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Upstarts · 2 min · May 1, 2026

A single editor showed how Runway could fit into TV production

Cristóbal Valenzuela · Co-founder & co-CEO, Runway

A late-night editor used Runway to finish work much faster without telling colleagues.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 20:02Runway kept going when investors said generative AI was not a market5 min
  2. 25:19Build for changing models, not today’s limitations5 min
  3. 6:11Runway’s founders treated early AI as a creative medium7 min
  4. 15:29A single editor showed how Runway could fit into TV production2 min
  5. 38:56Video models could train robots and power real-time characters4 min
  6. 13:00Creative satisfaction can make AI tools worth paying for3 min
  7. 30:13Runway gives amateur filmmakers access to the same tools as top directors3 min
  8. 32:56AI misuse is the creator's responsibility, not the tool's3 min
“he was using runway that was his weapon and then at some point he's like okay i'm going to tell you what i'm using i'm using this thing called runway”
Cristóbal Valenzuelaat 16:22 · Upstarts
16:22

Takeaways

  1. One user adopted Runway after seeing a video about it.
  2. Colleagues thought he was doing an extraordinary amount of overnight work.
  3. The show later became one of Runway's first enterprise customers.

About this segment

A late-night editor used Runway to finish work much faster without telling colleagues. His adoption led the show to become an early enterprise customer.

Cristóbal Valenzuela

Cristóbal Valenzuela is co-founder and CEO of Runway.

Co-founded Runway, an applied AI research company whose creative suite has more than 30 AI-powered tools.

  • Alex Konrad, Host · Founder & editor, Upstarts Media

    Ran Forbes' Midas List for ten years and co-created its Cloud 100 list; founded Upstarts in 2025.

From “Runway’s Cris Valenzuela: Building The Hollywood-Friendly Video AI That OpenAI Couldn’t”, May 1, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is AI paying off for companies?” See all 54 answers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 15:38

    Like, I'm trying to think, what was the aha moment that this is, you know, valuable and sustainable for people? There are a few aha moments of different products we've had over time where you start seeing how valuable things are. And so, again, on the more individual consumer side, you can just see the stats of people coming back and generating over and over and over again. you're like why why are you generating so much stuff and like you start understanding you interview people and you realize it's just like they like it so they're obsessed with it and then for companies we have times where i don't know i remember like the late night show with seven converts started to use runway and having seen them it was an interesting like a kind of concept and like realization because the person who found out about it just saw like a video about runway

  2. 16:20

    and then started to use it he didn't tell his colleagues he was using it but he was like 10xing his like work and so everyone thought he was just like doing some insane amount of like work overnight he was using runway that was his weapon and then at some point he's like okay i'm going to tell you what i'm using i'm using this thing called runway and and then they became one of our first kind of enterprise like how would they be using it um so we had an early version of runway that allowed you to kind of automate a lot of the editing process of making things um and that's kind of the mantra of runway it's like if you want to make something it should be fast whatever you want to make an early model was a way of just editing things and removing things from scenes that would have otherwise taken you you know hours or maybe days they were able to do in

  3. 17:04

    a couple minutes and they were using then those kind of films or scenes or videos into like the show um into like the the gold bird show is like runs live but you have like segments that are recorded so those things were using runway that was like i don't know like four years ago and have many times in like our lifetime where that happens over and over again where like there's a film that was like recently like um screening on theaters that had a couple scenes done runway and like when you know about what they managed to do and how they did it it's kind of insane it's great you're starting to see the beginnings of like that uh creative revolution yeah have you seen the social reaction evolve like for example do you think if these customers