In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia. Chris shares the journey of founding Wistia in 2006 with Brendan Schwartz to help businesses connect through video. He discusses pivotal moments such as their decision to take on $17.3 million in debt in 2018 to buy back equity rather than selling the company. Chris details their growth from raising angel investments to running profitably and the challenges faced when they attempted to scale too quickly, causing a loss of focus. The conversation explores Chris's authentic leadership style, the impact of AI on Wistia's products and operations, and how remote work has transformed their team dynamics. Chris also reflects on balancing work and family life, sharing personal insights from his journey as a founder and a dad. Jason concludes the episode by discussing his own project ideas, seeking advice from Chris on building a media venture called 'Fogey Founders,' focusing on middle-aged entrepreneurs. Chris encourages feedback on Wistia's products and highlights the importance of thoughtful company culture.
This episode of 'The Next Next' features Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a video marketing and analytics platform. Host Jason Jacobs explores Chris's journey in establishing Wistia in 2006 with Brendan Schwartz, navigating its growth into a multi-million dollar business, and making the critical decision to maintain company independence by taking on debt to buy back equity. Chris shares insights on running a profitable business, handling external growth advice, and staying focused. Post-pandemic transitions to remote work, the reintroduction of equity, and the integration of AI into Wistia are also discussed. Additionally, Jason shares his idea for a potential series called 'Fogey Founders,' and Chris offers valuable advice on leveraging video content for podcasts.
00:00 Introduction to Chris Savage and Wistia
00:44 The Journey of Wistia: Early Challenges and Decisions
01:27 Personal Insights and AI Integration
01:56 Host's Personal Journey and Goals
02:32 Chris Savage Joins the Conversation
03:14 Balancing Family and Ambitious Goals
05:05 Wistia's Growth and Key Insights
07:15 Navigating Financial Decisions and Market Challenges
24:05 Reflecting on Stress and Family Dynamics
29:41 Balancing Remote Work and Team Dynamics
30:08 Navigating Remote Hiring Challenges
30:47 Adapting to Remote Work Systems
31:14 In-Person Collaboration and Planning
34:05 The Impact of AI on Business Operations
35:13 AI-Driven Product Enhancements
39:58 AI in Internal Operations
43:41 Future of Work and AI Integration
50:13 Exploring New Content Creation Strategies
55:35 Final Thoughts and Call to Action
Jason Jacobs: Today on the Next Next, our guest is Chris Savage. Chris is the co founder and CEO of Wistia, a video marketing and analytics platform designed to help businesses host, customize, and measure their video content. He established the company in 2006 alongside his college friend, Brendan Schwartz, with the mission to enable businesses to connect authentically with their audiences through video.
Under Chris's leadership, Wistia has grown into a multi million dollar business serving millions of users worldwide. In 2018, he demonstrated a commitment to maintaining the company's independence and alignment with its core values. And he and Brendan chose to take on 17. 3 million in debt to buy back Wistia's equity, rather than selling the company.
Now there's a number of interesting things about Chris and the Wistia story. One is that while they raised a bit of angel money early on, they were running profitably. Now, once they did, they got feedback from the outside that running profitably was selling themselves short and they should be running in the red and reinvesting in the business and growing much faster.
So they did that. They took on more and more initiatives in parallel. And in doing so, they lost focus. So they had to rein it in. So while they had several buyout offers on the table, they made the decision. to turn down the buyout offers to get focused and to buy back the equity or at least give the option to do so to investors and employees.
Chris also is just an authentic leader who what you see is what you get and he's fascinating to talk to. He also has been leaning hard into AI as a company they've been using these tools both internally and increasingly to enhance the functionality of their offerings as well. At any rate this is a great one and I hope you enjoy it but before we get started.
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is the next, next, it's not really a show. It's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week, we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built.
And selfishly, the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself. While bringing all of you along for the ride. Not sure where this is going to go, but it's going to be fun.
Okay, Chris Savage, welcome to the show.
Chris Savage: Hello. How are you?
Jason Jacobs: I'm good and this is cool because for a few reasons. I've known you a long time, and I knew that it made sense to have you on the show, but the more that I prepped for this discussion, the more I was like, oh, hell yeah. This is gonna be really great.
And also we haven't just done a proper catch up in a few years, and we didn't do it in prep for this discussion either. We're just gonna do it live.
Chris Savage: We'll do it live.
Jason Jacobs: But let me tell you why I want to do two things to frame the discussion. I want to tell you a little bit about what I'm up to because I don't know that you are up to speed. And I also want to tell you what it is about your background that I thought would be so interesting for us to talk about.
Cool.
Chris Savage: Sounds great.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. So me you know what I've been up to and essentially I'm on a new Journey now and I'm a founder, building companies is what I do but because I'm so involved in my, my kids are almost 13 and almost 10, I'm just super involved in their activities, which I feel so fortunate about but it also means like I'm pretty booked and it's just I'm not able to build the way that I used to build, which is to pour my entire self into companies.
But I'm a builder, like I'm not, Really employable. I don't want to be like a CEO coach or something like I want to build something big and impactful
Chris Savage: want to be in the arena?
Jason Jacobs: yeah, so I have to build different right? So that's one piece of the journey is like how to build different and Then the second piece is what's happening with AI, right?
Because it's like there's a lot of noise and hype and grift and, we're probably overestimating what's going to happen in the next year and underestimating what's going to happen in a decade. But I believe there's profound stuff happening that's going to change how we work and live. And I want to understand what the implications will be for how startups get built and funded and specifically how someone like me, who's an experienced founder who needs to build different might be able to leverage AI to help facilitate that and you have built different and are building different and are starting to incorporate AI and you're in a category where I think, seems like it might have big implications.
And so for all those reasons, and you're a dad it's man, like I got to catch up with Chris. I'm going to learn a lot from this discussion.
Chris Savage: Awesome. Look, yeah, you nailed it. We built different. I am a dad. I'm very involved in my kids lives. It's, the challenge of balancing your own expectations of like how much time you can put into something versus building systems. So you can have the freedom to do that. But also I actually think that Creating a lot of freedom and delegating and giving yourself time to think is what often leads to big key insights in the business.
And yeah, we're using tons of AI at Wistia. So happy to chat about all of that.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, so for starters, if you had to break down Wistia into chapters of a book, and I know the book's still being written, what are the key chapters in your mind?
Chris Savage: Oh, wow. There's the initial start I always think about, which was, I classify as like the first two years where we knew we didn't want to do something in video. We tried a lot of different things, eventually found our way to helping businesses use video. And one of the, got this key insight, which is that companies are going to need to use video, but a lot of the people in those companies who are going to need to use video are actually not video experts.
And so they valued a product that was like really easy and simple and allowed them to do that. Then we raised some money, hired a few more people.
Jason Jacobs: some money from what type of capital
Chris Savage: I was all individual angel investors.
First round was 650, 000 that we raised in 2008. And that allowed us to hire two people. And we just kept iterating on the thing we were doing.
And in that course, that two years, we figured out the business model. We figured out how we thought we'd market the business. And just we were running out of money. We had this insight on the business model and sign up online and transparent pricing and all these things just clicked.
And so while it was like actually almost four years from when we started which is insane. I'd never thought there'd be four people after four years. We had a summer where we went from like 30 paying customers to 200. And so it was clear, like we'd broken through
Jason Jacobs: What was that insight?
Chris Savage: it was a few different things together.
It was, you used to need to like, we had to be involved in the sales process. You couldn't just self serve. You could do a demo, but we had to help you purchase. We didn't have price. We had like indications of pricing on the website, but didn't actually say exactly what the pricing was. Wistia started being only for private video sharing.
And we were really competing with DVDs in these companies. And our customers were pushing us towards using us for the videos on their website to understand how they're performing. And so we launched that. And so that combination of things like embedding with analytics, clear flow for signup, clear pricing, flip things.
And so we started adding customers like a fast, right?
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And so you were almost out of money, you had this insight, you gained a bunch of customers, and then I cut you off. What happened next?
Chris Savage: We went back to the original angels and I was like, I have good news and bad news. We're basically running out of money. That sucks, but good news. Look at this chart, look what's happening. And they were really excited. One of the investors in particular was like, I don't want you to waste a day on this.
And he flew me around and helped me get the round done really rapidly, which was awesome. And then the trajectory
Jason Jacobs: was, and what was that round?
Chris Savage: $800,000.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh. Also from angels?
Chris Savage: Yep.
Jason Jacobs: Only angels?
Chris Savage: yep. And then the trajectory continued and like that graph of the customer numbers just kept going. Which was amazing. And we hit like the first moment of.
It was that same trajectory, which was interesting because when we raised 800, 000, we actually told our investors, we don't expect to raise any more money. We think we can get profitable on this and they're like, you're crazy. That's not going to happen. I guess it is going to happen. And it happened, which was really cool.
And so we had this freedom when that happened, where suddenly when we were profitable, it allowed us to invest in things that were hard to invest in before. We were really early on content marketing, for example, started making a lot of content, posting a lot of stuff in the blog, making videos to show off like the team and features and things that we never thought we would, because it would be admitting just how small we were as a business.
If there was, if if you saw Wistia has been around for six years, there's six people in the team. Would people trust us less? That's what we thought would happen. And the opposite happened. People saw her six people like, Oh, this is awesome. I feel like I know these people, they start to trust us more and that marketing and stuff we figured out because we were patient and because we were profitable and being profitable allowed us to follow our instincts.
And a lot of that stuff, it's hard to measure that you believe in it worked. And so we grew faster and faster. And then we hit the next chapter, which was. We had about 10 million in revenue and three million in EBITDA. And everyone I talked to was like, I was thinking, look at us. Like we're such good entrepreneurs.
Like we've gotten so far. It's a little, and basically every person I talked to who was in the, investing entrepreneur because it's you guys are idiots. Like you could be growing way faster. What are you doing? Like you shouldn't be profitable. You should be applying it back into growth. And I think imposter syndrome hit us.
And so we decided to run the business. Like we'd raised money. And so we had this we've been now saving up a bunch of cash with this profit and we just poured it back into the company and ran at a loss. The goal being to greenlight more projects and do more things and try to find extra growth.
And that we, that from the outside, I think looked like it was working. Like I would go to an event and someone would say. Wow. Like you guys are doing so much stuff. So great. I'd be like, yeah. And the team size just grew. We're like 50 people and I'm like, Oh, that's so cool. That's so cool. And inside it was like chaos.
We had tons of projects that weren't working. We'd lost the ability to say no to things specifically be like, if there's some good idea that's new, is there something we should stop doing? So we should do that idea. Not everything's going to work. And so if you have people, you might have great people on things that aren't working.
You can lose the rigor of actually asking the hard questions of why you should stop. And so unbeknownst to my co founder and I, we both were like, not very happy about how this was going. Also running at a loss caused us to not be able to do as many of the things that we felt had made Wistia really unique, like the bigger brand campaigns, the bolder creative stuff.
When we try to fix fundamental things in the product or fundamentally change core things in the product, they're hard to justify because we don't know what the return is going to be on this versus new feature seemed easier to justify a return. And it was at that moment that basically we had a bunch of offers to sell the business.
And the long story, very short is that those offers caused Brett and I to ask ourselves what would we do if we did sell? And what we got to is if we sold the business, we would try to start a company again, because we felt we had a unique partnership. We would try to do something in the SMB space, which was where we had been.
We thought that was like a really good space. We felt that video was starting to change a lot and we had a lot of opinions on it. And so we probably jumped back in the video space and we're like who would we hire? And we've made a list. What kind of culture would we have? How creative would it be?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We basically realized what we were saying is that we would rebuild with you. And it seems stupid to to do that. And so we decided not to sell. We raised 17 million of debt and did a leveraged buyout.
Jason Jacobs: Did you, were you running out of cash at this point, or what was the financial picture?
Chris Savage: we still had a bunch of cash.
Jason Jacobs: You were burning.
Chris Savage: we were burning. Yeah. We would have conversations like how many months to let, to live, which basically caused us, it, it caused everyone without even set.
We even said we need to stay long term and these are the core things we do, but it caused everyone to get very short term.
So basically we do the leverage buyout. Turns out it works really well. The company gets profitable. We get more creative, more brand focus, invest more in the product. Put us in a really great position and it just worked better than I thought it would.
And then the most recent chapter was really kicked off by everyone going remote and being on camera every day, which was a cultural change of getting people more comfortable with video and realizing that they should use video, which caused like tremendous change in terms of our product and strategy.
And that's, those are the chapters.
Jason Jacobs: Okay, so if I'm hearing you, when you started the company, you were bootstrapped and in your element, and then you wanted to grow a little faster, so you brought in some angels, which gave you a little extra capital, but still had that kind of bootstrappy feel. And from that, you got Pretty profitable with, impressive, but still modest by blitz scaling venture
Chris Savage: totally.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah and then the advice from, was it the advice from the angels or where was the, yeah, where was
Chris Savage: it was all external. It was just like outside investors that we talked to other entrepreneurs that have raised lots of money. VCs. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And with the benefit of hindsight how do you feel about that? advice today? And similarly, how do you feel about the decisions you made at that inflection point with the benefit of hindsight?
Chris Savage: Yeah. So I'm not against funding actually. I think you just need to be really clear if you're raising money to search for growth or if you're raising money to serve growth. So if you're searching, like you don't know where the growth is going to come from That's like often an expensive time to raise, right?
Like you're unproven, you don't know how you're gonna spend the money. It's yes, you can be optimistic and stuff. Hopefully you have some signals that things are working. But it's very hard to predict how things are going to go. And therefore it can become risky capital. What happens to a lot of folks is they raise too much money while searching.
They often will find something. It's not big enough for VC. And the business is upside down. And so it's Hey, how much did it help you? It might've actually put you in a position with a preference to Axel and stuff that where you don't even have a business where you might've had a business otherwise.
But if you're serving growth and you understand what you can do to grow, you understand the economics of growth, you understand how to get more customers, how to get more revenue in a consistent way, that's just math. Okay, maybe if you're raising to serve you can look at equity as a way to fund that you can like, look at like customer payments and cashflow as a way to fund that you can look at debt as a way to fund that.
Like you have more options and it's irrational not to look at those options. But I think just trying to ask yourself, what are you really doing? If you're searching, I would try to raise the least amount of money possible that you think gives you a runway of, I don't know, two years, three years so that you can have an idea and be patient and try to see it through.
I wouldn't try to raise a huge round because the pressure ends up becoming. To search for the bigger and bigger thing and you might even miss the thing you're looking for.
Jason Jacobs: So when you got that advice, did you raise at that time?
Chris Savage: No, because we had this cache, so we thought, okay, the first thing we can do Is we can run negative and it'll be like we told ourselves we knew we had 3 million EBITDA. So if we were to run it, like a 3 million loss, that would be 6 million difference in spending. We knew most venture rounds were for about two years.
So we're like, Hey, if we run it a negative 3 million, it'll be like we raised a 12 million round, which is like what round sizes were. So if we do this, it's going to be like, we have. A series a or series B, let's go do it
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And,
Chris Savage: Clearly you want to say we didn't, because we didn't have VCs.
We didn't have outside people coming in, being like, Hey, giving us advice or feedback or whatever. And there's lots of very smart people out there who could do that. So that wasn't happening. We're still completely self directed, which maybe is why it didn't really lift the growth. But yes,
Jason Jacobs: and it sounds like at that point you shifted from being focused and being craftsman to starting to get, do more things in parallel and maybe, I don't want to say mailing it in, but just,
Chris Savage: We weren't mailing it in, but I think we lost focus and undervalued the importance of focus.
Jason Jacobs: Now, With the benefit of hindsight, it sounds like you're attributing that to trying to move faster and take on more things in parallel. Do you think it was that, or do you think there could have been a way to move faster with that strategy that was advocated from the outside, but just make different decisions?
Chris Savage: If you were to look at our market, what you would see is that we had a lot of overfunded competitors that didn't work out. Everyone was just too early. So my hunch is like the fact that it didn't work for so many of these other competitors, leads me to believe that we actually were just so early in this market that it probably wouldn't have had like a huge impact.
And actually I think the fact that we didn't raise as one part of the reasons, one of the reasons why we were able to survive until the market got big enough.
Jason Jacobs: So as you were feeling that you and Brendan were I'm happy with the direction. It sounds like that was also around the time where the acquisition offers presented. Were you seeking acquisition at that time or was it just inbound as you were
Chris Savage: it was, yeah, it was three inbound offers at the same time. And it was those offers that caused us to reflect, to actually say out loud to each other are you happy? Are you happy? I'm like no. And it was like, why aren't we happy? And it's we're not doing our best work is the long and short of it.
And something's gone awry in the culture. And in hindsight, I would say it was like, yeah, we lacked focus. And that's what's so interesting about this is. When we decided to change things, all we did was we slowed hiring. We cut back on some extraneous wild marketing things we were doing that were actually, we're trying to scale a lot of performance stuff that wasn't really working.
And so we pulled that back. We let the revenue catch up. And then what this meant though, for the team is now we were really clear to the team Hey, we're not just trying to sell this company tomorrow. This is a long term thing. We're going to focus on brand. We're going to focus on building a creative company.
We're going to focus on building a strong culture. We're going to simplify our focus within the product as well. And what ended up happening is the revenue growth rate increased after we slowed hirings, did all these other things. And we cut back on projects.
It was better, closer to the customer, better understanding of what they wanted. And having more people working on the same thing versus many more people working at different things.
Jason Jacobs: And this isn't an investment banking show or anything but what were the basic mechanics of the buyout, and what was the rationale for the buyout, because couldn't you have just gotten focused without the buyout?
Chris Savage: Totally. Yes, I think that was the part that made people think that we were crazy. So the thinking was we told our angel investors, we're going to sell the business someday if we're turning it down a good offer. We should take care of them, like morally, that's how we felt. We told the early team that we're going to sell the business.
Someday we're turned down an offer and give them a bunch of equity. We should get a return for them. And we felt that this is one of those moments where we're like recommitting to the future of the business. And so that's what led us to this thing of like, how nice would it be if we could not just say this, but we could make the changes that would get us to a better place.
And so we hit on this idea of doing the buyout and as a part of it, we'd get liquidity for employees. We get a return for investors. We use a similar valuation to the acquisition offers.
Jason Jacobs: so were, had there been the equivalent, were there stock options for employees up to
Okay? So employees it had common and investors had preferred and you were turning down the offer and you thought Why don't we buy out all the equity from all of those stakeholders
Chris Savage: yeah. So we did, we, yeah, we did basically, we did something called a tender offer. You can't force someone to sell you their equity. Everyone got a packet of information on how the company had done the previous few years projections, maybe for the next year.
Like strategy documents, all that kind of stuff, same terms exactly to preferred and to common. But part of the deal with this is our preferred chairs had a bunch of preferred controls in them. And we thought if we're going to get these people returning to take on this risk. We should convert that.
The preferred shares to participate converted into common. They had to vote to convert into common so that they could participate in the buyback. If they didn't want to do this, they could just not. Vote to do it, but if they vote to do it, they would convert. And so ultimately that would end us up in a place where we had a much more simple cap structure.
So we'd never raised that much money. So like we didn't have a big liquidity preference, but there were a lot of things around changing control and subsidiaries and approvals of different things that were like, this is just, we don't need this. And that was really interesting because most of our investors have never experienced that.
And because it was a tender offer, people didn't have to sell what, some people sold everything. Some people sold of the investors. Some people sold some, and some people sold nothing. And some of those people said to me, if you and Brendan believe this much in this, and you're this long term focused, and I don't need the cash because I'm a long term investor, like just keep it going.
I don't care where it goes. Just let it roll. Which is really interesting. And, it was on the employee side, really amazing because we got to actually get people liquidity, like we'd sold the business. And then if they wanted to be there, they had to be make almost like a conscious choice of yeah, I want to be in this company.
That's trying to do things differently.
Jason Jacobs: What does the incentive structure look like on the other side of that for the employees that got the liquidity and for new employees that you hired?
Chris Savage: Yeah. So we introduced profit sharing. We take a percentage of profit divided up amongst everybody based on people's salary. And so it's like a bonus based on profit. We did that for three years. One of the other things that was nice about profit sharing is it's really, because it's a bonus, we could change it year over year if we wanted to mostly stay the same, but actually, as I was alluding to when I really look at COVID made everybody realize that their computer is a camera, right?
Like you and I are making this podcast video podcast together. Just the two of us were both on our own computers. Nobody else is here. There's no other setup in the studio, blah, blah, blah, blah. The idea of doing a video podcast in 2019, I did one. That's what it was like. Cause like studio set up in person yada.
But this revelation was such a big deal that it made us actually realize that even though we'd been doing this business for a while. I think the market's getting early stage now. Like it was like a funny thing of wait a second. If video is getting democratized and anyone can do it, what does that change about what our customers want?
And going and talking to them, we saw they wanted us to solve way more problems. So they want us to help with a much broader set of product problems so that they don't have to use as many different video products. So since 2020, like that has meant like we've shifted from being a point solution to a platform, but that made us realize.
Actually, we, the market doesn't care that I've been doing this for 13 years. At this point, 14 years, it's just, it just is what it is. So if it's early stage, then we should treat like it's early stage and we should introduce equity. So we reintroduced equity a few years ago for the team, basically, cause we felt like we want people to approach this from the lens as, which is how we are too, which is it's basically the beginning.
And we're going to build this thing together and see where we can get it. And if we do it right, and it's a really big market, there'll be a great return.
Jason Jacobs: So for all intents and purposes, while there are some either historic equity holders or current equity holders or some combination of the two, are you essentially running it as if you have full control? It'd be helpful to understand if you index the chapters that you just laid out with two things.
One is your personal stress level through these chapters. And the other is just the family journey of at what point were kids introduced into the picture and how did the family development and the company development interact.
Chris Savage: Yeah. So we'll go stress level most stressful, although it was extremely fun. This is probably the most stressful was around, was leading up to the buyback and the acquisition offers. Cause I felt like Wistia had turned into something that I didn't want it to be. And I, I felt a lot of like guilt and like I'd made many large mistakes and like trying to wrap my hands around this thing that you've created.
And it feels like it's off the wheels is not a good feeling. So that there was a lot of stress then probably like next on the list. I'd put the very beginning, although it was also extremely fun. It was just like.
Jason Jacobs: you start it right out of school or in
Chris Savage: One, one year out of school, which was a clear choice. Like we saw this opportunity. Thought we'd go for it. And we talked a lot about the fact that we're used to living in college dorms. We don't have expensive living expenses. That will put us in a position where we can take on more risk. This is a moment to take risk where the risk is actually quite low for us.
And we knew it would be hard to start something brand new. If you have a mortgage and you have to be paid from day zero and all these other things, if you've changed your lifestyle. So that made it feel less stressful and it was so fun. But there was definitely a lot of feelings of can I do this?
Like, why am I allowed to do this? There's a lot of these feelings of imposter syndrome early.
Jason Jacobs: That was the second most stressful.
Chris Savage: I think so. Yeah, there's been lots of different periods of like little snippets of high stress. But yeah, that was the most stressful
And family wise, do you want that one at the same
Jason Jacobs: Yeah let's hear it.
Chris Savage: So my wife and I have been together for a very long time. We've been married 10 years. We have a nine year old and a seven year old and this stressful moment was happening right after we got married and our daughter was born a year and a half later, I think. So I think, yeah, I had a baby at home.
So that was also really ramping. Ramping up the stress. And I remember having a conversation with her when we decided not to sell. And she's you've been telling me this whole time, someday, you're going to sell and all the sacrifice of your time is going to be worth it. And I was like, ha.
And, but what it made me realize is what if I treat the company like I have sold it? What would I do? I would definitely be more comfortable taking more vacation. I'd be more comfortable prioritizing time with my family. And what would that mean? It was like, oh it would mean I would need to delegate a lot more.
And really delegate, like delegate whole problems that other people can solve versus just like the solution that I think should happen. And I'd have to pull myself out of meetings and I'd have to do less one on ones and stuff like that. And the cool thing was that from that stressful moment of doing the buyback and even on the other side, like how are we going to get profitable and stuff like that?
I actually didn't feel a lot of stress then. And it started to figure this out of like, all right. I work like crazy during the day. I try not to let meetings run long. I try to start them on time because I have a better alternative of my time, which is always to see my kids. And so I'm going to leave at five and that I'm going to do that no matter what, but I'm also gonna be hyper productive and I'm going to delegate these problems and over time that really actually reduced my stress tremendously.
And yeah I feel like I felt very lucky by that. And then when we went remote, which was in 2020. It's meant that I've been able to see my kids grow up and still balance work in a way that would have been much harder. Otherwise,
Jason Jacobs: When did you introduce equity again? What year?
Chris Savage: 20, 2022, I think
Jason Jacobs: Okay, so you went remote in 2020 and what year did the buyout take place?
Chris Savage: 2017,
Jason Jacobs: Okay, so the buyout took place in 2017, you went remote in 2020, you introduced equity in 2022 because you felt like it was early again and you're
Chris Savage: five years later.
Jason Jacobs: high growth startup culture. How did that affect both your stress and your working style?
Did it change it at all?
Chris Savage: Introducing equity again.
Jason Jacobs: No, getting back to the mode where introducing equity again makes sense.
Chris Savage: Oh
Jason Jacobs: they go together, right? You didn't introduce it just as an aside, you introduced it because psychologically, you felt like the mindset was getting back to a high growth mode.
Chris Savage: What's interesting is I feel like we had a lot of people who are like, is equity really going to return something like, am I really, is this real? And then we'd hired a lot of people who wanted to be here because they valued the culture, because they'd been a place where they got equity that wasn't worth anything.
We pay people really well and we're a really talent dense team too. That's like another piece of the puzzle is like, if you look at most companies with our revenue, they would still be running at a loss. They'd have a lot more people. And so we've made explicit strategic choices to say no, we pay people really well, we have less people than our direct competition, but we think that they're better and they're going to get to better solutions faster.
And I think the equity came almost like. After we had set off on this. Updated big change in the strategy and felt like it was working and, we'd always told the team like, Hey, there's no equity, but if we sell the business morally, we're going to, we're going to take care of you. And one of the realizations was like, that's not a great answer.
So we should actually put that down. So people understand. What they're getting and can have some prediction and element to that. And I think the biggest change actually has been being in a position where the fun of it is just like being really close to the work. I don't think that Brendan and I have.
Use the product more given more feedback on details, more suggestions in there on more strategic conversations than like we are right now. But it's still, but I still actually have work life balance. No problem. It's just that we have great teams. They all know on roadmaps, we have a culture and strategy that's set up.
It's all really crystal clear. People are going the same direction, know why they're doing what they're doing. And so we found a way to interface in that world that works.
Jason Jacobs: And so going remote in 22 how has that been going and what have been some surprises that you've seen from that experience so far, if any?
Chris Savage: Yeah, so we went, yeah, we were remote because of COVID and then There was a big question that came up of we need to hire, where are we hiring when we decide to try hiring more broadly across the U S and that really changed how hard it was to hire. One of the remote companies said this before COVID they say it now is I think the average role we posted last year got like over 500 applications or something.
And so it's just extremely different after spending years and years of trying to convince people to move to Boston, to join the team and they're like, why should I move to Boston? It's cold there. And dah, Like you can do it, but it's just, it's hard. It was like, Oh, we have this ridiculous pool of talent that's like ready to go.
It took, to get remote working well, it takes a ton of work. Like it took changing a lot of our systems of how we plan of how we communicate. Now that things are like normal again, we do a bunch of in person stuff. So that's something I think I also learned from companies that were natively remote was that they all did a lot of different in person things.
And that's because like the connection and communication you can get when you feel like. You actually know people in person. It's different remote when you do that, when, than when you don't. So now when we do planning we do it three times a year, which we call our tri annual business reviews.
And so we're planned for four months at a time. 30 or so, 30, 35 people come into our office in Cambridge, we spend three days together, everyone hears about how like everything went the last four months we have initial proposals on what should happen next and then feedback in person and everyone's like hashing it out and then plans are laid and go forward from there.
We do an offsite every year with the whole company. We have budget for teams to get together in person. If they're working through a hard problem or just to build more team unity. So there's like a, if you were to go to the WSSE office, one of the interesting things you would see is that there's a lot of days when there's five or 10 people there.
And then there's a lot of days when there's 50 people there. It's just you don't know which day, if you're not really looking closely you could be very surprised when you show up and there's a whole team that you weren't expecting.
Jason Jacobs: It seems with the pandemic, there was a big push to remote and that it's almost going the other way now where people are, especially some of the things you were talking about losing focus and wanting to be, more tight knit and better oiled and everything fitting well together.
Did you lose some of that with remote? Is
Chris Savage: it's just harder. It's just harder. There's a lot of things you get for free in person. Like you turn over to somebody, if they're in their office, you could tell if they're busy or not. You have to use tools to do that stuff. So we use tools where you can see if someone's in their office and you can go knock and chat to them and have a video chat, or you can have a video call.
It took a lot of figuring that stuff out. And I think that the most interesting thing I've seen. I don't know that I would start something new with 10 remote people that I didn't know that would just be hard. It would take a long time, to build up the trust you need.
If it was 10 people I knew really well and had worked together with a long time, like I might do it. But it's, I feel like it was like. We did, we inadvertently were forced to do all these tests or we hired all these people remote and had to work completely together remote. And those are the moments I think when we had the most confusion, the most chaos, the most toxicity and really lack of clarity.
And then once you start getting together in person. Oh, these people really jive together really well, or these people don't, or you do something that builds the trust up so much that the next time you're doing a remote meeting, it's much easier really to have hard conversations, which I think is ultimately what people are talking about is like, how quickly can you easily have hard conversations around strategy product, anything that you're doing and do it from a base of trust.
And I think a lot of people in remote don't feel comfortable doing that. And therefore that slows things down tremendously. And if you can't do that it makes it possible to work well remotely.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And we already indexed this journey against family journey and against the stress journey. I'd like to index it against one other journey, and that is when did you first start hearing about, thinking about, And then what has been the journey there in terms of how it's rose in attention and what you're seeing and what you're incorporating into whiskey is strategy and operations.
Chris Savage: Yeah. The, so the first time I really saw like LLMs was someone on my team was experimenting with open AI before chat GPT launched and was like, Hey, you can do a bunch of sweet stuff with this. We're like, but it's not that accurate. We're like playing around with it a little bit. I'm like, Oh, this is interesting.
So in chat GPT first launch, I was like, I've seen this thing's cool. And then of course saying the cultural moment of that, I was like, whoa, this is like people, this really is not just cool. This is everyone's starting to wake up to this potential. And I would describe the journey as AI has mostly been.
Over hyped and has under delivered. And so that has turned a lot of average non tech people, normal people off because they tried a lot of stuff that didn't work very well. Or they got a bunch of errors. And so they felt okay, I can't use this thing in like a production environment.
But I would say what's happening now is that I think that is moving beyond that in a lot of cases where it actually does deliver. It delivers incredibly well. We are starting to see massive like productivity changes. And I think the fact that we're already there is just only a signal.
We're going to see a lot more of it. And so for the company, we have built some things into the product that are AI based that have had a huge impact. One like really discreet example is we've had transcription in Wistia for a long time. So you have a video, you want captions. We had an automated captions. Service that was going through, or you could pay for human beings to caption your video because for a lot of people, it's really important. AI transcription has gotten incredibly good and incredibly fast and incredibly cheap. So something that used to be a paid ad on is now free included on every whiskey video.
But what does that mean? Once every video has a really accurate transcription. You start to know what the videos are about. So we can give you the title, give you the description. We give you chapters in the video. We have an editor built into Wistia. You can bring the video into the editor and you can edit it by edit, by editing the text versus just using it as like a nonlinear editor.
And so that, those are all pretty amazing things that really. Started to, we started to see that we're democratizing in the product. Something that's in beta right now is like AI translations. So you can have a video and you can translate it to another language. And it does a clone of the person's voice, puts them, it's their voice speaking the other language, and then it reworks their lips to dub it so that it looks like you're really saying those other words.
And it's like some of the most impressive tech I've ever seen. I can't believe it's in Wistia. And it is also I've never seen something that provides as much accessibility as this. Where it's like, Hey, I want to watch this video. It's 25 minutes long. It's a really important thing explaining how something works.
I don't speak English. Guess what? Now you can watch it in Spanish. That was something that only like the biggest companies in the world had the budget to do before. And now everyone's going to have the budget. So I think we're going to see a lot of products. Like I think you're screwed if you don't look at how you can adapt this stuff and add it into your products.
If you have existing products. And then the other piece of the puzzle is just like how operations change and how productivity changes. I could go on there forever, but there's a lot there.
Jason Jacobs: Are you seeing anything compelling or do you think we will around? Because it sounds like you give a lot of tools to. people to host video content, but it's still them that is doing the hosting. Do you think that that they're like, will you still have to hire someone to speak through a commercial, for example, or can you just get a human looking AI to do it for you?
Chris Savage: There now. I think those companies would argue that it is there now. So you can get an AI avatar and type in what you want to say or have the LLM write it for you and spit out the video. Yes, that is there. Synthesia. Hey, Jen, both have great solutions in that space.
There's a lot of other ones too. Yeah, I think it's at the place where I look at all of this is like democratization of video something that was so hard. And felt so out of reach for most people is just getting closer and closer into reach. The question is with any tool, like how do you use it?
So if everyone's using the same AI avatar, that might be fine to explain certain things. But if you're building a brand with that that might not be the greatest idea, right? If you have the same actor and everything and the same spokesperson, that's not going to, it's not going to stand out.
There are, yeah, we're seeing tools like. We have some things we have a partnership with Adobe and we have this, they have this podcast enhancement feature that makes any mic sound really good. Takes out background noise. You would have to be a professional before to even come close to making something sound good.
If you recorded it with a crappy mic, now you just run it through this filter and it sounds really good. The AI music with Suno has gotten really good. Runway has a bunch of amazing AI generative videos. We have actually a new ad campaign coming out soon that uses like a lot of that stuff that's really fun that I'm excited about.
Yeah, it's basically getting there very rapidly. And I think it just, it's bringing up a bunch of interesting questions, which is when should you have a person versus not? When should you have you like how much of his is a face attached to a brand in a world with unlimited video content and unlimited avatars.
How does that change the importance of the scarcity around human beings? I think probably a lot. And I think my guess would be that generally trust will be reduced. Where you can't tell if something's real or not, and you don't know if you should trust the person you're seeing.
And so I would expect an emphasis on more live events where you can prove that somebody is real. Brand centering more about specific people that are known to be real. So that when you see them in these other contexts, you trust the advice and context they're giving you. It's like a wild world that we live in now.
This stuff hasn't been, everyone has not adopted yet, but they will.
Jason Jacobs: we've been talking about how AI can be incorporated to enhance the offerings for customers. What are you seeing, if anything, as it relates to being leveraged for internal operations?
Chris Savage: Yeah. So there's a few places. Where it's really starting to move. We've seen people using GitHub copilot to increase their speed of writing code. That's something that we've been using basically since it's been out. And I think it really does improve productivity. Depends on the task at hand.
Depends on how complicated it is. It doesn't work in every situation, but we're seeing it being used more and more. We have a bunch of folks, myself included, who have been playing with cursor to build things themselves. And,
Jason Jacobs: Do you code, by the way?
Chris Savage: Not really, I coded in high school and I took some classes in college,
Jason Jacobs: turning you into a coder?
Chris Savage: It's funny.
I've been baking, I've been making prototypes myself and webpages and stuff. And I'm using a tool that allows me to be a coder, but that's really interesting actually, because what does that mean? We're seeing cases where I think what's going to happen, someone described this internally and I thought it was really cool, which was like basically the AI that's here today.
Effectively gives everyone on your team, an intern in every other department. That's like the level of where the AI is at. It's like you have an intern, but it's getting better rapidly. So soon it will be like, you have a mid level person. And this is interesting because a lot of our systems and companies are set up around prioritization.
Like how do we make sure that we're doing the right thing at the right time? How do you make sure that you're not wasting resources? So if you want to make a new webpage for a feature. What do you have to do? Someone has to wireframe it. You have to work with copy, figure out what copy is going to go on there.
Back and forth. Is it the right wireframe? Is this the right copy? Are these right images? Yada. Once that's figured out, it gets put on a list. It gets prioritized against the other work that an engineer is going to do. Engineer makes the page, puts it up there and all these people are busy.
All these people are doing lots of different things. All these people have meetings. Sadly, that type of process could take a lot of planning. It'd take over a month, right? For the right thing. If you're in a world where you can prototype something that is actually made with real code, you can actually touch and feel, and the designer can do that themselves.
Maybe it's not production ready. But it's going to be pretty darn close and how quickly can you get there? Because the code is that the LLM is writing the code for is something that might've taken you two, three days to figure out yourself, or maybe you couldn't have in two, three hours of you saying with the copywriter.
Maybe you can get it to a place where it's like ready to be checked in with an engineer who is going to actually make sure that it's ready before it goes out, or maybe it's just out the door. And so that one example, let's say it takes a day instead of taking over a month to get out. The tech is there for that.
Now we're starting to see people do that. We're starting to see people use prototypes to explain potential solutions. A lot of people have ideas for what should be built and they can't. They're just arguing why it's important to be built, but they can't show the thing themselves. They can't, they're not a designer.
They're not an engineer. With some of these tools, they effectively are. So a lot of folks need to see something visually before they can get excited about it. And if you could show someone a visual prototype that works and be like, this is what I'm trying to explain. So you just skipped the prioritization conversation.
And so I think we're going to see a lot of that. I think we're going to see a lot of jobs changing. I think we're going to see a big shift in how companies have to work in terms of how they prioritize and mitigate risk. And I think it should look like folks going much faster and a real emphasis on like the creativity.
And the innovation and the difference making stuff where a lot of the stuff that today, we have a lot of process to get stuff that just has to get done which is important, but not like game changing. And that stuff will all get much easier.
Jason Jacobs: Is it changing either the quantity of hires or the roles that you're hiring for or the criteria that you're using to assess fit for these roles?
Chris Savage: It is just starting to, we're just starting to ask the questions on when we're hiring a role, what should we be looking for? And how should that change? And I think yeah it's just at the moment where that is starting to happen. And I think it's going to require looking for people, like T shaped thing.
I think that's actually going to become more important where it's like, you need to be an expert at the domain you do, but you're like, you're pretty good at these other things too.
Jason Jacobs: I use a little different analogy. I use like a free weights versus Nautilus equipment where like with the free weights, like on the bench press, if you use Nautilus equipment, it's only working in your packs. Whereas the free weights, you have to balance it and it uses all the other little muscles around, around your packs.
And yeah, but
Chris Savage: Yes, you're going to need more people who manage freeweights basically, and do mobility. And our, yeah, I think that's going to happen. And I just think it's going to, it's going to really change a lot.
Jason Jacobs: And then, there's all kinds of other questions in my mind for example, tool standardization. Right now, there's a lot of tools that can do the job, but different people have their favorites. Is it fine that each employee in a company has a different stack or should there be standardization amongst tools so that everyone's speaking a common language, for example?
Chris Savage: I think in areas where people are doing things that are outside of their traditional department, probably we're going to end up with more standardization because there's going to be more education on how to do these things and how to interface and how to like not create problems. One example is we have a great data team.
We have a ton of data that they're constantly getting questions Can you help me figure out this insight? Or do people use this feature? Do they churn at a different rate or whatever? And like the features brand new or whatever. And it's someone has to go and write SQL code or write R and basically come back and give you this dashboard that help you understand what's happening.
If you can use an LLM to help you write the code, like you're going to be able to do that. But now are there a million dashboards? What, how are they formalized? What's the titling? What kind of questions do we ask? Which variables should be used in different contexts? There's a different type of education that has to happen and probably a different type of standardization.
But part of it is we are all in a sense and this conversation is like skipping ahead, of like where we think it's going to end up. I think like the path to incorporating these tools, a lot of the path is likely to be individuals in your organization that are experimenting with something that looked like a toy and actually.
The results are so much better than they believed. And other people believe that everyone wakes up and goes, Oh my gosh, are you telling me I never have to take notes again in a meeting? I was like, I'm telling you, you never have to take notes again. The notes are better than you ever could have imagined.
And they're searchable and they have all the context and all this stuff. So you're going to be more presence. Great. And everyone adopts the thing. So I think there's going to be, that's going to be a lot of stuff like
Jason Jacobs: Was that a sponsored statement from Granola?
Chris Savage: That is granola. You could tell just from how I described it.
You know what the product is, but that was my experience. I was like, this is literally for years. Who's going to take the notes? Who's going to take the notes? Like whose responsibility is it? Yada. I was like, no, it's just, it's done. It's better. It's useful. It's searchable as a context.
Jason Jacobs: No, I know we're running up on time. There's a couple other things I want to hit on if that's okay. You doing okay for? Yeah. So one is just, I've noticed that it seems like in certain areas AI will. be more impactful at bringing the bottom half up and in some areas it'll be more impactful at Bringing the top half up right and I'll give you two two examples One example is coding, right?
It seems like in coding look it can help people like me who don't code to fake it or do some big price of prototyping or whatever but it seems like it's more impactful at least today by giving leverage to people that already know how to Would you agree with that?
Chris Savage: Yeah. I think it's moving up the floor of what's possible for sure. And I think it's only going to get better and easier for everyone to do this. And I think like the thing we haven't seen yet is we're seeing some productivity gains at the top, but the truly gnarly problems, I think everyone agrees it's not solving all those problems yet.
I think if it does, it's, which I think it will it's going to change things a lot more there. Like I think there, it has raised the top, but I think that's the biggest question from my perspective is how high will it raise it?
Jason Jacobs: And, you can go craft by craft, so you can look at writing, you can look at song writing, you can look at what's another example screen writing and and you can look at coding. And one of the things I'm trying to figure out is, Does it do something similar to the bottom and the top across these domains, or does it affect different domains differently, and then what are the criteria to determine how it will affect a given domain and skill set?
Chris Savage: Yeah, that's a, this is a hard question. I think it's a really interesting thing to look at. For some reason I keep thinking about translation probably because we've like just added this feature. And I think it's a really interesting thing to think about, because if you ask yourself what percentage of content on the, that's created to, I can't even say today, created last year was translated to other languages.
Pretty small percentage of content. A lot of human beings doing translation. But probably on an absolute basis, like not a large job category. We're heading into a world of everyone can translate everything into every language. Your browser can do it and you're going to be able to do it in videos.
You're going to be able to do an audio. You already can. And so you're gonna have a lot more content that's translated. You would think that means you're gonna need less translators. That's possible, but also. If all these places where the translations need to be perfect business enterprise, where a lot of the times they can't use a product, if it's not a hundred percent what are they going to need to do, they're going to need to pay for people to watch these things, read these things, make sure that it's not going off brand, make sure that it's not having the wrong message, make sure that the tone and context is right.
And I would imagine there's a million X more pieces of content being translated. There's actually probably going to be on an absolute basis. A lot more people who work in that domain who have translation. It's just that their job is going to be different. And that's one of the things I think that's like funny about this moment is it's just very hard to predict how these things will go, because I think, I know there are people who are afraid.
There's not gonna be more software engineers, but there's also a world where there's effectively millions more software engineers and the software engineers who are really good at solving the hardest problems and figure out the right approach in, they're going to be like, they manage thousands of people.
And so their impact is going to be tremendously larger than it is today. And like the market will have to respond to that. So I think it's just unpredictable. What's going to happen.
Jason Jacobs: I, the last thing I want to cover, I just have a couple areas where I think you could be helpful, and I would be remiss if I didn't run them by you live while I've got you.
Chris Savage: Let's do it.
Jason Jacobs: So one is I am hosting these pods and I'm cranking out content and there's great value for me from a learning standpoint and talking to more and more guests the editing part the lighter the better and I don't want it to be crap, but it's not strategic for me to like super edit them and take You know 120 minutes of content into the most compelling 20 minutes of content like what is what you get I'll clean up the ums and the ahs.
I'll take it out if the guest has anything uncomfortable So that's what I've been doing and it's working great using Descript But I've got this video content too from Riverside like we're recording the audio in the video. I'm not doing anything with the video What should I do with the video? That's one question.
Chris Savage: You should be making clips in the video.
Jason Jacobs: I do that. No, I do make the sound clips for I do the clips for Twitter right, but I put the long form discussion. I'm not doing any anything with the
Chris Savage: Oh, you could, we're just looking at data on this, but I think 40 percent of people prefer to watch a video podcast than to just to listen.
Jason Jacobs: Where should I post it?
Chris Savage: you should post on YouTube. You should post it on your site with something like Wistia. You should make sure. That is available for the people who want the video version that they can actually get it.
And my take on that is like a lot of people are they're listening. Even you can publish it into a lot of the podcast apps also support video. Cause RSS, you can put video in there. So like in Apple podcasts, you can even have it show it up. I think that most people are not watching an Apple podcast.
I think they're mostly going to YouTube for that.
Jason Jacobs: So I'll just check the script to see if the video they spit out is actually in a form that's shippable. Like all the edits I'm making to the text that then edits the audio, I wonder if it's doing it for the video too, I don't even know.
Chris Savage: yeah, you should look, I think the key thing on the videos is like aligning. The clips that you make to the platforms you're putting them on because the platforms are different and care about different
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, and I'm just worried about being multimodal too early because I'm a band of one and I'm spread really thin already.
Chris Savage: Yeah, I think getting it right with the audio part first and really nailing it and then adding video in I would say first making it available on video and then working hard on the clips. The clips is like for my podcast, that's been a huge part of how we've been able to grow it.
Jason Jacobs: And the second one, this is, I'm not sure if this is a Wistia one or if it's just a Chris personally one, but I know that before you founded Wistia, you were a filmmaker, right? You won some awards, right?
Chris Savage: Huh.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah? And now you're building Wistia and you've gotten to a place where it's profitable and, you have a great team around you and you've delegated and it's balanced, right?
Yeah. Yeah, and you're a family guy, so like building different's important to you. And so one of the things I've found in my journey so far, and we talked about the two things that, how to build different and how AI can help facilitate that, right? One of the things I've found so far is that there's a whole crew of these middle aged founders running around trying to figure out how to build different that are experienced founders that swing a big bat, but, that have a lot of experience, but need to build different this time around.
And Their lives as they're sorting through this, and regardless of stage, like it might be that they're a Series C venture backed company, it might be, that they're sitting in their kitchen trying to figure out how to code as a non coder using AI tools, but whatever stage they're in, it's funny as shit.
And no one's telling those stories. And so if you think about the show, Silicon Valley and the success that it had, I feel like the prototype of the characters was like the, it was like the YC hacker and hustler types, right? It's like the 20 somethings. And so I want to build a show.
That is the equivalent of Silicon Valley, but for middle aged founders called Foggy founders. And without any gatekeepers, I want to start. Bottoms up. So start just by fleshing out individual characters and building individual followings for individual characters on someplace like TikTok or Instagram Reels.
And then I want to start weaving them together into just scenes right together. And then I want to weave the scenes together into a show that ultimately becomes a series that's mobile first, right? And I want to use AI for as much of this as possible. So there you go. That's my pitch.
Chris Savage: It sounds funny. I think you're right that there are a lot of people who that will resonate with. So I think you should do it.
Jason Jacobs: Where do I start? How do I get going? Is this something that you want to be involved with in some capacity? What could you point me to?
Chris Savage: Yeah, I think your approach is probably right, which is like picking, trying to find the characters first. Are you thinking you're going to be in this?
Jason Jacobs: I would prefer not to be I would prefer if it was just AI characters, to be honest, but I don't know if the tech is there.
Chris Savage: But I don't think it's there.
Jason Jacobs: yeah.
Chris Savage: I have seen some people make, yeah, that is also close. Again, you could hire someone who is like an amazing animator today and what they, one person can do today is like so much more than they could do a few years ago.
So I think you could build an animated show like that. I was just watching like a short film. There was maybe 15 minutes long that was made with unreal, like the gaming engine. And it took me like. Five minutes to realize that it wasn't real people and I was like, wow, that was crazy. That it's that good but yeah, I think you should just go around to all those people and get some money from them and Get them to fund this thing and see what happens.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, we'll see. I'm talking to some showrunner types. I'm talking to some film production studios. I'm talking to a writer for a Netflix series. I'm just trying to learn. And you know what? I'm going to bring on some of those people on the show too, to sort through it. I'm going to build, I'm building everything in public.
Including the show, if I end up proceeding with it. But anyways just to wrap up, first of all, this was awesome, Chris covered a lot of ground. I really appreciate it. Anything I didn't ask that I should have or that you wish I did.
Chris Savage: Oh, wow No, I think you got we covered a lot. I think you got through the right set the right stuff
Jason Jacobs: And my last question is just for anyone that's listening. What do you want them to hear? Do you have any call to action that would be helpful for you? Things you're thinking about? Things you want them to do? Think people you want to hear from? You
Chris Savage: Yeah, I would say,
Jason Jacobs: the ask however you want.
Chris Savage: Yeah, I would say, if you're interested in what it takes to build a different type of business I share a lot more of that story in my podcast. So check that out. Talk to you loud with Chris Savage. And then the other big ask I would say is we're shipping like crazy at Wistia.
It is very bizarre for an 18 year old business to feel like an early stage company, but it really does. So if you are, try any of our products or have any feedback, I just please ask you. To share it with us. Like you're like, oh, this is confusing or I'd want this or whatever. Like you could share it through all the normal channels.
You can share it on social, you can email us, you can email the support team. You can email me, you can contact me on LinkedIn. But yeah, that's we just crave more customer feedback. So please send it if you got it.
Jason Jacobs: and I have to tell you I'm doing my own thing and I don't know if I could ever not do my own thing, but if I were ever looking to not do my own thing and work in a job for a company, Whiskeyist seems awesome and you seem awesome and I would work for you I'm just really impressed by how intentional and thoughtful you've been about it.
Building the company, how transparent you are, and also just how down to earth and easy to talk to you are and how you've clearly thought a lot about culture in the company. Well done.
Chris Savage: Thanks buddy. I appreciate it. That's very nice of you to say.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Thanks again. I'll keep you posted. I'm not giving up on on getting you involved in Foggy Founders, but if I need to show more and get further along, that's fine. But no, on a serious note, I appreciate you coming on and and best of luck to you and Wiskia.
Chris Savage: Absolutely, man. Best of luck with the project.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into the next, next, if you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player. In addition to the podcast, which typically publishes weekly, there's also a weekly newsletter on sub stack at the next, next dot sub stack. com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground.
I'm covering areas I'm tackling next and where I could use some help as well. And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we