This Week in Startups - Frame.io CEO Emery Wells on helping the film industry go remote, how distributed work is changing movie studios & more | E1163

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Check out Frame.io: https://frame.io FOLLOW Emery: https://twitter.com/emerywells FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in Startups. and Jason Calacanis, and today on the program, an artist who made incredible videos and worked with Saturday Night Live pivoted his company from being a service company into being an enterprise company. And that company is frame.

com. You've probably heard of them. And the CEO and co-founder is Emery Wells. Welcome to the program, Emery Wells. How are you? Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm great.

It's great to be here. How are you holding up under COVID in New York City? my hometown. It's been a, you guys had a rough go of it early on, and then things opened up, and then things closed up again, huh? You know,

I feel kind of guilty saying it, but totally fine, because I'm introverted, and this, I'm one of the people that's in the camp of, you know, I quite enjoy working from home, and I feel very productive,

and I'm doing well, and our company's doing well. So we're very fortunate that, you know, we, in this environment, we have a tool that enables distributed work. So,

you know, that's certainly been, we've seen the tailwinds of that. Yeah, that is a common theme I've heard among my friends. The extroverts like myself are losing their minds. And this is just torture and solitary confinement in their minds, even though it's not close to that. But it's in the same wheelhouse, but not exactly as brutal. And then for introverts, it's like, oh, this is great.

We don't have to do meetings. So tell everybody in the audience what frame.io is and how you came up with the idea. Sure. So Frame I.O is a video review and collaboration product, and we essentially have a tool that enables video teams to do their work. So prior to Frame IO, I had a post-production company in New York City. As you mentioned, we used to do things like the Saturday Night Live digital shorts and commercial parodies. So I spent, I don't know, almost 15 years doing professional post-production filmmaking type stuff. And we started building Frame I.O as an internal tool at that company. really just to solve the problems that we were having, working with our clients, with our vendors, internally with one another. And when you think about for those that maybe are not as close to the process of creating video, we think about creating video, you know, like any business process, and especially the more professional something gets, just the more complex everything gets.

The more people are involved, the more companies are involved. And so when you're working on video, well, you obviously have first and foremost, let me set the record straight. I think sometimes people see Frame I own, they think, it's a video editing tool like a collaborative video editing tool like a figma for video and that's not what we are we we solve um you know kind of the media sharing and the review and communication and kind of approval processes and things like that but it starts with well you have different different people working on stuff you need to share big files you know maybe there's an editor

that's in one location there's someone doing motion graphics there's a client in another location so frame out first and foremost kind of host all the video files that you're working with and it acts as a a central repository. And then all of the communication review happens on frame I.O. So when you think about, you know, getting a video, if I sent you a video, Jason, if you were doing something, I'm sure you've made some videos and done some marketing. And if I sent you a video for one of your businesses, you'd immediately have a million thoughts, right? You're looking at it. Say it's an unlisted YouTube link or something. I don't know. You'd immediately have a million thoughts. And you'd sit down and you want to tell me, because say I'm the editor, you want to tell me

all these thoughts. And you're like, all right, let's see. Well, I'm going to sit down at the email and say, okay, how am I going to construct these thoughts? Well, in the beginning or in the middle, or there's that part where the thing, when I said this or someone said that, that I want to like change or cut out, video has a time dimension. And it's actually very challenging to communicate around an asset that is moving. And so we have things like timestamped comments. So you comment directly on a video frame. You can, you know, select a range and say, well, from here to here, let's cut this thing out.

So, you know, that's the gist of what we facilitate. And we also integrate with all the creative tools. So when you leave a comment, if I was the video editor and you left me a comment and said, hey, I don't like this shot. Well, actually what happens for me is that comment shows up in my video editing tool. So if I'm using Premiere or Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve, it actually shows up on the clip in my video editing tool. And I just said, oh, immediately I could just swap it out and then kick off another version.

So in some ways, you could kind of think of frame I. like, you know, sort of like a GitHub where we act as the central repository, but the actual work is happening elsewhere. It's happening, you know, like in developers, they have a code editing tool, and then they push to GitHub, which is the central repository. So that's similar dynamic with Frame I.O. There's video editors. There's motion graphics artists.

There's people that are doing all this work. They push to Frame I.O. And then that's where people can look at it, can collaborate, can say, yay or nay, I like this, I don't like that. And then we go through this iterative process. And so in that way, it's almost like. You can think of two components there. One is the Dropbox kind of media management component.

Yeah. And then there's the piece, which is more like the envision and the notes and the approval and workflow process. That's right. Yep. That's perfect merge of tools that is frame I own. And is that used to occur or occurred best, at least from my, you know, outside of the industry, but know people who've made movies and TV shows and stuff like that and having visited them in an editing suite somewhere down in Tribecom, Manhattan,

and you would go into a room and there'd be a big avid. And basically people just sat over the editor's shoulders and gave them notes. That's right. You gave them notes in that sort of model. That's right. That still occurs. Is that considered the best practice? Or do people prefer doing it in this distributed fashion?

And what have you learned about which works better? Like, can you make, you know, I don't know, there will be blood, you know, in this kind of format? Or do you need to be in the room with the people, you know? Yeah, so that's exactly how it's always historically worked, which is you sit in the room, you're over each other's shoulders, and that's how it's been forever. In fact, that was really the only way you could possibly do it because you needed expensive equipment, you know, you needed the footage, the footage was on a big hard drive. It was all very tied to the physical location. That started to evolve. Over the past, I would say, you know, basically as the internet got a little bit faster and online cloud storage got a little bit cheaper, people started.

naturally, you know, moving some of this processes to like cloud-based tools, but they didn't have purpose-built tools. So they would use like stuff that wasn't meant for video. They'd use Dropbox. They'd use high-tail links. They would use, you know, whatever, I tell you send it, Dropbox, all this sort of amalgamation of stuff just to kind of try to try to do it. In fact, it's very common actually to use in the early days like just unlisted YouTube links or private Vimeo links or things like that. So, um, uh, Anyway, historically it's worked that way, but absolutely. I mean, now with tools like Frame IO, people are shifting to this distributed way of working.

And I think what COVID has proved is that, you know, we were already moving in this direction. It was already happening. This was already the trend. But COVID, of course, was a catalyst for people having to adopt this. And guess what? Like everything's still coming out on Netflix, right? Like everything's still happening. And so I think that it was, you know, for us, this was, from a business perspective, it was good.

from a world perspective, of course, it's terrible. But it proved that people thought, people did think there were a big group of people that thought, well, for like a certain class of work, you couldn't do it in this distributed way. You had to sit next to each other. And that's proven to be not true. I think, like many have experienced with COVID, there are pros and cons to working in an async distributed way. Sometimes, you know, there are benefits to working live and there are cons to working

live. There are benefits to working async distributed and there are cons to working async distributed. That's really interesting your point, though, about prior to everybody being forced to work from home, everybody being forced to be distributed, there were people who believe there was a cap on what type of project could be done asynchronously. A fancy way of saying, like, you do a little bit of work and I'll get to it later. Asynchronous being email, right? You can do your work, send me the emails. They sit there and then I respond to them on my schedule when I want to. you respond to it.

But am I correct that the entire industry, you know, making something like Mandalorian or making something like, you know, I don't know, Queens Gambit, all that stuff had to be done, distributed. People couldn't be in the same, you know, video editing bay. And so what level of shows, if we were to, as a, as the audience here to imagine, what's the highest level of show that would use something like your product? So up to the highest level. So we have a pretty wide range of customers all, you know, from the, from the individual

creator that are doing kind of like high-end YouTube videos all the way up to Hollywood Studios. So we've had, you know, shows from every Hollywood studio on Frame I.O. A big part of our effort over the kind of maturing of our company has been being able to, you know, have the security controls and accreditations to work with those studios. And we've accomplished that over the past couple of years. So we have major Hollywood feature films, films that have won Oscars, big television shows, all of it goes through Frame IO. And the key issue is the internet, just people always think the internet was fast since, you know,

whatever. They got their cable modem in, you know, 2000 or whatever. But actually a cable modem in 10, 20, 30 megabit, that's not actually enough to do this high-end video editing, right? Like, what do you actually need as a spec for people to reasonably work from home on these videos? Or is it enough? Yeah, it depends on your workflow. So, you know, it depends on what portion of the workflow you're responsible for.

But first of all the shows you mentioned, they're all being done from home now. So there is no, none of those companies are, you know, working in the ways that they did. They're all being done from home. We've done a lot of interesting case studies of how they shifted to those work from home environments. But, you know, for the basics, the basics of using Frame IOs or review and approval tool, you actually don't really need a lot of bandwidth. You need like 20 megavits. You know, you'll get by with 20 megabits.

If you want to do, you know, an entire workflow where everyone's distributed and you're moving, like, large original camera assets, I don't know, the more, the better, right? Because let me give you some specs. The typical camera, like for any, any, any, I'll just say the average amount of footage that's generated from an average amount of shoot, an average shoot is going to be probably one terabyte per camera per day. It could range. It could be 500 gigs. So it's a lot, right? I'd say that if you have a gigabit connection, you can meaningfully move that data around. And one of the other big things that we focus on is large data transfer, because we have to deal with that.

So moving large amounts of data over the internet actually pretty hard. Browsers are pretty crummy at, you know, doing file transfer in an accelerated fashion. There's actually a whole sub-industry, you know, kind of more niche industry, but a whole sub-industry that focuses on moving on large data transfer around the internet. They focus on industries like media and entertainment, oil and gas, like all kinds of companies that have large data sets. And they do that through like some special backends and servers that are distributed, I guess. Tell me how they solve that problem, the last mile problem in the terabyte per camera per day

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All right, we are here with Emery Wells. He is the CEO and co-founder of Frame.I.O. Based at my hometown, New York. Previously, he ran a very successful boutique video agency that did SNL's digital shorts. That's pretty cool. Did you do Lazy Sunday? Was that one of the first ones who did?

I started working with that team kind of just after sort of towards the tail end. of Andy Samberg's time there. So I did work on not the original... Natalie Portman? No, not Natalie Portman. Not so, but I was to say not the original. So Dick in a Box was the other big...

Yes, that was the other breakout. All right. So there was a three-part series. So Dick in a Box was before my time, but then there was two others that came after that, which was called... I think it was called Not Gay and a... No, it's called Not Gay in a Three Way and something else.

So I did the two... episodes that came after Dick in a Box and then, and then, you know, for four seasons straight, basically all the pre-recorded, everything from trailers to the commercials to music videos, all of those. Yeah. And so tell us about... We did post-production. Tell us about how the internet, how video editing and your studios are making this work.

Like, I remember back in the day, I knew somebody was working with James Cameron on, I guess, avatar. And I mean, James Cameron had some kind of crazy. crazy fiber brought to his house or whatever they were telling me. And they did all these crazy backhoe things and they spent a million dollars on fiber lines or something to make it work. That's right. That's right.

So there's basically two approaches these days. So that I probably know the company that James Cameron worked with to get that fiber line installed. There's a company that basically has a private fiber network that runs between all the major studios and anyone that has money to get a private fiber to their location. And so it enables the studios around the world to work with one another and they're moving, you know, terabytes and terabytes of data. It's very expensive, as you can imagine. It's dark, you know, they basically, they license dark fiber. They build their own private

fiber network. That's one model. The other model, which is what we, what we use and what other, some other companies in the space use is basically still using the backbone of the internet, the standard backbone of the internet. But there's a lot of, actually a lot of things you can do to do large data transfer. There's infrastructure side. There is, you know, there's an infrastructure. structure side, there's a software side, and maybe just to give you the broad strokes of it, when you're moving data, you start on, you know, say my machine here, I have a hard drive, a lot of data. I got to get it. I got to get it to a location, right? So the first barrier is, well, what is my interface to even communicate with the internet? Am I using a browser?

browsers have HTTP. That's a pretty crummy way to move large amounts of data because it's slow. You can use other protocols like UDP, but then, you know, you're going to typically go to like a desktop-based client because you're not going to have that, support in a browser. So a lot of companies will first solve that first mile problem of like, how do I get stuff fast to the internet in general and they'll use UDP with a desktop client? We chose not to do that. We actually use HTTP, which means just works in the browser like normal, right?

And the way to get around the speed barrier is it's fairly simple now, not like a novel approach at this point, but we take the file and when you drop it into the browser, we break up that single file into thousands and thousands of little blobs and we do parallel. Streams. So, you know, that can create some. Like a download accelerator. People may be familiar with this. Like back in the early days of the internet, you would have a download accelerator, Chrome extension or something.

So instead of downloading from one FTP server, you would download from 10 at the same time. And you would then recompile it. BitTorrent was a similar protocol. Similar idea. So we take that one file, we do multiple streams up to the server. And then when it gets to the server, it reassembles all those little blobs. But then, you know, the second component is, well, we want to be communicating with a server that's very close to our physical location, so we limit latency. And so that's how you utilize a global CDN, so we're communicating with a server that's near to the user.

So if somebody in London is uploading, they're uploading to a server in London. But our home base is not in London. Our home base is in North Virginia. That's where our data origin is. So now we've got to get the data from London to North Virginia. And that's another, that's a long stretch. And basically what we do and other people, but what we do is then we are not going over the standard internet. We're on AWS.

We're on AWS. We go over the Amazon backbone. We can move it very quickly so we can do low latency connection for the first mile and then do UDP-based, you know, just blast data on the AWS backbone from London to North Virginia. And that's probably also very economical, right? Amazon has that as a fixed cost business. They've already run those cables or whatever. Well, you think so. I mean, it's pretty expensive.

So the reality is, is, you know, our users really, they, if you look us up on Twitter, people are always commenting like, oh, my God, what kind of magic sauce is in Frame IO? How are I uploading so fast? It costs us a lot of money. It does cost us a lot of money. It's a very expensive part. It's probably one of the most expensive parts of our infrastructure, providing this accelerated data transfer service.

But it's so worth it. And you need it. You know, you absolutely need it. Of course, over time, we've learned how to make it less expensive. We're continuing to do that. It's very important for us to figure out how to keep bringing those costs down. But it is pricey. It is pricing.

And has this ability to be distributed, how is being distributed change the industry in that, you know, when I was growing up in New York, you know, there were filmmakers in New York, you know, and Spike Lee, whoever, NYU film crowd. Darren Aronofsky was doing this, like, pie thing and. Bennett Miller was doing the cruise. It was like this little cadre of editors, but eventually they all had to, where they were all thinking, like, I got to go to L.A.

because I'm not going to be relevant, right? And if you were a writer or an editor to be in New York versus L.A., you were basically considering, like, well, maybe I'm capping my upside here

of what's possible. Has that changed now where, like, they don't care where video editors are now that there's a pandemic, work from, that would have been in,

you know, bays, uh, editing bays, and Studio City are now sent around the world? Or was that already occurring before this? It was already starting to occur, but not nearly like it's occurring now. And so right now, location is relatively irrelevant.

I'd say there's two parts to that question. The first is that for the people that are like, hey, do I have to be in a major market, do I have to be in L.A.? Well, something that's changed is that, you know, if you want to be in Hollywood, you still have to be in L.A. But Hollywood is actually, it's one slice, you know, the world of video and the opportunities to be a storyteller and a creative have just expanded so much, right? Like, yes, Hollywood is still in Hollywood. But majority of the industry, if you look at like our market, our total addressable market, majority of the market is not in L.A.

You know, feature film markets in L.A. But if you look at total global footprint of people that make video, they're just all over. And how much of your product is being used? used by the studios, the TV industry versus, let's say, this emerging YouTube sort of, you know, that's not emerging anymore. I guess that's kind of established. You have the sort of YouTubers who are making the three to, you know, 10 minute videos. And then you have this new phenomenon of, you know, stories and TikTok. Are any of those type of people using your product? Or is it just for a 30 second, you know, or two minute clip? It's not necessary. Yeah. So the answer is yes.

I mean, they are, the threshold for using Frame I.O. at the low end is people that are kind of earning a living making video. So the TikTokers are typically not, like maybe the very high-end ones. It's like the YouTubers, high-end YouTubers. If you're earning a living, then Frame I.O is fair game. I mean, we're very accessible. We start at 15 bucks a month. So, you know, very, very accessible. But then we scale all the way up to the Hollywood Future Films, major media organizations, broadcast organizations, major brands that have, you know, big internal internal teams. So it's every. I mean, when we pitch to investors, you know, one of the questions I get asked every single time, I've gotten asked every single round. And I don't think they've ever felt my answer was sufficient. They say, well, who's Frame I.O.4? Like, are you for X or you for why? You know, are you going to be an enterprise company? Or are you going to be, you know, this consumer company. And I think that, you know, what I've always said is like frame Ios for anybody that makes video because actually the fundamental mechanics of what you do when you're making video are actually the same, whether you're doing a YouTube video or a feature film. Obviously, there are differences and there are different needs from security perspective and how we build our business with go-to-market function and sales and blah, blah, lots of things differ. But our model has been, we have a retail business, which is self-serve. People can sign up with a credit card. You never have to talk to us. It's very easy. That generates a lot of awareness, a lot of word of mouth, and then people kind of spread it into these organizations that then start using it.

And our sales team goes in and sells to them. So we've had this great virtuous cycle of having, I think this is. actually more common now for SaaS Enterprise where you have this bottoms up in top-down motion and they're feeding each other. And that's worked very successfully for Frame I.O. So we have all the every studio, every major studio has had something go through Frame I.O. at this point. And we have been able to meet all those security requirements. But then we still have the, you know, the individual creator that's doing stuff for the web. That's got to be like they're big, pet peeve now is making sure that the Luke Skywalker cameo at the end of, you know,

Mandalorian Season 2, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen it. You know, some cameo like that or a shoka, whatever, doesn't leak, right? And they, I saw John Favreau talking about it, couldn't believe, and Mark Hamill couldn't believe that his cameo at the end of Mandalorian Season 2 didn't leak. And I guess that's the issue you're talking about here in terms of security and authentication that you had to as a SaaS company convince these studios that you as Frame IO can't see their videos. All that stuff is either saved on their servers or saved on your service, but you can't see

it, right? You have to, and I'm not saying that Disney's your customer, but in a hypothetical case like that, you've got a clear their hurdle in terms of security, correct? That's right. And Disney really sets the benchmark for security in the industry. They're sort of the benchmark setter. That's absolutely correct. So, you know, it is, all the, all this stuff is on our server, but, you know, there is a, there's a process that requires multiple humans to, for anyone human to get access to, to footage in frame I.O. And, you know, we have to do the standard enterprise security stuff, SOC2, you know, stock compliance, we're SOC2 type 2 compliant. There's something in the media entertainment industry called TPN, which is like a governing body that manages content security. It's kind of like it was used to be MPAA. I'm sure.

You all seen that logo. It's now, it's that sort of evolved into TPN, trusted partner network. And so we've gone through all these programs. We've built some really cool tech. We have a feature called Watermark ID, which is if I sent you a video and you hit play, we would actually do a real time on demand transcode of that asset with all of your personally identifiable information burned in. It would say Jason, location, time, IP address, and that's visually burned into every frame

and it happens in real time. So even if it was a feature film, like two hours, you hit play, it's going to start back in two seconds. That's amazing. So if Howard Cern wants to watch some film that's coming out, or they give him a screener ahead of time, it's going to say Howard Cern at the bottom of it. He always complains about that. When we get back, oh yeah, and a shout out to Vanta doing SOC2 compliance for folks, vanta.com slash twist. One of our sponsors is Inside Joke does, you had to do SOC2 compliance at some point, I take it and

make sure that you could sell enterprise into it. All right, when we get back, I want to talk about how you did pricing on this product and how you raised money for it coming out of a service background, I don't think you were like a developer. You were an artist, right, and a producer. And so that would lower your credibility in the tech field, but raise it in the, obviously in the media space. So I'm curious how you were received by the venture industrial complex and how you cleared market raising money for frame.I.O. when we get back on the swing and serves. It can be awkward or even embarrassing to talk about erectile dysfunction. Usually we just brush it off. We blame ourselves. But Roman is here to get the advice. you want and the help you need with no shame. With Roman, you can get a free online evaluation and ongoing care for ED all from the comfort and privacy of your own home. A health care professional will work with you to find the best treatment plan. And if medication is appropriate, Roman will ship you real medication with free two-day shipping. The whole process is very straightforward, simple, and most importantly, discrete erectile dysfunction used to be something really tough to

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fancy office in Soho or something in New York that now is empty and you just pay the rent bill every month? That's it. Yeah, we're in the financial district. We got about a year ago, we got a beautiful new office, 31st floor, great views, lots of space. Yeah. So it's got to be brutal to write that check every month. Yes. If I had to physically write that check every month, it would be brutal. I would puke.

I still puk a little bit when I think about it. Sorry to bring it up. No, it's okay. We're all having the same thing. It's like as a founder, I don't know if you had this experience, like when you get that office and you have that incredible office with the incredible views and you've spent the time making this beautiful nest for everybody to live in and you've got this incredible vision and just, you're like, okay, this is.

is going to be worth the money. This is 5% of our spend every year. It's 12% of our spend every year, whatever it is, but it's going to build the culture. And now all these culture nests are just sitting there like empty. Yeah, it's painful. So sad. It's super painful. Do you go there and like walk around and just sit down alone like a madman sometimes? Yeah. I've done it a handful of times. I mean, too depressing. I live, I live walking distance on like, I'm like a seven, eight minute walk from the office, which is, by the way, founder hack, like, do that for yourself. You have the ability to architect. 100%.

This is the greatest thing about being the founder. Is that you get to put the office within walking distance. And so much so that, like, yeah, being able to go home or change or, you know, whatever it is, go back to the office after you, you know, go to dinner or something. It's just incredible, right? It changes your life. I've never had that experience before. And a little inside joke that, like, when we moved to, I live in, live in

downtown Manhattan. We used to have an office in Flatiron, which was, you know, fine commute. It was, you know, not a long commute, but it's a commute. When we moved into our downtown office, six avenue, zip-zip. Yeah, super easy. But when we moved into our downtown office, basically me and our VP of Finance were kind of the, you know, the deciders. And we both live down here. So people are like, okay, we get it. Actually, I was very against moving downtown because I thought people wanted to stay central to Flatiron. And I didn't architect it intentionally, but I would never change it now that I have it. Well, the other thing that's great is, I mean, if you're living in Queens or Brooklyn, getting to downtown Manhattan is like, it's the first or second or third stop, right? If you're

coming over Manhattan Bridge or you're coming through the tunnel, it's just so simple. Yeah. And now Manhattan is cheaper than Brooklyn. Sometimes, yeah, you know, changing locations is a bit of an unknowing thing. You do like a commute study, you try to understand like what's the impact, how are people going to receive that, you know, I'm sure in San Francisco, I'm not, you know, I don't live in San Francisco, but the same, I'm sure the same way in San Francisco, like people make decisions based on their commute. Like, it's an important life decision. It is one of the most, I think it's like one of the, you know, one of the great things to come out of this pause that we've had is people are reevaluating the impact of everything, right? And so,

I don't know if you have kids, but when you know, so when you have kids, you're like, what is going on at school, you know, like, what actually am I getting out of that? And then you start realizing when you're homeschooling, like, oh, what percentage of school is learning versus socialization versus babysitting, like depending on the age or child. Or child. care and you kind of, and now you learn that with people commuting. You're like, how much work were people actually doing at the office? How much of it was socialization? Okay, people probably were grinding off five solid hours of work, two or three hours of socialization meetings, whatever. So maybe they were working four or five really tight hours a day. They were doing 25 hours of work. Now they're

working from home. They can bring that up to seven, eight hours. And they've saved the commute. So the employee gets two more hours and the employer gets two more hours. That's my basic math. How do you think about it and how do you think about now that you've got 24-hour places, putting shots in arms? We're taping this in the 13th month of 2020, January 2, 2020. I mean, in the 16th month of this pandemic, you're going to, or whatever, they're doing 24-hour shots now, right?

And anybody over 65 can get one now, I think. So we're going to quickly get on the side of this, God willing. Knock on one. So how are you thinking about returning and how are your employees thinking about returning? And what do you do? Like if some people move, like some of your people probably moved up to, you know, Hastings on the Hudson or whatever. Everybody went north, I heard. Yeah. So, you know, I think what we, we let people just, we told people, hey, do whatever you want. Like, you go wherever you want. Don't worry about like needing to be back at a certain time. You know, we're going to give plenty of notice. And if he moved or had to get away and we're not

kind of mandate that you're back. We've just sort of been like very flexible. What we didn't do is what some other companies did, which I admire, they just said, hey, like early on, they're just like, you know what, distributed forever if you want. And we, we kind of held the optionality to understand how the world was going to change. And like, do we, do we want to return to the office? Do we not? We wanted to hold on to that optionality rather than just saying, because once you say, you kind of can't claw that back, it's pretty tough to claw back. But we've been very, very open and just, you know, we've, so a couple of things that have happened. One is we started hiring people wherever.

We just stopped caring about where they were. We hired a lot of people that were not in New York City over the past eight, nine months. How did the change your life as the founder and the velocity of what you're doing as a company? When you've removed the geography, you know, vector from hiring. Yeah.

Well, of course, it's enabled hiring. As everyone has experienced, there's talented people all over. It's, I don't think it's, I don't think it's changed our velocity, our ability to get, I don't, you know, I don't think we've had any impact. and our ability to be effective as, you know, getting stuff done. We've had a lot of focus on just, like, improving our overall operational effectiveness. And so, you know, this year has been, or 20, last year was probably one of the most

effective, efficient years we've had. How much of that was, was that due to work from home? Maybe a little bit, but, you know, we did a lot of work on operational effectiveness. But I don't think, I don't think that work from home makes you less effective. It doesn't make you less effective. And it likely makes you recapture. Do you believe my premise that? People were working probably five or six hours, and then this four hours got reclaimed and you kind of split it 50-50 with the employee.

Yeah, I think so. I think generally. I mean, it varies from employee to employee, but yeah, I think so. I think generally that I agree with that math. Have you, what was the culture when you were in the office? And then what happened to the culture and have you given that thought, you know, and sort of distributed? People are doing these like, I don't know, happy hours on Zoom or stuff like that. that seems just crazy dystopian to me.

I went to like a 50th birthday party on Zoom, and it was, I literally felt like this was like some crazy Darren Aronofsky film. It was like a requiem for a dream level dystopian to me. We've done Zoom everything. And it's a little weird sometimes, but you know, you make it work. So we've done a lot of Zoom sort of like social things. We have, you know, like different groups, different groups will get together. Our leadership team will get together for like a while.

wine, Zoom wine tasting and things like that, which, you know, corny, but the, the weirdest, I'll tell you the weirdest thing that we did, which I really appreciate the effort. One of the thing, you know, we, I think we have a pretty fun culture. One of the traditions that we started last year that we had so much fun doing, or kind of 2018, I'm sorry, 2019 that we wanted to carry forward into 2020, is we did a, we did a lip sync battle. So we did a lip sync battle at a, at a drag club. and it was so much fun.

Everybody just had so much fun. It was hosted by some really brilliant, funny drag queens. And we were like, well, we got to do lip sync battle. We're going to figure out a way to do lip sync battle. So what do you do? Do you do lip sync battle over Zoom? Well, that would be... You're talking about Lucky Changs?

Did you do Lucky Changs when you were in New York? I don't think it was Lucky Changs. I don't think it was Lucky Changs. I'm forgetting the name of the... Do you a Royal? Maybe. Yeah, we rented out the venue. and I forget the name of the venue.

But, okay, well, how do we do? New York's ultimate drag queen show place, palis. I honestly don't remember the name of the venue. It could have been any of this. Drag culture, just, you know, putting it out there. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. So what we did is we still had it hosted by some really funny and brilliant drag queens on Zoom,

rather than doing the Lip Sync battle live, which would have been very weird. People pre-submitted their videos, and we watched them on Zoom together. Look, I'll say the whole thing was like kind of. So it was a watch party. It was a watch party. The whole thing was a little bit, a little bit funny.

But you know what? It was something. It was something and people liked it. You know, people liked it. Yeah, I saw Cameo. I had the guy from Cameo on the pod and he's been doing, you can get a celebrity to be on your company Zoom. And you think about it like, okay, I got 220 employees.

We got this X budget a year. So much easier. You know, having a celebrity come on for 5K or 10K to address the company and goof off with a company is. kind of dope when you think about it, right? It is. And it's so much easier to do. It's so much, you know, you just say, hey, jump on a Zoom from home.

And they're like, I don't have to be in New York. Yeah, 10K for like Jason Sedakas or somebody to come on and do a TED last. A little Q&A or something. Yeah. It's so amazing. Yeah. When we get from the final break, I got to cover two things with you, raising money and really explaining how you went from a service company to a software company

because everybody talks about that and very few people pull it off. You pulled it off. And then pricing, we get back on the speaker. Ah, yes. If you want to build a website. or an online store, or you want to do a conference, or maybe you've got some really creative project you want to do, or maybe just a portfolio. There is only one place for you to go. I literally was on the phone with a founder who was like, how do I make something beautiful? And she was like,

going to spend $35,000. I kid you not, on a website with modest functionality to some crazy agency. And I said, hold on, show me the scope of work. She shows me the scope of work. I said, you realize Squarespace is better than this. And Squarespace is literally going to cost you 1% of what they're asking for for the next couple of years. Squarespace makes beautiful websites. That's all you need to know. And they have tons of templates that are all responsive.

You get to be part of the Squarespace ecosystem, which is constantly improving. You can blog and publish content. That's obvious. Promote your business. Sell products. And they have all these beautiful templates by world-class designers that work on all devices. they also put a ton of energy into SEO, search engine optimization. Plus, you get the free and secure hosting, 24-7 award-winning customer support.

And of course, they added e-commerce. We decided in 2020 to make the best use of the pandemic. We were locked up in our houses. And I looked and I said, you know, there's all these companies not getting funded. We started something called Remote DemoDay.com. I said to everybody, I want the website up in 24 hours. They had it up in minutes. And then we just had to write the copy.

We got it all up online. And it has played a huge part in that. We actually purchased the Remote DemoDay.com domain right on the site. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code Twist, and you'll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Please use the promo code Twist so they know that I sent you. Squarespace and the team have been an incredible partner of this program for years.

Anthony, great founder. We'd love to have them back on the pod, actually. We have to check in. We haven't talked in a long time. So go ahead and use Squarespace.com slash twist. Thanks again, Squarespace and the team over there for making great software. Welcome back, everybody. Follow Emery Wells on the Twitter, E-M-E-R-Y-W-E-L-S.

He's a CEO and co-founder of Frame.io. You can go check them out. It's free for individual users, right, on a pricing basis. And then 15 to 25 bucks, a seat, depending if you're like a pro or a team member or something. Maybe you get a discount if you get, you know, 100 employees on it or something. Or does it go price go up if you use on? The price goes up, yeah. Oh, the price goes up.

Because you need to check. There's more features. There's a lot more features. Yeah. Got it. So what's the biggest footprint of a customer? And how do they look at your pricing? And how did you determine all the pricing?

Pricing is such a complex thing. The biggest footprint of a customer is like in thousands of seats. And so it's, you know, we've had big deployment. So we have, you know, we have a studio. We did a deal with a studio, which I cannot name, but they committed to, you know, doing 150. original pieces of content in our platform. And so that was thousands of seats.

And, you know, studios work with a lot of, you know, the studios are financiers. They're not actually doing the work themselves, but they wanted to centralize and has central governance over everything that they owned. And so it was still like, they work with production companies, right? That's their, they don't own all the video editing bays in Los Angeles, at least in New York, actually. All the video editing bays were kind of like a we work style, right? You would rent those for your project.

you would rent the editors. The editors were all freelance, I believe. Or they work for production companies. Yep. And then the studios would just subcontract out with those production companies, right? Why do they do it that way instead of having like a hundred video editors on staff? And are they moving to that as Disney becomes, like Disney has basically become Disney Plus, right? Like that's the company.

So, and Netflix has always been that way. Are they going to move eventually to having that in-house or is it just not how the artists like to work? I'm curious. That's not how the artists like to work. That is a model that you're seeing in. That's not a model that you see in studios and nor will we see that model in studios, but you do see that model in a lot of companies that would have previously hired like an agency. So if you're a brand, a lot of brands, right?

So like, videos the way people want to receive information. So people that were doing marketing that was like maybe 10 years ago was banner ads and email marketing and blah, blah, blah. All these companies need to be able to create video. And they're bringing it in-house where they previously would have hired. somebody at freelancer, hired an agency, whatever. And that's because, you know, the cost of doing this has come down dramatically. The equipment is so much more accessible.

So that's moving in house. But for the studios, no, they're going to continue that model, which makes sense for them. They're, you know, when you want like the highest, they're constantly working with different groups of creatives and, you know, those people want freedom. It kind of works better in that model for them. Yeah, I remember when I was doing this reality TV show, I got like the inside skinny on how this all works. And they're like, yeah, these production companies are getting whatever, $400,000, $400,000 in episode.

And then they're renting themselves back their machines or, you know, like, it was like all this money was moving around and people were, you know, getting all different pieces of the budget for, you know, renting. And then they were buying their own avid machines, renting them to themselves or whatever it was. It was pretty interesting. How did you cross the chasm between having, being an artist and, you know, having a production company and then trying to raise money as a. software company because people try to do that all the time and it doesn't work. It's hard to do. It is hard to do. So I've had two passions in life. One was to be a filmmaker and, you know, when I, when I, for the sort of 10 years that I did it most professionally, I did post-production and I did visual effects. And post-production and visual effects are like the intersection of creativity

and technology. It's very, very technical. And I love that intersection. Like that's where I love to live. And so while I was doing post-production, you know, I always dreamed of having, a tech company. I always wanted to build software. But, you know, I would, I, I, I, I, there's a couple things I've tried in life and sort of failed that. Like, I've given, I've learned, I've tried to learn how to become a developer or an engineer like six times, like an earnest effort. I've probably read 20 coding books and I've just never gotten good. It was just, like, didn't click, you know? Like, I tried and I tried, and I tried and I tried and it just didn't, I just never got good. But you were good at motion graphics

and editing video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, yeah. Yes. We did a lot of technical services. Motion graphics, visual effects, color grading, finishing, dailys, all kinds of stuff. And it was when I met my co-founder. My co-founder, I hired right out of college at my post-production company to do a job that had nothing to do with engineering, but he did have exposure to computer science in school and continued learning just kind of on the side. And we, you know, he was like showing me stuff he was learning and stuff that he was doing. I was like, oh, it's really cool. I'm like, man, like maybe we should do something. We should we should make an app. Why don't we make an app? And we made a little iPhone app together.

And that was our first time like building an app. And we just had so much fun. It was so fun. I designed it. He built it. I've done design my whole life. And after that experience, you know, it was a small app, niche app for our industry. We're like, all right, we got to build something and like make software. We can do this. And I think we're really good at it. And so we thought about a bunch of different ideas, things that we could do like, you know, location based photo sharing app and being the next Instagram and all the, we were working on a lot of those. ideas. But, you know, the realization that we came to was all of those companies and not to take anything away from those founders, those are lottery companies. There's only, you're either Instagram

is a lottery. You're right. Yeah. It's lottery, right? You're in your snap or you're nothing. Your Instagram or you're nothing. There's no like moderate success. Everybody cares or nobody cares. Everybody cares and nobody cares. And we're like, you know what? We don't want to put herself in that lottery. Why don't we do something that we know really, really well that we can build a business. If we're going to spend the next like X number of years doing something, let's guarantee that we of an outcome. So we said, well, let's, we're going to build this, this, build the solution for this problem. We, we understand deeply. And so we started Frame Io. And we had no connections to Silicon Valley whatsoever. Didn't know anybody. But you said, like, I, if you haven't built software before,

you don't come from that industry. You don't have a lot of credibility. And that's right. I thought, I'm like, hey, well, I've built like a, I've built like a multimillion dollar company. Like, maybe that gives me credibility. And it didn't. So we, we built, we built the product. And we did a viral launch. You know, there's all kinds of companies that do really good viral launches where they get tons of like organic social spread, you know, everything from the like, here's the coin and you drop it in the bucket and then you do this and the, you know, all that stuff. Yeah. We did a really good viral launch. We spent three months working on a viral launch and we and we launched it and it did its thing. It went viral. We have, you know, thousands and thousands of tweets. And then I just started getting all this

inbound from investors. I was getting investors. I was getting inbound from Andresen and Excel. And I was like, Oh my God. I couldn't believe it. So just from the launch, so if you coordinate a really big launch day, that actually works. Well, yes,

because it was, I mean, we were on the front page of hacker news. We were on early, early product hunts. You know, we'd had tons of organic impressions on social. And so,

yeah, that worked. I mean, not only it was at the initial base of users, but it got us. Was there a tool that did that really well? No, we built it all from scratch.

We did it, we did it all from scratch. And we spent three months building this like launch thing. It was like, it was like, you know, it was, um, first, there was a couple components to the launch. First, it was like an absolutely like dripping gorgeous landing page. Like it was, you know, you know when you see a page, I've never seen that on the internet before. Like, oh, that's really cool. We did one of those, right? We did one of those. And so that was just like very eye-catching.

And then usually the sign up is drop your email. We'll let you know when it's ready, right? But we did drop your email and then it moved to another screen. It's like, all right, we got your email. You're in. But here's all the. the things you can do to increase your position in line. And we have a little, you know, the gamification and this point. Invite a friend, tweet it, get a point. Right. So we did all that. That was like, I mean, people still do that, but that was like back then,

that gamification was kind of more novel and it really, really worked. So due to that, and this is the critical piece. So all of that works, but the critical piece was you got an automated email from me. It was timed specifically to be 15 minutes after you signed up, plain text, no unsubscribed, subscribe. So it looked like a real email. It looked like a real email. I mean, it really it. I was like, hey, I noticed you just signed up, like, you know, whatever. So it was like two sentences, look like a real email. And from that email, I got thousands and thousands and thousands of responses. And where an investor from Indrisen or Excel or whatever, maybe they, you guys are

lurking around the internet all the time. You might drop your email in and be like, I want to keep track of this tool. Sure. And then 15 minutes later, you get, you get a email from the founder. It's like, hey, why did you sign up? You're like, oh, well, it looks cool. And so I was able to engage with the VCs that way. Yeah. So we're really excited. You developed your pawns.

You moved the relationship forward a bit. Exactly, exactly. So my first pitch ever, my first pitch ever was at Indreason Horowitz to Steven Sinovsky. And so he had shortly, Microsoft guy. So president of Windows of Microsoft, he had moved over to Indreason to be a venture partner. So that was my very, very first pitch in my life was to, was to Steve. even. And, you know, anyway, he loved, he loved the pitch, love the product. Long story short is we did a number of pitches. This was all pre-launch. So we had we done this, this, you know,

that that, that, that, that launch campaign that I'm talking about, that was like a pre-announcement. You couldn't use the product at that point, right? Right. It turns out we were actually a full year away from actually having the product ready. We thought we were like further along. So in that time, in that sort of like your time, I met with a bunch of investors. And everybody was like, hey, amazing product, wow, like so cool, come back to us when people are paying new. And nobody wanted to invests. And so we got really close, like, you know, we got really close, but ultimately nobody wanted to, you know, you get the typical stuff like, oh, we'd be interested in like participating

if there was another lead, you know, blah, blah, blah, nobody, nobody's looking for somebody else to validate to validate you the idea to anoint it. Yeah. And if not, the other way to anoint it is to talk to a customer. So you don't have customers. The product's not built, but you've basically done this incredible fanfare. So they're aware of you, but they don't want to pull the trigger. That's right.

And by the way, that's not a dig on Andreessen. Like, that's probably the right way to. I mean, that's probably correct, right? We're unknown, had never built software before, didn't have any customers, didn't have a launch product. And so then it took us a full year to actually launch it. And when we did the actual launch, we did another viral campaign. and it worked again. We kind of use the same mechanics and it worked again.

And then you launch twice. We launched twice. That's a little bit greedy. It's a little greedy, but I like it. It's a little greedy. But actually, I think you should always launch twice and I can tell you about that. But because you should always do a pre-enact,

go ahead. Tell me. Well, if you have something big enough that warrants it, you should always do a pre-announcement and an actual announcement because you get double the bang. Yes. It takes more work.

It takes more work. But like people, like when something's not accessible and it's like, this requires something big and, good. You don't want to tease people something you don't care about, but if you have something big and good, like tease them, do that pre-announcement. And then, you know, I wouldn't say wait a year, but a couple weeks later, then hit them with the full announcement. So anyway, we launched and we had immediate traction. We had really good early traction. And we were doing

$30,000 a monthly recurring revenue in the first 90 days of launch. So, and that was like these like $15 plans. And then we, you know, reengaged all the conversations and the conversations were totally different. It was totally different. How so? What would the, now that you got paying customers, how many paying customers did you have at that point? Um, it was, it was quite a few. I mean, it was, I, the revenue numbers or low thousands?

Yeah, it was more than, more than in, in the many hundreds. So it was like, it was, um, 30,000 a monthly recurring revenue with these like $15 plans. So now all of a sudden, the entire dialogue changes and they want to know what, your valuation? The entire dialogue changes. And, um, well, there was actually another thing that, happened in between, which was prior to actually launching, while we were never able to get an investor to lead, we did get a large company to go very far down the process of trying to acquire us before we launched.

Wow. We had a $10 million acquisition offer from a wonderful founder. I love this guy. He's such a man. I won't name names, but he loved getting to know him. It's a big publicly traded company now. And they offered us $10 million when it was just me and my co-founder. Just me and my co-founder, no products, no product.

Or we had a product, but it wasn't launched. So we had a product. I'm guessing this is either box, drop box. Yeah, okay. Probably one of those. Probably could be. I'm just taking a guess. Just taking a guess.

They've always had aspirations of putting a front end and, you know, being a horizontal platform, you know, for storage, obviously, but they need to go have vertical tools, right, on top of that horizontal. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So we had that. We had that.

We had that acquit. So we use that to anchor our valuation. We're like, well, listen, X, somebody's going to want to pay us X. So, like, we're going to be where we are using that as the anchor for our valuation. Love it. So we wound up doing a CBO. Why did you turn that down?

I'm curious. Take me through your thinking. So I, uh, we had a lot. You're sitting there with your co-founder. It's just two of you, right? Just the two of us. So it's $5 million each. Yeah.

It's a lot of money for a kid from New York. It was, it was. We were, um, actually this, the intro to this, to this, the intro to this, founder was like my second conversation in Silicon Valley. My first was to Steven Sinovsky and he was my second. And and we went to dinner with him in San Francisco, met his whole team. We wound up being, you know, we wound up being at dinner for like three, four hours. And then we immediately went back to the office, their their headquarters. And like we showed them to give them a demo. So I never gave him a like live in person demo. Anyway, we were doing like the courtship, right, happens over long period

time getting to know each other. And after like this long period of courtship, I told my co-founder, I'm like, God, like, when is he going to, he's got to pop the question? You know, like, why is he going to pop the question? Because you're in this long courtship. And so, and so finally, we had a call scheduled, me and the founder of this other company, we had a call scheduled. And I told my co-founder is like, all right, there's nothing else we could possibly talk about on this call. He's got to pop the question. He's got to pop the question on this call. Right. So, um, he asked if you want to go to Paris? Right. Right. So this was like 11 p.m. It was like 11 p.m. my time. It was pretty late. And I told my co-founder, I'm like, before getting on this call, I mean, my co-founder said like, okay, what's our buy-it-now button? Like, what is the buy-it-now price? And I think we said something like, something like, 20 million was our buy-it-now price. And so we get on the call and we, you know, we do a little song and dance. And eventually he's like, you know, it does pop the questions. Like we would love, we would love to do something. And he basically, you know, gives us an offer. And it was, it was. It was a low offer and it was like, you know, a million bucks or something.

Which honestly for two people and no product, like an unlaunch product, actually a pretty good deal. But, you know, that, frankly, I think what enabled me to very easily say no is actually already had success with my other company. Like, that wasn't going to be life changing for me. And so I had to reach down deep into, you know, muster the courage that I, that I, all the courage I could have. And I responded with, we're worth 50. And that was my response to a million, which is like crazy, right?

It's like totally nuts. But we didn't want to be acquired. And anyway, we actually wound up getting an offer for 10, which was incredible. But we had spent, this was our first big software project. We had put our hearts in our soul into building this product. And like, we knew we had a path ahead of us to do something cool. Yeah. We just wanted, we wanted to do that.

You know, we really wanted that opportunity to do that. Who was the first investor? Who were the first investors in that seed round or series A? Excel. So Excel is the first investor and we used that offer from that other company as an anchor for our valuation. And we did a $2.2.2 million seed round at a, I think it was 12.2 post money valuation. So basically said like we really just based off that, we're like, hey, we got an offer for 10. That's what we think we're worth. So put in 2.2, 12.2 million dollar valuation. And it was a pretty swift, pretty swift deal. And then once you're in the club, then you're in the club. Yeah. Assuming you do well, right? You got to do well.

Yeah, you've been anointed. You know, you're going to. You're anointed and now and then, you know, we're just on the, on the track. And Jared Lotto participated as well. Jared Leto participated. Yep. Yeah, we had a couple celebs. And Jared's interesting.

He, because he, he doesn't go through people. Like he just, like I talk to him directly myself and, you know, he's a great product person. He got actually really good product thinking. And he's been, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't talk. to him a lot, but he's, you know, he's cool to work with. He's, he's into it as well. Like, he's really into startups and stuff like that. He was, he had Uber shares.

He's had a lot of cool investments he's done over the years. Yeah. And he's, he's honestly like, you know, he's pretty gracious too. Like, he invited us to, like, some stuff in Hollywood world. Like, he invited us to his Halloween party. And yeah, just like, it was cool, a nice guy. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. Like, you would, in Hollywood, sometimes you meet somebody and you're just like,

I wonder if that person with an awesome. or whatever he's got or, you know, fame or whatever. It's like, oh, yeah, he was in Airbnb in Stripe, too. So, I mean, he, he hangs with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and he's considered, like, incredibly humble and he's engaged and he's smart. Like, he asks questions and that kind of thing. And by the way, I'll say one of the things like lightning fast email responder, lightning fast.

I mean, like, I'm like, every time he responds in like two minutes, I'm like, isn't, I think he must be so busy. He's just, I mean, he is on it. Like, if I'm giving him an update or something, oh, here, update here, update there. Like, oh, hey, it would be, you know, be really cool if you could tweet this. It's just like fire, just right back. Yeah, Mark Cuban is like that as well. And Mark Cuban is like, does that at 2 a.m. 3 a.m.

Like, just we'll write you a 2 page. He was an original investor for us when we were doing our blogging company back in the day. And, you know, he would just write a 3. I mean, you would get responsiveness, yes, but even, you know, like out of the blue, you you got a 2 a.m. email, hey, I was thinking about your business. Here's some ideas. I mean, I think that's why he's really good at what he does. I'm a big believer in, you know, communication cadence is really important. You set the, like, how quickly you respond is like what sets the expectation for how quickly somebody responds to you. And so, you know, like, even

with my executive assistant, like, we have a rule, not a rule, but like, you know, if, obviously, like scheduling is always like constant thing, hard thing. And I, um, always try to ensure that like, she'll respond to do scheduling within five minutes after. an initial email, like just keeping that cadence really tight and fast, really dictates how somebody's going to interact with you. Yeah, and it shows like how serious you are about business, right? Like, if you're a quick responder, you're probably going to build a successful business. You're reacting quickly to important constituents.

So where does the business go from here? You get to 200 employees. You've got obviously pretty serious revenue. And now you're sort of probably bumping. up and having instead of venture firms and, you know, Oscar winners calling you, you might be having SPAC people call you or just people buzzing around. How do you think about the future of the business? Obviously, there's a ton of SaaS companies out there who are buyers, whether it's Salesforce or Twilio or Adobe, who have competitive products or maybe, you know, are looking at what you're

doing and saying, hey, that's interesting. How do you think about the future now? Because you've, you really got to a pretty amazing summit. Are you thinking about, this should be independent for a long time to come. You're thinking about SPACs, are you thinking about exits or just putting your head down and what's next? Those are all really good questions. And in fact, that was the topic of conversation

at our last board meeting before the end of the year because we're at that stage where, you know, you have these different avenues in front of you. And I think that, you know, the dynamics, I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer. But the dynamics that, you know, you face, that sort of force you to think about that

are as you reach the scale, you think about raising, you're thinking about raising more money, thinking about the valuations of those of those rounds that sort of sets you on, you know, one path versus another, at least makes you lean towards one way or another. So I think we're facing some of those decisions. We've got to make some decisions about, you know, about what we want our future to be. And those are kind of active discussions. It's very hard to know when you have a winning company what to do because you have more options. And it does complicate, right? You could stay independent. You can be part of something bigger. You can SPAC or you can just put your head down and keep working, right? And in almost all cases, when you have product market fit like you do,

letting your winner's ride is the right answer, right? Like if, I'm not giving you advice here. And then there's something incredible that you happen to be a beneficiary of just based on when you came into this, which is, you know, the ability to do secondary transactions didn't exist 10 years ago. Like that, that was not a thing. And now they, you know, you can really have founders like yourself, go for the goal because if you wanted to sell some of your shares at a, reasonable price to another pre-IPO, you know, late stage investor, that, that opportunity is there, right? You could even create an SPV yourself or your company and just every six months do an orderly secondary sale and you can pay down your mortgage on your loft in New York or whatever it is.

That's seven minutes from the office, you know, like that has changed the game. And it's just such an amazing turn of events for founders. I don't like it when it happens at the Series A, like Clubhouse famously, I think they took a $2 million off the table each or something. That seemed weird, but, you know, obviously worth it to win the deal, I think, ultimately, we'll say. But yeah, that has, that has changes. That seems like a lot for a, that seems like a lot for an A. Yeah, the secondary stuff came into play for us, like in the B and C rounds. And it was pretty, very, it's very small in the B and a little bit meaningful in the C. But yeah, it does. It does because, you know, you, I don't think, I don't think most founders do this for the money.

I think at least, I don't know. I think at least most of the successful ones don't, or at least not their primary motivation, because I think that... No, it's an after effect of it, right? It's an after effect. You have the secondary effect that wealth is created for you and your team. Yeah, that's right.

For the whole team. Yeah, so you want to see some of that, some of that win. And I can imagine that if those dynamics did not exist, that it might influence your decision a different way. It definitely is great also I find for team members to see that happen. especially for a New York company where when I was in New York, there weren't a lot of examples of people who got rich off equity, right? It just didn't exist as a thing.

But then you started to see it with a certain companies going public or Tumblr, I guess, was one. Or, you know, some of these were able to show, hey, yeah, somebody could get rich and could buy a nice house or an apartment or, you know, a car. Just over the holiday, my co-founder and I were looking at the cap table. And it was really rewarding when we actually looked at like, okay, how many people have we made millionaires? And that was really cool to see.

It was really, I hadn't looked at it in that way. And I was like, oh, wow. It's based on, you know, it's paper millionaires. But it's still, it was very rewarding to see that we've been able to have an impact like that. It is one of the greatest things ever because, you know, this is why I really believe in these secondary transactions now. When a company gets to product market fit and let's say 10 million or more in revenue, just to do 10% maximum. per person or something 5%, it makes it real for them. And it lets them believe the story that equity could be worth something.

And I think a lot of times employees that these companies don't believe it unless they're at like, you know, Uber or, you know, late stage or Google or something. And they actually see it happen. But when they see it happen, then it's like, oh, okay. You get the RSUs. It's real every month. I mean, that's- Right. The RSUs at those big companies, restricted stock units, it's very real because they're going

into your account every month and you have to pay taxes and all this kind of stuff. And with secondary, it does make it real. We have taken advantage of a lot of secondary opportunities just to sell 10%, especially for our syndicate investors so that they can see that this is real, right? So just pairing 10%, you know, two or three times where your company goes public is the best advice I have to people because let's say you wind up selling 10% three times. And then the company goes supernova from there. You still got 70% of the benefit of the supernova moment.

But you also got the downside protection of the 10-10. 1010, which paid for your apartment, your kid's school, or whatever, it happened to pay down your credit card debt. All right, listen, you've been very generous with your time. Congratulations on just an amazing success and, you know, go for the gold. It's like... All right. Thanks very much.

When you get to this level, Emery, like, it is so hard to get where you are. You represent one in 10,000 people who, you know, started, you know, and incorporated, like, to get to your level, like... Well, quick, funny ending story, because just this morning we had our all. All hands, first all hands of the year. And, you know, I give a raw, raw, like beginning of the year and just reflection and all and all that. And I gave the analogy, which I just thought of this morning, but it was a fun analogy for the all hands, which is we're reflecting on. I asked the company, like, you know, what percentage do you think, what do you think the percentage of companies make it to this stage?

And we ask people in Zoom, those Zoom chats going, you know, 10%, 1%, 5%, whatever. And then the analogy I made is that like startups are a lot like baby sea turtles. You know, you all hatch on this beach and everyone's excited to make it to the ocean, but, you know, so few. That's right. Ripped apart by the sea. But if you make it to the ocean and you get, you become an adult sea turtle, you know, the adult sea turtles have very few predators and most of them live long, peaceful lives. So, you know, this year for us, I said, we're like right at that. We're like, we're like touching the water.

We're touching the water and we're like, you know, almost past the most treacherous, perilous, perilous part. of this startup journey and like on our way to being an adult sea turtle. That's very suddenly last summer for a for film references. You ever see suddenly last summer? I did not actually know. Oh, this is a crazy. It's an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play. But Elizabeth Taylor's in it.

And Catherine Hepburn plays her on to wants her to get this crazy, new treatment for her hysteria, because women suffered from hysteria in the 50s. And it's called with electric shock therapy, basically. And the screenplay is by Gourvedal, actually, which is incredible. And I think they were like maybe two or three years apart in age, Catherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. But it's the famous scene of Elizabeth Taylor coming out of the ocean in a white one-piece bathing suit that was incredibly risque and crazy at the time. But this was when Freud and a lot of that stuff was sweeping through the public consciousness, and it's sort of about unconscious and memory.

It's kind of like Christopher Nolan before Christopher Nolan, you know, like Memento kind of like trying to figure out memories and Roshamon kind of Kurosawa influence maybe. I don't know if Roshamon came before. So this summer was 59. I don't know what Roshamon was. Maybe they influenced each other. Anyway, so really going, who's your favorite? You said you want to be a filmmaker.

Who's your favorite? Who are your top three favorite directors? Well, the everybody has ever top. wants to, well, everyone that wants to be a filmmaker, I think they typically have like something, like there's a moment or film that inspires them to like, to really want to do it. And I'm 38 years old. And when I was 18, what was when Lord of the Rings came out the first edition. And I love fantasy and I love visual effects. And I, and I love the magic of big cinema. And that was the film series that really, it's been, the generation before me was Star Wars. Yeah. Star Wars.

Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones. There's like a couple that, you know, like, you know, like, Spielberg draws. Yeah. inspired generations. And so that was the film that really inspired me. Yeah, it was Peter Jackson. And I watched all three of those films, like probably each of them I've probably seen 100 times like insane. Because I studied

them. I studied every single scene, shot, frame, everything. And that actually is what got me on the path to visual effects because I spent a lot of years doing visual effects. And I was like a teenager basically with my crappy camera, trying to figure out how to do high-end visual effects. and just trying to do basic green screen.

And back then it was so hard. I was like, how do these feature films get every little strand of hair to be perfectly separated from the background? I'm like, that is, I became my mission to figure out how to do that level of green screen. And so I spend years, you know, now it's substantially easier. But it was not. And it was not. And we'll touch you up and put you on a green screen.

If you want to see a great film by Peter Jackson is a, One, that's a sort of a romp of the Muppets called Meet the Feebles. Did you ever see that? No, I didn't. Oh, my God. Meet the Feebles is completely politically incorrect, but it's essentially like, imagine the Muppets if they were like doing drugs, having sex and going absolutely insane. Like Peter Jackson was out there in terms of like his thing.

But I literally just watched the X. Was that an early, early Peter Jackson? Yeah, it was way before. It was 1989. Meet the Phillies. Oh, okay. That was the, yeah, he did some crazy stuff. He did some wacky stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting to watch. And I just watched the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings with my four-year-old twin girls. And they loved it. And it's long. And it drags at times that extended edition.

Four hours. Four hours each. Yeah. It's like it's 11 hours. What's your favorite? I had the blue ray set. Every now. Yeah.

And I would watch, I would stay up all night. I mean, I'll watch it like almost like a couple times a week. I don't know what this wrong. I was that way with Blade Run. or Blade Runner was the film for me that I used to. Blade Runner, Gladiator. I think, yeah, I'm Black Hawk Down, the Mission. But I really like that, yeah, Prometheus I like too.

I like that whole, I like anything by. One of the fondest times, Ridley Scott, yeah, one of the fondest times of my life was when I, when I first moved to New York, I was like 20 years old. And, you know, I moved to your, like, classic, like New York story dream, like, 500 bucks, didn't know if I could survive. I wanted to be a filmmaker. But I lived across the street from a movie. In fact, I live in Battery Park now, and my first apartment in New York City, strangely enough, was in Battery Park right next to the Battery Park Cinema movie theater here.

Yeah, they have like a multiplex with a giant escalator that goes up. Yep, yep. And I lived right across the street center. I lived right across the street from that. So I grew up in Florida and like, you know, in Florida you have to drive anywhere. So I was right across the street from a movie theater. And I would go almost every night. Yep.

I would go almost every night with a notebook and a flashlight. And I would watch movies. And I would just take notes. And I would just take. And it was the cool. And I would go by myself. And I just thought I was the coolest person in the world. Like living in New York City, I'll go to the movie theater.

I'm like, I'm going to be this filmmaker. I'm taking notes with my little flashlight. And that was a really fond time. We had the film forum in New York. And then there was a place called Theater 80 on St. Mark's Place. I don't know if it's still there. But Theater 80 used to do, it's like a little tiny 50-seat theater or something. Or maybe it's, yeah, anyway, they would have all the revival.

So they owned copies of all the Curisawa films or whatever. were, you know, French New Wave and in film forum every year did their Kurosawa festival and they would do double features. So they do two nuis or two samurai or whatever. And you would we would just go and try to stay awake. You know, we'd see two Kurosawa films a night for four nights in a row just. But the Angelica was the other one where we just. Yeah, Angelica is still there. They're still around. Well, I mean, the Angelica in New York in like the 90s when Sundance and sex lies and videotape and, you know, independent film was peaking. was it was like the center of the world.

You would go to St. Marks. When you went to, you know, Houston and Broadway, and when you went to the Angelica, the scene outside were celebrities, filmmakers, just everybody hanging out in the lobby, and people would be, yeah, it was like the center of culture in a lot of ways. And now film is not.

It's so that the feature film is... TikTok is the center of culture now. Oh, it's gross. It's such a waste. Ugh. And like we used to actually go to see these films and then talk about them. Like it was a really important thing to have seen these films as a piece of art and a piece of piece of cultural relevance. And if you didn't see a certain film, you were just, how could you operate in the world if you hadn't seen certain, you know, Paul Thomas Anderson films?

I do think it's still a very important part of our connective social tissue. I mean, like if you're meeting a stranger, you can talk about shows. Like, oh, do you watch this show? you watch that show and you can instantly connect with people. I think it is still an important part of our social-connected issue. I think I was just talking to a friend of mine who's a filmmaker, Nick Jurecki, and he'd an arbitrage, and he's got a new one out now. And I was like, if you made these into seven hours, you know,

all these filmmakers were constantly asking for more time to make their film like three. I would like to go to three hours, and they're like, no, keep it to 90 minutes or whatever. Harvey Weinstein would cut your, you know, three-hour film down to 80 minutes or 90 minutes. and now they have the ability to do some incredible piece of art like you know, Queen's Gambit or whatever. I mean, the production value in these things is just, or Mandalorian, like,

Mandalorian is what, a nine-hour Star Wars movie? Yeah, Mandalorians really trail-bath, they're really trailblazing some new tech. The fundamental thing that they're doing is they are, they're replacing onset, on set green screen with virtual sets

that enable them to kind of film the virtual set in camera and it's, I mean, it looks great and it's incredible. I talked to John Favreau about this actually. They use like the Unreal Engine to make like a world. And then it's an actual, I don't know if they're LEDs or O LEDs or whatever.

Yeah, fully interactive. It's pretty incredible. But they're doing a camera that's filming a screen behind the actors. That's right. Yeah. So typically there would be a green screen and then you go to post-production and you replace the green screen now. It's a live. It's a screen that has the full Unreal engine or whatever it is they're using. And it's connected to the camera. So if the camera moves, the virtual background moves. And you can explore your shot. It's more like being in a real location, right? You can find your shot. It's pretty incredible. That's insane when you think about it. What that unlocks. Like literally the same sound stages, they're going to be able to walk on there and do the Ashoka series or the bad, but whatever the whatever. Whatever. You. you know, spinouts, Obi-Wan or whatever. And once they make that Unreal engine,

it's almost as if they've created like Call of Duty and they're just going to different places in the Call of Duty video game and shooting scenes. That's right. Well, the world of gaming and the world of cinema have long been just like very adjacent. I mean, the technology is all the same. It's just that, you know, like the gaming,

real-time gaming engines were just never up to the quality that was necessary for film. And now it's reached that level, you know? So like, I mean, I don't like people realize the rendering time, like a per frame, like if you take it like a Pixar film or something, yeah, like,

you know, it could be like 10, 20 hours per frame with like a giant farm of servers that are rendering. Like that's how much compute power it takes to do like Pixar level rendering. And we're getting now to the stage where for backgrounds at least, not like tight close-ups, but for backgrounds, you can use a real-time game engine.

It's pretty remarkable. It is unbelievable. And just, you know, the quality of people's screens, they're watching on, the fidelity of your iPad now is just so crystal clear. It's pretty crazy. It's almost, I had to, there's a feature on your TV where you can kind of de-escalate the Christmas of it because sometimes you watch one order or some other old movie and you're like,

oh, that's a set. They can kind of blur it down to make it almost like a little more boring. Yes, much to the, I mean, filmmakers absolutely despise all these features that are in televisions that they use to like enhance the picture. They're like just, we've done, we want, we've made our picture look like what we want it to look like to show the picture. We don't want all your add-on crap like that you're trying to do to like mess up.

You know, they have their 60 hertz mode. They have their like sharpening. They have like all this crap that they add to it. And the filmmakers hate it. They hate it because it messes up the picture. Messes up their intention. Yeah.

I want to go see more films in, what is it, 70 millimeter is the, I saw the, well, very few. are being done. But there's a bit of a, there's a bit of a, you know, now it's a bit of a push to like high frame rate. It's not being, it was, people thought we were going to adopt it. Like, you know, the Hobbit was shot at 60 frames per second, which makes it have that very hyper

smooth look, which most filmmakers despise. Most, it's like, because it's sacrilegious because, you know, for years, that's what video cameras looked like, because video cameras couldn't shoot at 24 frames per second. So like that, that ethereal look of film, people think must be at 24 frames per second. But now there's people that like 60 frames and that's a trend going on. I saw the hateful eight and 70 millimeter when they did that special road show. Did you see that? No. Oh, yeah. So Quentin Tarantino did this like hateful eight, 70 millimeter roadshow. And they put an intermission in it. And he went and had to go find like all the old projectors and he had to find the projecting people and like they were breaking and the lights didn't

work. And, uh, he's a purist. He's a purist. He's, He's, he's, he's, he's, there's a handful of purists that just, they're not going to do digital. They're not going to, you know, like, but, um, and he's, my favorite part of it was in the road show, the hateful eight road show, they gave you a program with all photos from the shoot and everything like that. So you got this like program. And then when you came in, they were playing. I think Nolan did Dunkirk in 70 millimeter as well when he released it and he got a bunch of advice

and quitting, but they, not only did they give you this pamphlet, they had the music playing, like the overture playing with like a title card that was kind of interactive or moving. And then they had an intermission for 15 minutes where they also played music. And so you had this like really interesting. It was almost like going to theater in terms of the anticipation and they took out the commercials. It was really an amazing, really amazing experience. Anyway, listen, I can talk to you about film all day. Congratulations.

So you see, that would be a reason, Emery. If you take the company public, then you'll be like 45 years old. get a little bit of money in the bank, you can go be a filmmaker. You can go back to your... Well, I never did... I mean, that's right, because I never did my initial dream

was to make a feature. Everyone starts by wanting to make a feature film. They want to be a director. And I've had an idea in my head for 20 years, inspired by Lord of the Rings and fantasy worlds and all of that. And for 20 years, this I've been making this film in my head.

And so maybe one day, maybe, maybe you get to make it. You know what? I think there is, there is going to be a convergence that happens because I was watching Star Wars Theory did a Vader fan film and those fan films now

are starting to look like video games and using video game engines and stuff like that. And I think the fan films are going to, you know, like in five or ten years, it's completely possible that the fan films will look like the Mandalorian, right? And the fans are making Star Wars Khan. They're getting there.

Yeah, the game engines change the game, for sure. You can do incredible things in these game engines. All right, listen, I kept you forever. Great job on the company and we'll continue. with it and I'm assuming you're hiring and you can work from home. We're hiring. You can work from home. All roles. There you go. So go to frame.io slash careers slash jobs. Jobs. Jobs.com. Something like that.

Frameio jobs. It's got to be a job board somewhere. All right, Emery, continued success. Thank you very much. Cheers. And we'll see you next time, everybody. Bye. Bye.