Companies take opposite approaches to synthetic media, and the one you'd expect to win often doesn't.
For years, I struggled with synthetic media, making every mistake in the book. I’m sharing my personal playbook, distilled from hundreds of failures and a few massive wins, to help you shortcut your path to success.
The Counterintuitive Truth
In synthetic media, the best practitioners often do less, not more.
Trying to do everything at once is one of the most common ways to fail: even a team with strong technology and talent can spread itself too thin.
The lesson: the data tells a different story than your gut. It sounds simple. It's incredibly hard to execute.
What I've Learned From 40 Companies
A few patterns in synthetic media come up again and again.
The founders who handle synthetic media well understand that most founders overthink this and underspend on execution.
The Reality Nobody Talks About
A lot of the advice on synthetic media rests on assumptions that made sense five years ago. The world has moved on.
The first thing to understand is that the market doesn't care about your roadmap. I've seen this play out across dozens of companies. The pattern is unmistakable.
Many teams spend months on the wrong path before realizing that the best solutions are often the simplest ones. Once they make the switch, everything changes.
The Numbers Don't Lie
The gap between companies that take synthetic media seriously and those that don't is usually clear.
Investing early in synthetic media can be the difference between raising your next round and running out of runway.
One of my portfolio companies went from struggling to profitable in under a year after they finally got serious about this. The founder told me later that they wished they'd started sooner.
This connects to broader themes around AI writing, AI journalism, AI storytelling that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Final Thoughts
There are no shortcuts in synthetic media, but there are smarter paths.
The strongest teams treat synthetic media as a competitive advantage, not a checkbox. They invest in it early, measure it obsessively, and never stop improving.
If you're just getting started with synthetic media, don't be intimidated. Everyone starts somewhere. The key is to start with the right mindset and the right framework, and then execute like your company depends on it. Because it probably does.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.
Q:Do all experts agree with this view?
No, and that's fine. The best ideas in business are often contrarian. I share my perspective based on my experience and data, but I encourage you to seek out opposing viewpoints and form your own conclusions.
Q:What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 234 startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.