$1BN ARR in 18 Months; The Untold Story of Higgsfield

That’s very special opportunity for us. Thank you for having me. Obviously, your story is inspiring as well, like how social media has become like an elevator for you, opportunity to create fun and so on.

become a programmer so early? So first, you need to understand where I come from. So my father is from Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is a country in Central Asia where, like, if a family of five people makes thousand dollars a month, it’s considered to be wealthy. It’s not very high standards of living, unfortunately. But both my parents are professors of mechanical engineering. And since I remember myself, since I was eight, my parents told me that I must get to The United States because this is the place where technology matters.

So mother had to work three jobs because basically my education was to compete in programming competitions all the time and to go to various educational camps where I could learn from the best, like certain data structure... Data structures, algorithms, and so on.

when you are so young? Absolutely. And I’m very grateful to my parents that they showed me the path really from that early on. Definitely, when you come from this part of the world, think about post Soviet countries, India, China. Getting to the top of the rankings in any competition, in any international competition, is the only way to really break out. So by the age of 19, I was able to get to top three in the world in competitive programming. But then instead of pursuing academical career, decided to do startups.

What happens then? So let me take you back to 2014. I was very fortunate to work on pre transformer architecture neural nets. And I was primarily just doing optimization, make it run faster, parallel across multiple machines, and so on. And we actually built state of the art system for language translation from English to Russian and Russian to English. Apparently, talent wars were a real thing even back then. A lot of my teammates were hired by DeepMinds and Meta, but my passion was actually different. I was very, very surprised to learn when I come to SaaS for the first time how quickly Uber actually spread out.

And I was thinking, if this app can take over the world so quickly and transform the whole industry, maybe what’s gonna happen is that mobile phones are gonna become the most used devices in the world. Maybe there is gonna be a version of the future where everyone is gonna be spending most of their time in their life watching AI generated videos on the phones. Because who else is gonna produce videos for the phones? Maybe it’s gonna happen with AI. Okay.

So, yeah. So the company was called AI Factory. Was fortunate to meet Mahi twenty eighteen. He’s co founder of Higgsfield. And he’s a, like, a veteran of Silicon Valley, went through ups and downs, and sold it to Snap for 166,000,000. Then I was leading gen AI there. Pause.

We both remember these times where the capital for AI companies was not really that much available, and AI multiples were not like 2 hundreds to revenue as they are today, but closer to zero because AI was not a topic. So there was like severe dilution, which we experienced. So just to calibrate. But what was the round? No. Look, I mean, back then rounds of like $12,000,000, having like $12,000,000 in investments was considered to be really good. But it was still an opportunity for me to finally go to The United States.

So after the acquisition, I permanently moved to First two LA and then to Silicon Valley, and my dream simply came true.

That’s a good question. So San Francisco is definitely a place where no one judges by race, nationality, and so on. That’s truly phenomenal. There is definitely a meritocracy in a sense that it’s possible to meet anyone. But in the same time, what I see across Silicon Valley investors, it’s extremely consensus driven. I think that last part, expected to be different. But then I read the book about the law of capital and I realized this is just how the world works.

Back then, like Snapchat 2020 was really growing so quickly. And the face filters which my team has built was driving most of daily new users. What’s important is that these face filters, we were able to manage to run on mobile devices, so it was virtually for free for Snapchat. It’s not like current LLM tokens costs. And it scaled to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. It was truly phenomenal to me to build a product which is still probably the most used consumer media AI product.

But then what I realized is that there are a lot of unmet needs on advertising sites. Average company cannot figure out how to be relevant on social media. And this is a major gap. Like, social media is the main media in the world. A lot of companies are actually able to build direct response advertising so that they can actually sell more. But in the same time, most of the companies in the world cannot simply do that. And basically, no... Because no one simply can keep up with the pace of production for social media as trends change pretty much every day.

Yeah. Absolutely. So where it all really started is that there was a tool to upload set of images and transform them into a slideshow with music. It’s kind of better than nothing, but still pretty bad. Right? Another solution was to take long form video and cut them to short vertically oriented videos. This was better, but still really not perfect. And it felt to me that, especially 2023, it was absolutely clear that scaling loss finally work. It’s not just a concept from science that scaling loss work.

Video just takes maybe two, three years longer than LLMs encoding, but it was clear that finally scaling loss should work in video as well. And I decided just to take a bet. But I just want to go back.

No. Actually, we spent more than a year in a search of products which could work. We burned more than 10,000,000 out of 16,000,000 raised in seed fundraising. So we felt we have just one attempt left. And frankly, I feel I am responsible because I was focusing on the wrong things. I think I just lost the touch with reality back then. I was so much optimizing for what’s hype today, what’s the right narrative, how we can hijack their attention, all these things, really, everything, of building a good product.

So when we had less than 6,000,000 left, I guess it was slightly less than five actually, I realized that the only thing which we can be focused on is to lean into the product, PLG, and just finally set belief that the best product is gonna win. And then we just started to talk to customers. We spoke to eight creative directors about their experience with AI and what’s simply missing. Everyone told us that camera control does not exist in AI, and camera control is so important to tell a story.

So this is a very important bottleneck to solve. So we released our products March thirty first last year. And since then, we are really riding this crazy wave. Was it immediate product market fit then? Yeah, it was immediate. Is

Yes, it’s definitely when you know, you know. Like, for example, we don’t do any paids. And we have on the team people who scaled businesses to over billion and 2,000,000,000 in revenue, like other businesses, with paid advertising. At Higgsfield, we decided to really make a bet that You don’t do paid. You don’t do paid.

not paid? That’s a good point. So with influencers, there is typically... There are different types of influencers, but typically, there is some fee for just video production and then some cost per click attribution, which works really well on YouTube.

Look, I think the main takeaway from our experience is that it’s very very important to own distribution. Distribution now more important than ever. And we basically did outsource. We had just a team of two people on creator and customer success sides, And we just did outsource to the agency, and that was not a good experience. I do just wanna go back to part of the story. Where are you at revenue wise today? So today is actually exciting day. When we record, just Bloomberg article went out so that we cross 1,000,000,000 in annualized revenue.

Yes. Actually, it took us eighteen months from 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. For Cursor, it took twenty four months. So we are probably probably like the thirds after OpenAI and Anthropic.

Absolutely. By the way, your cohost, Jason, also asked this question in May. Luckily, answer didn’t change. So we are at least consistent. So let me be transparent on that. What we do is we look revenue over the last four weeks and multiply it by 13. From what I know, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cloud, but all of them use the same methodology. What’s very important is that we take revenue, not sales. So if that’s like annual subscription or annual enterprise contracts, we prorate this across twelve months and only take, like, a piece which corresponds to one month, to twenty eight days to be precise.

That’s the first piece. And second, it’s only live revenue. It’s only live revenue. We are not taking three year enterprise deals and baking into 1,000,000,000 figure. No, don’t do that. If you were to break

So video AI is still relatively early. It is still probably two years behind coding in terms of adoption. So on demand usage for leading coding companies could be over 50. And I would be honest, for video, it’s substantially less than that. In the same time, what’s very interesting for us to observe in the business is that there is some significant revenue expansion. I always love to study stories of the largest customers on the platform. So one customer started six months ago spending just subscription ninety month, and $9 now we just signed a deal over 6,000,000. 6,000,000? 6,000,000 a year, right?

So this level of acceleration is something which really mind blowing to me. But dude, what are they getting for 6,000,000 a year? That’s like a Hollywood content team

So there are multiple trends, and all of them, frankly, coming from Asia. So first, we’re seeing a lot of direct to consumer e commerce companies rebuilding their whole go to market to be AI native, where they just make hundreds of ads, if not thousands a week, where they can AB test what performs well. But we all know about short form dramas. Right? Short form dramas today is an industry over 10,000,000,000, owned primarily by Chinese companies, having huge impact both in China, United States, and Europe, everywhere in the world.

And most of new shows there are made with AI end to end. So look, I think this adoption obviously is coming like bottom up, but that’s very difficult to refute this new reality.

So that that... That’s a great question. So business revenue is slightly over 50%. Wow. Yeah. On the consumer sides, it’s also very important to break it down. On the consumer sides, out of these 50 is around like 10% is pure consumer use cases, pure consumer. And that’s roughly people who use it on mobile. Mobile. So share of our revenue from mobile is less than 10%. We are very different from many other companies. But there are lots of aspiring creators, like basically those people who are freelancers doing social media marketing projects projects and so on, who try to learn video AI so that they can make more money.

It’s true that their behavior is a little churny. Within a year, most of them actually come back to try again. And we do believe that over the time, most of them are gonna figure stuff out and they’re just gonna become this new AI native workforce. So it’s still important for us to educate them. That’s why we invest so much in like Higgsfield Academy, YouTube channel, and so on. But we also are fully cognizant that we will never be able to win in the markets of subscriptions of $20 a month.

So Why? Because I think today, Google and OpenAI, they pursue ads so much. But fundamentally, I think they are going to completely demolish all their prosumer subscription markets, which is $20 a month subscriptions.

Yeah. I do believe that. That’s essentially what’s gonna happen over the time. I know this is a very contrarian bet, but at least we can see some of You’re that saying

Yeah. And I do believe this is just the most apparent example, but there are a couple more, which is already happening. And I do believe that’s why at Higgsfield, what really matters for us is we... Even if we get someone on $20 a month subscription, how can we show them value? How can we make them to upgrade to over... To spend over thousand dollars a year with us?

So there is quite massive drop within the first month just simply because people don’t fully realize the value. That’s a core priority for us to actually get better in that, so showcasing the value. Is it like half or... No. It’s it’s maybe like 30% drop. Okay. But then it’s it’s really flat after that. It’s... We look obviously at, like, logo retention. I wouldn’t say it’s great, but because, like, we all remember, like, b to b SaaS era, like, retention was expected to be... Logo retention month one was expected to be over 80%.

So clearly, have a lot of work to do on user education to get there, but some things are truly phenomenal. Like when I look at the core... At the business segments and ARR at month 12, obviously, like you’re gonna argue it’s like eighteen months old company, like, what are you talking about? But still, when I look at the numbers which I have today, NRR at month 12 is over 300%. It just never happens in B2B SaaS, right? So that’s why I’m saying that while there is substantial churn in month zero, and we have to do a better job with user education to address that, expansion is unprecedented.

That’s a good question. So first and foremost, like, the goal is to make sure that the best commercial video content is generated on Higgsfield, and we show all the workflows of how to make such professional looking videos. And we have an in house team of over a 150 creative professionals. 150. It’s almost half of the whole work... Workforce, frankly. And those people, they make product launch videos. They make tutorials. For example, we made the first AI generated movie, which is also like obviously a sensitive topic.

But what’s important, we open sourced all of it. And what we learned is that for ninety minutes of like, let’s say, TV quality content, it was over hundred hours of yet generated content. So creative decisioning, picking the right piece is still very important. So that’s really what we are focused on, and that’s what’s driving most of the most of the revenue.

Yes. We don’t do any page.

Oh, yeah. Obviously, this was obviously, this was my mistake. I’m gonna be... I’m gonna do my best to be transparent. What I need to admit, at some point of time, I really was thinking that chasing benchmarks is valuable, but I don’t believe this is just sort of corporate psyops, frankly. I was part of the large organization, so I know what happens. What happens is that everyone just thinks, like, we need to show some progress, so we need to have some benchmark. But then when I talk to the top researchers from these labs, especially larger companies, what happens is that they start to put test data into the training.

They start to kind of use leverage test data to use LLM as a judge for training of the models, use all the various tricks to basically gain benchmarks, get quarterly bonuses, and so on. That’s like, who cares, right? So if I make my couple million dollars a year one of these labs, I can move to another lab easily. So that’s unfortunately what’s happening in larger organizations. That’s- Can

Yeah, look, I think let’s just look at the outcomes which we have today. Out of all the incumbents in The United States, when I look at Open Router data, the only company which is relevant is Google out of all the incumbents. When I look in China, where probably obsession with benchmarks probably is less, We have Tencent, Xiaomi, Alibaba, three incumbents being completely relevant, and, obviously, like, Biden’s obviously trying to catch up as well. What’s

that? I just do believe that there there is just... Obviously, in the tech bubble, there is a strong obsession over the benchmarks, which do not necessarily represent the reality. But I can talk specifics specifically in the... For video. A lot of benchmarks today for video is really text to video, which does not represent actual workflows at all. The way to think about video models today, it’s just modern rendering engine. Think about this as like Unreal Engine or Unity, but just different types of inputs. And it’s virtually impossible to really define a visual output and direct the execution just through text.

If you just go into our open source projects like this movie, which I mentioned, average prompt length is over 3,000 words. That’s the first thing. And like, look, all these benchmarks which we are talking about, they are not like as comprehensive in terms of the details of prompts and people who are labeling, they obviously read like 3,000 word long prompts. But also on average, there are at least 10 image references for every scene. The reason why it’s important is because it’s important to define how the characters look like, how the background looks like, how actually characters are located to each other in the scene and so on.

And so that’s why prompting and just the workflow is so complex. Benchmarks just don’t represent that.

So it’s true that with VFX and camera control, we got very, very quickly from maybe 1,000,000 to 20,000,000 in ARR within maybe the first three months. Then we released our own image model, which is really good at aesthetic photoshoots and product consistency. This is what allowed us to scale then from 20 to a 100,000,000.

We still do them whenever we see specific use case like these photoshoots, but as soon as this is what our customers want. So it’s all driven based on the customer feedback, not just by ambition to conquer the vaults and build the best model in the vaults.

So first of all, to be honest, whenever someone says we build our own models, very likely what they mean is something what’s happened with Cursor. We we do remember. Right? A lot of companies, they actually take open weights model and just post training on own data. And post training can happen in two ways. Most important is whenever you have customer data around decisions they make, like sequence of decisions, and you can teach the model to actually take... Learn how to compress these 10 steps into one step, this type of reinforcement learning is the most valuable.

And I think increasingly more and more companies will have to do that. We see this in the market as well. So most of the companies in the world today, most of the businesses, they don’t necessarily need Astra specifically. They don’t necessarily need the newest Fable model. That’s why OpenRouter reports that share of open source models went from below 30 to over 60 within this year.

Look, I do believe that’s just because the capitalism works. I mean, OpenAI Anthropic still are gonna have more than 50% of the markets. In terms of the dollars generally. In terms of the dollars, right. And especially because for coding still remains to be very prolific use case where coders are always jumping to the recent model. But for our markets, we’re seeing completely different dynamics. What’s actually happening in social media marketing as companies start to print hundreds of ad creatives a week, they wanna have maybe cheapest, more steerable models because PhD level intelligence is not necessarily needed to make viral social media video.

And that’s where we actually have seen that we get 80% plus margin whenever we run open source models, like post trained open source models, but it can be way more cost efficient for our end customer compared to the proprietary models.

The margin on own models and open weights models is over 80%, and then it almost doesn’t matter. And for closed source models, it’s probably between 2030%. And then what becomes important is can we actually steer the traffic? What makes me excited about Higgsfield is that agentic grows so quickly. And actually for us, as companies start to actually create those agentic workflows to make more ads, we choose which model we can use. So we choose what model to use in over than 40% cases.

Yeah. We call it tokenomics essentially. Right? As there is certain amounts of work customers wanna do, how can we optimize number of tokens which require it, and how we can pick the most efficient tokens for them. There are actually two incumbents in The United States who figured out models. It’s not just Google. It’s also NVIDIA. Why do you think that is? What I’m constantly seeing is that there is diversions of models. So there are these state of the art models which have to be really good in computer use, like Astra or in coding, but they can be prohibitively expensive.

And we were chatting about that. It’s like on average at Higgsfield, person on the team spends over $10,000 a month on various models. And remember, we are split across United States and Asia, across the So

So internal usage of models a month is over 4,000,000.

We have close to 400 people and just wanna make sure that the math adds up. Yes, it’s it’s definitely over $10,000 per person. How

That’s the best question of the whole show, by the way. That’s the best question. What actually started to happen is the creative team started to do vibe coding. Like, this month, I was... I I just caught a guy who spent over 30 ks in a week on Astra model. Because he was frankly frustrated that some asset organization workflow, and as you said, basically auto editing, is still not very good in production. And he said, oh, I’m just gonna do this myself. And just went, like, five nights straight on Astra.

And it works? We learned a lot. I wouldn’t say it was production ready, but we learned a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Many people spend over 10,000 in a week. Do you mind? Yeah. My finance team will probably say... I don’t know if if if, you know, if you ask any of them, but they will probably say that I’m like being too stubborn, too relentless to control this spend because sometimes I feel it goes like... It really goes out of control. Like, 30 k in a week is quite lot. But we learned this. So this was actually a net positive experience.

So across the top engineers and across top creatives, it’s going to keep growing. And I do believe we are gonna get to spend close to 50 k and 100 k a month for those who can call 10x engineers, 10x creatives. Unfortunately, I also expect that these people will ask for comparable salary raise as well. So I think that is just gonna correlate at some points. But also for a lot of other jobs, let’s say we take legal, finance, and so on, it really stabilizes around like $500,000 a month very, very quickly.

I can definitely say that I had sort of a feeling that legal customer support is going to be mostly replaced. And that’s obviously one of the main mistakes, operationally, which we have done in the company, that we didn’t ramp these teams quickly. What we’re seeing today is that, let’s say our legal team is over 10 people, our customer success team is over 40 people. All of them use AI heavily. At these professions where I stay quite close today, I definitely can say that I don’t see any elimination.

It’s true that probably over 60% of customer support requests, especially the first line of defense, can be handled with AI. But when it especially comes to B2B, like AI just doesn’t work.

It’s it’s it’s pretty good, but obviously, they did invest a lot into that.

And and... But also very important, the way how Nick thinks about that is in terms of the playbooks. We launch products, new products pretty much every week. We have to keep up that agents with all the information and so on. And just due due to the high velocity, having extremely smart coordinated team is is very important.

Of course. Because the agents are as good as contacts and the rules which they have. And if contacts and the rules change pretty much twice a week, it gets a little difficult.

So from a period from March to June, everyone really moved to Claude, including the creative team. And that’s where we actually started to see creative team vibe coding functionality, which we don’t have in production. But then we started to see that all the coders quickly moved from CLOUD to Codex as of mid June. Over the time creative, especially 10x creatives, moves to Codex as well. But look, I do believe that it’s cyclical. So...

I don’t think that’s gonna happen anytime soon. I believe, like, for example, recently, OpenAI announced that they basically built OpenAI for law, but that’s only v zero. So over the time, they also are going to try to print smaller specialized models for... Not like exactly smaller, but really specialized model for certain use cases. Clearly, like, Astra excels in long term horizon. Do you buy

First of all, I think definitely the ability to switch internal use just for internal teams outside of law firms. I think that’s definitely happening. Oh, I think we both invest... There is some company called Solve Intelligence. Love it. Yeah. Very specific. Very specific. And let me try to maybe bring couple examples why, like, solve intelligence is so special and, like, where... Like, for example, how we learn from this. What can happen very often is that a company wanna just control the patent workflow even if they outsource the work.

And that’s very valuable just to have one system of record. So whoever can create AI native system of records is gonna win. And but going back to Higgsfield, why it seems so important for Higgsfield? There are so many systems today which are used for just to store assets. Like, some people use Dropbox, Some people use Google Drive. Some people are gonna try to use Miro. Some people are gonna try to use frame.io. Like, there are many solutions. But let’s think about what people need. What people need, they wanna be able to search contents, and marketers especially wanna make sure that content is on brands in terms of the visual identity, but also, like, if that sort of adheres to certain brand guidelines.

And that’s where, like, semantic understanding and semantic controls become finally possible. It never existed before. So in our space, there are definitely other companies like Adobe and Canva who builds the best software for the Pixel for Cerebras, where everything was defined with pixels. But that’s clearly not how the world is gonna work in the future. What we’re envisioning, and that’s what everyone wants, they wanna just be able to search and really work through the library of assets and all the knowledge through natural interfaces. So being able to own this interface and build the analytics, like this system of records, is important.

That’s why at Higgsfield, we invested so much in harness so that it improves over the time. And this harness also allows... It it basically learns visual style over the time, which let’s say, Cloud and OpenAI cannot necessarily do.

I think it’s very difficult to figure out where the value accrues in the supply chain. We do believe that there are only two ways of modern value creation or moats today. First is when you deliver the outcome. And for us, it’s allowing businesses to sell more through AI ads. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is network effects. Unfortunately, AI does not replace network effects. And when people talk about swarm of AI agents talking to each other, I’m not sure this is happening in the next five years.

That’s why it’s so exciting that within Higgsfield, we really wanted to empower community to create more projects, open source them, to really build a snowball where people can capitalize on each other output. This is the reason why software grows so quickly because it’s so easy just to go and fork someone’s project on GitHub. We were able to scale from basically, like, I don’t know, 10 seeded projects, open source projects, like eight weeks ago to over 10,000 today. Like seeing these type of network effects, I believe can become a moat over the time.

Obviously, Yuri Milner gets gets it. But you just

Yeah. Definitely in person. And definitely Yuri stays on top of all the trends. Was it?

I I wouldn’t say nervous. It was just more to see how much of the... If we see the market the same way. And I was truly surprised that Yuri deeply understands this transformation of content first and foremost. Obviously, it starts with this direct to consumer AI ads. It starts with short form dramas. All these trends come from Asia to the West. Also, fundamentally, we believe that most of contents on social and in the world is gonna be AI assisted or AI generated. And this multitrillion advertisement industry, and contextual advertisement is the main business model of the Internet, it’s all gonna be substantially disrupted with video AI.

This industry still gonna be very valuable, but it’s never gonna be the same.

You know, sophisticated investors, they can play games. I had, like, so many scars. People really shook hands, said, We do at this price. And next day, what I learned is that they called other investors and they pulled the syndicates to invest in 30% lower valuation compared to what we discussed. So look, these things just happen, so you never can be sure. But it didn’t happen with Yuri. I think

Yeah, you could also argue that’s what Cognition was valued at 50, right? So there is definitely an Upper bound even more, yeah, a 100%. So a couple of things which I believe are very important. So first, we build for long term. We have seen that direct to consumer space, like e commerce can be disrupted. Shopify is a great example, how they have become infrastructure to build direct to consumer businesses, and we become infrastructure to essentially build distribution for direct to consumer businesses. That’s one aspiration. And second aspiration is obviously a plug in.

The company’s worth over $200,000,000,000 It’s insane. So look, and as we think long term, just these multiples don’t matter that much. As we know we’re building long term, we’re gonna be over 100,000,000,000. It’s true that most of the people don’t get the opportunity that we are going after the biggest industry in the world, but I wanted to drop another number. And I asked the team to double check, so it’s at least four people on the team who proved... So it’s not like random fact. So I asked, When we look at public companies and we exclude pharma and big tech, spend on sales and marketing is higher than spend on R and D.

When it comes to sales and marketing, the goal is to deliver personalized offering which converts the best. A lot of that is human work, of course, but a lot of that is gonna be personalized videos in some shape or form. So that’s why I’m saying that many people just... And that’s good for us that many people don’t understand the opportunity, this large market, which we go after.

So all the West makes well over 70% of revenue. Well over. But just important to say that we learn a lot from trends coming from Asia. Higgsfield does not exist in China, for example, which is massive market for AI. The largest city by usage is Seoul in South Korea, while the largest country is obviously The United States.

biggest lesson

There is so much IP, so many products coming from Asia, and they all try to figure out distribution direct to consumer. That’s why they lean into the new tooling like video AI, which actually helps to achieve that. That’s just a very different mindset. They feel that they could do way better if they could establish direct relationship with customer instead of having some other layer. That’s why they go so so my direct to consumer rather than using some resale platforms and so on.

Look, this is... Goes even beyond that because my... From the age of seven to 12, my mother had to work three jobs, so I didn’t see her. My father was spending all the time with me going to all... And it was... I was basically minors, so he had to go to all these camps with me. I also play checkers. I was top three in the world. So we went... We traveled throughout the world. Then I did programming. He spent all the time with me, like really dedicated his life to me.

Like, he did sacrifice. And since twenty first, he has Parkinson’s disease. So even, like, having some ability to capital and exits cannot fully change things, and this is something which is deeply personal, obviously.

So I think Marc Andreessen actually described it really well, that there are like five archetypes. So obviously for me, it’s just huge conviction about the technology, about the markets, about the opportunity, and just huge fear of missing that. Huge fear of missing that. But remember that my parents really taught me that there is a place in the world where good technology products matter. I remember when I was six, there was this, I guess, magazine about Bill Gates building Microsoft and not being very socially accepted everywhere back then.

And my mother just told me, oh, these examples basically happen in the world. I think she didn’t fully understand San Francisco and Seattle are different cities, but that’s still deeply rooted in me.

For them, what was important is to just be in merit based environment, sort of. And that’s why getting to California felt so important.

Yeah.

I think one of the things why Europe thrives so much... Like, I know that you typically say otherwise, but let me just challenge you. Like, who are the most relevant neo clouds today? It’s and scale, Iran, and and Cursor. Crusoe, okay, Silicon Valley story. I ran from Australia and scale from The UK, and Nobious is UK and Netherlands. Let’s talk about the companies on application layer that matter. I know that you mentioned Mercor, and you mentioned Harvey, but Ligora, eleven Labs, Lovable, they all deeply matter.

So if we just go outside of the model layer, because then I don’t wanna go into the mistrial topic, right? Because I think by usage, the numbers are very strong, but people for some reason don’t believe in that. I don’t know why, but public data shows that the usage is there. But on every other layer, Europe is extremely competitive. Without ASML, this whole thing just wouldn’t happen. So I think fundamentally what matters if Europe is gonna figure out energy, but that’s above my pay grade, right?

So very important to say here is that now there are more opportunities to create company from different kind of cities, from different parts of the world, while before it all felt extremely centralized. And we are obviously excited about that. Another thing about hiring is that in Silicon Valley, unfortunately, what I’m seeing is that people just jump between jobs every two years. That’s why I think Europe can be so competitive because the sense of loyalty matters a lot. And that goes sort of a little bit to the childhood.

We just discussed that. Let’s say if you’re a Fulham fan, you are not gonna root for Arsenal just because they won or played in the Champions League final. But in The United States, if Lakers are on the top, people are gonna say, yeah. I’m I’m fan of Lakers because it just makes it easier to start conversation. You know?

In AI, it’s so important to look at actual signals and actual adoption and having access to raw information. I was obviously taught the corporate school of management in The United States. And when I look at the CEOs whom I’m learning from is obviously Jensen, Elon, and Nick. Those three, they completely abandon all the management principles. They don’t necessarily are fans of one on one and soft feedback. All of them, I think, are encouraged, being down to the points, knowing the details. While it would be called in corporate America something like micromanagement.

I do believe that it’s as simple as hire the best people to do the best work and figure out how to retain them. Everything else is frankly secondary. And people just create so much theory around that, and then essentially, there are just so many fake rules which are disconnected from reality. It’s really as simple as hire the best people, empower them to do the best work, and just figure out how to establish relationship and retain them.

Across our team, roughly 50 are in California. We’re gonna get to roughly 50 remotes and over 300 in Kazakhstan. So look, I just hope we’re gonna print more dollar millionaires in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, in this part of the world than any other company.

I I know that a lot of people, when they look at Higgsfield, they think about the arbitrage. Is that not true? Look. Like, Kazakhstan is top five in the world in physics. Like, you look at the recent International Physics Olympiad for high schoolers, like, they’re top five in the world. It’s on par with, like, The United States, China, India. And this is also the core of our team are people who won international competitions in math and physics. That’s the first part. The second part is that about Kazakhstan is that they actually took the Soviet school of math, but really upgraded with Singaporean principles.

Singaporean system of education is considered to be probably the best in the world. At least many people in Silicon Valley believe that. And the government basically subsidizes for thousands of high schoolers to study abroad, and many of these people come back. And so just the density of talents definitely got there. It’s like top 10 largest countries in the world, so over 20,000,000 population. And we are also actively hiring, bringing their talents from Europe, from other countries in Asia. And people just enjoy some benefits, like 15% personal income tax.

Yeah, man, it’s like, not 10%. Don’t

Do you have a mega pad in Kazakhstan? No. I don’t. I don’t own any property. What? Why? Remember that I come from Asian family. Whenever we sold the company, I made over $1,000,000, and I spent all this money buying apartments for my parents, relatives, my wife parents because this is just part of the culture. Wow. And the fam... Like, extended family is not small by any means. But look, it’s just part of the culture to give back. And then when it comes to the family, especially to my parents, they obviously sacrificed a lot.

So I felt like I had to give back at least things, like, mind three things, which I could do. But I drive Tesla Model three, and I sleep. So I’m not like a guy who’s gonna just show up with Lamborghini or Porsche. Do you invest?

Before I did that, but now I spend roughly ninety hours a week, eighty, ninety hours a week on Higgsfield. I try to spend ideally at least three hours a week with my wife, at least five hours a week with my son. Sometimes I do the catch up because when I travel for a week, for two weeks, for three weeks, then I try to take Sunday off to spend the whole day with my son. And over the last three months, yes, I was able to find one day when I spent, like, end to end with my son without emails, without talking to without talking to the team members.

I get in trouble

This is a good question. So look, obviously being an immigrant, I always have to prove that I belong, right? I hope that... I feel like now people accept, people recognize that Higgsfield is probably a top 10 application AI companies by revenue and probably number one. But I think when it comes to hard work, the people whom we know in common, we talked about, let’s say, Peter Sellis, legend in consumer space, obviously Jack. I spent decent amount of time with them and the other product leaders at Stamp.

Like, the density of product talent at Stamp was unprecedented. All of them work really hard. All of them are smart. Like, none of them just checks emails four or five hours a day and calls it work. Each of them is deeply rooted into their recent trends in product, product design, activation. They know data really well. So yeah, I don’t believe that there is any shortcut to hard work.

Yeah. Look, I’m very grateful for my wife for being patient. Know, it’s also very different if that’s Asian culture. It’s just kinda more natural to try to do sacrifices for each other, sort of, and I’m deeply... Obviously deeply grateful her for supporting me. But, like, sometimes at this scale, I get invited to parties. I always send her and don’t show up myself. I don’t know if I piss people off, but this happens very frequently. So wait, wait. You say yes, and then she goes. Yeah. I say maybe we both can come together.

Then there is always some urgent fire last minutes, and my wife just goes, you know?

Yeah. Look. I think, obviously, for all the things which we touch based earlier, whenever we are not very good in communicating the features or we felt like... I mean, now it’s like team of 40, so now the life is way better. But early days, obviously, I was involved in all the fires. I think recently all the types of attacks on AI companies, it’s crazy. It’s like LLMs are being used to hack companies. It’s like new types of LLMs to do some frauds, basically bots using credits and then doing auto refunds, all of that.

Since I have kind of machine learning background myself, data science background, I still can move a needle substantially when it comes to statistics and data. So yeah, I have to be involved somehow. But these LLMs, they amplify many types of behaviors, including various types of attacks and fraud, but we have to fight against that.

Oh, I was thinking that HubSpot is gonna get obsolete. Everyone is gonna build their own CRM. But when... Especially when we hire and scale B2B go to market, seems just having familiar interface matters a lot.

Yeah, I do think so. And especially I see that’s when I hire go to market talents.

I mean, people who are very good in understanding customers and talking to customers, they may not just simply accept new interface so quickly. And just having HubSpot as a system of records, being able, if there is any mismatch going, able to just understand where the data flow went wrong. I think that’s just still very valuable, like the familiarity. What do you believe today

I mean, look, I think people just still don’t appreciate that most of the content on social media is gonna be AI generated. There are gonna be some shows, like, obviously, yours, where it’s, like, authentic contents. It’s gonna be ten fifty x higher CPM, whatever, than AI generated contents. So it’s gonna be way less in terms of content created by... But it’s gonna create way more value than AI generated content. But even when I look into your content specifically, you made multiple very successful Shorts, millions of views, better than anyone else in this space, and you do a lot of overlay.

While the content is authentic, I think we should do better job so that you use Higgsfield at least for the overlay on top of existing videos.

And that’s extremely smart of you. You know, like, going back to some of the topics is, like, clipping is, like, a huge topic, And that’s like has its own upsides and downsides. But obviously everyone sees this opportunity to win, to build massive top of funnel, like hundreds of millions of views with short form content, as long as you can have downstream monetization or value creation like you do.

Okay, so in five years, people, especially in our space, creative directors, they are gonna be talking to computers and generating stories real time and video. And AI is gonna help to create multiple variations. Today, there is no word to really describe that because there is also... There are script writers, then screen writers, like those who are gonna break it down shot by shot. Then there are people who do that storyboarding. Then there is person who oversees all of that, like movie director and so on. So there are so many parts of that, but eventually taste is gonna matter a lot and just having stories to tell.

And there is no word to describe it today.

Maybe out of more professional CEOs, CEOs, I’m definitely Frank Slootman. Because going back to the point, I was just curious all the time. Does no bullshit culture exist in California or not? Can it allow to scale companies so quickly? Is it possible to build successful enterprise go to market motion with no bullshit culture? And when I read his Empty Up book, like book called Empty Up, I realized it’s possible. So, like, I’m a huge fan. I watched all his interviews.

So what’s the biggest lesson from Snap? The momentum doesn’t last forever. Like today, Snap market cap is below 15,000,000,000. There are a lot of memes on the Internet, but this is a great company. Cares so much about trust and safety and experience, and it puts it first. Do you think it is a

why I say that momentum doesn’t last forever. When Snapchat was worth $80,000,000,000 and the gap with Meta was less than 10x, then it felt, oh, we just go explore. We we just really must lean in, but momentum doesn’t last forever. And that’s my core learning. So that’s why... Like, while we do have the positive momentum, we don’t... We do not take this for granted. Clearly, like, the nature of capitalism is there are ups and downs. And since we’re building long term, we just should capitalize on the opportunity, like, with the fundraising and just keep pushing progress every

Just maybe saying these straight, a lot of public companies did not figure out their AI story. Snap, unfortunately, is part of that. We have seen other great companies like Figma trying to tell their story. You mentioned Canva. It’s not necessarily easy to be successful in private markets and public markets. And Zach is one of the best CEOs of all time because he managed that.

Yeah. Look. But this happens with Instagram, with WhatsApp. That’s why I’m saying that we just maybe should put Meta a little bit in Yeah, its own he

Yeah. Look, I do believe that it’s a little bit early to look at whole Meta AI initiatives. We probably need to see like year of like successful launches and so on. And then we can look back and see what was good, what was not good. But at least the consistency of storytelling and explaining what he is doing to public investors. Being able to articulate why Muse is so different is phenomenal.

Our current business model projects 4.5. It says by the end of the next year, but these basically involve substantial deceleration. And that’s what just my finance team, like there are a couple strong quant people. They told me that’s just how the business works. But look, we are still pushing to grow at least 30% month over month.

Over 10. Over 10. Let me tell you why. In a lot of adoption and creative AI space is driven by monetization, like all this direct to consumer brands making more ads, and also having like the aspirational cinematic AI content as this inspires creatives to explore the tooling. It feels to me that Hollywood starts to embrace AI mostly today as a tool for hybrid production, as a just new form of CGI. But the sentiments really shifted from strictly negative to neutral to slightly negative. And in private conversations, yes, there are maybe more than half of SDR talents who is gonna say we’re anti AI forever.

But increasingly, there are more and more people who are actually asking a question, can we tell more stories with AI? Can we overcome certain budget limitations which existed before, and maybe AI can help to tell new stories which we couldn’t tell before? And I do believe this just change in perception that’s at least comes from my conversations is extremely positive.

Look, we are not chasing just the valuation. Because again, the goal is just to make sure that the company can be sustainable over the time in public markets. So there is a lot of company building to be done beyond just chasing the revenue. But I just do believe- But you want to be

Yeah, I do believe that Higgsfield has great potential to be bigger than Apple and Shopify. Fundamentally, like building is one part of that. Shopify, one layer of infrastructure. Then for coding, there is obviously like a cloud, there is Codex. But what matters is distribution over the time. Distribution matters. You know that this better than any other It is my business. That’s why

Exactly.