It might have been a moment lost in translation, or perhaps a willful reinterpretation, but when I asked Cristóbal Valenzuela who in the tech world inspires him most, he named a Chilean poet. “Nicanor Parra came up with this idea of ‘anti-poetry,’” explained Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway, a generative AI video startup. “He thought about the whole canon of literature in a way that no one else had thought about it before.”
While Parra’s radical surrealism shocked his midcentury contemporaries, the literary mainstream later embraced exactly the same techniques. At Runway, Valenzuela is hoping to have a similar impact on the world of filmmaking. But the reality is that the tool he’s building, which may soon be able to conjure hyper realistic scenes with the press of a button, holds a lot more disruptive power than any poem.
I met Valenzuela, 33, at Runway’s SoHo, New York, offices on a muggy morning in late July. The few staffers who’d come in that day were tucked away in meetings and phone booths, leaving a soft soundtrack of indie music to serenade the floor’s many tropical plants. The calm of the office—and its CEO—stood in stark contrast to the funding frenzy surrounding the five-year-old company. In June, Runway announced a $141 million Series C extension at a $1.5 billion valuation, tripling its $500 million valuation from just five months before.
