#188

Guests: Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia; and Josh Coyne, partner at Kleiner Perkins

When Victor Riparbelli wants to learn something, he’ll start with a YouTube video or a podcast: “I maybe buy the book on Amazon as like the fifth step,” the Synthesia CEO says. His company is trying to change the text-first (or text-only) way information is conveyed at work, making AI avatar-narrated videos to replace documents like customer profiles and HR manuals. Victor says that as the technology improves over many years, it could replace text entirely. “I think for most people, if they had a choice, they would probably prefer to watch video and listen to audio.”

In this episode, Victor, Josh, and Joubin discuss Seedcamp, Annie Case, Rubik’s Cubes, AI video dubbing, Instagram filters, emotive avatars, Ilya Fushman, Atlassian, Grammarly, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, European startups, email responsiveness, acqui-hires, and being “lonely at the top.”

Chapters:

01:33 Loose screws

02:45 How Victor and Josh met

04:35 AI hype cycles

06:57 What Synthesia does

08:22 Copycats and competition

14:34 Winner take all

16:38 Synthesia’s origin story

21:36 Category creation

23:41 The next era of AI video

28:51 The uncanny valley

30:07 Watching videos at work

33:17 Scaling video and audio content

37:45 Emailing with Mark Cuban

42:40 How Victor proved KP wrong

45:15 Battle scars

48:47 Customer obsession

50:54 Pressure to succeed

54:41 Deep passion

57:16 Who Synthesia is hiring

Links:
* Learn more about Synthesia
www.synthesia.io

* Learn more about Kleiner Perkins Grit
www.kleinerperkins.com/podcasts
Email: [email protected]

* This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm