00:43:38 · Luke Igel, John Coogan
[00:43:38] S3: I imagine if it wasn't called that. It would be much worse. [00:43:40] S0: Totally. Introduce the product. Like, at what level of abstraction do you see the modern video editor operating? [00:43:47] S3: Yeah. We've all seen the videos, including my launch video co director Donald's where Opus 5.5 by itself can create unimaginably good motion graphics plus videos. In general, combining motion graphics, real life footage, and everything that FAL AI can give you. Yeah. We are giving that a home, in all of the things that you need to do real work where all of your teammates' footage and all of your teammates' edit decisions are in one place. And to prove that this is something that is worthwhile, Donald, my colleague, and I, we spent the past few days living in one giant editor timeline, Figma style, while swarms of my agents and swarms of his agents all just chipped away at the same mega timeline. [00:44:27] S0: That's cool. [00:44:28] S3: I think that we've been working on for a while. [00:44:29] S0: Awesome. So how do you see the how do you see the business positioning between building a harness and building like a SaaS workspace where AI work gets done? Like, these are blurring, but there are definitely companies, I'm thinking of, like, Slack with Slackbot is AI powered, but it's still mostly a software product. Most people would not refer to Slackbot as a as a harness, but then you have, like, a, like, a Cognition, a Devin, which is, like, a harness on top of the of the coding agents. How are you seeing the positioning of your product?
00:44:29 · John Coogan, Luke Igel
[00:44:29] S0: Awesome. So how do you see the how do you see the business positioning between building a harness and building like a SaaS workspace where AI work gets done? Like, these are blurring, but there are definitely companies, I'm thinking of, like, Slack with Slackbot is AI powered, but it's still mostly a software product. Most people would not refer to Slackbot as a as a harness, but then you have, like, a, like, a Cognition, a Devin, which is, like, a harness on top of the of the coding agents. How are you seeing the positioning of your product? [00:45:07] S3: We are a managed service through and through in a way that is very similar to Cognition and Devin, but I would think what makes us different is that we really want you to use your subscriptions [00:45:15] S0: Mhmm.
00:45:15 · John Coogan, Luke Igel
[00:45:15] S0: Mhmm. [00:45:16] S3: For OpenAI, for Claude Code, for everything. Yeah. Because we think that if you use $10,000 of Claude Code tokens, which is not hard to go through, it would mean a lot if you were to spend those doing productive work in video in our platform. Yeah. That means that what can we do to help? Agents make a lot of mistakes if they are left to their own devices in this weird and odd domain, and nothing really has a URL. We had to have to be the ones to make a URL for every single timeline item and media item, and we have to be the ones to manage this long tail of problems. You cannot drag and drop the video the video files that come off of your guys' cameras into Chrome. Yeah. So we had to make it so that you can... We had to build all of that... Those custom decoders. Yeah. You know, everything from black magic to red to a few more one... A few more fun ones. But there's a long tail of tasks that go into video editing from colorization to really in... Intense performance engineering that we're here to do for you. That's why we consider ourselves managing.
00:46:14 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:46:14] S2: Yeah. Video is an an interesting domain because it's it's like not... You can't just one shot it. Right? Because you could hire the most talented, like, video team in the world. Mhmm. Like... And you can tell them, here's my objective. Mhmm. Here's my influences. This is what I want it to look like. This is what I want it to do. No matter how good they are, you're gonna have a bunch of feedback and things that you wanna change. And I feel like that's quite different than some of these other domains where you can one shot like like [00:46:43] S0: You define a goal. [00:46:44] S2: You can you can... There's a lot of different things in software that you can effectively one Yeah. Basically say like, this is the feature. This is what it needs to do. This is how it should interact with the rest of the software. And then it just does it. And it's like, okay. It functions. Whereas like, video is so... Is a... It it can... There's always... You're always gonna wanna change things or at least for a lot of different Yeah. Formats and outputs.
00:46:44 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Luke Igel
[00:46:44] S2: You can you can... There's a lot of different things in software that you can effectively one Yeah. Basically say like, this is the feature. This is what it needs to do. This is how it should interact with the rest of the software. And then it just does it. And it's like, okay. It functions. Whereas like, video is so... Is a... It it can... There's always... You're always gonna wanna change things or at least for a lot of different Yeah. Formats and outputs. [00:47:08] S0: Talk a little bit about... Cinema. Yeah. Cinema. Talk a little bit about, like, how close is Chrome to actual, like, native app performance? Because a lot of just rendering out a timeline can be vastly different if your GPU accelerated versus doing on the CPU. Like, there's a lot of... When you're when you're deep in the Premiere or Blackmagic rabbit hole, you actually wind up starting to think about the specs of your computer a little bit more than I think most creatives would like to. But Chrome feels like there's been a lot of progress there with WebGL and Assembly. But is it 90% of the way there? Is it a 100%? Like, where where are we? [00:47:54] S3: Well, there's this new... Just like at WebAssembly, a lot of new businesses like Figma and many others. Web codecs is what I... Is... It's what allowing this formulation of our business. [00:48:03] S0: Okay. [00:48:03] S3: It is like FFmpeg in the browser, fully GPU accelerated if you want, which means that it's here. Like, we we could not have done this business in 2024. Interesting. This has all been here pretty recently,
00:48:03 · Luke Igel, Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Jay Madheswaran
[00:48:03] S3: It is like FFmpeg in the browser, fully GPU accelerated if you want, which means that it's here. Like, we we could not have done this business in 2024. Interesting. This has all been here pretty recently, [00:48:15] S2: and Yeah. [00:48:15] S3: We're building on top of that to do the really crazy stuff where, you know, vintage camcorders that people in Bushwick love to use, that works in Kino now because we built those decoders on top of this new technology that every browser has now. [00:48:28] S0: Wait. But what what... What's different about a vintage... Is it doesn't just give you an m p four at the end of the day? [00:48:34] S3: It's... A lot of stuff is from the pre m p four era. And, of course, even kind of fancy podcast sets, they're not exporting h two six four there. [00:48:41] S0: Sure. [00:48:41] S3: You know, you have to do the ProRes and everything. But I think the the much more profound thing is that performance. If people scrub back and forth and it feels crappy, they're just not gonna use us. [00:48:48] S2: Yeah. [00:48:48] S3: Yeah. And that's what we've been grinding along... Grinding on and just pulling people in. We talked to Tyler last year when we were much earlier in our journey. His very early feedback was so useful. [00:48:58] S0: And That's awesome. [00:48:59] S3: And very grateful. Towards where [00:49:01] S5: we come.