SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Can Consumer App For Authenticated Videos Tied to Location Work in 2020?
27 Nov 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of the podcast episode?
Timing is everything, right? And it's all about the ecosystem being there. I mean, at this stage, we're like eight weeks into launch. We're still very much learning. So we're looking mostly at engagement rather than growth. We haven't run any traffic to it. This is actually the very first podcast, the first publicity that I've been doing about the product.
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Peter Sisson. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Iaza.
Prior to that, in April 2001, he had founded a company called Wine Shopper, raised 46 million bucks from Kleiner Perkins, and was acquired by Wine.com in 2000. He then went on to found Mixonic in 2004, Teleo in 2005, another company called Line 2 in 2012, before getting involved with a entrepreneur residence at Startout Growth Lab, and then eventually founding Iaza in 2018.
We're going to focus on that today. Peter, you ready to take us to the top? I am indeed. All right. So you were like the original, you were like the original Gary Vee. You just sold too early. Well, you know, it's always a decision that involves more than just yourself, unfortunately.
And, and when you're investors and you might not always be exactly aligned on timing, you've got to kind of deal with it. Understand that. All right. So talk to us about Yaza. What's the company doing? Is it B2C or B2B? It's a, it's B2C. I mean, In its most basic form, it puts authenticated videos onto maps.
And so, I mean, the best way to think about that is right now when you post, you know, memories or what have you onto Facebook or Instagram, they go into a feed and scroll away. What we do is we record the video live and place it on the map where it happened and, in a sense, authenticate it to make sure that it hasn't been faked or defaked or altered in any way.
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Chapter 2: How does Yaza differentiate itself from existing social media platforms?
But I mean, I can, I do that right now. I do that right now on my phone though. I open up my camera roll and I go to location based. Like I do, I do this all the time when I'm like, I know I took this thing at the Dallas airport, but I don't remember when it was. I don't want to scroll forever. So I opened the map view. I clicked Dallas and boom, I find it very quickly.
Again, I just don't see how this is. I'm trying to figure out what use case you're trying to go after. You're like, what mousetrap you think you're delivering that no one else has. Well, the first and foremost is the fact that we can guarantee the content is authentic. I mean, the only way you're going to, if you're trying to, I mean, deep fakes are a huge problem, right?
And it's getting harder and harder to tell what video is real and what is not, right? But Peter, that's only if like news outlets wanting, like I know all the things on my phone are real. I don't need. That's going to affect election. We've already seen it affect elections and we're going to see it get worse. It's only, so the security issue and the preventing fakes issue is a problem that
is going to be 10 times bigger in five years. And we're sort of, we're planning for that. We're saying there will need to be a place where the content, you have total control over the content. It's in the stewardship of a public benefit corporation, which is what we set up the company as so that we have an obligation to protect your privacy and not monetize it in certain ways.
And it's going to be a place where you know that everything you see is true. And so that's kind of the idea is that there needs to be a place where you know that. It's not going to replace these other services. But there needs to be a place where you know that something is true and in the stewardship of a company that you can trust.
Because I don't want all my video memories to be left in the hands of advertising platforms. And that's basically it. where we're at now. Either that or they just sit on your phone on YouTube. So just to be clear though, Peter, like accurate videos are critical at any kind of like consumer stream where I can see everyone else's stuff, like a Facebook news feed or Instagram feed.
I want to know what's real or what's faked. I get that use case. I also get the use case that reporters reporting on a real-time story, right, want to know if this user-generated content from someone there on the scene is a real thing or a fake thing. I get that use case. Neither of those use cases are cases you told me earlier on that you want them to be used for. Right.
You didn't tell me that you're going to basically give reporters access to this so they can find things to use in press reports. And you didn't tell me that I'm going to be able to see a feed of everyone else on Yaza and all their content. You said it's for me personally to look at.
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Chapter 3: What are the potential use cases for Yaza's authenticated video service?
So one's like a B2B play. What's that messenger? Think of it as like a message. It's a it's a communications app. Yes. Okay. So if it's a WhatsApp messenger play though, I know everything I'm sending is real. And if I'm texting my mom on WhatsApp, I also, she has no incentive to send me deep fakes. Like that's the truth question is not a question I ask in a medium like WhatsApp.
It's when I ask in a medium like a Facebook newsfeed. Sure. No, I understand that. But there has to be a place where you can exchange files. you know that they're accurate. Whether you're exchanging them with a reporter, whether you're exchanging them with, you're shopping for real estate in Italy and you don't have time to go there. Is that the use case really? It's a real estate use case.
I get how all this makes sense. If it's a consumer trying to, I'm trying to find a place in New York right now, looking at videos in New York, I know they're real videos. They're not shopped. They're not doctored with some fancy CAD program. They're real things from a realtor posted. Exactly. No, and that's what the market's kind of telling us.
I mean, I do believe that some of these other use cases will rise up as customers get introduced. But real estate is where it's just everyone we talk to is like, I can use this both on the buyer's side and on the seller's. So how do you plan to make money on this thing? We'll do subscriptions. I mean, for people who have a lot of video...
and they want the advanced camera, just think of it as like Dropbox model will charge, you know, five, seven dollars a month for extra memory. And then you'll get a more powerful camera for editing and stuff like that. And then in the long term, I think there's a lot of analytics and a dashboard that we'll build so that,
on an opt-in basis, a realtor or whoever's looking at, we'll be able to say, okay, this many people looked at the video at this house, this many people looked at that and sort of get a sense of what's resonating with people and sort of bring a lot of the online dynamics to the offline world and sort of measuring foot traffic and things like that.
You've raised some capital to get this thing going. How much have you raised? Uh, just a tiny bit right now. We've with $150,000 in pre-seed money that we closed last year. Okay, so $150,000. And when did you start writing the first line of code for this? For this particular iteration, a little over a year ago. What about for the whole business?
Well, I mean, we've been kicking around a lot of things ever since Pokemon Go came out. I was thinking, you know, I studied AI at Stanford and I really, really was interested in augmented reality. And With Pokemon Go, I thought it really had tipped in the mainstream and we were going to see more investment and funding in other applications of AR, but we built an alpha app for AR.
What year was that? That was... the fall of the same year as Pokemon go. So you start 2016 ish. Okay. So you, you created this company back in 2016 and you grace him seed money, 2018 and kind of been toying around with different, different ways to get into the space basically. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was basically built an app and then tested.
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