Cris Valenzuela: AI Creators vs Hollywood Writers; How We Grew Runway into a $1.5B Company | E1054

Does it get easier over time?

It doesn't get easier. You get more used to the pain.

Chris, I am so excited for this. I heard so many great things from so many different people on your cap table, so thank you so much for putting up with my terrible British tones today.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast. Happy to be here.

That is very, very kind of you. Now listen, I spoke to Sunil at Amplify before we started, and he said to me that you and Runway is the perfect embodiment of founder/product fit. So just take me to the founding moment of the company and that a-ha moment for you. Why does he say that?

Yeah. Uh, Sunil is too kind. Runway's, uh, journey dates back to 2015, 2016, where I met my co-founders, Alejandro and Anastasios, in actually art school. Um, we went to- to a school, um, that's a very unique school that combines art and technology. It's been running for 40 years here in New York, um, ITP from- from NYU. And, um, the best way to think about it is art school for engineers and engineering school for artists. And while we were there, we were all coming from all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences from, uh, programming, engineering, business, and we started just tinkering and playing around with state-of-the-art AI at that time. I know- I know a lot of things that happen now, but try to imagine where, uh, models were and where research was, uh, 10 years ago or eight years ago. Um, and we just built a lot of different things. We built... I remember, um, Anastasios built this- this beautiful, uh, video semantic search tool that you could just type a word and it will, like, create a trailer for you, um, combining all sorts of different, uh, input videos, uh, analyzing, uh, sequences and scenes. Um, and so we started tinkering with this idea of taking AI models or research at the time and building creative tools. We built those three transformers. Uh, we- we built, using, um, LSTMs, this co-pilot for writing, and so you could... uh, that runs entirely on the browser using WebGPU, using, at the time, TensorFlow.js, which is- which is a framework that was built at the time. Um, and you could write and then, uh, and then a model was co-writing with you, uh, different sentences, trained on different authors that you liked. And so we were just building experiments and experiments over experiments, and realizing that there was something here, something special. And then we started delving into image and video generation. And again, PyTorch was, like, a year old. TensorFlow was, like, two years old. So things were very different from where we are today. Um, and I think we realized at some point that after building so many things, there was something special around both, um, where things are heading and how much passion we had to- for building these things, and for building an- an- an understanding how to take these models, uh, and apply them in a creative, artistic context. Um, and so I- I think the- the... we didn't found the company, I think the company founded us.