Let’s get wavy [company is called Wavy Media, social handle is @kallawavy, going for good vibes, vibes = waves…I digress]
Back again with another edition of The Founder Newsletter - this is Episode 5. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less. (If you missed them, check out the previous episodes on companies killing it with cookie dough, boots, customer service and peer to peer laundry).
(But what’s The Founder Podcast?)
The Founder Podcast is a weekly show where I sit down founders and have real-talk chats about the highs and lows of their entrepreneurial journeys. We cover things from where the spark for their idea/company came from and making prototypes to marketing tactics, tips from investors and their morning routine. Basically, it’s me going head to head with Guy Raz in the podcast octagon (just kidding Guy, you’re awesome and welcome for the backlink).
I’ve found the conversations really helpful for motivation, inspiration and generally fascinating to learn more about my favorite brands - I think you might too.
Alright, to get this out of the way - Here’s the podcast show link, here’s our website (mission control), here’s our Instagram (where I spend way too much time making quotes and audiogram content) and here are all the discount codes we’ve gotten from the companies we’ve had on the show.
(And who are you?)
I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself. Let’s get it.
This Week’s Episode (Ep 5) ⚙️
Dan Morozoff, Co-Founder and CTO of Vidrovr.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google
Summary 🔍
What’s the business?
Hold onto your hats folks, this one is a bit more technical than other companies we’ve had on the show thus far, but I think gives a compelling contrast to a completely different world of startups than the everyday consumer hears about.
Vidrovr is a company that makes video understanding systems. What that essentially means is that Dan (the co-founder) and his team have created a way for individuals and businesses to search videos for spoken words, images or video clips that appear in a video rather than the traditional search criteria we use today.
Now you might think, what’s the big whoop? I can go on YouTube today and if I want to find a clip of an elephant, I can just type in “elephant video” and in .0000002 seconds, I get millions of results.
The reality is that those results are populating based on the title of the video and the keywords that the creator has used. Which makes sense - that’s largely how search engines work today, based on indexing relevant metadata. But what if you wanted to get more specific and cut down your time clicking into different videos to try and find that perfect clip? Say you wanted to find a video where an elephant was spraying water out of its trunk onto another elephant. Vidrovr’s systems can actually search the behavior happening within all videos and pull the specific clips relevant to that behavior. You’d literally have a queue of just the clips where that exact behavior was happening.
Now that’s a silly example, but imagine if you wanted to pull all the clips with where someone mentioned Coca-Cola in a positive way or a vlogger referenced a pain point around a new product they’re using, etc. The Vidrovr system basically transforms the way you search and understand video.
Now today, Vidrovr is a B2B tool, meaning they sell access of their platform to companies who then have their marketing or content departments leverage the technology (hence the Coca-Cola example above). Vidrovr doesn’t currently exist on a publicly facing site that you or I could go use…yet. But think about the potential - it could change the game when it comes to finding and searching for video.
Who’s Dan?
First off, let’s just get this out of the way - Dan’s a genius. After growing up in SF and experiencing the boom and bust cycles of Silicon Valley, he went to UCLA to study physics and neuroscience and eventually ended up at Columbia University to pursue his PhD in modeling how the brain understands logic 🤯.
During his PhD, he eventually worked on a project called News Rover, which laid the foundation for what would become Vidrovr, three and a half years later. He currently serves as the CTO for Vidrovr.
We had a really interesting conversation where he was able to break down a lot of the technical aspects of what he’s working on and demonstrate real world applications. Despite his impressive education pedigree, he also shared some interesting insight around his philosophy for hiring. He doesn’t believe you need a fancy degree to be dynamic in today’s environment, especially in engineering and computer vision modeling - most of the Vidrovr employees today were self-taught. He also shared his experience with Techstars, a startup accelerator program, as well as securing significant government grants and funding to fund the early research and R&D.
Dan’s Startup Manifesto 🗣️
What’s a Startup Manifesto?
At the end of every episode, I ask my founder guests the same question:
If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?
Here’s what Dan had to say:
Startup Manifesto 📜
Avoid tunnel vision.
Find the best people.
Don’t believe everything you’re promised.
Follow the data.
Be curious and want to be a part of what you’re building.
What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔
After reflecting on my conversation with Dan, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:
Starting a B2C vs B2B company ⚖️
Like most people who are interested in startups and believe they will start their own one day, I often sit with my friends and talk about ideas. Some super practical without much vision, others solving a niche problem with a pretty limited potential market. A few times, we’ve come across an idea that actually has billion dollar market opportunity potential with a few other players (to our immediate knowledge) emerging in the space. Those are always the fun conversations where people adjust themselves in their chair a bit more and really start to poke holes in a meaningful way, thinking for 20 minutes that we found the big one.
Regardless of the size of the opportunity, it seems like we’re always focusing on B2C ideas, or ideas where our future company would be selling products and services (either physical or digital) directly the end user. Rarely do we come up with a B2B play, in which our end customers would actually be other businesses. For those not as familiar with the terminology, think of Apple as mainly a B2C play in that they sell Macbooks and iPhones directly to you and me. An example of a B2B-focused company (and they obviously do B2C as well) might be Zoom. Zoom’s main business model is to go to companies and sells them subscriptions so that all their employees can use the Zoom product for virtual meetings. You may go and use Zoom for free, but their bread and butter is with enterprise or business contracts. Classic B2B.
I think there’s a number of factors driving why the average idea brainstorm doesn’t result in more B2B ideas, despite the considerable opportunity. The biggest one in my mind is the lack of industry expertise required to derive a differentiated insight worth pursuing. Let me explain.
In order to start a company, you need a product or service that solves some sort of unmet need. Your company would also likely have one or more unique insights which led you to discover that unmet need. For example, having a cord attached to headphones always got caught on my arm or on doorknobs and would easily get disconnected from my phone or computer, etc. When no wire, bluetooth headphones were created, they were to solve this and many other pain points with wired headphones.
Now back to my friends…As consumers, we can easily point out what our biggest pain points are. To solve those pain points, it’s a difficult by doable exercise to come up with a version of a consumer product that might not exist today. In the same sense, to identify a business’s pain point, without having worked for years in that business or industry, is pretty hard to do. Even if you were able to successfully identify a business’s unmet pain point, you’d likely lack the requisite industry knowledge and know-how to build a compelling solution. It’s because of this that I think the most opportunity exists in B2B focused businesses, specifically when the product is digitized and scalable. There’s just a lot more competition and lower barrier to entry in most industries for B2C.
I started thinking about this when talking to Dan and listening to how Vidrovr started as a B2C consumer facing platform and then pivoted to a B2B model. I completed understood why they did it and think there’s still a huge opportunity for them to tackle. In their case, every marketing department that details with high volumes of video (which should be most consumer facing brands in the next 3-5 years) could benefit from a tool that dramatically decrease the lift and increases discoverability of applicable content.
Where do you fall on the B2C vs B2B spectrum when it comes to startup opportunities?
Wrapping it Up 📕
I hope you found this semi-interesting and inspiring/helpful in any way. If so and you want to help support The Founder, here’s a couple things that would be valuable to me and the show:
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Till next time ✌️
Kallaway