AMA - Co-Founder / CEO of Vidyard and GP of Garage Capital

@zfiscr - Complex! Economic theory would suggest that there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. At the beginning of the year, I found an interesting set of predictions made in 1923 about "North America, 100 years into the future". The population of the US? 350M (nearly nailed it), the population of Canada? 100M. How was this such a miss (we just crossed 40M)? Likely Immigration policy. If we had 100M people today, it's easy to imagine that there would be more entrepreneurs, more jobs, more housing, more GDP, more optionality, etc. but when we're looking at the problem of population growth from it's most nascent stages, it'll be painful. From what I gather from history (which rhymes if not repeats), population decline or growth is always the first domino to fall as it relates to improving or worsening economic conditions but decline is generally far worse than growth. Consider Japanese rural real-estate values. So from a macro perspective, Canadian immigration policy is a very good thing, but it will take time for the system to adjust to new inputs. A lack of jobs will inspire more entrepreneurship, which will create more jobs, government policy will support more housing (ie. the fed's recent announcement to not charge GST on multi-unit residential), and skilled immigrant labour will organize to help build that housing. If you believe in the role and responsibility of government, a larger tax base likely means more $s for infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, etc.) the list goes on. I'm loooong hodl, diamond hands Canada :-). With respect to wage growth, the link you shared doesn't work, but I suspect there's a forex component that needs to be considered to make the comparison apples to apples. That said, Canada is definitely a more expensive place to live, but it's also setup to be very productive over the next few decades and is less socially divided than other North American economies 0_0. This is expensive work, but this is the type of system I'm excited to be a part of, despite the short-term pain. In SaaS terms, there will be a churn issue, but the new immigrant entrepreneurs I'm meeting indicate that at least some of the right customers are staying put and building for the future. The first step is underway!

@michaellitt Thanks for sharing your perspective!

@brendan_lloyd_weitz - thanks for popping by! Will answer sequentially: Multi-product is a complex beast. Startups have very limited resources and the landscape is very competitive and so the prevailing wisdom is to get very good at solving one big problem before you look to solve others. This allows you to commit all of your limited resources at driving awareness, talking to customers and building what they want. The ultimate test of your success here is something like the Sean Ellis test for PMF (ie. how disappointed would your user be if the product disappeared). If you succeed here, you're in a very rare and privileged position (ie. Series C). Do you continue building more value for the user? How fast is the competitive landscape evolving? How much of the TAM have you captured? How much more value can you provide? At 50,000 feet, that's how all products are built. Sometimes that shapes a platform vision (a big complex product that solves multiple problems for a certain role), or that might lead you down the path of multiple products for multiple users, sometimes called a "suite". Either way, don't go multi-product until you have something that works that a large volume of people continue to want. The idea is to fund future expansion into new / different products to expand your TAM using the proceeds of product #1 to layer your trajectory. Regarding Vidyard; our vision was / is to help B2B brands build great relationships with their buyers. I loved video and had experience helping businesses tell stories with video and so we started with the hosting product and helping our users understand how effective their videos were. We didn't consider another product until ~$15-20MM in ARR and the only reason we did was due to feedback from customers + the creative use of video by our team in the Sales process. This led to a small team working on what we now call Vidyard Messages (funded by hosting revenues). Vidyard messages also helps B2B brands build better relationships with their buyers, it allows AEs to be personable and to build relationships asynchronously, we also help them tell better, more aligned stories with AI. Vidyard Rooms followed the same trajectory. We built it for the same user, based on feedback that their buyers wanted a richer experience around the video message. This meant going beyond video and allowed us to create a beautiful digital space for buyers and sellers to interact during the lifespan of their relationship. I personally get really excited about how these products work together to support buyer engagement. Buyers engage inbound and outbound and when they connect to a seller, there's information asymmetry (ie. buyer needs and product info) that Rooms can solve. So in short, our collection of products follows a pretty clear vision around "helping buyers and sellers create productive relationships". This gives us plenty of latitude to build value based on feedback from alot of customers and users. More to come!

@katyinnes - Great question! 1 - Know when to hire. If a founder doesn't have any hiring experience, adding the first few team-mates can be scary. Similarly, if they have hiring experience, it can be all they know how to do. In the same token, the work of a startup founder is a *grind* and hiring resources can help you amplify the impact of the grind and / or share a particularly unfulfilling task (ie. prospect research and outreach). Trying to escape the *grindy bits* is the wrong reason to hire. The grind is where the magic happens. It's where you learn what you need to build and who you need to hire. So on this basis, the advice is to hire slow. Each subsequent hire requires more process and has less passion / creativity than the founder does for solving that particular problem. 2 - Avoid hiring managers or "leaders" in your first 10-15 team-mates. The only resource a zero based company has is time and once you have clarity on needing more people to do more stuff (ie. write code, find opportunities, etc.), you buy back your time (h/t Dan Martell) by hiring *relentless* doers. Doing this quickly is key, this is why the first few hires generally come from close sources (ie. friends, previous co-workers, etc.) This also puts the right pressure on the founder(s) to think long about the vision and build real conviction in what those 10-15 people need to do everyday to achieve the goal. 3 - If someone isn't working or isn't fully bought in, help them find something better. Team-mate stress / strain kills startups and adds considerable stress to founders. I've never met a founder who regretted moving on from someone who wasn't a good fit. Don't let it consume you and distract you from "building something people want".

@katyinnes Hi katyinnes, I'm Sixtus Michael. I'm really interested in opportunities at (Sales and customer success/Market research )Can you share more details about available roles and the application process? Thanks!"

@anne_toner_fung - Thanks Anne - great question. I don't know that Waterloo originated tech is any more "good" than tech built elsewhere in the world, but we certainly do build good tech. :-) I haven't heard as much about that movement in recent years, IIRC it was part of a larger event series designed to increase Waterloo's visibility as an eco-system on the global stage. The event's theme was "tech for good" and talks / discussions focused on this theme. It was a pre-pandemic mandate and "of the time". Much of the tech narrative in '17,'18,'19 was about "tech for bad". All of this said, I personally believe tech can and should be used for good. It's why at Vidyard, we have a stakeholder prioritization strategy that includes "community". We celebrate milestones with volunteer hours and trees planted and have someone amazing on staff (h/t Laura!) that runs a charitable matching programme, offers our product for reduced fee to NFPs and is constantly looking for ways to help our team engage with the world for the purpose of leaving it in a better place than we found it. The general premise of technology is creating increased leverage via efficiency gains - this is mostly aligned to capitalistic pursuits (it's expensive to build and maintain) but doesn't mean that it can't be applied in creative ways to under-resourced not-for-profits that also need increased leverage. The key here is using specific language in and out of product that increases it's accessibility, potentially even having people on staff that can help with support / translation. With respect to the Garage portfolio, we actively look at companies that sit within the ESG category (> 20% of $s invested to-date are in ESG companies). As large enterprise continues to mandate community / positive impact, the TAM grows & more opportunities to build value emerge in this space.

@tyler_campaigne - great Q TC! As you know, all those categories you mentioned are how solutions are delivered (ie. business models, technology models, etc.) vs. opportunities in themselves. IMO, the key to creating value, is to help provide leverage to a particular user with a repeatable problem that's expensive for them to solve. And so, the biggest opportunities exist in industries that founders (often young / fairly inexperienced) don't have experience with. For example, many founders build social products because it's the world they know. When we were in YC, every 2nd startup was a music streaming service. :P The real opportunities exist in marrying things like sharing economy, blockchain, and GAI (for example) to give leverage in under-served spaces. Ie. Build a solution for a problem, vs. a solution in search of a problem. To be clear, we didn't invest in many crypto companies, because the founders had a very hard time articulating the problem they were solving. At the time, this made me feel stupid, but in retrospect, it's because the problem wasn't big or understandable enough. So, if I were founding a company today, I'd look at big and un-sexy industries where things are done very inefficiently and use GAI / blockchain to improve them. Vertical SaaS has been proven to build big value if the vertical is tall enough and founders are proving that sometimes you can traverse verticals with small changes to the way the tech works or is described. Get dirty with people in industries you don't know much about. Maybe you're already in an underserved industry that has a clear problem that you know how to solve - that's how we define founder / market fit.

@kayovin1 - Hey - we always try to explain why we passed on a deal. Otherwise, the process is that all 3 partners need to be aligned on the founders and the opportunity in order to make investment that matches our thesis. We're also transparent with who our LPs are.

@kayovin1 - Agreed. We're founders first and so try to provide the experience we wished many of our potential investors followed.

@michaellitt it's much harder to do what you've said but it's worth it long term and helps everyone

@elutz - I love this question (zero-to-one-sales). I answered a big chunk of it in @olenabomko's question above. BUT, once I got a rhythm of booking meetings going (as above), I hired a BDR to help me book the meetings, while I took the ones that were already in the calendar. Eventually, that BDR that helped me book, became and AE and helped me sell. We then hired 2 more BDRs to book meetings for both of us. Around this time, I started writing content, posting on social and sending mass e-mails which became the beginning of our demand gen programme. We also attended our first event (Eloqua Experience 2012). We built an integration, covered Devon's car in Vidyard stickers, drove 1200 miles to the event, parked the car on the lawn, had it towed, tracked down the keynote speaker (Jeffrey Hayzlett - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayz...) - had him talk about us during the keynote (orange juice and southern comfort was his drink of choice) and did whatever we could to stand out. We couldn't afford both materials so we projected a video f our mascot (vbot) dancing on the walls and ceiling. This was largely the process (albeit at larger scale) all the way to 10M in ARR. Our first 20 customers were a combination of SMBs (my (now) wife's company, TribeHR included!) and Video production agencies. Both were in our "ICP".

Re: PLG - it wasn't a day one plan, it only became obvious once we built a product that was easy to use and created lots of value for a single user very quickly. That's the core recipe for PLG (IMO) and that's exactly what our Messages product was - a quick way for reps to send videos to customers and prospects. It was faster / easier than writing an email. PLG isn't really a decision to make, it's a byproduct of how your product delivers value to your users and IMO, it's always worth running a founder led sales motion because it can be very hard (and expensive) to build reliable and repeatable channels early.

@derek_jouppi1 - Thanks Derek - I do love a solid Vidyard :P. Where are you building Advite?

@michaellitt in Toronto. Happy to come down to KW - I just sent you a message on LinkedIn.

@chikezie_sixtus - absolutely. Beyond relevant skill, I'm always looking for a certain level of autonomy as well as an ability to "handle hard" & communicate efficiently. During an interview, it's important to share stories of how you overcame a difficult objective as well as a learn fast / fail fast mentality. In this process, you prove that you can communicate efficiently. This one is an often overlooked skill, but so important in today's context. We all have time as a limited resource, so using it effectively while communicating is critical. As cliche as it is to say, Startups are hard and we find ourselves in difficult macro conditions at the moment. It's wartime (as they say) and so speed, autonomy and fast feedback loops are incredibly important for all roles.

@michaellitt Thanks

@olenabomko - thx for the questions! 1. When we showed up at YC, PG made me CEO because "I talked the most". This meant that everything go-to-market (I didn't even know the GTM acronym then) was my responsibility. There was no search, no visibility and no brand. This isn’t unique, it’s the comprehensive challenge that every new business faces. Every founder conquers this challenge in their own way, but most strategies come down to brute force. Our version of this, was building a web crawler (aptly named Nostradamus) that sat in the corner of our single family home office near Los Gatos in Silicon Valley. Nostradamus had great internet adventures where it was tasked to find businesses (often using the DMOZ) that had websites with videos embedded on the homepage. When Nostradamus got a hit, the URL would be placed in a database where we then had it find and publish the businesses location, company size, video hosting technology, size of marketing team, etc. this was invaluable data and after a week of running, Nostradamus had gathered an immediately addressable market of ~80,000 businesses. We then stack ranked the list, and would send 100 URLs / day to our friend Hazel in the Philipines to find email addresses and phone numbers. In retrospect, we had laid the foundation to build a “ZoomInfo”, but the data wasn’t our passion, video technology powered storytelling was. And so, as founder / CEO, my job was to talk to potential customers and revert those learnings into product requirements. This was a special but difficult time in my life. I would wake up at 6AM, speak to Devon and the team about what they had built overnight, and proceed to run 100+ personalized outreaches to this list. Time consuming work doesn’t adequately describe the do or die mentality with which I approached this task. Slowly but surely, I received bites. Was my outreach perfect? Far from it, I barely understood the demands of a large business. But I repeatedly found inspiration from individuals with whom my messaging struck a chord. One of those individuals became our first customer. Her name was proudly written on the whiteboard beside my desk, her list of product deficiencies and timelines to fix them long and daunting. She cared and was unrelenting with her feedback. We built a great working relationship that eventually became romantic. We’ve been married for nearly 10 years and I repeatedly tell the team that this sort of customer success / service does not scale :P So in short, the best channel was direct. From there, we learned how to message, how to do demand gen, how to generate inbound, etc. but all of the key learnings came from the grind of "direct". 2. Major factors correlated to founder success: 1 - A relentlessly resourceful attitude to solving the problem. Startups are hard (and the situation I described above, was very hard) so it takes a special person to have the commitment to win. This is hard to identify when you first meet someone, but it normally looks like a chip on the shoulder or some reason to over-commit and do whatever it takes to deliver. There isn't a cheat-code or a shortcut here outside of special industry knowledge or a track record of doing what it takes. 2 - An ability to ruthlessly prioritize creating value. There's so much distraction in starting a company. Showing up can feel productive, there's tonnes of "startup events" that are mostly useless, there's legal work to do. None of that ties to building or exchanging value with your users. If you can do that really well and have the attitude described above, the low lows won't distract you and the high highs will fuel the next win, the next feature, the next call, etc. Don't be distracted.

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@olenabomko - no problemo - watch this space, we're working on something to make outreach more tenable!

@msmello - I'm going to try to read your mind here.... - You believe that some companies got "lucky" and if you were that founder, you would have been just as, if not more "lucky". - You believe that you can work harder / smarter than nearly anyone else - You're constantly afraid of letting yourself and others down. You probably care too much about what other people think. - You feel like if you fail, you'll experience everything bad short of dying. This propels you to write one more line of code, make one more customer call.... - It'll get easier if.... you hire that one person; you close that one customer; you launch that one product, you raise that next round of financing.... None of these things are true, and yet they're the things that in some way, likely made you successful. Second time founders sometimes forget these artefacts and it makes them less successful. Anxiety is a founder super-power if it motivates the right actions!

@michaellitt I get it, based on your comment: - It'll get easier if.... you hire that one person; you close that one customer; you launch that one product, you raise that next round of financing.... - You believe it will get easier at scale Is suppose to get harder or the problems are different but the difficulty of it is the same? Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me, also thanks to your wife.

@msmello - Great follow up. Short answer is that the problems / challenges change. You become an influencer vs. a doer. You spend way more time inside the business than outside of it. The biggest challenges comprise of getting a large volume of people to point in the same direction. You used to be a zodiak, now you're a cruise-ship. Change direction is hard, physics resist. Building at scale isn't for everyone, but you don't really become a "CEO" in the traditional sense until you have >~ Dunbar's number on the team (~180).

@michaellitt I get it, so is the same as with great power comes great responsibility. Thank you for your time.

@jadsanaknaki - what are the customers / users saying? Why aren't they converting? What are your conversion rates? (I'd like to comp them on industry benchmarks). There are things you can do to remove friction in the process, but if the product value isn't clear, you'll hit a CR asymptote at some point no matter how much "growth hacking" you do.

@michaellitt Thank you so much Michael. Very insightful :)

@carissajansen - I'll make sure to take a look. Congrats - big step with many more bigger steps to come!

@jacob_elliott3 - Hey Jacob! 👋 Foundations: - Mental and Physical Health are so important, it's a marathon, not a sprint - Technical competency / know how with the current state of the art. Technology is easier to build than ever if you grasp the current technologies available to move fast to MVP. Strong technical leadership early is so important. - Being relentless (I'm going to use this word alot lol) - You need to be relentless about going to market and winning. The best founder CEO's are frankly ruthless operators who prospect and talk to users with your MVP in tow 24/7. This relentless "nothing to lose" attitude needs to exist across the entire team and you should hire accordingly. It's you vs. the world, you have no resources but the willingness to work harder and faster than everyone else. This is likely the most important factor between success and failure because it shapes the culture and attitude of your organization early. - Clear goals. During YC, Paul Graham (the founder) really pushed me to pick our most meaningful metric, and grow it by 10% WoW. For us, this was initially videos uploaded to the system, but it quickly became new bookings. This focus persists to this day and help us relentlessly prioritize. The founder / CEOs job is to relentlessly hold the team accountable to this goal. YC really helped me do this. It pays to be obsessive here. - Values. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Devon and I wanted Vidyard to be a relentless work hard, play hard culture where we strove to deliver the best possible user and customer experience. Early on, we called this "winning with experience" and it defined interactions for a generation of Vidyardians. We've evolved this into more explicit values today. Being relentlessly resourceful is one of those values :-)

@michaellitt thanks!

@jacob_elliott3 - NP!

@laura_smith_owen - we do but it's not within our experience / wheelhouse and so we often look for validation from the syndicate or the network. Are you building in Canada?

@michaellitt Thank you! We are based outside of Kansas City but will launch in the US and Canada in December.

@jordan_abbott - this is a really great, canonical question of the time. About a year ago, an amazing ex-CEO, Tom Jenkins (OpenText corp) told me that cash was king, but cashflow was King Kong. I took this to mean that you want to have a strong balance sheet, but also a path to or clear perspective on profitability. The SaaS community seems to have been looking for the bottom ever since, and to be transparent, I don't think we've seen it yet. So far this Fall seems to be a tough market and the future is somewhat unclear thanks to an upcoming election, continued rate instability, geo-political uncertainty, etc. Cash on the balance sheet is great, but if the winter is long and cold, it might run out before investors become rational. Sometimes the market remains irrational longer than you can remain solvent. This is why cashflow is so important. Revenue that sustains operations through difficult times allows you to continue to build value for users. This is especially powerful if your competition isn't able to invest in R&D. Fortunes are built in bear markets and harvested in bull markets. If you can build now when your competitors can't, you're setting yourself up for success in a future growth market. So to summarize: 1 - Preserve Cash 2 - Get as close to profitable or cashflow breakeven as you can 3 - Build for the future. We're at an amazing technological inflection with GAI and the products and companies built today under cash and resource constraints will be much better / more efficient than those built in the previous decade of nearly free money. It's wartime.