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This Insane AI Video Search Technology Selected by NVIDIA and Snowflake | Twelve Labs, Jae Lee

Today's story is about Jae Lee, the CEO of Twelve Labs. Twelve Labs is developing a multimodal video understanding LLM that comprehends various forms of information.

Jae Leeguest
Dec 17, 202421mWatch on YouTube

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At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Twelve Labs’ video foundation models: scrappy start, focus, and scale

  1. Jae Lee explains that Twelve Labs builds large video foundation models delivered via APIs to enable semantic search, classification, and summarization for developers and enterprises.
  2. He describes founding momentum formed during Korean Cyber Command service and the logistical challenges of building while co-founders were discharged at different times.
  3. He recounts how the team, starting with about $2,000, pursued visibility by entering an ICCV video-understanding competition, spending heavily on compute, and winning to gain market attention and investor inbound.
  4. A co-founder, Soyoung, shares lessons from early go-to-market mistakes, including pushing customers into buying before they were ready and learning to prioritize innovative early adopters who can quickly envision use cases.
  5. Jae Lee emphasizes staying focused despite mentor pressure to build specific applications, highlights how partnerships and conversations led to NVIDIA venture interest, and outlines a hiring philosophy centered on values and product-thinking.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Founders need a clear internal foundation to filter mentor advice.

He said mentors encouraged ideas like building “TikTok 2.0” or “YouTube 2.0,” and the team lost time considering products they weren’t excited about despite their conviction to build infrastructure for developers and enterprises.

With minimal resources, pick a high-leverage way to prove credibility fast.

He described how the founders started with about $2,000 after military service and chose to pursue an ICCV video-understanding competition as a way to get exposure and signal relevance despite limited resources.

Strategic, concentrated bets can accelerate progress when they create outsized visibility.

He said spending roughly $200,000 on compute in about 10 days was scary, but it enabled the team to build a strong result and win the competition, which then helped the company get noticed.

Early on, avoid forcing deals with customers who aren’t ready to adopt.

She described a customer who paid but didn’t use the product, and said the team had pushed the sale to turn a “no” into a “yes,” learning it would have been better to walk away and focus on innovators who were ready.

For novel tech, product demos plus innovative customers can define the roadmap better than scripted pitches.

She said overselling with generic ROI pitches and “sales 101” approaches wasn’t as effective as showing an indexed-video demo and letting innovative customers map the technology to their own needs; she added that customers often taught the team new use cases.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I joke about it, you know, I served the country with keyboards rather than, than, than a rifle.

— Jae Lee

Looking back, if we were to do it again, I don't know if we'll be able to do it, but some people say ignorance is bliss, and I think we were just, like, really naive and just really excited about building this company.

— Jae Lee

The founders are pretty, pretty much broke, right? Because we spent two years at, in military, and I think we had $2,000 uh, to start with.

— Jae Lee

You should probably start to optimize for hearing the no, uh, than the yes because that will help you find the right direction faster.

— Unattributed

If you try to accommodate all of the advices that you get from your mentors, your company will most likely become, like, an underwear company, totally different from what you wanted to build.

— Jae Lee

Read the available transcript
Video foundation models and APIsSemantic video search, classification, summarizationFounding during Korean Cyber Command serviceBootstrapped beginnings and early exposure strategyICCV competition and compute investmentEarly customer selection and go-to-market learningHiring engineers for values and perspective

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SPEAKERS

  • Jae Lee

    guest

    Co-founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, building video understanding foundation models and infrastructure.

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

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