# The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CTO) Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680/the-pivot-that-paid-off-how-fal-found-explosive-growth-in-generative-media-gorkem-yurtseven-co-founder-and-cto Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680/the-pivot-that-paid-off-how-fal-found-explosive-growth-in-generative-media-gorkem-yurtseven-co-founder-and-cto.md Podcast: [In Depth](https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680) Published: 2025-10-22T14:29:00+00:00 Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/FRCH1369273870.mp3 Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/FRCH1369273870.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-depth-1318680/episodes/the-pivot-that-paid-off-how-fal-found-explosive-growth-in-generative-media-gorkem-yurtseven-co-founder-and-cto Duration seconds: 3558 ## Resource 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… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-depth-1318680/episodes/the-pivot-that-paid-off-how-fal-found-explosive-growth-in-generative-media-gorkem-yurtseven-co-founder-and-cto/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-depth-1318680/the-pivot-that-paid-off-how-fal-found-explosive-growth-in-generative-media-gorkem-yurtseven-co-founder-and-cto.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.