Gadgetory

we're here in the Waterloo Region which you may not have heard of before but if you have is because you know that this is the tech hub of Canada it's home to blackberry the University of Waterloo and scores of startups we're gonna get to know one in particular that's doing something pretty unsexy but whose technology is vital so the way will consume video online it also doesn't hurt that this is home to the largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany I'm Alexis Ohanian start-up founder and Y Combinator partner over the last year I went on a two hundred event book tour and met people building small empires all across North America now I'm back with a new season revisiting some of my favorite stops from the tour it's really hard to start a company in a vacuum that's why so many entrepreneurs flock to Silicon Valley it's where all the other people working in startups are however there are small cities all over North America where one massively successful company can cause droves of like-minded people and companies to flock there like Waterloo Ontario where blackberry formerly rims headquarters are the problem is sometimes that huge company's business can go south causing the local economy to suffer there's a phrase for this boom buzz but the buck mostly refers to a natural resources just here so what happens when the boom was in technology do all the engineers and entrepreneurs leave do they build something new in the shadow of a crumbling Colossus my name is Michael Witt I'm one of the cofounders of vidyard and video does video marketing platform so very high level what we do is we take people's video assets we encode them for playback on all devices we track how every single person use that content and we give that data to their sales people and their marketers so that they can use that information to make better videos but also to have relevant conversations with people that have interacted with their content on their website now you didn't start out this way now what was the original company like original company was something called redwoods media and the idea was that we would help companies make videos and so we'd go in and and make these videos learn the business and produce an asset or a series of assets for a company to put on their website and what would happen was they were looking for a technology to easily host those videos and they also wanted some lightweight analytics to figure out how many views they got because their CMO or the person that kind of drove the business decisions said ok if we're spending ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars on these videos how do we ultimately tracked ROI how do we know these videos did anything to improve performance of our web destination how did that turn into vidyard so we were looking for a way to differentiate ourselves again we were making videos for clients does not scale yeah no it doesn't it was a lifestyle business but it was something you know to not be working for the man was pretty cool and that was that was what we got into it for and then we're looking to differentiate roads media a little bit so we said how can we offer video content with the guarantee so we're gonna produce a video for your business and then we're gonna guarantee that a certain part of the audience will make it all the way through and and being able to offer that kind of a contract was really attractive to client so it helped us close some deals and then based on that we obviously had to have a platform to physically track that and and ultimately I think both Mike and I were probably better engineers than we were creatives in the first place so we built this this tracking platform to track the videos we were producing for clients and quickly the the demand for that product superseded our two great videos how would you guarantee that people would watch all the way to down the video so we couldn't actually guarantee that that would happen but it was more than it if it didn't happen we would reproduce the the video for them so I guess it was more like a warranty and that if it didn't if the first video we produced didn't didn't meet that goal then we would produce another another version our our producers incidentally guarantee that people watch to the end of every episode of small empires yeah I'm sure it'll be true but wait so you're you're now getting some traction you're realizing you're software the platform which will scale is he's getting some interest yeah when did you decide to apply to Y Combinator so we were doing both at the time we applied to YC we applied to Y Combinator with the vidyard vision obviously I don't think the the consultancy was a fit for their model obviously but we applied with the videoid vision we we got that interview we were able to show them that they the application reviewers didn't watch our application video and I think that I kind of surprised them a little bit yeah um and we got it and so from there um you know it was from our first meeting with PG it was stop working on this other thing and and you know let's focus on video this is all happening while you're a university then it's time to graduate what what was the decision that wasn't a no-brainer you had co-op jobs yeah that's a very good question so we had this thing called project Christmas and project Christmas was that we needed to make $50,000 selling videos I end platform licenses such at the time were only $20 a month prior to Christmas 2010 and if we hit that goal we would not go out and pursue opportunities with other companies you know we had that revenue goal on Christmas Eve the goal was by Christmas and we hit it on Christmas Eve and and you know from there it was let's go for it historically the best data you could get for things like film or television was pretty awful it was Nielsen ratings or test screenings none of which were terribly helpful but it was the best you can do now thanks to the internet thanks to the software we can get real-time analytics about what parts of our videos you loved or hated even an episode of small empires like this we can learn at exactly what moment you click stop please don't that means we can try harder the next time and maybe do less of the stuff you don't like and more of the stuff you do so you can continue to go about watching your videos and we as video producers can learn how to make them even better my name is Wes Alcon I'm the marketing manager here at Athena software we've developed a web-based application that's used by social service agencies throughout the world so for example groups like United Way may be using a system like ours vidyard allows us basically to take somebody whose neck knows nothing about our company they click on our video to watch it they now know who we are we're from where we're at and where we're going within two minutes then the next part of the journey is vidyard delivers them at our case studies page now they can read about clients that are similar to themselves and how they've used our software and system to really transform their organization you can go into a bit of a TT a bit of detail how has vidyard helped you make a video like that more effective ah cool so with that type of video for example normally you'd have a video on your website sitting there and people would view it and you know people have viewed it be it by the views but what happens next and the dots where video really steps in and it helps deliver the next step makes them go to the next step of the journey that side of it is what the other side is the data on the back end of video art allows us to actually improve those types of videos so we're able to go and see how much of the video is being digest in a walk point and when people start dropping off we can go back we edit that video see where they're dropping off and make the corrections and ultimately get a higher completion rate through the video surely this is technology that other pure video hosting companies wish they can either emulate or maybe even acquire and that would have been a very different trajectory for the company yep why have you chosen this one during our seed round when we were fundraising one of the big video platforms said hey wouldn't be cool if all of you guys that are working on this technology came to work on our technology and that was a pretty attractive offer because we're right out of school we had no money and this was life-changing money potentially in front of us but the problem was we felt like we were on to something and why comment had validated our idea and we have customers validating our idea and we're also pretty young and it felt like an opportunity and an experience that would be stupid to miss out on and we wanted to build a big company we wanted to change the world to something I'm so affected and going and being an engineer on an already existing product or existing platform you have a small change and a small impact on that but it's not the impact you ultimately want to have not the experience we ultimately want to have so it's very experience driven you know another reason altitude which is kind of interesting is as we came back to this region for personal reasons as well family was here and taking that offer from this organization would have made us have to live in Silicon Valley and so it was kind of a myriad of things that you know drove us to that decision but because we had customers that were willing to spend money on the technology there's only a handful at the time you know quick back the napkin math would indicate that if this is growing and it is growing and I can't see any reason why I would stop growing this is not the right time to sell so the decision was was kind of made out of you know where we're at who's using the technology and what we want to do in our personal lives and we always kind of put you know the way we feel about that stuff first and I'm very happy we made the decision because I've learned so much we've had so much fun building this business that I don't think we would have had if we had taken that acquisition of her there comes a time in every early-stage startups life when they get an acquisition offer from some large competitor these usually referred to as aqua hires because they're essentially a signing bonus and the employees the technology all get gobbled up by that big company you know it is a significant amount of money plenty of founders do accept it the fact is though as soon as they sign those documents they go from being the boss of their own startup just being an employee at a large company so what was it like watching V rise and then fall of rim or Blackberry oh I remember so Devin Devin didn't tell the story but his mom would Devin wanted to come work with me and wanted to do the the read was media thing and he mentioned he was at rim at the time and his mom didn't want him to go because rim was such a stable company and you know that was the ideas you know you graduate you get a job at Rim all the smart people go work at Rand slash blackberry and you'll be set for life that company is team a look how big it is letting people work there and Larry Smith told me when I was starting this thing and I was struggling with that you know in my own way with my parents a lot of university bred startup founders feel this way they have pressure from the parents go work for Google he said you know there is no more stability and going to work for a blackberry rim then there isn't going to work for yourself because a blackberry rim you are basically a function of someone else's destiny and when you start your own thing it is all you and the only person you can blame for failure is yourself and if you are not someone who likes failure you won't fail you will find a way to ultimately succeed that's what I told my mom and she was like you're right this is the time to do this thing this is cool and that's what I tried to tell Devin's mom and you know she didn't like me for a little while but eventually we got to a point where there was revenue and there was stability in our business that it made sense and and he you know jumped ship and he did it early and he wanted and he pushed for it and that's when ultimately the company started that was the place to work that was you know there was the hot thing for a number of years back in the early 2000s late 90s and and that made it you know I think as a another startup coming up at that time it would have been awful tough to get talent um but we're fortunate now that that spotlight is a little bit off them and we can start looking at the great companies that are that are forming here locally and you have incredible talent coming out of there are our CMO was a senior guy blackberry was the youngest VP in their history and and he's joined us now it's just a super intelligent guy that you know blackberry went through and he trip and trained him up and he's you know it's incredible to have talent like that that's very hard to find be local we're here at the University of Waterloo in front of engineering five which is not the most creative name for a building but it is the hub for all those amazing co-op students we've been hearing about I'm gonna sit down with the Dean of engineering to talk to her about what it is about this place and about this curriculum that makes it so special could you break down for me what the co-op program is the co-op education or the cooperative education is a structured system of combining classroom learning with practical work experience so how it is structured is when the student comes in on the fall term they will complete four months of school work and then half of them will go out to work for another four months and it alternates school and work school and work until they graduate and students can also use that time to start a startup as long yes so co-op itself the structure remains the same we have evolved over time you know the innovation of co-op is to see what that students aspire to what are they interested in doing and we're finding the increasingly number of students are interested in starting up the companies so what we do is we have a Enterprise co-op with a coop program which started about six seven years ago and the students rather than going out to work for industry they will start their own companies so they will register with a Conrad center and have a mentor to help them make sure that they're spending time studying the company and they will check in every two weeks the mission they making progress and getting and they get also a lot of advice and mentor mentoring from venture capitalists in the area angel investors and also the professors at the Conrad Center would you do for your co-op I did some management consulting I did some pure engineering software development type stuff and project management stuff as well so I was a trim locally which is obviously a big part of the local community here and then I spent some time Toronto and in st. Louis as well - what was that portion of your work experience at rim likes you just graduated yeah you had relationships from the coop and then you were just like hey guys I'm back you know nothing really changed from from co-op to full-time and I think that's the best experiences that you can come in being a very you know ready to go employee like I'd already worked there for a year in basically the same job and that's why we hire coops at vidyard today - is is you know they're the ultimate goal is to recruit them after they graduate let's say there's a student here right now and she's working on brilliant technology who owns that intellectual property well that is the one of the interesting and important starting points of the water University of Waterloo and that is creator-owned intellectual property so when you have an idea and you create it you want it the Dean of engineering have no you don't even get a little bit not even a little taste you know when you feel and you know that you own the intellectual property you have freedom you have the freedom to speak you have the freedom to talk about it your freedom to build it and the freedom to know that you can walk away with it gives them the confidence they can walk out of here and start a cup and this is great for the nation it's really good for the country I do think that there is quite a bit of a talk about the decline of blackberry well the founder of blackberry was a student at electrical engineering here and what to you Mike Lazaridis and when you think about the guts he had to start a company and you know you know when he was very young and to develop the idea of a smartphone right and you know that kind of confidence and guts made a difference for this for this region blackberry may have you know contractor in size a little bit but they have they are still the largest tech company in Canada so it grew very quickly it had to you know you know you had to contract a bit but it's still the largest and it has provided the sentiment that we have the talent and the guts to move in the area of technology we are the penological help I believe of Canada um do you think maybe it even helped I don't know I motivate founders even more knowing that this once tightened had fallen and there was an opportunity oh I don't doubt it because now there's the whole velocity scene happening of the garage with all sorts of companies in there and it's always handy to have that one Trailblazer that one Idol I guess to to starting something up so it might be that Idol to other founders that potentially are considering it there's an example of it going and succeeding and so everybody thought that about blackberry I mean there wasn't a day that went by that the front page of the record had something about blackberry in it and so when blackberry started to flounder people start to get very worried like is this community going to be screwed and the important thing to remember is there were 600,000 people in this community I think there's actually no 750 in kitchener-waterloo and 10,000 of them worked at blackberry so it wasn't like a huge number of people but as a huge number of knowledge workers and BlackBerry casts such a huge shadow and everything that was happening technology wise is community for so long that nobody even knew that startups existed and blackberry did lay off a ton of people but they all got displaced and a ton of those people were commuting in from Toronto and just found jobs and Oracle or other businesses that have big offices there and so I haven't actually seen the impact of that other than the fact that we have a number of great people and really smart people that left blackberry when that started happening in search of greener pastures so it hasn't been a bad thing for any reason and what do you hope vidyard is doing years from now it's uh you know it's hard to imagine but uh you know I think we're going to build a really great technology parks and you know I think that we do it for the team members we do it for Kitchener Waterloo we do it for Canada and and we do it for you know just being really passionate about what we're building and you'll continue to I presume poach talent from blackberry and from the University here oh absolutely um you know we're this is our headquarters our home and again there's so much great talent whether it be coming out of companies like blackberry or rather be straight of the school or or folks we have to import and I think we're at the scale now where you know we can attract folks from from the bigger cities from Silicon Valley from Toronto and waterloo's got a great brand and it's a very exciting place so you know it's uh you know we're gonna grow into it we're here in the anechoic chamber the University of Waterloo there is no noise here just signal that's what you need when you want to take a longer-term perspective on things it's exactly what the university has done with regard to intellectual property instead of obsessing over every idea and the head of their students they're trying to give them freedom so they can go off create amazing things that only benefits the university long term likewise when a founder has a decision to take an early acquisition and she decides not to she's doubling down on herself she's taking that longer-term perspective on what that startup can one day be it's that same mentality that has allowed the region of Waterloo to not look at the decline of blackberry as a decline of their community instead it just means a richer more diverse ecosystem many many more startups now that if anything have just made it a stronger place vidyard data and analytics show that more customers than ever opting for a mobile experience but mobile apps can do so much more than order food or book massages mobile point-of-sale apps like Vantage allows small businesses to accept credit and debit as Pam the system also ties in with your inventory system so you always know when you're low on something health tracking apps allow patients to monitor their heart rate and send the results directly to their doctors companies are even using mobile apps to make it easy for employees to clock in and supervisors to manage their reports how can a mobile app help your business for more business advice visit a ents business circle on