Wayne and I did not start HeyGen because we love being on camera.
We started HeyGen because we don’t.
We’re classic introverts. Put us in front of a big crowd or a loud mixer, and we immediately feel out of our depth. The people who speak the fastest, laugh the loudest, and take up the most space usually hold the room’s attention.
But here's what we’ve come to believe: having something to say and feeling comfortable enough to say it in front of people are two totally different things.
We felt that gap for most of our lives. We had thoughts we wanted to share, things we wanted to build toward. But we were always more comfortable behind a screen than on a stage. That’s why we found ourselves drawn to code, to product, to systems. Never to cameras, microphones, or spotlights.
And over time, we realized we weren’t alone. We kept meeting the same kind of people. People who had so much to offer but felt like they were starting at a disadvantage in today’s attention economy, where we’re overwhelmed by content and information. Not because they had nothing to say. But because saying it out loud, on a public stage, felt like climbing a mountain.
The world moved to video
For over six years, I was at Snapchat building the technology that powered this creator economy. Wayne was at Smule, where millions of people sing together on their phones. We had front-row seats to a revolution.
At Smule, Wayne met users who spent hours in a park recording a 90-second duet. They sang beautifully. But they'd do twenty takes because they didn't like how their mouth looked on a high note. The audio was identical every time. They just couldn't hit share.
Wayne knew the feeling. His job as a product designer meant testing the app himself. But he'd hide behind a private account, recording take after take, because sharing any of it publicly made his stomach turn.
We built products for creators. We just couldn't be one ourselves.
We watched people effortlessly express themselves on video, building audiences, connecting at a scale we couldn't touch. Honestly? We felt jealous. Not because we lacked ideas. Because the medium itself had shut us out.
Video became the most powerful form of communication on the planet. And it created a divide: people who could show up on camera, and people who couldn't.
Think about who gets left behind
In a video-first world, it's the quiet experts who get left behind. The subject-matter nerds. The operators, creatives, and coaches who are brilliant but either don't have the time, the experience, or the ease to put themselves out there on video. So they face an impossible choice: stay behind the camera, or burn enormous amounts of time, money, and energy just to show up the way others seem to do naturally.
That never sat right with us. Their voices deserve to travel just as far as anyone else's.
That frustration (and opportunity) is what drove us to build HeyGen.
The moment everything clicked
It started with a simple question: what if we could use AI to create videos without ever standing in front of a camera?
The moment that thought landed, it felt like magic. The thing that had held us back our entire lives (the anxiety, the awkwardness, the fundamental discomfort of filming ourselves) could just... go away.
We didn't build HeyGen because we wanted to start a video company. We didn't build it to become tech entrepreneurs. We built it because we wanted to give introverts the same power extroverts have always had.
We wanted people like us, people with ideas and knowledge and stories worth telling, to finally have a way to share them. Not by forcing ourselves to become someone we're not. But by using a tool that actually works with who we are.
Why we obsess over every detail
This is why we care so much about our product at HeyGen and how our avatars move and feel.
We notice every imperfection. When the movement looks off. When a blink feels stiff. When the facial expressions don't quite land. When something just feels artificial. That sensitivity isn't just professional for us. It's personal. We know exactly how an introvert wants to show up: not perfectly polished, not fake, but authentically themselves. Just without the anxiety.
It's why we built HeyGen around you and your Digital Twin. We are laser-focused on building the highest-quality, most realistic avatar.
We're not here to chase the next “tech” fad. We're here to help you turn your learnings, lived experiences, and hard-won expertise into visual content that looks and feels authentic. In any language. At any scale. With as little friction as we can possibly strip away. All without production and a camera.
What we believe
We founded HeyGen on a handful of convictions that guide everything we build.
- Your personality should never limit your ideas. Introverts, non-native speakers, people who don't fit the typical creator mold: they all deserve the same stage as anyone else.
- Knowledge shouldn't stay trapped in text. Documents, slide decks, and PDFs have their place. But video makes ideas feel real. It builds trust. It helps people engage in ways that static formats just can't.
- Technology should serve the people, not the other way around. The tools should bend so you don't have to. If using HeyGen feels like work, we haven't done our job.
- Quality is non-negotiable. AI is not an excuse for "good enough." Our avatars, our voices, our translations have to clear a higher bar than what you could do on your own. Not a lower one.
- And with this kind of power comes real responsibility. When you can replicate someone's face and voice, you're holding something serious. We commit to strong guardrails, consent, privacy, and security. We protect your digital identity.
We chose a different path
There are a lot of AI video products out there trying to do everything for everyone.
At HeyGen, we made a different choice. We're building the best AI avatars in the world, so that the people who've always had something to say but never felt comfortable on camera finally have a way to show up. The camera-shy. The under-resourced. The ones who got skipped because video was never designed for them.
And as we said earlier, that means we obsess over how human our avatars feel. The expressions, the movement of facial muscles, the rhythm of breathing during speech, the tilt of the head, the eye contact. We care about presence, not just pixels.
It also means we design for reusability and scale. You should be able to build entire libraries, courses, onboarding paths, and training programs. Not just one-off clips.
And it means we build for easy, seamless workflows. You start from the prompt, scripts, documents, and materials you already have. Not a blank timeline.
Who we build for
Today, millions of people worldwide use HeyGen. Knowledge-based creators scaling their expertise. Educators reaching more learners. Businesses communicating across languages and time zones.
We'll always serve a range of use cases, from courses to social clips. But at its core, HeyGen is still for the people we used to be. Someone with something valuable to share who just needed a different way to share it.
Because your ideas deserve to be heard. Your knowledge deserves to travel. Your voice matters. You just need the right tool.
We're leveling a playing field that's been tilted against people like us for way too long. So if you've ever had something to say but couldn't bring yourself to say it on camera. If you've ever watched others succeed in a world that seemed designed for a different kind of personality. Know that we built HeyGen for you.
That's why we started this company. That's why we're still here. And that's why we keep building.
- Joshua Xu, Wayne Liang
Meet Joshua Xu, co-founder and CEO of HeyGen, leading the mission to make AI-generated video accessible to everyone. With a Master’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, he was previously a lead engineer at Snapchat, driving innovations in ads ranking, machine learning, and computational photography. His passion for AI video technology continues to shape the future of video creation.
