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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Appearances
I'm a big fan of working under constraints. I really do think it forces a lot of discipline that easily gets lost the more money you have because you have more options, right?
Too much money too early is not healthy. Maybe some people are good at really having that discipline, maybe like second time founders, but it's very tempting to spend on things that you shouldn't be spending money on, especially when things are not working right. I think once you clearly have product market fit,
then a lot of things, a lot of decisions becomes a lot easier because they're more obvious. But before product market fit, it's really dangerous, I think, to be developing two, three, four things at a time, having 15 people working on your team when you're still at idea stage. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of raising the money and then using it too quickly.
One thing you cannot use money for or buy away with is product market fit, right? I think learning about your market, about your customers, it just takes time. And having a team of 20 people instead of five people trying to learn that, I think actually slows you down. You have to own that as a founder.
I don't think we could have learned the same amount about our customers faster if we had more money back then. It really did take us like two years to just get into the minds of customers, understand video from like first principles. And I think people try and then you hire like a product manager to help you fix the product market fit problem because they're a product person.
Or you hire like a salesperson because you think you have product market fit and you just need to be someone who's better at selling it. Unless you have product market fit, like you shouldn't hire product managers and salespeople. That is your job as a founder.
100%.
I totally agree with you, and I think a successful company is a long series of product market fits, but you need that initial spark, right? Once you have that, you have something to build on. The bigger you get, the bigger company you're building. You need new products, new product market fit, essentially.
And I actually do think that that's one of the things as a founder that you should always be focusing on. What is the next market? What is the next product you're targeting? But in our case, I would say we have a bunch of product market fits already. And those, I think you can hire super smart people that can run with it, make it great lines of businesses, make it great products.
But I think pushing to those next product market fits and where the company needs to be in two or three years, I think that remains to be the founder's job.
Well, I think when you have the money, you do spend it, right? I think for us, it's been more a matter of just, we've always been obsessed about actually building a business, having great unit economics, and making sure that we're a business that generates money and revenue, and that we're always in control of our own destiny, rather than being tied to a VC parachute.
And so I think we've always just spent conservatively, but it's also very clear, right, that if you know where to spend the capital, it is an amazing asset, right? So building a great go-to-market team, for example, I mean, that does cost money and that there's like a cash flow thing of like you have to hire like a bunch of people that are really great. They have to train.
They take nine months before they wrap up and then the investment is worth it. You want to have capital, right? You want to have a really healthy balance sheet so that you can chase any opportunity that comes ahead of you. For us, like we want to build like a really, really big company. I think there is Easily a $50-100 billion company can be built in the space that we're in.
And we want to win that. You're not going to win that by bootstrapping all the way, right? I think that's a myth.
So I think we're in the early stages of a shift in how we communicate. If you think of most communication today, it's text-based, right? Emails, text, we read things. And text is a great technology. Built the world up to where it is today. But it's actually like a pretty bad way of compressing information.
You lose a lot of context when you transform your thoughts into something that's written down in a document, right? As humans, we're much better at consuming visual content. We like to hear things, we like to see things, we like to feel things in the physical world. We can't do that yet.
But it's very clear that higher fidelity content, like video and audio, is a better way of training, informing, and entertaining people. The reason that we're using that much text today is because text is the only scalable way we have of essentially storing information and sharing information, right?
But that's changing now because the more we don't need cameras and microphones and capturing things in the physical world around us, the more we can get video creation, audio creation to be as scalable as text. And once that happens, there isn't really any reason for us to use text anymore.
This sounds a bit crazy, but I actually do think that maybe not us, but maybe our kids' kids are going to be one of the last generations to read and write as a default way of communication. I think we'll increasingly just consume everything via video and audio. I think you have all the trends. You look at TikTok, right? I don't know if you're on TikTok, but
I do exactly the same thing. I think TikTok is a great example of how video truly can be the default of how we consume information, right? There's almost no text left in the interface, even comments, right? People respond to comments with videos. And so they've really started to build out this graph of how we communicate with video as a default medium. There's a long way to go.
Showing 61–80 of 267 · page 4 of 14
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