Burkay Gur is co-founder and CEO of fal, a platform for generative media, meaning AI models that generate images, video, audio and 3D content. — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).

Visual summary of operating lessons from Burkay Gur.

Part 1: The Vision for Generative Media

  1. On Bigger Than Language Models: Burkay Gur: "generative media is going to be bigger than language models" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  2. On a Category That Did Not Exist: Burkay Gur: "There was no such thing as generative media." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  3. On Models That Generate Content: Burkay Gur: "these models also turned out to be able to generate content" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  4. On Visual Consumption: Burkay Gur: "95% of what we consume on the internet is visual" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  5. On Compute-Bound Video: Burkay Gur: "video models in particular are computebound" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  6. On the Nature of Work: Burkay Gur: "I think the nature of the work changes." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  7. On Creativity: Burkay Gur: "But I think we still need the creativity." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  8. On Expertise: Burkay Gur: "They're still going to produce the best stuff." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  9. On Taste: Burkay Gur: "no matter how much slop we fill the world with, I think taste prevails, and people are drawn to experiences that are personal and human." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  10. On Ecosystems: Burkay Gur: "I think in the visual domain, like, ecosystem actually matters more." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).

Part 2: Scaling AI Infrastructure

  1. On Hyperscaler Pricing: Burkay Gur: "there’s a huge price discrepancy with hyperscalers and neoclouds" — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  2. On Architecture: Burkay Gur: "I think architecture needs to get better." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  3. On Shortage: Burkay Gur: "What we experience is there is always shortage." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  4. On Controlling Supply: Burkay Gur: "if you reach a certain scale like us and like many other companies you actually want to have more control over your supply" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  5. On Video as Tokens: Burkay Gur: "you can think of a video as like tokens" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  6. On a Thousandx Ahead: Burkay Gur: "we have like a thousandx ahead of us which is very exciting" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  7. On Scarce GPUs: Burkay Gur: "There is literally no way you can find it right now" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  8. On Slow Chatbots: Burkay Gur: "It’s literally because of shortage." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  9. On Product-Led Growth: Burkay Gur: "they will actually start playing around and then they will slowly find their use case and then let the rest of their team know" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  10. On Enterprise Revenue: Burkay Gur: "most of our revenue actually comes from you know the top thousand customers" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).

Part 3: Lessons in Hyper-Growth

  1. On a Niche: Burkay Gur: "we found this like very interesting niche" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  2. On Naming the Space: Burkay Gur: "I remember me and my co-founder actually in a room talking about like what should we call this space and we came up with generative media" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  3. On a Thousand Models: Burkay Gur: "Right now we actually have thousand different models on the platform." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  4. On Product Photography: Burkay Gur: "essentially able to automate all of their like product photography and ad creation" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  5. On Editing iPhone Photos: Burkay Gur: "let’s take some photos with an iPhone and we can just like AI edit it to look extremely professional" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  6. On Marketing First: Burkay Gur: "I think the most obvious one and the one that’s growing the fastest is marketing and advertisement." — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  7. On One-to-One Ads: Burkay Gur: "where it’s actually going is like fully personalized like onetoone ads and onetoone like shopping experience" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).
  8. On Programmatic Ads: Burkay Gur: "where you can do personalized to the degree of literally individuals" — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  9. On Visual Learning: Burkay Gur: "If you actually want to fully realize the power that these models are bringing, you actually need to go into the visual space, because then it’s so much more compact, it’s more approachable." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  10. On AI-Native Shorts: Burkay Gur: "I think AI-native stuff and shorter-form content is probably going to be very, very big." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).

Part 4: Engineering Systems at Scale

  1. On General Language Models: Burkay Gur: "language models are a lot more general, like generalized." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  2. On Small Adjustments: Burkay Gur: "in the visual realm, it’s just like any small adjustment you make to the model it can actually have huge implications, right?" — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  3. On Customization: Burkay Gur: "it’s just a very fertile ground for a lot of customization." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  4. On Exact Aesthetics: Burkay Gur: "there’s so many times you want the exact aesthetics, and then you may still have to fine tune the model to get exactly the output you want." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  5. On Particular Outcomes: Burkay Gur: "Whereas with LLMs, that’s not really how you operate. You don’t exactly want a particular outcome." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  6. On Photorealism: Burkay Gur: "photorealism is kind of cracked and, like, no one cares about it." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  7. On Pre-Production: Burkay Gur: "pre-production is all the tooling around storyboarding, et cetera." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  8. On a Broad Market: Burkay Gur: "what’s so exciting about this space is that it just goes across all of the, you know, markets you can possibly imagine." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  9. On Connection Over Slot Machines: Burkay Gur: "we want to make this about, you know, these connections, as opposed to influence slot machine." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).

Part 5: The Infrastructure Playbook

  1. On AI Characters: Burkay Gur: "we first need to build a connection to this AI-generated character before we can turn it into a film" — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  2. On Public Company Expectations: Burkay Gur: "if you’re a public company, you also have to kind of abide by, like, what the market’s expecting of you." — The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed (Sequoia Capital podcast transcript).
  3. On Overfitting to LLMs: Burkay Gur: "they’re kind of overfitting to LLM use cases" — Burkay Gur on Why Generative Media Will Be Bigger Than LLMs, 2026 Upfront Summit (transcript).