Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield, the third fastest scaling company to $1BN in ARR behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Reports suggest their latest funding round could place an $8BN valuation on the company. Prior to Higgsfield, Alex sold his prior company to Snap Inc for $166M. Alex was a competitive programmer as a kid, reaching third best in the world. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:20 From Kazakhstan to Top 3 in Competitive Programming 04:47 Building AI Before the Boom and Selling AI Factory to Snap 09:13 Burning $10M Before Finding Product-Market Fit 14:14 Higgsfield Hits $1BN ARR 16:44 How One Customer Went From $99/Month to $6M/Year 19:43 Why $20 Prosumer AI Subscriptions Will Get Destroyed 24:29 Why Building Proprietary Models Was a Mistake 29:13 Will Every AI Company Eventually Have Its Own Model? 31:53 80% Margins on Open Models vs 20–30% on Closed Models 33:05 Higgsfield Spends Over $4M Per Month on AI Models 34:03 T...