Wistia CEO, Chris Savage: Master the Art of Pivoting, How to Adapt and Grow Against the Odds | E61
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The most valuable things, they don't happen quickly. They take a long time.
Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a video for business which we're using as well.
Everything we do is about making it easy for you to get more value out of your video and enable you to use video better.
From starting in his co-founder's living room, Wistia has since grown into a multi-million dollar business with over 200 employees and millions of customers.
We thought we would do this for six months and then get rich. We thought that's how startups worked. It took a lot longer than I thought before things really started to connect and work. It's very hard to know if you're doing the right stuff, but if you do it long enough, you end up training your intuition.
Based on everything that you've gone through, what would be an advice to your younger self?
The first thing I would say is...
Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a video for business, which we're using as well. And from starting in his co-founder's living room, Wistia has since grown into a multi-million dollar business with over 200 employees and millions of customers. But Chris, it wasn't an overnight success. Take us back in time to your college days.
Definitely not an overnight success, no. Yeah, I started Wistia with my best friend from college, Brendan Schwartz, and we thought it would be an overnight success. We thought we would do this for six months and then get rich. We thought that's how startups worked. And that's not how they work. It took a lot longer than I thought. before things really started to connect and work. And it ended up being a lot more fun than I thought. And I also realized you can take things much farther than you think. And so, yes, that's how I would think about it now.
And I want to go there for a second because it started with some kind of movie that you got involved and it took off. But how did that morph into Wistia? It's just such a beautiful story.
Yeah, so basically I had worked on a feature-length documentary in college and was very fortunate that we got distribution and won a bunch of film festivals and stuff. And I watched the filmmaker who had put so much into this movie. I watched it basically at the last second not get full distribution. And this is before streaming online, really. So that was an industry that was gate-kept, which is not surprising. That's how the entertainment industry works. But I saw that so early and I was like, ah, this seems rough. This seems like a hard thing to work on something and actually have everyone tell you it's really great and then still not get distribution. and she had spent four years five years on it i had spent three and a half years on it four years on it myself so that was the backdrop and then i graduated from college in 2005 the movie came out at the same time and very soon after youtube launched and i saw youtube and i was like whoa this is different
And one of the things was different about it was I had tried to be a part of these online film communities before YouTube. And I was pretty tech savvy and had a bunch of short films and I could get the videos online and they never took off. It was very bizarre. There's a lot of community building and not that much sharing of video. And so seeing YouTube, it was so different. And after digging into it, it seemed like it was this confluence of different things. It was broadband internet and open source tools to do the encoding of the video. And everyone had Flash in their computer. And as we looked into this, Brian and I started realizing, like, wait a second. There shouldn't just be one company that could figure this out. Anyone could do this.
It's actually open source things. And so that got us riffing on ideas for what this company could be. Started very close to where I came from, which was going to be a filmmaking competition website. And then very quickly, we realized, okay, we don't have connections to brands and all these other things. And it evolved from there. But that's what got us to start.
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