How to Build a Wildly Successful Startup in Today’s Competitive Market (Episode 188)

Jeff Bullas

00:00:02 - 00:01:40

Hi, everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. Today, I have with me, Vikram Chalana. Vikram is a visionary entrepreneur and a trailblazer in the world of AI-driven content creation. And don't we all want to know more about how to use that, how to use AI effectively. So in the middle of one of the biggest changes in the tech world and in humanity, I think we're ever seen frankly. As a CEO of Pictory, Vikram leads a team dedicated to revolutionizing the way we generate video and social content. With Pictory’s groundbreaking technology, long-form content, such as blogs and webinars, can undergo a miraculous transformation into a month's worth of engaging visual and social media content all accomplished in a matter of minutes and we all love to do more with less. Vikram's journey is marked by an unwavering passion for creating transformative technologies. His foray into the tech landscape began as a Research Scientist at Insightful Corporation, love the name, where you honed your skills and developed a deep understanding of the industry's intricacies. It was in 2003, that Vikram embarked on his entrepreneurial odyssey. And we're gonna find more about what was the inspiration for that. Co-founded Winshuttle. This enterprise software company quickly gained promise for its innovative application data management solutions, specifically designed to revolutionize SAP-based business. Vikram is now living in the beautiful city of Seattle. It's been for a run. He is now reigning. Welcome to Seattle and welcome to the show, Vikram, great to have you here.

Vikram Chalana

00:01:40 - 00:01:44

Hey Jeff, it's a pleasure being here. It was really, really an honor.

Jeff Bullas

00:01:45 - 00:02:45

So Vikram, you're originally from India, but you've been in the United States for over 30 years. Tell us a little bit about your experience as a child growing up in India. And I've been in India a couple of times. I've actually four times and I've just, I've loved the energy of the people. They have this burning desire to make the world a better place for them and their family. And that is such a motivator. And I remember the first time I spoke at Bombay Institute of Technology in Mumbai. And I remember the young people there at the Bombay Institute of Technology just were so passionate about what they did. And they had this thirst for knowledge that I found intoxicating. So tell us a little bit about your time in India because I think it's important for us to understand where Vikram came from and what drives you. I would be fascinated.

Vikram Chalana

00:02:46 - 00:03:38

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest things that I learned or was inculcated in me was the value for education, value for learning. And I think I see that still a lot in India whenever I go, I have a team there of young people and the energy that you describe, it's still there and there's so much thirst for knowledge and learning about the world and I was one of them, I was just like, you know, as wanting to always learn new things and wanted to see what's out in the world and getting into. So, it was all, I think, focus was about family and education. Those are like the two biggest things in growing up in India.

Jeff Bullas

00:03:39 - 00:04:15

Yeah, that's what I observed the thirst for knowledge, and I think the other thing too is they don't feel entitled, the Indian, you know, special students and the people they feel like they've got to earn the right rather than actually feel they have the right. And I think that's an incredible motivator. And, so you went, did you go to like lover school in, I think you said you lived in Kolkata or something?

Vikram Chalana

00:04:16 - 00:04:46

Yeah, I went to various schools in the eastern part of India then, I went to boarding schools and then where I cut my teeth in India was in a college called IIT, I think, you were talking about Bombay Institute of Technology. There's another one, Indian Institute of Technology in a city called Kanpur. That's where I did my undergraduate in electrical engineering. And, yeah, that is that.

Jeff Bullas

00:04:47 - 00:04:52

Is that part of the same sort of network of engineering schools?

Vikram Chalana

00:04:52 - 00:05:04

Exactly. At that time there used to be five, now I think there are like about 30 of them and they're like elite engineering schools all over India.

Jeff Bullas

00:05:04 - 00:07:05

Yeah, I remember going there and it was really quite funny. They had this conference and that it was like the Bombay Institute of Technology and I came in the taxi, I think it was and they'd put up all these different banners on the power light poles, these are huge banners, like they were two meters tall and white and it was like, what they'd done is they'd taken some of the speakers for the event and put them up on these banners. And I, for a few minutes, I felt like a superstar because I was on the same banners as, you know, the banner was one of me and there's one of Einstein as one of someone else and then there was another, Einstein wasn't speaking by the way, but it was actually one of the banners was sort of at lower ground. So I actually took a photo of me next to the banner. I still have that today. But we run workshops about social media, digital marketing. And it, after I ran a workshop or spoke, I'd be surrounded by this incredibly intense Indian students. And I saw some of the accommodation they had and I went, wow, these are such passionate people that wanted to make a difference, want to learn. And I literally, and the other thing too, I noticed about India, which many people maybe haven't experienced. But the idea of personal space, in other words, if you live in the country in Australia, you're talking to a farmer, they'll stand about two meeters back. If you talk to someone in India because it's such a crowded, such crowded cities, the idea of personal space becomes shrunken and they will be that close to you talking and you almost feel like you keep walking backwards to get away from because your idea of personal space is quite different. And but it, yeah, it was induction through passion and observation was so good.

Vikram Chalana

00:07:06 - 00:07:30

Yeah, by the way, you're famous, I was being pitched by a startup talking about career paths and one of the career paths had you as a role model in there. And it was like, yes, become a marketing influencer like Jeff.

Jeff Bullas

00:07:31 - 00:08:42

I never set out to be a marketing influencer at all. I was just passionately curious about what social media was doing. And I think I became an influencer before the term was used before the web became known. So, but anyway, the young people on TikTok and Instagram now have sort of taken over that banner, you know, I suppose the, what we call the torch. But yeah, it was a lot of fun to go to India. I haven't been there for quite a few years yet. So yeah, well, that's quite funny really. But my second biggest audience after the USA on the blog is actually India. It's so it's yeah, so let's talk about you, Vikram, not about me. So, it's good. So you went to schools there now, what was the reason to go to America? Was it, I think you mentioned it might be, you went there to do a master's degree after you'd done it at the Institute of Technology in your home city.

Vikram Chalana

00:08:42 - 00:10:52

Yeah. So when I was a student, one of the papers I got introduced to as an electrical engineering student was one of the first papers that was ever written about neural networks. That paper came out in like ‘85 or ‘86. And I was a junior in college about ‘88-’89. So I read this paper and it just blew me away about the fact that you can simulate a neuron in the brain and do computations with it and it actually can do something meaningful like human patterns. So and this was like the starting of the AI machine learning, like the very, very beginning of that, the basic neural networks. And I got completely fascinated because I was like, there's something with this human anatomy and human physiology that links us with computing. And I really wanted to pursue that, that's kind of what my passion became. So at that time, so I went to, I applied to these biomedical engineering programs or bioengineering programs all over the US because I really wanted to pursue that. And it was natural fit, like I said, okay, I can, I learn about this, I learn about brains and I learn about, you know, combine my engineering skills with medicine and try to kind of explore that. So I applied to two or three biomedical engineering programs and the one I got into is one of the top rated ones at the University of Washington here in Seattle. And that's where I ended up pursuing and in fact, like I did learn about the brain a little bit, but then I switched to actually learning about the body and about medical imaging and how to apply neural networks and medical imaging. So this was about 30 some years ago, I was doing that and using AI and pattern recognition on medical images.

Jeff Bullas

00:10:52 - 00:11:04

Right. Okay. So it essentially came. So he started doing engineering, which is more like a hard science. And you moved into the messy science of humans.

Vikram Chalana

00:11:05 - 00:11:20

It was still hard science because when you have to kind of study human anatomy and physiology with probes like ultrasound and CT and MRI mean that's still, it is still hard science.

Jeff Bullas

00:11:21 - 00:11:24

So you did a master's in what was the topic?

Vikram Chalana

00:11:25 - 00:11:45

It wasn't medical imaging, it was biomedical engineering. And I was doing a pattern recognition and AI on medical images. And, then I did my masters and I continued to my PhD because the topic was super interesting and we just continued working on the road.

Jeff Bullas

00:11:45 - 00:12:01

So when did, so you finished that and you decided, you told your mum you're gonna be back in two years, and that didn't happen.

Vikram Chalana

00:12:02 - 00:12:24

That didn't happen. I met my wife-to-be at the university and she was also getting a degree there. And yeah, we got married soon after and, yeah, so that idea of going back to India after two years, didn't quite materialize.

Jeff Bullas

00:12:25 - 00:12:30

Okay. Well, I'm sure you've gone back a few times.

Vikram Chalana

00:12:30 - 00:12:31

Oh, yeah, every year.

Jeff Bullas

00:12:32 - 00:12:54

Right. So you finished your PhD, you sort of been inspired by neuro linking in the brain, this paper. So obviously, you sound like you became very curious about learning and how the brain works and how computers can facilitate that. Is that correct?

Vikram Chalana

00:12:54 - 00:13:23

Yeah. And how that, the brain simulation, can be applied to real problems like analysis of images of the body. So, when I was you like as an example, one of the problems that we worked on was detecting cancer cells in MRI images of the brain. So using neural networks for that cancer detection.

Jeff Bullas

00:13:23 - 00:13:45

Right. And so after you sort of, you became curious about this, you've done your PhD, when was your first foray into becoming an entrepreneur and how did that start? What was the motivation to say, well, I wanna be an entrepreneur now? Where was that called?

Vikram Chalana

00:13:45 - 00:14:53

So one of the things I realized about being a graduate student because by about doing a PhD is it kind of, it opens this whole idea of independent thinking and pursuing new directions and without and by yourself. So one of the things as I learned, my first couple of jobs was I didn't like being told what to do. I really wanted to pursue what I wanted to pursue. So graduate school is like a dangerous place. It's a great training ground for depth in a field. But it could also be like super liberating and, you know, you don't wanna work for anybody else after that. So I did a couple of jobs but then I was like, you know, I wanna work for myself. I want to figure out, you know, what this whole idea of starting something from scratch and building it just similar to kind of what I did in my PhD, starting something from scratch and building it. But now I want to do it in the business domain.

Jeff Bullas

00:14:53 - 00:15:05

Right. And so Winshuttle, that was your first real entrepreneurial adventure. Did that idea come from, Winshuttle? And tell us more about that.

Vikram Chalana

00:15:06 - 00:18:37

Yeah. So the idea of Winshuttle was actually very simple and it was kind of far out of my biomedical engineering thing, but I thought I would actually bring some of those things into here, into that as well. The idea was very simple. We came across these companies who use a system called SAP. SAP is used by most large companies to run their business. So all the accounting, all the HR activities, supply chain, everything happens. CRM, SAP has everything, all the systems. And one of the challenges as I talked to some friends who were in the SAP field, one of the challenges they mentioned was, you know, it's a closed system. Any time I need to do something with SAP, like change the data or something, I have to go to my IT department and make it happen. So it would be really nice to have a way that, as a business user, as a marketing person, as a finance person, I can make those changes myself and run the business and not have things interrupted by waiting for IT. So, that was the problem statement and we started trying to solve, figure out solutions for it. And the solution we ended up building was connect Excel to SAP and make it really easy for somebody to take data in Excel and push that to SAP. So and that opens up a whole bunch of things because Excel already is something that everybody has on their desktop. Everybody uses everything and it's something very familiar with. So we build an Excel add-on which helps you connect to anything in SAP. So I'll give you an example. I mean, you're familiar with CRM system. So say I wanted to change the territory planning for my customers. So all the sales, all the customers in the Sydney region now have a new sales rep. So I need to reassign the sales rep on that. So that change, it's a mass change. And the one of the best ways to do it is in Excel, just kind of go and see where the customers are, make the change in Excel. So literally our add-on would basically say pull all the customer records into Excel that are affected, make the change in Excel to the new sales rep and push that back into SAP. Sounds really simple, but this kind of stuff wasn't there in SAP and probably still not there in SAP. And so we just made that whole process of round tripping data back from SAP to Excel. Very easy and it just like opened up a whole bunch of businesses and we were doing we call today, you hear about this phrase called product led growth where you the product leads it instead of sales people or marketing people selling. So we were doing product led growth like 20 years ago into large companies who use SAP. And they would come in, try download this Excel add-on, they would try it, they would make it work and, then they would pay like five figures, six figure dollars to buy and install it at multiple PCs in their enterprise.

Jeff Bullas

00:18:38 - 00:18:43

So you were selling like subscription as a service that was an add-on to SAP.

Vikram Chalana

00:18:44 - 00:18:54

Yeah, exactly. add-on to SAP, add-on to Excel, add-on to SharePoint. And then we connected all these Microsoft systems together and connected to SAP.

Jeff Bullas

00:18:54 - 00:19:09

So what were some of the biggest learns you had from Winshuttle because you operated it until 2018, starting in 2003 though. So there's, it's basically 15 years of, I'd say very, a lot of learning.

Vikram Chalana

00:19:10 - 00:20:52

Yeah. There’s all kinds of challenges, all kinds of learnings. There are learning about, you know, in product development, there's two camps and it's often very, very crucial to find the balance between the two camps. One is follow exactly what the customer wants. So there's a famous saying that you probably heard from Henry Ford. If I'd asked the customers what they wanted, I would have built faster horses, not a car because they can't envision everything but you still want to listen to the customer and you wanna follow, you wanna build what they want because that's what's gonna sell. And on the other hand, you can't just build it completely like you can follow your vision that this is what I want to do, but then completely build something that is irrelevant to the market. So, you have to find that fine balance and I think some of the key learnings were, for me, were going on either extreme. Like on one side, we just followed the customers to the T and it wasn't, it didn't end up being innovative things. But yes, we did sell stuff and on the, and then we pivoted to the extreme where we built something to completely a vision that I had about this is how it should be. And it took a long time to get something to the market, to the place where the customer really wanted it.

Jeff Bullas

00:20:52 - 00:21:19

So the term, excuse me, the term MVP has been tossed around a lot with entrepreneurs like minimal viable product. So what do you think about that concept? And it sounds like you built something which is not minimal viable, you built like a full product and then you realize, oh gee it's maybe not quite what they wanted. So what do you think about minimal viable product approach?

Vikram Chalana

00:21:19 - 00:22:25

No, that's so that at the end of that journey, that's exactly what the approach I took when we started Pictory was we wanted to build an MVP before committing too much. So the idea of building and you, I mean, related to the MVP comes out of this lean startup movement where, you know, you introduce something small but something meaningful for the customer, then you iterate on it, rate on it continually and improve the product until you get something meaningful. So I love that concept of MVP. It makes a lot of sense and it depends on the market that at which you're playing, sometimes the MVP needs to be pretty heavy because otherwise, you know, if it can connect to CRM, if it can't connect to this, nobody is gonna use it. So the MVP ends up being pretty heavy. So, but sometimes an MVP can be really lean and that's so it's still a balance that you have to find.

Jeff Bullas

00:22:26 - 00:22:44

Oh yeah, so, alright. So let's move on to Pictory. So how did, you know, so how did Winshuttle, did you sell it? Did you exit it? Did you do an IPO? How did, what happened there?

Vikram Chalana

00:22:44 - 00:23:57

Yeah, it wasn't an IPO it wasn't big enough, but it was reasonable size, it was about 350 employees. I, yeah, so at the peak and then we decided that I was getting really bored and I was like, okay, this is I need more innovation in my life and this is not satisfying that. So, we ended up selling the company to a private equity firm. And it was a good exit for all the investors, the founders and the team members, everybody had a nice exit out of that. And then I decided to like, you know, look at other problems that I could impact. And the way Pictory came about was as I was thinking about the different problems that I saw while running Winshuttle. One of the things that was pretty obvious to me was I used to be, you said you started your blog 14 years ago. It was in a similar, like I started my first blog in like the late 2000s, sorry, in 2010. Yeah, so similar time frame.

Jeff Bullas

00:23:57 - 00:24:00

That's when blogs were cool.

Vikram Chalana

00:24:00 - 00:26:13

When they just started exactly text was the key. And I remember like doing a blog and a white paper related to that called doing more with less in IT. And it got so much traction. We generated a million dollars of sales just from that one white paper and you'd get the white paper, people would download it and you'd get calls, POs after that. And that was the last time that we did so well with the white paper because content just shifted, like content exploded, right? Everybody was doing blogs, everybody was doing white papers and then there was new media that started coming out like, you know, we saw, I mean we saw things go from Twitter to Instagram to TikTok. I mean this is like the shift that we've seen. So video was the thing that everybody wanted, everybody wanted videos and every like in our company of 350 people, we had one video person and everybody would be lining up in front of her cube that hey, I want help creating this video or I want help editing this video. And it was just like the tools out there like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro were complicated. They were not, you know, you need trained people, you needed special hardware, you needed a lot. And as I was coming out of this and I was thinking, you know, if there's one problem I wanna address because I was on that side of waiting for Laura to get back, get done with her project so she can work on my videos. And I was like, there has to be a way that it should be part of an office productivity suite. There should be like, you know, right next to Word and Excel and PowerPoint, there should be a video suite and that could make or edit videos. And so that was kind of the vision problem statement that we started Pictory with that and we wanted to use AI to help in this process. And we wanted to make it really easy for anybody. So our inspiration was Canva and you probably heard of Canva, there in your neck of the woods

Jeff Bullas

00:26:13 - 00:26:16

Melanie Perkins, she's an Australian.

Vikram Chalana

00:26:17 - 00:26:33

And we saw what Canva was doing for design and disrupting Photoshop. And I was like, you know, this is very cool. Like we would love to disrupt Adobe Premiere and Final Cut and that's the kind of journey we started.

Jeff Bullas

00:26:33 - 00:27:27

Yeah, it's very interesting. I was approached by Melanie and her partner about 10 years ago, 8-9 years ago to be an influencer, like their main influencer. And I didn't get that gig, guy Kawasaki did. So I but Canva’s been an incredible journey and I've watched them and they're a powerhouse now worth, what, 40-50 billion or something. And Adobe, by the way, did try to buy them when they were a lot smaller. And Melanie Perkins went. So, and I think that, you know, the amount they were offered is nothing like they're valued today. So they made the right call. So it's a good Australian success story.

Vikram Chalana

00:27:27 - 00:27:28

A global brand.

Jeff Bullas

00:27:28 - 00:27:42

Yeah. So Pictory. So when you start Pictory, that was 2019. So was AI on the page then in terms of your thinking?

Vikram Chalana

00:27:43 - 00:28:34

Yes it was. It was on the page since the very beginning. But obviously, the models that were available, the things that was out in research and in literature was very early. So we were using transformers had just been introduced. So transformers is the core of the GPT engine. And Google had come out with something called Bard, which was making all the waves back then. And I was like, okay, we can use Bard to make, to do some understanding of the script that people give us and create videos using that. And so that was a good starting point for us at that time. And we built something using those models. And yeah.

Jeff Bullas

00:28:35 - 00:30:53

so let's fast forward then. So the idea to become the, I suppose the video platform of choice to create not text content using Word or Google Docs, but to actually have a platform to create video content. And we, I haven't done a lot of video because I fell in. When I started the blog, I fell in love with words and I discovered I could write okay. My writing initially was very poor. So I fell in love with words and I still am in love with words, the use of language to make a difference, to inspire, to educate. And I said, I didn't really double down the video because as you were saying, it's actually was a very time consuming and difficult task and you had to bring, you know, video crews in, you had to do this, you had to do that. The editing was such hard work and it was technical, it was expensive. Fast forward to today, ChatGPT shows up in November 2022 which is not even a year. And now we have video being one of the main ways to communicate. Guess what though, when someone's speaking on a video, they have to use words. Well, not always words, like, you know, people can dance and sing. Well, not that its words. So, what's the, I'm intrigued by since the end of last year, how is this incredibly fast moving new space of ChatGBT, generative AI which went from no users in November till like, beginning of January six weeks later, 100 million users and caught the world's imagination and everyone uses it now almost. So what happened for you guys in Pictory since that rise of ChatGPT where we're seeing text to video, voice to video. So what's happened since then? I'd be intrigued.

Vikram Chalana

00:30:53 - 00:32:50

Yeah. So we, it was like somebody let fire to the rocket fuel for us. So obviously, we didn't grow as fast as ChadGPT but we did, we've grown a lot in the last, since, in the last year, I would say, since ChatGPT came out. So 7x in a number of customers in our revenue. And we were doing okay before that too. So it's been a great booster for us. And we've been able to incorporate, so ChatGPT is still largely a text model. There's some text to image bits that are coming out in there. And but we've been able to now leverage those models instead of the old Bard model that we started with. And it's really improved our performance of everything that we're doing inside Pictory. And there's really two key use cases that we have. One is, you know, that blog that you write, that you love writing. We can basically take that blog and create a video from it. So that tells the story that tries to continue that story, but in a video form and then you can add that video, you can add narration. We have very nice voices in there. You can add narrations and we have the stock of videos that automatically gets picked out. And so you can create a full end to end video experience. And you add that to your blog page. What we find is that it reduces the bounce rate. People spend more time because there's different. People learn differently. Some people love to read, some people love to listen, some people love to watch the videos.

Jeff Bullas

00:32:50 - 00:35:10

Yeah, we've got, so as humans, we do have different modality. My son is slightly dyslexic so he loves watching YouTube videos to learn. So, whereas, I'll get frustrated by a video because I can read quite quickly. So a video or a podcast, let's say I'm passively sitting in a car driving, then it just gets fed to me because I can't read and drive. Well, I could, but it's very dangerous. So I, because I can read quite very quickly and I can read a transcript or a blog post. If that was turned to video, I'd have to do 20 minutes. I can do that in two or three, you know, so for me, text is still very important because, and also the reality is that it's a printed word. I can actually take notes. One of the ways I love learning is read a kindle, take notes, send an email. I've got it right there then. Whereas like on a video, I've got to stop, pause it, make a note. It's so, but we're all different. So it's great. So in turn, what we're experimenting with too is we just started taking the podcast and using video with AI technology, taking long form video and turning it into video snippets. And what we're doing then is because you've got long form video and as we know, social media is much more about short form video and I'm interested in on some of your thoughts on that in a minute. But yeah, we take this typically one hour-ish podcast long form video on, you know, we post a YouTube, then we use AI to turn into 20 or 31 minute, 32nd video snippets to reels TikTok and YouTube Shorts and we get five or six times the amount of views because it's much more organic and, but it's still very, a little bit rough around the edges in terms of captions and so on, but it's damn good and it saves us so much time. So let's go back to what you guys are doing with Pictory. So you take blog posts, long form content and turn it to video, then we have short form video. Are they the two boxes we should be talking about?

Vikram Chalana

00:35:11 - 00:36:28

Yeah. So we also have the idea of taking a long video. So similar to what you're talking about the applications you may have used different apps for that. But yeah, we have that as well where you take a longer form video and convert it to short videos. So, yeah, we try to build a complete tool set that uses AI as well to do the analysis of the transcript. So as you said, videos with voiceover with spoken content have the meat in it. So then you can use the meat to distill it down to something shorter and more interesting. So we're using AI for that as well and then one other form is where you don't, sometimes people don't have a blog but they have perhaps written a short script for a video. And this is where the ChatGPT has been coming a lot for us is like people will say, okay, write a little script for staying healthy during pandemic as an example. And then it would create a script, then you would put the script into Pictory and then Pictory will turn that script into a video. So, that's the other kind of core use case there.

Jeff Bullas

00:36:28 - 00:36:43

Yeah. Is your platform allow you to post? Because the other one is once you created it, can you then. Is your platform allow you to post automatically to the different social media platforms as well? Or are you just creating content?

Vikram Chalana

00:36:44 - 00:36:59

We are working on that, yes. Right now we're creating content but we're working on the ability to post it directly and then also get the feedback from those channels and hopefully improve your videos in the process.

Jeff Bullas

00:36:59 - 00:38:04

Yeah. And because at the moment it look, we're at the start of the AI journey, what it's gonna do in one year is gonna be amazing compared to last year and then it's gonna be more amazing the year after. So it's just, it's like you said, it's like lighting, you know, the jet fuel. So it's not a revolution, it's not an evolution, it's a revolution, it's a forest fire that is just taken off. And for me a little bit in the writing area, I'll put something into ChatGPT and I'll see what it writes. I'm going, I'm having a writing existential moment. I'm trying to work out how the human creative and ideas as well as the storytelling. How does it sit with ChatGPT? So we end up using it rather than getting used by it and we give it everything to it, which is, it's a discussion I had with my senior editor as well. It's like how do we maintain our human creativity and inspiration and curiosity without just giving it over to the AI, ChatGPT?

Vikram Chalana

00:38:05 - 00:38:28

Yeah. This is gonna be an interesting balance. I don't like, I'm personally not, I don't feel threatened by it. I feel like it really improves our work flows. He sees that too and we're seeing it and, but the human creativity is at the center of it. What you give is what you get.

Jeff Bullas

00:38:29 - 00:38:50

Yeah, exactly. So I've, you know, there's been some experiments done with senior designers, designing a product and then they basically had the whole design team compete with each other. So you produce the best product design. And the one that ended up with the best product design was a senior engineer because, or sorry, designer because they were asking better questions.

Vikram Chalana

00:38:50 - 00:38:51

Yeah. Exactly.

Jeff Bullas

00:38:51 - 00:39:01

Yeah. And this is fascinating. This is where we're talking about prompt engineering now.

Vikram Chalana

00:39:02 - 00:39:06

That's gonna be a new degree program at some point.

Jeff Bullas

00:39:06 - 00:39:54

That's right. There will be a master's degree and a PhD on it as well. I'm sure. So, yeah, it's look, I don't feel threatened. I'm excited but I am watching to make sure we're making sure that we can do more with less and amplify what we do. And my senior editor said to me, she said, I'm worried that I'm gonna have less work and I said, no, you're gonna have more work, which is true. The trouble is the next level down, just writers that don't write well and not using ChatGPT. We actually, we had to do so much editing for writers that we went. This is too hard. So we actually did stop using a couple of writers. So but yeah, we're still trying to work it out, aren't we?

Vikram Chalana

00:39:54 - 00:40:18

Yeah, I think so. I think that journey goes on. And again, I think the lesson that I drew from my days at Winshuttle, it applies to anything you can go too much to what a customer wants or go too far and follow your vision. But this applies to content, it applies to product development, it applies to so many things.

Jeff Bullas

00:40:18 - 00:41:03

Yeah, exactly. So let me ask you one other question because at the moment in the space you're in, there's a lot of competition because it's not a, so what's your strategy to make sure you get to the top or at least get to the top two or three? Because the challenge there is that there's almost what we call two arms races in a startup. Number one, it's an arms race for market share. That's sales and marketing. Number two, it's also an arms race for technology. In other words, your technology has to be so you have to be constantly investing in the business and I'll see those two areas as maybe the most important. What are your thoughts on that?

Vikram Chalana

00:41:04 - 00:42:39

Yeah. it's absolutely that. You have to find unique ways of going to market and then you have to find the best talent who can build technology all the while being constrained by the money that you have in the bank, right? Because that's the important thing because you can, nobody has infinite resources. Although some of the companies raise huge amounts of capital and then they shoot themselves in the foot that way, but being capital efficient while being able to run fast on both the fronts is the whole challenge of a startup. And I'm loving it. It's this one is particularly fast moving than the previous company that I built. So, it's and at the end of the day, Jeff, it's all about the people, it's all about who's on your team and who you're working with and what skills they bring in, what drive they bring in, what hunger they bring in to make them so successful, make you successful. So, I feel like, you know, that and nurturing that in terms of building a great culture at your company is one of the biggest things that a CEO can do is just build an amazing culture that attracts amazing people and then you can conquer anything.

Jeff Bullas

00:42:39 - 00:44:09

Yeah, you're exactly right. I have a, I don't have a big team but I've got a small team and I'm so grateful for them and they do a lot of the heavy lifting. I'm not really good at technology slash software. In fact, I'm terrible. But and then, so my job is, as an entrepreneur, basically to try and provide the vision, don't distract them and get out of the way. In other words, let the team do their job without distracting them. And finding the right people to do it for you that, you know, can rely on you might have a crisis. We had a little mini crisis over the weekend and the team sort of did the things we needed to do to help, you know. So it's, and it's not like a demand, it's more like creating a culture where they feel enabled and want to help. So it's, yeah, it's, I'm so grateful to have the great humans and my team that surrounds me and I couldn't do it without them, that is for sure. So, the other thing that's I'm mindful of as well is that in any business timing is actually almost everything. In fact, there was a ted talk about it said that this guy studied 200 startups. I think he was a professor and he found out that 40% of success were driven by timing.

Vikram Chalana

00:44:10 - 00:44:13

Luck. I call it luck. Yeah.

Jeff Bullas

00:44:13 - 00:44:37

And here you are, you start, you had this idea about four years ago about Pictory. In other words, how can we become the platform for video, for social, take video and make it easy to create rather than hard? And three years later, ChatGPT turns up and gives you a rocket to ride.

Vikram Chalana

00:44:38 - 00:44:57

Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly how I felt at that time. It's like, oh my gosh, we were at this place at this time and I felt like, I mean, this is all luck. This is timing and luck.

Jeff Bullas

00:44:58 - 00:46:38

Yeah. But when I started the blog, I hadn't done any market research on blogging it, it's anything I just discovered social media and wanted to write about it. And there was, you know, there was these blogs about blogs about blogging and I read them and I even struggled with WordPress, right? And put it up, create a domain name and we had a sub domain and we had a domain name. So, and I look back on the trend in 2010, 2009-2010, which is when I started was peak blogging time. So, and like you said, I was getting, you know, just took a year or so to get real traction. But after that, it was like built social media. This is before the algorithm started to throttle organic reach, which happened about 2004, 13, 14 when Facebook started to monetize its free platform. So we moved from free and organic and tribes of people that connected organically, which was bloody exciting. I love those days at three or four years when Twitter was a tribe of healthy, hungry, curious people in all sorts of niches all around the world. Now we have Facebook using algorithms to create hate because it sells more advertising and disgust. And yeah, it was a golden and wild west back then and but still you gotta play the game. So we're just trying to work that out.

Vikram Chalana

00:46:39 - 00:46:53

Yeah. And is it true that, I read somewhere, like an organic post on Facebook or LinkedIn will get only like five, less than 5% of your followers to see it?

Jeff Bullas

00:46:54 - 00:49:03

I think it's even less than that. It's yeah, because it's pay to play and okay, so here's the thing about short form videos such as TikTok. It's not about how many followers you're following. It's about content, it's about they're serving up content that works. So it's a different algorithm to the Facebook’s and the Twitter’s. And also the fact is that because TikTok is still, I think is still very organic. And guess what's happened is that Instagram created reels to copy TikTok, Youtube Shorts, created YouTube shorts or YouTube created YouTube Shorts. They've had to make those short video platforms more organic to compete with TikTok. So I think in the organic space, the new place to play and has been for a few years is the short form video, which is where you're playing. And we've started playing with that now because we can scale it so easily. So we can take one hour of podcast on YouTube and turn it into 30 video snippets in a matter of minutes that used to take days and a deep pocket before weeks, right? So, yeah, we live in interesting times and but it keeps me curious. So I'm gonna ask you one a question before we wrap it up which I want you to maybe quickly reflect on while I chatter here. And what brings Vikram true happiness? Now it might be in your personal life as a human. That's not an entrepreneur label. And what maybe or what brings you real happiness as an entrepreneur and they could be one and the same. But I'm intrigued by what brings you joy. What brings you happiness? And I'm not talking about trivial superficial happiness. Something that, can you tell me what that is? What brings Vikram happiness and joy?

Vikram Chalana

00:49:04 - 00:49:30

Yeah. It's pretty simple for me. And it's both, it's the same in personal life and in professional life, it's connections, it's people and that's it. It's just living with wonderful people, working with wonderful people and making deep connections to everybody, respecting everybody, getting respect in return. This is true happiness.

Jeff Bullas

00:49:31 - 00:50:30

Vikram, you've just summed up ancient wisdom from Epicurus’s from two and a half thousand years ago. And you've just summed up the Harvard Research Institute that's been running for 85 years. You've just summed it up and for me too. I've always enjoyed things like dinner parties, great friends and family and so on, but are really doubling down on that more as in investing and nurturing relationships. And because we see it as being unproductive. In other words, we have this strange sense or idea that being busy and productive and ticking off boxes and you need to do box every day in your diary or digital diary, whatever it doesn't matter and being a hermit and is gonna bring it doesn't bring you happiness. You know the fact it showed that after $75,000 there is no increase in happiness.

Vikram Chalana

00:50:30 - 00:50:33

Money doesn't. Yeah. Money doesn't increase happiness. Exactly.

Jeff Bullas

00:50:33 - 00:50:57

Yeah. We don't wanna be, you know, struggling for life and food and everything else. But once we reach that base level. So, and I just, it's basically for me in the world of technology, how do we get more connected in a world that where people spend more time on their phones and even though they're more connected, they're less connected as in, they don't have good conversations.

Vikram Chalana

00:50:57 - 00:51:12

Yes, exactly. I mean, this kind of a podcast is a perfect example of technology enabled relationship. I mean, we're talking, we're connecting over halfway across the world. And it's awesome.

Jeff Bullas

00:51:12 - 00:51:40

I love it. I don't do this for the money. I do it because I learn which, and I'm curious and I love the connection and just getting insight into humanity and the different people I talk to such as yourself, your journey, which is inspiring. It's amazing. And I am never cease to be amazed by human creativity in a world of AI.

Vikram Chalana

00:51:41 - 00:51:47

Exactly. And AI is gonna be fun too. We're gonna enjoy it, the raid.

Jeff Bullas

00:51:47 - 00:53:14

Yeah. And I think what's gonna happen to just like any good technology, it becomes invisible and just makes, hopefully, makes us better humans, more productive humans while doing the things we love such as having a chat or, and then look Zoom's great. But I do love having catching up for dinner and drinks with friends and you know, it's basically about talking shit in other words, just talking about anything, having fun, laughing, taking, you know, in Australia, we tend to have a lot of fun. We, you know, give each other a hard time and just generally have fun and, you know, explore words and ideas together and yeah, like catching up in real life and sharing stories, sharing ideas. Yeah, that's what brings me joy as well. So Vikram, just to wrap it up then. Thank you for sharing that and you're obviously very wise because you've just summed up Epicurus's wisdom from ancient philosophy and you've summed up our Harvard research about the importance of relationships for happiness. Tell us a little bit about. So what's the pricing model for the company? What's the Pictory’s pricing model? How does it work?

Vikram Chalana

00:53:15 - 00:53:43

Oh, it's pretty easy. It's there's two variables in there. It's the number of videos you process through it and the second variable is the number of users who use it. So if you have a team, you have a variable in the number of people as a part of your team and the number of videos you go. So it's a per month, per user, per video hour type model.

Jeff Bullas

00:53:44 - 00:54:08

Sounds pretty simple to me. And so Vikram, thank you very much for sharing your story and it's inspiring and I look forward to seeing Pictory continue to grow and evolve. And what I'm really looking forward to though is looking after you and entertaining you and breaking bread together at dinner, wherever when you come to Sydney.

Vikram Chalana

00:54:08 - 00:54:10

Or when you come to Seattle. Yes.

Jeff Bullas

00:54:10 - 00:54:15

Don't worry. Let's see who wins on that score.

Vikram Chalana

00:54:16 - 00:54:20

That sounds great. Thank you, Jeff. It was really good talking to you as well.

Jeff Bullas

00:54:20 - 00:54:23

Thanks Vikram. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you.

Vikram Chalana

00:54:23 - 00:54:24

Excellent.