The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.
Freepik’s Playbook: How to Pivot When AI Threatens Your Business
Joaquín Cuenca (CEO & Founder of Freepik) had a company with $70M in revenue and 500 employees. He had spent 10 years building the largest image library on the internet. Then Dall-E 2 arrived, and everything he had built became potentially obsolete overnight.
Instead of freezing, Freepik became the first large image platform to integrate generative AI. Today it is one of the most used creative AI apps, according to a16z.
This is exactly how they did it.
The Playbook: Action First, Strategy Later
Most incumbents face disruption with endless analysis, committees, and 18-month plans. Joaquín did the opposite: he acted before he had any clarity.
1. Accept that You Do Not Have a Plan (and Act Anyway)
When Dall-E 2 came out, Joaquín had COVID. He was isolated, and he was looking at images generated by AI 24 hours a day. He came out of that with no plan, and with only the certainty that the current model was dead.
“When you do not know what to do, do something instead of staying still. Every time you carry out an action, you learn something.”
Instead of waiting until he had clarity, he made the next simple decision: put the technology in the hands of his users and see what happened.
2. Use Your Distribution as a Laboratory
Freepik had 600,000 subscribers. Instead of protecting the legacy business, they used that base as an experiment:
- They integrated Stable Diffusion 1.5 the day it came out
- They were the first large platform to do it
- They listened to what users were asking for (history, visual styles, thumbnails)
- They iterated on what they could control; they waited on what they could not
The existing distribution became their competitive advantage. It did not become that advantage because it protected the old business model. It became that advantage because it sped up learning of the new one.
3. the Strategy Emerged from the Action
Only after they acted did Freepik understand its true position:
- AI models get commoditized (many LLMs competing with each other)
- The value sits in the “wrapper”: how you expose the model to the world
- They already had distribution and knowledge of the creative user
“The strategy came after the action. We started by reacting to users, and after that we developed the strategy.”
4. Avoid the Self-Deception of Your “Advantages”
Adobe, Shutterstock, and Getty fell into the same trap: they built convenient theses (“only we have images with copyright”) that turned out to be false. Their models were worse because they limited their training data.
Joaquín saw the pattern: companies look for interpretations of AI that favor them, instead of seeing reality.
Freepik accepted that its millions of images were not a sufficient moat, and that freed them to compete on product, and not on protection.
“AI very often requires rethinking everything from scratch. And that is hard to do.”
This playbook is not about having all the answers. It is about moving fast enough to find them before your competition does.
Joaquín goes into much more detail about how he handled the conversations with his team (some of them needed psychological support), why he believes humans will continue to be essential in creative work, and his framework for thinking about which things AI will never be able to replace.
Also in This Episode:
[10:00] Why launching AI without a clear strategy was better than staying paralyzed
[23:00] The “humans vs AI” framework: what humans can do that AI never will be able to do
[31:00] How they had difficult conversations with artists who felt that their career had died
[45:00] The strategic mistake that led Adobe, Getty, and Shutterstock to react late to AI
[58:00] Why distribution is a temporary advantage, not a permanent one
[01:00:00] Why being from Málaga (not Silicon Valley) was a competitive advantage