# Inside fal’s $1.65B Series E & F Led by Sequoia & Bessemer

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

fal cofounders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say generative media is one of AI’s three product-market fits, and compute providers hold the margin.

- Show: Sourcery
- Hosts: [Molly O'Shea](https://realalpha.app/people/molly-oshea/)
- Guest: [Burkay Gür](https://realalpha.app/people/burkay-gur/) · Co-Founder & CEO, fal
- Guest: [Gorkem Yurtseven](https://realalpha.app/builders/gorkem-yurtseven/) · Co-Founder & CTO, fal
- Published: Nov 3, 2026
- Length: 1 h 4 m

## The best minutes

- [4:33](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=273) [Higher video prices are revealing deeper professional demand](https://realalpha.app/s/higher-video-prices-are-revealing-deeper-professional-demand/) (5 min)
- [13:22](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=802) [fal pivoted from Python infrastructure to image models](https://realalpha.app/s/fal-pivoted-from-python-infrastructure-to-image-models/) (5 min)
- [48:49](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2929) [Hollywood adoption is slower than the AI debate suggests](https://realalpha.app/s/hollywood-adoption-is-slower-than-the-ai-debate-suggests/) (4 min)

## Also worth watching

- [37:32](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2252) [Model launches now require compute partnerships](https://realalpha.app/s/model-launches-now-require-compute-partnerships/) (5 min)
- [9:22](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=562) [AI ads can improve through rapid creative testing](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-ads-can-improve-through-rapid-creative-testing/) (4 min)
- [27:37](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1657) [fal keeps management flat with hands-on team leads](https://realalpha.app/s/fal-keeps-management-flat-with-hands-on-team-leads-2/) (4 min)
- [32:14](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1934) [fal screens for agency, hunger and humility](https://realalpha.app/s/fal-screens-for-agency-hunger-and-humility/) (4 min)
- [45:06](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2706) [Open source persists because studios need model control](https://realalpha.app/s/open-source-persists-because-studios-need-model-control/) (3 min)

Skip the restaurant and funding intro, sponsor reads, the model-name discussion, and founder inspirations.

## Summary

Burkay Gür is fal’s cofounder and CEO, and Gorkem Yurtseven is its cofounder and CTO. They started fal in 2021 after building machine-learning infrastructure at Coinbase and Amazon. fal provides infrastructure for image, video, audio and 3D models used by developers, studios and model labs.

Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven describe generative media as a third major AI product-market fit alongside search and coding agents, supported by professional users’ willingness to spend heavily. They explain fal’s shift from Python data infrastructure to image and video model inference, where rising capabilities, prices and demand have kept spending up. They also discuss a flat organization built around senior individual contributors, hiring for agency and humility, and compute scarcity that constrains model launches. They argue that compute providers, not application companies, are positioned to capture AI margins, while open source and Hollywood adoption continue to evolve.

### Minute by minute

- [1:50](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=110) **Business matters more than headlines.** Gür and Yurtseven say funding announcements helped at first but now matter less than running the business. The episode description identifies their latest financing as a combined $1.65B Series E and F, with Sequoia Capital leading the E and Bessemer Venture Partners leading the F.
- [3:07](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=187) **Generative media is a third AI market.** Gür and Yurtseven see search, coding agents and generative media as AI’s three clear product-market fits. They say generative media is unusual because an individual doing the work can spend $10,000 to $20,000 a month on models.
- [4:33](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=273) **Video demand keeps climbing.** The founders say video grew to about 70% of fal’s revenue before image editing models revived image use; revenue is now split 50/50 between video and image models. They recall Veo 2 pricing at $5 per five-second video, more than 10 times the roughly 30-cent price of earlier clips, and say professional ad and film users still adopted it.
- [9:22](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=562) **AI can automate ad testing.** The founders say generative video suits ads that can be discarded and remade, and that a 60-second ad can use short cuts rather than one continuous generation. They see an opportunity to test creative variations and use performance data to refine ads automatically, though they say that workflow is not yet fully available.
- [13:06](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=786) **fal pivoted toward generative media.** The founders say fal began in 2021 as compute infrastructure for Python data science and machine-learning workloads. After ChatGPT and image models arrived, they focused on making image models run faster; that work gained customers and revenue, so they named the emerging category generative media.
- [17:53](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1073) **Hire people who follow AI closely.** The founders say they rely on their leadership team to stay current with research and prefer hires who are already deeply engaged in AI. One founder points to Coinbase’s crypto quiz, which tested candidates’ knowledge before they could get a team call, as an example of screening for people who follow a field closely.
- [22:49](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1369) **Creative adoption is still early.** The founders say generative media was overlooked beside language models and that technology’s impact on creative industries may arrive in another wave over the next five to ten years. They point to AWS and AMD’s media businesses, then recount meeting in San Francisco and deciding to start fal after a productive working stay in Palm Springs during COVID.
- [27:37](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1657) **Flat teams rely on super ICs.** Gür and Yurtseven say fal has at most two reporting levels and avoids pure management roles, instead building teams around strong individual contributors who can lead and do hands-on work. They say coding agents may help super ICs lead teams of five to ten engineers while keeping the company flat.
- [32:14](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1934) **Hiring favors agency and humility.** The founders look for agency, hunger and humility, especially in engineers who can make business decisions and work with customers. They warn that crunches can mean 60- or 80-hour weeks, but say they do not promote toxic hours and still go home on weekends. They describe staying at the frontier as demanding constant effort in a market where new models keep arriving.
- [37:22](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2242) **Compute constrains model launches.** The founders say model providers need to plan inference capacity in advance and often partner with providers such as fal before launching, because compute is hard to procure. They also describe generative media as a collection of modalities, including image, video, 3D and audio, with many labs leapfrogging one another and abundant video data to train on.
- [45:06](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2706) **Open source has durable uses.** The founders say open sourcing can give studios the ability to fine-tune models and apply LoRAs to unreleased characters or styles, as well as draw attention to labs that are behind. fal serves open- and closed-source models; they say enterprise customers value trusted GPU execution because unreleased creative work could leak.
- [48:49](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2929) **Compute providers may capture margins.** The founders say Hollywood’s fear of AI has outpaced its current impact: fal’s Hollywood revenue is growing, but they say AI has had no effect on labor and has produced little worthwhile content there so far. They say legal review has slowed adoption. One founder estimates AI lets fal’s software team move three to four times faster, while they argue that margin depends on innovating in the compute path.
- [53:28](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3208) **AI content needs lasting appeal.** One founder says he wants an AI-made short or animation that people will still enjoy years later, rather than content valued only for demonstrating a model’s capabilities. The other is newly bullish on interactive world models, citing persistent generated worlds and the prospect of making games with prompts, while noting their heavy compute needs.
- [57:18](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3438) **Application-layer margins are thin.** The founders praise Jack Dorsey as underrated and cite Ali Ghodsi’s ability to reinvent a company. One founder speculates about an OpenAI–Meta merger, while stressing he has no inside information. They argue that application-layer margins are close to zero and say coding may increasingly overlap with generative media.

## Transcript

Sourcery, hosted by Molly O'Shea, with Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven.

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

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=0) You guys have the coolest brand on earth. You guys are growing really fast. You keep on raising more and more money. AI really has three product market fits. One of them, we believe, is generative media. Three years ago, no one really understood what that meant. Three years down the road, and it's a whole new industry. You sit down in front of a computer, and you generate videos all day, and you spend $10,000, $20,000 a month. And we were like, okay, who the heck is going to pay all this money? Turns out there is essentially infinite demand. Every big company is going to be a compute company, just the storefront is going to be different.

[0:30](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=30) Our storefront is unique and interesting. No one else has a storefront similar to us. Were you surprised by how much money there is behind this? 100%. Okay, cool. Gurkem. Wow. You really don't need to. Gorkem. Yeah. Gorkem. Yeah. Wow. That was the last one. That was the last one? That was very good. Gorkem. Yeah. Gorkem. Now I'm just going to keep on saying it. Yeah. That's perfect. Teaching AI. Where's my camera? Internet. You've been pronouncing Gorkem completely wrong. It's Gorkem. AI. Learn from the YouTube videos. Berkai? Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. You guys, this is great. You guys have the easiest names on earth.

[1:22](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=82) Easy. uh welcome to sorcery thank you so much we're in a very special place so do you want to maybe tell us where we are sure yeah so we're at dalida uh shout out to sayyat and laura dalida is a is a eastern mediterranean restaurant with a lot of turkish influence and fun fact i got married here and gurkham officiated it great wedding congratulations thank you amazing well i'm excited i can already smell the food everybody is eating it behind the scenes so as much as this conversation is going to be rich and delicious i'm sure the food is as well it's amazing okay so i think i've reached out to michelle like a billion times because your name kept on popping up you guys have the coolest brand on earth like you guys are growing really fast every single time and it's about a round because we cover funding rounds i'm like i gotta to get them the next time no you guys already raised it it's gone it's over the next one gone over and I'm like keep on trying to catch you guys but you keep on raising more and more money so congratulations on the recent round thank you thank you so much you did like couple back-to-back rounds like any fast-growing air company these days but this last one is the biggest one yet so

[2:42](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=162) thank you so much congratulations I think you've also hit the point where you don't want to do any media on it anymore so you've passed the inflection point of like the hype cycle and now you just have a humming business exactly be rather focused on the business the the announcements you know it's it it gives some you know push in the beginning but as as you do more rounds i think it's irrelevant it's the it's the business that that matters more the adrenaline has worn off exactly it's probably worked for hiring and that kind of stuff and customers but you gotta focus Okay, so let's talk about the evolution of the business today.

[3:19](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=199) Generative media has taken off in AI. It's probably one of the coolest parts about AI, seeing all these videos being creative, all the creative stuff getting made. And so I don't know who wants to take it off, but feel free to just kind of like, where are we right now? And why is this just kind of exploded? The way we talk about it, AI really has like three product market fits. One of them is search and like initial ChatGPT consumer product and now Google and Gemini. The other really clear one that's like growing really fast now is coding agents. And the third one is we believe is generative media.

[3:54](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=234) And to put things in perspective, when we talk about it with coding agents, an individual can go spend maybe $10,000, $20,000 a month on their cloud or OpenAI subscription. Generative media is the only other thing. This exists. An individual, if this is your job, if you work at an AI native studio or a real studio these days, you sit down in front of a computer and you generate videos all day and you spend $10,000, $20,000 a month. This is the only other use case in AI that an individual can spend that much money. And search is so big that it gets a pass, and there is no other use case or part of the industry that has this dynamic.

[4:35](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=275) It's just coding and generative media. And that's why you are seeing all this growth, because more people are adapting it, and individually they are spending so much money on it. I know this is kind of an elementary question but did you like were you surprised by how much money there is behind this? 100% we were too like we thought like we were surprised all along the way we were surprised how quickly we switched from image models to video models where like now we make I would say 50% of our revenue from video models and then after that transition we thought like video was going to completely take over right it was zero and then it reached to around like 70 70 percent of our revenue and then we thought image models are like done and it's like it's it's not it's not enough compute it's it's a simple problem and from now on it's all gonna be video and then turns out image editing models brought life back to image models and then it's also useful for video models as well because it you can create different frames and video models does such such such better job interpolating between those frames so image editing all of a sudden made image models come back and now like our revenues 50 50 even that was surprising right

[5:57](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=357) like when we thought like a portion of our business was dying but it like made a huge comeback but yeah video models keep getting better yeah currently what we can do like the best video model maybe creates 10 to 12 seconds of video like the new ones are going to reach maybe like 30 seconds but until you can generate like real-time streaming very high definition video this is gonna keep increasing and as as you increase the resolution as you increase the duration the cost increases exponentially because you have to have more attention in the in the inference during inference time and the resolution increases the amount of pixels exponentially so things are getting much more expensive so now we have a framework to think about okay there's a lot more money to be made going forward because the video output we get is still like very rudimentary.

[6:50](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=410) There was also like a very interesting point sometime last year when VO2 came out. I think at the time like Kling was probably one of the best video models and there was also like MiniMax and the prices were like somewhat kind of going lower. I would say like they started at let's say 40 cents per five second video and then they sort of settled around there maybe like 30 cents for a five second like clip and then VO2 was very surprisingly it was like five dollars per a five second video so it jumped like you know more than 10x and we were like okay like who the heck is gonna pay the pay all this money right like this

[7:33](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=453) **Gorkem Yurtseven:** is just another five-second video turns out like there is essentially infinite demand so people people started using that model and then even more expensive models came around and people started using those models and what was really

[7:48](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=468) happening under the hood was we actually saw like more and more professional use cases start start happening for like ads like real you know people who are in marketing and like ads and actually like movie production they started using these models because the quality went so much higher and there was just more demand that like other models weren't able to actually capture so it's it's like the usage is going up and then the capabilities are going up and then everything's getting more expensive over time so essentially yes like people ended up spending so much more money and and and in terms of progress it's still happening like we're nowhere near, you know, with LLMs, I think people talk a lot about hitting a wall or like diminishing returns. I think in this side of the market, we're like nowhere near actually hitting like diminishing returns. I think there's just so much new stuff happening with like Seedense V2 and V2.5.

[8:50](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=530) It's just like the quality is going up, prices are going up, and people still want to use all these models. For sure. I mean, do you guys remember Sora? Yeah. Feels like it was a lifetime ago. I mean, that was a really cool moment, but clearly too expensive. Yeah, it was too expensive. Like, in fact, we saw, we also hosted Sora on our platform and like we saw huge growth in the like last three months before they decided to like take it down. We were like, what's happening? Like, there's like infinite volume here, essentially. But yeah, it turns out, you know, the rumor is like there wasn't enough compute for everything else. And it's also expensive to run. So yeah, but I think it had a great future. Maybe it'll come back sometime.

[9:35](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=575) I mean, it's really interesting because earlier today we were down at AppLovin and, you know, this will probably get released later than that. But I was talking to Adam, the CEO there, and Gio, their CTO, and we were kind of talking about how they've created their algorithms for all the ads and what works best and like the best ads are like actually 60 seconds long and i was like okay well are you thinking about using like a higgs field or any of these other kind of companies out there and offering that or acquiring any of these kinds of like generative ad platforms because some of them just really i mean most of these cases are ads and like it just it's just really not there yet it's like the best they can do is like five seconds so it's like not every brand can do that um in terms of where you guys came from and where it's going advertising is going to be the biggest use case you think i like ads like as a business like internet runs on it and also like the content these models are able to make is is perfect for these ugg style ads because the the content is usually throw away if it doesn't work make a new one like it works great but also like the the quality like the the lighting nothing has to be perfect

[10:45](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=645) it needs to be almost looks it needs to look homemade so it's like easier to do and you know yes the the best ad may be 60 seconds but you don't have to do a continuous 60 second generation you can do fast small cuts which works maybe better in in certain cases and then what you can do is you get a lot of data back right that's I don't think anyone is particularly doing a good

[11:10](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=670) **Burkay Gür:** job at it but if because you can post these ads and see how people are interacting with it you

[11:16](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=676) can have like continuously improving or you can do small changes totally to the to do what you are what you are posting and just show more of the things that are performing well and this can all happen automatically right so this is I think it works great with video models no one has done it perfectly but you would love to be part of this like automated ad story i think it's it's it's gonna be a great business it was really funny i i was i was gonna mention this in the interview but then i realized it was probably kind of inappropriate but like the kind of the the example you just mentioned of like reinforced learning models on themselves and and just kind of optimizing over and over again there was and i don't know if you guys see But I do this because I make clips and I make stuff for the internet, and one of the best hacks that I had was showing my armpits.

[12:09](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=729) I got so many more views from showing my armpits. As the hook, right? Literally, it's like I got 10x views just from having my arms up, and I was like, what the hell? Imagine you can have yourself in 100 different positions, and let's go. Yeah, I mean, but that's like a thing. It's like you the thumbnail is always testing I mean they're like YouTube for us. It's like you got to test thumbnail You got to test the title you got to test like the copy all of that kind of stuff because it works the algorithms differently Exactly. I think there's like really sophisticated Users out there that are doing it like and at like smaller scale Maybe they're like a creator but also like large companies is doing it right now I don't think it's like super spread out yet, but like it's out there for sure And, like, we work with a few companies that actually do it, but I think it's going to get even more available, I would say, because it's not very straightforward, I think, to do the whole, like, reinforcement learning and all the technical stuff behind it.

[13:14](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=794) It's not, like, fully there yet, but I think in a few years, this is going to become the norm. So let's talk about the engine behind Fall, and then we can kind of get into how your culture is keeping up with the growth, because it's crazy. So you were saying you started off with compute. You started off as a compute company. You found your way into this area space. What was that evolution like for you, and how have you completely embraced this new category? Right, yeah. So we started in compute, but like a pre-AI era, let's call it, right? so we started in 2021 and the whole thesis was like okay there's you know this previous data infrastructure wave led to some amazing companies like snowflake databricks and what do they have in common they own compute you know so in order to build the next generation of like the data infrastructure company we also have to focus on compute that was the initial thesis and we thought the next big thing is going to be Python. So SQL, basically like what Snowflake did and what Databricks did to a certain extent was like enabling SQL to run on, you know, in the cloud and they own the compute and they let you scale the compute elastically. So we thought Python is

[14:30](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=870) going to be the next thing because AI is the next big thing. So we ended up working with some really awesome teams like trying to bring their data science and machine learning old terms like workloads into the cloud so that was like our initial starting point and then soon after we started um some insane things happened in the market i think from a technology point of view like we had a massive breakthrough with chat gpt and in our space stable diffusion and and dali So we kind of had a choice at that point. We can either stick to our data infrastructure initial idea, or we could go into this new world of AI.

[15:16](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=916) And there was language models. And at the time, I think, people were very excited about a bunch of open source models. If you remember, Lama came out shortly after, and there was this huge price race to the bottom. and we just thought okay we're like five six people right now we don't have that much money in the bank you know we're pretty early company and you know we can't really like go and you know sell tokens at a negative margin and let's do something more interesting you know the trend

[15:48](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=948) **Gorkem Yurtseven:** still holds uh where the trend still holds is let's focus on image models because like there's something interesting happening there as well there was no sight of video models like no one

[15:59](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=959) even talk We talked about it, I think, back then. But we thought that we could take image models and make them run a lot faster in the cloud on the same infrastructure that we built. And so we did that. So we had a very technical team. We thought we could do a really good job running these models faster. I don't think we had a very formed thesis on where those models are going to go. So we kept doing it. and that got a lot of attention from like very early customers and we thought okay you know what like with this other business we ran it for a year we didn't make a single dollar with this one our revenue is starting to go like this there's clearly something here so we decided to focus on the image model space there and three to six months later roughly we actually realized that like this trend is probably much bigger and we thought that these models are um like useful for very different things than than what llms are helping with you know we thought it'll help with ads and marketing we thought it's going to be the buyers are going to be completely different so we decided to call it something else to like just be able to tell the story to people so we actually came up with this word generative media and we slapped it on our website and we said

[17:20](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1040) follow the generative media company and we always have to explain what it is because I think you know three years ago no one really understood what that meant so yeah that's that's kind of like how we got into it and how we sort of found our our like niche which you know three years down the road it's more well established and it's a whole like new industry so and people want to make feature films out of it. Exactly, yes, yes. I don't think, I think like when you first play with the first Dali, like you would never think, okay, like we could make movies with this. But it took only like... Came here very, very fast.

[17:55](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1075) Yeah. We came here really fast. It only took like 18 months that people started thinking, oh, like this could actually make feature films. So, we're in San Francisco. People here are super nerdy. Maybe you guys are too, but like, well, as you're growing super fast in this inflection period how are you keeping ahead of research like are you paying attention to research like what are you how are you learning as you go in the beginning we were extremely involved obviously like we had a very small team and we had to be part of every single little edge we can make and then nowadays we have a really talented leadership team that most of them we worked it before in different companies. So I would say that's the best part of our job that we can rely on these leaders. And that's a superpower to ask their opinion, what they think about like what's coming new, what they pay attention to. And a lot of the information I get these days is from that team. I'm also very curious to read everything, but I get, I learn more from the leadership team than than the internet these days oh that's pretty good what about you um yeah i think just to echo what gercam said uh it is it's very important like how you build this team i think i

[19:19](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1159) got a lot of inspiration from my days at coinbase in terms of like recruiting the earlier team i think one of the things we did we did there so i i joined coinbase 2016 team was like almost 100 people uh maybe like very early days similar to like our size now we're like 150 people uh today and one of the things they did was like they had this like um crypto quiz that they posted on reddit right and and one of the things they assessed for was like you're literally like your knowledge about crypto like how much do you know about it you know it's a bunch of technical terms also pre-ai Like, you know, it's...

[20:00](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1200) It was hard to find the answers to these questions, but there was literally a quiz, and you had to pass this quiz to actually get on a phone call with someone on the team. How cryptopilled are you? How cryptopilled was it? So I think this was a very key factor to Coinbase's success in the long term, because you really want these fanatics about the space so that they can keep things going. because like you know most of the time like the whole job becomes about it becomes like staying up to date right so like how do you stay at the forefront one like you could collect really great people and you know get them on your team and hopefully they'll feel motivated or you can get people who are like already motivated this is all they can think about this is the thing that they're like most excited about today if you didn't hire them they would be doing this anyways so like that was literally like I still is this is kind of the criteria we have for for bringing in the early hires because like it helps with just naturally like we're up-to-date all the time and I think it helps with people being just like constantly motivated about like what they're working on so like you know you don't have to try to do that people are already like AI pilled or gen media

[21:19](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1279) built. This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on. And I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work.

[22:05](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1325) It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. From handshake to signature faster, Harvey, the AI platform built for legal work, is trusted by 80% of the AMLA 100 and over 20% of the Fortune 500. Learn more today at Harvey.ai. That's Harvey.ai. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. So where are you hiring people from? What were their roles? Because this is all, again, this is all very new. This is a common question I ask in these conversations because it's like to remind people like none of this really existed like three or four years ago so how many people are trained even in the beginning it was an overlooked market because it happened at the same time with with the llm growth like maybe if it happened by itself it would have been the hottest thing but it was like the second hottest thing it's also hard because it's the creative industry it's kind of at odds with technology to some degree it's like there is a lot of technology involvement in creative industries right like even an imax camera is like you know size of that table over there like there is technology involved and in in different parts of like animation filmmaking bigger parts and then it plateaus and maybe

[23:34](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1414) we are going through one of those times where in the next five to ten years it's going to have another outsized impact on on the creative industries fees. But, yeah, like, AWS, AMD, they have massive, like, media businesses where they sell to studios and media companies. So, this is just the next wave of it. Yeah, I think I was listening to something on Christopher Nolan and his infrastructure. Where he's keeping all that IMAX film. Yeah, 900 pounds. So heavy. Which is funny. um okay so let's talk a little bit about the team and how you guys all gathered together so you came from coinbase you came from amazon yeah yeah so how did you guys meet and what was kind of like the early culminations of gathering together a group you you go so we are both turkish but we didn't we didn't know each other back home and we met in san francisco like when i first moved here 2014 is immediately I met him. We were both working at different companies and doing you know minding our own business and it was actually during COVID time we this we've told this story a couple more times before but we rented the house in Palm Springs and that's when we first thought okay maybe there's like a working chemistry between us and then it took us maybe another year

[25:20](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1520) to start the company but that's that's how we met we were long time friends for over 10 years and never worked together until that covid uh palm springs house and and here we are we've been building the company for five six years now and you've been pulling people from coinbase coinbase and amazon it's really oh damn from both places exactly and so what what were you like looking for in the early days what were the types of hires? I would say like just really good people in in many ways like I think one is obviously like they have to be excellent technically I think early on like we we we definitely had to get the technical part right because like we were just doing a lot of like deep technical work we still are but that at that time that was our like differentiator um so people who are really good at you know very good technically i would say also like people who are just like people that we get along with i think like early team chemistry is like really really important um i think if you can like figuring out like product market fit is probably the most challenging thing for a startup right so like you have to in our mind i think you have to keep a pretty small team and that can work really really well together that can like stick together

[26:51](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1611) and um just have a really like great way of experimenting with ideas and then like throwing things that don't work and and just like keep moving and keep looking i think this is one of the biggest advantages of starting a company in your mid-30s because you have your whole working life people you worked with you trusted you didn't trust that you can you can bring in together and as soon as you know you reach out to people you if if you have some something worthwhile they come and join you and they want to be part of the story and if you are like younger you unfortunately don't have that and you have to just go on your own and try to hire people and get trust but here we built trust with so many people that early engineering team was almost all people like we knew before and worked with and trusted helped navigating the problems so much easier what are your views on scaling up or keeping flat um so culture wise like our company i would say is like flatter than your run of the mill

[28:01](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1681) **Gorkem Yurtseven:** startup I think like the deepest level we have is like two levels of like reporting and yeah I think that's that's by design I would say we we we really

[28:13](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1693) believe in this like super ICs I think it's becoming more popular now it has a name. I don't think we had a name. Really? Yeah. It's a super IC? Super IC. So we have forward deployed deployed agent, not agents. Is it agents? No, any agents soon. I mean, I should know this. I know Palantir quite well. So we have forward deployed engineers and now we have super ICs. Super ICs are, I think like now it's becoming a more common term. Basically, you want your like management layer to be super ICs. So people who are just like so epic at their job, they can like actually do hands-on work and then they can also like lead teams uh i think we have a very similar without like calling it this way we we always have the structure um in a way that that like essentially like we don't have pure managers we don't plan on having pure managers yeah and we can gather the team around like these really magnetic like people within the team that are just like really freaking good. And that's just like a very, I don't know, natural way of like building leadership within the team. So that's kind of how we've been building it out. Like we just add really good people and then we see leaders emerge and we gather like the teams around them. But how long

[29:31](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1771) can you go this way? I think there's a limit, right? So you start hitting, I think like some communication bottlenecks right and I think that's part of the scaling challenge right like you have to kind of think about like like we think a lot about like how do you how do we communicate with the team broadly how do we keep everyone like aligned I think those are like you know as as you grow those start becoming the challenges and so far like we just try to have like many check-ins with the team I think we're still keeping everything flat and and see like when things break and then we would throw like maybe more management layers but but essentially like we're really focused on this like super IC strategy. And in a way our growth was timed perfectly with how coding agents and NLMs became a huge part of software engineering and I think forever we can keep this as long as agents and coding coding models improve at this pace you just need really talented leaders that super ICs to manage maybe be the leader of I don't know five to ten engineers and you rely on coding agents to do most of the work and I think we can keep up like this to to have like maybe just two levels of hierarchy and that's

[30:53](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1853) it I mean look Applovin does multi-billion dollars in revenue they have like 400 employees and 100 people on their engineering team. Yeah. Yeah. Big fan of Adam. Big fan. Big fan. I mean, I was there today. It's crazy. I mean, like their market cap peaked at like 250 billion. Now they're at like 130, 150. But I mean, it's like he is such a proponent of what you're just saying. Like his whole thing is built on individual contributors and like people not just because now we have access to coding agents. Like what about the other side of the brain? What about the like, you know the human personal things and also holding the business weight of it and making business decisions but like having you know the team effort around it so i think that is like kind of a structural component that's just fundamentally changing it's like you can't just be a 10x engineer you have to be yeah a lot more i think other ceos are like also talking about it right like brian armstrong from coinbase he recently talked about it like literally like describes a blueprint like this is how we're building the company going forward i think elon is a very big proponent of this, right?

[31:59](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=1919) For better or for worse, he talks about this a lot. Yeah, I think it's really picking up, especially among, I think it's harder to do at non-tech companies because there's so much hierarchy, but I think tech companies particularly are very, they still need to, I think, go out of their comfort zone, but at least they're better suited to be able to pull this off. But it is something I think a lot of people are talking about. so what are the key traits that you guys look for um agency is one thing that we talk about like we talk about in the office i think everyone would want people with agency but you you you just mentioned software engineers even making business decisions i think it's unheard of in a big company like amazon coinbase whatever software engineers do software engineering but because the market is moving so fast the the customers are you know emerging changing between different models so fast that a lot of the times we want our software engineers to make business decisions or work with customers therefore have to make business decisions around them and so that's that's the hardest type of engineer to to find and i think if you look for agency if you think this person can act independently take responsibility and own the decisions then the other things we want just

[33:24](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2004) comes naturally with it and hard to test for it I think the best way to know it is if you work with him before or her that's that's the best way to know it but that's something we care about a lot yeah I think we also look for maybe maybe correlates a little bit but like hunger I think is something that's like very very important because like i think you need to be you need to be able to like really push in in this market like to to actually win so you have to like just really want to you know win and build a big company so we try to test for that uh which is very hard to test but i think like you can kind of get a sense when you like sit down and talk to a

[34:06](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2046) **Burkay Gür:** candidate um we do a little bit of like reverse selling i think that helps maybe to identify hunger like hey like it's a lot of work we we don't like believe in i don't think we believe in

[34:17](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2057) like i don't know toxic work hours or things like that um we go home during weekends for example really yeah what imagine that this is the first i've heard of that so nothing to i think brag about like but like you know like nothing to brag about about not going home you go home during weekends and you're still successful. Yes, imagine. Crazy. But but I think like there is a certain baseline I think that we we try to be realistic about like what to expect and so that's part of the reverse sell. I think hey like there can be a lot of like time crunch you know like you know where we really push and we have to spend a lot of time working and 60 hours and 80 hours and I think that like filters out maybe like certain you know certain people so I think looking for hunger is very very important and then I think like culturally I would say anyone like who interacted with our team like on the customer side they would probably attest to this is like our team is like pretty low ego like pretty easy to work with I think we look for like humility in general like they got to be really talented but at the same time like not be a jerk about it I think that's like pretty unique to find and I think like anyone who's interacted

[35:42](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2142) with like our team probably knows that and that's that's I think why they really like us like people are really easy to work with and like really friendly I think I think you can you can have both at the same time so so we try to I think filter for humility as well what have been the biggest The prize challenges that you guys have come across, and not just like the standard stuff, but it could just be like something you had no idea you were going to expect. I'd say like being at the forefront, like as a company is pretty hard. I think one, you have to really want it, right? Like you have to want to build a big, big company. And two, you have to like keep up with it right which requires a lot of effort so that I think in order to you know build up build a big startup you really have to just be very committed and be very hungry and and I think like that's you know that that definitely that's a lot of work you know that that takes that takes a toll on you I think Adam would say this probably you know but but yeah it just requires a lot of hard work? I don't know. I asked him what he's most excited about. He says he doesn't feel excitement. So he's beyond that point. You're going to get there one day. No emotions. Our industry

[37:06](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2226) is incredibly dynamic, right? It's when there's no good model for a month, everyone starts panicking. Oh my God, it's been one month. Nothing new has happened. But the answer is just wait another month and something incredible is going to happen it's it's been true since since we started and that keeps excitement going and that keeps people like very encouraged that okay there's going to be the next model that's going to unlock these other use cases which is going to unlock these other types of customers and that has brought so much growth to our business and so far it just keeps happening for us where have you been seeing some of the best models come from do they just come out sporadically like what it is there any consistent theme between all of them so right now we we play a bigger role in the ecosystem because we are an infrastructure partner for the model providers but we are also the the api partner for the application layer or studios people who are consuming the models so we got a good sense of supply on demand on both sides and we are in such

[38:11](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2291) **Gorkem Yurtseven:** a compute constraint moment right now that um if you are coming up with a new model you really have to plan ahead of time you have to make sure you have enough compute to run inference if if you

[38:22](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2302) are successful you are likely not going to be able to procure it on your own so it's usually a good idea to partner up with an inference provider like us to to do your lunch so we work very intimate with the model providers and for customers like they usually use multiple models at the same time but they really care about model releases because they usually tie their product releases with model releases as well so we keep in very close communication with them as well and then we have to sometimes anticipate how much growth is going to come on the model side to procure our own compute to maybe do some some investment on our side to enable the whole space and someone really has to do that because otherwise all the compute is going to go to coding agents or whoever whoever is like doing the bigger investment by by planning ahead and investing on compute a little bit we we can enable both the model providers and the applications being built on it so that has become our responsibility in the ecosystem these these couple months because compute is so hard to come by i'll add a few more points i think generative media is like very unique in the sense that in in two ways one i think it's there's just more modalities i think when people think of gen

[39:41](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2381) media maybe they only think of video yeah but like you would have to think about text image image editing video 3d text to speech you know speech to text um i don't know if i said 3d like for gaming use cases, whatever. 3D, 4D, 5D. Exactly, all of these. There's actually many modalities within generative media, and there's five to ten companies in each of these sub-categories within GenMedia, so that's one interesting aspect. There's just a lot more happening, there's more fragmentation. And then the other is, going back to what I said about diminishing returns, I think it's still so early in the space that there's actually a lot more leapfrogging happening between more players.

[40:30](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2430) because like we're not at like the 98 point whatever percent we're only at like I don't know 50% of like you know where we're ultimately going to go so there's actually more people leapfrogging there's more diversity in in like the number of labs so it's not just like OpenAI anthropic OpenAI anthropic you know it's more like there's like eight you know players and they're all like leapfrogging each other like one big reason is you're not running out of data there is like so much video data out there and so much new video data is being produced every day that no one has no one claims to train all of that data right they have to pick the hard problem with training a video model is actually you have to filter out the interesting video data so that you you make a you make a good model so if you need to put more data into the model there is abundance and it's it's seemingly free it's there's enough free video out there that it works very well but also the problem space is bigger right you are trying to reason around like the whole world physics everything so it's not as specific as coding or like as specific as certain llms are trying to optimize around so there's a lot more angles people can take to to create a more interesting

[41:50](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2510) and appealing model and it's it's been happening every other month almost i think that's where the naming comes in too there you go you have to differentiate with your naming i mean they've got some funny names yeah happy horse nano banana what what's what do you like uh there's happy oyster it's like a game model uh um there's MiniMax sea dance sea dance and sea dream I think when Nano Banana had its moment and everyone was talking about Nano Banana for like three days, even my dad was talking about Nano Banana, I was like, what the hell is going on here? I think the back story is that it was an anonymous model, so people do these cloaked releases where they will release a model, they won't actually disclose who it is, it's codename get like people excited about it because it's like ranks highly and i think somehow they use that like nano banana as a placeholder name codename yeah and then it just like stuck so it became the original name if you guys were a model what would your model name be sorbet sorbet I don't know why. I wanted to rename the company at once, Sorbet.

[43:04](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2584) Sorbet? He likes Sorbet a lot. I also have this, I think about names, I also want these exotic colors, like burgundy, turquoise, you know? I think that would be a good series for model names. That is a good name, I guess. What about you? I don't know. Sorbet could be a color, apparently, too. It's like the peach color associated with sorbet as a color. I like, we can do birds, there's so many birds. Birds. Yeah, you can do birds. Do you have a favorite bird? I'm asking for a name. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Like, you can even do owls. Like, there's so many owls. You can literally just do, like, different owls.

[43:45](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2625) You can do insects. I don't know. Nature, I think, would be my theme. Well, how did you come up with the name Fall? All right. So. Let's talk about this. Yeah, yeah. So, FAL is, so we have a longer name, Features and Labels. It's a double entrande. Yeah, and it's the initials of Features and Labels. And it's not FAL, it's FAL. It's FAL, yeah, it's FAL. Yeah, it's Features and Labels, which if you're a real OG, you would know those two terms. It's like from the machine learning world. It's like very old, like pre-AI. And so, it's the initials for that, but also, it's, I don't know, have you had Turkish coffee?

[44:36](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2676) Yeah, I have. Okay. So, have you been, like, told your fortune from, like, the coffee grounds? No. All right. So, that's foul. It's, like, like, your fortune told by the coffee grounds. That... You should get it done. We'll do it sometime. Okay. Okay. Let's do it. So, you know, it's, like, your future prediction. Someone looks at, like, when you finish the coffee, it looks at what's remaining. can you tell portions you know no everyone is trained in turkey everyone has done it before yeah yeah like it's like should we do it right now we could try yeah yeah we'll get some coffee yeah i think they have turkish coffee here oh my gosh that's fun do you think the open source closed source debate is still going to be going on in two to four months six months how long do you think that's going to keep on going i think so because like anyone who's falling behind a little bit open sourcing their model is an incredible marketing tactic and the whole world starts talking about you if you open source your model and there are real

[45:39](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2739) **Gorkem Yurtseven:** advantages like if you talk to anyone any of these studios in hollywood they they want to be able to fine-tune the model they want to be able to apply different lauras filters to change the lighting

[45:53](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2753) to be able to use their unreleased characters, their unreleased styles on the models. And the only way to do that is open source. So there are real technical advantages to it. Also, it's an incredible marketing tactic. So people are just going to keep doing it. Someone's going to create a frontier model. People who are falling behind is going to open source it. And the pendulum is going to keep swinging. We thought this was a bigger threat to our business in the beginning because we were running mostly open source. And then we started partnering up with closed source models and running inference for them as well.

[46:33](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2793) So it's a win-win situation for us. But open source makes it a more interesting ecosystem. And I think it's good for the industry in general. So we always welcome more open source models and we support as much as we can the community. I think the fact that people want to protect their IP, that's going to continue, right? Not just for media, but also you want to protect your source code, you want to protect your customer list, whatever, right? All of that, that's always going to be a thing. So I think, yeah, if you have something local, you don't have to worry about it. So I think it's always going to be there, this debate.

[47:13](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2833) Like when we talk to our customers, if they know the model is run on our GPUs, they trust the whole process so much more. Open or close, this works the same. But that has been a big differentiation for our business. And obviously when it's open, like they know for sure that they can even self-host, but they trust us because we can do it better than them. but trust is really important with video models especially because people don't want their unreleased content to leak and it's usually an input to the video model when these creatives work with it. So we've been really pushing on that with the enterprise customers and it resonates.

[47:57](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2877) How good is AI at real professional work? Merkur's AI Productivity Index or APEX tracks it with every major frontier model release. Built with partners like Harvey and Cognition, see where the frontier actually stands at mercore.com slash apex. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Public is a multi-asset investing platform where you can automate your investing with AI agents. create your own custom agent with a simple prompt agents can monitor markets execute trading strategies and manage your cash across stocks bonds options crypto and more want to buy at market close and sell the next day's open just tell your agent automate your investing at public dot com founders scale faster on deal set up payroll for any country in minutes hire anyone anywhere get visas handled fast and get back to building visit deal.com slash sorcery that's d-e-e-l dot com slash sorcery talking macro what do you think the biggest question is that people aren't asking right now i would not exactly that but if you if you listen to like any hollywood podcaster or look at the news about Hollywood,

[49:13](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2953) they always have this angle of AI is going to kill Hollywood. And we are like really in this business, like we talk to these people all the time.

[49:25](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2965) **Gorkem Yurtseven:** So far, I would say I had zero impact on anything in Hollywood.

[49:29](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=2969) It's just like people are projecting to the future a little bit. The business we get from Hollywood has been increasing in the last six months. I think it reached to a meaningful percentage of our revenue, but I would say it had zero impact on the labor. It barely made any content that's worthwhile in Hollywood. It's going to happen. There are signs of it, but we've been talking about it for four years, and it's always been fear-mongering and nothing real. I think that's the thing that people don't realize from a distance. Yeah, most of L.A., like, that's where this is happening. it's really regulatory and what they're doing there with different laws exactly it really has nothing and that's been the reason the adoption has been slow because it's it's not only uh the the quality of the models the the lawyers of the companies need to be okay with it as well but finally slowly we are seeing that everyone is is going full force at it what do you think people should be asking what are what's what's going on out there i think people are asking everything they're asking too much they're asking too much um yeah i don't know there is there's a lot of skepticism i think about use cases again like just speaking more broadly about ai right

[50:48](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3048) there's this certain skepticism about um oh like all of this capex investment where is that gonna go and like you know like is ai actually useful but i think like i'm more on the optimistic side i don't think a lot of the people who are making these claims i don't think they they really actually understand like what's going on how like ai is actually being used at companies and and you know i think gen media is still like still very early if anything like it's just starting it's just like gonna i think ads we're starting to see it hollywood social whatever we're starting to see it um i think there's there's real value like we were just estimating like how much faster we're going like our um software engineering team is moving and i estimated somewhere between like three to four x like we would we would need pre-ai we would literally need like four times the people to go at the same speed so and we're definitely paying less than that yeah right so there's clear roi for us uh so so yeah i think i think if you If you really go deep into the ROI for the companies who are using AI, if you really go deep and actually try to measure it, not read it from a bunch of reports or non-technical people, I think you'll see a different picture.

[52:13](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3133) So, yeah, I'm very in favor, like very long compute, as they say. Like we talk about it, every big company is going to be a compute company. Just the storefront is going to be different. Our storefront is unique and interesting. Like no one else has a storefront similar to us. Some has coding agents. If you go to a NeoCloud, there is no storefront. If you go to Databricks, whatever, it's about like data. everyone has a different story and different way to talk about it but behind the scenes it's who's running the most compute that's that that brings the revenue and yeah we have a unique interesting storefront and it keeps growing yeah and there's not enough of it like all the numbers you hear you know like 200 billion in you know capex or whatever like a lot of that stuff is like not built yet so yeah like it's very slow right like building these things is it takes a lot of time and there's not enough compute right now so i have two final questions and then i'm going to ask you what your hot take is i'm letting you know that now so you can like get it think about it this was a hot take you guys have been crushing it you have great answers and they're quiet opinionated, so it's awesome. But before we get there, what are you most looking forward to

[53:41](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3221) in the next 12 months? I'm looking forward to the first timeless AI content. And the way I define this is you and I, we are going to watch this and it's going to be a year later. We're going to watch it again and we are still going to like it the same way we like it today. So far, AI content has been about capabilities it's been about oh look this is possible to do with a video model or that's possible to do it like an image model but we need to reach to that point where things look fresh all the time and I I'm looking forward to that I think we are in the next year there's gonna be a widely accepted maybe a short movie maybe animation that people are gonna look back at it in a couple years and they're still gonna enjoy it the same way they're enjoying it today it's pretty good evergreen content yeah it's very important i try to do that there you go like people say toy story is is that for computer graphics like that was the first time it came out in 1996 something like that crazy how long ago that was created you know we can just go watch it and it's gonna be good yeah it's i'm gonna enjoy it did you like the odyssey in that way i haven't seen it yet you haven't seen it all you've been doing is talking about

[54:59](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3299) i'm waiting for the imax the big imax and i couldn't i couldn't get a ticket yet yeah go to the spear did they show it there i don't know it's too big too big not as normal intended no um for me i would say like world models is we haven't spent too much time talking about them i think they're super exciting i I was like I was very skeptical like even three months ago so world models are these models like you can actually like play around and like move around it kind of like looks like a game and you can actually like put in actions like with your keyboard and you know you can navigate the world but like seeing what I've seen recently it's it's pretty incredible I actually started feeling very bullish about it it's a matter of I think the quality going up and then the speed getting so much better and I think there's not new architectures now that like people are able to actually have like more persistent worlds before you used to like look this way you know see the flower look away come back it's gone uh so they're able to like persist things now uh and you can actually you'll be able to like actually build like a game with a prompt but i think that space is like just gonna blow up so um again the big challenge there is compute but i actually think that because

[56:23](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3383) you need like a gp running at all times actually like play that game but i think the quality of the games itself is gonna go a lot better and i think it's gonna be probably yet another product market fit like gaming with ai that's not like a thing yet i i actually think there's a big chance that may happen and it might be like this fourth category maybe very expensive yeah damn okay so um this is we have one more question until the hot take okay i'm just letting you know again I'm warning you. Okay, so Sorcery is very proud to be sponsored by Brex. I don't know if you know what Brex is, but Brex knows where you are. So they're all about spending smarter, moving faster performance, a performance corporate card. I like to take this question in the personal bend things.

[57:15](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3435) I mean, you guys have worked for legends, whether it's Brian Armstrong, Jeff Bezos. I mean, you like Chip, so you might like Jensen Wong. I don't know. And then you also like Christopher Nolan. So I'm curious who are some figures that really inspire you and keep you motivated who keeps you like running at it great question to be your dog I don't know of the you know previous generation of founders i think jack dorsey is very underrated and i think he has more range than than anyone else and and then like now he's he's like maybe maybe coming back i think watching his his journey with twitter and then square i i never got to work closely with him but that that's a like inspiring figure when i was younger in silicon valley i always like look up to what he was doing yeah um i wouldn't say it like keeps me going level but like i really like ali ali gotzi um i think he's like transformed this company many times like over time i think like i like to think it's reinventing it keeps reinventing and um i think that's very important i think that's like a secret to building a long you know long lasting company and and navigating through like all these changes that are happening uh so yeah really great leader i think the time has come what is your hottest take right now

[58:57](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3537) do you have it no no there's so much pressure well we can we can take our time yeah let's take our time you can cut it cut it and then It's like dark outside. Should we prompt you with some? No, no, let's do it. I have a good one. It could be on like IPOs, it could be on like companies disappearing, it could be on fake GPUs that people sell from, I don't know where they get them. It could be. Yeah. I had a hot take, like, a year ago, the OpenAI meta merger. Yes. Ooh. Could still happen. Again. It could still happen. They're not doing too great. I think it makes sense. My hot take would be bad for the whole industry.

[59:51](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3591) Sure, sure. Okay. So, not, I guess, like, not too spicy or anything, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Like OpenAI was like known for this like, you know. Consumer, like, edge, right? Like, that was their whole thing, right? Oh, like, OpenAI is winning in consumer, therefore, they're going to win because, like, consumers are so much harder to win. And then Anthropic sort of came with, you know, their enterprise thing. And, you know, and then Google started adding, made their own consumer move. And so I see, like, OpenAI not necessarily, like, winning very strongly in either enterprise or consumer.

[1:00:31](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3631) And then Meta, on the other hand, I think is in a similar situation where, like, they need something. And I thought, what if they, like, combine their forces? That would be really cool. So, like, they can really just, like, really start winning consumer. So I thought it made sense. But again, I have no information about any of this. So I'm completely speculating. But I thought it would be a good move. That is very interesting. another one this is this is a common hot take i'll do it for both of us sure um i have more now okay good good good it's coming the consensus view was there's going to be more margin in the application layer yeah and i think it's completely reversed margins are close to zero in the application layer there's so much competition people need to spend so much money for marketing You can only create margin if you are in the compute path and you can innovate in that path.

[1:01:29](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3689) That's the only way you can create margin, which wasn't the case when we started the company four or five years ago. Everyone thought the infra layer is going to end up with price going to the bottom and application is going to have margins. Looking around, application layer doesn't have any margin today as well. So, wake up, we cease. It's a good one. We talked to Tony Kim about this, that raise, and he was like, the chips have much better margins than all these companies. They're the only ones with margins right now. I have another one. I think this is a very recent one. I've been kind of like toying with this.

[1:02:10](https://realalpha.app/v/pPzJ1wE8Lnw/?t=3730) I think coding is part of Gen Media. Really? Yes. Well, it's also part of Gen Media, right? like it's its own thing but at the same time like we're seeing so many developers building like richer applications that are not just like a website like they can be you know programmable video right like content like maybe you've seen these websites that like look more like a video like there's i think coding is becoming more and more like a very key part of like what the developers on file are using so i you know i think we're gonna like have to invest in it because there's just so much demand from our our own customers everything is a computer everything is a computer everything is computer that's the hot thing well that's a great place to end thank you guys so much i'm very excited for dinner and the coffee and the coffee i can't wait to know what my fortune is there you go cool thank you thank you molly hey it's molly if you enjoy our interviews check out our newsletter sorcery.bc where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews subscribe to sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on youtube spotify apple or wherever you listen

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