Rong Yan, HeyGen CTO on AI Video and Visual Storytelling

**Grace Gong** (0:00)
I can smell the life, oh my god. Hi, Rong, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Rong Yan** (0:07)
Good to see you. Thank you for having me here.

**Grace Gong** (0:11)
I'm so excited about our conversation because I feel like AI video is definitely a passion of mine. But before we jump into the podcast, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Navias. Navias is the ultimate cloud for AI innovators. Navias provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support outmatched by hyper-skillers.
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Okay, so I want to kick off with, so you were at HubSpot, you were the VP of Engineering, and before that you were a company's CTO, and you worked at Snapchat among many other top video generation slash commerce slash marketing places, and Meta and all that. Maybe we could start with, what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career kind of shaping into who you are today?

**Rong Yan** (1:11)
Oh, yes.
So there's a lot of great lessons that we learned. So if you think about, one thing I like to enjoy my career is that I always get a chance to join an earlier stage company that I can see those company grow to a bigger stage afterwards. For example, when I joined Facebook, there's about 600 to 700 people, and then I stayed there for four years after I left. It's around 10,000. So similarly, I think when I joined Snapchat, there's about only 100 people in Snapchat. I'm the 100th employee. Then after four years, six years, it become like 3,000 or even 5,000 afterwards. So the one thing that I truly appreciate and also feel the pains is about how you manage a organization when you go through a rapid growth period. So you're almost like you're running a different company every single year. So every year, the DNA of the company is a little bit different. It's no longer the same as what it used to be. How do you adapt that to the new environment every single time? It's going to be a challenges. So the one thing I would say if I want to summarize, if there's a common theme, probably there's a few of them.
I'll put the first things I would say is that you always want to make sure that you have more people, or you have more work than people, instead of more people than work.
Once you reach to a stage that, okay, you feel like you have money, you want to hire a lot of people, then you start to realize you have more people than work, you will start to see politics. This is just the nature of the fact that you don't have enough work. So what the remaining people will think about is that, how do we get resource from each other? So when they're thinking about if they're most of their mind shear or their attentions was focused on getting task, I mean, it's like fighting for task, if here it comes to politics. And when it comes to politics, that becomes a negative spiral. So this is one of the things that you will see when a company going through a fast human growth period, you always want to see. So that's why I think that's a very important principle that we want to adhere to. I'm actually glad to see that most of the AI company, AI native company people have these days, they always keep it in. I think that's the right things to do. And second thing is that you want to hire the best. You'll rather have like one, 10 X engineers than five or 10 one X engineers.
I think most people really just underestimating the communication burdens and extra overheads of adding people. So they think, okay, if I add five people, isn't that I'm going to five X my productivity? It's not the case.
Most of the cases, you add five people, you can add most double your work, you double your output, and because there's a lot of communication causes between each other and people tends to underestimate that. People tends to underestimate the co-ordinations. So, and this is one of the biggest problem that we should realize. And that's why I truly believe in 10X engineers, especially nowadays with AI agents come to be a more common things. I think a 10X engineer will be even more powerful in this new world. So, I'll probably do those two things. I'll probably the two I will consider as the first principle. I have in mind that I'm going to lead the new teams in that cases.