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

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. He joined in 2016, when Coinbase was almost 100 people. The quiz tested how much a person knew about crypto, including technical terms, and how deep that interest went. It ran before AI, so the answers were hard to find. The quiz was a key factor in Coinbase's long-term success, because Coinbase wanted fanatics who would keep the work going.

fal is about 150 people today, close to Coinbase's size in 2016, and the same bar still decides early hires. Most of the job is staying current. A team can hire strong people and hope they feel motivated, or it can hire people who are already motivated and would be doing the work anyway. The hires stay current without a push because they are already absorbed in AI or in generative media.

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 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  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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