Krea hits 30M signups as CEO Diego Rodriguez argues generative media tools will proliferate, not consolidate

cubitus. I think it's time green dial. Uh I wish I wish I had more time to give you the full my full uh case for it. But we will move on to our next guest. We have Diego Rodriguez from Craya in the re waiting room. Welcome to the show Diego. How are you doing? Welcome. What's up? How you what's happening?

Uh, talk to me about about the AI suite for creatives. I was particularly interested in this debate between like chopping wood and creating new workflows for specific video generation or AI use versus like trying to instantiate some things on the fly. I always see these like I made this amazing AI video.

Here's how I did it. And it's piecing together like three different steps where they fine-tuned on their face and they did a special model that had a beginning and an ending frame and then they did some sort of control net on top of it and then they upresed it.

And how are you thinking about actually piecing all the different tools together in a way that someone it's like a the final UI effectively?

I mean like I mean I'm here like at the fall conference and like talk actually exactly about that like I I'm don't know it's kind of frustrating to see people be like this generated this is not dude it's a new medium like it's just a new medium so like whenever I see a frame by say now Hollywood is starting to toy around these tools like the the best people tell you like like you you you you don't ask them like is did you use Photoshop or after effects or Houdini or AI right?

He's like, "Dude, all of them like this was even a dialogue when we were discussing about a certain idea. " That's also part of the process of making things and I think we're far from automating uh like true storytelling, which is why we need tools. Where's the pencil for the latent space? That's what we need. Yeah.

um what how do you think about um uh what the actual product looks like that people want at each level of scale like enterprise is fine with APIs and they will have a team of software engineers like build the tools exactly that they need then the proumer might be fine with a nodebased workflow or something that's a little bit more you know fine-tuning parameters under the hood but then they want something that's maybe repeatable tool that they can jump in and out of.

And then the final consumer wants like you know how you see those like dedicated app just for like just the face swapping app and like face swapping is obviously a feature that should exist in the nodebased workflow in uh Craya in a proumer in a professional tool.

So, how how do you think about like checking the box on all the features out of the out of the gate versus uh leaving enough flexibility that your users might get lost because you don't uh you don't handhold as much.

I think that like these barriers are uh let's call them vestigial concepts from our culture as in like we think those barriers are there because of where we come from which is like okay we used to have the professional who goes to Photoshop and everyone that is maybe doesn't need as much control goes to something like Canva and then if you're just a random person that is toying around with making stuff then you use a certain iOS app or whatever But the reality is that a lot of these barriers used to just be APIs uh like a certain plug-in or a certain API call or whatever and with Vive coding these they are blurring out now.

So I actually see consumers who ask me can you get an API because I have coded some things and then I actually get uh enterprises being like oh your UI is actually one of the best ones and that's why we are doing these things.

So I think that uh this is a time full of uncertainty and when you have uncertainty the only thing that can ground you is first principle. So you have to kind like uh go back to mon go back to the beginning like think about what is truly true and what is just marketing fluff.

So the way I'm thinking do you think images and video are two separate products long term? Like Premiere Pro is a different product than Photoshop. They are different and even Lightroom is another product in the Adobe ecosystem. Uh I can imagine you can I mean it's just pixels.

Uh you can clearly put all the tools in one bucket, one app. Adobe didn't. Is that vestigial or will we see another separation? I think separation will be here in the short term and midterm. Uh because um you you can you can argue that like as we advance there's actually even more separation, right?

Like like at first books were only in a certain way and now there's a myriad of formats and images and like can you even do books for like you know for kids where they even have things inside that they that they like animations even.

So I feel like as we push the medium and by medium I mean the latent space yeah forward we will actually realize that we need way more tools than we thought we needed and that's why we're starting like we see kind of like this cambrian explosion of like okay we have control net we have confi uh we have ka but then in ka you can like jump in between tools and then you can use say an image model within many tools and that's the key part which is you said it's just pixels and it's like yeah but guess what like a song can be represent presented as pixels.

If you have a like a certain frequency diagram, it's just pixels too. So at the end of the day, sheet music when you scan sheet music, that's pixels. Yeah. So what what we have at the end of the day is a technology that can understand like information in almost its more distilled form.

Y uh that technology can move around products but the products will be different. However, they will all use that same technology and that's what we're seeing. nodebased tool, image tool, iOS app. All connect to our image model for instance with Korea one or flux context or whatever, but it's different applications.

Yeah. Uh yeah, fascinating. We like to hit the gong for guests. How many how many users does Korea have? What's the latest? What's the latest? Give us some stats. Give us some numbers. What' you got? Last time I checked signups, it was like over 30 million. Oh. Congratulations. And that's wild. Yeah.

And and then but like I'm actually more interested and participating in uh like the enterprise cuz I'm starting to see true business adoption and that's where it starts to be like stopp very auspicious gong ringing. I don't know if you can hear it but the gong is still ringing for you. Something about how I hit it.

It's very good. It's a very good omen. It was very good omen for your company. Uh 30 million. You know, we I I just want to take a second because we get lost in like the AI boom or whatever that uh 30 million is so many that that is such a huge that is such a huge impact to have on a product that you've built.

So, sincerely like massive congratulations. That's very very big. I and I feel like uh you know Sam Alman's out there throwing around trillions and stuff and we lose track of the fact that uh that 30 million is a lot of users and and and congratulations. That's very great. Uh thank you so much for coming on.

Fun at the event. Yep. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Uh, up next we have Justine Moore from