Synthesia co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli shares his insights on building AI-first products based on customer needs, technology readiness, and a deep sense of curiosity
Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of AI video generation company Synthesia, discusses what it’s like to build a visionary AI-first company that focuses on user value and trust with AssemblyAI founder and CEO Dylan Fox.
Founded in 2017 by two AI researchers and two Danish entrepreneurs, Synthesia’s goal was to use cutting-edge AI technology to create a leading video editing platform that would democratize the video creation industry.
Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, describes how Synthesia helps its customers communicate their messages in the most efficient, engaging way possible—through video. In building the company, it was clear to Riparbelli that although video is the desired medium, many individuals—especially those in the corporate space—either didn’t want to get in front of the camera or didn’t have the tools to do so successfully.
This sparked an idea to create a collaborative platform that would help users more easily create and optimize professional AI-generated videos for business and personal use.
Initially, Synthesia had to work within the constraints of the available AI technology and modify its roadmap as such, but as Generative AI innovation exploded, so too has the utility and popularity of the Synthesia platform.
Here, Riparbelli sits down with AssemblyAI founder and CEO Dylan Fox to discuss a few of his main insights and takeaways from the past eight years in the AI space.
Here are a few takeaways from that conversation:
1. When you're building something brand new, it can be hard to find investors who truly understand your potential
Victor Riparbelli: “I think the lesson that we learned there—I think is that we were basically going out to the market and we were saying, hey, this crazy thing is going to happen...”
“And we had to start from scratch. Everyone thought what we were doing sounded bat shit crazy at the time. Synthetic media and AI video weren’t the current thing.”
“When you're so ahead of the market, you really need to find those missionaries who already share your view of the world. Right? And they are out there. It's just about finding them.”
2. Sometimes you have to adjust your vision to fit market needs
Dylan Fox: “Do you feel like there was an inflection point with that? Either the product or the market or the company?”
Victor Riparbelli: “The big unlock was in 2020, basically when we got the first round of funding…We treated that million dollars as the only lifeline we have to prove that we can get to the next stage.”
“As much as we thought it was very cool to make a Hollywood-quality video from a laptop, we were also very realistic that the technologies were nowhere near there. So what can be the first step towards that vision that we think we can feasibly both build and sell?”
“Then, what we learned in that period was, because we just went out and talked to everyone we could about video, was that actually there are like millions, maybe billions of people in the world who are desperate to make video, but they cannot make video… So the thesis shifted from, let's build tools for the video industry, to saying what if we can build a way to make video which is a thousand times easier and a thousand times more affordable.”
3. Balance the use cases you want to tackle with what's actually possible from a technology standpoint
Dylan Fox: “How are you figuring out what the new use cases are that you guys are able to support as the technology is getting better?”
Victor Riparbelli: “There are two ways of thinking about the technology: the pure avatar quality and then there's the platform we’ve built around it. And the reason our customers love us is because of the avatar models, but it's also because of all the additional workflow and edits that we've built around it. I think ultimately we have a scale now where we can let the users tell us.”
4. Finding success as an AI-first company involves a lot of trial and error
Dylan Fox: “What do you think are the differences in running an AI company versus running a traditional SaaS or just any traditional type of tech company?”
Victor Riparbelli: “I think one hard questions to ask yourself is when do you chase the shiny new thing, right? You can see clearly that something is going to be the future. So do you jump ship to it now or wait? And I think we've definitely made mistakes in both ways, sometimes we've been too eager and sometimes we've been too conservative. Because there's so much uncertainty with these things, right?”
“I think things are a bit different in SaaS, where if you're building a fintech company and want to support crypto, there's another set of objectives, and you can lay them out a lot easier, which means you can plan for it better and probably also mean you can execute on it faster, right?
5. Ensure you truly understand your product's unique value driver
Victor Riparbelli: “What is the primary value driver and why is your company valuable? When we started out, probably most of the value for us was the models, right? The technology in itself. And I think where we are now as a company is that the AI models are definitely a big and very important part of our value as a company, but we've built so much stuff outside of it, right?”
“All the boring stuff like permissioning, being ISO 42001 compliant, the publishing platform, all these other things together, they are very valuable because we've built the workflows.”
“I think for a lot of companies the value will be in the models. And, that's the right thing to do. And then you need to make sure you're really, really winning on the models because that's what you're betting your company on. I think for some, like us, I think probably the value of the models should decrease over time. And that's not because we don't want to do very deep research, but we build a company in a way where the value should accrue from the totality of the platform, not just from the model itself.”
6. Anchor yourself to your customer to create a successful roadmap
Dylan Fox: “A lot of times in the conversations in the AI market, it is so focused on the technology. Okay, where's it going to go in the next year, in the next five years? And I think that is a fun conversation to have, but what I don't think people talk about enough is who's your core? Who are you building this for and who's your core customer? And who's the product designed for? Because you can create a lot of differentiation once that's clear. And a lot of that isn't necessarily always on the technology level...”
Victor Riparbelli: “And that's why it's so powerful when you anchor yourself to your customer. You know, they hopefully will give you a good idea of what the correct roadmap is.”
7. The best product strategies are driven by a deep sense of curiosity and open-mindedness
Dylan Fox: “What advice do you have for either product leaders or engineering leaders or early startup founders on how they can try to find where to focus and not just on the general technology application?”
Victor Riparbelli: “I think you have to be driven by a deep curiosity first and foremost, of really exploring the problem space...”
“...Had we not been very open-minded, I think we would probably have ended up building a super complex visual effects pipeline tool for making these AI video translations.”
8. Speed to market is one of the most important factors in determining AI success
Victor Riparbelli: “It's very clear to me that AI moves in step changes and you want to make sure that you are progressing along with those. If you can, be one of the first ones to utilize one of these new step changes in the technology, it doesn't need to be that you invent it, but if you have a specific use case, you're the first one to put that out to market.”