Veed's Sabba Keynejad: 99% of Companies Shouldn't Build Their Own AI Model

**Sabba Keynejad** (0:02)
I think like 95%, sorry, that's wrong. 99% of the time, it's definitely the wrong idea.

**Wade Foster** (0:20)
Hey everybody, welcome back to Agents of Scale. It's the show where we sit down with the operators and builders that are turning AI from experiment into infrastructure. I am your host, Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier.

**Dan Slagen** (0:33)
And I'm Dan Slagen, SVP of Marketing at Zapier.

**Wade Foster** (0:36)
And today we are talking with Sabba Keynejad, the co-founder and CEO of veed.io, Veedio.
Veed is an AI-powered video editing platform used by over 10 million people a month, including 75% of the Fortune 500 It's a $40 million company that could have kept wrapping other people's AI models. Instead, they built their own Fabric 1.0. And then they've used it to completely reimagine what video editing looks like. So we're going to dig in today to why he made that bet, what it unlocked, what it tells us about whether you need to own your AI stack to win, and so much more. Sabba, welcome to the show.

**Dan Slagen** (1:13)
All right, Sabba, so let's get into it. I would love to get your sense. Give us a state of video AI in terms of what's working, what isn't quite there yet, what's coming next?

**Sabba Keynejad** (1:23)
Oh, God, that's a nice, easy question to start us off with. Thanks for that.
The state of video AI is absolutely crazy, to be completely honest. So much is happening, so many new models are coming out, loads of open-source models. And yeah, I mean, everyone's just really trying to work it out, like how to fit it into their workflows, how businesses can use AI video, individuals are kind of working out. So I think everyone is, I feel like everyone's kind of figured out that large language models are great at coding. I think that's like, everyone's kind of works it out now. I think people are trying to work out, where does video, like how does it work with video, you know?

**Wade Foster** (1:58)
What are the use cases that are working? To your point, like coding has taken off, like the latest models from the Frontier Labs were so good at coding use cases, and by extension, anything that sort of is text-based. But video, it feels like it's on a different timeline right now.

**Sabba Keynejad** (2:14)
Yeah, I think that like video is potentially like 2 to 3 years behind large language models and coding, and I think there's a few things that kind of keep it there. The first is how long it takes to generate a video. I think the latency can just, I don't know, like really get in the, the time to value is not 100 percent there. I think the other thing is the cost, right? If it costs three, four dollars every time you ask the query into Chat GPT, it wouldn't have the level of adoption that it potentially does now. So I think there are two things holding it back.
And when it comes to use cases, I mean, I think it's across the whole industry, right? I think like people in Hollywood are definitely using it, right? I think marketing teams are using it. Pretty much all our marketing content is done with AI now.
So it's there. But I think the dissemination into loads of organizations and companies is just still very much at the start.

**Dan Slagen** (3:08)
Yeah. Did I see, was it Netflix just bought with Ben Affleck's stealth AI company to help them do more of this kind of stuff or something like that?

**Sabba Keynejad** (3:15)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
It's funny when a company buys a stealth company and it's quite hard to like evaluate. Do you know what I mean?

**Wade Foster** (3:24)
I'm curious, like, what are the smart people doing? There's a lot of like AI sloth with video. It's kind of like the term of the moment right now.
But you mentioned like all your marketing is being done this way. So clearly like there are savvy people that have figured it out. Like what's different between them versus like the average person?

**Sabba Keynejad** (3:45)
Yeah, I think this term AI sloth is super interesting. And I think you can make sloth with any single medium there is, whether it's your iPhone, you can just take loads of terrible photos. And I think a lot of people do it, we don't decide to publish all of them to the world, it's that very small selection.
And I think it's so easy just to churn out loads of very average or very below average bits of content. But I think like creation is becoming incredibly important.