480: Co-Founders Formed on Friendship with Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz of Wistia

6 Oct 2023 · 1 h 3 min

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Notes on The Foundr Podcast Episode 480: Co-Founders Formed on Friendship with Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz of Wistia

Episode Overview

  • Podcast Title: The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
  • Episode Title: 480: Co-Founders Formed on Friendship with Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz of Wistia
  • Air Date: [Insert Date]
  • Main Guests: Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz, Co-Founders of Wistia

Episode Description Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz share insights about their journey as co-founders of Wistia, a video marketing platform. They discuss how their friendship since college has influenced their business partnership, the challenges of entrepreneurship, and their approaches to growth and profitability.

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Key Themes and Discussions

  1. Origins of Wistia
  2. Friendship as Foundation:
  3. Chris and Brendan met at Brown University and bonded over shared interests in technology and creativity.
  4. Their early collaboration included working on projects like Brendan's blogging platform and Chris's short films.
  • Decision to Start a Business:
  • They decided to create Wistia after realizing the potential of online video as a marketing tool.
  • Both quit their jobs to pursue their entrepreneurial dream, highlighting the importance of taking risks at a young age.
  1. Starting a Business with Friends
  2. Ingredients for Success:
  3. Emphasized the importance of prioritizing friendship over business.
  4. Suggested that open communication and honesty about challenges are crucial for maintaining the friendship while running a business.
  1. Profitability vs. Growth
  2. Initial Struggles:
  3. Discussed the challenges of maintaining profitability while trying to grow the business.
  4. Shared stories of early failures and lessons learned about customer acquisition and funding strategies.
  • Investment Decisions:
  • Shared their experiences of raising angel funding and the pressure to grow rapidly, leading to a loss of focus on profitability.
  1. Buying Out Investors
  2. The 2017 Buyout:
  3. After feeling pressured to sell due to investor expectations, they decided to buy out their investors instead.
  4. This decision allowed them to regain control of their vision for the company and focus on long-term goals.
  1. Shifting Focus Back to Long-Term Goals
  2. Cultural Changes:
  3. Introduced a profit-sharing model to incentivize employees and align their goals with the company's profitability.
  4. Encouraged transparency in financial discussions with the team, leading to increased engagement and efficiency.
  • Creative Freedom:
  • Once back on a profitable track, they were able to greenlight creative projects that aligned with their vision, such as the 110-100 documentary series.
  1. Current State of Video Marketing (2023)
  2. From Nice to Have to Expectation:
  3. Video marketing is now a necessity for businesses, particularly post-2020.
  4. Businesses are now expected to utilize video content across all platforms, reflecting a significant shift in consumer behavior.
  • Content Creation Responsibility:
  • More employees are being asked to create video content as part of their roles, emphasizing the democratization of video production.
  1. Metrics for Measuring Video Success
  2. Key Performance Indicators:
  3. Importance of tracking engagement metrics such as play rates, average watch time, and conversion rates related to video content.
  • Long-Term Impact:
  • Highlighted that brand-building content might not yield immediate results but can significantly influence customer engagement and brand loyalty over time.
  1. Hiring and Team Dynamics
  2. Hiring Challenges:
  3. Discussed past mistakes in hiring senior executives who did not fit the company culture or were overly experienced for the company’s stage.
  4. Emphasized the importance of growing internal talent and ensuring new hires align with the company’s vision.

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Conclusion Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz's journey with Wistia illustrates the significance of friendship in entrepreneurship, the balance between profitability and growth, and the evolving landscape of video marketing. By prioritizing transparency, creativity, and a long-term focus, they have successfully navigated the challenges of running a startup while maintaining their partnership and friendship.

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Transcript

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0:00Hey Founder fam, before we dive into another incredible conversation, I want to share something really special with you. Whether you're just joining us or you've been following us since the beginning, you've been a critical part of our community working to change entrepreneurial education. I started Founder almost a decade ago with the mission to provide entrepreneurs access to the world's greatest business leaders. Our goal was to break down barriers to entrepreneurial education, and that's taken us on a journey from Founder Magazine to this podcast and beyond. And today marks the next step in that journey, Founder Plus.

0:35I'm proud to introduce you to Founder Plus, which is an all-access pass to each of our online courses and programs and their proven frameworks for success. It puts every strategy we've compiled from world-class instructors at your fingertips while connecting you to a global network of like-minded entrepreneurs. Founder Plus will take your business to the next level for today and tomorrow. So whether you've just joined our family or you've watched us grow from humble beginnings, We're really thrilled to have you join us in this exciting new phase of making the founder brand and this company the world's best entrepreneurial community to launch and grow your business.

1:16So finally, before we get into today's episode, I'm inviting you to come back, check out Founder Plus and go to founder.com forward slash membership. I'm really excited, guys. This is an incredible new evolution of entrepreneurial education and our mission is really to get as many of these founders that we interviewed to teach and also give back on the founder plus platform and really go more in depth with the knowledge and the experiences and the lessons learned that they're sharing all in founder plus so guys please go check it out if you're enjoying these interviews that's it from me i hope you enjoy this episode now let's jump in What you need is thirst.

1:59You need to be a thirsty human who is intent on learning. It's a really fascinating exploration of human potential. Now. The Founder Podcast. Even the greatest entrepreneurs had help. If you want to learn from the most successful founders on the planet, you are in the right place. Branson, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Ariana Huffington, Steve Case, Gary Vee, Sophia Amoroso, Barbara Corcoran, Damon John. Learn from the greatest minds in business today with interviews hosted by Nathan Chan. This is not your average entrepreneur podcast, The Founder Podcast.

2:42Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of The Founder Podcast. Nathan Chan here. Today we're speaking with Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz, who are the co-founders of Wistia. This interview is absolutely incredible. You do not want to miss it. I'm going to speak with them about the real journey of entrepreneurship, the ups, the downs, the pressures of why you have to get revenue, revenue, revenue. You've got to keep growing. You've got to keep growing, but then you're making no money. And what do you do when that's not working? The real story of entrepreneurship, what it takes to build and grow a successful online software company.

3:18This was an incredible interview. I'm really excited to share this with you. please welcome to the podcast Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz. So the first question I ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job aka how did you guys find yourself doing the work you're doing today? Yeah I mean you know well we made them so that's the fun part of entrepreneurship you get to make it up but Brendan and I started Wistia in 2006 and we'd already known each other for a few years we met in college and lived in the same freshman hall we were friends and um when we decided that we wanted to go after this market which is video and saw all these changes and all these things happening it literally was as simple as like hey should brendan should we do this he's like yep i quit my job i'm like oh crap i guess we're doing this uh and you know the beginning it was easy to create the job in the beginning and the hard part's been scaling it that was always funny hearing that from your perspective because I don't the calculus and I feel like we were thankful to start at a young age was you know no matter what happens we're going to learn a lot we were yeah 23 24 and it's funny to hear yeah because I feel like I didn't have that much to lose I was working at a software company in Boston and I feel like once we really like we're going to do this I put in you know notice and then called Chris and then we're like alright it.

4:49Here we go. Yep. There you go. And can you tell us about a story of your school days at Brown that made you guys realize you'd be great co-founders? Yeah. You know, it's funny when you say that, I think about in college, Brendan had this website he was working on and it was, it was called Voxys and it was like a blogging platform before there were blogging platforms. It was like Brennan made this thing by himself. He designed every icon. He was just toiling and working out this thing for so long. But it's his friend watching him do this. I was like really rooting for him. And it seemed very clear that, you know, there was no rule book.

5:33There was no, there was nothing that like told you how to do it. And he did it. And I remember we were so pumped about it. Everyone was really excited about it. And we had a big party to celebrate. with this like launch party for um this like blogging platform and you'd think this story would be and then everyone used the blogging platform and it grew it's like no no one else is allowed to use it it's just like a very small number of us who are able to use this thing but watching brendan solve that problem working with him on it a little bit from the side and like just like then we ended up doing i did film and video at brown and so i made a lot of a lot of short films and brendan helped me with a bunch that was involved in them and it was just clear that we were like we could collaborate but like he was someone who could build anything and so when we when we decided to start this in the first place with no experience and like no real plan i was very confident that at least he could do it i wasn't sure i could do anything but i thought brendan would at least be fine that's very nice to you yeah i feel like just to get sentimental for a second too uh i feel like there were we we were like thankful to have like a lot of like really close friends in college but it was definitely uh it was junior year where a lot of friends went abroad yeah study abroad and then chris and i were like of the friend group the two people who were left and then we got a lot closer that year and i feel like what has remained was like true in college and has remained the case through building wistia and all the ups and downs we have is like this is this is like a weird weird place to get to this podcast so i feel like you if i am like really struggling or like you are always there to cheer me up like it is very helpful i could not do this alone people who do this without a co-founder it is very perplexing yeah like it's really really hard there's it's really challenging to run and build a business and it's hard to be you know 20 years old in college and trying to figure yourself out and to like have a friend who can like help, you know, buoy you and balance you when you're like not feeling great and not doing the best is, is really.

7:41Yeah. That's become a, like, I think like, you know, there's a moment people say when you start a business, like you shouldn't start with friends. Like that's pretty common advice. Cause a lot of people lose their friends, right. When they start a business. And I think for us, like if we hadn't been good friends going into and provide it and like really saying like, we want to continue to be good friends at actually prioritizing that probably we wouldn't be in business like we would assault because there are so many times that things get really hard and actually having a great friend there to work work through it or basically just be like man this shit sucks like this is terrible right like yeah this is terrible and then you're laughing about it like what should we do like i don't know i guess we figured out everything else we'll figure this out too it's like that backbone relationship is actually really important um and i think it also just imbued the business and the culture with this idea that like it should actually be fun like the work itself should be fun you don't have to do a bunch of crazy stuff to make it fun like if you if the work itself the problem solving and the building is fun then you could be really persistent you could have a lasting friendship but you can also have like a lasting company i think that's just like one of the things that came out of that that's still so true it's crazy yeah you you make an interesting point about the around the friends piece right like if you did want to get into business with a friend what what are the what are the ingredients you think you need for for that to work yeah i think what one thing we have found which is is like what what you were saying before is there's a there's like this uh thing in business that people say is you know oh it's just business it's not personal and i find that to be very like that's like the farthest thing from the truth especially if you have relations right you're working closely with someone a business partner you should care about them like we're all human and and one thing that's worked for us is like putting your friendship ahead of the business that sounds the opposite of what you should do um but that has really worked for us like if we encounter something hard you know something challenging every relationship has its challenges and say like we're committed to solving that because i feel like when you have that in reverse.

9:49You like are prioritizing the business, but what you're really doing is letting your relationship suffer. And you're not going to be, if you're a business partner, you're not going to be able to build a strong business. If you have problems in your relationship. There's also, there's like, I'm actually very recently, like maybe three months ago, someone who knows us really well and works at Wistia was like, do you guys don't do reviews for each other? Do you? And I was like, Oh, what? No, of course you do. They're like, you do? I'm I'm like, oh man, you should see the reviews we do for each other.

10:19We let it rip. We let it all rip. And I think that that's one of the parts of if you're going to go into business with a friend, you got to keep the friendship. You can't lie to each other. You got to be honest. You got to say the truth about what's working and what's not working. And not everybody can handle that. Turns out if you can handle that, things turn out better at work because you're actually improving and getting better and your friendship stays intact. And I think that's something that's been like a good example. So it's been really good for us. We've also been tried to be really clear about ownership.

10:53And from the very beginning, like, all right, Brendan, you're going to own building the product and like what that is. And I'm going to own how we get this to market. And then ownership changes and shifts and evolves. We're always trying to be really clear about like, hey, what are the things that we each own individually? And then actually, we're also we have a board. It's us and one other person. what are the things that we own as like board members that's important and that's actually a different thing. But just by being really crystal clear, it makes it much easier to figure out who's doing what, how the interplays work, when you should, you know, I know what I'm gonna trust Brendan on things and his vote's gonna matter the most and when mine matters the most, all that kind of stuff.

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12:12Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Yeah, I think from personal reflection as well, going to business with friends, I've seen a situation where it didn't work, but then also I've seen situations where it has. I think the upbringing coming from a similar upbringing or background is really key as well um what's your take there yeah i agree with that um i think yeah i have never we've never really talked about this but like we both kind of came from you know we both have dads who are engineers you know like i think like that's true who were like tinkering and like building things and like i mean my dad certainly was like an early adopter I think your dad is too yeah I think yeah we had pretty you know different in some respects but probably more similar than different did a lot of the same things in middle school and high school yeah a lot of the same interests yeah I think yeah pretty shared value system I think it's also yeah the value system is interesting because like when you start a company like just like a relationship I think you don't even you don't know what you're going to face obviously you don't know what challenges you're going to have and so part of the nice thing about having worked together for a long time and also especially in our 20s we're figuring out our values like we figured them out together like we face really hard decisions like what should we do in this case and back and forth and back and forth and you make a decision and see how it works and then you see how you feel about the decision and this like constant open reflection i think has made it like so we are we're so aligned on how to build the company it's like i know what brendan's gonna say and he knows what i'm gonna say, which makes it a lot easier, I think, to make a lot of decisions that come up.

14:07Yeah, no, that makes sense. So when you guys did start building the company, what was the problem that you were trying to solve with Wistia at the beginning? And how has that changed over time? Yeah, I can take this to start. So we just saw that online video was dramatically changing. uh you know this is in like late 2005 um i was on youtube which had just launched very early and it was really interesting to see youtube because like at that time it was a lot of like pirated content it was a lot of like you know snl clips snl clips i think of it as like america's home video stuff just dumb stuff you know uh but anyone could upload it it would work and this was really interesting because I had done film and video in school.

14:58I'd made short films and I had tried to be a part of these like online filmmaking communities where everyone supposedly can make stuff and they weren't that vibrant. Like there wasn't that much content going on to them. And they also were, it was really confusing technically how to make online video work pre-YouTube. It was like, do you use real player? Do you use QuickTime? There's all these different formats, you had to encode things yourself. And YouTube just took care of all of it. And so we were talking a lot about that, paying a lot of attention to it. And eventually realized that YouTube was using open source tools to do all the encoding of the video.

15:37So what that meant is you could have a hundred different formats and someone would be like, oh, my format isn't yet supported in that open source thing. And they would add it in, they would support it, and now you could upload anything and turn it back into something that ever could see. And so that seemed like the spark of a huge change. And that's what initially got us like really excited was like, this is going to be a giant new market. Online video is finally going to be here. We thought this would happen very rapidly, which is like, especially like it took us like about a year to focus on helping businesses specifically.

16:12And we thought like 2009, like 2010, this would just take off. And of course, we were very wrong on the timing, but right about that shift happening. When did you guys first raise money? Because you ended up buying your investors out in 2017. Can you talk us through that journey as well and how you came to that decision? Yeah. Yeah. We were pretty focused. The short arc in the beginning, Chris alluded to, is we originally built something for artists, portfolio website for artists, despite our friends and family saying, I thought you were starting a business. You realize artists don't have a lot of money.

16:49I'd be hard to make that work. So that was our kind of lost in the woods before we settled on building what was effectively a private video sharing service for businesses. And then that little journey, I feel like we learned a lot in that. And I remember when we did that pivot, we went to the opposite extreme. We said, if we're going to talk to businesses, we're going to sell in person to them and do like old school, like face-to-face sales. So what that resulted in is we had some early success. We basically got to the place where we were profitable, you know, barely profitable, right? Really about two years.

17:25Yeah. Able to pay for, you know, rent and food living in like a 10 person house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But we were effectively in that default alive state, right? That, you know folks tried to get to and at that point we still saw this this vision for expanding the company and building it much bigger and we had started to network and we met two other folks um who are a lot older than us and more experienced who weren't living in a 10-person commune you know they had family yeah they had expenses actually they required salaries and that's what we started to learn about fundraising and angel investing and we said okay we were kind of like doing this calculus you know do we continue on and slowly build it or or do we raise some money so we can hire these two other folks to help accelerate what we're doing so we ended up raising around angel funding um i mean it's like a pulmonary amount of money nowadays it's like 775 000 and that was in 2008 so almost two years exactly from when we started and then it was four of us for another two years so we raised the money the plan was remember we had this like forecast.

18:33But at the end of the year, we're gonna have 10 people, all this stuff is happening. And this is also 2008 was not a good time for the market. Generally, it was a little bit of a like, Oh, like, the market's turning. If you remember the, yeah, the financial crisis, great time, the great financial crisis. Yes. And so we decided to stay small and just try to figure it out, like figure out what the price should be and how we should market ourselves and how we should sell and all this kind of stuff. And just as we were running out of money from that round, things started to connect. So we started to like, really, we got the business model, right?

19:06We'd flip things to being self-service. So people would come to the website and signing up. They're signing up consistently. And we're like, wow, like we're running out of money. This is bad. But good news is look at that graph. Like the customer number is really starting to go. We should go tell our investors. They'll be pumped. And we went back to them. They're like, hey guys, bad news. Like we're running out of money. Like we're screwed. But look at this. look at this great thing and they're like that is great that's really that that's fantastic we'll we'll basically they gave us money so quickly it took like two days yeah but also didn't but we were like this is the last money we promised the last money we're gonna need and they were like they didn't believe that absolutely they're like no way but at this point you know everything's surprising us because it's taken longer than we thought we're four years in we're only four people i remember if we went to a meetup back then and someone would ask like what we did it felt embarrassing because you're like well i've been at this four years i've got like four people on the team and like where do you where's your office we've had an office like way out of the city so it's a suburb is it like we drive out we do a reverse commute a framing yeah yeah and so it was just this like funny moment um but it all it all worked like that trend continued we got more and more customers it was crazy i remember also like that feeling from what we were i feel like we were really fortunate early on to be in that place where for a moment we were like we could do this forever because we were just profitable enough and like chris said we were so keyed into getting profitable and we felt in that moment where we were losing a ton of money like more money than we like had ever seen in our life we're losing i think like 40 grand a month yeah with like the salaries of of these new folks and we were paying ourselves and we were so determined to get back to profitability in this like shitty office in lexington massachusetts above a frame store we put um these like graph paper on the wall yeah that went all around the office where it's like negative 40 000 on the bottom yeah and zero on the top yeah and we were like every sale that we had we would go and update it yeah and actually the best part was we had like a remember after we got in that office that was when we had the drought of sales so we raised the money this is a good going a little bit back after the first time we raised the money we hired these guys were so pumped and we thought we were going to be like we thought we were gonna be cash flow positive like three months because we just closed these big deals so we were just like we're picking out the espresso machines we're gonna buy once we're cash flow positive we were we were so cocky and then we didn't after we closed the angel round the first one we didn't close a deal for like three months like not one yeah so that graph was just the graph was just like flatlined yeah all right this is this is not good and then the first deal oh that's right that was close we thought our model was basically paying what four hundred dollars a month i think was like the initial math yeah or like a few grand i think it sold yeah yeah it was like four hundred dollars but then we sold it was one for a thousand dollars a month so we're like it's gonna be an average so we're waiting drought of sales our sales guys like guys i'm so excited i've got our first deal for us i charged them per user we're like okay like a dollar per user per month we're like okay how many users he's like 12 users you're like you're telling us it's 12 a month you got a customer for 12 a month like he's like yeah like okay customer 11 12 a month ready ready goes i'll never forget ready goes a sheet and it's you know 40 000 to go and he puts this like like yeah three 39 ,988 like you're like fuck uh and but the cool thing was that like eventually like that ended up being true that we need customers come in at 50 a month 25 a month 100 and that actually was what caused us to like breakthrough on the customer number thing um and because we were not going to tell you the entire history of wistia but i can jump to why we did the buyback if that's helpful yeah i'd love to hear so so you did the angel round a couple times yeah we did a couple angel rounds and i'll go fast we we scaled and like faster than we would have thought we got to like 10 million in revenue with 3 million in ebita and we're feeling pretty good at this point obviously we're like man we're we're great at this this is awesome um but we started to get a lot of advice from other entrepreneurs investors and everyone who looked that we were doing was like, hey, you guys, you shouldn't be profitable.

23:30It's bad to be profitable. You're growing like this. You should be investing all of that profit into growth. You should be growing faster. And the first time you hear it, you brush it off, but everyone we talked to, we heard the same advice over and over and over. And so we eventually decided that we were wrong and we shouldn't be that profitable. I think like imposter syndrome and all these things like affecting us and so we decided to push really hard to grow and we basically greenlit every new project that came up um and hired tons of people to do that and so suddenly you know it's funny like when i told people externally we're four people i was kind of embarrassed now you go to something you talk to them like what's happening like you won't believe it we just grew from 30 people to 50 they're like oh my god you must be crushed you're like yeah we've got this conference We've got this other agent program.

24:24We've got billboards. They're like, oh, yes, we're on fire. I'm like, I know we're on fire. Yeah. But the funny thing, of course, is we're doing all this stuff, and it's not really changing our growth rate, like our revenue growth rate, but we are no longer profitable. We go to being break-even, and then we go to losing money. And because we'd had a few years of profitability in there, we had cash in the bank. The cash to the bank is coming down every month because we are just greenlighting so much stuff trying to grow. And that changes your psyche. It changes how you make decisions. And without meaning to, we went from this mode where we'd been profitable.

25:06And actually, a lot of the best stuff we'd ever done now at this point, we did what we were profitable. like really wild brand campaigns and content and moves in the product and pricing and all these things we just were like they felt like the right decision especially long term yeah longer term yes since we were very early in content marketing and video content marketing and that is a long-term investment but that it was kept at it and it really started to pay off it was it was easy to do that we're profitable fast forward a year we're no longer profitable and everyone starts, without saying anything, everyone just gets really short-term focused.

25:44So people are like, and the reason that happens is like, you would think if you were to raise money, it would allow you to be long-term focused, which is kind of how we are running. You know, you have this money in the bank, like, couldn't you just go raise more money? But what ends up actually happening is you have a forecast and a plan and for us, it was like this. It was like, oh, January, we're going to lose 50 ,000. And that's fine because we've got enough money in the bank. Years of runway. February, we're going to lose$50 ,000 too. But we're actually going to spend more in February. We're going to have more revenue.

26:13Like incremental growth will show up. And you build a forecast like that that assumes you invest more to grow, you get more revenue, and it keeps funding it. So your losses are kind of the same every month. What ended up happening was like, we lost$50 ,000 one month. And the next month, revenue went up, but not as much as we were expecting. So we lost$100 ,000. And then the next month, the exact same thing happened. and you're up, you're losing 150 ,000. And then you have another good month, but suddenly your losses start to add up. And it just, what ends up happening is everyone gets short-term focus because they feel like, hey, we're behind plan.

26:46We have to adjust. We can't actually, the cash that's in the bank will not last as long. And we never said, hey, be short-term focused. Like that never once happened. But it naturally, by being in that state, everyone starts asking those questions and it changed the products we could do. And we just started doing things that were not, I would say like we couldn't drive as much unique value. It was like the frog being boiled. Yeah. Situation. Yes. You know, we, it like happened slowly. And then one day I think we both woke up and we're like, what happened? Like we were so proud of how creative we had been, how long-term focused.

27:25And then it felt like the next moment, the two of us had like sent an email to the entire company that said, please put your ideas in this Google sheet for, you know, like ways we can like hack revenue and jack it up in the next like 15 to 30 days. It was like the polar opposite of, you know, like what we, the business we had built and like what we stood for. Yeah. And it was like a, not the, it was a low. That was a low. It was a low. And I think the other interesting thing, you know, you started by talking to us about being friends and being honest. And like, you know, these are lessons we've learned, but one of the mistakes we were making that moment is that we actually weren't telling each other how unhappy we were.

28:05And it wasn't until we had offers to sell the company. We had three offers all come. Suddenly, companies circled around us. I'll try to make this short, but they came in and they're like, hey, you're doing something awesome. We want you to be part of our thing. We want to acquire your business. And up until that point, we'd had different acquisition offers. We'd always just easily said no, but this time, we're like, oh yeah, let's get them in the conversation. So we got in the conversation, We start talking about what's going to happen. And we eventually end up with an offer to sell. And we were sitting on like a loading dock behind our office.

28:41It's like over there trying to decide what we would do if we sold. Well, if we sell the business, we're going to stay at this new company for two years. That seems pretty clear. Then we're going to leave. And what should the two of us do? Well, we love working together. We think we have a unique partnership. We're going to start another company. Okay. What space should we do it in? A lot of opportunity in video. A lot of opportunity in video. Who should we hire? We've built and spent a decade building a great team. Look, they're all over here. We're sitting next to the office. Yeah. Yeah. Hire these people.

29:12We're going through the list and we're just like, we're going to hire these people. We're going to start. We're going to get back into video. We're going to do all these different things. And we're like, wait, what? We're just going to rebuild Wistia if we sell the company. Why do we need to rebuild it? And I was like, are you happy? No. Am I happy? No. What happened? oh we got way too short term focus and we stopped doing the stuff that we can uniquely do why don't we just fix that and we're like yeah we can fix this like we have the business let's just fix it and that meant say no to those offers to sell um and the second we said no we realized we had to do right by the team and by our investors because our investors wanted us to sell It was like a ridiculous return for them.

29:56And that led us to this idea of raising debt and buying them out. And that got us really excited because it was like, hey, if we buy them out and we raise debt, we're going to have to be profitable to serve the debt. And if we're profitable, we long-term focus, we'll do all the stuff that we can uniquely do, take the unique risks that we think we're good at taking. And actually, maybe the business will be better off. And so that's what we did in 2017 is we raised 17.3 million to buy them out and to get liquidity for our early team. And they had the option to sell their options at that point. And then the, you know, fortunately, it's a happy end to the story, which is that once we did that, we got way more focus.

30:40We took a lot of the risks only we felt like we could take. And it worked. We got really long term focused and it caused revenue to accelerate huge swing in profitability. and recently we just paid off that debt. So it's been like a pretty amazing thing to realize and to do. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success.

31:27You should come and check out our new podcast from zero to founder hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn. These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs, people just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder without the E. All right, now let's jump in the show. You talk a lot about the difference between being short-term focused and long-term focused, but what did that truly look like?

32:06Can you give us some examples of some of the things that you guys did strategically when you made that shift? Because I try to put myself in your guys shoes and you're losing money then you're going to take on a ton of debt to pay out your existing investors and early team um that would that really that really loaded the stakes and that would be pretty stressful uh because you're like okay well i've got this incredible business and i can probably have a life-changing exit now i'm basically going to go backwards in my mind and go make it really hard for myself and if this doesn't work then we're in serious trouble so what like what did you do strategically can you kind of talk us through some of that and and you know how long did it take to turn the company back around yeah i mean the i just found the psychology piece the honest answer there was it was once we decided that we that we were like really clear that we didn't want to sell and that we saw this path to basically getting back to what felt like was really working for us before this longer term creative focus it was like a very like freeing and expansive feeling like it felt like we were in control again if that makes sense this is like abstract and then what we what we actually did was one thing is we brought the team along on the journey.

33:32So even before we knew we were going to raise debt, we said, we're just going to be open and transparent about this and that we have these offers to sell the business. We declined them for this reason. This is what we want to do. It's created a ton of turbulence, as you can imagine, like a lot of uncertainty and turbulence inside the company. We figured out that was maybe in the summer that we said that. we kind of struck on this debt we we got that deal done in i think november of 2017 yeah and then what we start we had always run the business open book um but it was this very funny shift for the whole team where you know we if we talk about revenue or something like that uh before to the team it just like wasn't that much interest or like engagement or connection and once we had like really explained like why we were raising the debt how this is going to work what the future of the company looked like where we wanted to take it, there was this huge amount of engagement from everyone in the finances and operations of the business.

34:33I remember there was like this, like almost like knife edge switch where we do these monthly all hands meetings. And after we had done this debt deal, our head of finance was going through, you know, the same thing that she does every month, right? Goes through the finances and like, she's like, any questions? And normally people would just be like scrolling on their phones or like board or whatever and like hand pops up like another hand pops up you're like how much does the ski trip cost like how much do these snacks in the office cost like why we have two offices like why do we have two offices how much does that office cost like and then just all of this like the team got very engaged with how the business was was running so there was one thing that was like fairly easy to do which is if you've got people focused and motivated um on how the business is running we just got a lot more efficient and lean and so a lot of that looked like um i remember the infrastructure team they were like huh well there's a lot of ways that like we're not really running this efficiently like we could probably save a lot of money if we you know change maybe how we're storing some of these videos and using like different you know tiering systems in s3 for instance and like when you're growing quickly like you just don't care about that and it doesn't matter but if you're trying to run like a tight ship that matters more and so they went up and we're like, hey, we saved$100 ,000 a month because we're doing this and they get a standing ovation.

35:55Because the business, people understand there's an existential threat if we can't perform and become profitable. And also, we forgot to mention too, when we did this shift and we bought out, when employees sold their stock options, we create a profit sharing model. So employees' incentives were aligned to ours that if we get to the business to profitability, then they share in those results. And we also had to stop doing stuff. I think that's like, so one big lesson for us is that we all underestimate, focus, and alignment. Like, focus on the right problems. And there might even be 10 problems that are the right problems to solve, but it turns out often, if you get everyone focused on three instead, you make a lot more progress.

36:40And then on alignment, the truth is, after we did the buyback, we were so pumped. And you talk about that existential kind of like stress or dread. The way we looked at it was like, well, we took on this risk. If it doesn't work, we're going to have to sell the company because to serve the debt. And we just had an opportunity to sell. We turned it down. So the two people who are going to be the most impacted by this will be us. And we're kind of okay with that. Like that was a risk that we felt actually comfortable taking. It didn't feel like we were risking everyone's net worth. It was only our own.

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37:15but in any case, I say that because we made the call. We tell the company we're feeling so good. It's like literally like one of those, like you high five after the meeting and get out there. And then basically, I'm not going to say complete chaos ensued, but a lot of people got, were very confused. They're like, well, I don't want to, I mean, I don't want to be here now. Like I got to pay out. Like this isn't for me or I don't want to be a tech company that's profitable. Like aren't you supposed to do the other thing? And there was this like moment in time when a lot of people left. But then we hired a lot of people who what they wanted was exactly what we were doing.

37:49And so the shift was dramatic. It was like maybe six months of kind of stressful times before suddenly everyone who was at Wistia wanted to be here. Everyone knew why we were doing what we were doing. People were joining Wistia because they said, I want to see what a real business is like where you make money. Like that's I've never done that in my career in tech. And it was funny. It got easier to hire suddenly. um and the results of all of this was that we had a huge swing in EBITDA so in 2017 uh we were on track for negative 3 million in EBITDA and in 2018 we had positive 6 so like a 9 million dollar swing in like less than 12 months and that was just like focus um alignment and just it was execution again.

38:37And the cool thing about that was that is also when we greenlit some wild creative things. We greenlit a big marketing project, which was we gave a production agency $111 ,000 and asked them to make three ads for us. One ad with a$1 ,000 budget, one ad with a$10 ,000 budget, one ad with a$100 ,000 budget. And then we documented their creative process and the link between money and creativity. We made a feature-like documentary. That was greenlit at that exact moment once we were profitable because we're like, hey, we can do this. We believe it'll be sweet. It's not going to give us a return tomorrow.

39:16It's not going to get us for return next month, but we don't think anyone else is going to do it. So like, it'll probably stand out. It'll probably work. And it worked unbelievably well. But that was one of those things was like a little specific example that I don't think we could have done in the mode before. Yeah. I think the short answer to that question that we probably should have given at the start was the playbook that we had in our mind was, we know we can get this business profitable if we operate well and really focus. And then once we get profitable, that profitability gives us confidence that we can do projects like that one with the 110-100, this creative project that we know is going to pay a lot of dividends, but it's a much longer term investment.

39:57And we have to be profitable for this type of business and the way we like to run a business in order to make those long-term bets. And so we got profitable and then we greenlit projects like that and then we got more profit and then that worked and we got more profitable and started growing the business faster. Yeah, you guys have some crazy stories and I think that one that you tell is very common amongst founders, right? I think for whatever reason, especially when it's your first business, you just feel this pressure amongst others. I don't know why that if you're not growing, then it's not good.

40:36And if you're not got this crazy growth and like you're not hiring like crazy and all these different things, then it's not good. So you want to keep building that momentum and it gets harder and harder and harder. And then, you know, things change, right? And then did you guys go through the whole piece of, you know, bringing on execs and fancy execs and stuff like that and not working out? You mean that mistake? That whole thing? Yeah. The short version of that, I think, yeah. No, we've definitely, you know, hired a lot of different people for senior roles. And it turns out, like, today, I would say, it's like we have the strongest senior management team we've ever had.

41:20Highly cohesive. enormous amounts of trust in the room everyone knows what they're doing they make quick decisions they look for creative solutions to things like it's what it's supposed to be but the road to this has been really tough and it's really easy to get it wrong um and in many times we hired people who were great people they were just like for a company way bigger than us or for um you know two opinion we were so excited to change something about the business we hired someone super different. And then of course, like that didn't actually make sense with what we were trying to do. And it's, it's a very, very hard thing to get right.

41:57Yeah. I think we, that mistake we've made a few times and I'm, I think we've learned our lesson finally after a few times through is this, yeah, people who are much more experienced, um, kind of this like old ad, like what, what got you here won't get you there, which is true in some ways and not true, like any advice, right it's true in some ways they're not true in other ways and at times where we really felt like that and that we needed to change like chris is saying we overreached hired someone who it was like uncomfortable feeling in a way that we're like oh we thought this is like how we should push ourselves or yeah somebody who you know or you do the thing where you think is somebody who's really confident and has all those answers for you and you want to believe that's going to help change.

42:42It's never, it's never that simple. And the best, I feel like the best folks we've hired, there's somewhere between there. They have experience that you don't have, that we don't have, but there's also enough of kind of shared experience or grounding in what we're doing that they can pull us forward, but they're connected to the team and, and what we're doing. The ones that haven't worked, it's like really like out, you know, outside. Yeah, there's this like this adage from Peter Chernin, who worked really closely with like Barry Diller, which is like, you can't hire a world class team, you have to build it.

43:18And their thinking, which I agree with is like, if someone is truly world class, if someone is like, 100 times better than somebody else, which I think exists in this world, if you get the fit between the person and the company, right? it's almost impossible to hire that person away because the organization they're in knows that they're world-class. And so you might be able to hire people around that person. It's very hard to hire that person. And then if they are leaving, they do it on their own terms and often do their own thing. And so it's just really, really hard to get people who are truly, truly, truly world-class.

43:51It's not impossible. You can do it. It's happened. I've seen it happen, but it's very, very hard. So what you want to do is you want to grow the talent. You have to figure out how to grow the talent as much as possible and i think one thing we've seen is like we've hired execs who are incredible but there's something about we're doing that they're growing into there's something about it that's like very different and that causes them to show up in like um a different way than someone who just thinks it's old hat like if someone thinks they've done it before it's it's hard to be as committed it's hard to it's hard to get all the way there and so i think that's one you want to think about is like how do you grow people as much as possible um and take those types of risks and another thing we talk about is like the people who really are at the next level of like i think this is true in almost any role but especially like senior managers like they need to be able to be like a world-class manager or leader and they need to be able to be a world-class ic like individual contributor and what the problems we run into is sometimes you guys are as incredible ic and they don't want to manage and they don't like that part of it, the people part, which is an enormous part.

44:58Or you have people who, that people love the people part and they seem really good, but they can't actually get into the weeds with somebody and help them solve a problem like on the ground that's coming up or lead in that moment. And when someone could do both, that's when like magic happens. Yeah, we've hired a lot of, yeah, like people who are good at general management, but haven't been really engaged or really great at the function. And that has not worked for us. That makes sense. Thank you for sharing. So love to talk about video marketing. And then now we have to work towards wrapping up.

45:34But where do you guys see the state of video marketing right now in 2023? Yeah, I mean, I think that what's happening today is video has gone from a nice to have to an expectation. And 2020 really changed things because I think that was the year that people really started to see their computer as a camera. And so what are the implications of that? The implications are, you know, when we consume content every day, we have infinite content to compete with. Video is everywhere. I can open up TikTok, Instagram. I can open up YouTube. And like, there's a lot of people making great content on all these channels.

46:12And I'm used to believing that that's, I can learn about anything. I can discover anything. I can see that. And there'll be good videos there for me. and so that's what's happened to the b2c side and on the b2b side everyone's trying to grapple with this change which means like putting more of your people on camera um seeing your computer as a camera is a really big deal because it means that you know we see people now who are hired into roles that have never made a video before and you know if you're hired as a product marketer don't be surprised if someone asks you hey i'd like you to make the launch video of this new product That's a crazy thing to say five years ago, and it's not anymore.

46:54And not everyone is there yet, but that is the gulf and the delta of what we see is like today, like there's still, of course, you're going to make work. We have incredibly professional setups, both you do and we do right now. There's a reason we're doing that. We're elevating things. We're showing people that this is important. We have help. We didn't just make this up. And there's a production quality matters. It really does. but there's also you can get a much higher production quality yourself as a creator today and when that shows up at work it means for us like we've we've changed so much about our business since 2020 because of this really trying to enable people to make videos that are great themselves and i think that's the kind of the beginning of the trend that we see today for for video marketing and B2B.

47:44Which is just to come full circle. It is funny that we're sitting here in 2023 saying that because we honestly believed in 2006, like when we saw YouTube and like how fast this chain was going to be where we started, like every business, every person in every business is going to be making video, you know, definitely by the end of the decade in 2010. And again, it's just think right. We've been right about where things have been headed and extremely wrong about the timing, but it's really exciting to see the arc of that play out.

48:42forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. Yeah, I was going to say, just even reflecting in my own journey with Founder, you know, we started with like a digital magazine. I used to do the interviews via an audio just podcast, but then as the business grew and I just saw, especially with Instagram, when they started to introduce video, just the importance of how video was going to change the game. And it was only for us like 2016 2017 where we could actually really start to to develop that and like hire a videographer and now you know a lot of companies they they hire videographers right like and you just need that like you're just constantly shooting and then as time has gone on we've created more and more and more and more and more more video and we need to create more like it's never enough right that's that's that's the thing but yeah it really has shifted and i think the social platforms, not just YouTube, but these other social sharing platforms have really been the big mover for that.

49:44And then also the capability of your phone, right? The quality of content that you can put out. So I'm curious when it comes to, I guess, businesses looking to use video from a marketing perspective, what data is the most valuable to review, you know, in your guy's case when it comes to performance? That's a good question. I think you need to look at whatever the marketing channel is and then see how video helps you in that channel so like for example you know if you add video to a landing page for let's say some like ads you're putting in search um you're going to want to look at the engagement of the video of course you're going to look at where people are dropping off you're going to want to look at the specific people who are watching and you know tie that into the other data conversion data you have your list and your market automation whatever it needs to be to help you understand what's really working but ultimately you care about like how many great customers came to that channel signed up for the um signed up for whatever was on the landing page right like that that is the the thing you want to pay the most attention to and there's a lot of different video metrics that are going to help you get a better view that you need to look at um and you can benchmark and see if they're off you know but it's play rate it's engagement and retention of the video it's the individual heat maps and how those people flow through and take other actions but it's a step in the it's a step in the funnel versus like the just the whole thing unless it's it is the whole thing and we're talking about the content itself um and then you're going to look at like you know a video podcast um let's say that's on your site and also on other channels you'll look at all the social stuff?

51:29How's it performing on YouTube? How's it performing in other places? How's it benchmarks against other podcasts? Um, and on your site, you should look at engagement and ultimately should tie it into, um, conversion. Yeah. I, I'd love to switch gears as well. Um, when it comes to, uh, your award-winning series, one 10, 100, you guys explored the relationship between creativity and money. Can you talk about it just like from the other side, like actually creating the content or creating video to drive demand? How did that work out for you guys? And what was the performance there with that series?

52:09It's a good question. I probably should have answered the last one with this one because we looked at a bunch of different pieces. So we had the documentary itself, which about an hour and 40 minutes long. And we had tens of thousands of views of that just on our website. And so we looked at the engagement of those videos compared to long form content. And you could see it in the data. We share a video report every year at Wistia. So you can take a look at how's your engagement stack up and stuff. And it was extremely good. But then we looked at time spent with the brand through that project and this was the one that before that we really didn't understand how important it was um but i split explain that metric yeah basically it's just like yeah so it's really just looking at like when people click play how much time are they spending with 110 100 like hours long what's the total hour spent with that content and the idea it's So yeah, plays times average engagement rate gives you the total hours every viewer collectively spent watching this content.

53:16And so the reason why I say we had tens of thousands of views on the site, but the time spent with brand was really high. And what ended up happening was we saw as that spiked, we ended up seeing a spike and a huge increase really. wasn't a spike it maintained a huge increase in direct traffic to the website a huge increase in uh branded search for wistia and then we saw way more signups we saw a bunch of customers like a lot of customers and we went back and looked at the full time spent with the brand in the previous year like across this when we say that i'm saying like every single page people went on that previous year on the site, like time on site, time watching content, everything.

54:05At 110, 100 in like the first month and a half, had more time spent with the brand than all of the marketing we had done in the previous year. And so that was crazy. And even now looking back, it's generated so many customers. It's unbelievable. It's like, it's so many customers came in through that thing, which is so interesting because it doesn't say what Wistia is. It doesn't explain what a video marketing platform is. It's just our opinion and an approach and kind of a mission behind it. But there was other elements of it that we also looked at, which were, we made a trailer and the trailer was seen millions and millions and millions of times.

54:43So for a lot of people, they saw the Wistia brand and like the Wistia brand made a documentary about this and um well so it's on amazon like so the document was on amazon uh on amazon prime um and then one all the words and stuff but it started with this like foundational video engagement data and the play rate and the time so the brand and then over time we saw all the other things come to fruition where it became so obvious it was like such a good thing to do yeah that's cool Thank you for sharing that story because it's really interesting to hear. Oftentimes when you create content, you want to have this extreme immediate direct response and especially in the early stage startup kind of way or kind of era, you don't really think about what can you do from a brand building perspective or you've got to have a CTA, you've got to have the branding in there but obviously from what i'm hearing people enjoyed the content so much you didn't go hard on the wist of your push that people just naturally go i want to learn more about the company and behind who it is that have created this awesome series and then that obviously built a lot of trust and goodwill as well in the marketplace that allowed you guys to get that outcome but it's once you went like you guys talked about a longer term play not this immediate quick sugar hit yeah it was a conscious decision to have it be on the website too because the thinking was we need the main place to be on the website that's not going to get as much like natural distribution but it will mean that if you came and you watch this whole thing you're like what else do they do like you're gonna you're already gonna be there navigating around and so i think that was like another piece of the puzzle that really at least for in our case worked like really well.

56:33Yeah. But you, you just described the content marketing playbook really well, which is the, that is the way it's done. It is not an immediate payback. You need to be helpful. You need to be entertaining. You need to provide value and you do that consistently over time. And that's how you build like a following and an engine. Like, I mean, everyone is smart, right? The audience is smart. It's not, if you have something that you're like, it's some transactional thing or you're trying to you know trick someone into clicking some cta and signing up people don't do that the content you consume the content we can say it's things that are entertaining or really helpful and if you focus on the audience and that then it like we were you know fortunate to learn that lesson early in the business we've been doing it for many years when we when we greenlit 110 100 so we kind of we had applied the same yeah approach to that this is like what we wanted to watch it's like content that didn't exist that we would have been really psyched to see and we would have watched the whole thing.

57:34Yeah. Awesome. So we have to work towards wrapping up. We've got the hot seat round, quick rapid fire questions and answers, guys. What's your fellow co-founder's spirit animal and why? Flat coat retriever. He's always there. He loves the water. He takes, he's, yeah, there you go. um friendly shark uh fast swimmer uh can be oh deadly if needed deadly if needed i like it very friendly shark yeah but very you know i have no idea awesome thank you uh what's the last yes thank you edit that out yeah what's what's the last video you remember stopping the scroll on your phone i just did a 24 hour social media cleanse i know i have a lot that's why i was like i think i mean the last one i really remember stopping the scroll for me was a clip from kill tony which was like a live comedy podcast and i've and it's a delight it's a delight what daily habit makes you a better founder working out every day learning spanish love it all right last one i'd love to hear this from both you guys as well if you could have dinner with any entrepreneur dead or alive who would it be and why john carmack legendary game developer and entrepreneur uh he's just like uh was like a childhood idol right like program you know wolfenstein doom himself which I spent many many hours playing and I don't know if you've ever seen him talk but he has an uncanny ability he'll give like hour long keynote that are completely impromptu and extremely cogent he's just super smart interesting interesting guy interested in all kinds of yeah AI game development all kinds of stuff that I'm also interested um and i'm gonna go with the rock you know we don't think of him every day as an entrepreneur but that guy's got an entrepreneur a lot of businesses uh he's got a lot going on and i think it's like i'd love to i'd love to to learn from somebody who has figured out how to play in so many different arenas at the same time um and you know supposedly he's still like one of the nicest guys out there and like and um yeah i think it's interesting it would be interesting to kind of like learn more about that yeah that's a good one i'm a fan of the rock we also interviewed his uh ex-wife as well um fascinating businesswoman danny garcia she's yeah they work together on so much of the stuff yeah yeah she's fascinating so i want to know your answer who would you pick elon elon yeah yeah yeah yeah he's my hero yeah yeah that's a good one i was like should i go elon i was like no i feel like hey i'm reading the biography so maybe that's like something you know but there isn't one of the rocks so and that i know of there will be there will be you'll write it yeah look if it helps like most people say elon musk yeah awesome um would you like to have dinner with elon musk yes okay yep yep awesome well look uh thank you so much guys for your candidness and just like sharing how it's been how it is and what it takes really to build this extremely successful startup congratulations on all your success thus far and uh thank you so much for giving back to our community this will really help them hey thanks for having us yeah thank you hey guys i hope you enjoyed this interview As you might already know, our mission at Founder is to help tens of millions of people every single week with our content, either start or grow their business, which is exactly why we're partnering with world-class founders such as Damon John, Alexa Von Tobel, Greta Van Riel, and so many more to teach crucial skills such as negotiation, finance, e-commerce, and so much more.

1:02:03So if you'd like to get access to these free exclusive trainings, please go to founder.com forward slash free. These are 100%. We go super in depth on teaching a particular topic and I know that you're going to love them if you enjoy this podcast. So just go to founder.com forward slash free. All right, guys. I'll see you in the next episode.

From the publisher

If you’re young and looking to start a business with a friend, here’s the pathway to do it successfully. Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz were friends at Brown University when they began dreaming about working together. After quitting their jobs, they created Wistia, a complete video marketing platform that helps teams create, host, and measure the impact of their videos — all in one place. Now, almost two decades into their business, Chris and Brendan still love working together and are just getting started. 

Listen to Nathan chat with Chris and Brendan about:

Why their college years formed their co-founding partnership

The ingredients of starting a business with friends

Profitability versus growth

The trap of short-term focus 

Why they bought out their investors

Getting your team focused on the business details 

The state of video marketing 

And much more co-founder advice…

Who do you want to see next on the podcast? Comment and let us know! And don't forget to leave us a 5-star review if you loved this episode.

Wait, there's more… If you enjoy the Foundr podcast, check out our free trainings. Get exclusive, actionable advice from some of the world's best entrepreneurs. 

Speak with our friendly course experts to get clarity on the next steps for your idea, business or career. You will get tailored insights from results achieved by our proven practitioners as well as thousands of students. Book a call now... 

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480: Co-Founders Formed on Friendship with Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz of WistiaThe Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan · 1 h 3 min
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