The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:11:27 · Alex Mashrabov
[00:11:27] S0: No. Actually, we spent more than a year in a search of products which could work. We burned more than 10,000,000 out of 16,000,000 raised in seed fundraising. So we felt we have just one attempt left. And frankly, I feel I am responsible because I was focusing on the wrong things. I think I just lost the touch with reality back then. I was so much optimizing for what's hype today, what's the right narrative, how we can hijack their attention, all these things, really, everything, of building a good product. So when we had less than 6,000,000 left, I guess it was slightly less than five actually, I realized that the only thing which we can be focused on is to lean into the product PLG and just finally set belief that the best product is gonna win. And then we just started to talk to customers. We spoke to eight creative directors about their experience with AI and what's simply missing. Everyone told us that camera control does not exist in AI, and camera control is so important to tell a story. So this is a very important bottleneck to solve. So we released our products March thirty first last year. And since then, we are really riding this crazy wave. Was it immediate product market fit then? Yeah, it was immediate. Is product market fit like love? When you know, you know. Yes, it's definitely when you know, you know. Like, for example, we don't do any paids. And we have on the team people who scaled businesses to over billion and 2,000,000,000 in revenue, like other businesses, with paid advertising. At Hixfield, we decided to really make a bet
00:13:12 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:13:12] S1: that You don't do paid. [00:13:13] S0: You don't do paid. Is influencers not paid? That's a good point. So with influencers, there is typically... There are different types of influencers, but typically, there is some fee for just video production and then some cost per click attribution, which works really well on YouTube. You guys [00:13:34] S1: got into some controversy for... I can't remember what it was. You were paying people to promote for you or doing something rogue with influencers. Was that completely unfair? Was it kind of my bad we did do that? How do you respond to that? [00:13:52] S0: Look, I think the main takeaway from our experience is that it's very very important to own distribution. Distribution now more important than ever. And we basically did outsource. We had just a team of two people on creator and customer success sides, And we just did outsource to the agency, and that was not a good experience. I do just wanna go back to part of the story. Where are you at revenue wise today? So today is actually exciting day. When we record, just Bloomberg article went out so that we cross 1,000,000,000 in annualized revenue. If I had a gong here, I'd [00:14:29] S1: be like hitting the gong. A billion in revenue? [00:14:32] S0: Yes. Actually, it took us eighteen months from 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. For Corsair, it took twenty four months. So we are probably probably, like, the thirds after OpenAI and Anthropic. Eighteen months from a million to a billion?
00:14:32 · Alex Mashrabov, Harry Stebbings
[00:14:32] S0: Yes. Actually, it took us eighteen months from 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. For Corsair, it took twenty four months. So we are probably probably, like, the thirds after OpenAI and Anthropic. Eighteen months from a million to a billion? [00:14:49] S1: Yes. How do you calculate revenue? It's a controversial topic. How do you calculate revenue? [00:14:56] S0: Absolutely. By the way, your cohost, Jason, also asked this question in May. Luckily, answer didn't change. So we are at least consistent. So let me be transparent on that. What we do is we look revenue over the last four weeks and multiply it by 13. From what I know, OpenAI and Thropy Cloud, but all of them use the same methodology. What's very important is that we take revenue, not sales. So if that's annual subscription or annual enterprise contracts, we prorate this across twelve months and only take a piece which corresponds to one month, to twenty eight days to be precise. That's the first piece. And second, it's only live revenue. It's only live revenue. We are not taking three year enterprise deals and baking into 1,000,000,000 figure. No. We don't do that. [00:15:45] S1: If you were to break that billion up today into annual contracts, monthly subscriptions, and then token spend, what would that be?
00:15:45 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:15:45] S1: If you were to break that billion up today into annual contracts, monthly subscriptions, and then token spend, what would that be? [00:15:54] S0: So video AI is still relatively early. It is still probably two years behind coding in terms of adoption. So on demand usage for leading coding companies could be over 50%. And I would be honest, for video, it's substantially less than that. In the same time, what's very interesting for us to observe in the business is that there is some significant revenue expansion. I always love to study stories of the largest customers on the platform. So one customer started six months ago spending just subscription ninety month, and $9 now we just signed a deal over 6,000,000. [00:16:38] S1: 6,000,000? [00:16:38] S0: 6,000,000 a year, right? So this level of acceleration is something which really mind blowing to me. But dude, what are [00:16:46] S1: they getting for 6,000,000 a year? That's like a Hollywood content team almost.
00:16:46 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:16:46] S1: they getting for 6,000,000 a year? That's like a Hollywood content team almost. [00:16:51] S0: So there are multiple trends, and all of them, frankly, coming from Asia. So first, we're seeing a lot of direct to consumer e commerce companies rebuilding their whole go to market to be AI native, where they just make hundreds of ads, if not thousands, a week, where they can AB test what performs well. But we all know about short form dramas. Right? Short form dramas today is an industry over 10,000,000,000, owned primarily by Chinese companies, having huge impact both in China, United States, and Europe, everywhere in the world. And most of new shows there are made with AI end to end. So, look, I think this adoption obviously is coming, like, bottom up, but that's very difficult to refute this new reality. [00:17:38] S1: What percent of revenue is consumer versus enterprise?
00:17:38 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:17:38] S1: What percent of revenue is consumer versus enterprise? [00:17:41] S0: So that that... That's a great question. So business revenue is slightly over 50%. Wow. Yeah. On the consumer sides, it's also very important to break it down. On the consumer sides, out of these 50 is around like 10% is pure consumer use cases, pure consumer. And that's roughly people who use it on mobile. Mobile. So share of our revenue from mobile is less than 10%. We are very different from many other companies. But there are lots of aspiring creators, like basically those people who are freelancers doing social media marketing projects projects and so on, who try to learn video AI so that they can make more money. It's true that their behavior is a little churny. Within a year, most of them actually come back to try again. And we do believe that over the time, most of them are gonna figure stuff out, and they're just gonna become this new AI native workforce. So it's still important for us to educate them. That's why we invest so much in Hixfield Academy, YouTube channel, and so on. But we also are fully cognizant that we will never be able to win in the markets of subscriptions of $20 a month. So Why? Because I think today, Google and OpenAI, they pursue ads so much. But fundamentally, I think they are going to completely demolish all their prosumer subscription markets, which is $20 a month subscriptions.