68: Chris Savage: Why Wistia Chose Culture Over Quick Profits

In this episode, we’re joined by Chris Savage, the innovative founder and CEO of Wistia. 

From his early days studying film to building a multimillion-dollar company, Chris shares his journey with a mix of humility and wisdom. We delve into the challenges he faced starting Wistia and how setting realistic goals played a crucial role in the company’s growth.

In this episode, we’re joined by Chris Savage, the innovative founder and CEO of Wistia. 

From his early days studying film to building a multimillion-dollar company, Chris shares his journey with a mix of humility and wisdom. We delve into the challenges he faced starting Wistia and how setting realistic goals played a crucial role in the company’s growth. 

Chris emphasises the significance of a strong, positive company culture and believes in making work fun. He talks about the pivotal role of core values in decision-making, Wistia’s unique approach to remote work, and the art of hiring the right people. 

Key Talking Points:

• Chris Savage’s journey and Wistia’s early challenges
• The role of goal setting in business growth
• Building a positive company culture
• Integrating fun into the work environment
• Core values in decision-making
• Wistia’s approach to remote work and hiring
• The story behind the HBO deal decision
• Wistia’s current success and future plans

Tune in for an insightful conversation full of practical advice and inspiring stories. A must-listen episode for growth-focused business leaders!

Resources:

Connect with Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjsavage/

Learn more about Wistia: https://wistia.com/

Listen to Chris’ Podcast ‘Talking to Loud’: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talking-too-loud-with-chris-savage/id1525785118

Listen to More Founder Stories from Truth & Lies:

Ep33: Wellbeing for All: How pirkx & Stella Smith are Redefining Employee Benefits

56: Othered to Empowered: Maneesh K. Goyal and the American Dream

64: How a $100m+ Founder is Revolutionising Tomorrow’s Workplace

Connect with your hosts

• Connect with Al on LinkedIn 
• Connect with Leanne on LinkedIn
• Join the discussion about this episode on LinkedIn
• Email: podcast@TruthLiesandWork.com
• Follow us on Instagram @truthlieswork
• Chat with us on Twitter @truthlieswork
• YouTube channel for the podcast @TruthLiesWork
• Check us out on TikTok (LOL!!!) @truthlieswork

The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

Ep68

[00:00:00] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: You are what you tolerate, you know, like a culture. You can say all these things, you can write them down, you can do it. But the reality on the ground is you have to deliver it. So if you have toxic people and you don’t get rid of them, the signal is it’s okay to be toxic. If you’re always late to meetings, the signal is you can be late to meetings.

[00:00:23] Leanne: Hello and welcome to the Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture podcast brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I’m a business psychologist.

[00:00:33] Al: My name is Al, I’m a business owner.

[00:00:35] Leanne: We are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace cultures.

[00:00:39] Al: Yeah. Busy episode this episode. We’ve got a fair bit to get through. Uh, so just a quick one. We’re going for some shorter episodes. Uh, we’ve asked a few listeners and people have said potentially that an hour and 20 minutes of listening to us is a bit too much. So we’re going for around about the 30 to 45 minute mark.

[00:00:55] Al: Um, give us feedback. Tell us if you like it. Tell us if it’s for you. So today we are joined by the co founder and CEO of a company I followed for many, many years. In fact, most of the setup you can’t see here because it’s behind the camera is down to this guy and his team, because they have taught me so much about cameras and set up.

[00:01:13] Al: He studied film at Brown university. He won the Western fine arts award for excellence in filmmaking. He started Wistia with his co founder, Brendan Schwartz in their living room. And now Wistia is a multi million pound company with over 175 employees. In 2018, they turned down offer to buy the company and instead raised the money and bought out their original.

[00:01:37] Al: Angel investors. He’s a documentary maker. He’s awarded top entrepreneur by business week, New England entrepreneur of the year. He has the most badass video setup and the enormously successful podcast talking too loud. It’s my genuine pleasure to tell you we have Chris Savage from Wistia on the show. Am I

[00:01:54] Leanne: also right in thinking that talking to your lad has just joined the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals.

[00:02:01] Leanne: It has,

[00:02:01] Al: but also I, I avoided saying that from, you know, the whole Nepo baby thing and the

[00:02:05] Leanne: nepotism. Oh, this was recorded long before they got on the network.

[00:02:09] Al: Exactly. So they are part of the show, but I didn’t want it to look like they were part of the show. And that’s why he came on. I just, I was nobody. I just randomly reached out on Twitter and he was like, yep, I’ll

[00:02:17] go

[00:02:17] Leanne: on.

[00:02:18] Leanne: Yes. No, we saw, we saw the value there long before the HubSpot network did. That’s probably not true and that’ll probably get me in trouble, but let’s see if they listen, Marie. Hi, how are you? So back to Chris, back to Wistia. I remember you telling me out about Wistia and I did start doing some research before the interview and everywhere I have looked, Wistia talking about workplace culture.

[00:02:42] Leanne: Then I listened to the interview that Chris did with Al, and it really is evident that this has been a culture has been a conscious decision from the very, very start.

[00:02:52] Al: Absolutely. We’re going to start off by talking about how Westy has started. Uh, we’ve talked about how fun is baked into the culture, why creating values doesn’t always work, uh, how COVID influenced their remote working policy and why they turned out HBO as their fourth client.

[00:03:08] Al: So let’s start at the beginning. How did Wistia start? Here’s

[00:03:11] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Chris Savage. Basically, it was straight out of college. It was, uh, my co founder Brennan and I had, we met at Brown University, which is in Providence, Rhode Island, and, um, we’d always schemed together. We’d always had a bunch of schemes, get rich quick schemes in college that we wanted to do, and, um, partially driven by seeing people around us successfully have some, um, and, uh, you know, we thought we then, we saw video changing online in a big way and thought, You know, videos finally here.

[00:03:41] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And so we, we saw YouTube starting to take off in late 2005. And the interesting thing was they did all the encoding for you from any format. So it could play back and anyone could see it. And it was very clear that that was different. And we looked into it and it turned out that it was open source tools that they were using to do all that encoding.

[00:04:01] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And that was a light bulb for us. It’s like, if they can do it, we can do it. This is going to open up this whole market and that’s what caused us to start. And I won’t tell you the whole story about the, but like, I will, but keeping on the, the, uh, get rich quick scheme thinking we thought we were going to do this for six months and then we would sell it.

[00:04:23] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And that was just being utterly naive. And having no idea how businesses work or anything works, uh, because obviously been doing it a lot longer than six months, it’s been 17 years now. And, um, it turns out that companies take time and that’s part of the fun. And that was not what I expected when we started.

[00:04:41] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And that turned out to be very much like where things are, which is great.

[00:04:44] Leanne: If they can do it, we can do it. I love that about Chris. He likes to solve problems but he’s realistic. I, I enjoy that. I, there are plenty of founders out there who set these huge goals. I mean, I’m not looking at anyone in particular, Al.

[00:04:59] Leanne: Um, but yeah, you know. I’m a firm believer in setting smaller achievable goals. I can’t remember who said it, but most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10. Chris seems to be a believer in this and started with a pretty conservative

[00:05:19] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: goal. And I remember talking to my dad about that and I’m like, dad, we have these big goals.

[00:05:23] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We’re going to try to get 60k a year. He’s like, um, I think you should shoot higher. So, but you know, what’s funny about that is like, I’ve joked about that many times, but I actually think that having a goal. That we actually could achieve that actually 30 K a year meant we would be able to survive and it would cover all our expenses and stuff.

[00:05:45] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And we ended up doing that and a couple of years, um, that was actually helpful because it was like a realistic thing. And once you got there, like, Oh, I can do this. Like I can do something bigger too and that’s continued to be a pattern that happens and I think it’s kind of a very normal Entrepreneurial things.

[00:06:02] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: I don’t know how I’ll run a million dollar business. It’s like I don’t know I don’t know run how I’ll run a 10 million or 50 whatever and it turns out if you’re doing it at 10, you can probably do it at 50 and Yeah, but it’s, it’s hard to imagine that at the beginning. I was

[00:06:15] Leanne: keen to learn why culture was so important to Chris and Brandon.

[00:06:19] Leanne: Turns out it started pretty early

[00:06:21] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: for them. The first thing is when we started, it was just the two of us for two years and we had to learn how to work with each other. And so we figured out that, um, we should divide up ownership. We should have clear roles over who owns what I know. That sounds simple, but sometimes you don’t do that.

[00:06:39] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And there was a period of time when we weren’t doing that. And that was, it was definitely much harder to be accountable, to know what to work on. We, and we, from the very beginning had this very balanced approach. Like he’s going to build the product. And I am going to market and sell the product. And we’re going to divide things like that.

[00:06:57] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And then we raised a round of funding. We hired two more people and we stayed at four people for two years. So four years in, we’re four people. And it was about four years in when we really started to get traction. It was, you know, we went from 30 customers to 200 in like three months. 30, this is all paying.

[00:07:15] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Um, and we’d made some pricing changes. We’d launched some new features. We’d, kind of the marketing we were doing started to connect. We’re like, this is what it’s supposed to be. Then, you know, we, we hired and we, uh, we hired folks. And we were still really careful about how we were spending money. We wanted to be profitable, all this kind of stuff.

[00:07:33] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: So it was like five people and six people. It was probably. Six years in before we really started to hire more quickly. And at that moment, we started asking ourselves this question of like, why are we still doing this?

[00:07:45] Leanne: I’ll say, say slow and steady does win the race. Yeah, fair

[00:07:50] Al: enough. But like, we’ve always got this analogy of this hot air balloon in that I’m the hot air balloon.

[00:07:55] Al: And without the basket, I’ll give you that. Very good. But without the basket, I’m just basically disappearing to the atmosphere and burn up. And you’re the basket. You make sure that I don’t do that. But without me, you’d still be on the ground. Having a picnic. Oh,

[00:08:08] Leanne: absolutely. I would, I would not be self employed, let alone have a business without you.

[00:08:13] Leanne: It wouldn’t, wouldn’t even be a thing. And I’d

[00:08:15] Al: have gone bankrupt yet again.

[00:08:18] Leanne: Multiple times. Yeah. I mean, you know, you know, RX seven. Blueprint, which is all about the foundation, seven foundations, amazing workplace cultures. One of those, and one of the most important of those is role, understanding what your role is in the business.

[00:08:32] Leanne: As I said, he’s the, he’s the, the dreamer, I’m the grounder and both needed to, to get the balloon up in the air and keep it there sustainably. It pleases me to hear that Chris also took this very seriously.

[00:08:46] Al: Over the hour that Chris and I talked, the recurring keyword that came up was fun. And in fact, I did a quick count and he used the word fun 17 times in the hour.

[00:08:58] Al: Whereas the word revenue he used three times. It turns out when you enjoy your work, it’s so much easier to build a great workplace. It

[00:09:06] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: just put the idea of culture in our minds really early of like, Hey, the work itself is actually fun. And so we’re not burning out. We’re not getting tired of it. It’s that we really love working with these people.

[00:09:16] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We love this kind of having a total blank slate on how you’re going to solve a problem and really being willing to like to solve it from first principles. And that was just so exciting and so invigorating and so We started thinking about culture really then and started to write it down and think about it then.

[00:09:35] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And, you know, once we had that as a North star, it was helpful. And the, and the other thing that happened was around that same time. So about six years in is when we started to make videos to showcase our culture as a part of our marketing. And none of this was intentional. It’s basically all by accident.

[00:09:54] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: It was, let’s make some fun videos so we can show our parents what we’re up to, kind of a thing. The videos take off. There’s no content in it that has anything to do with our product. But it gets us a bunch of traffic and people come and sign up for the product. And it was this weird lesson in brand and this weird lesson in And, um, we realized the more we are authentic, the more we let people connect with us as individuals, the more we showcased like what was working and often what wasn’t working or things that we had just learned or whatever, the more things seem to resonate.

[00:10:23] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And so it became this idea of. For our marketing to be good, we have to put our culture center stage, and that means our culture has to be real. That was like the driving force, I think, behind it. But, um, the actual learning was, just like anything, experimentation. We got a ton of stuff wrong. Tons and tons of stuff, uh, that we thought we were, you know, so smart about, and just so innovative, and it was just Disastrous, but eventually we found our way to, you know, a lot of the tried and true things that you need to do and some different things.

[00:10:53] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And yeah, it’s just a, I honestly, we’re still learning, like there’s still evolving. We’re still growing and it’s, it’s not a journey that ends. And I think that’s actually what makes it fun.

[00:11:02] Leanne: Chris, you had a great story that sums up this idea of fun and actually turned out to be one of the best things they ever did for growth.

[00:11:08] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: That page is actually a good, a good example of something that was like, we did that purely for our own joy, it was someone’s birthday on the team, there were six of us, we took photos of us, put it on the website, and we did a serious version, which is the one we thought we’d share, and then we did two silly versions, and my co founder Brennan thought it’d be funny to put an Easter egg where if you typed dance, it would do this ran, it would randomly show the different photos of everyone, make it look like we’re dancing to play music.

[00:11:33] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And that was for the birthday of someone on the team. It was just a little joke he did. It took like 10 minutes to do and it went viral. And it was the least professional thing we’d ever done. It got us the most customers up till that point of anything. And so when that starts happening, like You really start questioning everything.

[00:11:49] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: You’re like, this is the opposite of what I thought. This, I thought we were supposed to be super professional B2B, you know, thing. And like this, like authenticity and this realness and this willingness to take a risk, people could sense it and feel it. And that’s what they were attracted to. I think a lot of

[00:12:05] Al: people, particularly when they start off first in business, they worry about how they’re going to be perceived.

[00:12:09] Al: You know, they dress up in borrowed suits to sell to people. They don’t even like really. And that comes across as really inauthentic. Instead of trying to be someone you’re not, why not identify the core values of you and your founders and your core team and build a culture around that. But be careful when you present these core values, it can actually backfire.

[00:12:31] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: It was definitely that year that we did it. And I’m kind of remembering, I think we’d gotten from maybe six people to nine people that year. And I remember showing it to the team. We’re like, do you have other things we should add on to this? And a designer on the team was like, what are you guys doing?

[00:12:46] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: What the hell is this? Like, are we like some big company now? Is that what I just joined? I thought I was joining a startup. And I’m like, no, listen, I think this stuff matters. Um, yeah. And I, I think the things we got wrong in that first iteration of the, of the values was Too many, couldn’t remember them, couldn’t actually help you with decision making.

[00:13:06] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: They weren’t all unique. Um, some things you’d want to be true in any company versus the way we think about values now, which is you want values that help you make a decision. And you want values that are uniquely Wistia, where our values could be used. You could take the opposite of them and they would be good for another company with a different strategy.

[00:13:25] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: That, that you need strong values. And I think you need to say what they’re not to. And so we’ve been through a few iterations. I could go on a whole thing on values if you want, but, um, yeah, I’ve, I’ve learned a lot over the years because it, it really is, let me put it this way. Values and how you make decisions are really the representation of your culture.

[00:13:46] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: So what you, what you praise, what you punish, what you promote for, what you fire for, all those things. Um, the decisions that people make and, and culture is how you enact strategy.

[00:13:56] Al: There are so many examples of how products and services grew from core values. About 10, 15 years ago, there was that cool advert from the Dollar Shave Club, um, where I think they were saying, stop paying for shaving tech you don’t use.

[00:14:08] Al: What was the other line? They said something like, um, Your grand had one blade and polio, you know, but the whole point of that, the core value of that was baked into the name dollar shave club. That that was the idea behind it. And also the idea obviously was fun. Now, obviously they went on to sell for a while, a billion dollars to Gillette or something like that, but the lesson stands core values.

[00:14:31] Al: Keep them simple.

[00:14:32] Leanne: Yeah. Key in the word core, I think, you know, you shouldn’t have 10 core values, not so core anymore. So it is the same when it works in terms of, of product values, in terms of culture values, building cultures, every employee at every level of your company should be able to, to recite, or at least at the very least name your core values and give you an example of what that looks like in action without having to look at a fancy chart in the foyer.

[00:15:00] Leanne: It does come down to the idea that how you do something is how you do everything.

[00:15:06] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We focus on the core of the problems we’re trying to solve. There are some places that will sacrifice simplicity for revenue, often enterprise. You know, that’s, that’s often the name of the game is like, you’re going to add more features.

[00:15:20] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: You’re going to make sure your checklist has every single thing on it. It’s not just about simplicity. It’s, it might be about like. Getting the RFP done. And so, you know, you would want different values in a culture I’m not saying they’re bad actually for that business If you said only keep it simple, it would might be the opposite of what you want in enterprise But you you want it to match back to the behavior look you’re looking for people to actually have and do in the business Another one for us is stay nimble We take action, even when things are ambiguous, we pivot fast and we find a better approach or new information.

[00:15:53] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: That’s a value because we’re launching a lot of new things. We’re trying a lot of new things. There’s a lot of parts within Wistia that are like startups. We need people to be willing to throw out the thing they just did if it didn’t work. We need them to be willing to try again and change and what have you.

[00:16:08] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And, um, if we weren’t in a space that was changing so much, we might not want that because sometimes you have the right thing and if you’re too nimble you can break everything and break all the systems and things stop working and so, I’m just a really big believer. You need the values that are matched to your company and you need your values that are also matched to the strategy.

[00:16:27] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: That you’re enacting. So if you change your strategy to change your values, um, or change your customer segment, same thing is going to happen. You’re going to need to look at like, how does this impact how people should be making decisions day to day.

[00:16:37] Leanne: Staying noble, keeping it simple and making a product that customers love.

[00:16:43] Leanne: These are Wistia’s values and they make decisions so simple. Even when the decision is to rip up six months of hard work and start again.

[00:16:52] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And the last year for Wistia, we launched a webinar platform. We launched an editor natively into the product and we launched recording natively into Wistia. If you know Wistia, you know, we’ve had an external recorder soapbox, but we’re building a better version of it into the core product.

[00:17:06] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And so it’s all in one. So you can get in there, you can upload a video, you can record a bumper, you can edit it, you can change all that stuff. You can do a live event and have it pump it to your account, all that kind of stuff. Well, when we launched the recording, Uh, product. We decided to make a separate part of the app called the studio.

[00:17:22] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And the reason was so you could have all your unfinished recordings in one place. And then it would be charged differently. So you have unlimited unfinished recordings. Uh, but if you add more videos in a Wistia where you pay more, then, you know, you’re only adding finished videos in, and so you’ll pay more.

[00:17:36] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And the team was like trying to balance what’s right for the customer. They’re trying to make it simple. All these things. They’re trying to stay nimble. They’re trying to get this to move. Well, lots of people start using this feature. They like it, um, but they are actually confused because the studio, why are videos in the studio different than videos just in the rest of your account?

[00:17:55] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: This feels weird. You know, why are there recordings? It’s just, it’s created too much confusion. It’s not simple enough. So they’re like, all right, staying nimble. They very quickly, this thing has been out there for like four months. They’re like, we’re going to change all of that. We’re switching it so that it goes directly into the account.

[00:18:09] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Um, we’re willing to kill a thing, a bunch of parts of what we just made. But we have the new stuff that’s going to make it even simpler and better. It’s going to be a better customer experience. Um, We’re making a hard pivot. We’re admitting we’re wrong on this thing and it’s just happening to me. I look at that and it’s like the other values we didn’t talk about are like take ownership and descriptions.

[00:18:30] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: But I look at living our values. This is living our values, this example, and it’s that the organization is doing this by themselves. They’re making these calls. They’re figuring it out. And I have a million examples like that. It’s just everything, everywhere I look, the things that are built, um, the messages that are going out to customer, how we treat customers when it’s a hard situation, all this stuff is very much just like, you can go back and you can see it’s tied directly to the core values.

[00:18:54] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Of

[00:18:54] Al: course it’s hard, but if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. When was the last time you used Skype? I know that’s a word I haven’t heard for a little while. If you have, you’ll find out that it’s buggy, it’s laggy, it’s the UI is just not cool. When you compare it to Zoom, Zoom’s just like. Point, click, done, chat, you know, it’s just so simple.

[00:19:13] Al: Microsoft didn’t seem to have the balls to rip up Skype at the beginning of the pandemic. Fair enough. They might not have known it was going to go on for so long, but Zoom, well, look where they’ve come from. From a smallish company to now you talk about as a verb, you Zoom things. Now I’m not saying the culture at Microsoft is bad, but I do know that Chris strongly believes that your culture dictates everything

[00:19:36] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: you do.

[00:19:36] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: You are what you tolerate. You know, like a culture, you can say all these things, you can write them down, you can do it, but the reality on the ground is you have to deliver it. So if you have toxic people and you don’t get rid of them, the signal is it’s okay to be toxic. If you’re always late to meetings, the signal is you can be late to meetings.

[00:19:54] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Like if you don’t treat people well, uh, when things are good and when things are bad, like people notice. And so We have just always tried to optimize for doing the right thing and doing the right long term thing and I, I think that’s why hopefully it shows up like that and it’s worth saying like, you know, I, it’s not me.

[00:20:12] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: It is, it is the whole team. It’s the senior management team. It’s the directors. It’s, you know, it’s the new employees who come in and they get excited. They want to defend and build a culture too. And that’s the only reason why I think it shows up like that.

[00:20:25] Leanne: Onto my favorite subject, managers, great managers and leaders not only know how to communicate well, but they also have a good grasp on where they’re going.

[00:20:37] Leanne: Having a clear destination makes it easy for their teams to follow.

[00:20:41] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Communication is what matters. You’ve got to communicate a 50%

[00:20:51] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We do them once a month. That’s like a kind of leadership led all hands. Many do once a month. That’s, uh, employee led. Anyone can get up and talk about anything, but the leadership one, the 50 percent of it, at least it’s exactly the same every time. It’s like, here’s our strategy. This is why we’re doing what we’re doing.

[00:21:05] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Here are our goals. Here’s how we’re doing against our goals. Here’s the next level of our goals on everything. Here’s why, how we’re doing against them. This is what’s working. This is what’s not. And we repeat over and over and over. So, honestly, I think it’s kind of boring. Like, I think if you’re in every one of these meetings, you’re like, I get it.

[00:21:20] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Like, I get what we’re trying to do. Um, but that’s actually the goal. Is to make it such that it’s so clear that people really get what it is we’re trying to do. That then in their world, they have freedom to actually make decisions. They can feel confident that they’re doing it. In a way that aligns back up to the strategy and what we’re trying to accomplish and I think that’s something that has been a big lesson for me in like the last five years where I used to think that leading was about charisma and like telling stories during all hands and, you know, telling anecdotes and stuff.

[00:21:53] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And of course there’s stuff like that in there. But it is actually the actions that you’re taking to get people aligned and to learn.

[00:22:01] Leanne: No founder story would be complete without finding out how they dealt with the pandemic. But even before COVID, Wistia embraced remote working and included remote workers wherever they could.

[00:22:12] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We had become very remote friendly before COVID. We’d hired Uh, our first maybe five employees fully remote, and we were getting a lot of pressure, especially from our engineering team to go remote. So maybe 10 percent of the company was remote before COVID. And that was working for us. So what that meant is when we did an in person all hands, we would always have a mic in the crowd and we wouldn’t take a question from somebody unless they spoke into the mic.

[00:22:37] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: So people were remotely could hear the question. We would ask the remote folks, like, do you have questions and stuff like that? But I think the thing that’s so. Different about now is, and this is what feels very, really weird is we have incredible people all over the place and a lot of them, you know, one of our biggest challenges so far is convincing people to move to Boston.

[00:22:56] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And, uh, even though Boston is a great city, it’s expensive and. you know, it was, if someone’s going to move to the States, like why Boston, why not New York? And, you know, it was just like, it was always like this hard friction point. That’s completely gone. I was talking to a

[00:23:10] Al: guy called Rory Sutherland yesterday.

[00:23:11] Al: Who’s from Ogilvy. He’s fairly high up,

[00:23:15] Leanne: fairly high up fricking name, drop out. He’s not the chair.

[00:23:18] Al: He is a

[00:23:19] Leanne: really interesting guy. Well, I was talking to Rory

[00:23:23] Al: yesterday. Me and Rory, we chat all the time. He often rings me up for advice. And I think that if you are listening, Rory, that that was a joke. Please can I tell it to

[00:23:32] Leanne: you again?

[00:23:32] Leanne: Lawyers stand down.

[00:23:35] Al: But he was saying something quite interesting. He was saying that the return to office like message might be coming from the actual property owners themselves because they’re actually, let’s be honest, shitting themselves that if people don’t go back to the office, then. They will lose all their tenants.

[00:23:49] Al: The message they seem to be peddling is that if you aren’t, if people aren’t in your office, then you don’t know what they’re doing. How can you check they’re doing all the right work? Chris totally disagrees

[00:23:58] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: with this. We actually never used our office as a way to micromanage. At least I, I hope that managers never did that, but it was never about like.

[00:24:05] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Are you here at this time? Are you doing this work? I’m watching you do this work. I, I don’t think that’s a good way to get really talented people doing great stuff. Like if that’s what you’re resorting to, I feel bad like for you and for the employee, because that’s like, that can be a rough way to go. Um, so we’ve gotten really clear on the goals and outcomes, which gives people the freedom to actually figure out how they want to solve the problems themselves, which I think is really important.

[00:24:29] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: The best remote companies do a bunch of stuff in person and they will tell you, you know, my friends at help scout or customer IO, which have been remote forever, um, very strong cultures. COVID was really hard because they couldn’t see people. And, you know, so for us, we’ve tried to say, like, what are the things that, that we really should get people together in person for?

[00:24:52] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: So for us, we do these, uh, three times a year. We call them tri annual business reviews. And we get, basically, the director’s on up. It’s about 40 people get together in person. We spend a couple days going through how things just went. What we’re going to do next. And we do all company retreats a couple of times a year.

[00:25:09] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Um, we’ve done the office. We’re taking the company to Austin, Texas next month. The whole point of this is like, we could do that stuff remote, but these long meetings are easier in person. You build more trust in person. It’s easier to have a back and forth conversation. It’s easier to have that little moment after, uh, like a hard conversation, be like, Hey, are we good?

[00:25:27] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Did, or does that make sense what I’m saying? Or like the clarifications, the hallway talk and that permission and that trust you build in person makes it easier to actually have that trust remotely. And then we also have found that if you want to connect online, you need to use online first tools. At least for us, and I don’t know how many other people did the same thing.

[00:25:46] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We had all these events and stuff we did in person. We tried to translate them all online and they sucked. They were really boring. I think

[00:25:51] Leanne: that can really be summed up by, if you don’t trust your employees, why did you hire them in the first place? This is key, and why hybrid has the potential to be an ideal solution.

[00:26:03] Leanne: So long as we’re intentional about what can be done remotely, and what has to be done in person, And why? But also let’s not forget our lovely and sometimes lonely Gen Zed, where most of them have only been at work for about six years and three of them were forced to work from home. They may be craving in office working for social reasons.

[00:26:24] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: It’s funny, we have teams at Wistia who, they work remotely most of the time and then I’ll see them come into the office. I’ll have it be the, they’ll come into the office, you know, like four o’clock and they’ll work together for two hours and I’ll go get dinner. And it’s like part of, it’s the social aspect is the reason why.

[00:26:38] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: They’re doing it, so Yeah, but it’s, it is very universally understood now in a way that it wasn’t before. So I think it’s, you’re making a trade off in either direction. If you are in person, you know what you’re giving up. And if you’re remote, you know what you’re not getting. Okay.

[00:26:54] Leanne: Onto my second favorite subject, recruitment.

[00:26:58] Leanne: I’ve talked about toxic superstars on the podcast before, and it’s true, having room for them. Full of superstars is not always the best idea, but Chris has a great strategy for having an office full of world class talent who aren’t subject to the superstar effect.

[00:27:12] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: If you want world class talent, you have to grow it.

[00:27:14] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: It’s almost impossible to hire because if you have world class talent in a company, they usually know it and they compensate those people such that you can’t hire them, or if they leave, they do their own thing. So you have to take risks on people. And this is not just for me. I I’ve learned from other people and read and watched a lot of stuff.

[00:27:30] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Peter Chernin, um, who works with Barry Diller for a long time, did a great. Um, interview once just about this that you should search for and find. Um, but I think what that means, you might have world class talent in your business. You might be world class talent. You might have leaders who are world class talent.

[00:27:44] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: You might have a new employee who is world class. They just don’t know it yet. You don’t know it yet either to figure it out. You have to give them bigger and bigger opportunities and you have to. Push them and yourself, um, to give feedback and like correct and try to see if, if they can grow to the level that you want them to grow to.

[00:28:00] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Um, and I think, uh, a really common pitfall that we’ve certainly fallen into at different periods of time, really try to avoid now is when you’re hiring someone very senior, the people who, at least who I’ve seen who ended up being world class are people who there’s something about the opportunity that they’re going to have to grow into as well.

[00:28:20] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And usually if you could find that. That’s what gets the A players like they’re looking for really hard challenges. That’s what gets them motivated and excited is like that extra challenge. It also, the thing you want to look for when hiring any, I think any manager, any senior manager is, is this person, can this person be both a great manager, but can they also be truly great at being an IC for the job?

[00:28:46] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Individual contributor. The longer that people have been in management roles. The easier it is to talk the talk and not actually know what it takes on the ground to do great work. And you don’t want your managers just doing individual contributor work all the time, but every once in a while, they’re going to need to do it.

[00:29:02] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: They’re going to need to, you know, get next to the troops and like fight through something really hard and figure something out. And if you can find someone who’s really great at that, you get both. You get like inspiring confidence on the ground. You get inspiring confidence by leading. You get someone who understands when they’re taking on a project, what it really means.

[00:29:21] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: To the team in terms of like how complex it is, how hard it is, what the pitfalls are going to be. And so those are just two things. I think like thinking about how you grow the talent and then also thinking about. The raw elements that you look for, because the things, this is one of the easiest things to screw up in your business as you’re scaling is to hire the wrong person.

[00:29:41] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And, um, you’re never going to get a hundred percent, right. But, um, at least for me, these things have really helped push to a place where I look around. I’m like, man, there’s world class talent at Rose, like incredible, but you need people who can be autonomous, um, who are going to over communicate when there’s a problem or raise the flag.

[00:29:57] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: When there’s an issue, people are going to think outside the box. People are going to push you to great things. And. If you want to hire adults, you need to treat them like adults. And that means again, more

[00:30:05] Al: trust. So let’s spin back to 2007 ish is about a year into Wistia. Chris and Brandon got the opportunity to pitch for HBO.

[00:30:14] Al: If you’re not heard of HBO, you’ve almost certainly watched something they produce soprano sex in the city. Um, the one with your man who does the drug dealing in Mexico. You know, they do everything, the one, you know, the one. So surely that’s a no brainer to take them on as a huge client. This

[00:30:31] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: is how crazy things are.

[00:30:32] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: At the time. I thought things were going so slowly. We’re a year into the company or maybe 15 months in took us a year to get our first customer, like three pivots in that first year, but we got them. They’re using us for back then private, uh, video sharing and like media management. And we get one customer one month, we get a second one the second month.

[00:30:50] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And I’m thinking this is taking forever. And in hindsight, I’m like, actually, that was not so bad. Um, but we get introduced to HBO and they were looking for somebody to manage all the dailies. For them. So they’re, you know, the dailies, everything that’s being shot, that’s before it’s been edited. Right. And I couldn’t believe that this was happening.

[00:31:09] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: I was in complete shock. So we set up, HBO is like account like number four in Wistia. You set up an account for them. They start uploading footage from behind the scenes of Sopranos that no one’s ever seen. And look, we’re like, this is crazy. And we ended up, you know, going out to LA and like really pitching the deal.

[00:31:31] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And we’re working with an intermediary from a talent agent that brought the deal to us. It’s such a long story. So just, that’s the part that matters. And they, we were ready to charge them. You know, I can’t remember what the price was like. We made up some price. It was like, 15 grand a month or something like that.

[00:31:47] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: That’s what Brendan and I would charge HBO. And the guy we’re talking to is like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is, and it just makes up all this other stuff, the intermediary and comes up with a price that’s like 750, 000 a year to start. And we went in there and pitched them and they’re like, yeah, this looks good.

[00:32:01] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And, you know, went out to some crazy dinner after, and there’s like Hollywood hugs from the talent agent. And I’m like seeing celebrities or a dinner is so bizarro, you know, to go from toiling away. And four months later, this is happening. We started to ask ourselves the question, like, well, if we get this deal with HBO, they’re gonna want us to move to L.

[00:32:21] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: A. And we’re gonna have to. Because they, while our thing was already Sass, it was like Sass, basically, barely when Sass was called Sass, like software as a service. Um, they want to, they, they’re going to want like an on premise version of this thing. So we’re going to have to figure out how to do that.

[00:32:38] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Remember, we’re two people. We’re like, okay, we’re gonna have to move out there after this on premise thing. We’re like, how big is this market? If this is the whole HBO deal for all of HBO, like how big is this market? We’re like, is this like an 8 million market total? Like, what is this? We couldn’t really fathom how big the market was.

[00:32:56] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: But it didn’t seem like it was going to be that really, and I think maybe also because of my experience doing film and video and knowing all these like niche providers in that space, it just kind of felt like that’s where we’re going to end up. So we’re looking at, should we do this or not? And we basically.

[00:33:13] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: Convinced ourselves. If we did it, that’d be the only thing we could do. Cause we also wouldn’t want to let them down. We really were, we were good boys and we didn’t want to screw over a customer. That’s like the last we just would, we would want to uphold any commitment that we got. And so if we said, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it.

[00:33:30] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And we decided that that was like too small for us and didn’t make sense. We didn’t want this whole entrepreneurial journey just to be that just to be dailies for the studios. And so we decided we would say no to them, um, and just back out of the deal.

[00:33:48] Leanne: Here’s what makes my psychology solving a difficult decision was made by consulting their core values.

[00:33:56] Leanne: This is like a true, real example of putting your people first, even before your customers, even before HBO. But the issue was at the time, they’d raised funding from angel investors based on HBO being a client. Was this going to wreck the deal? The

[00:34:14] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: initial pitch to the angel investors was like. Here’s our first customers.

[00:34:17] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: We have Nestle and we have this billion dollar telecommunications company and we have PBS and we’re talking to HBO and I’m talking to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And before the round close, we’re like, we went back to the investors. Like, Hey, I know we told you there’s this big deal. We’ve decided not to do it.

[00:34:34] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: And I remember the feeling when we told them and I was like terrified, like they’re going to think we’re idiots. They’re going to think we’re so stupid for doing this. And I, and the first investor we told, I remember him saying like, Hmm. Really? Okay, and then just like went forward and we like did the deal and raised the money and then later he’s like that was that was what I thought was a good sign is that you had the confidence that you knew you did what you didn’t want to do and you wanted to do this other thing and, uh, maybe we were just crazy enough.

[00:35:03] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: I don’t know. But, um, yeah, it was. It was a very weird, wild experience. And, um, yeah. end up working out. So no complaints.

[00:35:13] Al: What a story. And I bet now with 375, 000 plus customers and household names like Zendesk and MailChimp, turning down the HBO deal doesn’t seem like such a bad thing after all.

[00:35:25] Leanne: Yes. What a company.

[00:35:26] Leanne: What a guy. They have so many great sections as well on their website. When it comes to people and culture, they have a whole section on DI. They have a better workplace series with the VP of people and the most beautifully designed core values page. So

[00:35:41] Al: to learn more about Chris and Brendan and Wistia, go to wistia.

[00:35:45] Al: com. If you loved his story, his way of presenting things, his excitement about stuff, then go and search for talking to loud, which is his podcast. He does with Sylvie. Um, really great podcast. Lots of interesting people. Um, and obviously now part of the podcast network.

[00:36:01] Leanne: Network buddy. Join us next. We, we are talking about, we’re talking about the perils of stress Christmas and how to manage that.

[00:36:10] Leanne: We are bringing you a special two part episode series talking about individual wellbeing and how you can build your mental fitness over Christmas so you don’t end up poking your uncle Kevin in the

[00:36:23] Al: face. Kevin’s a nut. He really is. Okay. See

[00:36:27] Leanne: you next week. Bye. Oh, don’t forget to subscribe. Do your things.

[00:36:30] Leanne: Click. You know by now. Leave a review. Five stars. Thanks.

[00:36:44] Al: Yeah. Maybe you’ve got boogies.

[00:36:48] Leanne: Maybe, you know, anyway, onto my,

[00:36:57] Al: I hear you

[00:36:59] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: preach sister. You

[00:37:02] Leanne: weren’t listening. No, I wasn’t.

[00:37:05] Al: I was just correcting a little note I saw coming up that we could do better.

[00:37:08] Leanne: You can, uh, well you can take that out because I knocked the microphone with my massive chin.

[00:37:13] Chris Savage, Wistia Founder: I wish I had a chin.

[00:37:16] Al: Now what I’m not necessarily saying here is that the culture at Microsoft is bad. I’m not, but it does mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about.