Victor Riparbelli
CEO & Co-Founder, Synthesia
28 Jul 2026etn Raise $1.6M Seed Round and Go 5 Days A Week
Synthesia CEO Victor on Real-Time Avatars & Role Play Sessions
Synthesia's CEO Victor returns after being one of ETN's first-ever guests. He walks through last week's launch of Role Play Sessions — real-time avatars that role-play customers for sales and manager training, with live coaching, scoring and a 'talent graph' for executives — and predicts the rise of agent-to-human meetings and simulation-based education. He explains how Synthesia gates bets on new technology and spins up isolated teams for new products, reprises his TED argument that text is lossy compression and most communication will go visual, and closes on open vs closed models, 'token maxing' versus value maxing, and his internal note against AI slop writing.
15 Oct 2025Episode #1: EU Tech Optimism, $21m for Paid, Swedish Stealth Launch, Rishi Sunak at Anthropic
Victor (Synthesia) on Synthesia 3.0, Video Agents & AI Slop
Victor of Synthesia joins as one of ETN's first guests, with banter about ETN caps and a future merch swap. He walks through Synthesia 3.0 and its new agent product, which turns videos into interactive experiences like sales-training role-plays and IT interviews. The conversation covers Sora, whether the internet is escaping 'AI slop' (he argues we're still in its early days), and how Synthesia's models predict body language, expressions and voice to look human while staying controllable for business users.
Victor on AI Companions, Enterprise Focus & Strategy Games
On AI companions, Victor says people already form real attachments to chatbots and that avatar relationships will happen, bringing downsides but also benefits like affordable AI tutors. He explains why Synthesia will stay enterprise-focused: the consumer end means competing with Meta and TikTok, which will give creation tools away and monetize distribution. He also credits a youth spent on strategy games like Rome: Total War with training his decision-making, calling intuition a 'biological LLM' trained over a lifetime.