Rethinking Video For More Human Connection

Rachel Cossar: And welcome to another episode and conversations in the future of work. Today’s episode, I have to say I’m really excited about because it focusing on a topic that is very near and dear to my heart all things video. And our guest, Chris Savage, I’ve been following for a while. You gotta check him out on LinkedIn. He’s got some phenomenally funny, videos that he he and his team post on the regular. So in this conversation and the future of work will be focusing on rethinking video for a more human connection. With that, Chris, pass it over to you. Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

Chris Savage: It’s nice to see you. And I’m the CEO of a company called Wistia. We’re a marketing platform. So our goal is to make it easier for marketers to make, edit, share, host, analyze videos. I also host a podcast called Talking Too loud, where I interview guests about really the entrepreneurial journey and marketing and brand and it’s, we’re about to hit a 100 episodes, which I’m really excited about. But I’m I’m very excited to be here with you today talking about rethinking video for more human connection. As I’ve seen the evidence myself of actually using video to scale relationships and build relationships and really just, like, build a brand that is extremely human. So thank you for having me. Awesome.

Rachel Cossar: So first question, I mean, videos gone through such an insane evolution over the past few years. And I’d love to hear from your perspective, like, what are what is or are the biggest hurdles that companies are, facing in terms of getting the most out of video? It’s a great question.

Chris Savage: So, we just released a report a couple months ago called data video report. Every year, we, basically look at the data across our platform. So hundreds of millions of videos and billions of views we interview marketers and talk to them about their challenges. And one of the really interesting things that we saw this year is it’s like, a huge percentage of people wanna make video. It’s like 85% of people wanna make more video. But a lot of folks actually don’t have more budget. And you know, tech in particular has had a very hard time with high interest rates, and many other things like flowing through the system. And so what this seems to be holding people back today is trying to figure out how to enable people on their teams to make video that actually good and represents the brand well. And that’s an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do, because a lot of folks are afraid to get on camera or they are afraid to edit and so I think that’s that today seems like what is stopping folks is like they all wanna do it, but how can you do it and where you make great stuff and it’s actually affordable. It needs to do. Right.

Rachel Cossar: And I would imagine, especially across larger teams, that doing that at scale, right, making sure that anyone who might be using video would be empowered in these ways. Is it big challenge too. Right? That’s right. And it’s changed.

Chris Savage: Like, the the market’s changed so much since 2020. Like, I I think about it as pre 2020 and post 2020. Yeah. And that the, you know, people wanna make videos forever. I started with you almost 18 years ago, and I’ve when I first started talking to companies, they’re like, this sounds great, but I can’t spend $20 in a video. And I watched that price come down as the top technology changed. And the thing that happened in 2020 is that people saw their computer as a camera. And so expectations have shifted where you might be afraid of getting a camera. You might be concerned about the brand, but there’s probably someone in your organization who’s saying, hey, shouldn’t we be able to do this ourselves? Shouldn’t you be able to do it? And I think that the culture shifted too where we see people all the time in their homes. Right? I don’t know if you’re in your home or if you’re in an office right now. I’m in my my home office. We see inside people’s homes all the time. That is not what it used to be. Yeah. I think about do you remember the guy who, was doing that remote interview on BBC? And it’s like, kid came in the back and it was like chaos. Yeah. That was a remarkable moment that wouldn’t be remarkable anymore. Right. Right. If your kids come on the background, that’s that’s happened to everybody. Yeah. And so I think it’s just I I like thinking about that because it is such an indication how much the culture shifted. And so it’s all about how do you find tools, process, how do you shift expectations to give people the freedom to experiment? And that’s really what you need is a lot of experimentation. If you if you can grant your team that ability, someone is gonna find a way to make it work. If you’re paying attention, then you can replicate what that person did ideally. Right. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And that actually feeds into the next question.

Rachel Cossar: Like how do you see video continuing to evolve as a channel of communication?

Chris Savage: You noted a few things in your previous answer, but I’m curious to just go a little deeper on I just think that what we’re seeing is like an insatiable hunger for more video. I think there’s a lot of things that are going to create even more video. AI, obvious one. AI is going to enable us to make it much easier for someone to make a video. That’s already happening. There are tools that we have. We still have lots of tools that are gonna help you with the editing and creation of video. There’s also literally, you know, AI avatars here today where you can make an avatar of yourself and not have to be a camera. Type what you want to say, and it will come out. And this is gonna do two things I think. I think we’re gonna see in a way more video, but I also think it is going to shift. The emphasis from just making video to making video that has a person that you trust in it. Yeah. And so the connection to the human to the individual is going to matter a lot more. We we also see this on social already where all the social platforms are not giving the same organic reach to brands as they give to individuals. They’ve also they’ve all tuned their algorithms, right, to stop them from being overrun with AI too. So you have these 2 factors together, which I think is causing this this really interesting shift of you wanna connect to the person in a company, a person that represents a company, a person that you think you could trust a specific topic. And so We’re gonna see more video, but it’s gonna be more important to be yourself and find ways of doing things that an AI can’t do to prove they’re your real human being. And that’s gonna add up to be a way of scaling trust in this world where there’s like effectively gonna be infinite content. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: So I this is like one of the things that I’ve been most looking forward to asking you is, like, with a, like, there in our view, right, at virtual Sapiens, we use specifically to help the human improve the way they show up to help them improve their presence and communication skills and their confidence. But there’s, you know, from the beginning, you know, we’ve had investors be like, well, why waste your time having the AI try to improve the human when you can just use the human to like deep fake Yeah. You know, certain behaviors on top of that human directly. So it’s interesting to hear, I 100% agree I think that the value of being able to prove to the person on the other end, the person who’s receiving that video that, like, hey, I took the time to create this video content for you, whether it was like a very specific personalized video or something that was going out to the masses, I think that that, value is is absolutely gonna just become, like, like, a skyrocket. Yeah. I think that and I agree with you. Like, this is I’ve heard the same thing.

Chris Savage: And there are use cases I’ve seen where having an AI avatar today could make sense. So, like, a training video that people are required to watch, which already affect they were prior they were not prioritizing it. Being entertaining or engaging. They’re part prioritizing having certain information in it. Yeah. That’s the one place that I’ve seen where today, like these AI avatars, but let’s be Most of these things are robotic anyway. Like, it’s not that different. But 100% agree that, like, the issue is people are going to use it. There’s gonna be a lot of people you that use it.

Rachel Cossar: So how what does that mean for all of us? Like, some some of the people I’m sure look and be like, yeah, I wanna use this.

Chris Savage: I don’t make videos anymore. But that what that inherently means is just like an LLM that’s writing text for you where it has, you know, that thing with, what was the word that was being used at Delph? Did you see this? That, like, now, there was, like, this thing going around that was, like, if if, if the the instances of the word delve, like, an indication. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: It’s like an indication of, like, a totally different line LOM because LOM’s, like, like, he said a lot. Yes. And so then you start reading stuff and you start to I think this is an AI and then you instantly test it less.

Chris Savage: Even if it’s true, like, it’s just you can tell we’re wired to connect with people. Right? So I think we have this knowledge. We know there’s gonna be way more video. It’s gonna be more robotic and there’s gonna be certain things that are really hard to fake without it being like a studio doing it. Right. What are those things? How do you find those things? How do you get good at those things? I think live events are going to be more important, in the future world. I think live events online. I think live events in person. I think if you had a connection with somebody where you’re really sure that they’re real and you could trust them, that actually might even give that person permission to use some AI content. Mhmm. Because if you look at Chris Savage, like, I trust Chris Savage He’s authentic. He’s answering these questions. He’s sharing his experience. I met him at some event, whatever. And then you see stuff coming from my social profiles, you at least know that there’s a real person behind it. And I think even that is gonna be a difference in the world that we’re going into. And so It’s kinda like I also think for a long time, it was like, you know, you talked to video producers and everyone was trying to focus on, like, what the sweetest new gear was. Right. It’s like, oh, I have this sweet new ring light. It is so cool. Like, the look it feels so different. And that’s like, I got this new lens. No one has this lens yet. And that was a way of, like, signalling to the viewer, subconsciously. This is special and different. Right. And now it’s like, that’s shifting away from the tech actually to the creative approach you take. Mhmm. And if you can do something that’s really creative or really interesting, and is inherently, like, very human. That is going to do better and better over time as we have, like, an abundance of things that aren’t creative as human. Right.

Rachel Cossar: I and I also find because there’s this like TikTokification, a video where, like, the more, you know, that the the more like, oh, the camera angles coming from down here because they’re like live in action. Like, and that I find is an interesting counterbalance too because those videos are so unfiltered at least in terms of what we were used to on Instagram But then at the same time, then there are these, like, hyper realistic AI avatars or models, right, who are just, like, super human looking people. It’s just yeah. It’s it’s like, you know, it’s funny.

Chris Savage: I had a conversation with my kids about this because My kids are 6 and 8. And we were talking about screens and and peep videos online because, you know, people talk about videos online in school. Every once in a while, we’re watching the fear. I really don’t let them go wild on social. They have no social accounts. The only plan they would see is over my shoulder. Basically, like, But I had to explain it. I was like, look, anything you can see on the screen might not be real. Yeah. And you have to look at it that way. You have to look at it and assume it might not be roll. Real. Doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. Doesn’t mean that there isn’t real stuff on there, but you have to look at it with that view. And to this is very similar to me when, like, Photoshop came along. And suddenly, like, the broad scale advertising in the US changed, where for a long time is, like, if you saw someone, on the cover of a magazine, you saw them at a billboard, you thought that was probably the real person. And I was like, oh, they’ve been photoshopped. And so everyone’s expectations had to shift. She’s like, hey. All the content we’re seeing, all this stuff is hyper perfect. Yeah. And the reason it’s hyper perfect is not just because people actually look like this. It’s because they’ve been photoshopped, and we had to, as a society, as a culture, get used to that. And I think that’s gonna be what has to happen. I think my concern is it I think it’s gonna take a while for people to get used to it. And so there’s gonna be folks who are very hyper aware and, like, questioning the things that they see. And there’s gonna be a lot of it’s gonna take a long time before everybody gets there. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: We need, like, a certified certified real human, like, badge on some of this content That’s crazy. Crazy worlds. So at Wistia in terms of your like the way you built the company switching gears a little bit and, you know, your your own policies, how do you guys balance in person and virtual or video communication. For from, like, an op how we operate? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Savage: So, the way we do it is We’re remote business now. We’ve got a 185 people or so. We default to making sure that things work remotely. But then we do a bunch of in person stuff. Yeah. So, like, our normal meetings and everything are remote. Our we do a lot more asynchronously than we used to. There’s a lot of documents and asking for questions in advance of meetings and, you know, trying not to have meetings unless you have, like, the agenda and the information and everything, like, readily available. But then what we do is we do a lot of our big planning in person We work on trimesters. So every, there’s trimesters in the year. So we plan for 4 months of time. When we do that, we bring basically the directors on up into the office in Cambridge, which is about like 25, 30 people. And we basically say, how did the last thing go? What did we learn? What’s working? What’s not working? We set up what do we think based on this we should do going forward? And it’s really purposely across everything that we’re building in product and also how our go to market teams are thinking about things. So everyone can kind of know generally where we’re going next. And then it’s this process, this loop, basically, where every time we do it, we check-in and say, what can we do better? What worked and what didn’t? And it’s it’s like a self improving system is the idea. And that works it out really well. And it’s just also long days of meetings and and are much easier than long days of meetings. People it’s just easier to build the trust that you need to figure that stuff out. And then we bring the whole company together once a year for an off-site that is not designed to be work related at all. So it’s just like pure fun and connection. Yeah. That’s the part that I found has been the hardest of running a remote business is how do you actually get the connection to connection to your own team you’re on can can get pretty strong remotely, but connections to other teams is just harder to get it really strong, well remote. And that matters. You know, when you get to the, the long tail of, like, are you giving feedback to the person. So you don’t work with that much. We work with them a little. If you feel a strong connection to them, you’ll be like, hey. This went really well, but I have a concern about this. If you don’t, you don’t do And that I think that difference on the margins, like, really adds up. Yep. Yeah. So that’s kinda how we do it. So that’s I mean, it makes a ton of sense.

Rachel Cossar: I I’m curious if you feel in any way that this remote first and then in person with great intentionality. Do you find that that has almost helped foster these, like, relation, like, fortify these relationships between employees. And what I mean by that is I have found that a lot of people have this, like, nostalgic kind of remembering of, like, the in person office days with, like, no serendipity by the water cooler and whatever. And I was kinda like, I don’t know if that, like, it feels like that’s a romantic, like, romanticization of the past whereas I feel like if you can move forward now and really be intentional about, okay, this this doesn’t have to be a meeting. It’s gonna be an asynchronous document. We’re gonna get together once a quarter with all the directors and then once a year with the entire company and it is for the sole purpose of hanging out and having fun. Like, to me, it seems like that could be so much more of a powerful intentional way to build culture than just having everyone in the office.

Chris Savage: I think that the serendipity thing can happen online. Yeah. I think that it does require much more intentionality. And I think that’s why a lot of people stopped doing remote because they were like, I can’t do this. Like, this requires so much more prep. And planning. And but the other side of it is, like, it’s totally changed the pool of talent, like, in a way that, like, I never could have imagined. And so in a really positive way is what I’m saying. So, yeah, I think it I I think also if the only way you’re getting good ideas of breakthrough ideas was through serendipity, you have a problem. Right. Right?

Rachel Cossar: And that that that is the other part of it is, like, you can create it online.

Chris Savage: Like, we use a virtual office that’s called Rome, Ah, yeah. The room’s great. And, it’s been huge for us because it just means that, like, you could see if someone is in their little virtual office, you could knock on the door. You can have a quick conversation and we tracked actually before we we we did a test the whole company before we rolled it out. And we, you know, we said we’re gonna do this for 1 month. We’re gonna see how it goes. And we looked at the total time spent in meetings the month before and then the total time after. We looked at the number of meetings and the length of meetings. And what happened was when we switched to Ram, it cut our average meeting time from, like, 35 minutes to 12. It increased the number of meetings Yeah. By, like, 50%. But, actually, if you do that math, what you’d see is it’s like the less. We actually spend less time in meetings than we used to. Yep. And there’s more just fast connections where you see someone you knock on it or you have a quick conversation. Yeah. And I just think that we’re actually We think about how long in person remote was a sorry. In person working was the default. We have not it has not been that long that, like, remote working has been the default. So what do cultures look like? When you’re remote, how do you connect with each other? How do you plan if you think about it as, like, the only time we’ve really been able to make this work is since, like, things were normal in, like, 2022. We’ve got, like, 2 years And I think that that’s why there’s still a lot of friction, but, for us at least it’s I think it’s It’s allowed us to move much faster, hire better folks, and just have, you know, more balance in how we work Yeah. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: And I’m sure the, like, yeah, like you said, like, the workforce is able to be a little more distributed, but still unified. I do think it takes a lot more effort to do it well. Yeah. But I also think that in person, in person workplaces take a lot of effort too. And They do. So We it’s funny.

Chris Savage: We used to do a a company trip even when we were in person. Would be like a sweet many different things about yours right before Kevin, we’re doing ski trips. We take the company. Anyone who wants to go for ski trip. Same thing as our upside now. I think about that a lot. Like, I saw these people every day, but what would end up happening is, like, people get in their routine, they put their headphones on, and they would set up their desk, and they would you know, I really interrupt this person when they’re like, no. Like, their headphones are on. There were days that I would talk to a pretty small number of people in person. Even though there was tons of people around. But, like, when we did the retreat, we did the ski trip, it was all designed around that. And so it’s kind of funny to think about because I think, like, we found that that was beneficial when we’re in person. And that’s, like, a something I think about a lot, or even just defending time outside of the workday. Like, hey. We’re gonna have something tonight at 6 o’clock. Well, how will this work with people who have kids? How will this work with people to pick up their pets? And, like, it would just would if that stuff just didn’t happen as much or it was it was inherently biased against some people. And now if we say, hey, this is only happening, five or six times a year and you know way in advance what it is. You can actually plan for it so more people can go to it. Yep. Totally. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, like you said, it’s in its infancy. I think it’s still one of the most fascinating conversations to speak with other leaders about. So really interesting to hear what you think. So finally I’d love to hear again just focusing on your own entrepreneurial journey which has it’s just so interesting to me that this has been your space for so long what has been with some of your biggest learnings as a founder in in this rapid world of work? Yeah. Wow.

Chris Savage: I mean, this we could talk about for a long, I mean, hours. But I’ll I’ll try to go with I’ll try to go with the thing that’s, like, recently been, I think, the biggest learning. In 2022, we really invested in growing. The 2021, 2022, we invested in growing our product and engineering teams in like, we doubled them from, like, fifty people approximately to about a hundred people and expect it to go a lot faster because the breadth of the problems we were solving really fantastic. Like, we see it for, basically, all of our history was hosting and analytics. And then in 2021, we said, hey, we’re gonna do recording. We’re actually gonna do editing. We’re actually gonna do live, and we’re gonna do this all at once. So we’re gonna do this all in one platform. Sounds great. Exciting. That means we have to build tons of stuff We need way more people to do that. So we double the team. And I expected that if we doubled the team, we would go faster. I didn’t I didn’t know if we would go twice as fast, but I, you know, I I thought we would go faster. I thought we would go 50% faster. Something like that. And we got these great people. We built the sub teams for everyone to work on the things they’re working on. It seemed like it would work, and then we didn’t go much faster. In fact, we started going slower even with, like, double people. Wow. And it was really hard because we had these big bold expectations of what we wanted. And we kind of, for the first time, especially, you know, we’re not a bootstrap business. We raised angel money. And then we bought out our Angels. But, like, we’re very close to being bootstrap business. Yeah. We’ve always felt like under resource. And for the first time, I was like, hey. I don’t think we’re under resource. Like, I I think we’ve actually have tons of incredible people. We kind of lost all the other excuses around why we’re going slow. And so That year in 2022, we shipped 12 product things to customers. That we told them about. More things that were behind the scenes, but, like, 12 product updates that were like, hey. These are our big product updates. And in late 22, we had a breakthrough that was we had accidentally created a system that was really focusing on roadmaps and focusing on making sure our roadmaps were correct. So each team had a road map of all the things they’re gonna do. And we would meet and we discuss the roadmaps and we would try to make sure that number 1 was the most important thing. Number 2 is the most important thing. Number 3 is the most important thing. And this seemed like a good idea because we built tons of successful things over the years and we thought our advice was good and we thought this was a good plan and it was kind of how we’d done it. And in, like, October of 22, we things are going so slow. We’re like, what if the problem’s us? Like, what if we’ve created a problem that is slowing us down? And then we hit on this road map. They’re like, what if this is a problem? What if the problem is, like, we’re putting too much attention on if this is the right order and these are the right things, which what that meant is that anyone who’s doing those road map number one had to be usually something that was very broad that could affect every customer. Mhmm. It had to be something that was extremely well researched. It had to be something that had, tons of usage data and all this stuff. So it was it was often a broad thing that was not very risky and that could be defended because they had to defend it. We said we’re done approving roadmaps. We’re done, making sure that the order is correct. We’re actually gonna give you complete freedom right over your road map. But the one thing we ask is that we want you to ship something every 2 weeks to customers. We don’t really care what it is. We care what your customer problem is. We’re gonna give you feedback, but you own it. You control it. And it’s we just want you to ship faster and the implicit thing we were saying is we don’t actually know what’s gonna work. So let’s ship and learn. And what ended up happening is in 22, we had 12 product updates that we tell customers about. In 2023, we had 72. Wow. And on this year, we’re on track to have more than a 100 with the same team. Basically. Right. Almost exactly. Yeah. And it was like an incredible lesson for me on how your culture and the systems that you can be. They can be well intentioned and for like a resource starved work, it was probably the right thing. But as we shifted, it was we had created the problem that was holding us back. And once we change the culture and we focused it more on shipping fast and we focused it more on ownership to those people. Right? The speed came and it and I’ve realized it really is all about speed. And if you if you can move quickly, what that allows you to do is the number thing that was, like, number 5 on the list that the PM might have had an amazing instinct on. Like, they’ve talked to 3 customers. They think this thing will be the solve They never could have put it at number 1 before because it was not that defensible, but they’re in their heart. They thought it was right. Now because I have to ship something over 2 weeks, they that thing is easy to do. They ship it and it works, and they have the data to show it. And so it flips everything on its head. And so I feel like that’s It’s changed my entire perspective honestly on, like, what it takes to, like, build a product company and how cool we can go and how much is how much culture matters. Right. I mean, that’s fascinating.

Rachel Cossar: I think I I, there’s some more literature now coming out to support that like self organization perspective, I think, where the organization is slightly more horizontal in terms of the empowerment that you give to each individual person that’s part of a team. So it’s less like pyramid structured. I don’t know if if if that’s kind of what you’re talking about. Yeah. I mean, it was more we still have, like, a higher gate that’s normal.

Chris Savage: Yeah. It was more like the cultural aspect of saying speed. We like we actually look if we have a cultural document that basically says, We used to praise like an organized well well, we got a bulletproof roadmap. Now we don’t praise that anymore. We praise speed now over internal comms. We praise, you know, learning fast over having the right plan. We we praise a roadmap that changes over one that stays the same. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: We’re really explicit on those cultural differences and that ended up having an enormous impact.

Chris Savage: And, actually, it it had an impact in, like, days. That was what was so crazy about it. Wow. It went to all the PMs. We’re like, hey. This is what we want. And I remember them saying, like, we I was, like, slightly nervous because they were not shipping that quickly. And I was like, do they not wanna ship quickly? And they were like, no. We wanna ship quick. Of course, that’s what we wanna Yeah. Like, that’s, of course, I wanna ship fast. Right. Right. Oh, wow.

Rachel Cossar: We really have created this issue, haven’t we? So Right. Right. Right. Like, yeah.

Chris Savage: Like, holding people back with, like, delays a little bit. Wow. Fascinating.

Rachel Cossar: This has been such a such a pleasure, Chris. Thank you so much for showing up and sharing so many of your insights. It’s fascinating to to hear your perspective. Is there anything else you wanted to share with our audience? How can people get in touch with you if they wanted to to follow your work? Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. This is fun.

Chris Savage: And you can find me, Chris Savage on LinkedIn, and I’m also on Twitter. And my podcast is talking too loud and, obviously, atwstia.com. So check us out. Awesome. Great. Thanks everyone for tuning in.