized or do we have three general massive models?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think there will be some concentration for sure in the big companies. But it's kind of interesting because specialized models, it's still very technology centered. I think there'll be many, many, many different products that people use in their daily lives to run their businesses. And a lot of those will probably use models that are like an open source thing that's got like tuned specifically for something and integrated into like an overall platform. And if you think of that as a specialized model then yeah, I think we'll see a lot of specialized models. But it's very like tech industry to talk about models all the time.

[Unknown]

Right?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Like I think most people we will interact with models like we do in ChatGPT whatever today for sure.

[Unknown]

Sure.

[Victor Ripabelli]

But a lot of the things that you won't notice as a consumer when you're just using someone else's platform or product, there'll be a lot of workflows in the background that are also driven by LLMs. You'll definitely see a lot of companies building their own specialized LLMs. But I think we should think more about products than models.

[Unknown]

Final one on models Then we talk way too much about models. Final one on models. GPT5 has taken so long, dude. Everyone is like oh, when's it coming? It's been delayed, delayed, delayed. How do you think about the delay and do you think it will surpass expectations or fall beneath them when it does release?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think it's going to be incredibly difficult to do anything that can mirror the ChatGPT moment when it first came out. As humans I think we saturate incredibly easy. We often forget how crazy just like GPT3 actually is when you use it.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

So my sense is that when they release something, something it'll probably be good and there'll probably be a whole bunch of tech nerds will be very excited about all the things you can now do. And maybe I'm wrong and it's just like super intelligent thing, they'll just self improve and save the world. But I think it'll come out and It'll be good. It'll be definitely better than the previous things. But I think most people will not care that much because the bar for someone to really care that much is incredibly high.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And there's all this talk about, is it like AGI? It's not AGI. And I think all those things kind of little bit like, what's the definition of AGI, right. If you took ChatGPT 200 years back in time, right, in England, and you showed someone this magical thing you've built, you'd be burned at the stake. If you did it 50 years ago, people would definitely think, this is AGI. I am talking to a computer that knows everything about the world. This is absolutely batshit.

[Unknown]

Right?

[Victor Ripabelli]

And then today we'd be like, ah, it's just a stochastic parrot. And I don't know what's true or what's not true there. I think it'll be very powerful. I don't think it'll have as much as kind of like the cultural moment that ChatGPT created initially. And as I said earlier, I think elements of this that there'll be a small group of people who really care deeply about what benchmark does it work against? And it's slightly better in this area and in this area, and I think that's awesome. But I think for the average business around the world, the current models are already pretty good and can solve a lot of problems.

[Unknown]

One of my favorite quotes is Eleanor Roosevelt, and this is what I aspire to, not necessarily what I am, clearly, but she said, great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people.

[Harry Stebbings]

But I want to discuss the future.

[Unknown]

Across a couple of different segments with that in mind and discussing ideas. When we look at the future of content creation. This is my life, dude. What does the future of content creation look like in say, five years?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think what has happened in very broad strokes is that we democratized distribution with the Internet. There are no gatekeepers. Anyone can make a website. Everyone can share their content online. That's part been really, really powerful. Then we saw to some extent the demarcation of content creation because all of our smartphones have cameras in them. The price of camera equipment dropped and all those things which, I mean, this setup like 30 years ago would probably been like 100x the price. What it is today, what's about to happen now is that we're truly going to democratize content creation. We're going to change the world of making content from something that you need to where we capture things with sensors in the physical world being able to generate everything digital. And that's going to have huge implications. When you think about text, that's just like a fabric of society. We don't really think that much about text, right. But text went through this journey of the printing press was one of the first really big inventions around text. Then we invented the keyboards, the computers, and now text is everywhere and everyone can create content online. It's entirely digital.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And that's really powerful. With something like music, we've somewhat also seen that go from being something we generally do in the real world and capture what sensors to something we can do digital digitally. So most music today is not made with real instruments, it's made with software instruments. I can recreate almost any song I want without real instruments. I can synthesize that on my computer. And that changed the music industry in many, many, many, many different ways.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And I think we're going to start to see the same with the video and audio industry, where you are going to be able to bring your ideas to life without needing much more than just your imagination. And this is going to have a whole bunch of effects. Most obvious one is that the price of creating content is going to go to zero. Just like it costs you nothing today to write a book, everything is free. In the not too distant future, the price of creating a Hollywood film from a purely technical perspective I think is going to be zero as well. That's going to mean we're going to have a deluge of content, an absolute deluge of content. It means that people like yourself, YouTube creators, everyone else can compete with Hollywood in terms of what they can bring to life today. There's still the separation of Hollywood content. So all the Netflix series that we watch, the really high production value things and the there's like the YouTubers, you can do like prank videos and podcasts and kind of like fun things. But like even for you, right? Be very difficult for you to make like a Hollywood style production because it'd just be like, it'd be very, very, very expensive.

[Unknown]

Right?

[Victor Ripabelli]

That's going to like flatline, which means that the best ideas and the best content is going to win. And I think that's going to be pretty.

[Unknown]

I think we are so far away from this. This is someone who creates content for daily living. When I look at the clipping tools, they are so far off what my team is able to do upstairs, it's incomplete. I don't see that being two years out, there's a lot of knowledge involved it's highly ambiguous what bit's important of this episode. Depending on what we wanted to achieve, we could totally cut six different bits as being the best for a highlight reel. And so I find these like clipping tools as, hey, everyone's democratized. I think content's less democratized than ever.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yeah, and I totally agree with you. I think a very important delineation is when I say that you're just going to need your imagination. That doesn't mean that it doesn't require skill. It means that the kind of sort of technical barriers. You don't need to have a camera anymore. You don't need to be necessarily amazing at visual effects. A lot of stuff will be able to be done automatically, but it'll put more emphasis than ever on being a great storyteller, understanding what's important, on asking the right questions, on if you're creating fictional content. Combining things that work in the cultural side guys, but still stands out a little bit enough that it's interesting for people to watch. So I think all those things will be more important than ever. What would be less important? Well, knowing the right people to distribute your content. Having spent eight years and becoming the world's best visual effects artist, because you can get a lot of help with that from AI systems. But the storytelling piece is going to remain exactly the same. And also think what we are going to see is that the value of real content is going to be higher than ever because we'll have a lot of AI generated content and I think that'll be a genre of itself. But just like we still like to watch people play piano or know that some someone that the artist we're watching is actually like a real person. I think that will carry over to this world as well.

[Unknown]

Well, we have more human made or AI made content in five years, definitely.

[Victor Ripabelli]

AI made content for sure. But I think what's actually more important is what content surfaces.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Because if you go to YouTube today, I mean it's like I don't know what the status, but it's probably like 95% of all videos have like less than 10 views or something. So the content is there. It's a matter of like what. What actually gets surfaced.

[Unknown]

Well, this was my point, which is when you reduce the cost as much as we are here with AI and we increase supply side so much, what is the future of discovery?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think a lot about this And I think TikTok is actually a really great product, potentially like a bit of an unpopular opinion. When I look at my TikTok feed today, I would say it's 90% highly informative, educational, really great content. It's about music production, it's about the music that I like. It's about politics, about tech. I see your face once in a while. I think it's an amazing feed of interesting people. What TikTok has done really well is that they built the graph based on your interest, not on your kind of social connections. There's a bit of that as well, and I think that model is actually extremely powerful. What I do want to see is a bit more control over your algorithm. So today it's basically like, I think everyone has this intuitive thing which is like if you see content, you don't want to see more. If you swipe really quickly because you know the algorithm will kind of notice that you swipe quickly past that. So you're kind of almost trading the algorithm just yourself. I think that's an awesome way of doing it, but a bit more control. Maybe we can say these particular topics just don't show it to me. I'm not interested in it. And then I also think what TikTok has done really well is because they have this really great interest graph. They know a lot of people who are very interested in specific areas. When you post a piece of content yourself, they basically show that content to a couple of hundred of people and they quickly send to those hundred people like the content or not like the content. And if they don't like the content, you go in the trash. If someone kind of likes it a little bit, they'll show to a bit more people and they'll try to figure out what's actually great content. I mean, if you look at TikTok's usage, right, I think that's very clearly working really well.

[Unknown]

Should TikTok be banned?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I tend to believe that it's a moral panic more than anything. Clearly, TikTok has built an amazing product. I don't think it's a brainwashing machine. I don't think it's a propaganda machine.

[Unknown]

My thing is the denigration of social media, which is to your point. You said it's educational, it's about music. Mine is motivational speeches, air fryer recipes and workout routines. Mine is highly additive to my life in positive ways. Just like a diet can be chocolate and sweets or vegetables and fruit, you choose your own content diet and that is a human responsibility. I think it's unfair to demonize social.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I totally agree. And I think that's the paradox because probably for you, maybe for me, we built our algorithms to be productive to our lives. We're kind of starting to find our way into how do we build a really awesome, awesome media ecosystem that is driven by citizens and experts rather than journalists and politicians, and where we still have some of the control that you can argue has been good around the previous generation of media, where a few corporations owned the newspapers and there's this chain of command of before content goes out the door. It's been reviewed by six different people. And I think what just always happens in the world is that we invent new things as humans and we learn as we go. And there's definitely some negative consequences. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. But I think we are finding our way. I am actually very optimistic about the future moving into.

[Unknown]

I also think the quality of the content that you consume is inherently better. I mean this in the nicest way, but I think the content that we produce on venture capital is inherently ten times better than the content that a journalist at a large publication produces. Because it's my job, day in, day out, I live and breathe this.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yep, exactly. Exactly. I did a TED Talk like a few months back where I could talk about this, but I actually talk about this because. Because I think this.

[Unknown]

Sorry, you did a TED Talk?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I did a TED Talk.

[Unknown]

Dude, you made it big.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Thanks.

[Unknown]

That seed round.

[Victor Ripabelli]

No, what I should talk about there is that my kind of provocative opening statement is that we may be the last generation to read and write.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And I think there's a lot of moral panic about TikTok. For example, like are people's attention spans decreasing massively? And maybe those are real problems, but what if we're just tired of overly dense, long, boring content and that actually a two minute long TikTok video is a better way of understanding a topic than a 20 minute long YouTube video, which is a better way of understanding a topic than a 300 page book.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you say to the fact.

[Unknown]

That we're just then dopamine junkies getting jacked on two minute clips because we can't be asked to read a five minute piece?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think with dopamine junkies for everything, I think that's how we govern our lives most of the time. I mean, I totally get the analogy, but is it all the dopamine addiction if you do sports every day, whatever thing you do that makes you feel good? I think most of the things we do is to try and make ourselves feel good in some way.

[Unknown]

One of the problems is identity misuse or Fraud. How do you think about the future of identity verification both for you and cross platform?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I do think we need some degree of identity verification for some of the big spaces that we use. I think we need to know somewhat where content comes from, who created it, when was it created, how was it created. So I think we need identity verification to some extent, but I also think we need to take that all the way down to kind of like the content level. So if you imagine that you fingerprinted, you know, Shassam, the app on your phone. Of course, yeah. If you imagine you had like a Shazam, but for every single piece of content on the Internet, you could say, hey, this picture was originally uploaded, you know, like five years ago. It was uploaded first time by like Harry. Maybe in the future. It also like this was like partly made with Synthesia. You're watching adopt version. So this is kind of like AI for translation, whatever, like kind of signals we can give around content. If you had that and identity verification and community notes, every time you scroll past a piece of content, you would see if it's verified or not verified. Today, everything. Well, it's changed a bit now, right? But it used to be that only celebrities had like verified accounts. Why was that? Well, that's because a lot of people tried to make an account pretending to be some celebrity. And so as a consumer, when you see that like trusted verified sign, that tells you that that's actually the celebrity posting that content.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think we should try and flip that around so that everyone and all content is kind of verified. If we have the provenance trail of it, we know kind of where it came from, maybe how it was created and some other kind of things around it. And they'll give you like a green check mark on that content and it should stick out like a sore thumb if something is not verified. So if there isn't a fingerprint for the content, if we don't know where it's from, that should be the thing that sticks out, not the kind of verified sign on a celebrity's page. Does that make sense?

[Unknown]

Yeah. Does that not inherently lower the value of your content though?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I would lower the value of your.

[Unknown]

Content because your content is AI generated, so it wouldn't have the green tick.

[Victor Ripabelli]

No, because I think right now, is it real or is it fake? We're in a world where most content that we consume today is to some extent fake. Right. Most pictures on Instagram have been touched up in some way, shape or form. When it leaves the sensor, they already do like Color corrections and a whole bunch of other things. And so I think this line will just increasingly blur and I think it'll be less about how you made something and more about the content itself. You could make a video of you talking about something and in a couple of years no one will be able to tell if it's actually real or not. But it won't really matter that much. What matters is that you made it, right? And that whatever you say in that video is something that you actually wanted to say more than how you made it. It's a bit like we don't care if content uses green screen today. Don't care that much if when you go to see a Hollywood film, right, I know that's fiction, but care how it's made. You care if it's a good film or if it's a bad film. You should evaluate content based on the content itself. And in here, how it was produced certainly is a signal, but it's also signal. When was it produced? Who produced it? Are you watching the original version? Are you watching an edited version of it? It's really hard, right? It's not because it's right around the corner, but you can imagine a world where you can begin to build a chain of where was content originally created, what happened to it since? Are you watching an edited version? Maybe you're watching a 25 second an outtake from Harry's podcast show and you want to watch the full segment, Click here, you can trace it back to actually watch the full episode. We can begin to build these kind of things. And the reason I mentioned Shazam is that Shassam exists because this was a commercial problem for essentially YouTube, right? Record companies were telling them, hey, people uploading videos on YouTube, but they're using copyrighted music. We're going to sue you out of existence if you don't fix this problem and pay us some money. I said, what did they do? Well, okay, what we have to detect if something is actually copyrighted, right? So when you upload a video to YouTube, as I'm sure you know, will scan it and if it's copyrighted music in it, it'll either take it down or most of the time it'll just put an ad in the middle of it and it'll pay something back to the license holders. Now what's actually happening here, right, is that you're uploading a piece of content, and in milliseconds, that piece of content is held up against a database of billions of songs from that little short clip, like A four second clip of a song. It actually identifies in milliseconds what song it is. And if it's a copyrighted song, they'll put something in there. So if you imagine that happened as well, you upload a video and I upload a video on my channel, maybe with this interview, right? But I've cut out 10 minutes of it. It'll just say, this is actually a piece of this, a clip from Harry's original podcast, which was released two weeks prior to Victor putting this in his YouTube channel. And if you want to watch the full thing, you can click to it here. So begin to build this chain of content and we can identify where things came from. That does require we have a centralized database, decentralized, ideally, right. Where you just write every time you make content. No matter if you're making a video on Synthesia or taking a picture with your camera, you registered in this. I kind of hate to say it, but it could actually be a blockchain where you register the first time a piece of content was created and you then upload content to different social platforms, distribution systems. You check it against that just to see if disinformation. One of the big problems about what people mostly do is that they take a picture from a war five years ago and they say, this happened yesterday in whatever country. And if you had a system like this, if I tried to do that, actually what it would do is it would say, well, this picture was uploaded five years ago. So when you're looking at this picture, it'll have a little block of notice under kind of Community notes, right? But the automated version of Community notes saying this picture was actually taken by a BBC journalist like seven years ago. A lot of this stuff is hard, but we actually have a lot of piece of the technology to get there. And I think when we think of content identity verification, we think of moderation, content creation. I think we are beginning to see the birth of an entirely new content ecosystem. Ecosystem that will look very different than what we have today.

[Unknown]

How will that new content creation ecosystem change the labor markets of content? And what I mean by that is which roles are legitimately threatened and which will be created.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think the very technical roles, like camera operation, those types of things, they'll probably fade away. And I think a lot of emphasis will be put on creativity, storytelling, being relatable, all those things that makes great content, I think will be more important than ever.

[Unknown]

But if you're like a thumbnail designer today or a visual effects person today who is threatened and Whose job is going to be created.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I actually think that most of those roles will have a natural transition to something different, assuming that you're open minded enough to do it. So visual effects, for example, as we talked about before with making clips, AI can do do a first pass asset, which is maybe better than random, but it's way worse than what you can sit down to yourself, right? But you plus AI can probably be really, really good, right? Because if it's a two hour episode, it just figures out all the right places that could be interesting and shows you that and you can kind of choose yourself. If you're a visual effects artist, probably what it means that you'll just like a software engineer means that you'll probably be 100 times as efficient. And instead of relying on 20 other people to create a digital clone of me by modeling my face, you just prompted or control the river. I think if you're good at that, you'll be even more powerful in this new world. I think we'll have much more content creators than we have today. Just like if you look at pre Internet, pre computers, how many people wrote things? Very few people, right. Like in the 1930s or 40s, most people didn't create text. There was specific people like secretaries and then typewriters later on. Now all of us produce content all the time and I think that'll be a big trend. I think most of the rate limiting on how quickly AI becomes a part of our daily life is actually not the technology. As I said earlier, I think we have very, very powerful LLMs today can do a lot of great things, but the rate limiter is people. Because people have to use these things, they have to trust these things, have to pay them, buy them, integrate them. I mean with technology that's always the case. It takes a long time, dude.

[Unknown]

The final one I have to talk about is location. You decided to do this in London, which I love as a Londoner, but it's a different choice. Why did you choose to do this in London?

[Victor Ripabelli]

The honest question is because I couldn't get to the us I mean I didn't have like an amazing CV before I started Synthesia and I couldn't get the US like basically you need to get a sponsorship if you want to go to the us, right? I couldn't really get that. Want to start a company, knew a few people here, so I just kind of like moved on a whim actually and spent a year.

[Unknown]

How would Synthesia have been different, do you think if you'd been in the.

[Victor Ripabelli]

U.S. i still do think, think that the chance of success is higher if you're in the US on the West Coast. I think there's a lot of pros, especially like the last six, seven years, got a lot better to build here. But I do still think that there is a lot of advantages to be in the US But I think Europe is catching up pretty quickly.

[Unknown]

What are the pros of being here?

[Victor Ripabelli]

One big one, which is talent, kind of goes both ways in some sense. But if you look at the ecosystem in the Valley, one thing is kind of like the price of talent, which is just abnormally high. But there's also things like loyalty, for example, that I think are less spoken about. I think in the US you have a lot of people who are very driven and they basically view their career as building a portfolio of stock options in different companies and hopefully one of them will explode and they'll be very rich, which is a rational way of thinking about it. And it makes a lot of sense, but also means that it's a more transactional relationship I think people have with their employer. People are much easier to jump ship. You have one or two bad quarters, may lose a lot of good people because, hey, there's this other cool thing on the block over here that I'll go to work out instead. In Europe, I think people, for better and for worse, I think people are, they think less like that, right? As you of course know, like stock options in Europe, people still view it as like a random lottery ticket, not really as part of their compensation, because no one in Europe knows anyone who got rich off working in a startup because we don't have that many successes here.

[Unknown]

Are you seeing that attitude change?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I am seeing that attitude change a little bit. It's going to take a long time to change because the way no matter what I tell people who work at Synthesia, no matter how much they can kind of read the news and see all the stuff, what people care about is do they know someone, do they have a Cousin who made $2 million of being early in a startup? In the U.S. especially in the Valley, everybody knows someone who made $2 million of working in a startup, and they know several of them that make you feel like you can do it as well. Here it's very kind of abstract, like, oh, yeah, these companies made. But before we really see that. And that just requires a bigger ecosystem with more exits, more big companies and so on. I think it'll get there, but it'll take a long time. But what I think you get in Europe is you get more loyalty in the sense that people care a lot about working a place that they like working, working on interesting problems, having great. And I think that's a pro that's less spoken about.

[Unknown]

Do you think people work as hard?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Honestly, I don't really have a strong sense that people work way harder in the Valley. I know a couple of great friends who've moved over there and opened offices. I have not heard from any of them that wow, people just work so insanely hard. There's probably a percentage of people there that work really, really hard. But I think we have those people here as well. I think that's more like a personality trait that's dispersed all across the world. But I don't think if you take an average software engineer in the Valley that they work harder than we do in Europe.

[Unknown]

Why do you think it's gotten better building here? I feel it's gotten much worse building here in the last six months. Do you share my opinion?

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yeah, I mean I think it's going to be interesting to see what the new government is going to do.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think they have a lot of great cards on their hand. You have a lot of great companies that are actually building here. And I think what's important about what we're seeing in the London ecosystem is that we're actually building global leaders leaders, not just regional winners of expense management or something like that. You have 11 labs who are leading in voice. You have us who say is leading in enterprise, AI, video. We have Wave which is definitely doing self driving. We have a lot of great companies that actually become global leaders. I think it's really important that the incoming government doesn't screw this up because it's a massive.

[Unknown]

How could they screw it up?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think they could screw it up by overtaxation. All the usual things that I think everyone is talking about. I think what they can do to make it better. I think the UK has a brand problem.

[Unknown]

What do you mean?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think we disagree on this but I actually think the UK is a pretty good place to build in general. I come from Denmark. Right. That would have been a terrible place to build a company. That would have been impossible basically. I think with SEIS EIS Entrepreneurs Relief I think there's a lot of good things that have happened in the ecosystem. You have all the talent. I think the venture ecosystem has gotten better. Even though it's still very pe centric. I still think it has gotten better. There's also still a lot of ways to Screw it up, right? And I see a lot of people who are leaving, especially after the recent administration.

[Unknown]

My phone is just literally, hey, where are you moving? What do you advise me? Where do I move to? From billion dollar founders every single day. So my question to you is, you're sitting down with Keir Starmer. You can advise him on what he can do to make the best developers want to build here, the best founders want to stay here. What would you advise him?

[Victor Ripabelli]

The obvious things like corporate tax, entrepreneurs relief, all those things make it really attractive to build here. Because we are in stark contrast to Europe, which is in many places a terrible. I think it's different because you're from here, you're British, right? I'm from Denmark. And I think we always like with wherever we're from, we're like much more negative. I moved here and I've seen a lot of the positives around it, but I think, don't screw up the fundamentals, don't raise the taxes too much. Make sure we still have great relief schemes for people who create jobs, create economic productivity and those sort of things. On the brand problem, that of course starts with the fundamentals like crimes on the rise, living cost, all those things that I think you've also been very vocal about those. But those are big problems. Right, sorry. What I actually would say though is.

[Unknown]

That, but also the consistent negativity from this labor government. It's like stand up and say London is open for business. Not negative, negative, negative, sell the store.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I agree, I totally agree on that. And I think that comes a bit back to the brand problem because I actually do think that as much as we have, a lot of people here want to leave to the U.S. one of my learnings has been that actually a lot of people want to come to London as well, especially from the US in our journey. I've seen that it's actually easier to move people from the Valley to London than from the Valley to New York, which feels kind of counterintuitive. But a lot of people want to come and experience the European lifestyle, right? They like the cultural heritage, they like the fact that London is a cultural melting pot. All the things I also love about London on a personal level, right. If you worked a bit more on the brand, I just think you could attract a lot of great people to also come here and build. But of course it starts with the fundamentals, right? Now, if you look at California, California versus London, in terms of taxation and things like that, I'm not sure you can say that there's a massive difference. California is also super high tax. It's very high taxes and pretty rough. So I wouldn't over index on that. But I think definitely a case of double down. There's a lot of good things happening in the UK and I think if we don't screw it up, we just need one or two companies to become plus $10 billion companies headquartered in the UK then I think we'll really start to see the ecosystem system grow.

[Unknown]

Couple of $10 billion companies and they crystallize those axes. Wait for it, Wait for it. And they ipo. Yeah. Where do they IPO though? That's the point. So I don't know. Synthesia, nasdaq?

[Victor Ripabelli]

No, but it's a joke. I mean the London Stock Exchange, they need to fix that. They need to put some liquidity in the system. I don't know, I'm not a financier, so I don't know what they need to do to fix it. But I mean that is a disaster.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And I think we're seen unfortunately great companies really suffer under that 100%.

[Unknown]

You have done.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Yeah. It's not very attractive.

[Unknown]

Do you think that's actually a problem though or not? Because the answer is who gives a shit? Liquidity is the liquidity, whatever market you get it in.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I agree.

[Unknown]

Synthesia got nasdaq. It still makes a thousand people in London in the office, millionaires who have early stock.

[Victor Ripabelli]

I agree. I don't think that's my top three of things needs to be fixed.

[Unknown]

What is your top one? That needs to be phase keep the.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Reliefs for entrepreneurs, for people who create things, maybe even make them better. Because that's very attractive. I think there's also a whole bunch of things you could do in terms of subsidizing GPU costs, for example. That would incentivize for UK data centers. That would be interesting. That's an actual competitive advantage. Obviously. Don't over regulate. We haven't seen much regulation yet. The senses that there's a little bit of a wipe shift from the last administration to this one in terms of regulation. Regulation. Don't look at Europe as an example. Europe has all the AI regulation and none of the AI companies staying the course to some extent and not screwing it up I think is really important.

[Unknown]

I want to do a quick fire with you, my friend. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. That sound okay.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Cool.

[Unknown]

So what do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think that playing computer games is probably one of the best things a kid can do for future success in their life.

[Unknown]

Why do computer games make for better entrepreneurs? Because Toby at Shopify said that if you can run a clan, it's better than the university.

[Victor Ripabelli]

That's exactly what I did. World of Warcraft. No, actually what I think it is is that we were probably the first generation that really had access to especially a bit more complex strategy games. Basically what you learn throughout life is decision making to some extent.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And computer games is a microcosm of the universe and you can run so many simulations and it may not look like it for parents if you're playing Warcraft 3 or Red Alert or whatever game that you're playing, World of Warcraft that you're playing back then. But actually what you're doing is you're training yourself to make a lot of decisions really rapidly and to understand what the implications of each decision that you make are in some kind of game that you're playing. But life is a game. Careers is a game. Building companies is a game to some extent.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

And I think we're just the first generation where you actually can sit by yourself and get so many iterations in that would have otherwise been impossible. You can't sit down before the computer era and simulate lots of of small decisions in how to run a business. You just couldn't do it. Right. You had to actually build a business and run a business. Here you can play rollercoaster tycoon. And of course, roller coaster tycoon is not like running a real theme park, even if it's just like 20% of being the CEO of a real theme park. Right. I think that teaches you a lot. And so I think the decision making and kind of sense of strategy you build from that is, I think is highly valuable because it's a two way feedback mechanism.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Victor Ripabelli]

You can sit down and read books about things, but I think what's powerful about computer games is that there's this kind of constant feedback loop.

[Unknown]

What trait are you slightly ashamed of, but that has contributed to your success?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I am a generalist in the purest sense of the word. And when I was younger I wanted to be an artist, wanted to be a great computer programmer, developer, and I just never really excelled at any of them. I still have a dream of making the music improve one day, but I think what I'm really good at, I know a lot of things about lots of very random things. I'm just extremely curious. I'm not like an expert in anything specific, but I have a very, very Wide range of interests. And I think my neural network has been trained on so many random things, like how elevators work through black metal in Norway to how people make technobuilding, all these kind of different things. And I kind of used to be a bit annoyed at myself, like, why can't you just sit down and become the world's best music producer or the world's best programmer, AI researcher, something like that. And I think now I've realized that my power, power is actually the fact that I'm decent at a lot of things. I think, especially in my role. What you do is you make decisions and you get ideas and you can't force those things. I think I really, truly believe that those come from your subconscious. And the more food and diverse things you put into your brain, the better you get at making analogies and pattern matching and those kind of things.

[Unknown]

Vidu told me you were the resident dj, which I thought was a brilliant description. Tell me the heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What unmade decision weighs on you most?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I did a degree in split computer science and business at university and I really kicked myself for not just taking a STEM degree like a pure CS degree. Studying business controversial opinion is mostly useless. There's basically 10 ideas in business and if you learn those, you'll be pretty well covered. I should just have done a pure CS degree or pure math, engineering, something like that.

[Unknown]

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I think that one of the things I've changed my mind on in this whole AI hype cycle. I think when you're in the middle of these cycles and you see all these things getting funded, all these competitors pop up, you get a lot of noise and a lot of, oh, should we do these things? Should we listen too much to what the market says? Someone is doing this over here. And I think I just really learned the lesson again, although I think we've stayed the course really well to never do things out of guilt of other people doing it or looking too much at competitors or what the broader kind of AI landscape is doing. Listen to the customer. They're the ones who pay your bills and ultimately they're the one that you need to make happy. I had a period where maybe over indexed a little bit too much on what other companies are doing. As the AI space in general, what's happening there is the most valuable signal as opposed to the customer. So maybe more like a relearning of a fundamental lesson.

[Unknown]

In building startups, you can only choose One investor from your cap table for your next company?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I can't answer that.

[Harry Stebbings]

You can.

[Unknown]

I won't let you out of this room. You can choose one investor. Who would you take?

[Victor Ripabelli]

That's a hard one. I would take Mark Cuban again because he truly believed when absolutely no one else believed in us. I'll be forever grateful to him for doing that.

[Unknown]

Boom. That is a clip. You think in clips when you're me these days. Penultimate one.

[Harry Stebbings]

What about the way that your parents brought you up?

[Unknown]

Would you do deliberately differently with your future kids?

[Victor Ripabelli]

My parents generation, they saw computers as this inherently socially isolated thing of you're just sitting and dopamine addicted to clicking buttons. Exactly what people say about TikTok today. The reality is usually much more nuanced. And I think for me, when I played computer games as a kid, first of all, it was a very social thing, both because you play with other people online and I think our parents have a house time believing you can be friends with people you haven't met in real life. And second of all, that is like a waste of time.

[Unknown]

Right?

[Victor Ripabelli]

As I said, why do you think you're playing strategy games? I would sideline that with solving math problems or reading STEM books. Of course. Everything in moderation. That's one thing. I'll definitely encourage my kids to play great computer games.

[Unknown]

Every parent is questioning their own parenting decisions listening to you. Final one. I presume you've had some secondaries now does have having some secondaries have the mentally freeing effect that people often say it does?

[Victor Ripabelli]

I definitely think so. I definitely think so. Not having to worry about financial stress and having everything you own in one stock, I definitely think frees you up to make better decisions. So I definitely, I mean everyone I angel missed and I definitely encourage like take second errors off the table when you can. I'm 100% certain that had we taken no second errors at all, we would definitely have thought about selling much earlier and you might have made more rational decisions.

[Unknown]

Right.

This has been one of my favorite shows. Honestly, it's painful. It sucks to be honest, when someone you met years ago is now a guest on the show. It's like we have. It sounds so tickish.

[Harry Stebbings]

We have a high bar for where.

[Unknown]

You have to be to get on the show and that just shows what a fuck up it was for me. So thank you so much, dude. And you've been amazing.

[Victor Ripabelli]

Thanks dude. This was great.

[Harry Stebbings]

I am just in so much pain right now. I cannot believe that I had the chance to invest in that company at below a 20 million dollar valuation. Oh, it pains me. Victor, what an incredible guest. What an exciting future ahead. If you want to see that episode in full, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Cadillac Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Harry Stebbings]

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[Unknown]

There.