The Ledger, every show

“Whereas I think Capco's approach is much more traditional. They're actually just trying to do exactly what Canva did, which is, okay, let's make the UI simpler and add a few more buttons and essentially bootstrap it to TikTok and distribute it like crazy.”

“But on the documentation side, there's no good thing that AI video can do. Not one good thing, right? Like there's, it's all bad. There's nothing good.”

“So much time and money has been spent on making the shot of the Empire State Building, and almost nothing On like actually getting the dialogue going.”

“Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship A marketable product every week.”

“As a startup, your job is to take on technical debt, right? Because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company, right? Bigger companies don't take on technical debt. They pay it usually right away, or they're paying back technical debt. From the days…”

“But these are all features that every competitor knows about, right? Like these are public. Like if a user is asking us for it, they're asking everybody for it. And every team has essentially more or less the same list and everybody's prioritizing it. And yeah…”

“And a lot of times the biggest wins will come from the secret roadmap, right? That's the game-changing stuff, right? It's not gonna be the user requests usually that are gonna do that.”

“That product market fit can be so strong sometimes that it can be hard to actually build something because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing or if it's actually hurting it and, you know, this is growing…”

“What was expected from the designer at Snap was not just the ability to design, like, you know, the skill set of designing, which all of them were IC designers, by the way, right, and there were no reports, right, so they weren't allowed to have reports, actua…”

“One of the insights that we had, which was unique, was as the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality. If there's enough people in the company, it actually starts acting like a consumer base might. If you share somet…”

“Snap almost had essentially what is TikTok earlier than TikTok existed and it kind of died out because it didn't align, align with the mission essentially.”

“I do think to fully get there to the point where it cannot be differentiated at all, it's still a couple of years away.”

“You could imagine a social network of the future where all content is generated. None of the people are real. It's, I mean, the algorithm isn't tailoring whose content to show you, but it's purely generating content that, you know, is completely catered to you…”

“I have to say here that I actually don't read books. It's actually something that I decided on purpose where I decided I don't want to build my skill in reading and I want to build it in listening and watching instead, because I think that's the future.”

“We ran A-B tests actually Within the advertising groups to see like, oh, like let's segment some users out, not show them TikTok ads, see if they behave differently in the long run, right? In terms of engagement on Snapchat and stuff like that. And there was n…”

“Like you actually can't templateize video because the nature of it is completely, it's unknown, right? It could be saying anything. It could be doing anything. Anything would be happening. The, template just can't fit with, it can't understand what's happening…”

“So once, as AI Creator develops and becomes perfect, you will not use to use the, need to use the camera anymore, right? So you'll just be able to generate all the footage that you want.”

“We are making the unique bet to say that we can actually build a better model than they can because of our unique data sets.”

“And very quickly for us, it became, wait, this actually performs better than if we were to, you know, hire someone to like make this video basically. Right. And the reason is because we can customize it to an unlimited ability, right? Like we can get all the v…”

“And by the way, like the H 100 and A 100 kind of suck at encoding and decoding video, right? They're actually slower than like a T four, for example, which has like media sort of like drivers and stuff that can actually like do it really quickly.”

“I think hallucinations in text obviously can be a bad thing, potentially, because they're saying stuff that, you know, isn't true, but in a video, like, you are delegating a lot of decisions to the model, right?”

“We run these things in ads like on scale. We also run these things on social media. People, big creators use, you know, these models and they get tens of millions, sometimes many, many tens of millions of views on their videos and nobody can tell that it was g…”

“I think for video editors, there's a small chance that it actually becomes the most important profession of them all. It actually is possibly the profession that rules them all because suddenly one video editor sitting in their basement can make A movie that g…”

“Because I think of all the possible sort of AI unlocks, like even compared to LLMs and stuff, there's probably nothing more dangerous than video. Generation in a way, right?”

“It's just becoming a lot easier, and it's also bounded, right? Which means that there is a limit of realism, right? And then you've kind of solved it, essentially, right? Yeah. You can't get more real than real, and once you're there, you kind of have achieved…”

“They were running, like, a hundred million dollars a month of ads on Snapchat, right? Initially, right? When they were not, there was no presence.”

“Our general framework for it is to look for user demand, right? And actually the easiest way to check for user demand is to just see what has virality, right? Usually what has virality. What people want to share and talk about. There's something at the core of…”

“So it's like almost reversing the process a little bit and starting with design first, but it can often result in like finding unique ideas, basically.”

“Snapchat opens to the camera. And that was actually the differentiator, right? That was actually that small decision was holding the entire company against all competition. Because when the moment passes where your friend is doing something funny, and you need…”

“And the design team was like, 10, 12 people, basically pretty small, even at, you know, five, 6000 employees it was that small still.”

“Initially, there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in.”

“I do think PM is a very valuable function, right? I think it may be actually, and you know, maybe I'll get roasted for this, but I think at the end of the day, not hiring PMs at Snap might've been one of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that…”

“I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing in a way. And the reason is that if you think about marketing, it's expanding the surface area of the product, right? It's like search marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google. Facebo…”

“So there's a set of companies today that are able to create these types of what we're talking about is like avatar videos. They're using this technology called neural rendering. It's actually not a technology that's affected by sort of the transformer and diff…”

“About a year ago, we would run AI video in ads and things like that, and we would get all these comments of people being like, oh my god, this is so fake, like, you know, don't show me this, and Around that time, the technology got just about good enough that …”

“TikTok spread in the US mostly through Snapchat, and this is like not well known out there today, but a lot of it was they were spending a very, very large amount of money on advertising on Snap, right?”

“Microsoft OpenAI did much better in terms of reliability. It just worked perfectly for latency and never went down, which is what you want.”

“If the goal is to sell to enterprise, it's like really hard to justify it if you're crawling YouTube”

“Audio conditioning is just, it's not a thing that really has been solved at scale, and nobody else has done it, right?”

“I do think the point of, you know, complete perfection in terms of generation where there is absolutely no way to tell is still a couple of years out, especially in terms of this type of a role video because a lot of the core problems haven't even been fully s…”

“Actually just dubbing it literally with LibDub. And now it's like the same exact script, just in a different language delivered the exact same way. Right. Actually performs just as well as the English version. Right. Which is like, which was a crazy discovery …”

“Our goal actually isn't to disrupt professional video editing, right? It's actually to enable, and it actually probably creates more professional video editors because a lot more people can get into the profession, right?”

“So it started off being more expensive and it's only the price has gone down, right? It's literally only gone down and it's gone down more than 10 times every year that this You know that we continue down this journey.”

“Today, like, You know, for us, COGS is like the least of our concerns, basically. I mean, to give you an idea, like if we were to remove a lot of the sort of capital investment in you know, model training and things that are long-term value for us, like we wou…”

“Canva for video as an idea has been sitting around for a while. And I think it's actually finally possible because of AI, right? Because the real value of Canva is you start with something, right? You don't have a blank screen.”

“I think it was very clear that they hadn't prepared for the amount of virality that thing got. Right. Like even the name chat GPT kind of gives that away. Right. And so it wasn't a planned thing. It kind of just happened.”

“Like there's more things that can be done than there's people available to do them. It's just such a rare thing. And honestly, it's not gonna last forever. Like we are gonna catch up to this, but.”

“At the end of the day, like if you're just building a playground and People play around in the playground and then to leave after playing around. It's not a business, right? So I think that is still key, right? You have to be solving real problems.”