# Runway’s Cris Valenzuela: Building The Hollywood-Friendly Video AI That OpenAI Couldn’t Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Cristóbal Valenzuela argues that video-based world models can support creative tools and applications beyond filmmaking, including robotics. - Show: Upstarts - Hosts: [Alex Konrad](https://realalpha.app/people/alex-konrad/) - Guest: [Cristóbal Valenzuela](https://realalpha.app/builders/cristobal-valenzuela/) is co-founder and CEO of Runway. - Published: May 1, 2026 - Length: 43 min ## The best minutes - [20:02](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1202) [Runway kept going when investors said generative AI was not a market](https://realalpha.app/s/runway-kept-going-when-investors-said-generative-ai-was-not/) (5 min) - [25:19](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1519) [Build for changing models, not today’s limitations](https://realalpha.app/s/build-for-changing-models-not-todays-limitations/) (5 min) - [6:11](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=371) [Runway’s founders treated early AI as a creative medium](https://realalpha.app/s/runways-founders-treated-early-ai-as-a-creative-medium/) (7 min) ## Also worth watching - [15:29](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=929) [A single editor showed how Runway could fit into TV production](https://realalpha.app/s/a-single-editor-showed-how-runway-could-fit-into-tv/) (2 min) - [38:56](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2336) [Video models could train robots and power real-time characters](https://realalpha.app/s/video-models-could-train-robots-and-power-real-time/) (4 min) - [13:00](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=780) [Creative satisfaction can make AI tools worth paying for](https://realalpha.app/s/creative-satisfaction-can-make-ai-tools-worth-paying-for/) (3 min) - [30:13](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1813) [Runway gives amateur filmmakers access to the same tools as top directors](https://realalpha.app/s/runway-gives-amateur-filmmakers-access-to-the-same-tools-as/) (3 min) - [32:56](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1976) [AI misuse is the creator's responsibility, not the tool's](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-misuse-is-the-creators-responsibility-not-the-tools/) (3 min) Skip the opening company and world-model setup, the audience-reaction discussion, the sponsor read, and the later access-to-creation discussion. ## Full analysis: Cristóbal Valenzuela says Runway's festival drew 6,000 submissions - Runway's AI film festival drew 6,000 submissions last year, Valenzuela said. - That signals creator participation, but the episode offers no revenue, retention or unit economics. - For buyers, test workflow gains now and treat robotics as an option, not proven returns. Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/#analysis), free with an account: - [31:44](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1904) Runway's festival shows reach, not a paying market - [14:02](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=842) Creative rewards can broaden demand beyond commercial work - [5:34](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=334) Control may distinguish Runway, but evidence remains thin - [25:59](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1559) Model churn makes adaptation part of the product - [41:00](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2460) World models widen the bet and raise proof burden - [24:40](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1480) Runway's business case remains unpriced in this conversation ## Summary Cristóbal Valenzuela is the Chile-born co-founder and CEO of Runway. He says he and two classmates began exploring visual AI at an NYU lab in 2018; Runway now builds video and world models and products for creative and other industries. Valenzuela describes Runway as an applied research company building video models that he says can help models simulate the world, not just describe it in language. He argues that creative tools should give users control and that people can value them for personal expression as well as commercial production. He says rapid model advances make adaptability and long-term direction more useful than building around current limitations. He also argues that audiences ultimately judge stories, while the responsibility for how AI is used rests with people. ### Minute by minute - [0:49](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=49) **Runway began at NYU in New York.** Valenzuela says the three founders met at NYU and began Runway while studying in New York. He describes it as an applied research company that trains video and world models, then builds products on top for entertainment, gaming, robotics and other industries. - [2:23](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=143) **Video models simulate the world.** Valenzuela contrasts language models, which he says describe reality through language, with world models trained on video that can learn by simulating how things behave. He says Runway sources video data through industry partnerships, purchases and collection, depending on the task. - [4:35](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=275) **Video products need craft and control.** Valenzuela says OpenAI’s Sora was the first direct competition Runway felt it had, and that building video products to meet user demands is difficult, especially for consumers. He says Runway focuses on craft and user control so people can shape the output through their process. - [6:22](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=382) **Art and engineering shaped Runway.** Valenzuela says the founders met at NYU’s ITP, which he describes as a mix of art and engineering. Early experiments included a visual search tool that matched a street recording to similar shots in films; those prototypes helped lead to a product and company. - [10:33](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=633) **Creative voices should shape AI.** Valenzuela says the early reaction to AI tools was excitement about making things that had previously been difficult or impossible. He argues that creative people should help shape these systems, and recalls building a browser-based writing tool that completed sentences in the style of authors he liked. - [13:00](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=780) **Creative work rewards users.** Valenzuela compares creative AI tools to a gym for the mind: people may use them because making something feels rewarding, not because they plan to sell it. He says engineers and people in finance use Runway to realize ideas they could not execute with their existing skills or resources. - [15:55](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=955) **Faster editing found an enterprise use.** Valenzuela recalls someone at a late-night show using Runway to speed up work without telling colleagues at first. The tool automated editing tasks, including removing things from scenes, in minutes rather than the hours or days he says they could otherwise take. - [17:55](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1075) **Audiences judge the story.** Valenzuela argues that viewers care more about whether a film’s story moves them than which camera or editing software produced it. He says AI will become part of storytelling and that people are already engaging with content made or mixed with AI. - [20:27](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1227) **Startups need non-consensus conviction.** Valenzuela recalls showing his team investor emails rejecting Runway because generative AI was not yet seen as a market or opportunity. He says repeated rejections created doubt, but founders need to stay willing to pursue ideas that are not yet consensus. - [23:09](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1389) **Teams must adapt as models change.** Valenzuela says model capabilities now set new standards every few weeks, so products built around current model limitations can quickly become obsolete. He says teams need to drop sunk-cost projects, stay adaptable and work toward long-term goals; he gives elaborate prompt engineering as an approach that became less important as prompting grew more natural. - [30:20](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1820) **Video tools widen access to filmmaking.** Valenzuela says Runway’s tools can help established filmmakers push their craft and give amateurs access to similar technology, leaving ideas and storytelling as the greater distinction. He says the company’s film festival received 6,000 AI-generated or AI-assisted submissions last year and has helped new creators get opportunities. - [33:05](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1985) **Creators remain responsible for AI use.** Valenzuela predicts that AI will become as ordinary as cameras or the internet. He argues that responsibility for harmful or misleading uses belongs to the people who create them, not to the technology itself. - [36:12](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2172) **Ideas matter more when tools get easier.** Valenzuela says easier tools lower the technical barrier to making things, but leave people with the harder question of what they want to create. He argues that artists should use advanced technology, while their ideas should come from their experiences and view of the world. - [38:56](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2336) **World models could support robots and characters.** Valenzuela says video models may learn patterns of the world, including movement, gravity and how objects interact, which could make them useful for robotics and autonomous systems. He also describes real-time, lifelike characters that can hold open-ended conversations, including one he uses to practice French. ## Transcript Upstarts, hosted by Alex Konrad, with Cristóbal Valenzuela. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=0) It's a dream. It's like you have this thing that basically conjures whatever you want. And the first thing people struggle to do is like, it's not to use the tool. It's like, what do you want to make? You know, what is in your head you want to make? Welcome to the Upstarts podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup founders about their upstart moment. Upstarts are challengers who punch above their weight and take on the status quo to improve the world, all while building a big business too. I'm your host, Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. I'm excited to be joined by the co-founder and CEO of Runway, Chris Valenzuela. Thanks for joining us, Chris. Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, banking redesigned from the ground up. You've historically made these pretty technical video models using AI. You're also based here in New York. We're at the New York Stock Exchange this morning. And you have the distinction of being the only guest that I think in the run-up to the show I've ever run into on the street, because we both live in Brooklyn. [0:57](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=57) Yeah, we're neighbors. Why are you building this company in New York? We started, the three founders met in NYU and we started the kind of initial beginnings of the company while we were at school in New York. And so it was very natural for us. It wasn't typical back then, to be honest. It was just like eight years, nine years ago. But I think we just, I love New York. I love the city itself, the people, the culture. It just feels very special. And it's becoming very special for the company as well to be able to be based here in New York. So for people who are not familiar, what exactly is Runway and how do you describe it to people today? [1:32](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=92) Runway is an apply research company that builds video and world models. And so what a world model is, is kind of an extra tier of AI research and AI capabilities. These are basically models that can understand and take actions within the world, maybe in a similar way that we do. And then the way you get there is by training large video models. And so we've been working on this for quite some time, and now our models are getting deployed in entertainment, in movie making, in robotics, in many other industries, in gaming. And so Runway builds these world models, pre-trains them, develops them internally, and then we build products on top of them. [2:11](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=131) And so those are kind of the best way to think about it. It's like an apply research company that builds the products, build the infrastructure, and of course, builds the models to make these world models work out in the world. A lot of people are talking about world models in the tech world. For people who are not deeply in that online discourse, why is the world model... model new and so exciting in this moment? A lot of the paradigm of AI that we've gotten into until now is based on this idea of training large language models, if you've probably heard about LLMs, right? LLMs are just large AI models that are trained on language alone. [2:44](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=164) And so they're trying to get a sense of reality by describing reality. The thing about language is that language is not reality. Language is an obstruction of reality that we humans have created to try to approximate to what things are happening, right? So a glass of water is not really a glass of water. It's like we made up the symbols and the representation of that. And we train models on that language alone. What we do with world models is slightly different. We train them on video data. And if you show video data and models enough kind of information in pixels, there's enough information about what water is and how it should behave in containers, in other spaces, that the model starts to understand slowly. [3:23](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=203) Not by describing it, but by simulating it. So that's a good way of thinking about it. Language models describe reality. World models simulate reality. Where do you get the data, the video data to train off of? It depends. We need to partner with partners, with industry folks. We have people, we buy data, we collect data. Depending on the task at hand, you might need to source from different points. of different points. It's a very technical challenge to do. What made you guys confident that you could do it better or have a different approach than maybe some of these big famous AI labs that our audience is familiar with? [3:57](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=237) We started the company in 2018. And I think back then there wasn't a lot of intuition into how to build the models and the kind of models that we're building these days. And I think over time you build some sort of experience and intuition into what are the best ideas and approaches you can take to scale deep learning models for them to work at this kind of pace and level. And I would say that most of the best research labs these days are not, have been working on this for at least a couple of years. And I think that separates the kind of, I would say, the best from like the new, the kind of like the ones that are trying to build the best models. [4:32](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=272) And I think for us, that's been the lesson. We've been working on this for quite some time and we have a natural sort of research ideas and approaches and experiences that allow us to differentiate more than others. Now, people are probably aware that OpenAI had this consumer video app that they launched a great fanfare and then they recently sunset it. It was kind of actually a miss that OpenAI sunset Sora. When we saw it first coming up, it was the first ever real competition we felt we had. And now, like, two years after they announced that they shut it down, a few things are true. One is, like, it's very hard to build the kind of products and models that video requires and the users kind of demand. And specifically, consumers are just very, yeah, very hard as well. [5:16](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=316) For us, it's always been around, well, we're building towards a world where we think this might become the foundational base on which you make every piece of content out there, from ads to media to films to things you share with your family, with friends, or just things you make for you. And so the level of craft and the level of control that you need to have in the tools needs to be critical. When people think of Runway and people use Runway, one of the things that keeps coming up as a core differentiation is that it's not just like one prompt and you kind of make a thing, it's you're in control. [5:49](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=349) This is a tool and you kind of like wield it in the way that you want and the outputs are a reflection of your process. And I think the way you think, we think about it might be different from how others might have thought about it because you can see how different like building of products and models is. And I think from, at least from us, from our professional enterprise consumer side, which is a lot of what we're focusing on, that really reflects really well. And people come back to us because of those kind of things. So the initial idea, it comes out of this kind of weird lab at NYU that is a mix of like art projects and technology. [6:23](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=383) Can you talk a little bit about sort of what you were doing there and how deliberate versus accidental, you know, developing runway was there? Yeah, that's a good question. So, yeah, we've the three founders met at ITP. So ITP, the best way to think about it is it's art school for engineers or engineering school for artists, which is another way of saying that it's a way to explore like the reasonably possible, the things that are adjacently like or new in terms of technology and like possibilities from a technical standpoint. At the time when we started kind of working on first ABS of runway, the deep learning revolution that we're in was kind of beginning to take shape and form. [7:04](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=424) It was 2015, 2016, 2017. And a lot of what we're trying to do at the time was really understand what was possible. Because we need to remember that in 2018, the state of the art, and I think we suffer from collective amnesia because we forget this. The state-of-the-art AI models, the thing that people were freaking out about was a model that could distinguish a cat from a dog. That was revolutionary at the time. To be honest, it was, because you never reliably could do it with any other process or technique. But suddenly now you can go from identifying objects to identifying different kinds of breeds of dogs, which also at the time was fascinating. [7:43](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=463) And so the applications of AI and deep learning back then were very boring, if that's a good way of saying it. People were thinking about classification or financial systems or security or organizing data. And for a minute, I thought there was like maybe something else that was more interesting coming from a mix of both engineering and kind of art background where you can see this technology basically as a tool to express or to create or to imagine things. And so really what we tried to do really early on, once we start training early models, both on kind of computer vision and then on like generative side, was to just build things, prototypes. [8:25](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=505) A couple of things we built back then was we built this film kind of recommendation system or think about it more as a search engine that you can search for visually for shots. So I remember I went to like New York, to a street in New York. I recorded a bunch of people walking and then I put it to our system. and then the system returned me like seven films in which like the same type of shot was like in a scene. And so I can remember Children of Man, it was like the same shot, but like way nicer done. And so you got all those like kind of opportunities of, oh, you couldn't do that before. Now you have the system that can do it. [9:01](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=541) What does it mean? I don't know. We're just building, experimenting and one experimentation led to the other, led to the other, led to the other. And then eventually we're like, oh, we should take this more seriously and start building a product around it and a company around it. Did you have a good sense of who your ideal customer or power user would be then? And has it played out the way you maybe initially anticipated? No, I think to be honest, when we started, it was too early. I think we were building something that wasn't a comparison, there wasn't a reference point. So it was hard to wrap your hand around as to why this will ever exist. [9:33](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=573) And again, this is why we sometimes have collective short-term inertia because now there are a lot of things that are obvious. But a couple of years ago, a lot of things weren't these obvious. And so the use cases of other models, mostly because in a way the models weren't working as well. So you were like, why would I ever use this? And I think a lot of what I had to do was prove that you can get better models by improving both data and algorithms and training and everything else. Once you cross that threshold, you start kind of realizing more of the use cases more early on. But I would say that early on, if you're doing kind of research and discovering new things, [10:09](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=609) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** it's really important to have an open mind and be kind of less obsessed with what you know and more of what you can discover. [10:16](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=616) And that has allowed us to understand how the models can be used for things that I could never imagine for, which is exciting. And from a business perspective, what I like thinking about the most is instead of like a company winning a market or like being good in solving specific like need. It's more about creating a net new market. You created something that didn't have a name and you help people do things they never thought they could. And that becomes the new standard. That's how I like to think about what we're doing. What was your sense of how artists and sort of the film industry would react to a tool like this? [10:49](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=649) Was this something that you felt they should be supporting and excited about or feel challenged by? I know you've said in the past that you think maybe the next great filmmaker doesn't come from L.A. and Hollywood anyway. So what was kind of your feeling about that relationship? So, you know, back then I don't think there was a sentiment or a point of view in terms of how you should feel about it. I think it was, at the most, it was just very exciting. Like you were able to do things you couldn't do before. I remember we trained this model that you could write. This is like before Transformers, anything else. [11:23](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=683) But it was a website. It was a web editor. and i trained it on like a couple of authors that i like so it was bolano and like jane austen and a few other folks and you could write something and you could get a completion of a sentence kind of as if that person was being your editor or was like helping you and it was kind of cool it was it was using like lstms and it worked in the browser in real time so it's like a cursor for coding from like 10 years ago and when i share with people and with writers i think people just got excited it's like oh this is this is very cool and i could think about all the things i could use it for and of course it wasn't as good as the stuff we have right now but i think the excitement when you show people projects like that and ideas like that is it begins to open their minds into what else can they do and i think that was at least my perspective on like the the whole field was like this is a whole new medium it's a whole new way of thinking about our relationship with technology and if we really need to think about them from a creative standpoint then what we need to really think about this is how do we get creative minds to be part of the process? Because one thing that becomes clear, maybe. [12:30](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=750) Kind of touching back on what we just spoke, is that if you design the systems in isolated ways with one particular point of view of the world, then you're not going to get the kind of things that you can do in runway and kind of models and stuff, because you need to have more of a creative, artistic point of view and actually create tools for them. And so I think we've always thought about it that way. And the excitement that we had back then, I think we still have it today. I guess I'm trying to picture you create these visually impressive videos that maybe are in the manner of a movie or something. [13:00](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=780) And researchers are playing with this. How do you start making money? Like who ends up being willing to actually pay for what otherwise is like a really cool thing to post on social media or something? There's always this utilitarian kind of point of view about models where people are like, well, why would I ever use this to make a movie if I'm not a filmmaker? Like I'm not trying to sell something. I don't need ads. Right. and i think an underappreciated aspect of of a lot of this technology is the reward it gives you personally to be able to make stuff like this and this is something i would say technology has allowed us to do over time we just sometimes forget about it i compare it to like going to the gym right so if you go to the gym and you exercise a lot of times you're going there not to become an athlete or like to you monetize your like your your performance in some way and get sponsors because you're going to be the best athlete at particular things right you just go there because you feel good it's good for your body you feel um we're all um excited to do it [13:57](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=837) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** hopefully more and more right i like to think of sometimes these models and the things that we're building as kind of a gym for the mind where you are exercising your creative muscles and once you [14:09](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=849) exercise that once you practice that enough times you like it and you're willing to spend money on Because there's a reward mechanism that you're activating in your brain that you never had a chance of activating before. You're able to make things. You're able to creatively concept about things you never thought you could. We have users who are engineers. We have users who work in finance, who you never might have thought of like a runway user. But they are creative. They still have creative ideas. They have creative minds. They're thinking about things. They just don't have the technical experience or the resources to execute some stuff. And when you provide them with the things, it helps them be creative, and they're going to be able to and willing to pay for it. So there's definitely that component of it that it's an answer to how to monetize this. We'll build things that people like to use a lot, and people make countries. [15:00](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=900) little videos per day. We have people making thousands, even like a week. And of course, on a more utilitarian aspect, well, of course, like this is incredibly useful for studios and agencies and content and gaming studios and everyone who's selling or who's in the business of pixel making. If you're making pixels for a living, this is a completely new way of making pixels with way cheaper and way more controllable methods. And I guess I'm thinking with you guys, Was it sort of like, hey, you can take this beyond that fun side project and actually use this in commercial ways or ways that, you know, advance your business? [15:38](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=938) 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 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 [16:32](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=992) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** 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 [16:40](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1000) 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 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 [17:45](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1065) whether it's a tv show or a movie if they told their audiences hey we used ai to help make this scene or these two scenes do you think the audiences would see that as cheapening the process or they wouldn't like it or you think people are kind of proud to say when they're using it and has that changed at all i really want to get and i think we're approaching that time to be honest we're like you don't have to say how you make things right like and if you think about how you consume anything um you never care about what cameras were used what editing software was used to make a movie what was the last time what was the last movie you you you saw i liked project tail mary for the story not necessarily how it came together right and and And people might be, okay, I want to understand the behind the scenes or whatever, but like 99% of the world goes and watches a movie because of the story, right? [18:31](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1111) It makes you feel something. And if you think of AI as a technology within the evolution of storytelling, dating back to filmmaking even before that, we're reaching a point where I can tell a really good story. I don't have to tell you how I made it. Who cares how it was made? Did it work as a story or not? You're going to judge it not based on the tactical merits of it and the execution of it. You're going to judge it on like, did it make you move and feel something in some way? And so that's how I feel about it. And I think we're now at a point where that's beginning to happen, where people are really engaging with really good content that can be generated, mixed or created fully that really doesn't matter. [19:10](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1150) But now you're seeing stuff and you're just engaging with it and you like it. And that's, I think, where we're going to go very soon. And to be to be fair, this conversation we had had it many times before in the history of like storytelling and creative, where like we we tend to emphasize for technical reasons the way things are made until eventually you realize that no one cares. Just move on. You know, as a year old startup, we experienced a lot of firsts at Upstarts Media. So when it was time to process our first international wire following a London event, I braced myself. This is going to be a painful lesson. [19:42](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1182) instead Mercury made the process easy issuing an invoice sharing routing numbers and processing the wire with just a couple clicks no phone calls no paperwork no learning curve we're still figuring plenty of stuff out when it comes to our banking Mercury's already got it all figured out for us Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members FDIC. We've had CEOs on the show talk about the technology being the hardest part or just finding the first customers or raising funding from VCs who didn't believe in the product until it was obvious. [20:22](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1222) When you think back on the journey so far, what has been the biggest challenge Or on the show, we call it an upstart moment where maybe you felt like you were punching above your weight the most or, you know, facing a very high stakes challenge. There are a lot. I mean, I think building a startup is about like overcoming those moments over and over again and they never end. You need to start getting used to it. Maybe one that comes to mind and maybe feels like counterintuitive just given where we are and like how everyone feels and knows that this is what models are able to do and how the economy is changing. [20:54](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1254) And basically, AI is in everyone's mind. a lot of the hardest things we had to do back then was to convince people investors and like talent that ai had legs and that it could have it works and again it sounds contrary to it because like now of course it works it like works pretty well but back then it wasn't as obvious i have a presentation i've shown to our team and i think we we do a version of it every almost every on site where I show screenshots of emails I've gotten over time. And some of them are from some of the best investors you can imagine, like the top, top 1% of the top 1%. And it's funny because the emails are like, you know, Chris, we're not going to invest in your Series A or your seed. [21:40](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1300) And the reason is that we don't think Genitive AI is yet like a market or like there's no opportunity yet, like define, in quote, and I have this perfect email, Genitive AI is not like a thing, you know? When you're trying to build something that hasn't been proven, that's counterintuitive, and you get an email like that, you're like, oh, maybe, either maybe I'm wrong, maybe they're right, or maybe they're wrong, and I'm right. At that time, you're not sure. [22:04](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1324) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** And there's always doubt because, I mean, you get 50 rejections, and you're like, okay, there's definitely something odd here. [22:09](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1329) But I think I've realized that in some cases, a really interesting thing about like building something as special, I think, as Runway is, is you have to be able and willing to be like non-consensus driven, you know, like I think there was consensus at the time that something didn't work until they work. And now, of course. And now it's consensus that this is the thing everyone should be investing. But at the time, that was a very hard time for us, for the company, because we had to convince people that this is worth spending time on. I find that interesting because in a way, it might be a little bit liberating if it's not you specifically that is maybe what they're doubting. It's the whole technology. And so to your point, if you believe in the technology, then yeah, of course, you have a chance to win. [22:55](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1375) And now it is the opposite where I could imagine people questioning, well, actually, this is so obvious now that aren't a million people going to do this or, you know, aren't they going to force you to do it at a way that can't be sustainable because you have to spend more money than you can you can make from it. Do you feel those doubts now? Does that feel different than maybe the doubts of like, does this work? You know, now it's maybe can you be unique or is this viable? yeah um of course now you have more doubts and more questions and more ideas and more more competition and everyone's thinking about the same but but i think again i like i like to think about it more from a this lateral thinking perspective which is like okay what's the non consensus thing here and what is maybe going back to what you just mentioned is like what is the things that you what are the things that we believe are true regardless of whatever else thinks about and that actually is a very hard position or like it's extremely expensive or heart to be in a position where you can afford yourself to think long-term because in day-to-day you're like it's a battle and it's a fierce like competition and you're everyone is looking at [23:58](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1438) each other you know and long-term long-term thinking is a strategy if you're able to we had it back then like we're thinking about this 10 years ago and and we had we were able to flesh out some sort of strategy over time and improve it and modify it but it was there and i think for For us now, there's something that feels something similar with some of the things that we are building that we're getting some of the same like perspectives on like, oh, it's not going to work or it's not there yet. Or like, yeah, well, that's what everyone else thinks. But I think we're pretty convinced that we have something here that might be as important as with the things we've done in the past. [24:33](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1473) And so being kind of obsessed with the things that you believe to be true and working towards making those things happen really matters a lot. Do you think you've already proven this can be a long term sustainable business? Because, you know, there are those macro doubts of, you know, Sora maybe was burning too much money for OpenAI. A lot of these AI companies are facing pricing challenges right now. You know, there's been a lot of brouhaha about, you know, Isanthropic having to change how it's pricing its claw. code because maybe it's too popular is there a scenario where runway is too popular and that's a problem for you as well i mean there's always problems as you scale of course like serving tens of millions and hundreds of millions of users it's just requires different engineering sort of problems but i think most of the things are solvable to be honest with the right kind of process and people the biggest thing for me is less of like how do you solve for those and more How do you not get trapped in like local maximums? [25:29](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1529) You know, the thing about the way the technology is moving is like every model release or every couple of weeks now, because it used to be months and before that it was years. But now I feel like every couple of weeks you get to a set of new standards of what you can do with just models generally. And once you get there, there's a tendency for people to think, OK, what are the things that don't work? What are the things that work? and you build kind of like a scaffolding around that. And I think the thing I keep seeing back and back and back from many products and many companies [25:59](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1559) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** is they spend too much time on building the scaffolding and the processes and the orchestration for the limitations of the models [26:07](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1567) and the things they can do only for you to kind of become incredibly irrelevant the moment a new model just like leapfrogs you all together. And everything you build, you have to throw it to the trash and it's months and it's expensive and it's also culturally and like frustrating for people to like do that all the time so i would say that the biggest thing more than like thinking about the cost is how do you make sure you don't get stuck into that suboptimal point how do you make sure you can just keep on you know preparing yourself for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing that i would say is way difficult way more difficult than kind of optimizing for whatever moment we have right now i've seen you uh describe it in the past as like you know there's there's a product company or there's a company that's building the systems to kind of keep shipping products because things will change really fast. I also saw you posted recently on social media that 2026 has been so crazy in AI that how could you possibly really plan too far out? So how do you, how do you think about this and how do you keep your, your team from overloading or freaking out? Like everything is just going to completely change every week [27:08](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1628) and this is no way to live. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, well, I think you've, um, you need to kind of like thrive in that. first of all you need to thrive personally and culturally and professionally in like a world like that i think personally there are some people who might not feel there's too much change and like you just personally like freak out and like you it's you get paralysis you can do anything it's like So it's kind of a self-selecting thing where, like, are you ready for the thing? Because, like, it's going to be hard to predict. But I think I personally thrive on that a lot. So I like it. [27:41](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1661) The second thing I would say is, like, really reminding everyone of sunken cost. You know, like, engineers in some cases, or I think, like, many people love to stay very close to things they've worked on for so long because they've worked on for so long. and like there's someone at some point who has to make a call and be like we're just like going to throw it away and move on like the fact that it's not helping us like it doesn't matter it's great that you spend all the time and it's perfectly beautiful code but like who cares like move on you know and the ability to move on but also learn from that it becomes really important so i think like that idea of sunken costs and and just like personality wise being adaptable and being able to change becomes crucial and the third thing is again long-term strategy like there are things you're gonna you know are gonna be there at some point so instead of project sometimes providing the team with very concrete objectives what you can do and i think what we try to do at some point is you provide them with like boundaries you know and where they can like move and experiment and do things but it's less about being prescriptive about this particular thing and more about like well we're heading there right so if you think about video [28:51](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1731) generation video generation three years ago two years ago was a very early stages i mean the first model was we released was two and a half years ago and it was it was by today's standards really bad by two years and a half it was like the best ever and a lot of assumptions could have been made around how you write the best text prompt to get the thing that you want right eventually to for us it was like well that's a suboptimal thing to work on because there are going to be other control mechanisms around the corner that we need to craft and create that'll be much more impactful than kind of knowing obscure prompts because i don't know if you remember this but people used to write incredibly complex prompts with like words and combinations and everyone was saying the the new job is just prompt engineer like know the world's most elaborate prompts yeah that for me was like look um you can spend all the time you want on that but realize that like no prompting will just become more natural and like you don't have to do all the obscure things you have to do. And that's where we're right now. You can just say this gravity one very naturally, provide the right references artistically and get very close, almost there in a couple [29:55](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1795) of minutes. And so, yeah, it's reminding ourselves of that long-term kind of perspective. I met or at least had one of our first long conversations at a dinner with a famous filmmaker, Darren Aronofsky in L.A. Darren has since done a lot of stuff in A.I., including a series around George Washington where he was using A.I. Do you see Runway and sort of tools like it as most exciting for folks like Darren, these established filmmakers to be pushing the limits of their craft? Or is it more about the democratization of the amateur Aronofsky's out there? I think both. I don't think it's a serious game. [30:29](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1829) game. You can have the best filmmakers, the Darren Aronofsky's of the world, be able to do more and find new creative ways of pushing their own craft, and they're in the 1% of the 1%. These are the best of the best. But the thing about this technology is that it's very ubiquitous and it's very easy to access, so anyone can access. And that for me is the [30:51](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1851) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** most insane thing, because if you think about it, you have access to the same level of technology that someone like Darren has. So you're basically both starting at the same level. [31:01](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1861) The feel has been equalized. Now, are you able to do something better than him? Well, that's not going to be a technical limitation anymore. That's something else. And that's something else is your ideas, your storytelling, whatever you want to tell. But the fact that you're there first, I think it's a huge upgrade. And so you guys even do these film festivals, right? And is it fair to say you're trying to promote those new generation folks and at the same time partner and talk to the Darren's of the world to help them be, you know, even more in that top 1%? Correct. So, yeah, we host a film festival every year. [31:33](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1893) We've been doing it for the last four years, both in New York, L.A. This year, actually, we're taking it to Japan. So we're going to do New York, L.A. and Tokyo. It's becoming an institution now. The last year, we got 6,000 submissions of phones that are AI generated or made with AI from all over the world. and the idea with when we started back then making this film festival was really to celebrate like the people behind the technology and it's pretty obvious that like the people who come and celebrate now are from kind of all spectrums of professional you know experience in storytelling from yeah the diaries of the world he was one of our first panelists and the first film system we had to like like the winner of last year's festival um it was a musician um that we're gonna move for a year um and the movie was amazing if you haven't seen it we have it on our website and it was so good that now he has a deal to make more and so now he became like filmmaker just because of that and we have so many stories like that but people whose lives have changed just because of that so yeah the festival is a way of celebrating that to your point earlier that we don't care necessarily how it's made as long as it's good it makes us feel [32:42](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=1962) good like do you expect that the current debates around use of ai in video or in hollywood will kind of go away or what's your prediction for sort of what the state of play will become yeah so it's hard to predict well i guess i guess one that i was seeing on the way here thinking about was controversy around a famous actor being used after their death in a you know via ai for perpetuity will that be something that we just expect is normal or is that still one of those weird edge cases you know yeah so i guess there are a couple things to unpack from that the first one is like um what's normal right and and again that's the role of technologies to define and standardize what's normal yeah we live in a world where if i say the word hollywood that's normal to everyone everyone knows if i say a film everyone knows what a film is it's a it's ingrained in our collective imagination if you travel back in time 150 years ago and i tell you a film and i tell you hollywood and i tell you i can make a living by like editing films in like a software you're gonna be like that's insane none of that things make sense first of all and secondly if i try to make an exercise the thing you're speaking about is that this like really [33:53](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2033) bad photography thing you think it's going to make an industry you're no it's not gonna work right that's a really interesting point because like Hollywood is the it's the result of science it's technology like Hollywood movie making is an art that it's rooted in technology and so when people might feel conflicted or have specific thinking things about how technology changes filmmaking that's like you're putting water in the ocean it's like the same thing right So for me, it's a constant evolution of the process of making things. And we're thinking about it in one way in like media and Hollywood, but actually the implications are way broader than that. [34:30](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2070) From that perspective, from how people think about and how they normalize it, we're very soon going to get my approach and my prediction is we're going to get very soon to the moment in time where we think about AI in the same way we think about cameras or Hollywood, or we think about the internet. You don't think about the internet anymore. This is just parts of what you do every day. You don't have to say, this podcast is going to go live in the internet. Of course, it's going to go in there. Where else are we going to go? It just normalizes this and you get used to it. We're approaching that hopefully very soon. [35:02](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2102) And then on the second part on like use cases, when you say like, I don't know, when a doctor dies, my position on that is like that has nothing to do with AI. Right. You can anyone can just take any traditional computer graphics editing software and do that today. No way. You're not going to blame like whatever software people use for that. [35:21](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2121) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** You're going to blame the intention and the creator and the person who did that. And I think AI is the same. [35:27](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2127) The fact that you can do it faster doesn't change the rules of the system of how people should learn how to use it and what are the consequences if you misuse it. And so it changes a little bit the equation of where like, don't put the responsibility in the tool. Don't put this responsibility in the technology. Put it on people. Because that's what we've done collectively with all technology altogether. If you take a car drunk and you crash, Toyota is not going to get sued. You're going to get sued, right? And so it's the same kind of way of thinking. If it's a technology, then we should think about it and treat it like any other technology. [35:59](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2159) I know that you have talked about and believe that this also democratizes the access to make things, you know, globally and not just in a place like Hollywood. But what would be your message to people who do feel like whether it's, you know, that photographer or that, you know, wannabe filmmaker that now it's more about how good you are with these tools versus, you know, do you have the right idea? that basically people would get left behind in that transition. In a way, if you think about creation as a whole, creation is a representation of how accessible the technologies that we have at large are able to allow us to express those ideas, right? [36:37](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2197) So if you want to code a website or, I don't know, create an application, you had to go through a painful process of learning how to do and code and maybe even spend months and many, many resources on learning. or now you can get to a point where like you can just five code something and get really close to what you want that that feels for me like insane it's like we've normalized the fact that only a couple months ago that would be magic and that allows way more people to express themselves creatively to do more work you can think about that same kind of way of thinking across every kind of human modality in any shape way or form there's less of a barrier technically for you to execute something it's more of like well what's the idea and i see this consistently over and over time where i sometimes get people with like new models and new tools and we give them a preview with something And it's like, it's a dream. [37:32](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2252) And so you have this thing that basically conjures whatever you want. And the first thing people struggle to do is like, it's not to use the tool. It's like, what do you want to make? You know, what is in your head you want to make? And that's when the conversation around some of these tools, like lovable, the app generators is like, okay, it's easy maybe to vibe code an app now. Do you actually know what app to make? Correct, correct. Correct. And I think that for me is like the most interesting thing where like that goes back to like, it's not about the medium. It's about like the idea that you want to use. [38:06](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2286) And I really like this. Luke Dubois, who's an artist and a professor at NYU, has this beautiful quote about every artist should use the maximum enough technology in their civilization to make art and to question what it means. I think we're at a point where like everyone who was an artist or who wants to make something should use the maximum level of like technology which is like this frontier models to make anything they want now what do you want to make well that's that's on you and that's a that's the hard part I'm not gonna help you in that because they you need to have live experiences you need to like think about the world there's something you want to see and you want to convey now you can but what is it would it make sense and why would it make sense and so that I think doesn't change and so as you expand beyond video um at least filmmaking use cases into robotics gaming and obviously robotics is super exciting right now in the tech world we see you know vcs lining up we see lots of labs creating um their own models just for robots where does runway naturally fit there and what makes you excited about these use cases beyond sort of the original idea so the original idea of runway was always around how do we use technology to augment human creativity and [39:11](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2351) meant humans in some way. And the way we started was, well, we have a beginning of an idea of, let's start with the creative industries, because it feels like the most obvious one when I create pixels on a screen, when I create moving pixels on a screen, the first thing people think is, well, movies and ads, and it's the obvious kind of first line of sight. But then if you really think about the technology that we're powering and building behind it, We're making visible and possible to create moving pixels, realistically animated, whatever shape or form you want. And those pixels can be used for way more things, right? [39:50](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2390) So one of them is entertainment. So can AI models be used for storytelling? Yes, of course, 100%. That question is answered. Can AI models be used for... What I call boring content. Boring content is you want to watch a movie of yourself in a spaceship. I think that's fun, entertaining. Would you watch six hours of cars driving on the street? No, probably not. But if you look at it from a technical standpoint, those two things are very similar. They're just pixels on a screen. Just moving things and things are happening. Now, we attribute from a human perspective value to one more than the other. [40:21](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2421) You're willing to wait in line and buy a ticket and sit for two hours to watch number one. You're not going to do that for number two. but someone else is willing to pay and spend and watch that for a long time number two which is autonomous systems or robots or drive self-driving cars that's how you learn all in the world you learn by watching videos so instead of me not only recording the videos i can generate the videos and you can learn from that and so for us it's like well if we're solving we're answering the questions of like these models are used for this and they're helpful and that answer the question [40:55](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2455) **Cristóbal Valenzuela:** this answer, we're now kind of realizing, and other people also realize, that if you scale these video models to a significant point, these models not only encode storytelling, they encode and they figure out the patterns of the world at large. The physics, the concession, like the occlusion of [41:11](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2471) things, how things move, gravity, there's a lot of things that models are learning just by observing. And the implications of that are, well, you can start thinking of all these different applications, robotics. And then the other question, the other kind of interesting perspective is once you have a world model, a model system that can understand the world, maybe in the same way that we might have understood, we understand the world is that you can technically run them in real time. You can make them react and condition them on things that are happening on a real time basis. And that opens a whole new avenue of like opportunities. It opens a whole new avenue of opportunities in in entertainment as well you can think about having conversations with characters moving in open worlds similar to a game you can think about conversational systems we released this protocol characters really recently that's based on our world models systems and models that allows you to have open-ended conversations with avatars that look extremely hyper real and they're happening in real time like is there a chris that your employees talk to there's many versions of many different people including chris uh but the thing is that you can create one for anything you [42:16](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2536) want. I'm using one to learn French. And I have a philosopher now. I actually connected two of them and they can chat with each other. And that for me is very interesting because it obeyed maybe to the point of something we mentioned in the beginning was it creates a new market. I don't think we have a name for that because people might think about it as a game or a film, but it's not really either of both. We actually don't have a language and a word to describe what it is. You're interacting with your screen, your pixels moving, you're being part of it, and it's entertaining. You're going to spend your people spend hours on it. [42:48](https://realalpha.app/v/hBT2oKYGcKU/?t=2568) What do we call it? I don't know. We'll figure it out. But it's just really interesting. Well, we are excited to see where you take this and what kind of things we can do with the products, you know, in the future. So thanks for joining us, Chris. Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me.