Victor Riparbelli
speaker
267 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Victor Riparbelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Do you care if our content is AI-generated or not? Do you care when a film uses special effects or a green screen? Do we care that actors in commercials are paid to play someone else and endorse products that they've probably never heard of? Do we care if actors are real or generated? Are you a fan of Harry Potter or Daniel Radcliffe? Does it matter that Daniel Radcliffe exists in the real world?
You'll never meet him, probably, right? What about Mickey Mouse or Pixar characters? Can we feel something for them despite them being AI-generated? Will we trust AI agents, or do you still want to call the call center to speak to a human? Can we be entertained by computers interacting with each other? Would you want to play computers, play soccer, or play chess against each other? Maybe not.
The future is ahead of us, and while a lot of this sounds like sci-fi, it really isn't that far off. And it's up to all of us in this room and society to make sure that we build a really awesome future. I think we have the technologies, and I think we have the people to do it. Thank you.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, six or seven years ago, this Danish entrepreneur walked into my office and presented his vision for the future.
I'm sorry for you that we're meeting under these circumstances.
We just raised a Series D, which is a super exciting big milestone for us. We raised $100 million, led by NEA, with participation from all of our existing investors. So we're very excited to get into 25 with a big war chest and just get to escape velocity, shut down the category that we're in, and win.
So this is back in 17. So it's a long time ago now. And the very short story is that we're a bunch of people. We had this sort of idea that generative AI, which back then wasn't really a term that most people thought about. But generative AI would change how we create content. And the big shift was that back in 2017, when most people thought about AI, it was about analyzing data, right?
Making decisions. That's kind of like that era of AI. But there was these early kind of GANs, which was basically a neural network that could kind of produce new data instead of just analyzing existing data. We thought that this was going to be a world-changing technology. We thought it was going to change everything we know about how we create content from video, speech, audio, music, whatever.
But we were focusing on video. I went out to the world with a great PowerPoint deck and, we think, a great vision. But I think, understandably, most people thought we were pretty crazy, right? We basically went out and said, look, in 10 years, you're going to be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop, needing nothing else than your imagination.
That wasn't a pitch that landed particularly well, especially not in Europe. We were based in London at the time. Why do you think that was? Because I think in Europe, the VC industry is still dominated by people who used to work in private equity. And that's a very different mindset than technologists, right?
So when you used to work in private equity, you're like a financier more than you're a technologist. And this was not a pitch you could understand for an Excel sheet. So we got turned down by, I mean, basically everyone, I think like 80, 90 investors, something like that. Including podcasters.
The first round was a million dollars. We ended up doing it at 5 million post with Mark Cuban.
And with today's valuation of 2.1 billion, that's... He has like 15% today. Something in that range.
So that was the later round. So that was back in 2017. We did a million at five. That kind of got us started. We went like 12, 18 months, as you do. Went out to the market, felt like now we had a working technology. We were back then focused on AI doping, not the kind of avatar tech that we mostly have today. Again, learned a hard lesson.
We went out and we're like, okay, we built this great technology. We have a great team. Let's raise $8 million. That completely failed. And for like nine months, which is like dragging our feet. I made all the mistakes you can make as a founder. I dragged out the funding process over nine months, like different data points, different investors. It was a big shit show.
And we actually had to rewind because we were running out of money. And we ended up raising $3.1 million. And that kind of took us through to the series A, which is when we had actually found product market fit and had like a sustainable business. But those two first rounds were very much rounds we raised based on story.
And it was a story back then that just didn't resonate that much because it was very hard for people to see what we had, how that could extrapolate that into everything that became today.
So we talk a lot about this, and I don't think we would. I think if we'd raised eight, we could have done a lot more things, right? And we would have done more things. We would have built deepfake detection, which everybody wanted us to build. You have to remember, this is in 2018, right? At this point, AI video, to everyone outside of Synthesia, it was just deepfakes.
People thought that that was going to be the big thing. And that is, of course, it's a problem and it's a real thing, but we always thought this is a subset of AI video. Most people are going to use these technologies to create awesome creative content. But if we got that money, I think we would have built a team to do that. And that would have meant we've lost our focus.
And I actually think that operating under the constraints that we had at the time really just focused us on our customers and selling the product. We were like ferocious about charging people from day one, even if it was like £500, right? And I think that focus and working on those constraints definitely help us to get to the point where we actually found product market fit.
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