Pictory CEO Vikram Chalana Explores the Future of AI in Video Production

0:00Welcome to the show today Vikram and thanks so much for coming on. Thank you, Jaden. It's a pleasure. Would you be able to tell everyone a little bit about your background and maybe what got you interested in the AI space at the beginning? Yes, I have been in the AI space for a long time, a couple of decades now. My background quickly is I have a PhD from University of Washington here in biomedical engineering. And in bioengineering, we were basically looking at medical images using AI to analyze medical images. And I've been doing that for dozens of years. And this is kind of a shift now from medical images.

0:42I got into enterprise software. So I did a startup in the medical imaging space. Then I did a startup in the enterprise software space where it was basically a lot of people who run SAP, large businesses that run SAP. We had built a product that helped connect SAP with Microsoft, and we made it really easy. And there was a lot of data. There was a lot of analytics there. So that was my kind of main entrepreneurship path. And then I ran that company for about 15 years, built it to about 350 employees, sold it about five years ago, and then started this company, Pictory. And we've been running this since 2019.

1:31Serial entrepreneur, been in AI for a long time. Yeah, it looks like you guys are doing some really incredible things over at Pictory. Can you tell everyone a little bit about the company and what got you interested in starting that, what your motivation was for and kind of what your mission is today? Yes. So one of the things I realized as I was building my previous company, Wind Shuttle, was we had 350 people and we had one person whose responsibility it was for videos. And over the years, we've seen video just rise. Everybody wanted videos. And in that company, I saw like product wanted videos, marketing wanted videos, sales wanted videos, everybody wanted videos.

2:12And this one person, she was just like backlogged. And the tools were like that because like I started to learn adobe premiere and i failed like it was hard it is hard to kind of get this timeline editor going and all that stuff so i was like there has to be an easier way this is this is not sustainable and then what we saw uh we saw canva and we saw how easy canva had made design and any non-designer could do design and and i was like this is exactly what we want to build we want to build a Canva for video. You want to make it very easy for anyone to become a video creator, a video editor, and using online software as opposed to desktop-heavy software that requires a steep learning curve.

3:01And so that's my mission. I mean, there should be, as a part of an Office-like productivity suite where you have Excel and Word and PowerPoint, there should be a video editor right next to it so that you can... And because everybody is going to be using videos in the future. And we want to make it easy for that. I love that. That's amazing. And I think something that you've done really well to your credit is really build a solid team around Pictury, a really solid product, a really solid team. When you were looking at kind of launching this and getting this company started, how did you kind of look at putting together the team that you currently have?

3:38Like, did you go and look for co-founders? And what was that full process like for you? Yeah, I'll tell you the first interesting story before that, because actually we had the idea that, hey, this is possible. So I had some time. And so this was summer of 2019. And my son had just graduated from the university there. And he had been to a lot of hackathons. And he said, Dad, do you want to go to a hackathon with me? Like, yeah, that sounds like fun. so so i pitched this idea at the hackathon that hey where we have this idea can can people help build this this thing for as a team and uh and we had people who raised hands or four or five people who came on board and and we had a team it was a saturday morning we kind of some of the guys stayed overnight and and we built this prototype of something the first version was text to video So take a piece of text and convert a video, create a video out of it.

4:35And overnight, they were able to build the first prototype of what wasn't even called Pick3, but it was just like something. And then we won the hackathon. It was like 200 people there and the BCs were the judges. And while the team was doing the building, I was doing the market validation. I was calling every marketer I know, every person like you, Jaden, in a corporate marketing job. And it was like, you know, hey, would you buy something like that if we had it? And we got like an overwhelming positive response to this. So I had market validation. We had tech validation. And then because we won the hackathon, I had like funding validation because all the judges or VCs.

5:19So that was a very early validation over one weekend that, hey, it's possible to do this, right? then then we jumped into this then i got like a couple of my co-founders from my previous company uh windshuffle some of the the early product managers that i'd worked with and and we created a core uh co-founding team of three people uh usually they say when you find a found a team a founding team should have a hustler a hacker and a visionary and and so i had the hacker who was my CTO, Vishal, who was also my co-founder at Windshuttle. And then I was the hustler, the sales guy. And then I had a product person, Abed, and he was our visionary for the product led growth.

6:14So yeah, you need the team. And I feel like for any good startup has a great founding team. Did any of those original kind of hackathon members join the team or was it just for that one event? We tried to convince them, but they were like, you know, we don't want to leave our jobs or we're still still going. But it was a great experience. That's awesome. Well, I mean, I'm sure it was still an amazing opportunity either way for them to kind of be at the beginning of that company. Talk to me a little bit about some of the pivots that you guys have had to make. What are some of the changes you've seen in the industry, maybe some things that you've had to change internally at the company?

6:52And how has the landscape kind of shifted from back then till today? Yeah, really good question, because initially my market validation was all this corporate marketers. So when we first built the product and we launched it in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, we're like, OK, let's go after corporate marketers because we have good market validation from them. But nobody bit. They all said they would buy it, but nobody actually bought it. But the thing is, it was a great lesson in that, you know, people say something that you may want to hear. But the real validation is when it's like, come put the money on the table, right?

7:31Or put your credit card in there. So that's the real validation. And what we also realized that the product wasn't quite ready for the corporate marketing world yet. because the branding requirements, the kind of stuff that people wanted to do, the quality requirements were pretty high and we were not there yet. So I believe we're still not there yet. So one of the big pivots we made was we started focusing on creators rather than enterprise marketers. And that was one of our biggest shifts and that really helped us take off because creators, they're like desperate for tools for video creation, video editing.

8:10A lot of people want to create YouTube channels or want to create, and even like small marketers, small business marketers, the branding requirements are not that stringent. So we were able to kind of get in front of them and over time, so that was one big pivot in the beginning. But then over time, we're continuing to improve our product and add better quality videos and just overall improve the quality. We just launched, for example, a team's plan where people can collaborate to make videos. So we found that that was like an essential. So now we're ready to kind of go back to the corporate marketers and see.

8:53Yeah, I think that strategy overall is really solid. You talk about Canva. I remember when I first discovered Canva, the thing that really stood out to me was just how simple it was to use. I see this as kind of the same strategy you're deploying over at Pictury. But essentially, I was using it in college for all sorts of things. It wasn't as complex or as sophisticated as different Adobe products I was used to, but it made things really easy and I was able to get them done really quickly. And then fast forward to when I had my first job out of college, being able to, I really just like fell back on that, even though I had access to all the Adobe tools, I still would use it because it was really easy.

9:29And I would actually show a lot of my coworkers in the marketing department, you know, Canva and how easy it was. And they're like, oh my gosh, this is so much easier. And before I knew it, like other people were starting to make different, you know, presentations with Canva and all sorts of things. And I think it really kind of is a really good strategy to start with something really simple. And then it scales up as you add more features into more complex things. Talk to us a little bit about what the number one use case for Pictury is today. What are people actually using on the platform? Yeah, so we have several tools in there, as you saw, you've probably seen on our website.

10:05The most common use case for us is script to video. So you write something like a story that you're trying to tell with video. You write the script for the story. You put the script into Pictory. And it creates what we call faceless videos. So there's no person talking. But for every sentence in your script, we find the best matching B-roll stock content. So we have licensed places like Getty and Storyblocks and we search through those and we have incredible search algorithms that will find the best matching visual automatically to every sentence. And then it will stitch it all together. It'll put the text as captions in there with nice animations and everything.

10:58And then it automatically, if you want, you can add a narrative like a text-to-speech AI voiceover. You can also put your own voice if you want, but a lot of our people will use AI voiceover. And music, we have a lot of music tracks. It automatically picks out a music track to go with it. So literally in a matter of minutes, you can have a video starting from a text script. And that's, yeah, that's our most common use case. That's a really good use case for that. What are you using for the actual voice aspect of this? Are you using third-party tools or something? Yeah, we're using some of the best voices that are offered off the shelf.

11:40So we're not building our own model. So like Google has so well said, 11 Labs, there's a bunch of different really good tools out there. But today what's in our product is Google and Amazon and Microsoft Voices, some of the really good ones. Yeah, it's really cool. There's a lot of really awesome voice options that you can get right off the shelf. There's 11 labs, well said labs, a lot of really awesome options. There's some lesser known, right? I think meta is coming out with some open source projects where you'll need like a couple seconds to actually clone your voice. You can do all the voice cloning stuff on 11 labs too.

12:13So yeah, a lot of really amazing options there. What is one of the biggest challenges you've really happened to overcome while building this out? Like challenges are the name of the game in a startup world all the time. it's a game of whack-a-mole. So you figure out something that you've solved and then something else comes up and something else comes up. But like in the beginning, actually this whole thing of doing video on the cloud is a pretty challenging exercise. If you think about it, like the reason Adobe and Final Cut Pro, their desktop products is you can use all the power of your desktop to render the videos and stuff.

12:54Now, if you have to do it on the cloud, you have to really think of the algorithms and still make it efficient and optimize the cost and quality and all that stuff. So technically, that's one of the biggest challenges. Of course, there's go-to-market challenges that any company faces. There's new competitors that always emerge. There's, yeah, there's, so there's like a slew of things. And once you solve one, you discover where there's like credit card fraud going on. And there's like, all kinds of challenges. You mentioned at the beginning of this that I think it was the judges of that initial hackathon were VCs.

13:37And so you got a little bit of validation from them there. Talk to us a little bit about funding for Pictury, what your situation's been, whether that's bootstrapping or raising funds and how that has kind of, how the process has kind of played out. Yeah, so in the beginning, we bootstrapped it. We self-funded the first couple of years. and because, you know, as you're building the product, you're trying to validate it, you're trying to get some market traction on it. But as soon as we had this pivot to creators and we started seeing, in one summer in 2020, we saw growth from like 50 customers to 5 ,000 customers in like two months, as soon as we made that decision about creators.

14:18And so that's when we went to some of the VCs that we'd been talking to before and we showed them that, hey, there's some traction there. And then we were able to raise our seed round. So we've raised a couple of seed rounds, nothing big. This is all public. It's about$5 million we've raised so far. But we haven't raised Series A yet. And we haven't had the need to because it's been, we've seen a lot of growth, especially since ChatGPD came out. We've seen a lot of growth in our business. Yeah, and we've been able to kind of self-sustain. you know something i've talked with a lot of founders about is kind of that moment that chat gpt came out and how that kind of changed a lot for the industry what did that moment look like for you guys over at picture what was what did that you know that that moment with all this explosive growth in ai did that shift many things for you how you're building stuff what walk us through you know how how you kind of saw that whole how that the whole moment as it occurred yeah yeah i mean i'll i'll give you a reference point here from before chat gpt we were growing like 17 % month over month.

15:25And then we got to a good milestone by November. And then then ChatGPT came out and we've grown like, you know, 100x over the next month over month for the next three, four months. So we've grown like 7x in the last seven months. It's been pretty crazy. yeah so yeah and and pa and the main the main way uh that happened to us was uh we were just we happened to be at the right place at the right time a lot of a lot of startup successes are it feels like luck and and it probably is and uh and you we were there and then somebody created a video showing just like you were doing a podcast with ai voices somebody created a video saying that hey use chat gpt to create your video script put the script into pictory and let it create a youtube video and create a youtube channel that way and uh and so so that some of those videos went viral they were like you know millions and millions of views and then our just our business just took off and we didn't we didn't explicitly actually implement chat gpt in our product it was just like some of our users saw a way to connect the things together.

16:42And then we've since, because we had AI in there already for searching the right visuals. We have another piece of AI. So we didn't talk about another use case we have is, say this podcast is supposed to say a 30-minute podcast and you want to create a two-minute trailer of this podcast, right? So you would upload this video into Pictory and Pictory will come up with the best two-minute segments that it would just like, it would use our voices, our faces, everything. I mean, it's not replacing anything, but it's automatically determining the best two minutes in that thing. So that summarization algorithm, we have since leveraged GPT algorithms, the OpenAI algorithms, to make the summarization algorithms much better.

17:36Okay, very cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what do you kind of see as the future of AI based off of what's shifting right now? Maybe what's happening to AI and video, you know, as the CEO of this company, where do you kind of see this going in the future? Yeah, there's a lot of shifts underway. And it's really hard for me to kind of think five years on the road. If I can envision a one-year or two-year future, that is going to be sufficient. because like if you had asked me last year at this time and I wouldn't have predicted chat GPT I mean I don't know and and how much that would impact things like that so um what we like where you see things go is a lot more AI like we are not right now we're talking about like using stock visuals and and combining beetles and all that stuff but we've already seen some really good products out for creating like generative videos, generative images.

18:38You've seen Dali and Mid Journey and all this stuff. And it'll come out with generative video clips that we can leverage to tell the whole story, you know, with like the same characters. And that's kind of the, yeah, those are some of the things I can envision. I can envision a lot of personalization happening So, you know, like you make this video clip, say from your podcast, say you make a video clip, but perhaps you make 100 video clicks for different audiences. And it just like it personalizes it, especially for sales and those kind of things. We're already, again, seeing that happening. And then you've probably seen the avatars, the talking avatars.

19:30they're going to get a lot more realistic. And so, I mean, there's so much that will happen in this field and we just want to stay up to speed. And we, like our principle has been at Pictory, is like we're not a foundational model company, like unlike the other one, like OpenAI, they've built the foundational models. But we are going to be all about leveraging the latest and the greatest and the best models and create a great user experience for video creation and video editing. As you were talking, it was making me think about how incredible it is in the future. We'll probably get to a point where you can just describe what you want.

20:12These videos are going to be automatically generated. You're going to be able to direct your own movies. And it's going to be cool because it's not just like individual movie clips, but they're all going to be shot in the same style and the same mood and theme. and you're going to be able to do so many incredible things with AI and video. Amazing things you guys are doing over there. I know you're going to be at the forefront of this. If people are interested in trying out Pictory, where's the best place to do that? What's the best place to contact you and find out, you know, if they have any questions or more about your platform, what's the best way to do that?

20:44So Pictory.ai, pretty simple on our website. And myself, I'm Vikram at Pictory.ai, as it says on the screen. so if people want to reach me or or uh or check out our website and check out our product we have a free trial and it's very easy to get started and and try it out but uh yeah so it's uh make it super easy all right and i will also leave a link to pictury in the description for listeners to find but vikram thank you so much for coming on the podcast today thank you so much for sharing your insights. It's incredible what you're building. It's amazing and very motivational to hear from someone that's been in the trenches for a while, but has come out with such an incredible product.

21:27So we really appreciate it. To the listeners, thank you so much for tuning into the AI Chat Podcast. Make sure to rate us wherever you get your podcasts and have an amazing rest of your day.