00:17:45 · Burkay Gür, Gorkem Yurtseven, Molly O'Shea
[00:17:45] S2: Exactly. Yes, yes. I think, like, when you first play with the first DALL-E, like, you would never think, okay, like, we could make movies with this. But it took only, like [00:17:54] S1: Came here very, very fast. [00:17:55] S2: Yeah. We came here really fast. It only took, like, eighteen months that people started thinking, oh, like, this could actually make feature films. [00:18:02] S0: So we're in San Francisco. People here are super nerdy. Maybe you guys are too, but 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? [00:18:22] S1: 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 with 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 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 learn more from the leadership team than the internet these days. [00:19:05] S0: Oh, that's pretty good. What about you?
00:19:05 · Molly O'Shea, Burkay Gür, Gorkem Yurtseven
[00:19:05] S0: Oh, that's pretty good. What about you? [00:19:11] S2: Yeah, I think just to echo what Gorkem said, it's very important like how you build this team. I think I 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 there so I joined Coinbase 2016. Team was like almost 100 people, maybe, like very early days, similar to like our size now. We're like 150 people today. And one of the things they did was like they had this like crypto quiz that they posted on Reddit, right? And one of the things they assessed for was like, literally like your knowledge about crypto. Like, how much do you know about it? You know, a bunch of technical terms. Also, pre AI, like, you know, it was hard to find the answers to these questions. But, like, there was literally a quiz, and you had to pass this quiz to, like, actually get on a phone call [00:20:08] S1: with someone on the team. How crypto filled are you? Was You can't remember.
00:20:08 · Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gür
[00:20:08] S1: with someone on the team. How crypto filled are you? Was You can't remember. [00:20:12] S2: So, this was like I think this was like a very key factor to, like, you know, Coinbase's success in the long term because, like, you really want, like, these, like, fanatics about the space so that, like, 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, 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 and it still is. This is kind of the criteria we have 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 built or gen media built.
00:21:21 · Molly O'Shea
[00:21:21] S0: 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 Sourcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work. It's time to get Brex AF! Learn more at brex.com/sorcery. That's brex.com/sourcery. Bye. From Handshake to signature Harvey, the AI platform built for legal work, is trusted by 80% of the Am Law 100 and over 20% of the Fortune five hundred. Learn more today at harvey.ai. That's harvey.ai. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zone develops next generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. So where are you hiring people from? What were their roles? Because this is all, again, is all And very this is a common question I ask in these conversations because it's like, I have to remind people, none of this really existed like three or four years ago. And So how many people even are
00:23:16 · Gorkem Yurtseven, Molly O'Shea, Burkay Gür
[00:23:16] S1: in the beginning, it was an overlooked market because it happened at the same time with the LLM growth. Like, maybe if it happened by itself, it would have been the hardest thing, but it was, like, the second hardest thing. [00:23:27] S0: It's also hard because it's the creative industry. It's kind of at odds with technology to some degree. [00:23:35] S1: Is a lot of technology involvement in creative industries, right? Like even an IMAX camera is like the size of that table over There is technology involved in different parts of animation, filmmaking, bigger parts, and then hit clutters. And maybe we are going through one of those times where in the next five to ten years it's going have another outsized impact on the creative industries. But yeah, like AWS, AMD, they have massive media businesses where they sell to studios and media companies. This is just the next wave of it. [00:24:13] S0: Yeah, I think I was listening to something on Christopher Nolan and his infrastructure where he's keeping all that IMAX film. [00:24:23] S2: Yeah, 900. That's the... [00:24:25] S0: So heavy. Is funny. 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. [00:24:36] S1: Amazon, yeah. [00:24:37] S0: Yeah. So how did you guys meet and what was kind of like the early culmination of gathering together a group? [00:24:43] S2: You go.
00:24:43 · Burkay Gür, Gorkem Yurtseven, Molly O'Shea
[00:24:43] S2: You go. [00:24:45] S1: So we are both Turkish, but we didn't know each other back home. We met in San Francisco, like when I first moved here 2014, immediately I met him. We were both working at different companies, minding our own business. And it was actually during Covid time, we've told this story a couple more times before, but we rented a house in Palm Springs and that's when we first thought, okay, maybe there is like a working chemistry between us and then it took us maybe another year to start the company. But that's how we met. We were longtime friends for over ten years and never worked together until that COVID Palm Springs house. And here we are. We've been building the company for five, six years now. [00:25:35] S0: And you've been pulling people from Coinbase? [00:25:37] S1: Coinbase and Amazon. It's [00:25:39] S0: funny. It's like [00:25:40] S1: from both places. Exactly. [00:25:42] S0: And so what were you looking for in the early days? What were the types of hires?