Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
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Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CTO)
In Depth
59 minutes
2 months ago
The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CTO)
Gorkem Yurtseven is the co-founder and CTO of fal, the generative media platform powering the next wave of image, video, and audio applications. In less than two years, fal has scaled from $2M to over $100M in ARR, serving over 2 million developers and more than 300 enterprises, including Adobe, Canva, and Shopify. In this conversation, Gorkem shares the inside story of fal's pivot into explosive growth, the technical and cultural philosophies driving its success, and his predictions for the future of AI-generated media.
In today's episode, we discuss:
How fal pivoted from data infrastructure to generative inference
fal’s explosive year and how they scaled
Why "generative media" is a greenfield new market
fal's unique hiring philosophy and lean <50-person team
Building a brand that resonates with developers
What the world looks like in 2027 when AI-generated video becomes mainstream
And much more…
Where to find Gorkem:
LinkedIn
X / Twitter
Where to find Todd:
LinkedIn
X / Twitter
Where to find First Round Capital:
Website: https://firstround.com/
First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
References:
Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
Base10: https://base10.vc/
Black Forest Labs: https://blackforestlabs.ai/
Burkay Gur: https://www.linkedin.com/in/burkaygur/
Canva: https://www.canva.com/
Clay: https://www.clay.com/
Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com/
Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
DALL-E: https://openai.com/dall-e-2
Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/
Dylan Patel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanpatelsa/
fal: https://fal.ai/
Google DeepMind: https://deepmind.google/
LLaMA: https://ai.meta.com/llama/
OpenAI: https://openai.com/
Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/
Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/
Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/
Sora: https://openai.com/sora
Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL): https://stability.ai/stable-diffusion
Stability AI: https://stability.ai/
Together AI: https://www.together.ai/
All images and videos generated using models run on fal.ai
Timestamps:
(01:43) The generative media industry
(02:29) From $2M to $100M ARR: fal's explosive year
(04:06) How Gorkem met co-founder Burkay Gur
(05:38) The hardest decision that saved the company
(09:52) Spotting the opportunity in generative media
(13:28) Turning Todd into George Clooney
(15:29) The early adopters of the first fal product
(17:54) The transition from toy to tool
(19:27) Why 2025 is the year of AI-generated video
(21:44) Staying nimble as a 45-person company
(24:42) Predicting AI-generated film in 2027
(27:24) Why generative media is a greenfield market
(30:33) fal’s greatest optimization wins
(34:42) Why fal has 500 Slack channels
(36:02) Competing in a fast-moving, fragmented market
(42:06) How to build a world-class team
(47:24) Learning sales as a technical founder
(50:55) How fal built a brand without a marketer
(53:21) The story behind "GPU Rich / GPU Poor"
(54:22) Inside fal’s rule-breaking playbook
(56:09) The hardest part of scaling fal
In Depth
Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
