Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:00 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:00:00] S0: When you go and watch a movie and you pay to go to a theater, why are you watching that movie? Do you care do you care which cameras were used in, like, making the the film? Do you care about, like, the software that was used? If you go there for one thing and one thing only, which is you wanna be entertained. You wanna you wanna like the story. This doesn't change the equation. If I can have 100 more people make a 100 more movies that you like watching, then you will watch them. You will find the time to watch them because that's that's what you find valuable. I think the the dynamics and the formula and the equation that's changing is how many more people can do that and and and how many people can tell their stories. The way we value them will still be the same. Like, nothing will change. You as a viewer are gonna judge it with the same values that you had it before, which is, is it a good story or is it not?
00:00:47 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:47] S1: Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. What if the next Oscar winner made their film entirely with AI? Well, Cristobal Valenzuela is the cofounder and CEO of Runway, the company that pioneered AI video generation and is building world models that will power the next era of human storytelling. The company is now valued at $5,300,000,000. Their models are being used by Hollywood studios, gamers, architects, teachers, robotic researchers, and everyday creators around the globe. In this conversation, we're gonna talk about why AI video is an entirely new medium that requires an entirely new mental model. What happens when the cost of creating video content truly goes to zero, how these models are already acting as genuine creative collaborators, and why every major technological shift has felt catastrophic in the moment and transformative in retrospect. Let's dive right in. If you're running a startup, we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com. And with that, let's welcome Chris. First of all, Chris, I'm so grateful to have you on today. I know our good pal, Howie, from Airtable had us meet. I'm really happy to have you here, especially as a fellow New Yorker. So first, just thank you and welcome. I wanna start from the beginning. One of the things I find so interesting about you, especially with this incredible business that you've built that's sort of the intersection of the future in so many ways, I wanna take a quick minute to rewind. You grew up in Chile, and you moved to New York to join NYU's ITP program back in the day. Growing up in Chile, how do you think that changed you? How do you think that impacted you? It would just be so great to hear a little bit about that.
00:02:48 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[00:02:48] S0: Yeah. Happy to. And thanks thanks for having me. Great great to see you again. Yeah. You know, I... It's true. I grew up in Chile. I spent most of my time in Chile. I came here to New York almost ten years ago, as as as you were saying, to study at ITP. Well, I think Chile like formed me in a lot of different ways. I've I've studied there. My family's there. My upbringing was there. And in a way, think I had to bring a lot of that into the way I've started to build runway and the way I maybe we shape... Help shape the culture within the company early on. Chile, if you've ever been there, it's a very different country and culture from from from The States and from The US. And so it was definitely an adjustment period at the beginning, specifically within like speed and how things are done. Chile is very, very stuck in sometimes in the past in some particular ways. And so, yeah, changing and adapting to it has been probably like the biggest lesson as I've been hearing for now more than a decade or so. [00:03:49] S1: That's wonderful. If you think back to 2018, can you just, in plain English, give us a sense of where did the idea for runway come? What was the moment? And in so many ways, you actually... You built Runway well before generative AI took off on the main stage in so many ways. You were extremely early. Let's start a little bit with where was the idea? Where did it come from?
00:03:49 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:03:49] S1: That's wonderful. If you think back to 2018, can you just, in plain English, give us a sense of where did the idea for runway come? What was the moment? And in so many ways, you actually... You built Runway well before generative AI took off on the main stage in so many ways. You were extremely early. Let's start a little bit with where was the idea? Where did it come from? [00:04:20] S0: Yeah. So the the idea... Kind of the the origins of Runway did back to our work as as the three of us, the cofounders, were were doing at NYU. We were trying to understand and research this idea of using AI and deep learning for creative use cases. And more of like, oh, we're going to, there's one particular idea I want to explore was more about the concept of using and training large models to help solve or understand how they can be useful within creative environments. And that was like the premise, would say. I think more than idea, we had like some boundaries and some context in which we thought was worth experimenting and building. And over the last eight years and and since we started the company, we've been relentless in like making sure that that vision and the thesis like still kind of like becomes true, which is using AI as a as a means to augment human creativity and human intellect. And I think we've gotten far and further from realizing that in some way, but we're still a long... There's still a long way to go, to be honest. [00:05:22] S1: In plain English, for everybody out there, what is Runway doing? And what does it help people do?
00:05:22 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:05:22] S1: In plain English, for everybody out there, what is Runway doing? And what does it help people do? [00:05:27] S0: Yeah. So in plain English, Runway does is we're an AI research company that's building what we call world models. And world models are AI models that can understand and interact the world perhaps in similar ways that we do. And the applications of that technology and those models are broad. There's a lot of applications as you can imagine in, in film and media and advertising, which is where we're kind of like growing the most these days. You can create these very sophisticated models that you can then deploy and be kind of a copilots of creative minds. And so we're very much use these days in Hollywood and in media, and everyone is using these highly sophisticated models to do things that they just couldn't do before. But the idea is also that these world models and these these video models can have such a wider spec set of applications beyond media alone. And so what we do at Runway is figure out what other applications we can deploy the models into. And we now have use cases in robotics. We have use cases in the gaming world, in education, and in many other kind of disciplines. At the core Runway is both training the models, creating the technology, innovating it, and then building the products and the experiences in which millions of people can now use them. [00:06:37] S1: Chris, give us a few examples. Just like you just rattled off some categories. Give us some practical examples and use cases.
00:06:46 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:06:46] S0: Sure. So you can think about basically three main use cases and I'll walk you through each of those in a minute, but the most, the first one is with this idea of using AI or video and world models to create entertainment or create media. So you're, if you're, if you're ever watching a movie or if you're going to stream something in your house, you are watching the content or the scenes or the videos someone either recorded or produced with traditional kind of VFX, CGI techniques and tools. Today, where AI is, we are at a place in time where a model can simulate or generate almost all of those scenes. And so if you're in the business of storytelling, the business of filmmaking, in the business of making medium, because this also helps and works really well for advertisers. And basically for any other honest, honestly content creator out there, you can use these models to, to do that, to do that at a fraction of the time that it would have taken you to do it traditionally. And so the more concrete use cases, well, this is, this is a new kind of camera. This is a tool instead of AI models that can help you tell stories visually in ways that you couldn't do before, for high end professional cinematic worlds and for casual creators. And so that's a little bit of the user base of Runway. We work with the best and greatest Hollywood studios in LA and the world. And we also work with just consumers and creators who are using Runway to have fun. So that's kind of one concrete use case that's actually getting deployed a ton these days. It's just as a means to create video and content. A second kind of like possibility is what happens when you start running these models in real time? So again, you can create movie like content or really compelling stories, really compelling scenes. What happens the moment you start running them in real time? Real time, this is real time, right? We're speaking to each other. You're responding to my questions. You... I'm asking your questions as well. You can do a version of this with AI models, you say, visually, which is kind of surprising and kind of magical to be honest. And so there's a lot of interactions and things you can do. You can, have personalized tutors, you can teach people about new languages, you can just have a game live experience where you can chat with characters you couldn't do before.