How Synthesia Became One of Europe’s Fastest-growing AI Companies | Frameworks for Growth

Christina Cacioppo (0:05)

Welcome to Frameworks for Growth, where we explore the systems, frameworks, and tools that the world's leading founders, operators, and investors use to build and scale. I'm Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and CEO of Vanta, and I'm here today with Synthesia's CEO and co-founder, Steffen Tjerrild. Thanks for being here today.

Steffen Tjerrild (0:22)

Thank you very much for having me.

Christina Cacioppo (0:26)

So for those unfamiliar, could you tell us a little bit about Synthesia?

Steffen Tjerrild (0:30)

Sure. Yeah, so Synthesia is now the world's largest AI video platform for enterprises. We allow our customers to kind of produce videos with computers and not with cameras and microphones and actors. But actually kind of, you know, taking video creation into the 21st century by allowing companies to kind of produce content behind their desk. And that is like just a very kind of, you know, incredible way for companies to kind of scale their video production, right? I think we all live in this kind of video first world. Everything we do in our private lives is very media and very rich media. But when we come into work, especially in the biggest enterprises in the world today, right? It's very much PDFs, PowerPoints, emails, Word documents. And there's just a starker and starker difference between how companies, how much content they want to produce and how much they actually produce. And also as the new generation coming into the workforce that is demanding, more kind of interactive and more engaging forms of communication, that is just becoming the norm and companies are craving new ways to kind of keep up with that kind of content needs.

Christina Cacioppo (1:36)

And you're at the forefront of AI video production. What are some things you're excited about in tech today?

Steffen Tjerrild (1:43)

I think there's so many kind of very exciting things. And especially with LLMs are just incredibly magical technology. And I think there's going to be a forest of incredible new small companies and companies being produced out of this.

And I think we're really excited to just take this new level of reasoning that kind of computers are starting to grasp and really kind of crafting that into kind of new experiences with Synthesia. So it's just an incredible kind of time to be alive. And I think also with the scale and resources that we have as a company, I think we're in pole position to leverage a lot of these kind of breakthroughs. And I think for us, we've kind of been going at the company for many years now. But we still feel we are 10% or 15% into the roadmap of kind of creating Hollywood style kind of videos on our laptop, which was our initial tagline many, many years ago. And we used to say that I was 10 years away. I think we're actually going to be more close to that in the coming years. And so we were pretty kind of right on that prediction.

But yeah, I think there's just incredible kind of opportunity ahead, especially as LLMs become incredibly magical to kind of allow new kind of techniques and workflows and experiences to come to life.

Christina Cacioppo (2:57)

The idea of text to video sort of wasn't a thing before you all, but you all believed in it. What did you see?

Steffen Tjerrild (3:05)

I think we probably have raised a lot more money early on in our journey if we had our crafted vision for where this kind of category was morphing into. But I think we had at least the kind of crazy kind of moment when we saw this kind of technologies for the first time back in the fall of 2016 where the professor, one of the co-founders of Synthesia called Professor Matthias Niesner for the first time showcased a paper called Face to Face, which was the precursor of these technologies that was coming on the back of the VR hype cycle back in 2016, where a lot of like deep learning, computer graphics, computer vision, really kind of coming together to enable some of these things. And when Victor and myself saw this, it was like an incredible kind of glimpse into the future of content creation. I don't think we had like the foresight to see the product expression that it has today, but it was at least crazy enough for us to create our jobs and pursue this idea.

Christina Cacioppo (4:03)

And so you all saw this, but kind of everyone else missed it. I'm sort of overshadowing, but I'm sort of not. Like what did everybody else miss that you all understood?

Steffen Tjerrild (4:12)

I'm not sure we kind of understood everything. I think it's easier to kind of draw the lines and the dots in the back rear mirror. But I think what we saw and what we had conviction about and what people had misunderstood is that there is just a long tail of people that want to create video, but can't do it today, right? I think the biggest invention in video production has been our cameras that we have on our phone. But it's still inherently physical, right? You have to kind of put that up. You still have kind of actors and studios and these types of things, right? And actually digitizing that motion a bit similar to how other creative disciplines has kind of been disrupted by technology. If you go back 20 years, right? You need to kind of record everything and kind of, you know, for music production, right? That used to be in like, you know, recording in a $10 million LA recording studio. Today, you can kind of synthesize any tune in the universe on your laptop and every kind of, you know, music and hard top-charting hit today is kind of, you know, synthesized with computers and not with physical instruments. And we just saw that, of course, video is going to be on the same path and video is going to allow us to kind of produce content behind our laptops and less with a smarter or faster kind of physical production process, right? And I think this starting point with avatars, they kind of, you know, felt pretty odd because if you kind of speak to investors and consumers right, they're kind of, you know, thinking, oh, did like look janky or robotic and these type of things. But if you compare to text, right, that is kind of, you know, where you have to compare. You don't have to compare it with hundreds of millions of dollars in visual effects budgets from Hollywood. And that is kind of, you know, the market. Net new kind of video creators versus existing creators, right? And that's also a little bit of like the attraction we have in the companies today, right? It's less about making the video department 10 times more effective. It is to make all the consultants and your consultancy video producers, not for maybe not for every PowerPoint, but for every 10th PowerPoint, right? Maybe make a video because it's more engaging. It's more intuitive to kind of disseminate information through video.