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
But if you believe that that is true and that not just your TikTok scrolling at night, but if you're trying to buy a software product, you actually don't want to read a whole bunch of stuff and jump on calls with people. You want to watch a video. And at some point, you probably want to watch an interactive video, right?
Where you just, you know, with your voice say, hey, can you show me how this functionality works over here? And the video will just like switch over to that. When you do custom support, you're not on the phone, you're not reading long knowledge articles, you're watching videos. Again, probably they'll be interactive. Then all the world's communication is the market.
When we started the company, we always talked about, and it's a very important part of our thesis, is that our market is not video production. Because all video production today, that's an interesting market, but all of our market is text. Text and slides is the market that we're targeting. And that market is infinitely big.
And if you manage to capture just 5% of all the world's text communications and turn that into video, I think you have probably more than $100 billion company.
I mean, I think it can backfire if you don't know what to use the capital for. You start doing stupid things, right?
I mean, sure, it's a part of it, right? But I think more than anything, this round is raising the capital to build the best product in the category. So, I mean, every time you raise the signal, like hiring people, you send a signal to competitors and VCs, et cetera. But I've never made a decision to these based off what our competitors do or don't. I think that's a bad way to run a company.
Do you not pay attention to competitors? Of course you pay attention to competitors. And now we have lots of them, right? I think it's great to have someone to kind of play ball against to some extent. One of the interesting things about Synthesia is that when we raised our A to B to C round, it was very much a secret how fast we were growing and how much people loved the product.
A lot of people looked at us from the outside like, oh yeah, there's like a few people in learning and development and training that thinks it's like a cool thing to spend time on making these AI videos, right? And what we actually saw from the inside was holy shit, this is huge. And training and learning was the first market we targeted, but this is clearly just the beginning.
But from the outside, it looked like, oh, it's just like cute UK company doing these avatars. It's kind of fun, but like most people probably don't use it for anything else than just like making a fun video for their mom. And so for many years, we had the market to ourselves. And then slowly people started to realize that, okay, actually this is maybe not just like a flash in the pan cool demo.
Maybe there's something real under the hood. And so we started getting a lot of competitors. We have one particular competitor that, I mean, literally verbatim copied our mission statement, like everything I say. They like just copy everything that we do.
They know who they are. But they copy everything that we do from the way we talk about the product, we talk about the market. And of course, that's annoying, right? But that's capitalism. That's good. And then eventually, you start to learn from your competitors. They do something right. They do something wrong. And it's actually very helpful.
It's really difficult to pioneer space because you have no feedback loop except for whatever you do and how the market reacts to that, right? And seeing what competitors are doing and seeing what works and what doesn't work is extremely powerful. I think for us, at least, that's been a very powerful thing for us the last 12 months.
I think the reason that we had a massive re-acceleration in the second half of the year, and a big part of that is actually because our competitors did a whole bunch of marketing for the category. We clearly had the superior product. So that actually helped us quite significantly. I don't think you always have to be the first to do something.
If you're good at being a fast follower, that's also very powerful. It's a different way of running the company when you have a lot of feedback signals in the market around you. But it's much more fun. And I think it helps you get to the right answer for your customers much faster, which ultimately is the most important thing.
I think that's pretty spot on. What I see a lot in the enterprise is buyers don't really know what they want. A lot of people have been told that they need to have an AI strategy, they need to execute on AI strategy, which means they're very willing to have conversations. They're also very willing to spend their innovation budgets on doing things.
but they don't really know what they actually need and want. They don't understand the technologies well enough to kind of themselves figure out what do they need for their business. And that is both an opportunity, but I think it's also a problem for a lot of AI startups that doesn't have that customer obsession.
It's great because you have a lot of budget available and people are extremely willing to do things and sign up for pilots and POCs because they want to deliver to their boss that AI strategy. But when they don't know what they actually want, it's very difficult to prove the RIs for them, right? So what is the problem?
I think the problem is that to be successful today as an AI company, I think you need to be extremely customer centric. You need to deeply understand your customers. What are their problems? How can your product help solve whatever specific problem that they have? Now that sounds like pretty obvious, right? That's not like AI specific.
But the issue is that today there's a lot of companies who do a lot of like cool technologies and they go out and they kind of convince the customers that whatever they're building is the right thing. It'll help solve some like big problem for them, but maybe it doesn't really work or they haven't understood the customer's problem deep enough.
And so now you have this thing where the AI startup kind of thinks that they're delivering real value, but actually it's not a good signal because on the other side, you have a buyer who's like, just spent a lot of money on doing something. And they'll like say, yeah, it works really well because they just spent $100,000 on doing it. But eventually they will churn, right?
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