Transcript:
Michael Litt:
Every time we made a video, the question always came back … ‘How do we put it on our website? … What do you recommend? … And at the time YouTube was the the best recommendation. Now … YouTube on blackberry.com was a bit of a challenge because a YouTube player functions as an outbound link to YouTube.com- which is an ad monetised platform …. that’s how they make money. If your competitors are smart, they can advertise against the videos you have on your homepage. And in fact, when the Blackberry Playbook launched, if you remember this tablet ….
Stephen Cummins:
I do. It was dodgy on the technology.
Michael Litt:
It was a little dodgy in ways, but at the end of the video, which is on Blackberry’s homepage, all the recommended videos were iPad versus playbook comparison videos. And if you watched one of those, it was very likely that you weren’t going to buy a playbook. And this is on Blackberry.com. So we solved that problem by just building a simple video hosting solution. And then the questions came … ‘How do we track who’s watching the videos? …. and for how long? …. and ‘Can we port that data into our CRM and our marketing automation system? Can we add interactivity? Can we transcribe the video? Can we personalize? Can we integrate into other systems of record?’ And so we were always … we existed to solve a problem!
Stephen Cummins:
This is the first of a 2 episode interview with Michael Litt, CEO & Co-founder of Vidyard, a platform for video hosting and audience engagement. This was recorded live on SaaStock’s podcast stage in Dublin. The company did a 15 million dollar debt financing round shortly after this interview – and has a raised a total of 76 million dollars.
In this episode we find out about how Michael set up a business to solve a simple, but lucrative problem in Blackberry where he was working at the time – and this led down a fantastic rabbit hole that resulted in rocket-ship that he sits in the cockpit of today. We also learn that ice-cream is not always bad for you
Stephen Cummins:
It’s wonderful to have you with us here on the 14 Minutes of SaaS podcast show here in the the SaaStock podcast stage. That’s a lot of SaaS going on. How are you?
Michael Litt:
Yeah tons of SaaS everywhere. I’m great. I’m great. It’s 9am … ish. Yeah. And day 3 of SaaStock I guess … so it’s coming to an end today
Stephen Cummins:
And how has the event been for you … personally … and for your business?
Michael Litt:
It’s incredible. I was telling Alex this yesterday. The people here obviously are dedicated to this … his business model we all love, software as a service. And I feel like the community here is both very innovative … and also kind of oriented around deal-making and progress, but really supportive of one another. You don’t get that at all tech conferences. There’s real sense of camaraderie. It’s less combatative than I’ve seen in other conferences before. You get a lot of tech conferences … you get a lot of what we could sometimes classify as people that are really excited by the idea of entrepreneurship, but not necessarily the work required to be one. And that could be a little bit tiresome sometimes. But everybody here is exercising new business models, new ideas, solving real problems. Quite a refreshing audience. And I always leave SaaStock and go back to HQ … and feel really good, and feel really fueled.
[00:03:22] Now you’re from Ontario in Canada. So before we talk about your interesting history in technolog … before you get into technology …. your childhood growing up, give is a 2 minute resume of Michael Litt’s life.
[00:03:36] Yeah. Yeah. And so I was I was born just south of a city called Waterloo, in a city called Kitchener. Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge is the Tri-Cities in southwestern Ontario. About five or six hundred thousand people total between those three regions. And my very first job was as a paper boy. And I had two paper routes, eventually acquired a third … and I actually paid kids in the street to run the second and third paper out for me. Eventually the first. So … had a little bit of a paper-round mafia …
Stephen Cummins:
What age were you?
Michael Litt:
Would have been probably 10 or 11 at the time. So grade three and grade four. And I guess that was probably my first kind of adventure into entrepreneurship and leadership, so to speak. My parents …. My dad was an electrician who worked at the local utility company Kitchener Wilmot Hydro. My mom worked at St. Mary’s Hospital as a clerical worker. And they were adamant that my brother and I essentially had more to them …. more fulfilling careers than they did in a way. And my dad worked for engineers. And when the University of Waterloo was being built, he was a contract based electrician at the University of Waterloo. So he would bring my brother and I there when we were very young and say, you’re going to go to school here one day. And so I was definitely pushed into science, technology, engineering and math. Despite the fact that personally, I was more attracted to kind of the arts … and so in high school I spent a lot of time in computer sciences & technology. Eventually got in to engineering program with the University of Waterloo.
[00:05:23] A common vein through my entire childhood was work in jobs. I was also told by my parents that I was going to have to put myself through school. So that meant always working and always saving. So 10 percent of everything I made went into an RESP … from the very first dollar I made. Often I had four to five jobs at a time, so I was cleaning the local pharmacy. I washed the windows at the local bank. I let a summer camp called Summer Playgrounds at Alpine Public School. I was a swimming instructor and lifeguard at Harry Class Pool. And I was a bike technician at Sport Chek. And so all five of those jobs at one time in preparation for school taught me some work ethic, taught me some financial management. And so when I got to university, I met my co-founder, Devin Galloway on the very first day in an ice cream eating contest. And I guess you could say the rest is history.
Stephen Cummins:
On the very first day! …
Michael Litt:
Yes, the very first day of undergrad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually I’ve a really funny story real quick.
Stephen Cummins:
Yeah please tell us …
Michael Litt:
Yeah. So Devin was also local … and the University of Waterloo is kind of a very international school. People come from all over the place to study engineering. And so yes … it’s a really great option in North America. I think the undergrad programs rank similarly to MIT. So it’s Waterloo or MIT …. it’s kind of where you wanna go.
Stephen Cummins:
Very prestigious …
Michael Litt:
[00:06:42] Yeah. And anyways … there’s a scavenger hunt during frosh week and one of the competitions during the scavenger hunt is an ice cream eating contest. And Devin loves eating ice cream. So do I. We both volunteer for it. We get to the room and they say build a really awesome sundae. And then the competition is how fast you can eat the sundae. But the crux of the competition is you don’t feed yourself. The person who’s eating it puts their hands behind their back and the person who’s feeding it slides their arms through that person’s armpits, grabs the spoon and puts it into their mouth. So this the first time I’ve met Devin and Devin says, I love eating ice cream. I can do this really quickly. I’ve done this my whole childhood. So I say, sure. So I slide my arms through his armpits and I’m really close behind. I mean, he says, feed it to me as fast as you can. I can take it.
So they count down from three, they say three to one. And I see everybody grabbing the spoon and starting to shovel ice cream. And I think, you know what? There’s got to be a better way … so I throw the spoon away, grab both hands full of the ice cream, the whole sundae, just shove it into his mouth. And he took it and he ate it and we won. And we became best friends after that and have been breaking the rules and solving problems ever since. That was 16 years ago.
Stephen Cummins:
[00:07:54] So if you had that most much trust at the beginning, there was always gonna be trust after that. Has he got like a Marlon Brando type thing? … Is he like … able to get through the door today? …
Michael Litt:
[00:08:05] He …. he’s …. definitely potentially a little … I don’t wanna say anything about him ….. [laughter]
Stephen Cummins:
I shouldn’t even ask that … I just thought of Marlon Brando [laughter]
Michael Litt:
Devon’s a great guy. He’s a great guy. We still love eating ice cream together [laughter]
Stephen Cummins:
[00:08:17] I noticed when I read your professional history, you were with Research in Motion for a while.
Michael Litt:
Yes.
Stephen Cummins:
And I used to love my BlackBerry. The thing I miss about it is … I used to love e-mailing and messaging on it … well e-mailing really … which I miss … I can never get my my fat fingers around my iPhone as quickly, like, you know. What happened? Like how did such a great company fall so far so fast.
Michael Litt:
[00:08:48] Yeah, it’s a great question. First of all … you could still buy a BlackBerry … it’s keyboard runs on Android. But I think they’re sun-setting this product line.
Stephen Cummins:
And I just switched to android.
Michael Litt:
Well there you go. They’re very rare. You’ll see them in Waterloo, but not much else. So in 2007 … is when I worked there, and 2007 was a remarkable year for BlackBerry for a number of reasons. One, it was an incredible growth rate. I think the market cap at that point was 60 or 70 billion dollars. You know, you couldn’t do wrong. It was the cool place to work. I was in software product management on essentially a secure device management platform for small businesses. And in that year, Android was announced and the original iPhone launched. And the iPhone internally was looked at as a consumer product, and almost a plaything. It ran an iPod with calling functionality. Now, this is before the app store, before any of this stuff happened. And, you know, battery life was bad. No keyboard. All the things that BlackBerry people loved, the iPhone didn’t have. Now, one of the challenges, I think is that, you know, customer advisory councils can be dangerous things for companies. And BlackBerry specifically was a really incredible tool for CIOs that were security focused.
[00:10:09] And those were the people that made it the customer advisory board. But what I saw in small business was that companies were moving to this bring your own device strategy … almost like a product led growth today, which is what I spoke little bit about on stage yesterday. And in that process, consumers had all the power in what they want to bring to work. And so as the iPhone became more feature rich and the app store became a thing … turns out people … the end user … cared less about security than the owner of the business did. And they wanted to be able to play apps when they went to bathroom, and do all the things people do on their iPhones. Right.
Stephen Cummins:
And so they got a bit of both, right.
Michael Litt:
Yeah. And so the iPhone kind of came into the organisation via this kind of strategy and method of execution and purchasing power on the consumer that BlackBerry didn’t necessarily foresee. Yeah. And it just couldn’t get the app strategy and other aspects right, because it was such a transformational change to their business model, which limited them from doing so.
[00:11:04] So I think that’s part of it. There’s a myriad of reasons. But yeah, I think there were egos. There’s all sorts of stuff. Right. I mean, this company at its peak was one of the most powerful in the world. They invented the mobile Internet. Right? To some degree. And. And so I think, you know, the bigger there are, the harder they fall. But that industry … you know, Nokia, Motorola, Palm … had all fallen to BlackBerry’s rise prior to it. And then Apple just kind of cleaned everything up.
Stephen Cummins:
[00:11:30] Vidyard is nearly nine years young at this stage. Take us back to the beginning. What was the problem you saw … or the opportunity you saw that made you want to found that with your good ice-cream eating friend?
Michael Litt:
[00:11:43] Yeah, great question. So when I was at BlackBerry, one of the projects I led was to bring in a company to develop a series of videos that were designed to help a small business owner install this fairly complex server based security software that managed devices, device management software. It was complicated. You know, it sat inside of a firewall. There’s all sorts of interesting aspects to setting it up. And video was the best way that we could think of to help these people use the software and not put a huge support and resource burden on BlackBerry at the time. And so this company charged, I think, eighty thousand dollars for what was effectively five videos. And the videos were nothing special.
And something that I realised I could potentially do in my basement on evenings and weekends. So actually, at that time, I thought of spinning up a company and then bidding on that contract independently, which is obviously a massive conflict of interest. But, you know, this is what we do as entrepreneurs sometimes. We started that company. After BlackBerry, after Cypress Semiconductor … I took my very last co-op term off. Engineering in the University of Waterloo is 4 months work, 4 months school all the way through the program. So I took that last four month co-op off to start a video production business … and went back to my co-workers at BlackBerry and Cypress Semiconductor and other businesses with this idea of we’re going to help you make videos to solve problems and reduce support burdens.
Of course, every time we made a video, the question always came back … ‘How do we put it on our website? … What do you recommend? … And at the time YouTube was the the best recommendation. Now … YouTube on blackberry.com was a bit of a challenge because a YouTube player functions as an outbound link to YouTube.com- which is an ad monetised platform …. that’s how they make money. If your competitors are smart, they can advertise against the videos you have on your homepage. And in fact, when the Blackberry Playbook launched, if you remember this tablet ….
Stephen Cummins:
I do. It was dodgy on the technology.
Michael Litt:
It was a little dodgy in ways, but at the end of the video, which is on Blackberry’s homepage, all the recommended videos were iPad versus playbook comparison videos. And if you watched one of those, it was very likely that you weren’t going to buy a playbook. And this is on Blackberry.com. So we solved that problem by just building a simple video hosting solution. And then the questions came … ‘How do we track who’s watching the videos? …. and for how long? …. and ‘Can we port that data into our CRM and our marketing automation system? Can we add interactivity? Can we transcribe the video? Can we personalise? Can we integrate into other systems of record?’ And so we were always … we existed to solve a problem!
And, you know, I think that’s the advice I give a lot of entrepreneurs is … you have to be a solution to a real problem … and get obsessed with that problem! And Y-Combinator, which ended up funding us … their mentality is build something people want. So we’ve always been built around that strategy.
Stephen Cummins:
In the next and concluding episode with Michael Litt, CEO & Co-founder of Vidyard, we learn about the Vidyardian culture. Sounds like an alien species in Star Trek. We also hear the fable of the unpruned rose, and why a great scale-up is a rocket-ship that carries no passengers
[00:15:02] You’ve been listening to 14 minutes of SaaS. Thank you to Ketsu for music provided under a Creative Commons license. This episode was brought to you by me, Stephen Cummins. If you enjoyed the podcast, please don’t forget to share it with your network, subscribe to the series, and give the show a rating.
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Thank you for the artwork to the talented Michael Quill, AppSelekt CTO & CoFounder