 Clash. I am so happy to be here again. I think I said this yesterday, Slush is my favorite conference and in fact the only conference I've been going to in the last couple of years. So I'm delighted to be back here and really delighted to be back here with a wonderful founder, Saba Advid. We were actually going to have two wonderful founders on stage. Andre from Miro was going to join us as well, but unfortunately he's unwell and wasn't able to travel. But we will make sure to edit a video with Veed and send him a nice version. And the topic for today is right up your alley. We're going to talk about AI and creativity. But first of all, maybe we can share a couple of sentences on Veed and your journey. We partnered with Saba a couple of years ago and the company got really, really far since. Veed builds an in-browser AI-first video editor and it's used by consumers like myself when I want to make a social media video or SMEs, especially when they want to use it for marketing purposes. And then many teams within businesses and enterprises. So use cases in enterprises are internal communication, training, marketing, sales demos, product demos. It's really endless. And any sort of video that you want to create and make really beautiful and really, really easy to understand, Veed comes in. And there are 7 million people every month that go to the Veed platform now, which is growing really nicely, definitely since we partnered. And my two favorite stats. Every single second, there is a video created with Veed, which Saba told me yesterday. I actually hadn't even realized that stat. And I got really excited. And then every other second, there is a video created with AI features and AI tools within Veed, which is obviously our topic for today. So Saba, maybe we can start by talking about AI creativity and Veed. And then we'll talk a little bit about your journey as a founder and how you started the company. But tell us a bit about how you think about AI. Is this something new with Veed? Or what's the history there? Thank you, Luciana. Thank you so much for joining us here today. So at Veed, we build a collaborative, browser-based video editing platform. And the mission that we had at Veed is always to lower the barriers to creating content. And as you can imagine, AI plays a huge part in doing exactly that. And five years ago, the first paid feature that we ever built was automatic subtitle generation. You would upload a video, click Auto Subtitle, and in one click, it was done. And this created a lot of value for our users, and they absolutely loved it. And what we kind of realized through this process is that editing before was really dumb. It was an offline experience. And by having it and building video editing in the cloud natively, you can utilize the power of AI in the video editing workflow. And this is super cool. And so as we kind of looked at it, we realized that if you can build workflows with AI, save your user's time, really speed up what they do and how they get their job done, then of course you should do it. So since then, we've built a slew of AI features within Veed. And honestly, it's some of the most popular tooling that we've built today. When we partner with you, and when we were doing our homework around the space, people loved the subtitle feature. There were so many positive reviews, and it saved people time, et cetera, et cetera. Tell us a little bit about some of the new AI features that you've introduced since. How you chose them. What are your favorites? What should people try? I can share my favorite. Sure, yeah. So I mean, some of my personal favorites is eye contact correction. The reason why is because when you're kind of speaking to someone, keeping eye contact with them is so important to make it an engaging conversation. And that's true in video two. So one click, that happens, it's awesome. Magic Heart is also a great tool that we've built, which basically automatically edits the video for you. It kind of understands the transcript, what you're saying, removes all the mess ups, the bad takes, the ums, the rs, and every time it kind of breaks the video. So that's awesome too. And there was one more that is my favorite, it's completely... Magic Heart is my favorite. Is it? Yeah. Because I'm embarrassed to say that I do say and a bit too much. So that's one of my favorites. I think voice cloning is really cool too. I think magic. And that's newer, right, on the platform. That's newer. I think like if you have to always set up the mic and record yourself, it's just a bit laborious. But if you can just type it out with your voice cloned, it's just a very kind of a magical experience, you know? And Saba, I'm thinking we're almost exactly a year to the day since ChetGPT was launched. The world and the consumer experiences have changed so much in the last year. If I'm running a large company that already has distribution and already has consumers, on the one hand I could think of this as the most exciting thing that can happen and it would give me the opportunity to improve my product. On the other hand, this can also be a risk to many, many businesses, obviously. If you were the CEO of an incumbent company today, what would you do? Yeah, it's interesting. I think that's more of a cultural question. Like, do you have a culture of allowing innovation within your company? I think if you don't, then potentially the answer here is giving your teams and your employees the ability to fail, to make mistakes, to try things that might not work and that being OK. I mean, a lot of the teams that we have within VEDA have a lot of autonomy and I love that because you turn up and you see what people are working on. It surprises you. It's exciting to see what people are building. It's like, I get a lot of energy from that. It's really cool. Is it OK to fail at VEDA? Yeah, good question. This question is coming from your investor, remember? So the answer is no to Luciana. The answer to everyone else is yes, of course it is. And I think that's important, you know? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Tell us a little bit the speed of change, as I mentioned before, is just the pace that I certainly haven't seen in my venture career. Does that create opportunities? Is that scary from where you're sitting? Yeah, so I think it's like really exciting, but I'm not going to lie, it's quite overwhelming. There's a lot going on. So, you know, the speed of change, we definitely feel it. I think the opportunity here and what we all need to be doing in our companies is kind of like, you know, understanding what's possible, what's coming out, what great technology can we leverage to make our products better for our users, but at the same time, deeply understand the user's problem and what they do. And, you know, I kind of mentioned voice cloning earlier, but like no one's ever asked for that. But what they have said to us is it's really annoying to re-record audio or video if I forgot to do it earlier. So that's an example of connecting those problems. And for me personally, you know, I'm very passionate about having this deep connection with our users and understanding who they are, to the point where in the first two years of running the company, up to the point where we had 50 employees, millions of users, any paid user could book a call with me and I would be on like eight, nine, 10 calls a day. And it was really exciting because I could really understand even before I went on the call who the user was, right? I didn't know that actually. That was new information to me. I'm pretty impressed. That sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, it's really tiring. Like, I think it's incredibly valuable, you know? Did it actually guide your product roadmap? Oh yeah, completely. Like, you know, people are very articulate about what they love, what they don't love, what to work on, what's important to them and what's not. And I think, you know, we've all got our ambitions and our dreams about what we want our products to be. But at the end of the day, we need to build a business here and that's supported by our users loving the things that we build. So do users even know that they're using AI features or do they just know that their problem is being solved and the product is better? How do you think about that, both from a product perspective and from a branding and communication perspective? Yeah, it's an interesting question. So, like, I think it really depends on, like, the type of user that you serve. For us at Veed specifically, we kind of use naming conventions like auto and magic because that kind of connects with our user who's not as technically savvy, potentially. But some products actually really lean into the fact that it's a GPT at LLM and an AI, right? And, you know, I actually had a look the other day at the top 10 apps on the App Store, five of them had AI mentioned in the title, right? That's unbelievable. So, but is that a positioning thing for startups and tech companies or is that actually demand-driven by the market? And another thing that I saw, which was really interesting is when I'm looking at search trends and search traffic, there's been a huge increase in people looking for specifically AI tooling. So, for example, people used to Google looking for a video editor, but now they look for an AI video editor. Oh, interesting. So, there's actually definitely a groundswell of consumer demand of people looking for more AI tooling, specifically in different industries. I think it's really important to be visible there. So, that's on the user side. Let's talk a little bit about the creator side. So, if I'm a creator in 2023, you know, I think generative AI took everyone by storm and by surprise to some extent. We probably thought that repetitive tasks would be automated first, not necessarily creativity, but we're actually seeing creativity from artificial intelligence. How do creators feel? Is this a threat? Is this exciting? Are they jumping on the bandwagon? What are you seeing? Yeah, so I think, like, for me, and I believe this is gonna be true, is like AI is a tool for us to be creative and it's a tool for creators to use to express themselves. And I think that's awesome. So, I don't think it's replacing creativity. It's a medium way of communicating, right? And I, you know, video didn't kill radio and animation didn't completely remove the need for filmmaking and motion picture. So, I think it's just an extension of the toolkit that we have as creatives and I think that's really cool. It's democratizing, allowing more people to get stuff done. I'm all for it. I think it's a stimulant. It's a catalyst for creativity. You don't think it replaces some of the magic? No, I think it makes the magic. Really? Yeah, completely. Magic cut, right? Magic cut. I should mention that Saba actually studied art and that takes me to my next question. So, you wanted to be a creator growing up, is that fair? Tell us a little bit. You're not the typical engineering CEO running an AI company. You studied art, but are technical enough to be dangerous and you wanted to be a creator. Tell us a little bit about all of that. Yeah, so like, I went to art school in London and I spent like three years thinking about visual communication and storytelling and the thing that, I mean, I was so sure at the age of like 18 or 19 or whatever that technology was the future. So, I wanted to combine the discipline of creativity with technology at the same time. So, I spent a lot of time working on projects that involved computer vision, making interactive installations that moves as your body kind of like reacted to it. And that was kind of like the in for me and I think it served me really, really well. I think the next kind of part of that story though is my observation around like how video was changing and that made me really excited. I was connecting with creators on YouTube and I learned how to code for YouTube and I was like, wow, this is super powerful. What a powerful medium. Shouldn't more people be able to create videos, you know? So, I took that dive myself and I started creating content. How did you make the jump from this point to actually starting V? Tell us a little bit about the founding story, why you decided to do it, your co-founder. Yeah, this is a can of worms. It's not... Let's open it. Let's open the can of worms. So, yeah, I mean, wow, where to start? I mean, so, you know, the observation here was video was really hard. There's professional software and I'm trying to make this like short form content, right? So, the idea was let's make, you know, the future of video editing, browser-based, collaborative, utilizing AI to help people get their jobs done. But with your background, arguably, you could use the professional tools, one would think. Yeah, but I found it challenging. I mean, the tools are called like iMovie, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, but I wasn't making movies. I wasn't screening premiers. And I wasn't a professional. So, you wanted to democratize that sort of, that access. Exactly, yeah. So, professional. Yes, exactly. So, you know, me and my co-founder, Tim, who had me for a long period of time, we built an MVP. We quit our jobs. We sat down with all the money that we had at a time, which was, you know, quite a, you know, small amount. This gave us runway for a year. We built the product. And it was just the two of you. Just the two of us, yeah. And at the end of this year, we had a product and no users, right? And so... What a great product or... Wow. A product. A product. Okay. MVP. Okay. Lovable. And at this point, we tried to raise our first pre-seed round and it didn't work out, unfortunately. So, my co-founder, Tim, he got a full-time job and he then sent me half of his salary every single month. That's incredible. Yeah. That's an occasion. Well, this is it. And I think at this point, this kind of signaled two things to me. My co-founder, Tim's like really in and wants this to be successful. And we're not gonna give up on this opportunity. Like, we're gonna see this through. So, that was actually a really cool moment in the journey. And then what happened next is we get some users. And then... Okay, after a year. After about a year, it starts bubbling up. Okay. And at the end of that year, we had about 30,000 monthly users. That's pretty good. Not bad. Not bad, yeah. It's a good start. And then this is when we thought we'd try and get funding again. So, we interviewed for YConvenator. We think this is a great opportunity for us at this point. And they rejected us. So, like, two years in, we've spent all the money we've ever had, been rejected so many times. And this is when we thought, look, let's just bootstrap the company. And so, we just turned on the paywall. The first five dollars came in. And then, you know, two years later, it was six million ARR. And that's when we met. Yes, yes. And it took a little bit of convincing to get Sabah and Tim to want to partner with us. But maybe that's for another time or for later. Tell us a little bit about those couple of years of bootstrapping. Do you feel that it was harder? Do you think there were positives to bootstrapping and not having endless amount of capital? What would you advise other founders? Because at the end of the day, we're talking to founders in the audience. What would you advise them to do? Yeah, I mean, like, it was invaluable. We built an incredibly cash-efficient business that, even to this day, has that DNA of being really cash-efficient. And you can only focus on a few things. You have to be very, very intentional about where you spend your resources. So it's, yeah, very, very valuable for us. We learned a lot. And I think a lot of that DNA still retains in the company today. So discipline, focus, that makes a lot of sense. What were the, there must be some drawbacks as well. Yeah, I mean, you're not paying yourself very much at this point. I can imagine. Are you still splitting a salary with Tim at this point? Yeah. Okay. No, okay. No, but, you know, I think, you know, I think the biggest stress for me when we're bootstraps is like, to unlock your next hire, you have to make the revenue. Right. And you only have enough runway in the bank. This is how we did it. I don't recommend this. We had enough runway in the bank to pay the next month's salaries. Right. So if anything happens, there's no margin for error. Right. Keeps you up at night. No, I can imagine. But it also keeps the mind focused. And that's something I've seen working with you and Tim since we partnered, speaking of few things that really matter and really executing. And you know, it's one of those few occasions where as an investor, I have to push you to spend a little bit more in certain areas. That's not normally the case. Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing that like, probably one of the most valuable things about being a bootstrapped company is we had to grow in the most capital efficient way possible. And even like when we partnered, we were probably doing two million, two million a month for users. And that's amazing. And I think it really forces you to be creative. I think it's a bad trap to like raise your first round, spend it on marketing, spend it on advertising, but actually finding that grassroots, organic growth, customer love, you have to do it, you know? So, and again, like this culture retains with us. And even now, like the vast majority of our users, like seven million users, like so many of them are like organic through word of mouth. It's incredible. What are those few years teacher about hiring and how many of those early employees are still with Veed? Yeah, like most of them are still with us. They are lifers. Lifers? I've never heard that term before. You know, yeah, I mean, like hiring is, I mean, you can't hire anyone for logo. If you've got like Facebook or anything on your CV, like there's no chance you're going to work at my bootstrapped company. I remember everyone, like those kind of early employees, they've kind of like, they want to take risk. Like they're in it. Like they want to join the mission. They want it to grow and everyone's so incentivized, all pulling the same direction. So again, like the energy that we had was super special. And so you're hiring people that don't have an obvious background. They don't have an obvious CV. How do you figure out if they have the right level of drive, hunger? How do you interview? Did you learn anything that you're still applying today? Yeah, so I think the DNA that we had was kind of like, back then was just like young, hungry people that just really wanted to prove themselves. They might not be in London or New York or San Francisco. Instead, they might be somewhere else in Europe and not have the same opportunities that potentially you do geographically. And I think for them, like they wanted to be part of this mythical startup adventure that we all hear about. And, you know, they saw that in us. And we saw the fact that they wanted to engage in that and contribute and that's what made it special, you know, really special. Any interview questions or anything about your interviewing process that you still use today that helped you in the early years? There was one funny thing that we used to do. If there was something that we really, really liked, we used to, and like they were a bit unsure. This definitely happened with Sam, our VP of product. And actually quite a few of them. We'd have a chat with them and they were like, yeah, I like the company, but you guys are quite early, it's quite high risk. So what I'd do is I'd take their email address, I'd add them to Stripe, I'd add them to Profitwell, and I'd add them to Slack. And naturally they'd then join Slack and see our communication and how we're talking. They'd then go into Stripe and see that we're growing incredibly fast. I like that. And Profitwell would automatically send them emails like every day about how much we grew. That was the tipping point for, well, definitely Sam and a lot of the early team. That's really smart and Sam is still our VP of product and runs the team beautifully. So now you're raising some money. You can hire people from more established companies, from other scale-ups, from big tech companies. I do want to say that Sabah still keeps this first principle thinking when it comes to hiring, and he's a lot more focused on the person than on the CV, which I really, really appreciate. So how has your role changed from, and again, I'm talking to all the founders in the audience, from those early days where you're splitting your salary with Tim and it's just the two of you, to then having 50 people of missionaries that really want to make Vee the most successful company possible, but that might not be joining you from big scale-ups to today. How has your role changed as a leader of this company? Yeah, so the way that I look at it is like seasons, right? The initial season of Vee was build products quickly, fastly, make it work. Season two for me was grow the company as fast as I can, get users, users, users. And then the next season was hiring and learning how to do that and interviewing properly. I think what now the season that I'm in is trying to understand deeply, what does it mean to build a mission-driven company? How do you align the organization so that everyone pulls in exactly the same direction? And it sounds easy and we hear these words all the time, but actually doing it is something completely different. Defining what your values are as a company and actually living those values, it sounds easy, but it's actually incredibly challenging. So that's the season that I'm in right now. Well, we're very happy to be part of these seasons with you and the team at Vee. So we learned about AI and creativity and how creators feel about all these changes through Sabah's lens, who wanted to be a creator himself, actually, but ended up building a company that builds tools for creators. And then we learned about Vee's early years of bootstrapping and growing fast and efficiently and hacking to a certain extent, but now growing very sustainably and building the right infrastructure for the future. I want to ask you two final questions. Yes. Okay, so firstly, again, we have a lot of founders in the audience. What would be your one piece of advice to yourself five years ago? Oh, God. Oh, I say to myself, we didn't prep this question, Luciana. I know, I know, I took your feast, I'm sorry, but... It's totally fine, no, I've got it. So my piece of advice is just... It sounds really dumb, but early stage founders, I see it so, so often, they love building products. And I'm not surprised, it's amazing. You get to make pixels look lovely and make incredible code that makes things work. But growing your company is completely different and it takes a completely different set of skills. And normally it's not in the founding team of the company. So my experience was we need to grow this so we can get a salary next month. Therefore, if you find the lever of growth, you keep pushing that lever and pulling that lever until it stops working. So that's the main bit of feedback. So think about commercial, the commercial muscle as well. Think about monetization as well, not just about building the best product too, but also thinking about the commercial parts. I think for most talented founders, building a product is actually relatively easy. I think the growing it and getting people to use it and love it is actually the hard bit. Yeah, I have to say, I was talking to another founder yesterday and she mentioned exactly the same thing in terms of what you would change if she would go back to the first years. Final question about AI to wrap it up, since we are here to talk about AI and creativity. Okay, if there is one thing that you hope that AI will unlock in the medium term, what would that be? So I'm going to answer this question slightly differently. Okay. And I took a flight here and next to me was this lovely lady, a self-declared boomer. Okay. And she said to me, she was like, what are you working on? And I was like, oh, I'm doing a talk at Slush. She was like, oh, great. Can you send me the talk? I'd love to watch it. So I'm going to send this talk to her. That's nice. And this is her request. Yes. She said she's got a remover at home and it cleans the floor. But she's worried being, as you get older, there's not going to be enough people to look after her. So she was like, Sabah, can I please get some sort of robot in the house that's going to help me out? So my wish is for the lovely lady that I met on the plane to have her personal assistant robot at home. Well, I certainly hope that you'll have that. And I'm so grateful to be part of the V journey and to get to share a little bit of your journey to get today with our founders and the audience. Thank you so much. Thank you.