No Priors Ep. 2 | With Runway ML’s Cristobal Valenzuela

(music plays) Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me here. I'm super excited to chat with you.

So, can we start all the way back? I think you are the only person I know with degrees in economics, business, design, and then also went to art school. How did, how'd that happen, and then how'd you stick an interest in ML in there that became very real at some point?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I've always been very curious about just things in general, and so I've been trying to, like, uh, find ways of channeling that curiosity. I'm originally from Chile, and, um, I studied in Chile a combination of, like, business and econ, and then went into design, and it was a very particular design kind of like program. I spent a lot of time with physical computing, which is like working with hardware, with, like, um, electronics, mostly applied to design and, like, art. And while I was doing that, I was also consulting, so for a moment I ha- I thought I had, like, two lives. Uh, I was, like, doing art, uh, on the one end, with, like, Arduinos and electronics, and on the other side I was, like, consulting for these banks, which was very, like, different. But I love it. I think it's, it's, it's perspectives and worldviews that are very opposite at the same time you gain from being at both. And around that time, I just spent, like, three, four years doing that in Chile and started, like, teaching myself software engineering, like programming. That was just driven by curiosity. Uh, again, just, like, exploring or experimenting, which I think has... I would consider a constant, like, characteristic of how we think about what I wanna do and what I wanna, like, learn. And it also has been combating in the company itself, in, in Runway. Long story short, I, I kind of, like, fell in love or was experimenting with, um, early computer vision models in 2016, '15, and then went into a rabbit hole. S- apply and got a scholarship at NYU, and then spent, like, two years in, in art school. ITP, uh, that's the name of the program. It's a very unique program. Happy to go deeper into (laughs) , into that particular program b- because for me it was very fundamental kind of, like, piece in, uh, in my career of, like, understanding how to bridge business, design, art, and, and, and technology in a cohesive way. But yeah, I, I think just curiosity, I think, drives me a lot.

Amazing. And, uh, now you have one life that combines those.

(laughs)

But in the art side, how should I picture Arduino electronic art?

Media arts probably is the best, uh, way of, uh, describing it. (laughs) I think I was just interested in the wild y- the, the kind of, like, experimental side of technologies. How do you take, like, this, this hardware, these systems, these networks, and, and build interactive experiences? So I had the chance of presenting at a few festivals, uh, with, with, actually with one of my co-founders. There we were at, at Ars Electronica, which is this large, like, um, electronic arts festival and media arts. I think for me, media arts is a way of, like, expressing a worldview, um, using technology like any other form of art. Like, you just kind of like experimenting and, like, reflecting and, and, and expressing a worldview using a piece of, like, a tool. And in this case, like, it happens to be that we like to express it via, like, computers and software, and writing software is a form or an art- of art, and write- making hardware is also s- form of art. One thing I've, I remember early on in my career when I was dabbling between, like, art and, and business, I met this very famous Chilean artist that, he's a photographer, and he was just, like, mentoring me, and, like, we were chatting, and he, he was speaking to me, and he was like, "How do you think about doing these kind of, like, installations?" And like, "I was exposing it at a museum there, like National Art Museum in, in Chile." And I told him, like, "It's, it's a wonderful new world. Like, I've never been exposed to this world." And I remember the answer, it struck with me forever, which was like, "Chris, this is the same world. We all live in the same world, right? It's the same, right? We just build, like, silos and, like, arbitrary definitions of what is what." And it, it just really stuck with me. I think he just said it like he wasn't really thinking about it, but it, I really, like, stuck with that. And, and I think that's, that's how I like to look of the world. Like, it's, it's just the same world. You can apply different points of views and perspective on that. We build arbitrary, like, definitions of, like, "This is, this is art, and that- that's, that's, like, design, and that's econ, and that's business." But I think true creativity and curiosity comes from just, like, looking at it as a whole, and taking things that weren't supposed to be part of one thing and then adapting them. And sometimes it's hard, because you need to, like, learn things that you've never done before, and it's uncomfortable, and it's perhaps you feel like, uh, an imposter. Like, you haven't, you shouldn't be doing this. I've learned not to care, to be honest. (laughs) I just, like, just drive by curiosity, like, you'll figure something out, and I really like that.