Chris Savage: Growing & Scaling Without The Hassle Of Hustle

At the time of writing, Wistia have turned down the offer to sell the company and have instead taken on $17m of debt – seemingly a strange move. Why? Because Wistia are in it for the long run – they want to run their business their way. Last year at BoS Conference USA, Co-Founder & CEO Chris Savage talked about the process of scaling Wistia over the past couple of years, including some fascinating insights into how to communicate well internally in a growing company, and the importance of delegating as your company grows.

Slides

Transcript

Chris Savage: Hi, everybody! I like to come with my own walk on video these days, so thank you, Mark, for indulging me.

So Business of Software, one of my favourite conferences. I’ve been here maybe 4-5 times. Came as a sponsored guest the first time with a little start-up, it was just the two of us. I was actually asked to speak once before which is amazing! Gave a talk about the 3 mistakes that defined our business. I’ve updated that talk since. Phenomenal talk! I think you’ll love it! It’s at wi.st/threemistakes. And the business, Wistia, was about 20 people when I gave that talk and I was certain that these were the things that defined us. It felt like it, marketing things and product things and all the early lessons that we made, but I’ve realised since then that I was very wrong about this! Still a good talk, but actually there’s only one thing that matters. And it’s this. It’s just people. And since I last spoke, this is from our annual conference Wistia Fest which we also did at the Seaport. But since I was last here, the company grew from 20 people to 100. We have 100,000s of customers now, we have multiple buildings, people who are remote, multiple products. A lot of stuff has changed and there’s a lot of stuff that I wished I had known about when we were 20 people cause it would have had a big impact on how we scaled to 100. So today I will talk about things I wish I’d known scaling from 20 to 100.

Scaling Challenges

So I will give this all with one caveat. Just like Natalie was talking about, I will assume that you hired the best, you found people who want to be there and are fantastic! There’s a million talks about why you need to hire the best and you do. I’m not gonna talk about hiring slow and firing fast, I’m not gonna talk about those things, but that’s my general assumption as we’re going through these challenges, even with the best people there’s things that come up that can throw you in a loop.

The first one. Communication just gets a lot harder. Much harder than I thought it would be. It was effortless at the beginning and it became very hard. Big problems are scarier; because there’s more people that care about them, customers relying on you, there’s 100s of people and when you see a problem and if it’s gonna negatively affect the business it’s just not your life but other people’s lives as well. Last one, there’s no time to think.

Communication Gets Harder

So the first one we’re gonna talk about is communication. So when we were 5 people, 10 people, we would eat lunch together basically every day and work next to each other every day and everybody knew everything about what was happening at the company. People said what do you do for communication? I don’t know, we just are, we’re just here and everyone knows stuff. When you’re 100 people, it turns out not all people know the stuff because some people are in some meetings and some in another meetings and someone was on vacation and people all treat their inbox differently so cutting through the noise and getting a clear message through can be really hard. So if you want to go in this new direction, it’s not as simple as saying I want to go in this direction. I will give you an example of some communication that didn’t go as well as I’d hoped it would go and I think what you can do to do it better.

Communicate: New Goals for the Year

Every year we set annual goals and at the end of 2016, we’re setting goals for 2017 as you do. Last year, slightly better than average, we were done in November, I was very excited about this. So we had a meeting with everybody and said here are our new goals, this is where we are going and what we’re doing and we sent out a document. It was our blueprint of our goals. The vision, the market opportunity and how our values fit in – all of this stuff. We learned this lesson if you have an in-person meeting and you want people to remember something, it helps to write it down and send it out at the same moment. So people have a reference – they have a recorded video and this. We thought we were doing everything right, I learned all these things about how to communicate better. Sent this document out there, had the meeting and it went pretty well. You can’t see this on the left here, it’s comments. So people are commenting on the document. And they’re like; why do you think we’re going to do this or is this a big concern? I said this is amazing! I sent these goals out, it was super clear, everyone understood them, I cut through the noise.

And then, couple weeks later, just like walking through the office and someone says when are you sending those finished goals? What do you mean? I sent them out two weeks ago, we had a meeting, sent out a document, we had this finished stuff. He was like no, there were comments on that. And if there’s comments on it, it means it’s probably not done, you’re probably looking for insight and changing this, so actually I think it’s unfinished. I was like – this shocked me. So I started asking other people hey, have you started creating goals for your team? He was like no, the goals aren’t done. What are you talking about? Like we spent all this time working really hard to come up with these goals to get the company aligned and get to the direction – and basically the tone was off for this. So  because there were comments on these document, people assumed it was unfinished. And actually, because it felt unfinished, it was unfinished. And this was a problem because now, we just wasted a ton of time, nobody knows what we’re doing – I created anarchy a bit because people saw these things and said I don’t know how my work fits into this – so people start doing crazy things – these are great fantastic people, but the tone was off.

So we tried to learn from this lesson and we had another challenge that we wanted to fix and work on, which was all of our teams working on different schedules. So product and engineering would release product, then marketing – they aren’t ready to do it cause they’re finishing something else and they get free and then support would say we don’t have any knowledge articles written, so the teams weren’t aligned. This seemed not that big of a deal. My co-founder and I were talking about this, and said we will create a schedule for everybody, try to get everybody on the same schedule, everyone will go at the same speed and pace and it will be easy.

So what we wanted to communicate was let’s try to get all the teams on the same schedule. Seems simple, and as we’re writing up the documents this time, we thought ok, we need some kind of metaphor to make this clear. So we called this the operating system for how we operate; and we leaned a little bit into a mountaineering metaphor and I will show you what this is. And we’re trying to make it as clear as possible, trying to make our communications so clear so people know what we’re doing. So we made basecamps and summits. So Basecamps are a week and during this week you do planning, retros, you form your teams. And summits are when we do the work and you execute and then you do demos. So this was a change, but we didn’t think it would be that big of a deal.  We thought this would be cool and we’ll tell everyone we’re gonna try to get on the same schedule. So put it on a document, learn from our mistake last time – no comments are on, had the meeting, sent it out – can you guess what happened? Why are you changing everything? What the fuck are you doing? And suddenly I had a room of smart people who were very passionate, very upset because I sent out something that where the tone didn’t match the message. We were trying to show everybody not to try something and instead because we wrote it up in this way, it felt so formal that it felt we’re changing everything about the company and they were up in arms and they should have been. So we made the same mistake again, we got the tone wrong. I had no idea how much tone would matter. I want to show you how we learned from this mistake, what we did that ended up working.

We thought about the mountaineering stuff, ok we want to get everyone on the same schedule, but we don’t actually want – we want people to try really hard, but not to stress because there shouldn’t be any stress cause we will try it as a company so what are the things we can do? We realised instead of using this metaphor for clarity, what if we used it to make it less serious? So we got back in front of the company and I started presenting this. What’s a basecamp? It’s preparing for the next climb, you’re monitoring the weather, letting off steam, we want to have time to get ready for what we will do next. That turned into goals for summits being things like laying ropes for future climbs, acclimatising so you can get up to basecamp and then camp 2 and 3 and get your lungs in a better place, get the oxygen in the blood, rigging ladders, all this stuff and this started to work. This simple thing started to bring people onboard, like maybe this isn’t as serious. Then we needed a mascot – anyone knows this guy? This is Ed Viesturs. He’s one of the greatest mountaineers of the world! So we started talking about Ed and what Ed wanted for the operating system and how he wanted us to work and how you work well on a mountain. It continued down this thread as we realised the tone of the messaging was going to determine how people respond to this – we felt like we had to take it to the next level and get them super comfortable. Obviously, Ed is super expensive so we couldn’t get him to come to the office. So we took my mouth and put it on Ed’s face and we made a bunch of videos that came out every week. I will show you the first one right now.

A round of applause for that! There we go! I never thought I would show that video here, but when I had the opportunity, I had to. Ed made an appearance once a week for 6 weeks telling everyone about what they should be thinking about in the first week of a summit, how they should be preparing to get to the top and turn back around and all that type of stuff and it worked really well! So we were able to change the entire cadence of how we work as a company and adopt this operating system and it was because we made the communication less serious and let people try it. The tone is the message is the takeaway from me. In the early days I thought it’s about clarity, that’s what everyone told me, it’s about clarity, it’s about being authentic. All those things are true but the tone of how you communicate things has an enormous impact on how people respond.

So if you say the same thing and you send it via email or Slack or text or say it in person, it’s received very, very differently. Actually, this stuff matters when you have a growing team, because you want to reduce stress and want people going in the same direction and you want to indicate is this something formal or casual? I wish I’d known that cause there’s many things we tried over the years that I was surprised over the response and this tone piece helped.

Big Problems are Scarier

So big problems are scarier when you’re scaling. There’s more people and more money on the line, everything feels like it has a bigger impact. As the company grows so does the impact of decisions. There’s this instinct you have that everyone wants to feel like this guy. Remember who this is? Ken Jennings, in 2004, he won on Jeopardy $3.4 million. This guy had every answer. Everyone wants to feel like him, you want to feel like you have the answers and when your company is growing, you want to feel like there’s a reason it’s growing – like I did something so I must know something. And you want the answers before you communicate, especially around big problems. When they come up, I want to have an answer before I tell anybody. I think this makes perfect sense. I will show you an example of where we got this really wrong and what we learned from it.

We had a big pricing problem in the business, like many software companies we’ve done a ton of pricing testing and the prices on these plans don’t matter. A couple years ago, we had the smart idea that we would create a new plan. Wistia is a subscription service so people pay them monthly and keep using their accounts. Someone had the idea and we tested it and it was a simple idea. We will make a plan this 25 a month and have unlimited videos on it. For us, it means you can use it as much as you want. The only other way someone would pay us more is if they’re using bandwidth which is how much people are watching these videos? We put this out there, ran the test and it’s amazing and received well. There’s like everywhere I feel so smart and good. Revenue is flying up, just accelerating super-fast, customers also. So we look at the data and it says this is a win! Great! So then, a while later, someone comes to me and says have you been looking at the gross margin? Well it’s seeming like it’s pretty close. And this is like we started about 74% and this margin will go up and down a bit, so I was not too worried about it. It started to tail down a bit so we’d gone from mid 70s to high 60s and I think we have a problem here, we need to look into that it’s dropping. We told our people they could have unlimited videos, not a surprise. It won’t drop that much. Let me do a little digging. So a guy in the team digs and comes back and looks at the business in a way we hadn’t looked before, which is not looking like a 20% segment, but every single customer. How much does this customer cost us, how much are they paying us and are they writing in? he’s like I have something I need to tell you. Ok. We have 100s of customers that have over 10000 videos in their unlimited video account. Ok. We have about 50 customers that have and have 100000s of videos, close a to a million and we have one customer that has – that’s adding a million videos a month. To be fair, that one customer was paying for some bandwidth. We go look at it, our biggest customer – we were losing about 25k a month on one customer. And then you go look at all the other customers in this state and it’s not a good state. And how do we make this mistake in the first place? Basically we thought we’re Google. We’re a big company, the cost will come down. Well they don’t. So what are we gonna do? As we were looking at the data, we realised the rate the videos are added on these old accounts was so high. Wasn’t even current accounts anymore, ones that signed up years ago. Were so fast that this gross margin would drop in 3 years we will be screwed. So didn’t tell the team, because we wanted to figure it out so we got a few smart people together and dug around, we looked at some old testing data, we tried some stuff and talked to some existing customers who told us we were under-charging dramatically and we secretly solved the problem. We came up with a plan, really excited, Eureka! We will tell the team we had this problem. Don’t worry, here we go! The problem is we’re gonna have to raise prices for some customers, but we know that that will be ok cause it will save the business. So we’re excited to tell the team, here’s the problem and the solution. The team, I’ve never seen a group of smart people hate something so much as the day we told them we wanted to make this change to raise prices for customers. This made sense, because one of our values is customer first and we always put them first and this didn’t feel like that and they basically rebelled against it and told us that we couldn’t do it. Ok. So what should we do? So we formed a new team that was much broader, had more people from across the company on it and they would go an investigate the issue and see how bad is this and could they come up with a solution? And what they ended up doing was something very different than we had done, where we were afraid to tell everyone about this problem and it created this huge whiplash. They solved the problem openly. On a weekly basis, they would tell everyone we did this test, migration customers over here, they didn’t respond well to these things – we did this and we will try and fix it and they solved the problem completely in the open and by the time we made the change in May, everyone understood why it was happening, everyone was on-board and because that problem had been solved openly, everyone was excited about it and we found a way to do it in a customer first kind of way. The realisation on that, to close on this particular thing, is that if we didn’t do this, our business would be screwed in the future and we will have way less to serve customers. So it’s painful but had to find a way to do right by them so they came up with a system that was fair and it ended up going extremely well. We only had a very small number of people cancel, a lot of positive tweets, I didn’t expect this but it came from solving the problem openly. Now when I look at problems, I try to think how can we solve this in an open way with the team? We’re working at our strategy for next year, totally new process, people know it means change from what they’re doing and we had an offset Monday and the day after I sent a video and email to everybody on what we talked about the offset. There weren’t any answers to come out of it, just here’s the process and the three things we will do and we started doing thing 1 and feel good about it. The lesson is to solve big problems openly and I wish that I had fought the instinct to be Ken Jennings. Everyone has it inside of them and it’s hard when your team is big and you try to do right by them and protect and shield them and it created whiplash.

The last big challenge I want to talk about is there’s no time to think. From 20 to 100 people, there’s a lot more people, problems and opportunity but having time to think is tough, which is very different than the early days. This is my co-founder in our office, AKA his bedroom of the 10 person house he lived in. this is what it looked that most of the time or I looked like this. You’re allowed to laugh, that’s fine. Every once in a while at the phone. That was for this presentation. Back to the computer, back to Brendan. We had a lot of time back then in the early days. This is a shot of my calendar 1 year after we started the business. Take a look here, at the top meeting. This is a 5-hour meeting on one day. This was someone told me they would be at a coffee shop and I should swing by. My one meeting was to remind me a friend of mine would be at a coffee shop and when you have a lot of time to think and to create and do dumb stuff, you do things. And I will show you a video that I just found – a very important video – from this actual same month from that calendar I was just showing you.

So let me explain what’s happening here, ok? I had a point and shoot camera that recorded video, I taped it to a golf club and I went like this. I invented the selfie stick and I had no idea, we didn’t do anything with this. This is what it was like back then, you would just invent them and never commercialise them. You have nothing but time. Obviously this is different than what my calendar looks like right now and it’s – I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s my job to be busy. 100 person company, the CEO is busy and in many meetings and that’s how it should be and I got used to this and also to try and be more productive. One of the things I’m really proud of is even if I’ve been busy at work, I’ve been able to keep a good work-life balance. I leave my house at 8, I go to gym and work, I come home at 6PM. I’ve been able to do this. That’s my wife and daughter, I got another one coming on the way. Super exciting! And I felt like I just had things in control, but as the team started to scale more, I started to notice that when I was at home, I would talk more about challenges of the business. My wife would tell me about something that happened today and I would try and redirect. What do you think about this thing? What about this problem that came up? What should we do? I noticed I was waking in the middle of the night thinking about the business. And I was just becoming [inaudible] so while my calendar made it look like I’m busy and I’ve got this great work-life balance, I wasn’t as present when I was home and I was trying to think. Actually it was more like work life unbalanced. It looked balanced, but it wasn’t. I forgot something that I think is really easy to forget which is that I forgot that thinking is work. It takes time to think and as we were scaling, there’s all these different challenges coming up in the business and I needed to think about them. They weren’t happening during the day, but at home. I also think I didn’t realise and I knew it inside of me that running a company is a really creative endeavour. It’s different, the type of creativity of when you’re starting your business. Then  you make selfie sticks, and the types of creative challenges that you have to face when you’re running a company or things like solving complex challenges, making a decision around pricing, trying to build a more diverse workforce, they are hard to do and take time to think and I wasn’t given myself any time to think, all I was doing is being busy and mistaking that for work. So you need to see thinking as real work and I think I knew this but didn’t know how to act on it. I think a lot of us do this and we know that getting free time is hard so we focus on productivity and talk about how can we make sure that we’re being get to inbox 0, get shit done methodology and these productivity hacks and I was focused on trying to find this time.

And 6 months ago I talked to this buy, Ben, the CEO of Mail chimp and they had 800 people and were covering on things about their business and I got to the schedule question. How do you manage your schedule? He sits there, takes a sip, looks back at me and he’s like it’s never a schedule problem is it? It’s a people problem. What? People problem? He’s like you need to delegate more or you need to get better people and that’s it. Thinking is work, you need to create the space for the work and you have to get other people to step up. I think this being busy is a people problem, not a productivity one, has been so insightful for me it changed my job and how I spent my time. It’s a simple thing, you just have to delegate more and get better people. I said we have great people, the weird thing is once I realised this, I asked people to step us and it actually worked. But sometimes we don’t think to ask ourselves the questions. It’s like the frog getting boiled slowly, we don’t realise until it’s too late. Another thing we’ve all talked about is sometimes it’s easier to see it in another people than yourself. We’ve been doing hackathons for years, we do them twice a year and people do stuff that doesn’t look like work. They’re building a crazy LED thing, this team built a phone booth. People building physical items but we knew they needed a few days just to think and create and of course, we ended up building things that turned into products. We made this – wistia for Chroma came out last year. We just launched Soapbox, a video creation tool born in there. Everyone in your company needs time to think and create and the key lesson is that you can’t feel guilty about that – having that free time. You have to allow yourself to have that free time, to maybe build a selfie stick and never commercialise it and this is one of those hard things because we are also addicted.

So the big takeaway and things I wish I’d known when we were 20 people, were focus on tone when you communicate. The way that you communicate and people react has an enormous amount of impact based on the tone. Solve the big problems openly, don’t try to be Ken Jennings. Show everybody your problems as they’re unfolding and bring them along on the journey – it makes a difference in how fast you can progress and you won’t waste much time and don’t feel guilty having free time. They are super important! We talked about mental health today, it’s all tied in together, but you need to have free time to do your best work and if you think about it, the early days when you handle that time and you’re creating, that’s what you get good at doing. Then to use Natalie’s analogy, the beast comes along and it takes your time and you have to find a way to get it back. That’s it! Thank you very much!

Q&A

Audience Member: Hi! So you talked about not solving problems secretly and solving them out in the open. So one thing that we’ve had trouble with while scaling is having too many cooks in the kitchen, too many people trying to solve the problem. What is your advice?

Chris Savage: Great question! We found that we have to be explicit about the part that isn’t solved yet. We will say we solved the first part. This team will work on solving the next or this person. And so we’re explicit in who will be trying to solve it, but not necessarily how long it will take or even when we think it will be done. So the bizarre part of this is that there are some things that we tell everyone about and then they get resolved the next day and some things have gone off for years but it’s ok because everyone is on the journey.

Audience Member: Hi! Do you schedule free time?

Chris Savage: Yeah, I tried scheduling thinking time and I had like 2-3 hour blocks, like every week there was my unstructured thinking time. That was always the first time that got taken up. I would use it and other people also and it was never used the right way. And I actually – since I’ve got my schedule displaced, took them to see Dunkirk on a Monday. The point was we have to get out of the office and think about this stuff. We had huge insights on the way and on the way back and that wouldn’t have happened if we wouldn’t have done it. It doesn’t look like work – I tried that and didn’t work. I truly delegated entirely problems that people could own and solve themselves.

Audience Member: Thanks for your time! Do you have a couple examples of things you delegated that were useful?

Chris Savage: Yeah, I was running a bunch of meetings cause I felt I should run them. In all cases, I was pulling together everything and this is a simple example but telling people which topics do you have for this? I was actively running it and I realised I needed someone to step up and take this and they took it and suddenly it gave me back like 2 hours a week and that doesn’t seem a lot, but you start adding the other big things. There’s a huge thing we’re doing right now that I’ve delegated to someone else and I didn’t imagine I could do it, but we set up guidelines like we want to do this, it’s great! We would have done it before. You’re doing it, how long do we have to check in on this? And that’s gone really well too. A lot of it just asking the team to say like what – I’m thinking about the roadmap of the product, how will we do it better? It’s also about who should we target and this big aspect of the strategy and try to take the thing and run with it.

Audience Member: Communication challenges when the company went from 20 to 100 but you focused on the ton of the communication being the leader or CEO. Can you speak about other types of communication challenges? More specifically about people being in the loop on all the different initiatives. 100 peoples working on different things, multiple initiatives at the same time, people being in the loop, knowledge going from 20 to 100 will be worse. What challenges you faced and did about it?

Chris Savage: We’ve had all of these challenges and we’ve tried a lot of stuff. The example that’s happened across the business. When we were small everyone knew everything and now we don’t know everything. We got the functional heads to present your part of the business. I discovered people weren’t engaging with it and it wasn’t that helpful. The thing that has actually worked and we’re still working on it, is asking the team to – it’s the same as the big problem – own more of this. How can we help everyone be in the loop on what’s happening? We did demos at the end of these summits and it was one of the ways we started doing it. The most important thing we did was we started taking engineering practices and putting them in the business. As we’ve gone throughout the last year, we’ve been able to have a constant iteration on the communication stuff. It wasn’t a big thing, but tons of little things. We had to help everyone to get comfortable with the fact that I don’t know everything about the business anymore. And you can’t either and that’s ok so we have to focus on the most important parts to pull out. The other thing is I did learn the lesson being really clear and writing things down, that stuff is helpful and should be done but everyone has information overload. So the other way to do it is to force managers to do it. Basically say you’re responsible for communicating what’s happening in this meeting to the people who report to you and then and we will get them together and if something is changing we will say this is what’s changing. Do you understand it? And then tell them all to go to their teams and do the same thing. We try to cascade through the organisation that worked well but it had to be explicit to work.

Audience Member: It would seem the inherent danger in delegating a lot of the stuff would be that you’re doing to the people the work you’re delegating to what you’re trying to get out of. Is that premise true and did you proactively look to analyse that to make sure it wasn’t happening and what did you do?

Chris Savage: Yes and one of the things I realised was you need to be constantly thinking of your overall business as a creative challenge cause it is and many that come up are different to many things and I should try to specialise more in thinking and then of the senior team, I try – it would be very bad if people weren’t doing the same thing. The problems hidden aren’t hidden and I think a lot about that and I try to work on it but I’ve had the opposite happening. I was so concerned to giving it to people that they begged for more.

Audience Member: Thank you very much! You mentioned giving time to your team to create. There is a talk also in Europe in June about downtime, everyone needs it. I’m in the same position you were in. So while I resolved that, we have people we want to give downtime to but how do you do it and they utilise it without having too much structure whether they’re gaining skills or relaxing? Do they not have to go? I’m curious if you have any insight.

Chris Savage: That’s a great question but we don’t have it figured it out – we have to be clear and in some areas of the business we should be innovating like crazy and all those people need time and it needs to be protected. The things that come out the other side – that doesn’t solve the problem, it’s the first step only. We’ve seen it work by being more explicit like over here innovate, over here try to operate better [inaudible] but that’s the part of the creative process and that’s become embedded in the culture and it was easier to show this way. I don’t have an honest answer, but you need to give permission. Don’t just do busy work, if someone does that, that’s horrible and people don’t know what it is, but it’s natural because our hustling culture causes us to do that.

Mark Littlewood: Thank you! Go and meet Shane!

Audience Member: Right up here! So as you’ve gotten wiser in this journey, looking forward I’m assuming the company will continue to grow. What do you see a couple of the problems of the same size and magnitude as these ones that you’re trying to get ahead of?

Chris Savage: Yeah, I think the community the problem never goes away, it just gets worse so we’re trying to get ahead of that one. For our business, we know we need to build new products which is something brand new for us. We had our core product launched in August 2007 and the customers are still on there and we’re trying to diversify the business. That’s a new challenge and I’m worried about the structure – I think we’ve had to get a lot better at thinking longer term and we flipped the company between these modes short and long term and I try to figure out how do I get the balance right in the company? I think those are hard challenges, there’s a lot. I could probably go on for a long time about it.

Audience Member: Thank you! Thanks for the talk! Back to the communications subject, I am trying to figure out a more practical takeaway from that apart from not allowing comments on a finished document. You mentioned that Slack and email are the means of communications, you seem to imply they bear a different tone.

Chris Savage: Yeah! The key way I think about it is like there’s a huge change happening in the company. What kind of it? No choice and we have to go in that direction or we don’t want them to feel like it’s a big deal? An example is we did a meeting last week, talked about things happening and didn’t have notes for it. It was like a conversation and after 10 minutes people asked questions and that drove the entire communication. We need people to know why it’s happening and we want them to be around us on the journey. Then there’s tons of stuff like how lasting is the information? I think when you get bigger, people stop responding to emails because they just do. Everyone in the room, there has to be more emotional responses so you think about that. We said in an email we don’t expect a response. If I look for more responses I will put it in Slack. That’s how we tried to think about it and it surprised me cause I didn’t think about it at all so does it matter if it’s done in different ways? Sure!

Audience Member: This is maybe a short answer. Are you willing to share who was the customer that had a million uploads a month?

Chris Savage: I cannot share that unfortunately. We have a bunch of companies that use it as a platform and we interface with only through the APIs and a customer gone in a particular time and built a great business as we helped fund them through this. I didn’t see any of that, but that’s ok.

Mark Littlewood: Fantastic!

Chris Savage

Chris Savage is CEO & co-founder of Wistia, the best video hosting platform we know. (BoS opinion, not Press Release).

Armed only with a degree in Art-Semiotics and his experience editing and producing an Emmy Award winning documentary as a recent college grad, Chris and co-founder, Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in 2006. They raised some angel funding in the early days and since then, have consciously grown a profitable, long term, business that customers and employees love. Wistia now employs over 100 people in its Boston HQ and is focused on building a business for the long term.

More from Chris.

Next Events

BoS Europe 2025 🇬🇧

🗓️ 31 March – 1 April 2025
📍 Cambridge, UK

Spend time with other smart people in a supportive community of SaaS & software entrepreneurs who want to build great products and companies.

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BoS USA 2025 🇺🇸

🗓️ To be announced soon
📍 Raleigh, NC

Learn how great software companies are built at an extraordinary conference run since 2007 to help you build long term, profitable, sustainable businesses.

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