0:00:07 - Alex
All right, there we go. All right. Well, welcome back to Experienced Focus Leaders. It is my special pleasure to introduce you to Mike Fogner, my personal friend, an investor in Relate 2. But, more importantly, mike is to video startups, and video technology is what Pink Floyd is to psychedelic rock. This is the godfather of innovation and video. He's exited his startups to Yahoo, back when Yahoo was cool, and to Twitter, back when it was Twitter and not X. Then REN Inside those organizations, ren their video program. So, mike, welcome to the pod. We're excited to have you on board and also hear about your latest projects. We have a new scenery video that you can see here in the background, which is going to redefine the exactly right, which is going to redefine the way great videos are created Welcome.
0:01:12 - Mike
Well, I didn't know where you were going with the Pink Floyd psychedelic, but then you finished it with music which I think is I'm in the valley. So you never know where you're going to go with this podcast.
0:01:23 - Alex
But we could say you're like classic rock and let's have a look. We could work with the metaphors, but fundamentally you've really stuck to reimagining video in various formats in various distribution channels. So guide us a little bit about the evolution of video in the time that you've started, from your first startup onto today.
0:02:01 - Mike
That's actually kind of a fun thing to talk about, because it's hard to imagine today a time when you couldn't just take a video, not just from your phone, but when I started working in. This video was shot on film primarily and actually when we were in business school together is when I started my first company, jumpcut, and one thing I've always tried to do I found it to be helpful to try to identify moments in the market that where there are opportunities where you can start to play in areas where potentially incumbents or other people can't play. And this was back in 2003, 2003, 2004, when we first started thinking about the idea of Jumpcut at Stanford with you and we were in business school together for the audience and the Don't hold it against us.
0:03:00 - Alex
I didn't see the startup ways right away, but Mike was always an entrepreneur, so he's a doer, not a big business school talker. You're too kind, I actually.
0:03:13 - Mike
I like being in big companies too, but at the time video was shot on film and basically our thesis was we saw Ophoto and Shutterfly take off and when you convert a film process to digital then you get all of a sudden you can share a file, you have a file on your computer, you can actually do something with it, put it on the website, put it on a website, let somebody else see it.
And so we kind of had this idea that Ophoto for video was going to happen, and Chad and Steve had that same idea at YouTube and there are a couple other people. We pitched that idea as a group at Stanford and Eric Schmidt was the professor and my buddy was sitting next to him and he said this should get funded. He wrote on his a little note and he never became an investor, which is probably a big mistake. But the mistake I made was I waited and finished school and then found my co-founder and started Jumpcut. But we could have been off to the races. You never know how it would have went, but it went really well. We started Jumpcut in 2005.
0:04:23 - Alex
And so that's your first project and tell us basically Jumpcut kind of started, allow YouTube to basically start editing those videos in the YouTube.
0:04:33 - Mike
Yeah, it was really video sharing was kind of the core thing you couldn't do before, which take a file from a Sony camera, from a mobile phone later in our lifetime and give it to somebody that they can view without having to download the file and put it into real media player or whatever Windows media player. And then we got a little aggressive and we built a fully in-browser Flash-based video editor and Flash was actually a brilliant way to build technology back in the day. You could actually do really interesting compositing. It was really good with graphics, and so we built basically an iMovie competitor for consumers where you could. Our news cases were wedding videos and anything.
We did a deal with Fox Atomic where you could take and remix a movie trailer for them and we got a lot of traction with an early community of creators and we actually had a lot of interesting social features.
We had a feed of activity and you could heart, you could like videos, which I think we were one of the first companies to do that, but we had a lot of traction. It was also a very competitive environment with YouTube really kind of taking the oxygen from the room. We had niched out a little creator area but YouTube was really hot on really copyrighted content. They struck gold with letting people share Saturday Night Live videos and music videos and also other real videos, but they really got a little traction from that. They did a really good job embedding in MySpace pages and then we were very friendly with them and we were a very good technology fit and basically the path for us became clear that if in a copyright unfriendly world, it was probably better for us to join forces with somebody that was bigger. So we actually talked to Yahoo, google, youtube and Yahoo at the time was actually a strong company to go with and it was a fantastic experience there and we ended up selling it to Yahoo.
0:06:52 - Alex
And what was it like? So you're an entrepreneur and then you're joining Yahoo. You know you're, you know how has this, you know, accelerated your ability to innovate, obviously reduce some some legal concerns, right Like, or has it? Has it been difficult? Like you know, most people can envision that they are. They don't envision the exit right Like in the you kind of you were really successful operating and you know more than one. You know larger, larger companies. After exit, what did you learn, Kind of what did you have to adjust as an entrepreneur? You know, post exit to be successful?
0:07:30 - Mike
So I think my my first learning. I was pretty, I was pretty young and at the time and I actually was a couple months in, like six months in I was actually given a very large responsibility Yahoo, which was the entire video team. I was a GM of video and I ran all the players across the sports, you know, news, music and and and all of our back end, plus the video search. So I had a. I had a large kind of large team across a lot of different areas, and it was the one thing I learned is that as soon as you, as soon as you sell your company, you really have to get on board with, you know, being a, being a part of this other organization, and those are those objectives become your objectives. I think when you, when you can have a lot of tension is when you kind of hold on to some of the ideas that you maybe had prior to acquisition, and then obviously you want to come in with your passion and and your ideas, but you are actually now working for this other company. They brought you in for a reason, but that that was a learning that I kind of had to. I had to learn. Like you know, I was really passionate about jump cut, but really the.
The bigger opportunity for Yahoo at the time was licensed video. We were by far the largest streaming platform of video content. We were, we were basically the only company making money streaming video and and our pro my problem became entirely different was competing against YouTube. Youtube is sitting there. You know, for instance, we have Yahoo music over here, which was the largest music streaming service by far in the world, and we did deals with all the music labels and we monetize videos. So, as a consumer, you would playlist video, but you'd have to watch ads and you could go over to YouTube and get all the videos that were never outside of windows with no ads, because YouTube wasn't. Nobody was taking them down yet, and so that was. Those were.
The type of problems I now have is how? How does Yahoo's business that's being rights friendly? We were, you know, big part of LA scene. We were complying with all, the all, the all the existing agreements. How do you compete with this new entrant that isn't doing that and therefore has a better user experience? But the? But the clients that you're working with aren't yet suing them. They haven't really made the decision of what they're going to do, and so those became my problems, and so I'd say the learning there is is, you know very quickly, kind of like take the magic that you have, that they that they bought before, but also like really adopt like what, what are the, what are the new objectives of the company? And try to be successful within the organization that you're actually a part of now, and, and the more you can do that I think, the happier you are.
0:10:22 - Alex
And Mike, one of the things I admire about you is that you, you know, after your kind of stint yeah, who the right, successful as it is you decided to go back to video and it sounds like the more I listened to what you were doing at Yahoo, the more I realized you actually took some of those same ideas and applied the lessons learned in your next video startup, where you you kind of like clients like NFL and NBA, so very, very high value licensed content. You know. Tell us about that process where, like first, like why you know some people want to try different things, you decided to stick to it. What kind of what was it in you that kind of kept you sticking to it?
And I admire that because I actually think the people that really understand the problem very deeply, you know, and stick to to space, tend to tend to grow. Was this and like, I haven't you know a set of insights? But like, was it just you internally passionate about it or you just saw another opportunity because you were so close to the market? Guide us on your next move.
0:11:24 - Mike
So the, the, the one of the teams that I I managed was was actually in charge of editing all of the content for all of the Yahoo channels. And this is way back in 2008 or 2007 when, when you know the majorly baseball and NFL, all these content rights holders they don't have digital teams yet, they're just doing linear television and, in fact, like all the linear television windows don't allow you to post. If you're complying by the rights agreements and you're playing ball with all the rights holders, you actually can't even post a video to the internet for 48 hours after the show air. So the industry was structured against a fat like anybody posting content quickly to the web, like Yahoo's business was all like longer tail, like like well after the well after the game summers, and we had built out the largest content team in the world making all these highlights. We were actually cutting the highlights for all these rights holders and we would actually give them the highlights that we cut as part of our deal because we had this. We had this digital content team that was doing this, and so, as as Facebook and as an executive at Yahoo, one thing you saw is that Facebook was just, you know, the everybody was sharing the charts of like how fast Facebook was growing and what a threat they were going to be. It actually wasn't common knowledge across everybody, but you know, ash Patel really was worried about Facebook and I remember talking about the charts with him and and so I really started studying Facebook. We had some classmates that had gone there that, so we knew about them. And then Twitter, you know, it was obvious on the scenes and what was happening was social media was an entirely different thing than YouTube, or or in social media was actually film feeding, the fire of YouTube virality, and what was happening is people were just pirating like NFL content and touchdown would be scored and that would post to Facebook and Twitter. A YouTube video would be linked there and that would go crazy in the first hour, right, and that that was not what Yahoo could do. Yahoo couldn't even did and the rights holders didn't even have any business inside that window, and so that was in what I said before.
Like sometimes, as a startup, you see these opportunities where you're like there's actually structural reasons that that that incumbents can't play here and so so this is an interesting opportunity. And so when I, when I left Yahoo, my co founder and I actually we tried to not go to video. We actually sat for six months and we said we're going to have an idea a week, then we're going to evaluate the idea technically and business wise. We're going to have, like we brainstorm ideas and then we kind of like evaluate one a week. We did eight ideas and the first one was live video post production. That was our first project. And we did seven other ideas and we kept coming back to like how good is this compared to what we have? And there was obviously we had really good founder market fit in that first one. We had other ideas but we just kept coming back to it.
And so we so we started snappy TV, which was all about how do we, how do we make it as fast as possible for a rights holder to take a highlight from, you know, a slam dunk on TV, a quote from, say, the union, and put it into Facebook and Twitter where all that viral was happening and basically the value prop to them was hey, your content's getting pirated and all these views are not occurring to you and you get make no money. If you just, if you just put your content there, then then you'll get all those views, you can actually take it down faster. So it's a really clear value proposition to the rights holders. The biggest thing was that they actually contractually could not do those. But what was happening is all the TV rights agreements were being reworked and as they were being reworked, they would write in okay, eight digital highlights within the window of 24 hours.
So they were basically writing in and it was actually a really fun position because we kind of became experts at what rights you actually wanted. So you know, sometimes I would be on the phone with general counsel for a major broadcast network or a major studio and I would actually be kind of giving them advice on like here's what I see from, like the type of rights you want to have to maximize your, your live audience, and and. So we became a very friendly company to rights holders and it was a. It was a fantastic position. We were just really at the at the right time as these agreements were getting redone and and and and. Snappy was basically the kind of the leader with that live post production into Facebook, twitter and YouTube you know as rights, as the content was happening.
0:16:01 - Alex
Got it. So you know you, you basically are taking what you've learned. You spotted a particular opportunity. You've expanded a set of relationships that you may have already had but probably didn't, you know, didn't have fully a Yahoo. What were the challenges in? In doing the second one right, like as people you know? People always say like, first time entrepreneurs pursue one type of thing, second time entrepreneurs pursue something else. You know what did you find? That surprised you.
0:16:35 - Mike
Well, so so I. I even, the way I hear myself tell the story there were there were parts of it that I skipped. So so one part I skipped was we actually were wondering whether the right way to go about this business was to play ball with rights holders and like be there, be their partner or say there's all this piracy happening, just like, like co-op the piracy. And our first prototype was actually an iPhone app where you could watch TV and it would sync with the TV and you could, when you saw the highlight you wanted, you hit a button and you got an instant replay on your phone that you could share. And it's actually, it's a better app, it's a better experience. Really it was. We were kind of a one to one and so, but but we were trying to do that with a deal with the rights holders, and so we'd go and we'd say, hey, we're like like, put license your content into this experience and you'll own all, the, all these, like consumers sharing it. But the problem is they didn't have the rights to do that, like, no one had the rights to do that, and so it was actually the, the, the. We had these two approaches, like you know, just be a tool for post production and then do the consumer one. We tried it and the challenge was is is is we just they couldn't grant us the rights, like no one could grant us the rights, so the NFL didn't have the rights, fox didn't have the rights because they had the agreements didn't allow for it, and so we had to kind of navigate that.
And then what we what we were getting was like we would demo and we give them the app and they would actually use it for their social teams and they're like this is we can get content ourselves in seconds as opposed to four hours or 12 hour turnaround time from our video production team. Like can you just give us this? And that was kind of our initial idea. And so we said, okay, there's a poll there, let's, let's actually like not try to do the consumer thing and then we pull, then we pull over here.
And that was actually a one of the challenges was we had already talked to these people as like hey, here's an idea to maximize your rights. We were rights friendly, but we were, we were this consumer thing and we had to like reset the entire conversation of like we're no longer the company that's trying to do these weird rights things. We're just like straight and narrow video production down. You know no rights issues and so and we're going to help you maximize your rights. So we had to reset that in the market. That was challenging and and I think there's there's not really a lesson.
0:18:57 - Alex
You're actually a pivot, like you kind of pivot, and you just need to be aware of the cost, of the cost, of the cost Like, like the cost to us was actually the engineering cost of pivoting.
0:19:07 - Mike
We actually kind of built the infrastructure to do both. We didn't really know what you would work. I under anticipated the cost of having to reintroduce myself to these people as a as a friendly, like, as a like a down the down the middle rights person that you can deal with, as opposed to this person that's like has this interesting idea. You're always, always, always playing ball, though Like I was never, I was never trying to do something that I wasn't going to talk to the rights holders about, and so that that was not as as hard, but that was. That was a bit of a pivot and and I think it was it was an interesting. It also added two years probably to the, to the lifetime between, you know, the initial idea and product market fit and growth, like probably a year and a half, like we had to. If we would have just done the first idea and just ran straight there, you know, I think the company would have been successful, more successful earlier, which is always good, but it turned out. It turned out well.
We learned a lot and I think the lesson there for me is, like you know, you can get in the market. You need to learn, you need to be fast, you need to cut, you need to cut things that aren't working, even when your team kind of like is. It was challenging to say, well, let's chase a different idea. That was actually a challenge, but you have to do it. You have to move when, when you feel it and you as the CEO, you're in all the meetings you're, you're getting the feedback you kind of the chair you're in is important and it's hard to communicate everything you're hearing. And the sixth sense you kind of develop because of what you're hearing internally and externally and you really have to trust some of those intuitions that you develop, because sometimes you can't even explain everything you're hearing, but it just be kind of comes comes to you. Second sense because of all the meetings you're in.
0:21:00 - Alex
Got it. So you kind of had to take the tough decision and was was selling to Twitter. A tough decision, like obviously it's a company that's in the news and everybody wants to hear what's your take on that, and Twitter then and X today. But like was, how was that? How did that feel when you, when you had to make that call?
0:21:20 - Mike
It was a much different decision than the first company. The first company was we were in the middle. We were a very small company, that was, we only had raised a million dollars and it built out a product we had to raise again in a rights unfriendly landscape. It was like a kind of an unproven thing where YouTube was taking off, so that company I feel like selling was the right jump cut was like that was the right thing to do is to is to kind of exit that. That and history is probably proven this right. I think maybe there were like five of I think over 300 video companies that actually returned investor money and so it was really a bloodbath with that market, with snappy. It's interesting because you wouldn't think about it, but in 2012 and 2013, when we started to make money, enterprise SaaS was actually not that favored. We I was actually having a hard time raising money and we were growing revenue pretty. You know we had crossed a million. You know we had. We had eyes on two and a half million. We grew to five million the following year. We were going to do 10 the year we sold. Those are really good growth numbers. Now I mean, I mean the valuation two years ago I would. I would have raised a monster round on those growth numbers.
But at the time VCs didn't the VCs I was talking to didn't really like Enterprise SaaS and they also were really concerned with my market size and I was. I actually, as a I kind of had an intuition that it wasn't as small as people were. They basically were like you have the NFL and the NBA, who else are you going to get? And we hadn't cracked the international market yet, like, like it turned out, oracle was a huge customer for all their conferences. They wanted live highlights of their conferences. So the market was big and gosh, like live videos hasn't gotten smaller. So I did it was. It was. It was interesting. I was having a hard time raising that next kind of growth round.
And then Twitter, we were monetizing, like live highlights and we were a large part of their video revenue when they're, you know, right after they gone public, so that that that made a lot of sense for them. And it was also the comps. The public comps at the time were like Bright Cove which was trading at one X revenue, like. So it wasn't really like the, the, the, the, the, the end point, the raising, wasn't clear, the endpoint wasn't clear, and then and then we had like a large value to a strategic partner immediately. So that made sense at the time to me, even though Twitter didn't want to own a SaaS company, and then FL didn't want their video infrastructure belonging to Twitter. But we basically gave Twitter a two year head start on live highlights, which that turned into a 100, you know, 100 plus million dollar business inside Twitter. So we were a phenomenal. Actually, jack Dorsey said, you know, told me that Snappy was probably one of Twitter's best acquisitions.
0:24:21 - Alex
And, by the way, for those that don't know, twitter did quite a few acquisitions, so this is not trivial statement.
0:24:30 - Mike
And I don't. It's actually like you, you you've got. You kind of want to have them pause on that. Maybe I didn't do as good a job negotiating because, like you, kind of want to hurt a little bit more. But we but the but it was a great fit because we we really drove a ton of content and a ton of revenue in Twitter and and that was actually I had a great time at Twitter.
We plugged right in, had had an awesome fit with all the teams. Immediately, we had global distribution to all content everywhere, because Twitter had content teams on all continents. So we were, we overnight we got all the European sports leagues using Snappy. We got you know news, you know news organizations in India and the Middle East, like it was. It was crazy how fast we grew a thousand percent growth, you know, and, and and then they would turn on monetization too. So it was a phenomenal acquisition for Twitter and the team was my team was great at Twitter.
I think we made a big impact on that company and so all that was great. That said, you know, a year later, sass, sass startup, scott Hot, and our revenue growth would have been probably would have been it wouldn't have been that big, but it would have been continuing and I think we probably probably would have done really well as an independent, because there's a lot of companies that kind of filled our space after we exited, while Mocha and WSC and and they all turned into really nice businesses and I know those founders are great and so so I think it's it's that's one where I'm like I probably probably would have been like a better idea to hold on to that and see where it went. But I also had a great time at Twitter.
0:26:07 - Alex
You can do it. You were, like, I remember meeting your GM of basically the video business at Twitter, right, so like, how was that as a culture at the time? And you know, now that you know Twitter continues to be in the news, you know what's your take on what's going on there and, like you know, okay to to share controversial views, obviously, but like what, what you know, guide us a little bit. And then, and now, from what you see, Well, I wasn't a GM.
0:26:35 - Mike
I was. I did. I ended up running the chunk of the video business, the live business and then the Periscope team, which was is also a phenomenal team. I worked for K-Von but, but K-Von was a GM, but the. So the culture at Twitter was very flat and the talent at Twitter was insane, and so the and then the other thing that was. I was actually.
I've been very fortunate to be a part of two organizations in the Valley that have had just world-class sales teams. So Yahoo, when joined their sales team, could sell ice to Eskimos. They were just, they were so good. And then Adam Bain, who ran the sales team when we joined there. The sales people that he could get would Twitter. It was figuring out the model, but they could sell anything and they had relationships, they and there was value in what we were selling. It just was hard to. It wasn't at the scale that Facebook and others were, but it was a great organization to be a part of because there was actually excellence across different things as much as Twitter gets kind of hammered for that, like there were really great people.
Now they we had major infrastructure issues and we didn't ship nearly as fast as we should have at the time, and people were working on that and there was a little bit of decision paralysis, but I had also learned to just like I didn't want to be a person complaining, I want to be a person helping, like I just I wanted to kind of like get in the boat and, just like you know, pull people in and and I really tried to just reframe things and try to be try to focus on the things that could change, and one of the things that did change was the focus on data driven and decisions in machine learning. While we were there, like in the last couple of years, I was there in 2018, 19. And that really turned Twitter around. We started really seeing user growth and and I think it was it was well on its way to turn around. And then I think I was, I had been well gone by the time. You know Elon tried to buy it. So I don't really have any direct stories there, but I think you know, I think I think Twitter had already turned around and had already been, you know, on the path to growth and doing well, I do think he.
One thing I will say is I do think he underappreciated kind of the, the ad business that they had and the relationships they had and how that team really could punch above their weight in the market and and I think he might have been done. But he might have actually caused himself a lot less pain if he would have kind of eased up on that business and kind of rode that a little bit and then transitioned slowly. But he's not that type of guy and so but by a bio reports of people that are still there, like they, it's kind of fascinating working for him. It's. I think it's challenging, but he does get stuff done and I love my Tesla, so I can have, I can have multiple opinions about him, but I think generally he's probably the best entrepreneur of our generation. So you know, it's fascinating to watch him from afar.
0:30:10 - Alex
And how would you like, now that you're in the third startup and which, by the way, scenery is sort of like I, you know simplistically describe it as the, the figma of, you know, video collaboration. I think you have a slightly more nuanced description last time we spoke, but you know we'll dive into that. But you're not in your third. You're backed by some of the best investors in the business. You know the, the, the Greylocks, the crafts, the figma itself, you know. Back to you, you know, tell us about your style and kind of what are you? How are you adapting? You know, obviously you're again tackling video, but how are you adopting your leadership style? Because, you know, for many people it's kind of painful to work for first time entrepreneurs who are like still figuring stuff out and by you know, by having worn hats, having let larger teams, I imagine you can refine your approach. And you know, I'm curious what you know, what you're feeling yourself and maybe what you're hearing from, from the folks that you work with.
0:31:16 - Mike
That's a good question, alex. So let me let me tell the, the group, about scenery. So we, we, we became at Twitter, the. I saw the transition from like, from our design team. I was always I wish I could have been a designer in another life. I really enjoy working with designers and having that creative process. And and Figma was a huge unlock for me the, the Periscope team.
I think it was the first team in Twitter that adopted Figma and it was a game changer for me because, as a product leader, I went from seeing this awesome work that a designers would do, where they would show us stuff in presentations or PDFs and then and then, and then we'd give them feedback and then they'd go away for two weeks and we'd come back with a revision and then, all of a sudden, they'd say no, just go to this board and you can, you can cruise it yourself, you can grab something, duplicate it. I'm just like this is amazing, like, and I and I would actually use that to like deconstruct how these wonderfully talented designers actually made this, cause I'm like I can't make that, how do I make that? And then you can actually just see how they make it. You can, you can kind of deconstruct it. I thought it was one of the biggest. I think Figma is is one of the best products that's come out of tech in the last you know, 20 years.
And so the and we when Ryan and I, after we left Twitter, we were going to do something together Ryan Cunningham is my, my co-founder for all all three startups we were. We were talking about what, what we could do, and we and we just kept going back to designing things at Figma. I'm like man, this, this is how video editing should be, like there should be. You shouldn't have to lock people out of projects and unlock them, and everything should be real time and you should be able to share, share ideas and more easily pull things apart. And and we we had hooked up with with one of our people that worked with us at Jump Cut named the shop Trojan. We jammed with him for a little bit and, and we just had some good ideas.
And then we we ended up building out the team with Chris, or Chris Martin was, was was actually already on our team. Actually, before that, we had worked on a different consumer app with Chris, and then we kind of pivoted into, into building scenery, and Chris was always a part of the team as well. So, and then we, we, we, but basically the, the there was this kind of how, how, how can video editing be more of a team sport. How can organizations especially during COVID, when, when everybody was outside the edit bay, like we just talked to, we started to interview customers and there was this huge need to be able to say, like I used to be able to sit in the edit bay and review things and change things on the fly, and I can't do that anymore. And so we this this really like brought this idea to on the forefront and we and so we got really excited about it and we, we started to come, we, we pivoted at COVID to go after, you know, figma for video editing and that's how we found it Scenery Great.
0:34:28 - Alex
And so describe to us. So it sounds like part of the recipe of success is bringing the band back together and working with people who you know how to work with. You know. Tell us a little bit about the fundraising process. Some folks are curious, some folks are, you know, wondering. What does it take to get attention of? You know great, great VC firms? Tell us about your journey there.
0:34:55 - Mike
So it's part, you know, getting the band back together. We actually did bring in some people that we had worked with. We also, you know, we've got some fantastic other people that you know have brought in a ton of value Brad Edelman, like career graphics and really heavy tech. He's been a co-founder, he's been a huge part of the company and we actually I work very closely with Colleen Pendergas, who was the lead designer for all the Apple video products for 15 years. So we've been able to attract just a world-class team of people that know different areas of the technology and that has been, I think, that's different because I think we, with this company, we've been able to really get people that have had a lot of seasons, experience in different areas. That has been great. And then the and then. But it's also we're growing this company in a COVID situation. We were remote and we've been remote. We're actually going to get back, start to get back together with the Bay Area team in person.
So that's been its own unique challenge and I'd say that that nothing in my startup experience has really prepared me for the like how to work remotely, continually with an entire team and that's had its own unique set of challenge that I think I don't get. I don't get a lot of credit for past, the past history of what you had done, because it's been. You know async work and you know heavy documentation and you know talking over Zoom and having to figure out how do you keep everybody on the same page when you make these. Really you know big leaps in assumptions as small team over Zoom, how do you actually bring everybody else along when they're not in the same building? It's just an entirely different dynamic and so that's been a learning for me and how and I've had to go back and kind of become a little more of an IC because I think documenting everything and sharing kind of learnings as you go it becomes even as a CEO, it becomes critical, and so that's been an interesting difference between the previous companies and this one.
0:37:15 - Alex
Interesting. So even though in the meta world you're kind of creating video for remote teams, but you're still dealing like as a product builder yourself, you have some unique challenges. Was how do you build a product which some of the decisions are a little bit different than yeah, and they're probably you have to undo some learned behaviors that made you successful before and you have to rethink it.
0:37:36 - Mike
So I can imagine some you know some first time founders actually being better at that. So it's not necessarily the advantage, but I, you know, you got to be learning. But actually the fact that scenery I mean the we are eating our own dog food you know we're a remote team and we have a product built for remote teams and so and you know, seniority's value proposition is really taking the content creation process from soup to nuts and putting it into a single platform. So if you're a team and you have an asset library, you need to pull, you know, brand assets from here. You're pulling webcam video, you're, you're, you're somebody else's recording something that you're going to edit, that all lives in the same place, instead of disparate hard drives on people's you know, inside people's helms, you can easily pull things in, you can cut them, live together, just like Figma, you see cursors moving and then and then you can instantly review anything. So if you and I are doing this podcast edit, I do a couple cuts I can, I can share the link and you don't have to wait for me to render something and put it into a different. You can just look at what I'm doing. You can say, hey, you spelled my name wrong. Boom, it's fixed, everything's real time, and then you and then you publish it and then you have your entire archive, not just of the video that's created but all the work. And and that's a game changer, because you can go back and pull segments, like I liked what I did in this one I can go grab that title sequence dropping in another project so it becomes the, the you know cloud server, cloud team based software. You know in the notions, the Figma's a cruise over time. The value of cruise over time, the more, the more work you do in it, the more values actually in that.
That doesn't exist in video, because video just stays on people's hard drives. It's actually worse over time because if you have two different video editors, they store things differently. Their whole work pattern is different, and so we have all these customers that that when they actually like, say we want to go into the cloud. It's actually a huge pain in the pain in the rear because you're everything is everything is done differently, whereas like, whereas in scenery, because it's cloud based and all the projects are together, everything is coherent and people can dip in and out. If somebody's sick, just pass the project on to somebody else.
That that that's the new way of working and, frankly, it's not new to most software. It's just new to video. It's you can't do it with a video editor right now, so it's this. This idea is kind of more straightforward in a lot of ways because it's just this is this is the inevitability of software. That is, cloud and team based, and video editing for professionals is not there yet, and so it's kind of just that. It's just an execution game. Can we? Can we? Can we get everything performant? Can we deal with large files? All those?
0:40:29 - Alex
Which was a big issue for Figma, for example, right, like you know, because it wasn't obvious that the technology could be performant and because of that was sort of the the the hard technical problem to solve, and it sounds like you're also doing that, but it's only the user behaviors to risk. By the way, if you're watching this, this is going to be edited courtesy of scenery. So we're really excited to to be walking the talk.
0:40:54 - Mike
This is my way of acquiring a customer I'm pulling him in here.
0:40:59 - Alex
You've heard of that. You've backed our vision and which, by the way, actually we you know, we were really inspired by what you were working on was videos and kind of creating short form video formats in your past, and what we found is we started transforming. Related to we were actually, you see, here content experience, pop over. We actually started first was documents, and we said, like, what's the lowest common denominator of a medium that has not changed, besides a video? Well, actually, documents, pdfs and PowerPoints have effectively been around since, you know, before the World Wide Web, and so they're pretty old school as well, and so we wanted to transform it, and one of the things that we found, thanks to our customers, is that the easiest way to transform it is to actually enrich it with videos. Right, and it could be a video in the background that you designed was the help of scenery that kind of reflects your, your brand B roll, or it could be like just a snippet of a live video, what you could drop from, you know, youtube or Vimeo or Wistia, or just an impact form file if it's something that's secure it's not meant to be for public distribution that you could kind of present it to us and so we really quickly realized, like when we say, well, we transform documents, it just wasn't like doing it justice and so we kind of had to do our own mini pivot and we became not a document, you know, experience platform, where we became a content experience platform, and you know the most successful users, you know, bring in video. So we're really excited, you know, to support what you're doing, but effectively democratizing amazing video creation, right, and the better the video, the more you could start mixing. It was other formats that you know that allows, like, for different learning styles, right, different preferences of how people consume information. So, you know, we really support your vision, you know.
But what's your general take? Like you, obviously there's a lot of changes in content, you know, you've, you have the pattern matching. You know you see that video sketching up to some other products. But what's your general take on the future of content? How do you imagine it? You know, in video, but also expending, because we see ourselves as a multi, you know, multi model solution, right, and whether it's, you know, especially with AI, right, like historically, people, oh well, it's text to you know, text to audio or text text to video, and we kind of. We like the idea that you could actually combine different mediums together, right. I think that's where the consumer experience really asks for, because you just never know if somebody wants to watch two hour video or they want to find the exact snippet and then read some text and drill into something more substantive from there. So that's our hypothesis about the future. You know of video that it's going to be deeply integrated into other mediums. What's yours?
0:43:57 - Mike
I think that the I think that that's that's right and you have to look categorically. You have to look, you know it's. You know what's happening for consumer video on mobile devices versus what's happening with? You know content marketing versus you know documentary and editorial video. Those they're actually, they're actually really different answers.
0:44:18 - Alex
Some, some. That's right.
0:44:20 - Mike
I'm too narrow in the, in a kind of like B2B, B2B focused content, and you're too cool, but the audiences are the audiences are on the mobile devices, and so I think, actually one of the things that we we find is that the we don't have to sell the idea that even when you're doing a webinar or podcast, that you actually have to think about how do you, how do you reach your audience in these short form, fast, twitch, you know, scrollable mobile environments, what, what, what format of this conversation actually hits with that audience.
That that's actually a component that everybody has to think about and that we don't really have to sell that, but that that that's actually the market told us that, and so I do. I do think there's commonality and there's also you can't just think about the video you're making for this one. You know YouTube channels you're distributing. You have to think about where are all the places my audience is, that I'm going to, you know, appeal to them, and then what is the format that this content can take? You know that is so, so that's that's one thing that we're investing heavily in. This is and scenery is really really good at that where you can take. You can take this webinar. You can actually identify what are the great moments that might work on social, push those out in the right format.
0:45:43 - Alex
Can you make me good looking? Add a little bit more hair here, a little.
0:45:50 - Mike
I think AI is on the way. I mean, talk about giving me hair. Ai is on the way for that, but it's not good enough yet. Otherwise I'd have a different look right now. But actually I think AI is going to affect everything. We are investing in it. I'm sure you are as well, I think. I do think that the generative AI stuff is going to be incredibly interesting and important, but also I don't think it's going to be necessarily dominant, because I think, at the end of the day, people do want to see you and I having a conversation, and that content is actually. I mean, I'm a big podcast consumer and I think authenticity with people will always have a place, and so we're investing on AI.
0:46:46 - Alex
You don't want me talking in this voice about this podcast.
0:46:52 - Mike
And all that stuff will work. There's a place for everything, especially advertising, but one of our beliefs is that there's just going to be a ton more video out there at Edit and you are going to. Ai is going to help you get to places, but there's always going to be ways for humans to make decisions on what the content should be, and we want to make sure that that's kind of the primary driver of the editorial process. So we're really building for editors.
0:47:24 - Alex
It's hard to acquire good taste. I think that's what we're finding. It's great for ideation, but one of the things and back to the value of AI one of the things that we realized is that there's so much experimentation, you kind of need to go and find where people finding value first and then figure out if the AI or sometimes algorithmic approaches could support those pockets where there's real value. And so in our little world, like I was saying that we love, we'd love you to succeed because we could have more great videos to put in we found that when people come up, like typical presentation is static and the moment you try to load, let's say, some videos into PowerPoint, that kind of blows up and it just becomes non-sharable. You obviously can't put videos into customer-facing PDFs because that's not even a thing that PDF can support. But people love the idea of kind of emotional movement on their cover page when they introduce their idea and their chapters around the conclusion, something surrounding important demo. The demo itself could be video, but surrounding it. So what we found is people love this, or what we call a background video, which kind of fills in underneath the text. Sounds kind of obvious, right, a little bit of creativity in AI and so picking the right dimensions. That fits right in. But we literally started saying, hey, let's go build out a library of perfectly tuned videos and then the smarter brains in the mind could go and figure out what will match what people could put in their branded content. And so for us, this has just been really transformative little thing.
People found value in it before AI Like this was there. It's proven, and so then you can use the tech, whichever tech you're using to then fill in those gaps and create a little magic out of what used to be static slide. Or you would try to be forced historically, try to put some gifts in there, which kind of would be slow, and if you believe GIFs, that depends on your you are not religion, how you call it. So that's our kind of conclusion is that you sort of need to work back as to what would make the end user experience less about oh great, some generated stuff for me, and more about I want to interact with this. I want to feel something from this.
This is an experience. We call it interactive AI or kind of an interactive led AI, and I think it can use generative to your point. Right, but it's not. Generative is just a step on the way to delivering some sort of emotional connection, some sort of value to the end user. Is that kind of in line with what you see in the space, and particularly was a video focus? You're deeper in that world than we are, obviously, since we cover broad sets of content.
0:50:29 - Mike
It's funny. I think that that's a good approach, and I think I've seen other companies be successful. I've seen us be successful with those. How do you take something that the creator wants to achieve and just give them a little bit of help to get there faster? That's a great use of it. I also think that some of these generative things are going to actually be fantastic and you are going to be able to say, like I want this and you're going to get something. That is what you want, and so I think it's going to happen everywhere.
I think that what our approach is really focusing on the workflow and focusing on the teams that have. You know, we're actually we still are big believers in collaboration. Teams that have teams that are remote. They need to work together, they need to understand what people are doing, they need to go through and get feedback on their work. Just all that stuff, I think, is always going to be a necessary part of a team-based content creation experience, and so we're focused on these content marketing teams and agencies that are working with clients Anybody where you have somebody that's doing the work and somebody that's giving feedback on the work. We add a ton of value to that, and then we're looking at ways to have AI help in the process, but I think people that are doing full AI bets Synthesia is the AI company that no one talks about Now.
People are talking about it, but, man, they're killing it, and so I'm a believer that it's just going to be kind of a bunch of different flavors. You know, we're making our investment kind of because who we are and what we're focused on, but I actually think a lot of it's going to work, and this isn't ARVR or NFTs. This is fundamental, real going to be in. Everything already is, and I think that's kind of how we're treating it. But I think our core is still workflow and collaboration, and that's also something that is. You know, ai doesn't really solve for having teams be together in their own workspace as opposed to disparate applications and disparate hard drives. So we're just finding ways to actually be helpful to our original vision.
0:53:09 - Alex
That's great and very authentic of you, because I think a lot of people want to start jumping in the bandwagon, whatever that is Right. Like you kind of listed a few trends that were very popular and so you know you could see some LinkedIn experts who were like NFT experts now or AI experts and you know et cetera, and like people shift. And I think if you're focused on what you're passionate about, focused on what your mission is as a company, focused on your customer, then you could start bringing in those technologies if they are relevant. And it sounds like that's your approach, where you're kind of not saying it's not going to happen, but you're just staying core to your mission. And you know I respect that a lot because it's sort of it's the easiest thing to do is kind of follow the buzzwords to some degrees, and I think that's not the answer, but again, this is more than a buzzword.
0:53:57 - Mike
This is different.
0:53:59 - Alex
This is the one, but like you're not saying, you're not following it right?
0:54:02 - Mike
You're just saying you will be, we're sprinkling it.
0:54:04 - Alex
You got to do your first job right, like what's your core, and I think very correctly so. Like you know, this thing goes in ways, right, and you have to have a collect, like in documents, for example, there was first like hey, I can, I'm in PowerPoint, I create some bullets. Right, like great, I'm a democratized basic creation. Then there's a wave of you know, I can use Google slides and Google docs or Figma in your universe and stuff like great, that was collaborative now. So that sort of was the second phase. Now there's maybe the third phase. Right, we think it's more about interactivity and end user experience. Some people think it's about AI, so it's most like it's a combination of the two. Right, but, like you have to, you can't skip phases. You can't just skip the collaboration phase unless you want to produce something that's you know not, you know very consumer-y, where you're the only creator. Right, like it's fundamental and fundamentally you're addressing a more sophisticated market that does require collaboration, so it heads off to you.
I admire anybody who dedicates you know a large portion of their career to refining one discipline. I think that's where a lot of breakthroughs happen. So I'm, you know, excited for scenery. Thanks for inspiring and supporting us. And, mike, if anybody wants to find you sign up to scenery, where can they do this?
0:55:29 - Mike
Go to sceneryvideo and it's a freemium model so you can give it a try and you can feel free to ping me on LinkedIn or reach out. If you have anything specific, you'd like to talk to you. If there's something about what we do that is interesting to you, I'd love to. I'm always interested to hear feedback from the product and market. And, alex, thanks for having me and congrats on all the success with Relay2. It's been fun to watch your journey and thanks for doing this.
0:56:01 - Alex
Amazing. Well, everybody, mike Fuldner on experienced focus leaders. To use another music metaphor that we kicked off was the Bob Marley of Reggae. You know this is the same man for video collaboration, creation, innovation. Thank you, mike, for joining us and we hope this was fun for our audience. And one of the themes that we want to bring in is not just to speak to folks that are in the larger enterprises, but we also want to speak to the innovators on the ground who are experimenting, trying new things and changing the future of content. You know that people that are helping create the most engaging content experiences quickly. We love to partner with them, learn from them. Thank you, mike, for being part of our journey. Thanks.