The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 333: Chris Savage - How To Bet On Yourself & Scale Through Creativity (The Wistia Way)

Episode Date: October 13, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk #333: Chris Savage - How To Bet On Yourself & Scale Through Creativity Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com Chris Savage is the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a web-based video hosting solution built for businesses. He founded the company in 2006 with the goal of helping businesses effectively market their products or services in a smarter way through video. Under Savage's leadership and vision, Wistia has experienced 100 percent growth over the past three years, expanding the company's client portfolio to more than 110,000 users in more than 50 countries, including companies such as HubSpot, MailChimp and Starbucks. Text LEARNERS to 44222 Notes: Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence: Voracious learners - "they celebrate learning more" Crave feedback - a strong desire to improve - "They are wired to want that" Patrick Campbell - "He's trying hard to learn as fast as possible" Chris's process for continual improvement: Placing people in his life to push him "I go to them to push my thinking" Block time to think - "Being busy is not a sign of success" Spend time with customers and employees Enjoying the process: "It was stimulating and exciting.  It took us a year to get our first paying customer." The business was funded by savings.  They kept their expenses very low Key to a successful partnership: Ensure values are aligned - "These are intrinsic" Know that everything takes longer than you think Have a decision making framework - Demystify the process to make big decisions The product strategies/options: Operational efficiency - The cheapest (No, this is not optimal) Product leadership - Be different Customer intimacy - This will solve customer problems Their values: Long term company thinking Creativity Presentation - An elevated experience. Aesthetics matter. Simplicity Hiring - "Hiring is everything."  Qualities he looks for: "How are people intrinsically motivated?" "Are they excited about the craft, the challenge?" Give them a real-life problem to solve -- And see how they handle it/resolve it Inside their process to hire a VP of People: Clearly define what success is in the role Do a project after the first round of interviews - "Do the job, get critiqued." Build out strategy - Not a perfect plan, but have a process Meet with management team, present the plan. Building your network: "Take the weight of your friends.  You're the average of them." Be proactive who you want to be --> Look for people who challenge you. Reflect on that... Tactically: Make connections with people who you admire.  People like honest, sincere compliments.  Tell them WHY they inspire you Financials: Raised angle round of $650K.  Then $800K.  All individual angels.  No venture.  They have $10m in revenue. Crisis: "We were losing this money, we weren't having fun anymore... People tried to buy us." They raised debt to do a buy back... "I felt amazing." Wistia: Creative risk taking Have to scare self - made a feature length documentary Host of the Brandwagon show "Take risks that scare you" Growth and profitability aren't mutually exclusive - "Focus on building products and experiences that people love... Growth follows." Use the "Get To Know You Document" Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea  

One of the things I'm always looking for is intrinsic. How are people intrinsically motivated? Because we can give you every extrinsic motivation. We can pay you really well and do bonuses and all that stuff. But in my experience, that's always you end up with short-term thinking when that happens. And so you have to find someone who, for every role, it's like they're excited about the craft, or they're excited about the opportunity, or they're incredibly motivated by the challenge itself. And when we can do that, that is.

when magic happens. On October 24th and 25th we are hosting our once a year personal excellence workshop. This workshop is for you if you're interested in making connections with other like-minded leaders that will help you grow. If you want to gain an outside perspective that you can take back to your team to re-energize yourself as well as your business and if you want to leave with clear outcomes for how to become a more effective leader. To grab one of the last few tickets, go to ryanhawk.me. Again, Ryanhawk.com for our once a year personal excellence workshop.

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. receive mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, watching, thinking about, and writing, have the opportunity to be part of my book launch team. Texts, learners to 44222. Now on to tonight's featured leader of Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, which is a web-based video hosting solution built for businesses. Under Chris's leadership and vision, Wistia has

experienced massive growth over the past few years. They now are in 50 countries. They help over 500,000 businesses make $32 million per year in revenue and have 87 employees. Few of the topics that we discussed, how to clearly define your values and why it's imperative, you do it. Then a specific strategy to build your network effectively to surround yourself with the right people to help lift you up. And then we deconstructed the process Chris took to successfully hire his VP of people and how you could implement the exact same process in your business.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's so good with Chris Savage. Chris Savage, man. So good to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Excite to be here. I love studying people who have found a way to sustain excellence and those who have surrounded themselves with others who've done the same.

And you're a prime example come highly recommended by a guy who's become a friend of mine, Jay Akunzo, among others to say you've got to talk to Chris Savage. So excited you're here, but I'm curious from your perspective, when you analyze those who have sustained excellence, what have you found that they have in common? The people that I, they come to mind when you say that are all people who from the very beginning of their careers and a lot of these people I've known since the beginning of their careers, like I met them in the early days of building Wistia, where I've met them in the early days of building their own companies, has been that they are. are voracious learners. Like they're constantly trying to learn. And while they will usually figure out how to celebrate the wins, they usually celebrate

the learning more. Like it's like the person who you compliment them on, wow, that was awesome. And they're like, great, but what's the feedback? Like, well, you know, they dig and dig and dig until you can find the things. There's always something you can do to improve. And I think you have to be, you have to wire yourself to want that feedback and to be excited about it. And it's almost like you figure it's that that realization that like everything in life is a skill to be learned. And the hard part is always the beginning. And it's like that trough

of sorrow, you know, where you're not getting, you know what great art looks like, but you can't make it. Like I think there's, Seth Godin calls it the dip, I think. And that's like a really common thing. Whatever you're doing something new, but the more you can have confidence in yourself that you can get through those dips, then I think you can really go tackle big things. And then if you're learning, it tends to be fun. Are there a few people that immediately come to mind as those voracious learners craving feedback that you're like, oh, yes, those are the leaders who I've seen sustain excellence. Yeah. I mean, there's a friend of mine who runs this company Profitwell, Patrick Campbell. I met him before they had really started. And,

And I remember we did maybe like three years after he had started. We had a founders retreat, a bunch of different founders getting together. And everyone's like having dinner and sharing stories. And we're trying to, you know, be honest about the challenges and stuff. And so we're going through all of this. And then we're having drinks and we're hanging out. And then at one point, Patrick is like gone back over to his computer and he's doing work again. And I'm like, what are you doing?

And he's like, oh, someone gave me this idea. I felt like I had to like dig into my numbers. And it was like 11 p.m. at night. And this guy was just like trying harder and harder, doing whatever he could to learn as fast as possible. And it stuck out to me because like they were quite small at that moment. You know, they were just really getting traction as a consulting business. And now they have product, multiple software products.

They have really successful like content in studio they've built. And it's just like, yeah, he's the same guy now that he's. was then just like searching, searching for that learning. How have you implemented what you've learned from someone like Patrick and others into your game? Because as the co-founder and CEO of Wistia of a company, everyone's looking to you, everyone that works for you, regardless of, I know you're a humble guy from what I said, but they're still, you know the eyes are on you. So they're thinking, what's Chris's process for continuous improvement? and based on what yours is, it's absolutely going to impact them. So what is your process for continuous improvement?

Yeah, I think, you know, I've learned over the years there are certain people who push me on different things. My wife pushes me on certain things and she's an amazing advisor. There's people at Wistia who push me on different things on how, you know, forcing me to be more creative or forcing me to think more about like business impact faster or forcing me to think farther outside of the, you know, the opportunities and challenges we have day to day. And so I try to go to those people to push my thinking. I try to have time to think. You know, I realized at some point that being busy is not a sign of success. But our culture kind of sees

it as that. You know, like our culture reinforces this idea that busy means important. And it clicked at one point because I realized I had no time to think about the big challenges that we were facing and our big opportunities and things are way farther outside of what we see day to day. And so to do that, I had to spend time with prospective customers. I had to spend time with partners. I had to spend time with other entrepreneurs. I had to spend time of myself. I had to read more stuff. I had to work out more. Like, I had to do all these things. And to do that, I needed more time. And it was funny. It was like this realization that scaling a business is a creative endeavor. The problems get bigger and harder and the opportunities do too,

but there's a better reward. You know, it's a larger reward the bigger the company is. And it reminded me at some point of like back to the beginning. You know, when you're a startup, all you have is time. You're just trying to figure out with no one cares. They don't know what you're doing. They don't know your products. Are you just trying to figure out how to get them to care. You're trying to figure out what the right product should be. And so we did a lot of crazy creative stuff in the early days. And then we started get traction and it's easy for that stuff to go away. And for me, to feel confident to think through that stuff, like, I know I need time and I know I need people who are, you know, all the different facets on the team, senior

manager team, everybody in the company, outside advisors, I need that mix to help me make good decisions. That time was 2006. You started the company with your co-founder, Brendan. I believe I read that you went to college together at Brown, you being a film student, him, a computer engineering major. Is that correct? That's all right. Yeah. You've done your research. Interesting combo, but it seems to make sense. Can you take us back to 2006? You briefly hinted at it of trying crazy, creative stuff at that time.

But I'm always curious because we talk with leaders now who have kind of passed certain thresholds of success. And now you view and your company is very successful. There's a lot of things we'll get into as far as the financials. But I like to highlight maybe an inflection point or two, maybe the very beginning and then the first moment or two that you or Brendan remember saying, wait a second, we're on to something here. This is going well. Maybe it's a, you landed a big client or two, or maybe something else happened with great hires. I'm curious, can you think of a moment or two at the beginning that really helped, I guess,

gets you through some of the dip? So we had this idea, which was naive, that if you make something and you put it on the internet, people will find it. And we had, that was our initial plans. We would make stuff. We'd get it every word perfect on the website. You know, we'd get it up there. It would go viral. People would discover it.

And that's just kind of how it felt at that moment in time. And we had a lot of hard lessons where we made things. and nobody saw them. We got distracted by side projects searching for something that could be viral. We had a side project the first year that was called Fame Thrower. And we had bought the domain.

That was a great domain. And do you remember a million dollar homepage? I don't. Okay. So this guy made this thing, million dollar homepage.com. The million pixels on it. And you could buy a pixel for a dollar

and he would link that pixel to whatever you want. So the PRness of this took off and the guy made a million bucks. Okay, he sold every pixel. And so we saw it, we're like, that's so crazy. We should try to do something like that. We should try to get something that goes viral that's similar to that. So fame thrower was going to be that thing. And we basically made this website where there's a photo and then all these other photos that got smaller.

And whoever spent the most on their photo, their photo was the biggest. And they could link to whatever they want. So we thought the ridiculousness of this would take off and people would spend more money. And to give you an idea of just how vi-like how we thought the internet worked, we did this thing and we made $1,500 the first week. And we thought it was a complete failure. And looking back, I'm like, wow, that was insane that that happened. It's so hard to get anyone to pay attention to anything or buy anything. And so we just shut it.

We just did it for like three weeks and we stopped doing it. And it was that idea that like success comes really quickly. and we had this fear. When we started, we thought we were only going to survive for six months. We honestly thought that. We thought within six months

we'd build something and sell it. And I remember the moment that we had no success at all. It was definitely, everything we were doing was like an abject failure, probably eight months in, but we actually enjoyed the process

of building this. We enjoyed every day waking up being like, what should we do today? What can we do today? It's the most impactful thing. Throughout everything, every thought we've had before, and that was like incredibly,

stimulating and really exciting. And then it took us a year before the moment when I was like, I knew we had something, which was we'd done all this stuff in video. We tried all these different video things. And we got our first paying customer. And what they wanted was like an aspect of what we had built. We had built this portfolio website for artists. They had a private area on it for in progress work that we'd not even launched. But we talked to this medical device company that wanted a way to share videos instead of shipping DVDs around the world. We can do that for you. They're like, that's amazing.

That's a huge problem. They said, can we hire you to consult for this? We said, no. We heard it. We'll build the product. You pay us monthly. They're like, great. And they signed up.

They spent $400 a month. And we're like, oh, my God. This seems like something. And we looked around and realized no one was solving this problem. It was this tiny, tiny little niche. But we felt like we could, we could solve it. And then it was like basically every month after that we got a customer for the first year. And that was, again, that felt slow back then. And in hindsight,

feels really fast that like a year after being onto that, we were self-sustaining, covering all of our costs, we're starting to save money. We had giant companies trusting us. And it was clear that we were on to something, something much bigger. How was a business funded at the time? So we were both very fortunate that we graduated college without debt. And we basically saved money from our first jobs. So I had done freelance film work. So it was like editing and producing and making commercials and stuff. And Brandon was working a software company. And we talked about starting a company. So we just scrolled away a tiny amount of money. And then we moved into a

10 person house so that our rent was crazy cheap. So our total expenses when we started back then for both of us and food and servers, everything, was $1,600 a month. Wow. And so that $400 customer got us a quarter of the way there, which was really exciting. Yeah. Let's talk about partnerships because I think there's a lot of listeners who have maybe not starting a company with somebody, but they do have to have partnerships, whether it's in their personal life or professional life at work.

what have you found to be the keys? Like if there are two partners coming in and maybe they're just getting started or they're trying to figure some things out and they're asking for your advice, what are the keys to a successful partnership? I think the key to a successful partnership is having values that are aligned. And the question is whether or not your values are defined yet or not. So in my marriage, you know, my wife and I've been together for a long time. We met in college. And I think we kind of figured out what a lot of our values were in our, you know, early 20s. And so we were figuring this out together.

We had a lot of moments where, you know, you have a fight and you talk through something hard. And then you're like, actually, we are on the same page of this or we're not. We end up being very values aligned. And I think the same exact thing is true with my co-founder, Brendan, that we went in with a lot of the same values, and we continue to have the same values. And so when you tackle new problems, if you have the same values, it's easy to work through them. So I think if you're starting something new, the question is like, how do you have the hard conversations that you need to have upfront? Everything takes longer than people think. You know, my story is a perfect example of that.

I've been doing this for 13 years. I love it. I could, you know, the plan is to keep going. One of our values is a long-term company thinking, and I think I'll be at this for a very long time. but I never could have imagined how long, how much time I spent it with my co-founder, or we have many employees on the team who've been here a very long time. And they have the same values. And it's just that it's very hard to figure that out if your values aren't crystallized. So I think you have to talk through the most challenging topics, the hardest things you think you could face, that you have to talk through current issues and like what you like

what you like about what another example of a company is doing and what you don't like. and you have to listen to yourself. And you might find someone who's super talented and seems like they're the yin to your yang, you know, but if you don't have similar values, you then at times of stress, that's, that's when things can break down. I was reading your core values of the company, long-term company thinking, creativity, presentation and simplicity. I think I so agree with the importance of having clearly defamation.

defined values. What's your process to document, create? Because there's four listed. I'm guessing you have 50 in your head. So you had to get rid of 46 other values that are probably important, but maybe they're not important enough to, because at some point you have to make a choice. What is that process for the person who's listening who said, you know what, Chris, I actually, I haven't really defined those values. I know what I believe. I know what I think, but I haven't really taken the time to define it.

So what's your process? And then why those for? Why are those it? Yeah. Great question. So I think of values in two ways. I think of kind of intrinsic values that people have. And a lot of those are going to be things that you,

a lot of companies would want. I feel like they're the values that look similar. Integrity, curiosity, passion. you know, like that kind of inclusivity, like things that people are pre-wired for where you ideally would want to operate in that way. And like those are the values I think you can look at in the world and be like, do we share the same values or not? And you can have conversations and try to figure out.

And then for us, the way we think about it is our core values are actually a decision-making framework. So it's like if you come to Wistia, the things that we want you to, we want you to make decisions in a Wistia way. And to do that, use all these four values. And so the hard part is how do you balance creativity, simplicity, presentation, long-term company thinking. But it is funny because when you do balance them, you do end up making things in a wistia way, I think. And you end up enacting out the strategy.

So we have a very clear strategy of what we're trying to do. And our culture is how we enact it. And so when culture is matched with strategy, when the values of your decision making are match with what you're you're trying to accomplish, magic happens. Like people say culture and strategy for lunch, that's because if your values are like, let's say, what's a good value that wouldn't be helpful for us today? One of our old values, because we've changed our values,

was pioneering. Trying to do things for the first time, which was really helpful for a long time, until people were pioneering on every single aspect of how we build a company. And there's a lot of things that we don't need to pioneer on. There's a lot of things that are the same. And so we're wasting energy and realize that that was actually not, that it's a well it's an important thing and I do generally love pioneering it was not the most important thing it was not the thing at the top of the list and so yeah it's about for us like it's demystifying that decision-making framework such that the culture can match the strategy and I think it's important to look at that and every time you change your strategy actually and we changed our strategy a few years ago and we realized we had six values and three of them were good but they were actually not the most important ones

So why those now? Long-term company thing, creativity, presentation, simplicity. Especially presentation is kind of a unique word to use when it's, you know, smacked right in the middle of your values. I remember clicking on that one first as I was doing my research thinking, what do they mean? And it feels to me like a, like a, you value design, you value look, that you value small, tiny details. and coming from a guy who cares about the tiniest of tiny details, I love that one. Like, I care about font and certainly typos, which I think is a huge thing and all of this. So I'm just curious, like, how that became one specifically. Yeah.

So there's kind of three ways, three different fundamental strategies. Okay. I think that are out there. The first one is operational efficiency, where you're trying to be the most efficient, which usually means you're trying to be the cheapest thing. Then there's product leadership where you're trying to be the best product. You're trying to have different product. You're trying to do different things.

People who pick that are, they're not looking for the cheapest. They're looking for the best. And then there's the last one, which we kind of call like customer intimacy, but you could look at it as like enterprise, which is like you will solve every single problem that your customers comes you with. And you can't possibly solve them all with your product. So you're going to end up having a very large, rich services organization to solve them. So for us, we looked at these three options and we're like, all right, we don't want to be the cheapest because we're just going to be fighting on price forever.

And there's only one cheapest at any given point in time. And culturally, do we want everyone to make decisions to be the cheapest? We're like, no. On the operational efficiency side, we tried to do enterprise stuff. And it just didn't match with like the types of products we think we're great at building. You know, you always have to go, you have to have a biggest customer come in and say, like, we're going to change our roadmap for you on that side. There's lots of people will build great businesses doing that, but that's just not the type of business that we wanted to build. And so for us, we're in the middle. We're the product leadership company.

So we're trying to build the best product, which means there are cheaper options and there's more enterprising options. So there's more custom stuff at the top and there's stuff that we think is not as good at the bottom. And our buyer is making a choice and they have the ability to pick the best. So they have the ability to spend more on the best. And so in that world, so you're thinking about how do you be a product leader, what do you want the decision-making framework to be? So long-term company thinking, we're focused on building a long-term business, we're a different type of company.

We run profitably. We're not venture-backed. You can see where that comes into play. Simplicity, we've learned the pain of like making solutions that are too complex, and the tax of complexity is high. And so managing that is really tough. creativity is around like pushing us to do things differently, to think differently, to come up with new things, to connect things that haven't been connected before. That's where a lot of the innovation is going to come.

And then presentation is about elevating the brand and product. And if you're going to be picking the best, everything should be elevated. And so in an elevated experience, all the details matter. The aesthetic matters. And that we realized that we're trying to, you know, there's things that might seem ready to go out the door. But through the lens of like presentation, it's like, well, we could push harder to make this more crisp, more clean, better designed, a better experience. And we think that our customer base is going to value that. I marvel at just that you could tell the care thought, attention to detail that you've put into this.

We put a ton of work into this. It's crazy how much work we've put into it. and not only like establishing it, but then making sure that when you come to Wistia as a new employee that you actually learn and are onboarded to what are we doing, what is our strategy, where are we going, and then how do you make decisions in a Wistia way?

And it's that thing of like, one of the things I'm most proud of actually about Wistia is that new employees will ask them like, what's surprise about Wistia? And they'll tell me like they have no clue who is longer. tenured and who is not. Interesting. Speaking of those new employees, part of the process for you, if you fast forward a little bit from the beginning of 2006 and you start getting some paying customers

and you did a good job of keeping your expenses low, but at some point you make decisions that we have to grow, meaning the team is physically going to get bigger. We have to hire people. Yeah. And you've written an article that I appreciated called hiring isn't your company's gas. It's your steering wheel. What is your philosophy on hiring talent, on hiring people to join your team? Because this can be hard, right? You have to start empowering other people to carry on that strategy and uphold those values. So what's your process and philosophy on hiring? Hiring is everything.

Like getting the right people who are, you know, fit your values, can make decisions in a wistia way. and they want to be here. You know, it's funny, but this, like, one of the things I'm always looking for is intrinsic. And how are people intrinsically motivated? Because we can give you every extrinsic motivation. We can pay you really well and do bonuses and all that stuff. But in my experience, that's always you end up with short-term thinking when that happens. And so you have to find someone who, for every role, it's like they're excited about the craft,

or they're excited about the opportunity, or they're incredibly motivated by the challenge itself. And when we can do that, that is when magic happens. And I think partially because we've been doing this for so long, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've made a lot of people mistakes. I've hired the wrong people. I've held too closely onto decisions. I have, you know, unfortunately made the mistake of diving in and trying to micromanage people at different points. I've made every mistake under the book, in the book, rather. And I think, what I've learned is like what I need is someone who can truly they can own a problem and run with it and you know for example we hired a VP of people about a year ago and she's amazing and she's

the first VP of people we'd ever hired and I said you're going to own it all you're going to own hiring you're going to own our review system our comp structure you're going to own like learning and development you're going to own recognition you're going to own all this stuff I'm I will happily help answer any questions I can about how to do things in a Wistia way, but it has to be your version of what the people operation needs to be at Wistia. And she jumped in and she took on everything. And I knew when we were hiring her that I could not have the mental space anymore for that problem in the day of day. I could think about it over the long term, but I could not do like the, you know, really, really specific stuff. And then it just worked amazing. You know, she came in

and owned all this stuff and solved many problems in different ways than I would and far better ways. And it's like that's what happens when you get it right, I think. It's like you no longer have to be worried about it or be thinking about it because someone owns a problem. And when they own a solution, that's when you get into trouble. When you hire someone to enact a solution which you have figured out, if the solution is not working, they do not want to change. And you don't want to change either. And I think this is where the steering wheel thing comes into.

place because like if there's a new type of problem we think we should be solving for example when we hired our first person new marketing we were kind of doing marketing but not really doing it we knew someone owning that would go way farther with it what's your what's the what's the problem we want you to own make wistia famous get us lots of customers like get our voice out there okay versus if we said we want someone to come in and all I want you to do is write a specific type of blog post and they start doing it and it works and then it stops working and they're like but I'm an expert in this and shit like that you know I've had that happen and it is not fun for anybody and it's yeah I really I really think making sure that whenever

you're hiring for a role you can give people a problem to solve or if they are part of a solution because they're part of like a part of the organization that's much larger you help them understand what the next problem to solve is going to be in the first place how do you not get fooled in that interview process you you it sounds like you've struck it struck gold, I guess, or oil with your VP of people, which in the corporate world, maybe they call that the head of HR. Yeah. You've hit it, right? You got it. You got it right. Can you take us inside the interview process when you were meeting with her and what is it? What is that maybe you asked her what

she said to you that you thought, oh, wait a second, this is, this is it. Like, I'm, I'm pretty certain she is the one and this is why. What happened there? Yeah, so the way our process works is, I'll walk you through, like, you can tell me if this is too much detail, but we have a first round, which is for somebody who is, you know, we think that they can do the job. We want them to get to know, like, some of the stakeholders that they're going to be working closely with. We've looked at their experience. We've looked at their trajectory. We think all of that stuff is a fit. And that they come in person and it's like, we're trying to establish, you know, we write down what success would look like.

any role out, you know, 90 days. Define what success. I mean, I think this is important. Some of these times I talk to guys like you who are really smart who just intuitively say things like they're not a big deal, but they are. Like, and these are. Oh, that's a huge deal. So clearly, clearly defining what success is is something that not enough of us do.

I've had made that mistake. Wait, wait, wait a second. We're doing a post-mortem. Do we even define what success was? No. That's our fault. That's my fault. Yes.

And when people miss it, then later, they're like, they can't even tell you if the person's working or not. That's the worst. And it's, or like, you sit down and define success and you can't. And it's like, well, I don't think the role is clearly enough to find. Like, you're not going to align on who this person is if you can't define what success looks like. But yes, that's done first. And we're trying to get a good, you know, suss out like the highest level, let's say three or four things that we think someone needs to do in a row. role. And then the second round, in between the first and the second round, we have them do a project.

And the project is designed to be as close as possible to what the actual work will be. And you simulate the role. They have to do the job. They have to do the job. And that obviously takes time from people and it's more of a burden on candidates. And so what we have found, though, is like the right people will tell them like, look, that getting the right person is about a match between you and us. I don't think you want the wrong match either, like as a candidate. You may want to work here today, but like if you see how we're really working and it doesn't align with how you want to work

and how you do your best work, it's not going to be a good idea for anybody. So we'll go into that and part of doing the project is we give people feedback. And so depending on the project, if someone's designing something, they're getting critiqued in the same way that any designer, would be. In the case of the VP of people is like build out a strategy based on the challenges that we know. And of course, one of the things we're looking for is people to ask questions. Like when you're doing your job, can you figure out who you should ask the questions from?

Can you get the right data to put something together? And it's not actually about having the perfect plan. It's about the process. And so then, you know, to stand the VP of people front, the way that it worked is they created a plan. They came in and they met with the senior management team who they'd be working with and they walked through the plan and we asked questions like it was a normal meeting and then we also knew in that case part of the role was presenting

to the company and communication of these types of things and so we had them do that for a small sample of people across the company and Jane who is our VP of people just crushed it. It was just so clear it was like you could clearly do this job like you came in you proposed

like things that were not easy to propose you got everybody aligned with it. You communicated really well. Like these are the fundamentals of the job. And it took us a while to figure out that the project was the key and that the hard part is like, you know, we have to put work into making a great project. But if we do that and it is closely aligned to the work, it ends up being better for the candidate and for us. I just think it's so worth it on the front end of having this defined process. That's why I highlight it for anyone because even if the average listener is,

is not a startup founder. It is someone who is in some sort of mid-level management role usually, and this is based on emails I receive, mid-level management role within a company, and they're striving to exceed goals, get promoted perhaps. And that's why I think for that particular person, they can learn so much from this section of our conversation about how to clearly define what success looks like. because as the person that role, my dad told me when I got my very first promotion, I was early, I was young, 26, and he said, hiring well will make you rich and famous within this

company. And if you don't, you'll be poor and unemployed. That's the thing, man. Focus on that first and foremost. And then it'll, you can work on building culture and all of that, but get the who right. And it's, and your life will be so much easier. It's amazing and it's so true. It is so true. And it really does come down to that. And it's like if you get the Who right and you get people who want to be there to solve the right problems in a way that makes sense, the organization to solve them, that's magic happens. Yeah. You can change the things that you're tackling every day and the team can do it.

Yeah. And so, Chris, part of my prep too was analyzing some of the work that you've published. And there's a lot of it, both a combination of written and video. And I think, again, speaking to that person who may be listening, one of the mistakes I made earlier in my career was not being intentional enough about building my network, professional and personal, I would say. Pretty heads down in the work, didn't look up very much. And that served me well in some capacity, but not probably, if I had to do it all over again, I may have tweaked that a bit and had my head up a little bit more on building network. you've written about this. What is your advice, your framework to building a network wisely?

So we are the average of our networks. And there's a lot of research that shows us. Like I think if you take, not that people are doing this every day, but if you take the weight of every person that you're friends with on Facebook, you're usually the average of that. From like a body mass index perspective. And I think that's really true that we are, we are the people who are around us. And so being really proactive around who you want to be

and searching out the network that will help you be that person is something that can be proactively done and can really change your career and change your life. And so I would say you want to look for people who are going to challenge you or farther ahead on some facet of your life that you want to be farther ahead on or think in a different way that you think if you could think in that way will help you get there. And I think that can be people who you're interacting with at work. That can be friends that you spend time with. Whatever it is, like if you see the person next to you is going out on their boat every weekend, you're going to start thinking, maybe I should go out on a boat. Like this is a very natural thing. Or if you see

that they're like really present with their family and you're like, I have two kids and you see someone next to me and they're like, wow, how is this person so present? I'm going to ask questions about my life, but how I can be more present. It's just natural. It's like it's human behavior. We're a product of our networks. And so I think it's just really reflecting on that and ask yourself the questions like, who do you want to be around? And from a content perspective, it's even true, like, what content do you want to be around? Like, what content is going to inform you and change your opinions or cause you to be better or expose you to things that you wouldn't see otherwise? And I think being really thoughtful about that really matters. And you can be in control of it and you can change

your career by doing that, but you have to be proactive. Take that a step further. Let's get tackle, put it into action. So like maybe this is still the way you operate or maybe it was more earlier in your career as you're building your business. What does that actually mean from an action perspective? What do you do? Are you going to specific events where these people will be? Are you online forums. I mean, I'm curious, like, how are, what let's put it into play. Yeah.

So earlier in my career, what I would do is if there was somebody who, I thought the work they were doing was something I wanted to do or I wanted to learn from, I would try to make some connection with them. And, you know, there's a lesson around networking, which is the first time you interact with somebody, you probably shouldn't ask them for, something doesn't doesn't tend to work that well unless there's like a really warm intro so but what

people like human age people like compliments that's what we like honest compliments yeah honest true compliments like sincere specific compliments yes and if so i would say if there's people that you are trying to connect with like you feel like what they're doing is inspiring to you and you want them more in your network or you dream of them being an advisor or something, you have to, you know, have your, your ears up on like things that they're doing that are inspiring. You have to reflect. And if the, and if you're, if you're, if you're being inspired, tell them and tell them specifically why. And tell them the feedback that it's happened to add on you. It's not going to, not every time that someone's going to get back to you, but every once in a while, you hit someone at that right moment,

you know, someone who is at the part of their career where they want a mentor or they see something that they can learn from you on and they respond and you have like the very kernel of a relationship. And then the next time something comes up that seems relevant to them or you could be helpful to them or whatever, you just offer the help. Like it takes work. Like you have to put that work in. But there are some really, really amazing relationships I have with people that were built completely cold just like that from me reaching out to them.

And there's people who I've built relationships with who have done that to me. And I think we forget that like on both sides of that relationship. whether you are a mentor or a mentee in someone's network. Like the mentor will mentor if they get enough out of it. Your part on the ask, I think, is really important that telling somebody, I mean, I write cold emails all the time still to get guests on this show. And part of my framework to write these emails is I need to be very specific on why they inspire me.

I can't be like, I just, I love your book or your company's great. I'm saying these specific reasons why you inspire me is going to greatly increase your odds of a positive response as opposed to just the empty platitude that may not be genuine. I think that's a key part of it. Yeah, you're right on the money, right? Like, you have to do work. Mm-hmm. And if someone can see that you did real work, they respect it and they see that it's actually important to you. which it probably is.

And if they can see that it's important to you and they respect that, and if there's a way that you can see that there's like a value alignment or what have you, those are the types of things that can help the best relationships flourish. And then I would say the other thing just in terms of networking is, you know, I went to conferences where the speakers were people that I really wanted to learn from and just did the same thing. I just told them, you know, like this specific part of this was inspiring. or we've gotten so much out of XYZ.

And, you know, if this is back to that you're a product of your network, but you go to the wrong conference, it's not going to work. Like, you have to go to the legit ones, which often are like smaller or they're more focused. For me, that was business of software. It was an amazing conference. I was blown away by the access I had to people who were speakers there and who, you know, genuinely helped me in like five minutes of talking to them. And I feel very fortunate I've been able to go back and speak.

there and I try to like pay it do the same thing like if someone comes up to me and they have a question I can be helpful I will help them because it's like there's a community around that yeah um so much good just general career advice so I really appreciate that Chris because I know there's a I have pages of notes that we're not really even covering but I think it's very useful we talked about one of the things in regards to wistia there's a few topics I want to make sure we hit before we go is that it's unique from a financial perspective and I'll let you tell the story, but as far as the money, not only that, that's, that you, how you guys have funded the business, how you've bought, you know, people back. Can you share the unique setup

you have at Wistia financially? Yes. So in the early days of Wistia, you know, we funded it with our own money. In about two years in, we had enough traction. We need to hire folks. So we raised an angel round, raised $650,000. And then we survived on that $650,000. 2000 for another two years, just as we were running out of money, like literally zero dollars in the bank account, we were finding real traction and we raised another 800,000. So we have only ever raised 1.4 million. It was all from individual angels, no venture at all. And we were happy, you know, growing the business.

And we got to be, there was a moment where about 10 million in revenue and a few million in profit that I was feeling like top of the world, you know, on top of the world, growing really fast and being profitable. And I tell people the story. And what everybody said was like, well, you know, you could be growing revenue faster. If you weren't profitable, you would probably be faster. You're probably not capturing enough opportunity. And my co-founder, Brennan and I, you know, we thought about that and we shrugged it off.

But everybody we talked to said this. Every person, every other entrepreneur, of course, every investor. everybody was like, whoa, you found something huge. You got to go. You got to go. And at some point, you know, when the world is telling you something, especially when it's your first time doing it, you listen. And so we listened and we changed how we were operating. And we flipped from being profitable to eating into our cash reserves and running out a loss.

And we did that so we could do way more growth stuff. Much bigger ad campaigns, scaling the team faster, more conversion optimization, all this kind of stuff, trying to grow revenue fast. because that's how companies are valued. So we're doing this. We'd spend a couple years doing that. We did get the company bigger, but the revenue growth rate didn't really change. It was like pretty similar.

And it dropped a little bit with scale, which I now know is normal, but back then was, you know, freaking out about. And we're losing this money. And, you know, we've talked a lot today about long-term thinking and how clearly that's one of our values. But what happened when we were running out of the loss

is everything we were doing, even the things that we said, they were long term, they got evaluated short term. Because if you have a month, and this is all real numbers, you know, a month where we're losing $2,000 or $50,000 in February, you have this plan and you're spending that money because you're to a big eye campaign, you're trying to juice up the new installs, blah, blah, blah. And then March comes around and you're planning on losing another $250, but you're actually going to spend more.

You're going to have more revenue too. The revenue doesn't show up. Now you're losing $300. And you start looking at the cash to the bank. You're like, you know, we can burn through this cash. We just went from like infinite runway to a year to six months. Like it changes your mindset so dramatically that everything got related to. You took on debt financing to make this happen.

Is that what you were talking about? That was actually not debt yet. Okay. So we're still just running off of the cash. Oh, okay, okay. And then we had this moment. So this is happening. And Brendan and I were not having fun anymore.

we weren't actually taking the creative risks that we used to take. We didn't think the work, we weren't particularly proud of the work we were doing. It was chaos. But we weren't admitting that to each other because that seemed like that would be really bad to do. And at this exact moment, we had three companies come in and try to buy us. And, you know, as a tech company, people try to buy you. That becomes the thing. You know, you have a team they want.

You have products you want customers. It's somewhat common occurrence that people will just send you an email poke around and whatever. And we'd always ignore it in the past. But this time we're like, we should probably talk to these people. So we start talking to them. We get some offers. And the offers are like, you know, truly life-changing money.

Like never work again money. And Brendan and I are sitting there trying to convince ourselves to sell the business. And so part of our trying to convince ourselves, we're like, well, what would we do if we sold? Well, if we sold this company, we like the company we'd sell to, they told us that we'd have to work there for two years. So we'd do our time, but it will not be our business anymore. So what would we do after? We'd have all this money.

What would we do? We'd start talking. We're like, well, we feel like we have this unique partnership. We would work together again. Oh, should we start a venture capital thing? Should we do an angel thing, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, we'd build a company. We'd build another company.

What would that company do? Well, we have all these problems we want to solve. They're in the video space. Well, we have this way, you know, we'd build this really strong brand. We'd do that. We've done that for long time. Well, we know who we'd hire. We were literally sitting there.

We're on a loading dock of this building, like right over there, sitting there having this conversation. And truthfully saying all this stuff until we realized, wait a second, we're saying we would rebuild Wistia. We already got it. Why don't we like fix what we have fucked up and actually like not have to go through that early part again? And like, what if we actually don't sell and we fix the business? What would that take for us to do? They put all the pieces together like, well, we'd have to be profitable again. We'd have to be focused on long term.

We'd have to be doing creative things again. We'd be working on a different set of problems. We'd be investing more on the product. We'd be doing more video things. And that sounds really fun. It sounds fun to do that. And so we got really excited that we were going to go back and fix the company. But we realized that turning down an offer meant that we'd instantly be creating

misalignment with our angel investors. Because our energy investors put their money in because they wanted to fake money. Yeah. That's how investors works. That's what investors want. Yeah. And our employees, we'd been giving them stock options, especially those early employees, who took a lot of risk and they joined us.

We couldn't pay them full salaries, but they took stock options. They're sitting here and we told them we'd sell too. And we're sitting here not selling. And so we had to find a way to get alignment. And what we hit on was this idea of raising debt to do a buyback. And so it would be like we had sold the company for our investors and for the employees. And for us, we'd be risking the business that we could get profitable enough that we could serve the debt. But we'd take all this money that we thought we'd make over many years, essentially bring it forward with the debt.

We'd do the buyback. And in one deal, we would switch the company out of the mode we were in into like a long-term focused mode. So our investors, we give them the option. You don't have to sell. but if you do sell, whatever's left, it's going to be the same class of shares as Brendan and I. You're just going to be common shareholders. There's no more preferred stuff. We're on the same side of the table after we get to this deal.

To the employees, we said, we're not playing in selling the business. We're going to institute profit sharing. We want to take care of you. So if you want to sell your options, that's amazing. If you don't, that's fine. You can hold on to them. But there's going to be profit sharing on the other side for people who don't have options. that's because we want you align with the way that, like, you know, we will be making the business

success and, like, let's go. And we did that in 2017. And I'm happy to report that it has actually, is actually worked. How does that make you feel today? I feel amazing. You know, it feels so good. Yeah. I mean, you know, we ended up being more profitable than we expected because the great irony

of this is options didn't really align people because they're so fuzzy. It's like what is the valuation of a company depends on market factors and what the growth rate is of how big you are, but also what the new things are you doing and how big the team is and all this other stuff. And but profit sharing is super clear. And so people get it. It acts like a bonus. And so suddenly, instantly, we had our next all hands meeting where we're talking about the financials and everyone's hand goes up. There's a million questions about ways we could save money, about why we're doing different things. And everyone really took more ownership in the business.

And the other great irony is that people think that being profitable means you can't take, you're not taking as many risks. And of course, what we've seen is like from a financial perspective, that's a little bit true. But from a creative perspective, we're taking way bigger risks than we were before.

And of course, those are the things that lift the business. And so the business has done better since we took on the debt than we were doing before. So we have a couple minutes. What is next for both you and Wistia? So for Wistia, you're going to see more creative risk taking in the content that we're doing. And you're going to see more product leadership, taking more risk, trying to innovate more on the product, trying to build the best goddamn product out there.

What does more creative risk taking mean? What is that? Like, what is, I, I understand what risk taking is, but like, what, like, tactically. How do I think about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tastically, for us, it, we, you know, we've done content marketing for a long time, but we kind of kept doing the same thing that was working. And so we've decided we have to scare ourselves again.

And we've got to push for things that are, you know, way bigger investments and much more terrifying in the gut, but like, that's what's going to make them really good. We're going to be out of our element. So last year, right after raising the debt, we set out to do a, a, you know, a, feature length documentary called 110 100 where we gave this LA production 208 $100,000. Did you say it? That was kind of viral.

I watched it multiple times. Yeah. So that was amazing. And it was terrifying because we signed on to do that to even spend the money in the ads when we were still losing money. And that made it scary, which also I think made it better. We ended up working harder on it. And then one of the things we're doing now that's similar is we have this show called Brand Wagon, which I am hosting.

Yep. And where I sit down with leaders to talk about brand marketing. Because over and over and over, I keep hearing from folks that are like, I want to invest some brand, but I don't know how, what do you do? And so we're like, we should sit down with people and do that. But we decided to scare ourselves by making it a talk show. And so it's like more like a Tonight Show style vibe of like these crazy segments and all this stuff. It's ridiculous. It's insane. It's completely ludicrous.

And it's also been really fun. And I'm sitting now with these people who are just incredible marketers and leaders sharing these wild stories about what they're doing. So I'm learning a lot. So it's really fun and really scary. And it's also episodic. So it's every week we are actually shooting this shit and I putting it out there. So that's been really fun.

And I think you're going to see more stuff from us that looks like that. We're going to see larger scale things that we're doing. you know, risks, it kind of comes back to risks that you feel scare you and where you don't know what's going to happen. And those are the fun ones. Those are the ones where you learn the most. What about you? What are you most excited about moving forward? For Wistia? For you? For you personally? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have two kids. One that is about to be four and one that's one and a half. and I have been so humbled by parenthood

and I also it's like the best thing in the world and you know for for me it's about like I feel like I have the dream job I like do what I love every day and then I also get to go home and like spend time with these like with these kiddos that bring me so much joy and it's like how do I help them be great people and how do I set an example for them

that they can be proud of but when they are like old enough to pay attention to it you know Yeah, so it's just every it's it's trying to like live my life in balance and You know not over stress about work or home and Be the best person that I can be that's that's what I'm trying to do I love it man Chris thank you so much for for joining me I knew Jay would not steer me wrong when he made this intro so I'm grateful for that Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online.

I would say I'm on Twitter, C Savage. I do write on my blog, not as often as I would like, Savage Thoughts, yeah. Savage Thoughts.com. And I would say, you know, right now, check out Brandwagon.

We're having a lot of fun with it, and I'm learning a lot as we do it. So I hope that everyone who watches it does. And that's just Wistee.com. You can find that. Great stuff, man. Thanks again, Chris. I really appreciate it.

I absolutely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Awesome. Thank you for having me. It's really fun. All right. See you, man. See ya. Love that conversation with Chris Savage. We did that one on video so I could see his mannerisms, the look on his face, the smiles, his eyes, everything about it was compelling. These are the ones that really make me enjoy doing this podcast.

I'm so lucky that it happened so frequently, but Chris is fantastic. Some of the things that really stood out to me is his hiring process for his head of people and the fact that all of us can implement a process like that, we just have to clearly define it and know what we're looking for and define success. Then their buyback program, I didn't fully understand initially all the details behind that. It was fascinating to learn about it. And also the realization that him and his co-founder thought, we love what we're doing.

Let's keep doing it. And their unique way to go about making that happen. and then keys to a successful partnership, ensuring you're aligned on your values and that your values, again, are clearly defined. So good. I really enjoyed it. Hope you did as well.

I love it if you would share it with a friend or two. Word of mouth marketing is as good as it gets. I love it. It continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, and for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week. Can't wait.

On October 24th and 25th, we are hosting our once a year personal excellence workshop. This workshop is for you if you're interested in making connections with other like-minded leaders that will help you grow. If you want to gain an outside perspective that you can take back to your team to re-energize yourself as well as your business, and if you want to leave with clear outcomes for how to become a more effective. leader. To grab one of the last few tickets, go to Ryanhawk.me. Again, Ryanhawk. Dot me for our once a year personal excellence workshop.

Perfect, man. Thank you so much. That was awesome. I knew we bounced around, but I felt like it still had a flow despite the fact that I was looking at different random notes. And then you'd say something, it'd pique my curiosity and I'd take it further. So I think sometimes, like, that's how the dance goes. And it's fun for me. Yeah.

I appreciate you making it happen. Oh, yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was really fun. And you're a great interviewer. Thank you. Good job. Yeah, it's hard. It's so hard.

I mean, I'm seeing this myself. It's like, how do you stay on? Like, there's certain things that I know someone's doing. Yeah. That are, I think are going to be interesting. And then they say something else like, shit, that's more interesting. I know. Do I throw it out or what do I do?

I know. It's tough. And sometimes you're wrong, you know? And I think that's kind of the fun of doing this on a regular basis. I'm trying to hang with smart, excellent people, leaders is knowing like, wait, I can't help it. I'm just too curious. I got to keep going, but maybe I shouldn't have. And then you question yourself.

But I think that's the fun of doing this is the art of trying to improve and get better at it, too, is figuring out was that the right move or not. But ultimately, it's about, I think, just following that curiosity and what you're obsessed about and helping the person share their story. So I appreciate you being so good at it. too. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. Awesome. I'll be sure. Let me know when it gets out there. I'll send it to you and your team when it goes live.

Perfect. All right. See you, Chris. Take care. See you. Bye. Bye.