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At a recent Leslie Founders Roundtable on April 7th, an event exclusive to members of the Leslie Founders community, we had the opportunity to sit down with Cristóbal Valenzuela (Tisch ITP '18), co-founder and CEO of Runway. The conversation offered a candid look into how one of the most important companies in generative media was built, and more importantly, how its founder thinks about creativity, growth, and enduring the chaos of startups.
Valenzuela’s path to Runway began at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at Tisch, an environment intentionally designed to let people explore without rigid constraints. That ethos carried directly into Runway’s founding thesis: the convergence of creative disciplines, emerging AI capabilities, and new forms of storytelling. In 2018, when the company started, AI looked nothing like it does today. The models were early and limited, but Runway focused on building orchestration systems that allowed those models to actually be used. That decision proved foundational. As the underlying models improved, Runway evolved alongside them, expanding into a full suite of products now used by everyone from Hollywood studios to major brands.
What stood out most was how deliberately Runway approached growth and fundraising. The company raised capital roughly every twelve months, but never from a position of urgency. Valenzuela emphasized the importance of maintaining twelve to twenty four months of runway (no pun intended) at all times, even while actively fundraising. The goal was simple: never negotiate from desperation. In his view, startups are ultimately defined by growth, but survival depends on discipline. Burning through cash without clarity or flexibility is one of the fastest ways to lose control.
That same balance between discipline and openness showed up in how he thinks about building. Founders, he argued, often fall into the trap of setting overly rigid goals, which leads to linear thinking. Instead, Runway operated with boundaries rather than fixed endpoints. The idea was to define a space broad enough to explore but constrained enough to maintain focus. One example he gave was the concept of generating synthetic data to help machines understand the world. It is a wide framing, but still directional. This approach allowed the team to remain open to unexpected opportunities while avoiding the chaos of being completely unfocused.
This philosophy is especially relevant as Runway pushes into what Valenzuela described as “world models.” With products like Gen 4, the company is not just generating media but attempting to simulate aspects of reality itself. As traditional ideas like the metaverse fade or evolve, Runway is exploring whether generative systems can become a more dynamic way to construct and interact with digital worlds. Importantly, he does not believe scaling in AI has reached its limit. There is still significant room to grow, particularly in how models understand physics, motion, and the structure of the real world.
On the operational side, Valenzuela framed startups as a constant exercise in adaptation. If a company does not change, it dies. That applies not just to product, but to people. He noted that founders should spend the majority of their time, close to eighty percent, figuring out the right problems to solve, not just executing predefined solutions. Hiring reflects this as well. Teams should include people who are strong at exploration and others who excel at execution. The founder, however, must be ambidextrous, capable of doing both.
There was also a strong undercurrent of realism about the emotional demands of building a company. Valenzuela described startup building as an exercise in “sustaining suffering.” Rejection is constant, and resilience is not optional. The founders who succeed are the ones who can absorb thousands of no’s without losing conviction. That conviction, in his case, came from mission rather than market analysis. He did not start Runway because he believed it was a guaranteed opportunity. He started it because it was something he deeply cared about. In his view, the best companies are built this way, with a clear sense of purpose that outlasts short term uncertainty.
Perhaps the most striking takeaway was his perspective on how founders interpret the world. We tend to treat industries, markets, and categories as fixed constructs, but in reality, they are fluid and often self-imposed. “Everything is made up,” he noted, not as a dismissal, but as an invitation. Founders have more freedom than they think, as long as they are willing to question assumptions and push into new territory.
The session was a reminder that building something meaningful rarely follows a straight line. It requires structure and openness, discipline and creativity, resilience and curiosity. For those in the Leslie Founders community, it was an unusually transparent look into how one of the most ambitious AI companies of this generation is navigating that balance in real time.
