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Back to Inside fal’s $1.65B Series E & F Led by Sequoia & Bessemer, with Burkay Gür & Gorkem Yurtseven.

How Did Fal Get Its Name?

fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal is the initials of features and labels, two old machine-learning terms from before the current AI wave. The short name is pronounced fal.

The name is also a Turkish coffee-house word. After the coffee is finished, someone reads a fortune from the grounds left in the cup. In Turkey, everyone has done that reading. Molly O'Shea had tried Turkish coffee and had not had a fortune read from the grounds. The founders offered to do a reading. The spelling holds both ideas at once: the machine-learning initials, and the coffee-ground prediction.

Transcript

Inside fal’s $1.65B Series E & F Led by Sequoia & Bessemer ·

Sourcery

More from this episode

  1. Why Is Generative Media One of Only Three Product-market Fits in AI?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say AI has three product-market fits: search, coding agents, and generative media.
  2. Why Did Fal's Image Business Come Back?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say about half of fal's revenue now comes from video models and half from image models.
  3. Who Pays $5 for a Five-second AI Video?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say a five-second video priced at five dollars still found essentially infinite demand.
  4. How Did Fal Move From Data Infrastructure to Image Models?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal started in 2021 as a compute company, before the current AI wave.
  5. Why Did Coinbase Make Candidates Pass a Crypto Quiz?Burkay Gür says Coinbase made candidates pass a crypto quiz posted on Reddit before anyone on the team would take a phone call.
  6. Why Does Fal Have No Pure Managers?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal has no pure managers and does not plan to add them.
  7. Why Does Fal Send Engineers Home on Weekends?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal looks for agency, hunger, and humility in engineers.
  8. Why Can't a New AI Model Buy Its Own Inference Compute?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say a lab with a new model has to plan inference compute before the launch.
  9. Has AI Taken Hollywood Jobs Yet?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say AI has had zero impact on Hollywood labor so far.

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