Investing in the Creator Economy with Julia Enthoven and Justine and Olivia Moore

Hey everybody, it's Eric Thornberg, co-founder, partner of Village Global, a network-driven venture firm, and this is Venture Stories, a podcast covering topics relating to tech and business with world-leading experts. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Venture Stories by Village Global. I'm here today with a few very special guests, Julia Entoven, founder and CEO of Kapwing, And then Justine and Olivia Moore, investors at CRV. Guys, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us.

Julia, why don't you start by giving us a brief background as to what is Kapwing and how did you come to start it?

Yeah, absolutely. So Kapwing is an online image and video editor. So we help people create multimedia content in the browser. And the problem that we started with was that existing editors for video especially are still the same, like, software programs that people used 2 decades ago. They're these powerful, heavyweight desktop editors that you install onto your computer. They take a long time to learn how to use, and even once you learn how to use them, they're slow and siloed just to your computer and don't work across devices. So we specifically, my co-founder and I, we were both trying to do really simple video editing tasks. We were Independently at the same time, I was trying to append like a series of photos into a video slideshow. And he was trying to like add text annotations essentially to like a travel video he'd made from his family trip. And just doing those like really simple things was still super challenging, even though it should have been easy. So we started out basically building a tool that we ourselves could use. And that has now blossomed into a full multimedia creation suite that helps creators of all sorts of different expertise levels get things done quickly, with each other, in the browser, rather than needing to use these heavyweight programs offline.

And when did you know that this was gonna be a really big business opportunity? And how did you sort of weigh, you know, a common question you got at seed was, why couldn't incumbents do this? You know, how did you sort of think about that?

Yeah, so, like most entrepreneurs, we got lucky in that we started building the very first version of this, which was just one very specific tool to make one media format. And the demand was so strong for that tool at the time that the creators that were using it just pulled every subsequent tool out of us for like 7 different video editing tools. So we built a meme maker, we built a resizer, we built a subtitle editor, and a bunch of other things that basically creators were begging us for, our users were. And it was the— when I say we got lucky, I mean that we hit the timing of the market right, in that it was just becoming possible to create this kind of technology in the browser because of the affordability of cloud storage and also data transfer and just web advancements in web technology. The demand for video and animated content was growing tremendously from the consumer side. And so we basically came into the market exactly at the time that the tool was needed. grew just on the organic demand for those products.

Justine and Olivia, why don't you give a little bit of your background in the space and what got you really excited about Koi?

For sure. So we work at CRV on the consumer SMB investment team. The two of us spend a lot of time on millennial and Gen Z trends and the consumer base there and kind of what they care about and what they're spending their time and money on. And one of the topics that we were most excited about was kind of the rise of the creator economy. Like, we've spent a lot of time at events like VidCon and Podcast Movement, and we see everyone from, you know, 6-year-olds all the way up wanting to have a newsletter or a podcast or a YouTube channel or an Instagram or something like that. And seeing it as a real career option that they can make money from and build a business around, which was super exciting. So I think the first, our first kind of reason for getting excited about Kapwing was just being a core tool in the infrastructure of developing this new economy, which we see as huge.

Yeah, and then I think as part of that too, we, as like the SMB side of what we do, we've just seen so many businesses pop up where you don't need a ton of people to run a lot of types of businesses now, which is great, but then the bad thing about that is you usually don't have like huge media teams and expensive budgets for a lot of software. And so the idea of tools that you could use in the browser and that there wasn't like this huge barrier to entry to learn how to edit a video or make a GIF or meme or something like that was really attractive to us. And then also, we've known Julia for a while. So we all went to Stanford together. Julia was a few years ahead of us, and we worked together at the student newspaper. So we're just really excited to reconnect with her and meet Eric too.

Let's talk a bit about the creator economy. Can you sort of give a bit of a market map Or sort of just draw— how should people who are new to that term understand what are the different types of companies that will emerge from that sort of broad sector?

Yep.

So I think a lot of people think of the creator economy as like influencer marketing tools, which is a bit reductive, and I think it's definitely gone beyond that now. And so you can kind of think of like new platforms like Twitch or Instagram, and then you can think of like tools that help people kind of create the content, like things like Kapwing, editing tools, recording tools. And then there's all these other tools that we've seen popping up around different things about being an influencer, whether that's financing, whether that's like finding partners. What are some of them?

Doing a merch line.

Yeah.

Setting up a website. So I think that the content creation side is the first big barrier to entry, which is part of why we got so excited about Kapwing in particular. And then there's all these other kind of tertiary services around turning that content into a real full-time business.

Yeah. I think if you like, there's been a lot of articles about this recently, but I think people don't realize even for YouTubers and others with tons of followers, how long it takes them to like edit their content and put something together that's like, looks good and looks semi-professional. They spend hours and hours every day, even more time than they spend actually recording the content. So there's a big opportunity there.

Yeah, also, I just— to riff on that, you know, a big trend that we see is basically that more and more, and we believe this will continue to be true, sort of the tedious jobs are being replaced by AI. And something that's not replaced by machines, or by— that humans still do much better than machines, is storytelling and sort of the creativity that goes into content creation. And so I think that we see this space as being something that's going to continue growing a lot, because humans love stories, they love entertainment, and it's something that people are really good at as creators. And so we think more and more people will continue to go into entertainment and storytelling-type professions.

Yeah, and let's focus on those segments one by one. So why don't you talk a bit about new platforms? You mentioned Twitch, you mentioned Instagram. I'm curious about live video, I mean, gaming's sort of the only thing that's really really worked. What types of new platforms are you sort of intrigued by or have requests for startups in or envision really taking off in the next couple of years?

Within video specifically?

Or new platforms generally?

Yeah, I think it's both new platforms, but also kind of new use cases and new types of creators on existing platforms. Like, I think we saw a huge shift in how people thought about YouTube, honestly, after kind of Emma Chamberlain and the style that she takes to creating and editing, which is, extremely time intensive.

And give us some— is she a makeup artist? Who is Emma Chamberlain?

Oh yeah, she's like a Gen Z influencer star with millions and millions of followers.

Yeah, I think she was one of like the largest growing channels of the past few years.

And her—

she's kind of a very relatable style, but she edits things extremely intensely. So she'll have tons of short, like quick clips, quick cuts.

Lots of transitions, lots of like overlays of like Sparkles and font and things like that.

Yeah, that I think is super appealing to the Gen Z audience. So I think we've seen a little bit of a transition away from on existing platforms like YouTube, just sitting in front of a camera and talking straight at your audience for, you know, 10, 15, 30 minutes at a time into something that's a bit more exciting and interactive, which I think is where editors really matter.

Yeah. And then we've also seen a bunch of like niche platforms pop up and we'll see like how big they get. But around, like, if you think of categories of YouTube, like things like beauty or like fashion or sports, or even like people who—

Books.

Like read and talk about books or people with chronic health issues, there's apps now popping up for kind of each of those specific niches that have like features and curation and the ability for new creators to rise up in like a smaller ecosystem that's more tailored to their interests. So we always look at those too.

Yeah. And then I guess TikTok and VSCO are some of the more Gen Z specific apps that are, have been around for a while, but in terms of where Gen Zers might be newly creating content or spending more of their time creating content, I think we're seeing more people emerge there.

Yeah.

Uh, would you put Discord in that same category?

Yeah, Discord is weird because a lot of it is still text-based. I know they're doing a lot more around audio too, but I think people have different ideas around like what counts as content creation. And we see, we see that more honestly as like a chat application.

Community management.

And community management. But I'm sure we'll start to see more and more like content creation there as well.

Yeah, I know some similar to something like Patreon. I know some creators have kind of paid only or subscription-only channels where they release special content on something like a Discord.

Yep.

But do you have thoughts on live video specifically? Like, do you think there will be a Twitch for X that emerges next year, or what is sort of uniquely hard about live video in terms of building a big business?

Yeah, I think the existing platforms have been really hard in terms of like a barrier to entry in that space. We've seen a number of companies come up that have tried to be like the Twitch for X. And it's just really hard to, like, people always wanna distribute their content in the place where they have the biggest audience and the biggest chance to kind of go big and have a viral hit. And so it's hard to convince people to put their content on a smaller platform unless it's like really 10x better for whatever type of content they're making. And there is some kind of audience there who's paying attention. And it's like really hard to build the audience without the content and vice versa.

It's also kind of an ephemeral stream. So when you think about like, You can record a live video and maybe post it on YouTube or another platform later and get views. But in terms of just the barrier to entry too is harder. Like you have to, it's something interesting has to be happening in a time-constrained way. Although we did see at VidCon, there is this kind of rising industry of live streamers of, you know, teenagers who just wear GoPros and backpacks all day and kind of stream their whole life. And there actually is a whole software industry building around that as well, because they have very practical issues. Like I have to go to the restroom, what software can I use to pause my stream so that, you know, people know that I'm still streaming for the day, but I need like 5 minutes off or something like that.

Yeah, I also think that, you know, there's this interesting trend of basically people— companies rather— bringing video production in-house. So most people are— most companies are still outsourcing video production to agencies. Actually, I shouldn't say that, but over time we see this trend of companies bringing video production more and more in-house as things like live video and sort of this more like raw, authentic form of, uh, like high quantity, high volume video production becomes more popular. And so it's a trend that's happening, not just at the individual level, but also at the, um, at the corporate level.

Yeah. We know LinkedIn is doing a ton, um, to get businesses to make more videos and like doing a lot to promote them within the feed. So even when we were at VidCon, which is typically known as like a teen influencer conference, there was a ton of people talking about LinkedIn and like brand managers being anxious about like, how do I make high quality looking video on a daily basis that I can put in the LinkedIn feed because we know like LinkedIn is gonna promote it for us.

Yeah.

Uh, Julie, why don't you add on to explain what's the why now for Kapwing and in terms of why couldn't Kapwing be as big 5 years ago? Like what, what are some other trends that have enabled Kapwing's rise?

Yeah, so I've mentioned the, um, tech— technology trend of basically cloud affordability becoming Or the cloud becoming more affordable. I also think there's a trend in how people are— what people expect from their productivity software, that people more and more expect their productivity software to be something that works across devices and something that they can collaborate in real time in with their colleagues. And so I think that there's just that trend because of things like Google Docs and Figma and all sorts of other real-time collaborative software. will move the same way for multimedia, for video and audio. I think there's also this, as we've already talked about, this trend towards really high-volume video production. And when I talk to our customers and people that aren't our customers who work in marketing agencies or who work at creative firms, they talk a lot about this problem of how do we keep our quality bar high? Yeah, how do we keep our quality bar high while also meeting the quantity demands for all these platforms. And that is exactly the kind of problem that needs cloud-based software because there's just more visibility for everyone involved, which helps keep the quality bar up. And it cuts out sort of all this time that you need to like download software, like re-export it, all of the delays that come with asynchronous collaboration. Basically having everything online, everything on one URL that everyone can refer to makes it a lot easier to, uh, it makes it a lot easier to, um, version control and quality control for high-volume content.

Yeah. I think that was one of the other things that really excited us about Kapwing, both when you look at consumer and enterprise creators, it's not like you're just on Instagram anymore. You're just on LinkedIn or something like people are creating videos, they're creating photos, they're creating memes, they're creating GIFs. And so even if you look at like an Adobe, cloud-based solutions that they've come out with, it's very much segmented into like this one specific functionality. And then if you want to do something else, you have to like log into like another, in another place. And then, and so the idea that in Kapwing you can do everything in one place, like there are, the tools are very sophisticated for each use case, but they're also kind of broad enough and there's enough functionality there that it covers all the major types of content and you can kind of collaborate there as a team was pretty exciting to us.

Julie, why don't you give some context on the broader sort of creator economy in general, or either of you. When did it sort of start? How has it sort of emerged over time, and where is it going?

You know, the creator economy, when we were, when my co-founder and I were at Google, you know, there's no place like the inside of Google to learn about the rise of video. We saw it not just in YouTube creations, like for a long time, The number of videos that were uploaded every day had been like pretty flat on YouTube, even though watch time was rising, you know, by a lot. The number of creations was pretty stable. And then in like 2015, that started picking up again. There are more and more creators starting to come onto YouTube. And we also saw this actually on image search. We were working— both my co-founder and I were working on— yeah, both my co-founder and I were working on features related to GIFs and to video in the image search feed, because the queries around this kind of content were just growing so much. So I think there's, you know, we saw basically the rise of demand from consumers for video content increasing, you know, 5 years ago. And then now the answer to that from companies and from individual creators has, you know, been evident in the last 3 years as that kind of content creation has picked up.

I think like different mediums started at different times. So even like almost 15 years ago now, podcasting started, it hasn't really taken off until like 5 years ago. But probably the biggest things were like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and then the iPhone, just like smartphones in general. Like, people have so much more time to consume content. They're not like tied to their computers. They can be like in the car or in line at the grocery store or wherever and be consuming content. And because they have a lot more time, it doesn't have to be like the same highly produced content as like TV or other sources. And I think We especially have seen in the past, probably like 3-ish years, the tide's kind of turned. So now when you survey teens about who are the biggest stars to you, it's mostly PlayTube and Instagram stars versus traditional TV or movie stars. And you're even seeing big entertainment companies scouting. Disney is trying to catch up with that by trying to cast those types of creators in their in their next shows, which has been really interesting as well.

I think another interesting evolution over the past 5 years in terms of the creator economy has been the diversification of monetization lines, basically. So before it was mostly just like digital ads. And I think creators have now been able to go direct to consumer in exciting ways and maybe more sustainable ways. Like I think Sarah V seeded Patreon back in 2013, 2014. Now we're seeing all these companies spin up that let you launch a merch line or hold events much more easily. And I think that's pretty new to the past 4 or 5 years in terms of being able to do that kind of thing in a scalable way, which makes being a creator, I think, a lot more compelling.

Yeah. Like a full-time business versus like a hobby.

Yes.

Or, or a hobby, but more money from it.

How do you guys think about the difference between creators and influencers? Or where's the overlap? Where's the difference? And how have we seen sort of the state of influencers rise over the years? Not just in what capacity, but how has it changed?

So that's, I don't know if there's like a technical difference in definition. I think like between creators and influencers, I think we tend to use like a lot of creators or people who make content who like may be influencers don't like the term influencers because I think they feel like it implies that it's kind of like not a real job and they're not like adding value in some way. And so I think the term creators implies that like, It's hard work and they're actually like making something and kind of recognizing the hard work that they're doing.

Yeah.

I think influencers is somewhat of a, in some circles, somewhat of a derogatory term almost because it implies like a monetary focus. Like I'm influencing these people to buy these things.

Yeah. Like I'm just shilling product basically.

Yes. Whereas creator is like, oh, I'm making, you know, I'm putting hours into like a Casey Neistat type, like beautiful, highly edited, really kind of sophisticated video. I think a lot of influencers actually are creators. It might not be true that all of them are. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and also, we see among the creators on Kapwing and among our customers, there's a huge amount of overlap between all of these groups. So, for example, like, most of our creators will make content on Kapwing that's both for, like, a business, like a professional purpose, like they'll make Instagram stories that are promoting a product and for personal use cases. Maybe they are just sharing something with a friend or they have a personal Instagram channel where they're just promoting their own— not promoting, but talking about their own lives. Or maybe they're even helping a friend who's an artist with their channel. So even though they create content for different groups, creative people don't see these lanes as being really hard and fast lines. There is overlap and increasing amounts of overlap between the kind of corporate world and the personal world, in terms of converging on high volume and high personality content.

I personally don't mind when people call me an influencer. So I don't take offense to it. You know, we were talking about video, we were talking about creators. In the last 5 years, last decade, I feel like video sort of fell short a little bit. Like, how many, there were all these, Socialcam, Viddy, I mean, there's all these startups that sort of crashed and burned. How many big startups have been built on top of video, or even in the creator economy? Like, there's Patreon, and then there's like, what else, right? How have we seen it play out and what's, what's going to change?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think in the video infrastructure side, like in terms of actual creation of content, this is kind of to the point of why now for Kapwing, is that there wasn't really— it was very hard for founders or startups to create something that was better than like a desktop-like app like Adobe. So I think a lot of those companies have failed because First of all, a lot of creators had invested in kind of the time to get past the learning curve on those legacy tools. But now there's something much easier, much faster without a learning curve. And there's a whole new generation of creators who have never used those tools and frankly would not tolerate the experience probably. They want something much easier and much better.

Yeah, I think with the creator economy more broadly, our opinion is that this is like, I think like the VC funding and the huge companies, is like kind of lagging a bit, the trends that we're seeing. So what I think we're seeing now is like very much a value creation time for the industry where we're going to see all types of companies become like the next big thing, whether it's like platforms like Brat, which are like basically trying to replace like Disney or Nickelodeon by actually making the narrative content that people are watching to like the content creation tools, to like banking and benefits and stuff like that for these freelance creators.

Interesting.

And so I think we're expecting to see over the next few years, some like huge companies come out of that space, whereas historically, a lot of the value in the space has accrued to big companies who have hacked together solutions that work for this market, but don't work super well and are really hard to use.

Yeah. Also, I would just throw in there, some of the biggest companies the last 5 years have been video companies. TikTok and Snapchat, the rise of YouTube is obvious. Adobe's market cap has increased significantly over the last 10 years. So there are a lot of failed startups in this space, but there's all sorts of startups like Imgur, Wistia, Vimeo that have just increased a huge amount in value over the last 5, 10 years. And I don't think that, even though there's lots of examples of ones that haven't succeeded, there's just so many examples of companies that are adding value in this space too. So I don't think it's like a— it's not like a dead space. Totally.

No, no, no. I stand corrected. I knew it was rising, I just thought it was captured by incumbents, but TikTok, there's some good counterexamples. Why has the rise of video surged? Or I guess more precisely, was it sort of inevitable that the rise of video would surge, that people just enjoy that better and enjoy the experience of viewing it better? What is it sort of about video relative to other mediums?

Video is, you know, if a picture is 1,000 words, and then video is 1,000 pictures, you know, It's just a way to communicate content that's so much more accessible and engaging than just written content or than static visual content. So one trend that we see is that it's not just about entertainment now. Video is also about all sorts of educational formats. So we see that students, people that are taking courses online, aspirational learners, yeah, aspirational learners are demanding video content too. So, There's all sorts of different use cases that we see applicable for like internal comms and the way that people communicate with each other, that we think like multimedia production will become more important. And just like Justine and Olivia said, I don't think it's actually about like just video. It's just that video is one way that people express themselves. It's really not a totally different kind of thing than GIFs or than images or than text. Like really, the reason we talk about Kapwing as a multimedia suite is because We think all of these things work really well together and are just different faces of the same die.

Yeah, I think there are also types of content that only really work over video or to some extent images. Like, if you think about something like a clothing haul on YouTube, which are huge, or like a beauty, like, get ready with me video, like, you can't do that over text and over audio. Like, you have to be able to see it, or in business purposes, like, teaching someone how to use a tool or do something, or like if you're a real estate agent giving like a tour of a house, like there are definitely cases where video is needed and where the content just isn't compelling without it.

Yeah, I think video is a lot more informational than photos and text in a lot of ways, but is also more maybe previewable and skimmable than something like audio, which is, I think, part of why it's having such a big moment now and will probably continue.

And also, like, thanks to now subtitles, like, so many videos, people, like, you wouldn't— like, you're on Facebook in the grocery store, you're not gonna, like, play to, like, hit play and, like, listen to something. But, like, you're gonna— you can watch a video and see the subtitles and, like, get the message in a way that's a lot more engaging than text.

So let's say us 4 teamed up and we're starting the Video Fund. We're investing in companies that, you know, we're taking advantage of this trend. And like any good fund, we would, you know, put out a request for startups for things we wanna see. What would be in our request for startups?

We've been thinking about this for a lot of different types of online media, actually. Like, podcasting is another space we spend a lot of time in. We did spend some time kind of in the more traditional photo-based influencer marketing, like on platforms like Instagram. I think ad tech has historically been maybe unattractive for a lot of venture capital firms, but it does feel like there will be a way in 5 or 10 years for brands to more authentically connect with these kinds of creators at scale. Because when you look at just like the ROI on something like a well-done influencer ad, especially to these micro-influencers who have like super close relationships with, with their audience base or even, you know, their fans or their friends, for these people that may only have 1,000 or 5,000 followers, it's That's super impressive, but there isn't a way yet for brands, I think, to really kind of crack the process of discovering those influencers and creators and getting in touch with them.

Yeah. I think just anything that helps creators be more like businesses or make their content more professional is definitely like a trend we're watching, whether it's like on the creation tool side or it's like helping them just like track who is coming to them for what type of content and like what they should do next. I think the thing, because there are large incumbents like YouTube in the video space, the thing we're always looking for is, is it truly a 10x better product experience? Because there may be some friction to getting people to switch. And so you really want to make it like so much easier and better that it's kind of a no-brainer.

Yeah, I mean, I have all sorts of ideas that I wouldn't put as a request for startups because I think we're gonna build a lot of them. But I'm definitely— I definitely think there's more room on the distribution side. YouTube is a huge incumbent, but there's all sorts of different, like, search and discovery needs that I think YouTube isn't that well suited for. Whether it's just, like, connecting with your friends on, like, more authentic kinds of video, or having, like, a more permanent place for things like your stories, sort of like video diaries and logs. I think that there'll be more things around like entertainment and kind of riffing off of a cultural trend, sort of like, you know, you could call these memes, but it's also just generally like a space where people can comment on something that's happening in the world with video. I think that there will be lots of different like consumer type of apps that we see around the distribution space. And then, yeah, I also think that recording, I mean, this has, you guys already mentioned sort of like the rise of the iPhone, the rise of the mobile camera as being a huge trend that's enabled creators. But I think that we will continue to see really interesting innovation on the recording side. Because, I mean, even like just in recording this podcast, we've had like recording problems, and those problems will be solved in the next 3 years.

Yeah.

Julia, why don't you talk a little bit— you alluded earlier to the corporate involvement as well. Why don't you talk a little bit about navigating consumer versus enterprise, and maybe there are lessons other founders can take from from your journey who are navigating relatively similar spaces?

Yeah, I definitely can comment on this and have learned a lot about it. Um, so, you know, people will always ask me, like, are you a B2C company or a B2B company? And for a long time that haunted me because I wasn't really sure myself. And then, um, I heard from the head of digital marketing at Slack, Holly Chen, and she was speaking on whether or not Slack was a B2B company or a B2C company. And her answer was, that they were a B2C2B company. And I just love that phrase so much. And now I'm kind of sold on this idea that, like, there doesn't need to be such a strict dichotomy between B2C and B2B. We have built a really great product experience, and in some ways it looks like a consumer product still. But when you're selling a product that saves people time, when it's a— when your main value proposition is around saving people time, Yeah, you're selling business value. And we definitely plan to sort of move in the direction of selling to businesses that are making money, whether or not that's just one YouTuber who has like a small team of like VAs helping them edit content, or whether we're talking about like a huge company that has like an in-house marketing team creating content full-time. So I think that there's— those 2 groups of users are really important. For other entrepreneurs who are thinking about this trade-off of like, B2C versus B2B and what's really the difference. I think one thing you can just use as a guiding beacon is, will we make money on ads eventually? Is ads the, like, is ads the business model down the road? And if the answer to that is yes, then, you know, you have to get a lot, a lot of eyeballs and you have to bring a lot of people to your product. So I think that is a more helpful question than just like, are you selling to consumers or are you selling to businesses? Because you can make a great experience for consumers that eventually sells to businesses.

So Justine and Olivia, you know, when you invest at seed like we do, and we're lucky to in Kapwing, you can sort of, you know, make the case on the market. We talked about Rise of Video. You could say it's an exceptional founder. But you at the A, you really have to make the business case for why this would be, you know, potentially an independent standalone, you know, public company. How did you sort of evaluate, you know, for a company like Kapwing, It was obviously, you know, it's making money, it's doing well, how big it could possibly get?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think a lot of it came down to the work that we did on the creator economy, both on the business and the individual side, figuring out like, how many creators are there, how much money are they potentially making? And then just like, in the case of something like this, you can see the explosion of online video to businesses as well. Like, all different types of businesses are using video now in their internal communications or marketing or all different sorts of things. And so the market size potential there is just huge.

So on both sides, on the consumer creator side and then on the business side, there was so—

there's so much opportunity.

Yeah. And I think when, when you look at the market cap of huge companies like Adobe, like in our diligence, I think we found upwards of 70% of Adobe's kind of annual revenue comes from creator-type tools like Photoshop and Lightroom and stuff like that. And so, I mean, even if Kapwing just takes all of that revenue alone, it's a huge multi, multi-billion dollar company, but I think we also believe that Kapwing will empower many more creators who never would be on Adobe, on an Adobe-type product. So I guess maybe for investors or consumers who aren't as close to the creator economy, it might seem like a smaller market size than it actually is, but I think we truly believe that this is one of the huge and enduring kind of consumer, not even a trend, but, but a change in In how people are creating and consuming content for many, many years to come.

Yeah, and I would also add in on that, that, you know, editing and creation is just the middle piece of this much broader market and space, which contains some of the things I just mentioned, like recording, video and media storage and management, collaboration with a team, distribution, sharing, and publishing. So our thesis with Kapwing is that because the editing piece is in the middle and is currently offline, if you can really own editing and creation, then you can move into those adjacent markets where there are all sorts of other huge companies. Like, you know, I mean, just so many huge companies like Dropbox and, you know, all these other companies that I mentioned, not just Adobe and not just the creation slice.

Right. The other thing I forgot to mention, I think there was a survey that came out in the last few months that showed like the new number one desired job for kids in the US and the UK between the ages of like 8 and 12 is now to be an online creator of some kind, like an influencer or a vlogger or something like that. So when you think about infrastructure or tools or distribution software that serves that market, it's hard not to believe that there's going to be several billion-dollar companies in that space, given that that's where the next generation is What do you think is the best comp for a company like Kapwing?

Who do you guys model yourselves after? How do you think about that? Like, sometimes people say Canva for video.

Yeah, I mean, I would say we think of ourselves more like an Airtable or like a Notion for multimedia. We really shy away from just like the— from just being considered a video company, because I actually think there's a huge amount of room in both like images and photography and in audio and other kinds of timeline content, animations, that would be, that we definitely plan to sort of help creators with too. Yeah, this cloud-based collaborative in the browser across platforms kind of SaaS companies has been, those SaaS companies have been rising in lots of different productivity verticals. And I think we see Kapwing as the comp for those in the multimedia space.

Cool. Julie, why don't you give a preview for what's to come for Kapwing, and for people who are fascinated to learn more, who potentially want to join the team, or be involved, where can you point them?

Yeah, there's so many interesting things coming up. We're definitely hiring right now. We've just closed our Series A. So if you're interested in working on a really fun team that builds products for creators, check out kapwing.com/jobs. And also, we generally have a lot of interesting tools coming up for creators that are using online technologies and really new ways to make the content creation process much faster and simpler. So if you're a creator and you're sick of how much time it takes you to make your stuff, check out Kapwing because we might be able to speed up your creation workflow tremendously.

Awesome. Great. Well, my guests have been Julia Entenben for Kapwing, Justine and Olivia Moore from CRV. Guys, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, of course.

Thanks for having us.

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