This Week in Startups - Next Unicorns: Building a $1B AI Avatar Business with Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli | E1776

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist Coda. A new doc that brings words, tables and teams together. All your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies in one place. Go to https://coda.io/twist to get a $1,000 credit! LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups * Today’s show: Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli joins Jason to discuss how his startup uses AI to generate realistic video avatars (10:16) before demoing the product. Then, the two discuss job disruption (31:43), preventing deepfake misuse (45:18), and much more! * Time stamps: (0:00) Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli joins Jason (3:47) Achieving unicorn status after Nvidia-backed fundraise (12:25) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist (13:54) Determining pricing for the product (17:19) Victor demos Synthesia and its AI features (24:38) Coda - Get a $1,000 startup credit at https://coda.io/twist (31:43) Job Disruption: How AI will impact hiring and business functions (39:38) LinkedIn Marketing - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (41:06) AI and dual fate technology (45:18) Preventing DeepFake misuse (52:40) OpenAI hit with a lawsuit * Check Out Synthesia: https://www.synthesia.io/ Follow Victor: https://twitter.com/vriparbelli * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

If you look at the shape of the music industry, right, back in 85 versus today, how it's been flattened out, talent can come from anywhere, it's about making great music less than it's about knowing the right people. Like all those things, I think, is going to come to the tech industry as well, right? We've seen some of that over the last five years, but I think as the kind of art of coding becomes more accessible, it's like, you know what? Why couldn't you be an eight-person company sitting somewhere in, you know, Norway or Denmark, something like that, and create something absolutely amazing. This weekend startups is brought to you by CrowdBotics. Great ideas can change the world. And crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code.

Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. And they just introduced an AI powered assistant to take the busy out of the work. Sign up to use Coda AI today at Coda.io slash twist. and LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash next unicorn.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend. Startups. Big, big surprise for you. Today is the start of the fifth season of a series we call The Next Unicorns. And what is the Next Unicorns? This is where we find companies

that have raised their series B round, let's say, they've got some really great traction, maybe they have market pull. And we just think as an editorial team, the producers here, some of the investment team might make suggestions, this company's got a shot at becoming a unicorn. What's a unicorn? In Silicon Valley, it's a company that's worth over a billion dollars. Now, you probably heard that we went a little crazy during the boom period of 2019,

2020, and 2020, and just gave a lot of companies, very high valuations. Some of them are now zombie corns, as we've talked about on the all-in podcast a couple times. maybe the companies didn't actually have product market fit. In other words, the product and the customers were in sync and there was a market for this product or market pull when customers are searching to get themselves at Tesla, an Uber or an Airbnb because they heard about it from their friends and the product is so good that you have market pull.

In other words, you don't even have to do marketing. People are just calling you up and you're taking orders as a company. Putting all that aside, I'm really excited about today's guest because he's been working on making virtual AI-based versions of humans. You can cynically call it defakes. That is the negative framing of this. Or you could say these are alternative versions of yourself, and there's a ton of upside.

And we're going to get into the downsides, the upsides, in this dual-use technology. Could be used, a dual-use technology. It could be used for good or bad. Just like humans can choose the path of darkness, the path of light. You could be Darth Vader, you could be Luke Skywalker. You could be a super villain, Lex Luthor, you could be Superman.

And the technology of AI is no different. It is a dual-use, dual-fate technology, if you will. And so we have a great guest. Victor Ripperbelly is on the program. He's the co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, spelled S-N-Y-T-H-E-S-I-A. Welcome to the program, Victor. Thank you, Jason. Synthesia is how it's pronounced, correct?

Synthesia. Synthesio. Okay. And paradoxically, we invite you on the program to come on the next unicorns. And then you, of course, make us one for one this season because we like to track how we do. This is our fifth season. You can see all of the episodes at this week in startups.com slash next unicorns, this week in startups.com slash next unicorns to see the other four seasons.

But you're the first guest on the fifth season. And since we invited you, you actually closed around at a billion dollar valuation, 90 million dollar series C at a $1 billion valuation. Congratulations on that. Who led the round? Thank you. Excel led the round with participation from Nvidia. Oh, okay.

So, Nvidia is investing in startups that are in the AI space because they're making the chips. They're making the infrastructure. Do you need to buy these chips yourself, or are you able to just use a cloud provider who has those chips? I'm curious. We definitely use cloud providers. I don't think for us as a business, it makes sense to go that deep in the stack. Nvidia is a great partner. I think most people think of Nvidia as the ones that make the GPUs and the chips,

which of course is their main line of business for sure. I think what's less well known is actually that Invidia does a lot of fundamental research, especially around like media technologies, so generative video, speech, text for that matter. And they're one of the world's best research teams and a big problem motivation for us to get closer to Nvidia. It's actually less on just like the GPU and the chips. But these guys are doing really amazing fundamental work in a lot of the technologies that we also are developing. So I think that's one of the big angles for us to get close to the video. And so you started this back in March of 2017, and the business was, I believe, in the early days,

your goal was to make a virtual avatar, not necessarily of a real person, but in order to do maybe say, customer support. So you go to a website or you go to a kiosk. Is that correct? Is that where you started? Was that the first use case? Well, sort of, I think, I think just we started a comedy back in 2017, right? And I think we kind of did what you're supposed to not do.

We started with the technology and then we tried to find, you know, out what we could solve with this technology. This is very, very early in what's now called Genitive AI, right? But the key idea was the same as it is today. We want to make it easy for people to make video content, not by making smaller cameras, not by making slightly better video editing apps, but by actually building technology to eventually replace the entire physical production process, right? So that's sort of like, that's the vision. That's where we want to go, it goes much further than just the avatars we have today.

The first three years of the company, I'd say it's like the wilderness period. We're kind of building the tech, figuring out if we worked or not. We kind of got into the service business of doing AI dubbing. So some of those who've known office for a while may have seen the David Beckham thing, the Snoop thing we did where we made essentially the celebrities speak in different languages. And this was like a great learning path for us. But what we figured out was that that was a service business.

It was a visual effects type of tool, but was actually much more interesting than selling to Hollywood and creative people. There's billions of people in the world who are desperate to make video content, but they can't today, right? They don't have the skills. They don't have the budget for it. And all these people, they're actually okay

with the quality threshold going down a little bit from a real camera. If it's a thousand times easier and a thousand times more affordable, right? And that insight is what led us to then launch our self-service text to video platform that we operate today with the world's biggest.

We launched that in the summer of 2020. And since then it's just been an absolutely fairytale. of going really quickly and just delivering tons of value to our customers. And again, it's less about this sort of video as you know it. It's actually more about replacing text for our customers, right? That's what they primarily uses for. So in that case, it's not necessarily to make a young Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker

and have them do a new adventure. You're not trying to compete with Disney. The goal here is, hey, I was going to write some materials here, some training materials, or I was a professor doing a lecture, or I'm writing some message to all of the, I don't know, franchisees in my Jiffy Lube franchise network. And I can type it in text, but have a human, a synthetic human, a replicant, speak to the people on the other end. So if I was the manager and the franchisee of this jiffy loob and you said, hey, here's our new pricing. Instead of just sending them a text document, they could watch it. Is that the customer base, those kind of applications that I described?

100%. That's very enterprise focused. We work with 36% of Fortune 100 today. They give you two very real examples, right? So let's say you're one of the world's largest fast food companies. You're onboarding and training millions of people to work in your restaurants every single year. What they used to do, they'd have a 40-page handbook. You'd send that to the employee.

They'd sort of attempt to read it. Remember absolutely nothing and be much less prepared to go into that job where they actually hit a restaurant. Now what they can do is they can make that into a video, which is in the native language of whoever's watching that video. So it works in 120 different languages. So that in itself is a massive unlock. But then the really, really big unlock that's kind of the false multiplier is that our product is extremely easy to use, right?

So if you know how to make a PowerPoint slide, you'll be able to use Synthesia. So now the same people who used to write that 40 page handbook, they can make the videos, right? Got it. So you don't need a video editor. So if we just pause there for a second, because what you said is profound. I am this, you know, international fast food company.

And I got people in France. I got people in Japan. And if I was going to make this 40-page training manual, I would then send it to a company that would translate it, make a local copy of it. And then people would pretend to read it. And then the French fries or the milkshakes would come out terrible because people didn't pick up those points.

Instead, you can take that. manual, the same person can write a script and the CEO of that company or the founder even could come on and speak to the person. And then there's all kinds of technology to make sure there's compliance that people are watching. If they open another window, I know this, like, if you ever took a driver's test or any kind of test, I recently went through this for like joining scouts, previously known as Boy Scouts of America, had to do background tests. And it was like a three-hour course. And if you, at one point, I asked. accidentally put another browser window on top of deposit.

So here you have an enterprise thing where any new person can hear directly from the CEO why it's important to get the fries right and how to do that. And you can make sure of this compliance. And that's one person's job. Exactly. And it reaches millions of people. I mean, that's just insane when you think of the leverage there. That would normally have cost them, God, it would have to cost them tens of thousands

of dollars per region across 40 languages. You'd be talking about a couple million bucks. And now it's going to cost 10,000. And let me give you, I think one of the really core insights we had earlier with this was that what you just described here is kind of the front end of producing content, right? It's like cameras, actors, studios, executives. We don't know how to perform in front of a camera. All that stuff in itself is incredible time-consuming and expensive, right?

But then what we figured out is actually all to that. Okay, so let's say you actually did that, right? You want to make this into a video because you know it's much more effective. Then what happens in every single businesses two months later? There's a business policy that changes, the pricing changes. you change your POS system, something like that. Now you're screwed, right? Because all your video material is completely out of date.

What's beautiful about this type of video production, right, is that you can just open up the file again, edit it, change the script, and you can feed that into all the other languages. So I really think that it's very early, right, but this is as profound as going from using a typewriter where you're producing something that's sort of hard-coded, heart-baked, like you would with a camera or microphone, into something that's more like a word document, right?

Open it up, edited, duplicate it, send it someone else. Our platform is collaborative. So we have real-time collaborations coming out next month or so, teams, work spaces. Kind of like using PowerPoint or like using Myro or something like that. But the output is just video, right? I think that's what we're seeing is just that the value in the enterprise is just like through the roof. I'll give you another cool example. Let's say you're one of the world's biggest software companies.

We have 4,000 AEs all around the world. You need to keep these folks updated on. Account executive salespeople, yeah. Excel people, exactly, right? You have to keep these folks updated on like what's happening with the product, what's happening with the competitors product, pricing, so on. Let's say you have one minute to talk to these people every single day about, you know, these things. You send them a document or something that they have to read on Slack.

Most of them will skim it, they'll forget it, right? What you can do instead is like you can make a one-minute video. We know that information retention is like six, seven, eight times as high when you watch a video as compared to when you read something. So if you take just a simple use case like this, right, the sales enablement team creates video content instead of only written materials for these folks and you do this for 4,000 AEs, you really just imagine just how much value that it has, right? Because you get a much better, informed, much better trained sales force. And I think we're still early in these kind of use cases, but this is really just what's, I think that's the reason we've grown so fast over the last three years.

All right, we all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean? Product velocity. Fancy term, right? You've got your product and your velocity. Speed. The speed in which your product improves.

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They may solve their problems by writing their own custom code or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, okay, yeah, we want to go faster. but you've got to go faster intelligently. And CrowdBotics is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service.

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no more waiting. Get a free build plan at Crabbotics.com slash twist. That's a $499 value just for the twist listeners. You get that for free. That's C-R-O-W-D, B-O-T-I-C-S dot com slash twist for a free build plan. So just to recap there, you've eliminated the need to hire a media training person. That costs $10,000, $20,000 a pop to train the host.

You've eliminated the host. That costs $10,000, $20,000 to hire. some person. You've hired the lighting, the camera operators, and the set. That's another 50 to 100 grand in my estimation. You've got to have a location to shoot in as well. It's another 10 grand a day, five grand a day. You got rid of all the translators. And you got rid of reshoots while increasing compliance and retention. And you've only given up, perhaps if this was done in a really, really by a very high quality team that spent the quarter million dollars to do it that I just described as what I would put this kind of shoot at. If it was, I'm talking about like a full employee handbook, you know, a couple of hours of content, maybe 40 segments or something, one per page. All you've given up is a little bit of polish on the edges of a great host that might be slightly more compelling. I wonder in this, do you have the ability to, do you make the full tool of like, here's the quizzes and compliance and making sure that people watch. the video or do you use like third party educational tools and they just export their

videos into those? Yeah. So at this point in time, we're not, we're not like doing the kind of last mile delivery, which also means you don't do the quizzes. You put that in an LMS system, something like that. A learning management system, LMS, learning management system. Exactly. So yeah, that's incredible.

Can you imagine like Microsoft or Salesforce having all these salespeople around the world and every day they just get a video and then it, you know, the learning management system just knows if everybody watched it, if people didn't watch it, they can't. do work the next day and their manager gets an email, hey, this person still hasn't watched the video. This person's three videos behind. That's incredible. And what do you, what would you charge in this situation without mentioning a specific

client, but if you did have that at-scale use case, tens of thousands of AEs, how do you charge? How much do you charge? What does this cost to do this 40-page manual if you were running, you know, a burger, a fast food chain or something? So really, our thesis revolves around the idea that, you know, in the future we're going to be reading much less and we're going to watch and we're going to listen way more, right? And we're basically building our product and price and structure around that. This is, as I said before, this is really about replacing text in the enterprise.

So the way we kind of price the product is per seats. We really view this as having so many analogies with something like PowerPoint in the early days, right? So it's seed-based that, of course, depends on like how many seats that you decide to buy. I can enterprise plans. Seats on the person creating it or seats on the people receiving it? So right now it's one type of seed that you buy. So basically it's got like a model you know from like Myro or Figma or things like that, right? And go in, you have a workspace together.

You can invite your colleagues. You can leave comments on the videos and all that. So if you had 20 people in the training organization, hey, you know, you pay what, $300 a year, $400 a year per person, something like that, $25 a month? A bit more than that. I think I think like we're probably like. ended around $40, $50,000 a year. Oh, okay. Great.

So it's a couple thousand per person. So this is high-end software in the, in like the Salesforce category, a couple thousand per person per year. So for 40, 50, whatever, for 50K a year, you can not have to do all these shoots and everything. All right. Let's do a demo here. Let's do a demo here.

And just to not scare people off. If you had the personal plan on the website, it says $30 a month, 270 years. So I'm assuming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. or the left that are right. So it's a traditional kind of product lead motion.

So you can go in, you can even make a video for free on the website, or you can sign up for a $30 plan, which you'll kind of get to get familiar with the platform and then the enterprise offers a bunch of other features. So here we are. We're looking at like a PowerPoint-ish, notion-ish interface with a bunch of projects and templates that you can pick from, an office, interior, an inspirational talk, whatever it is.

And I see you have a couple of this week in startups videos you've created. Oh, no. Oh, no. Exactly. I'm coming well and prepared, Jason. Uh-oh. So what you're seeing here is like, is the homepage, as Jason just described, that this is a traditional creator tool as people who probably have seen it before.

And I'm going to go to the avatars out here in the left-hand side. And what we're seeing now is a mosaic of all the different avatars that you can use to create your videos. So I scroll down here, there's around 150 avatars. They come in all different ages, ages, genders, ethnicities. Are these different professions? Are these computer generated? Or are they made by, uh, like having...

Partly computer generated. They're based on real actors, but they are sort of AI generated. And there's a bunch of... So you guys see you have a pilot there. You got a hipster. You got a four person, not a four man. We have to use gender neutral language.

I can see you have like a construction worker, you know, a police officer type thing. Doctors. Or a fitness person. And you got all the colors of the rainbow, genders, body sizes. So you can be super woke or super diverse here. You can pick whatever you like.

Exactly. You can do it, I'm assuming by region. So, you know, not to make light of it, but it might actually, the information might be received better by somebody who's wearing clothes or has the accent of a Japanese person in Japan rather, or an Indian person in India, correct? It's funny to say that because we have a lot of customs in Japan. We work with a very high percentage of like the 100 biggest companies there. And actually what a lot of those that use it for is to create partner. materials for English speaking or other con speak different languages.

It's a huge line of business for them, right? Because it really just breaks down to communication barriers. And that goes both ways. We also work with all the American companies who want to produce materials for the Japanese market. And this comes in really handy, not just on like the avatar periods, of course, but also with the 120 languages. So I mean, this actually makes a lot of sense.

English is the world's language now or the language of international business. And I'm not saying American. I'm saying English, right? Queens English here. And so if you're a Japanese company and you want to reach the maximum number of partners, if it's in English and the person is localized, yeah, that's going to be a lot better than perhaps a Japanese person with English as a second language, who's a rep locally in that market, whose English might be whatever, an 8.5 out of 10.

Here you're going to have 10 out of 10. Exactly. And that's fantastic. My Japanese, by the way, is a 0 out of 10. Mine is too, I'm going to show you. But what we're also seeing with this, right, is like, you know, let's say you have a lot of technical documentation, integration videos, which can be a lot of screen recordings and voiceovers and things like that, right?

It's again, just like, and it's so moldable because you just make it in Japanese and then you could go back and edit it every time. You don't have to go through the whole voiceover actor kind of process, right? But if we're out to make a video here, let's say I pick Alex, got a click on her, just one of our most popular avatars. You've probably seen her before. Then we got set into the video creation screen here, which is where the magic happens. So what I'm seeing here is a thumbnail of Alex, who's our avatar.

And then under her, there's the script box. And the script box is really where you just type in the script of your video, right? It's kind of like that easy. So let me just try and type in something here. I'll type in, hello, Jason. This is a test from Alex. And what you'll see here is that we automatically detect that you're typing in English. So there's this little drop down here, which says English, US.

professional. I can click on this drop down. And then I'll get a bunch of different types of voice that could just be the style, but it's also different accents. So let's say you want a British voice, an Irish, you want Australian, whatever. You can select whatever you prefer. So that's sort of like how that works. But then the magic here is that you can type in any language, right? So I'm Danish originally for anyone wondering where my accent is from.

Let me type in, I meet now Alex. As you see here, it just automatically is the text that I'm typing in Danish. Now the flag has changed to Danish. and so on so forth, right? So you just put in whatever language that you want the videos to come out in, and that's really as simple as it is. Now, in this tech box, we can do a bunch of other things as well. If I want to have a different gesture, for example,

let's say at some point in the video, I want the avatar to hit not yes or raise the eyebrows. I can put that in with this little kind of killed. How many gestures are there? There's five right now. It's a little beta feature, but we're adding a lot in the common ones. Are the gestures made by computer, or did you have the actors actually make the gesture and then?

They're made by computers. So that's a big part of the fundamental tech platform that we're switching into is essentially that the avatars become much more live, right? They look much more realistic. They can do much more things. You have disappointed in there? Like, just completely, I'm just completely disappointed in you. You didn't get the answer correct. You can have a lot of fun with the gestures, like putting like your hand on your, what is that?

Like face palm, you just do total face palm. Oh my God. And this is just not to be dystopian, but. In a Black Mirror episode, this is how you'll be laid off. Tech layoffs personalized, because I assume you can personalize these too. Like, I could put in, you know, percentage, first name percentage and have like a custom one made for each employee I'm laying off or giving a raise to. Exactly.

So I just put in a arrival here. I just might click and put an arrival. So I can put in like first name. You'll be familiar with this from like mail merge and similar styles of things. Right. I'm creating a template where you can also switch out the background images, videos, and all that sort of stuff. But what happens from here on is, like, I've typed in some text.

That's great. That's a scripted my video. But then, you know, one of the big unlocks and the thing that we discovered early on was for this to really be something that can be used by anyone, you have to be able to make a video end-to-end in here, right? So we have this sort of tool that sits around it. It'll be, you know, something like a PowerPoint or a camera. I'm just going to open up a template there.

So you can put in, you know, your text. You can upload your own custom funds. Right. Yeah. So I can have the post on the left and then just right behind them. like they're a weathercaster or a, you know, a weather person. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You could have the video behind them, you know, saying, hey, welcome to your first day at Stripe.

Today we're going to go over our HR policies. Here's what you need to know. And the HR policies could be done here. And like you're saying, hey, you know, we have a new HR policy. We're going to add June 19th, that's a holiday and we're going to take away one of the floating holidays. And instead of having two floating holidays, you now have one. Boom, you just put it in there. every new person understands that. And you could send that just that one slide to everybody in the

company announcing like we did. Hey, June 19th is now our, you know, whatever, ninth official holiday of the year, you have one floating holiday to choose from. Exactly. For many knowledge workers, over 50% of their day, it's filled with doing tedious, repeatable tasks. We all know this. They're technically working, right? But are they being productive? Are they driving the business forward in any way? Or is it busy work? Imagine if you recaptured 50% of that person's time. Think about all the things you could redeploy and all the projects you could finish. Well, now you can.

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Love it. Where I think this is interesting, right? So I think up until now, this is like video as you know it. It's a smarter way of creating video. But what's exciting for me about not just AI video, but any kind of like generative AI tech right now is it opens up an entirely new world. And we're just dimming our feet in this. Right now, I think all these technologies are kind of like the first websites.

They look like newspapers on the screen because that's kind of what people could imagine back then, right? Today, websites are very different. They have links. There's audio video content. We have newsfeeds that are personalized to everyone. A website is very different than a paper magazine today. Our bet is that the same thing is going to happen to AI video. So right now we just understand there as like an MP4 file, right,

but we've eliminated the camera from the equation. But really, this is going to be an entirely new kind of media object moving forward. Maybe we won't even call the video in a few years. And a lot of what that I think is about is like the UX of how you create these things. So I'll give you a very simple example of how when you work with AI and you don't work with camera footage, you can do cool things. So let's say you have my script here. So it says this is the same title screen layout.

In here, I want to have an. I want to have this title text element in my video come in right here. What I'll do here is just add a marker. This is marker 1 here. I'm going to click on my text element on the canvas. I'm going to scroll down. Then I'm just going to tell the app that I want this particular element to fade in at marker number one.

Pretty simple. But when I didn't play the video, then what's going to happen is that this text title in my video is going to come in at the point in the script that I wanted to come in. That is of course, I mean, that's cool. That's easier than doing it in Adobe Premiere. We have to sit with different layers and the timeline and things like that. But where this becomes really interesting, right, is if I type something in front of this, then it'll just move down.

So it's completely responsive, right? Right. Now imagine that you're translating the video, which is a massive headache today, right? Then French is 20% longer than German, who is a bit shorter than Japanese. So if you are, it's a video manager. Exactly. All of this stuff, you just translate the text. It just works in different language.

You don't really have to do anything else. In the future, you know, all this stuff. I think will be much more personalized. Maybe it's interactive. You can talk to the avatar. I really think we're just dipping our feed in this stuff, but we're really building for a new type of media format. We're not just building to make a better tool for making MP4s, right?

And we're dipping our feed in here. I think this industry is just so early. When you generate this, it just generates you an MP4 and then you would copy this into your learning management system or whatever it is. Exactly. But our bet is that over time it will be something different, right? And that would probably also require a new video infrastructure where every single video might be personalized

to everyone was watching it. Maybe you can just ask the editor, hey, sorry, I didn't really understand that. Could you explain it in a different manner? We have all these amazing technologies that are false multipliers. GPT is an obvious one here, right? That can help you write the script.

We also have that functionality. Stable diffusion can generate the images for you. I think when you think of all these tools that of working together in the next three to four, five years, I think it's going to be absolutely amazing the things that we can build once we get rid of the camera. You will not need to export these videos

eventually they'll just live at a URL on your service or a white label URL and then you don't need to export it because that then leads to all kinds of problems if you're having to upload it to another system and then compliance maybe you forgot to upload something it just puts a human into the process and I guess your idea here is if you had all 40 of the lessons to be an employee at a fast food restaurant you could then ask a questions and just you could have this on an iPad or somewhere in the, you know, at the workstation and say, hey, remind me how to make a Big Mac or do, you know, what is a double double animal style and it'll just be like, oh, yeah, double double animal style and just play the video, you know, how to make a double double

animal style and the person doesn't have to feel bad about not remembering and the chat GPT interface will be able to interpret what they're asking. I mean, it's just. Exactly. Imagine your salesperson, you're on a call after the call. You just get a two, three minute long kind of feedback video, right? Because the transcripts have been taken out, GPT4, whatever, maybe a different tool than us has analyzed, you know, what can you do better, talk a bit less, remember to disobjection,

face it in this way. Like, there's so many things you can do with this. And I think it's just kind of really exciting to see what people will build once. We have an API today, a bunch of users using that. But I think as the technology evolves, we'll really see a lot of varying use cases evolve. They'll just fundamentally be very different from, like,

video as we know video today. If you think about this, a great demo, by the way, anything else you want to show in the demo? And for folks who are listening, you can go to YouTube.com slash this weekend and you can find the demo of this. Yeah, so sure. I mean, maybe just give you a cool real-life example.

This is one of our amazing customers, GoCardless, right? They've built the entire university using Sothea videos. So what you're seeing on screen here is sort of their hub for learning how to use GoCardless as one of their customers. I mean, it's all the kind of, this entire value prop we've talked about already, right? Like videos are much better way to communicate with people in 2020. With these videos, they just go back in, edit it.

All these are created entirely in the platform, right? And then they're served up by Wistia probably or something. Exactly. Exactly. That's an interesting thing. If you look at Wistia's business, which I love, they do really great compliance things where you can stop for a prompt or a question or capture an email address, you know, whatever.

And so I think there's some great API uses there. Amazing job. Let's sort of then level up this discussion. I know the company's high growth, you're tripling revenue year over year. You raised about just over 150 million. I got 200 employees doing this or so. And so let me ask you a question about how you think about running your own company. I have noticed I'm forcing my employees to use chat GPT for every day, barred, etc.

I'd say about 60% I got over the line. The other 40% basically got the summer to, get their butts in gear, if they don't, they're out. I'm dead serious. Like, if you can't use chat GP4 effectively, can't work for me starting September 1st. So for people hearing this, I've been pretty gentle about it, but now it's going to be a mandate. I'm going to start having people tested on their chat GPT4 ability. Why? Because once people start using it, what I'm finding is they become maybe between 1% and 10% more effective at their job every month. If you compound those numbers at butt, let's call it, I don't know, three,

percent, that means in every 3 percent divided, let's just say 2 percent, that means every 36 months you'd be twice as good at your job. If it was 4 percent, you know, every 18 months, you'd be twice as good at your job. And that means I don't ever have to hire anybody, because the pace of our growth, if everybody just commits to being 5 percent better at their job every month, they become twice as good at their job every 14 months. So do you think you can just keep growing your company without hiring people and just making the existing team more effective through using these tools? I mean, we use GPT everywhere.

I think I'm very aligned with you. It's something that I don't think there's any function that can't use GPT. We use it in the most random of tasks, like if you just want fun example, right? But when you have to record your avatar, that's like a four, five-minute process, just be to the camera. We want to get like a nice variation of things that you say. We use GPT4 to just generate infinite amount of scripts, right? Otherwise, we have to sit down, write a different script for every single person.

Now we get a great variety of what people are reading out to the camera, which is great for our algorithms. I think for us, I mean, we'll continue to grow the team. I think people still want to talk to a salesperson. I think in our case, R&D, we do very fundamental R&D here, right? So we publish papers. We have a team around 40, 45 primarily PhDs, solving some really hard things here. And we'll need more headcount to that. GPT4 is not going to do that yet.

I really see it more as just kind of like up-leveling everyone. I don't think we'll stop hiring people because of GBT4 but I definitely think it changed the shape of a lot of functions, right? And when you think about it, if you have 40 people in the development team, how much better are your developers

get, you have, how many developers, how many engineers you got, Walpark? 80, I think. Okay, so we got 80 engineers. How much better did they get this year using co-pilot? Would you guess, if you had to guess, on average, how much more effective

are they at writing code? probably 20, 30% like that right if you're going to do with 20. It means you hired 8, that means 20% of 80 you hired 16 people. Absolutely.

I mean, and then do you think this is accelerating, staying the same, or slowing down? Do you think the gains in 2024 will be faster? Do you think it would be 20% in 2024? Do you think it would be 40% or 10%

if you had to guess one of those three numbers? 10, 20 or 30. I think, I mean, there's no doubt that all the technology are, I just still incredibly early, right? So they're accelerating. So that means next year, you got a, whatever it is, 96, we'll round it up to 100 developers. And you think it's going to get 30% right.

That means you're hiring 30 new developers next year without having them. This is the profound thing. When I walk people through this and I reflect back to founders, what they're telling me, I think the obvious thing to do is to focus on the productivity of the existing team. Because when you add people, it doesn't make an organization faster. it actually slows it down because you've got to onboard those people, culture, this and that. I think companies, the really great companies,

are going to focus on individual performance, getting those 30% gains, 10%, 20% gains, whatever it is, consistently for the next three or four years, and not add headcount. And it's completely doable. And it just requires a brain shift of writing a job wreck and doing a search. What does that typically take?

30 days, 60 days, you know, probably 60 days worth of time and probably four weeks of effort, right? Definitely. That's a lot more than making just, you know, doing some professional development with existing people, in my mind. Sure. I think the way we think about it is I think we've always been very conservative on hiring. So we run up a very much sustainable business. And I'm obsessed with how much revenue do we bring in per employee as a kind of a metric for like how much are we leading forward? forward into growth.

And I think especially if you compare that kind of number to what's the average salary, for me, that's a great benchmark for like how out of touch with reality you are. When we started the company, we found the company, we've always run the company like a business. I think there's a big problem in Silicon Valley with people with like overhiring. I think obviously now that that story is very different. But in 2021, right, it was just, it was just crazy. I mean, looking back at the companies hiring 600 engineers in one year and thinking that that's going to make you more productive, you'd probably be.

way better off just sticking with 30 people, right? So I think the productivity question is very good. And I think the best company is going to be the ones who utilize these tools, not just as developers, but in customer support, in content marketing, in every single facet of the business. I mean, that's what you're doing. You're literal, the purpose of your tool is to not have to hire an AV production company. And the fact is, you know, people used to hire a production company to do even the most,

you know, short video. and now you literally had to have a studio in your office. Like, people would build a broadcast studio for a quarter million dollars at Yahoo. Actually, they had probably a $10 million broadcast studio so that their CEO, so Marissa or before her, whoever, could then address the entire company. And they said, yeah, you know, we have this $10 million studio. We do Yahoo finance every day. The CEO or whoever can use this to talk to 1,000 people to 10,000 people. And now it's like, or they could turn on Zoom.

and for 1995 a month, they could talk to everybody. And I'll tell, I think one of the stories we talk a lot about in Syntesia writers, we go even further back, let's say we go back to like the 1960s, 70s, something like that, right? Producing text was literally someone's job. Most people did not go to work and typed out a lot of things, right? You don't have a secretary who would, like, write out of things. You had copyrighters. And if you look at today, like, writing is a part of every single white-collar job, right?

There's not a job where you're not like doing some sort of writing. And that's just normal now. We don't really think about that because, you know, why would you not? I think it's going to be the same for video content, right? In 10 years, I think just as everyone today writes things all the time, everyone will create video content all the time. The reason we're writing is because it's the only really truly scalable way of communicating with one another, right?

It's really easy writing on a keyboard. But as it becomes as easy to create audio, video, maybe in imagery, I think we'll just really see a lift in how we communicate. We already see this to some extent, right? Look at TikTok, for example. It's like the interface is almost only. video. Your lyric just scrolling through videos, there's almost no text left in the interface, which is very different for like a Facebook, right, where it's all about text and Instagram is maybe

halfway text, halfway images. So, I think if you just look at history and kind of, you know, the trajectory of how we communicate, it's always about being more visual, more interactive, and these technologies are going to be the things that truly unlock this at scale. And I think that's the really exciting part for me, right? It's just, you know, 10 years, everyone will be creating video as part of whatever job there in. Yeah, it's amazing. when you're selling to B2B buyers, you really need to get your pitch in front of decision makers, the people who control the purse strings out of business. Why? The upper level execs, they're the ones who eventually make the purchasing decision. At some point, you need to have

the CFO, the VP of Ops, the CTO, the CEO, the president themselves approving any kind of big spend. But here's a problem. How do you find those people, especially on social media? You don't, unless you use LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is about to hit a billion users, 930 million members. In that 930 million members are 180 million senior level executives. And they don't want you to know this, but there's 10 million C level executives like me on there. Those are the ones you need to build consensus with to get your product integrated into these companies. They have the purchasing power and LinkedIn ads is specifically meant for B2B markers. No other platform can offer you these people and all the data inside of LinkedIn exists only there and nowhere else.

You want to be where business is done. LinkedIn equals business, business equals LinkedIn. It's that simple. Whenever we post content on LinkedIn, we get really thoughtful responses from business people. Make B2B marketing everything it can be. And get a $100 credit on your next campaign from your pal J-Cal and the fine people over at LinkedIn.com. Go to LinkedIn.com slash next unicorn.

That's LinkedIn.com slash next unicorn. In terms and conditions supply, because, hey, they're giving you a lot. a hundee. I'm curious when you look at this technology as a technologist who's been grinding at this for, you know, getting close to a decade. And I mentioned at the top of the show, it's a dual fate technology. There's a group of people who believe this could lead to massive job destruction at a pace in which we will not replace jobs. You and I just had this conversation about how efficient, more efficient humans can be. We both put it at 30% a year. I think we're exactly in sync. And when I had Aaron Levy, Brian Chesky, and Reid Hoffman, I asked them how much on average are people

becoming more efficient already? They actually put the number at 20 to 40 percent, either 20, 30 or 40. I think two of them picked 30 and one of them picked 20. And you and I just picked 20 or 30, and I pick 30. So let's put the number at 30 percent a year. That means everybody doubles their productivity every two years. So are you in the camp that let's just start with jobs, not Terminator and it's the end of humanity? Let's just talk about jobs in the, and you're in Europe. I'm in the United States. Europe's got a very protectionist attitude towards employment, pretty hard to fire people and EU's really concerned about AI. Jobs are going to be eliminated at a massive rate. Your technology eliminates the need for camera operators,

a studio, a location, translators, I mean, dozens, and I mean, if you keep succeeding at this rate, you will eliminate millions of jobs just with your own piece of sophomore. So do you, are you concerned that those jobs will not get refilled? Are you in the camp of we will have universal basic income?

This is going to be a tragedy. And in the dual fate, this is going to be caused riots in the street because people are going to be 30% unemployed. Or are you in the camp of humans, uh, are creative beings and just like podcasting and being an influencer, uh,

or, uh, being a podcast producer, whatever jobs didn't exist previously will now exist. And so humans will find something to do with their time. Where do you land? I'm definitely, I'm definitely the long-winded questions.

No, that's great. I'm definitely the latter camp. I think in 10 years, being a camera operator is, is, is probably not like, um, you know, the most desirable industry a job to be in. But I think what can easily be missed here is also the kind of expectations of what

in my world of communications, right? So it's like, okay, all these people who are doing all this content today, they'll be disrupted to some extent. But I think, you know, the expectation would just be that everything is video in 10 years. So we will all need to be able to produce video content. And I also think that there's

going to be, I think human creativity, I think the absolute best films, music, like whatever, in the creative sphere that you're kind of doing, right? I think that's not just about production. That's very much what we are focused on. I think a lot of these tools are today. There's already lots of people who make video content.

There's already lots of people who make music, right? But it's still only like a very small percentage of those people really make it to the top. And I don't think that's because they have better production tools. I think that's about creativity, understanding, cultural trends, remixing things that haven't been remixed before. I think that's like the pace of AI right now. it's hard to claim that it's never going to be as creative as humans will be

but I definitely think that this is about lifting all boats and ultimately making everyone more productive but of course there's got to be job disruption we don't have we're not people making we don't have that many blacksmiths anymore after horses got replaced by cars

the typing pool you referenced earlier is gone there's also no more horses and buggies and we don't have the people who clean up the horse behind the horses and buggy which was a job for humans. In New York, you literally had people with shovels who shoveled horseshs for a living. People had to walk with a big red flag in front of a car, right?

When they were driving in the beginning, in the early days of cars, that was literally a job. So. All right, so let's go to the next one, which you have to own a bit of, which is defix. How do, and I'm asking just for the audience's sake, if there's any mids in the audience, when I ask a dumb question or a seemingly dumb basic question, I'm doing it to have a open-minded conversation about that conversation, not because I don't have my own views on the answer. So here's the question.

Defakes are going to be confusing two people. There was just an example of a fake person on Twitter, writing all kinds of racist stuff to create animosity in the United States with our original sin and the most painful part of our history here in America, slavery and race relations. It's the wound that keeps getting. ripped open and guess what? People want to keep ripping it open. So they make fake videos and they incite racial divide or they incite divide with fake videos. Your tool, perfect tool to

create those. So what is your responsibility as the CEO of a company that allows you to create fake avatars or synthetic avatars in combating this? Or do you have any responsibility and is the responsibility on the individual to not trust everything they see? and to be questioning. How do you look at this issue? I think we absolutely have a responsibility and we do a lot. I think as with anything, there's no one single answer to like what can we do to alleviate this problem.

I view this primarily through two lenses. One for me as a CEO of Sintesia, how do I make sure that people are not misusing our tool? I'll talk a bit more about that. And secondly, I also spend a lot of my time with NGOs, governments, media organizations and like what can we as society do to alleviate the misuse of these tools, right? because no matter what I do, there's a lot of going to be a lot of open-source stuff. There'll be a lot of other players who may have less ethical standards than we do. And I think a big part of this is going to be about education as you propose yourself.

In terms of what we are doing, so for us, air safety is incredibly important. We found the company on like an ethical framework, consent control, collaboration. I think the first one consent is fairly obvious. You can't make an avatar of someone without the explicit consent. You can't just go in and upload a video of like a politician, something like that. It goes through like a K-Y-C-style process when you actually make an avatar. On top of that, we do very, very heavy content moderation. So we definitely have a view on what kind of videos you can create and what kind of videos you can't create.

We have an entire team who sits with that. It's a mix of algorithms trying to figure out content that we don't want to generate and also human moderators looking through content. It's really hard and we're not perfect. I know you've been involved with the Twitter team. So you know that moderation at scale is a very, very difficult task. And we are creating a lot of videos every single day. For us, I think what's interesting is that we have what we call red content, which is a country you obviously don't want, right?

So, like, hate speech, you know, swear words, things like that. Those things are actually sort of fairly easy to detect. Where it gets much harder is in the kind of gray area content. So let's say you're creating content about cryptocurrencies, for example, right? Are you explaining how blockchain works? Or are you trying to get me to throw all my savings into a get rich kick scheme? That ultimately is going to lose me all my money. Are you creating health content that's about,

a great diet or you're trying to sell me pills that promise that I'll lose 10 kilos in a week, whatever. Oh, my Lord. Yeah, you have to become as the platform, do you feel as the platform, it's your job to police that? 100%. So we police that very heavily. Yeah, very heavily. So if you try to create content, even news content, we've also, you can only create

news content if you're an enterprise client and we know who you are, basically, right? So if you just sign up a third dollar plan and you try to create content around politicians, for example, that's not going to make it free. Wisconsin moderation? I have to say, that's really, you're really taking it seriously because if nobody in their right mind would expect Microsoft Office or Google Doc Suite or Soho, whatever suite of office, in any office suite, nobody would expect them to police the output of PowerPoint. If somebody, some Nazi group in the United States wanted to create a Nazi PowerPoint,

there's no way Microsoft or Google slides is going, you know what, we need to have somebody looking at the output here. and when the keyword Nazi comes up or white power comes up, we need to get in there and stop them from using it. So kudos to you. I mean, I think some people might. Yeah, go ahead. I love you made that connection because that's what we always talk about.

What I usually explain to people, right, is that these content creation tools, and I think what's happening right now is that content moderation sort of traditionally has been very much at the point of distribution, right? So as you said, you make a PowerPoint about something horrible, or maybe not a PowerPoint video about something horrible, and then it's up to YouTube to figure that out and take it down, or Twitter or whatever. And I think what's going to happen

with more more of these AI tools is that at the point of creation, we're going to monitor what kind of content you're creating and making sure that people are creating horrible content. Every business will, of course, be different. We've decided to take a very forward-leading approach to this.

We work with the Fortune 100 and I have no incentive to someone paying me $30 a month to make questionable content. And I also really think that's what's right for the world, right? We can't keep this back forever, but I think right now we're clearly technically way ahead of our competitors. And I think it's probably a good thing that we wrote it out on the side in this way. And then, you know, down the line, once open source libraries become good enough,

people have kind of seen avatar videos before and hopefully it'll be kind of like more on God, right? But it's a really difficult question. Look, and it's going to be a problem. It's not about that. I think, Victor, you're taking it seriously. I think most people would say, hey, we're just a tool. if people want to rob a bank with a Volvo or a Tesla or a BMW, that's their choice.

It's not BMW or Volvo's concern. It's not their responsibility. But you kind of fall more into, hey, this is a powerful tool. This is not an average tool. Therefore, it would be as if a gun manufacturer said, hey, we know in, I don't know, whatever, Texas, you can just walk up and buy a gun. But since our guns are pretty darn powerful,

we're going to ask that we have your name and you register your gun and you get insurance for it and you sign off on this code of conduct. Now, in America, that would be unconstitutional, but I'm giving an example here that if you do sell to the public, you have a choice of who you sell to and you might not want to. The gun manufacturers have a religious crazy thing here in America where they believe everybody should be able to trade these things like, you know, they're trading old comic books and they have gun shows where people just trade these things willy-nilly. You know, it would be quite refreshing if, you know, the person who sold the AR-15 or the most popular assault rifle said, hey, we're only going to sell in these states under these circumstances, and we want everybody registered. And you're licensing the gun from us for 50 years. And if you transfer it, we want to know who you sold it to. And they can actually build those laws.

You probably get fought, but I do think being thoughtful is important. And I actually think that, like, I find that in this industry, like most companies, I think, in a long those lines, like Open AI, of course, is also doing quite a lot of moderation and like what you can make DBT4 say, which can be annoying as a user sometimes. The tradeoff is UX, right? And it also is for us, like, also have users who complain that their videos is coding content moderation. But ultimate is like, it's a tradeout, right? And I'm really happy to see that at least the most powerful technologies right now are being kind of somewhat safeguarded. I think that's good for the world. Did you see the Open AI lawsuit last week by chance?

I saw that. And that's going to be very interesting to see how this is going to pan out. Just to give the audience a little refresher here, Open AI has been sued by a group of anonymous plaintiffs, individuals. Lawsuit alleges Open AI violated privacy laws by secretly scraping 300 billion words from the Internet from, quote, books, articles, websites, and posts, including personal information obtained without consent. The lawsuit is seeking 3 billion in potential damages based on a category of harmed individuals estimated to be in the millions. plaintiffs are anonymous, but some online information about their backgrounds revealed. It's all of the map, social workers, minors, all chat chip D users, 16 total plaintiffs, you know, they're cross-a-day. The training data is important here.

It's very important. How do you look at what would be a logical and pragmatic and fair way for people building language models to get permission and for people, people whose content is being used to get compensation or to be able to opt in or opt out. What's your solution, Victor? I think it's a really hard question. It's been a theme for many years, right? But the emergence of these very, very large models, I think have changed it a little bit. So if you kind of go back one year, one or a half year, whatever, let's say before

CHAPGPT was released and we had the big cultural moment around that, a lot of companies including ourselves, we're like, should we scrape data online, should we not do it for us, we've always stayed within what we know is definitely okay, we're just getting permission to every single video that we use to train our algorithms, right? That's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of money, it's not of time to get that instead of just scraping it off the internet because we believe that that's the right thing to do. I still think that's fundamentally my kind of belief,

but I think what has changed now is that these very large models, GPT style technologies, I think with them is that they're literally impossible to create if you don't train an internet-scale data. And if you train on Internet-scale data, it is almost like, you know, it's just going to be impossible to get consent from everyone. Like, if you need to get permission from every single author of a tweet or a Facebook update or a blog post of that, that's not going to be feasible, right? I don't think I have, I don't have the answer as like how, what should happen here. I can tell you that from our perspective, we care a lot about having clean data. and I hope that's not going to make us make it harder for us to compete in the future

because we're staying within those boundaries. Right now, we definitely have some set of companies who say, you know, we'll ask for forgiveness down the line and just, you know, scrape the internet, train our models on whatever data we can get our hands of. There's other companies who are saying, you know, we'll actually stay within the kind of boundaries where we definitely know is okay and do the hard work to get the data both in time and money. For me, the most important thing as the founder and of Sintesia is just clarifying.

Right now, nobody has any idea of what's okay, what's not okay. And I hope that the governments around the world will unite around some sort of guidance on what should you and what should you not do, right? But it's a really hard question. I don't have to answer for it. Yeah. I think we as an industry should get ahead of this. And a very simple solution I have is robots.

TXT is how Google decides if they're going to scrape your side. or I should say scrape. No, they are scraping it. They scrape your site and index it. You get the benefit of getting traffic from Google, but you also have the choice to opt out. There needs to be something that's not binary on or off. It should be you can scrape the site with permission.

Please ask first. Or two, you can scrape the site for a minimum of $1 million per year. Or you can scrape the site for $1 million a year. or you can scrape the site for $1 million a year for $500,000 a year if you send $500,000 in referral traffic back at a minimum, et cetera, et cetera.

You can come up with all kinds of licensing arrangements and those licensing should be, since we have smart contract technology, easily to enforce. And so what OpenAI could do, or let's say Twitter and Reddit, Twitter could say, in order to do this, you have to go through our API and get permission.

Reddy could say, you know what? You simply have to pay us $1 per user of your system per year with a minimum of a $1 million commitment and it's paid by buying these tokens here, put in your

credit card and then put in your hash. So there you have it. I agree. I think this is one of the areas where crypto is actually a really interesting solution where we could I think it's a great way for computers to transfer with computers, right?

I think that's, there's a lot of, of interesting things you can do with that. It's also like, I mean, I spend a lot of time with regulators and I mean, evolve both the EU AI Act, which is very, very restrictive and also in the UK legislation. And one thing is interesting, right, is that there's this sort of debate around. And of course, this is by the AI companies who say, look, we shouldn't, we shouldn't moderate what you use to train your models. We should moderate the outcome of those models, right? So now that's think of this is like, you could train all the,

world's images, but you have to make sure that if you have an image generator, for example, if you type in, you know, create me this image in this style of Andy Warhol, for example. Yeah. Then you can, at a prompt, you could block and say, Andy Warl does not want to have anyone prompt images in his style. Brilliant. Good punch up. Yeah.

Or, yeah, it's really, oh, you know what? Just to build on yours. If you typed in Andy World, say, Andy Warholed photos need to be cleared for, you know, non-commercial use at $100 per image. for commercial use, click here for your license options. And it could just be automatic where you could go buy tokens, API calls essentially. And OpenAI has this.

You buy a bunch of calls. You say, hey, listen, for this number of calls, searches, whatever, you know, just load up on your Andy Warhol tokens or your Marvel tokens or your Disney tokens. And it's all for non-commercial. But yeah, if you want to make Disney characters, yeah, just buy $100 worth of tokens or $50 worth of tokens and have that it. Brilliant idea. So get at the prompt level, anything that is IP protected, we can make an IP. This is such a good idea.

Are you the first person to, did you hear this from somebody else or did you just come up with this? I think I came up with one of these meetings. I think it's just the most, I think it's the most pragmatic way to ensure that what, because a lot of the concern from people like artists today, right, which the world that I'm in, is like someone can just create, you know, 100,000 different images and the style of banks, you and the wall or whatever. And this is what people are concerned about. think rightly so.

And this to me is a very practical way that could be implemented tomorrow. I mean, open AI is already to some extent doing this, right? Like if you ask it about specific people, it won't give you an answer unless that person is a public persona. So I think there is something very interesting around like kind of limiting, limiting what these models can output to not include copyrighted works, for example, right? So I feel like because I think the other solution with tokens is amazing, but we all just, we both know that that's going to take, that's not going to be implemented.

in six months, right? That's a much bigger project to get all this stuff sort of running and I think there's a lot of inherent issues with it. I think what's going to be interesting, especially on the tech side of things with chat, GBT, right? Is, okay, so you have this travel block and you publish a lot of content and that GPT has been trained on that and you go and you go and you go and you go and you go and you go, you're going to, you go and you're going, you're, in the North Vietnam as a planet, right? And actually, a lot of what is learned comes from that travel block goes. And all of a sudden you don't need to go as a website anymore.

I think that's, I don't think the technology necessarily is there yet, but it's going to be there very soon where maybe you don't really need to visit that many websites, which are just text. That's going to have a huge impact on those creators. I again, don't know what the solution is, but I think we're just very early, but that feels like one of the kind of inevitable things that's going to happen as these technologies get better and better. You have been an awesome.

unexpectedly awesome guest. Well done. I'd like to have you come back on the program and maybe do an AI roundtable. Would you be open to that? Yeah, we'd love it. Okay. Producer Nick, are you on the call?

Yes. Okay, producer Nick. Victor is very smart and insightful. I'd love to pair him on one of our AI roundtables in the next 60 days. You know, maybe with Sunny, and just have him come on and we just wrap out since he's deep in this

and he's got really great ideas. Everybody check out Symphesia spelled S-N-Y S-Y-N-T-H-E-H-E-S-I-A. Are you the dot-com or dot aI-I-O? Dot-O, okay, there you go. Syn-thesia. And maybe he's hiring, maybe he's not. I don't know.

I may have convinced him to never hire again, but I think he's got some careers. His staff is watching this podcast. Are we going to hire people again? Or did you drink the J-Cal-Cool-Aid of just keep having earnings go up? I think this is what takes us out of the recession is more, and I don't worry about people's jobs. I think,

Victor, there's going to be 10,000 more startups that were not possible before AI, that will be equally. Equally, they're, they're AAI companies, BAI companies, is before AI companies and there's after AI companies.

There's a whole swath of companies that are possible after AI, uh, you know, exists. Just like before Christ and after. Christ. You know, things were possible

that weren't. All right. I mean, it's just going to be so much easier to build products, right? It's like, English is the

English is the new interface. Yeah. Exactly. I totally. I think this is what, I think this is what, this is what's going to scare people, but should inspire them.

If you speak English or any language, any human language, you're going to be able to produce videos, produce illustrations, produce incredible writing, songs,

images, code, apps, the verticalization and the specialization is going to be democratized and everybody's going to be, you know,

let's call it, maybe not a great songwriter, but an okay, an okay songwriter, a good one. Everybody's going to be able to write a good blog post, maybe not a great one,

an okay one, a good one. Eventually may be great. But if you thought, hey, I have to hire a blogger to write this or I have to hire a PR

person to write this press release. The answer is you're not going to. Everybody in the organization is going to be able to write a pressure release. That doesn't mean you might have some comms expert who's going to do the strategy, but we're all leveling up. And the idea that we would sit there and worry about the ink and the hammers in the typewriter anymore is over. And I think you just have to say, listen, we took the typewriter and we threw it in the garbage and now everyone's on word processors. Okay, we took some of these jobs that were tedious and we got rid of them. My hobby is music production, right? And that's what I'm. I grew up being interested in.

And it's just amazing how if you look at the shape of the music industry, right, back in 85 versus today, how it's been flattened out, talent can come from anywhere. It's about making great music less than it's about knowing the right people. Like all those things, I think, is going to come to the tech industry as well, right? And we've seen some of that over the last five years, but I think as the kind of art of coding becomes more accessible, it's like, you know what? Why couldn't you be an eight-person company sitting somewhere in, you know, Norway or Denmark, something like that and create something absolutely amazing.

And I'm very excited for that. I think I love technology that democratizes and enables people to do more with that time. It's still going to require great ideas. You're still going to have a great product sense. You're still going to be a great songwriter, right? If you really want to build something cool, but we can just remove all the barriers that exist to creation today, right? And that's going to be fantastic.

All right. You've been awesome, dude. Thanks for giving me an hour of your time and sharing it with this week in Startups audience. This week in Startups audience. Founder Fridays are coming, and they're going to come to your city. You can go to Founder Fridays. Tech. I'm looking for some folks who want to host Founder Fridays.

It's only for founders. If you're not a founder, you can't come. And we just did the first one here in the Bay Area. 50 people showed up. It was awesome. So this weekend startups founder Fridays are starting in September, and we're looking for hosts. These used to be called Twist Meetups.

We'll call them Founder Fridays. We thought we'd come up with a fun brand. Every Friday, 5 to 8 p.m. after work, everybody gets together and shows what they're working on, and we'll see you all next time on this week's service. Bye-bye.