Heralds of the AI Content Flippening — with Youssef Rizk of Wondercraft.ai

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast, where we dive into the wild, wild world of AI engineering every week. This is Anna, your friendly neighborhood AI, and I'll be standing in for Alessio today.
Yes, you heard right, AI is taking our podcasting jobs. We flew all the way to London to interview Youssef Rizk, co-founder of Wondercraft.ai AI, which has created the number one piece of AI-generated content enjoyed by the Latent Space community.
We asked him how he arrived at his idea, what the future of commercial AI-generated content looks like, and confront him with the hardest question of all. What is his moat as an API wrapper startup? At the end, we even have him turn the tables and do a customer interview with Swix.
There's lots of audio goodies in this one and bonus 30 minutes video on youtube.com/latentspacetv. Watch out and take care.

**Alessio Fanelli** (0:54)
So we're in the studio here in London with Youssef. Welcome.

**Youssef Rizk** (0:58)
Thank you.

**Alessio Fanelli** (1:00)
It's been such a joy listening to Wondercraft's podcast over the last four or five months. You guys have been around for only five months.
And as you know, I am one of your podcast's biggest fans. And I think that it's super interesting because I talk to a lot of vendors, effectively people who create services for other developers to build. And you are at the application layer, which is great and challenging for me as a podcaster because you have some secret sauce that you're not gonna share. But I also wanna just talk to you as someone who has evaluated a lot of things and built something that I actually use every single day. So that's the context.

**Youssef Rizk** (1:39)
Great, great.

**Alessio Fanelli** (1:40)
How do you feel when I say these things? Is that exactly what you're going for?

**SPEAKER_5** (1:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Youssef Rizk** (1:44)
So it definitely makes sense, right? Resonates for definitely on the application layer and that's definitely by design.

**Alessio Fanelli** (1:49)
Yeah, we can talk about the origin story leading into the Wondercraft.ai. But just to learn a little bit more about you, you grew up in Egypt?

**Youssef Rizk** (1:56)
I grew up in Egypt, yeah. I spent the first 18 years there.

**Alessio Fanelli** (1:58)
Cairo. And then you came over to the UK. You got your master's in EEE at Imperial.

**Youssef Rizk** (2:04)
For those who don't know, that's Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

**Alessio Fanelli** (2:07)
You then spent four years at Palantir as a forward-deployed engineer. I think it's a role that Palantir invented.

**Youssef Rizk** (2:13)
Forward-deployed engineer is a super interesting job because it is kind of at this intersection of being an engineer, so software engineer, but also still doing business related things.

**Alessio Fanelli** (2:23)
Solutions architects, maybe.

**Youssef Rizk** (2:25)
Yeah, so part of the job was a solutions architect. Part of the job was reviewing contracts. Part of the job was doing sales. Part of the job was coding things. Part of the job was interacting with. So many different things. And I think that is a really good foundation for someone who does want to start something in the future.
You just do everything.

**Alessio Fanelli** (2:40)
So kind of an endorsement of that job if people want to get that experience. Okay, excellent. Amazing.
Yeah, Philanthropy is surprisingly strong here in the London Tech circles. I have a number of friends who are all ex-philanthropy.

**Youssef Rizk** (2:51)
I think it's actually the biggest offices in London.

**Alessio Fanelli** (2:54)
Surprising because I think of it as like a US defense company.
Then you started Moonshot for nine months, which is pretty important in your journey. I'll bring it up to Wondercraft.ai. You started Wondercraft.ai in April of this year, and it's been about five months going through YC in the winter batch, summer 22 batch. Okay, cool. What is Wondercraft? Nice.

**Youssef Rizk** (3:17)
Wondercraft is a podcast builder that uses hyper-realistic AI voices to create podcasts and make that whole podcast creation process super simple.

**Alessio Fanelli** (3:24)
Right.

**Youssef Rizk** (3:24)
So super simple example is you publish a bunch of blogs.

**Alessio Fanelli** (3:27)
Yes.

**Youssef Rizk** (3:28)
You can take that blog, put it in there. It'll just convert it to an audio-friendly format that people can listen to. It's just sometimes it's a bit more efficient to listen to things rather than read them.
What does it strive to be? It's a little slightly different. Because what it really strives to be is it strives to be this platform with the mission of expanding access to content.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:46)
Okay.

**Youssef Rizk** (3:48)
I mean this in a variety of different ways. Some people just are able to consume content. We have this whole debate in education. It's like, are you a visual learner, an audio learner? What do you do? People just consume content better in different ways. I'm a visual learner. I need to see things. So for me, actually, it's sometimes a little better to read the blog. But if we're just talking about like, I want to get a lot of information, podcasts are great because you can just do them while doing something else. There's a reason that podcast functionality is so natively embedded in all these smart speakers. It's just because you're doing anything at home, just put on a podcast.