Next Unicorns: Building a $1B AI Avatar Business with Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli | E1776

0:00If you look at the shape of the music industry, right? back in 85 versus today, how it's been flattened out, talent can come from anywhere. It's about making great music less than it's about knowing the right people. Like all those things, I think it's going to come to the tech industry as well, right? We've seen some of that over the last five years, but I think as the kind of art of coding becomes more accessible, it's like, you know what? Why couldn't you be this eight person company sitting somewhere in, you know, Norway or Denmark or something like that and create something absolutely amazing.

0:27This Week in Startups is brought to you by Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world. And Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. And they just introduced an AI-powered assistant to take the busy out of the work. Sign up to use Coda AI today at coda.io slash twist. and LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a free$100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash next unicorn. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups.

1:11Big, big surprise for you. Today is the start of the fifth season of a series we call the next unicorns. And what is the next unicorns? This is where we find companies that have raised their series B round, let's say they're got some really great traction, maybe they have market pull. And we just think as an editorial team, the producers here, some of the investment team might make suggestions. This company's got a shot at becoming a unicorn. What's a unicorn in Silicon Valley, it's a company that's worth over a billion dollars. Now you probably heard that we went a little crazy during the boom period of 2019, 2019 2020 and 2021 and just gave a lot of companies very high valuations some of them are now zombie corns as we've talked about on the all in podcast a couple times maybe the companies didn't actually have product market fit in other words the product and the customers were in sync and there was a market for this product or a market pull when customers are searching to get themselves a tesla and uber or an airbnb because they heard about it from their friends and the product is so good that you have market pull.

2:17In other words, you don't even have to do marketing, people are just calling you up and you're taking orders as a company. Putting all that aside, I'm really excited about today's guest because he's been working on making virtual AI based versions of humans. You could cynically call it deep fakes. That is the negative framing of this. Or you could say these are alternative versions of yourself. And there's a ton of upside and we're going to get into the downsides the upsides in uh this dual use technology could be used a dual use technology could be used for good or bad just like humans can choose the path of darkness the path of light you could be darth vader you could be luke skywalker you could be a super villain lex luther you could be superman uh and uh the technology of ai is no different it is a dual use dual fate technology if you will and so we uh have a great guest victor ripper belly is on the program.

3:09He's the co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, spelled S-N-Y-T-H-E-S-I-A. Welcome to the program, Victor. Thank you, Jason. Excited to be here. Synthesia is how it's pronounced, correct? Synthesia. Synthesia, okay. And paradoxically, we invite you on the program to come on the next Unicorns. And then you, of course, make us one for one this season, because we like to track how we do. This is our fifth season. you can see all of the episodes at this week in startups.com slash next unicorns. This week in startups.com slash next unicorns to see the the other four seasons, but you're the first guest on the fifth season.

3:46And since we invited you, you actually closed around at a billion dollar valuation,$90 million seriously at a$1 billion valuation. Congratulations on that who led the round. Thank you. Excel led the round with participation from Nvidia. Oh, okay. So Nvidia is investing in startups that are in the AI space because they're making the chips, they're making the infrastructure. Do you need to buy these chips yourself? Or are you able to just use a cloud provider who has those chips? I'm curious. We definitely use cloud providers. I don't think for us as a business, it makes sense to go that deep in the stack.

4:23And NVIDIA is a great partner. I think most people think of NVIDIA as the ones that make the GPUs and the chips, which of course, is their main line of business for sure. I think what's less well-known is actually that NVIDIA does a lot of fundamental research, especially around media technologies, so generative video, speech, text, for that matter. And they're one of the world's best research teams. And a big part of motivation for us to get closer to NVIDIA is actually less on just the GPU and the chips, but these guys are doing really amazing fundamental work in a lot of the technologies that we're also developing, right?

4:53So I think that's one of the big angles for us to get closer to NVIDIA. Yeah. And so you started this back in March of 2017. And the business was, I believe, in the early days, your goal was to make a virtual avatar, not necessarily of a real person, but in order to do maybe say customer support. So you go to a website, you go to a kiosk. Is that correct? Is that where you started? Was that the first year's case? Well, sort of, I think, I think just we started the company back in 2017. Right. And I think we kind of did what you're supposed to not do, we started with a technology and then we tried to find what we could solve with this technology.

5:32This is very, very early in what's now called Genitive AI, right? But the key idea was the same as it is today. We want to make it easy for people to make video content, not by making smaller cameras, not by making slightly better video editing apps, but by actually building technology to eventually replace the entire physical production process, right? So that's the vision. That's where we want to go. It goes much further than just the avatars we have today. The first three years of the company i'd say it's like the wilderness period we're kind of building the tech figuring out if we worked or not we kind of got into the service business of doing ai dubbing so some of those who have known us for a while may have seen the david beckham thing the snoop club thing we did where we made essentially celebrities speak in different languages and this was a great learning path for us but what we figured out was that that was a service business it was a visual effects type of tool but was actually much more interesting than selling to hollywood and creative people was like there's billions of people in the world who are desperate to make video content, but they can't today, right?

6:26They don't have the skills. They don't have the budget for it. And all these people, they're actually okay with the quality threshold going down a little bit from a real camera. If it's a thousand times easier and a thousand times more affordable, right? And that sort of, that insight is what led us to then launch our self-service text-to-video platform that we operate today with the world's biggest. We launched that in the summer of 2020. And since then, it's just been an absolute fairy tale of going really quickly and just delivering tons of value to our customers. And again, it's less about this sort of video as you know it.

6:56It's actually more about replacing text for our customers, right? That's what they're primarily used for. So in that case, it's not necessarily to make a young Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker and have them do a new adventure. You're not trying to compete with Disney. The goal here is, hey, I was going to write some materials here, some training materials, or i was a professor doing a lecture or i'm uh writing some um message to all of the i don't know uh franchisees in my jiffy lube franchise network and i can type it in text but have a human a synthetic human a replicant speak to the people on the other end so if i was the manager and the franchisee of this jiffy lube and you said hey here's our new pricing instead of just sending them a text document, they could watch it?

7:48Is that the customer base, those kind of applications that I described? 100%. That's very enterprise focused. We work with 36 % of the Fortune 100 today. It gives you two very real examples, right? So let's say you're one of the world's largest fast food companies, you're onboarding and training millions of people to work in your restaurants every single year. What they used to do, they'd have a 40 page handbook, you'd send that to the employee, they'd sort of attempt to read it, remember absolutely nothing and be much less prepared to go into that job where they actually hit a restaurant. Now what they can do is they can make that into a video, which is in the native language of whoever's watching that video.

8:20So it works in 120 different languages. So that in itself is a massive unlock. But then the really, really big unlock that's kind of the false multiplier is that our product is extremely easy to use, right? So if you know how to make a PowerPoint slide, you'll be able to use Synthesia. So now the same people who used to write that 40-page handbook, they can make the videos, right? Got it. So you don't need a video editor. So if we just pause there for a second, because what you said is profound i am this you know uh international fast food company and i got people in france i got people in japan and uh if i was going to make this 40 page training manual i would then send it to a company that would translate it make a local copy of it and then people would pretend to read it and then the french fries uh or the milkshakes would come out terrible because people didn't pick up those points instead you can take that manual the same person can write a script and the ceo of that company or the founder even could come on and speak to the person and then there's all kinds of technology to make sure there's compliance that people are watching if they open another window i know this like if you ever took a driver's test or any kind of test i recently went through this for like um joining um scouts previously known as boy scouts of america had to do background um tests and it was like a three-hour course and if you at one point i accidentally put another browser window on top deposit so here you have an enterprise thing where any new person can hear directly from the ceo why it's important to get the fries right and how to do that and you can make sure there's compliance and that's one person's job it reaches millions of people i mean that's just insane when you think of the leverage there that would normally have cost them.

10:06God, it would have to cost them 10, 10s of 1000s of dollars per region across 40 languages, you'd be talking about a couple million bucks. And now it's going to cost$10 ,000. And let me give you, I think one one of the really core insights we had early on with this was that what you just described here is kind of the front end of producing content, right? It's like cameras, actors, studios, executives don't know how to perform in front of a camera, all that stuff in itself is incredibly time consuming and expensive, right? But then what we figured out is actually all to that. Okay, so let's say you actually did that, right?

10:36You want to make this into a video because you know it's much more effective. Then what happens in every single business is two months later, there's a business policy that changes, the pricing changes, you change your POS system, something like that. Now you're screwed, right? Because all your video material is completely out of date. What's beautiful about this type of video production, right? Is that you can just open up the file again, edit it, change the script, and you can feed that into all the other languages. So I really think that it's very early, right? But this is as profound as going from using a typewriter, where you're producing something that's sort of hard-coded, hard-baked, like you would with a camera or a microphone, into something that's more like a Word document, right?

11:10Open it up, edit it, duplicate it, send it to someone else. Our platform is collaborative, so we have real-time collaborations coming out next month or so, Teams, workspaces. Kind of like using PowerPoint or using Myra or something like that, but the output is just video, right? And I think that's what we're seeing is just that the value in the enterprise is just like through the roof. I'll give you another cool example. Let's say you're one of the world's biggest software companies. You have 4 ,000 AEs all around the world. You need to keep these folks updated on... Account executives, salespeople, yeah.

11:38Salespeople, exactly, right? You have to keep these folks updated on what's happening with the product, what's happening with the competitors' product, pricing, so on. Let's say you have one minute to talk to these people every single day about these things. You send them a document or something that they have to read on Slack. Most of them will skim it. They'll forget it, right? What you can do instead is you can make a one-minute video. we know that information retention is like six, seven, eight times as high when you watch a video as compared to when you read something. So if you take just a simple use case like this, right, the sales enablement team creates video content instead of only written materials for these folks.

12:10And you do this for 4 ,000 AEs. You really just imagine like just how much value that has, right? Because you get a much better informed, much better trained sales force. And I think we're still early in these kind of use cases, but this is really just what's... I think that's the reason we've grown so fast over the last three years. All right, we all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean? Product velocity? Fancy term, right? You got your product and your velocity speed, the speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates?

12:41Can you release new features? Can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface? Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly? Because you're not alone, you have competitors and your customers have choices. They may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, yeah, we want to go faster, but you got to go faster intelligently. And Crowdbotics is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service.

13:14Basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible. You'll have access to an on-demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. Crowdbotics can work with your in-house dev team, or you can just have them work independently. And you own all the IP. You own all the source code. Let the folks at Crowdbotics supercharge your product velocity today. No more waiting. Get a free build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a$4.99 value just for the twist listeners you get that for free that's c-r-o-w-d-b-o-t-i-c-s.com slash twist for a free build plan so just to recap there you've eliminated the need to hire a media training person that costs 20 10 20 000 a pop to train the host you've eliminated the host that costs 10 20 000 to hire some person you've hired the lighting the camera operators and the set that's another 50 to 100 grand in my estimation because you gotta have a location to shoot in as well it's another 10 grand a day five grand a day you got rid of all the translators and you got rid of reshoots while increasing compliance and retention and you've only given up perhaps if this was done in a really really by a very high quality team that spent the quarter million dollars to do it that i just described is what i would put this kind of shoot at uh if it was i'm talking about like a full employee handbook you know a couple of hours of content maybe 40 segments or something one per page all you've given up is a little bit of polish on the edges of a great host that might be slightly more compelling um i wonder in this do you have the ability to do you make the full tool of like here's the quizzes and compliance and making sure that people watch the video or do you use like third party educational tools and they just export their videos into those yeah so at this point in time we're not uh we're not like doing the kind of last mile delivery uh which also means you don't do the quiz so you put that in lms system something like that a learning management system lms learning management system exactly so yeah that's incredible can you imagine like microsoft or salesforce having all these sales people around the world and every day they just get a video and then it you know the learning management system just knows if everybody watched it, if people didn't watch it, they can't do work the next day and their manager gets an email.

15:40Hey, this person still hasn't watched the video. This person's three videos behind. That's incredible. And what do you what would you charge in this situation if without mentioning a specific client, but if you did have that at scale use case, tens of thousands of AEs, how do you charge? How much do you charge? What does this cost to do this 40 page manual? If you were running, you know, a burger or a fast food chain or something? So really, our thesis revolves around the idea that in the future, we're going to be reading much less and we're going to watch and we're going to listen way more. And we're basically building our product and pricing structure around that.

16:16This is, as I said before, this is really about replacing text in the enterprise. So the way we can price the product is per seats. We really view this as having so many analogies with something like PowerPoint in the early days. So it's seat-based. That, of course, depends on how many seats that you decide to buy. account enterprise plans on the person creating it or seats on the people receiving it so right now it's one type of seat um that you buy so basically it's kind of like a model you know from like my row or figma things like that right and go in you have a workspace together you can invite your colleagues you can leave comments on the videos and all that sort of stuff so if you had 20 people in the training organization hey you know you you pay what three hundred dollars a year four hundred dollars a year per person something like that 25 bucks a a bit more than that i think i think i would probably land at around 40 50k dollars a year oh okay great so it's a couple thousand per person so this is high-end software in the in like the salesforce category a couple thousand per person per year uh so for 40 50 whatever for 50k a year you can not have to do all these shoots and everything all right let's let's do a demo here let's do a demo here let's do it let's do it and just to not scare people off if you had the personal plan on the website says 30 bucks a month 270 years so i'm assuming yeah yeah yeah so sorry to lift that out right so it's a traditional kind of you know product-led motion so you can go in you can even make a video for free on the website or you can sign up for a 30 dollar plan which you'll kind of get to get familiar with um with the platform and then enterprise offers a bunch of other features so here we are we're looking at like a powerpoint-ish notion-ish interface with a bunch of projects and templates that you can pick from an office interior, an inspirational talk, whatever it is.

17:56And I see you have a couple of This Week in Startups videos you've created. Oh, no. Oh, no. Exactly. I'm coming well prepared, Jason. Uh-oh. So what you're seeing here is the homepage, as Jason just described it, is a traditional creator tool, as people probably have seen it before. I'm going to go to the avatars out here in the left-hand side. And what we're seeing now is a mosaic of all the different avatars that you can use to create your videos. So if I scroll down here, there's around 150 the avatars they come in all different um ages genders ethnicities are these computer generated or are they um made by uh like having partly computer generated they're based on real actors but but they are sort of ai generated um and there's a lot of people there you got a hipster you got a four person not a four man we have to use gender neutral language uh i can see you have like a construction worker uh you know a police officer type thing doctors or a fitness person and you've got all the colors of the rainbow genders body sizes so you can be super woke or super diverse here you can pick whatever you like or you can actually do it i'm assuming by region so uh you know not to uh make light of it but it might actually the information might be received better by somebody who's wearing clothes or has the accent of a japanese person in japan rather or an indian person india correct it's funny you say that because we have a lot of customers in japan we work with a very high percentage of like the hundred biggest companies there and actually what a lot of those they use it for is to create partner materials for english speaking or other countries speak different languages it's a huge line of business for them right because it really just breaks down the communication barriers and that goes both ways we also work with a north american companies who want to produce materials for the japanese market um and this comes in really handy not just on like the avatar appearance of course but also with you know the 120 languages that's so i mean this actually makes a lot of sense english is the world's language now or the language of international business um and i'm not saying american i'm saying english right uh queen's english here and so if you're a japanese company and you want to reach the maximum number of partners if it's in english and the person is localized yeah that's going to be a lot better than perhaps a japanese person with english as a second language who's a rep locally in that market uh whose english might be whatever an 8.5 out of 10 here you're going to have 10 out of 10 exactly and that's fantastic my japanese by the way is a zero out of 10 mine is true i can assure you yeah but what we're also seeing with this right is like you know let's say you have a lot of technical documentation integration videos which can be a lot of screen recordings and voiceovers and things like that right it's again just like and it's so moldable because you just make it in japanese and then you could go back and edit it every time you don't have to go to the whole voiceover actor and kind of process right but if we're out to make a video here let's say i pick alex got a click on her she's one of our most popular avatars.

20:56You've probably seen her before. Then we get set into the video creation screen here, which is where the magic happens. So what I'm seeing here is a thumbnail of Alex, who's our avatar. And then under her, there's a script box. And the script box is really where you just type in the script of your video, right? It's kind of like that easy. So let me just try and type in something here. I'll type in, hello, Jason, this is a test from Alex. And what you'll see here is that we automatically detect that you're typing in English. So there's this little drop down here, which says English US professional, I can click on this drop down.

21:29And then I'll get a bunch of different types of voices that could just be the style, but it's also different accents. So let's say you want a British voice, or Irish, Australian, whatever, you can select whatever you prefer. And so that's sort of like how that works. But then the magic here is that you can type in any language, right? So I'm Danish originally, for anyone wondering where my accent is from, let me type in I am now Alex, as you'll see here, it just automatically detects that I'm typing in Danish, now the flag has changed to Danish, and so on and so forth, right? So you just put in whatever language that you want the videos to come out in.

22:01And that's really as simple as it is. Now in this text box, we can do a bunch of other things as well. If I want to have a different gesture, for example, let's say at some point in video, I want the avatar to hit not yes, or raise the eyebrows, I can put that in with this little kind of pill. How many gestures are there? there's five right now it's a little better feature but uh but we're adding a lot uh in the coming ones are the gestures made by computer or did you have the actors actually make the gesture and then they're made by computers and so that's a big part of the fundamental tech platform and that we're switching into is essentially that the avatars become much more live right they look much more realistic they can do much more things disappointed in there like just a completely i'm just completely disappointed in you you didn't get the answer correct you can have a lot of fun with the gestures like um putting like your hand on your what is that like face palm you just do total face palm oh my god and and this is just not to be dystopian but um in a black mirror episode this is how you'll be laid off tech layoffs personalized because i assume you could personalize these too like i could put in you know percentage first name percentage and have like a custom one made for each employee I'm laying off or giving a raise to.

23:11Exactly. So I just put in an arrival here. For those who can't see, I just put in a arrival. So I can put in like first name. You'll be familiar with this from like mail merge and similar styles of things, right? I'm creating a template where you can also switch out the background images, videos, and all that sort of stuff. But what happens from here on is like I've typed in some text. That's great. That's a script of my video. But then, you know, one of the big unlocks and the thing that we discovered early on was for this to really be something that can be used by anyone, you have to be able to make a video end-to-end in here right so we have this sort of tool that sits around it and it'll be you know something like a powerpoint or a camera i'm just going to open up a template as you put in you know your text you can upload your own custom funds right yeah so you have your own branding host on the left and then just right behind them like they're a weather caster or you know a weather person yeah exactly exactly you could have the video behind them you know saying hey welcome to your first day at stripe uh today we're going to go over are HR policies.

24:10Here's what you need to know. And the HR policies could be done here. And like you're saying, Hey, you know, we have a new HR policy, we're going to add June 19, that's a holiday, and we're going to take away one of the floating holidays. And instead of having two floating holidays, you now have one, boom, you just put it in there. Every new person understands that. And you could send that just that one slide to everybody in the company announcing like we did, hey, June 19 is now our, you know, whatever ninth official holiday of the year, you have one floating holiday to choose from. Exactly. For many knowledge workers, over 50 % of their day is filled with doing tedious, repeatable tasks.

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25:27This is going to empower you to prioritize work that's long term and strategic, that pays off massively. That's what we should be doing with AI. And you need to get your entire team on Coda and using Coda AI every single day like me. If you're watching the video right now, just look at this powerful and awesome jtrading.com website. This was built to track all my stock trades, and I am crushing it. I was able to do this and track all the stock prices live and build tables and formulas all in Coda. Get a competitive advantage if you want an assistant that lets you get back to work and does all the busy work get started with coda ai today for free how's that for a price head over to coda.io twist coda.io twist to get started for free so you have like all the creative tools that you need here that you could have in powerpoint or canvas and like that you can record your screen you can use shutterstock assets do different shapes all this sort of stuff love it where i think this is interesting right so i think up until now this is like video as you know it right it's a smarter way of training video but what's exciting for me about not just AI video, but any kind of like generative AI tech right now is it opens up an entirely new world, right?

26:33And we're just dipping our feet in this. Right now, I think all these technologies are kind of like the first websites that look like newspapers on the screen. That's kind of what people could imagine back then, right? Today, websites are very different. They have links, there's audio video content, we have news feeds that are personalized to everyone, a website is very different than a paper magazine today. Our bet is that the same thing is going to happen to AI video. So right now, we just understand there's like an MP4 file, right? But we've eliminated the camera from the equation. But really, this is going to be an entirely new kind of media object moving forward.

27:02Maybe we won't even call it video in a few years. And a lot of what that I think is about is like the UX of how you create these things. So I'll give you a very simple example of how when you work with AI, and you don't work with camera footage, you can do cool things. So let's say you have my script here. So it says this is the same title screen layout. In here, I want to have an animation. I want to have this like title text element in my video come in right here. What I'll do here is just add a marker. This is marker one here. I'm going to click on my text element on the canvas. I'm going to scroll down.

27:31And I'm just going to tell the app that I want this particular element to fade in at marker number one. Pretty simple. But when I didn't play the video, then what's going to happen is that this text title in my video is going to come in at the point in the script that I want to come in that in itself is of course i mean that's cool that's easier than doing it in adobe premiere we have to sit with different layers and a timeline and things like that but where this becomes really interesting right is if i type something in front of this then it'll just move down so it's completely responsive right right now imagine that you're translating the video which is a massive headache today right then french is 20 longer than german who's a bit shorter than japanese so if you're automatically yeah exactly all of this stuff you just translate the text, it just works in different language, you don't really have to do anything else.

28:17In the future, you know, all this stuff, I think will be much more personalized. Maybe it's interactive, you can talk to the avatar. I really think we're just dipping our feet in this stuff. But we're really building for a new type of media format. We're not just building to make kind of a better tool for making MP4s, right? And we're dipping our feet in here. I think this industry is just so early. When you generate this, it just generates you an MP4. And then you would copy this into your learning management system or whatever it is. Exactly. But our bet is that over time, it will be something different, right?

28:45And that will probably also require a new video infrastructure where every single video might be personalized to whoever's watching it. Maybe you can just ask the avatar, hey, sorry, I didn't really understand that. Could you explain it in a different manner? We have all these amazing technologies that are false multipliers. GPT is an obvious one here, right? That can help you write the script. We also have that functionality. Stable diffusion can generate the images for you. I think when you think of all these tools sort of working together in the next three to four or five years, I think it's going to be absolutely amazing the things that we can build.

29:13Yeah, I mean, it's obvious you will not need to export these videos eventually. They'll just live at a URL on your service or a white label URL. And then you don't need to export it because that then leads to all kinds of problems. If you're having to upload it to another system and then compliance, maybe you forgot to upload something. It just puts a human into the process. us and i guess your idea here is if you had all 40 uh of the lessons to be an employee at a fast food restaurant you could then ask you questions and just you could have this on an ipad or somewhere in the you know at the workstation and say hey remind me how to make a big mac or do you know how does uh what is a uh double double animal style and it'll just be like oh yeah double double animal style just play the video you know how to make a double double animal style and the person doesn't have to feel bad about not remembering and the chat gpt interface will be able to interpret what they're asking i mean it's just exactly you're a salesperson you're on a call after the call you just get a two or three minute long kind of feedback video right because the transcript has been taken out gpt for whatever maybe a different tool than us has analyzed you know what can you do better talk a bit less remember to disobjection face it in this way like there's so many things you can do with this and i think it's just kind of really exciting to see what people will build once.

30:32We have an API today, we have a bunch of users using that, but I think as the technology evolves, we'll really see a lot of very interesting use cases evolve. They'll just fundamentally be very different from like video as we know video today. If you think about this, and great demo, by the way, anything else you want to show in the demo? And for folks who are listening, you can go to youtube.com slash this weekend and you can find the demo of this. Yeah, for sure. I mean, maybe just give you a cool real life example. This is one of our amazing customers, GoCardless, right? They've built the entire university using Synthesia videos.

31:02So what you're seeing on screen here is sort of their hub for learning how to use GoCartless as one of their customers. I mean, it's all the kind of this entire value prop we've talked about already, right? Like, video is a much better way to communicate with people in 2023. These videos, they just go back in, edit it. All these are created entirely in the platform, right? And then they're served by Wistia, probably, or something. Exactly. That's an interesting thing. I mean, if you look at Wistia's business, which I love, they do really great compliance things where you can stop for a prompt or a question or capture an email address, you know, whatever.

31:38And so I think there's some great API uses there. Amazing job. Let's sort of then level up this discussion. I know the company's high growth, tripling revenue year over year. You raised about 100, just over 150 million, got 200 employees doing this or so. um and so let me ask you a question about how you think about running your own company i have noticed i'm forcing my employees to use chat gpt for every day barred etc let's say about 60 i got over the line the other 40 uh basically got the summer to get their butts in gear if they don't they're out i'm dead serious like if you can't use chat gpt for effectively can't work for me starting september 1st so for people hearing this i've been pretty gentle about it but now it's going to be a mandate i'm going to start having people tested on their chat gpt4 ability why because once people start using it what i'm finding is they become maybe between one percent and ten percent more effective at their job every month if you compound those numbers at but let's call it i don't know three percent that means uh in every three percent divided let's just say 2 % that means every 36 months you'd be twice as good at your job if it was 4 % you know every 18 months you'd be twice as good at your job and that means I don't ever have to hire anybody because the pace of our growth if everybody just commits to being 5 % better at their job every month they become twice as good at their job every 14 months so do you think you can just keep growing your company without hiring people and just making the existing team more effective through using these tools?

33:21I mean, we use GPT everywhere. I think I'm very aligned with you. It's something that I don't think there's any function that can't use GPT. We use it in the most random of tasks, like if you just want fun example, right? But when you have to record your avatar, that's like a four or five minute process. You speak to the camera. We want to get like a nice variation of things that you say. We use GPT-4 to just generate infinite amount of scripts, right? Otherwise, we have to sit down, write a different script for every single person. Now we get a great variety of what people are reading out to the camera, which is great for our algorithms.