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