Powering Online Video with Jon Dahl, Co-Founder & CEO of Mux

John, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Yeah, I appreciate taking the time. And with Mux, I mean, there is a lot to discuss here. Quite the journey you've had in the video world. For people who don't know Mux just yet, what are you guys doing today with the company?

Yeah, Mux is a video platform for developers. So we help software companies build on top of video. So that might be companies that are like really video-centric, like video events platforms or video-based fitness or things like that. And it's companies where video is just like a new feature to bring in, like a social media app that brings in video.

With that, I wanted to discuss a little bit more on the early days and how this has kind of evolved, because I know you started with kind of the data layer first, then you added in on the streaming side of things. But going back, obviously, you had another company before this with ZenCoder that ended up getting acquired. Where does this kind of interest in video come from, John?

Yeah, it actually goes back It goes back a long time. I'm old apparently. But back in 2007, I was a software developer and I got hired to basically build a video transcoding backend for a little startup. The startup wanted to do a video streaming site like YouTube. This is like 2007 was like really early YouTube, if you remember that.

Yeah.

And the startup didn't go anywhere, but I kind of saw firsthand how hard it was to build on top of video. Like, it was really hard. I had to learn a lot. First thing I looked for was like an API that I could use or a web service or a company whose product I could buy. And there was nothing. So that's kind of what got me into video. I spent a couple years bootstrapping around that. I was running a little like software dev shop and I just kind of put my extra time into bootstrapping around video. And then in 2010, we applied to and got into Y Combinator with a startup called ZenCoder. And ZenCoder was basically the API that I wanted in 2007. It was an API for video transcoding. So we took this really hard technical problem that every video that goes on the internet has to go through, and we made it a really simple, web API, cloud API.

At that time with that web calendar in 2010, the first time you went through it with that, you said you were bootstrapping before. This is a different— obviously ZenCoder was a much different situation with that, raising a little bit of capital at least. How did the team come together for that? Obviously, we'll get into Mux in a bit, but I'm curious how the team came together for that company.

Yep. Yeah. So the first 9 employees were basically the people that I was working with. It was actually a partner and I, we were running different dev shops and we kind of got together and we put our extra time into this bootstrapping. And when we got into Y Combinator, we were able to raise a little bit of money and we kind of rolled everyone from doing the hourly consulting services work into the startup full-time. So maybe that started in March of 2010 and by June of 2010, July 2010, we'd raised some money and we We just shut off all of our consulting at that point. And that was our first team.

So from that experience then, so that was 2010, this company, a little bit of funding, ended up selling it a couple years later. How did that come about? I was just curious as how you got that. Obviously a relatively short period of time. How did that happen?

Yeah, it was really looking— it doesn't feel that way. It felt like 10 years, but looking back, it was really fast. It was, so I don't think acquisitions are something you can manufacture, at least not until you're a certain size. If you're a giant company, you can hire an investment banker and try to sell. But when you're small, like we were 16 people, we were a few million dollars of revenue. Acquisitions really only come by people coming to you. So we had, what happened is we had one, We had one conversation with a big tech company that didn't go anywhere. They they were super cheap and like couldn't get to a reasonable price, and we're like, "No, we're happy. We're running a good business. We're growing really quickly." But then another company came around, which was Bright Cove, who's a bigger company in the video space. And you know, a lot of stuff just made sense then. A lot of stuff lined up. They they wanted to keep our product running, which is really important to us. They wanted our whole team, they basically wanted to run the ZenCoder business as part of something bigger. And there were a couple of reasons why, like, we debated, like, do we want to sell or keep going? And it was a hard call. But there were a couple of reasons why it was a good time for us to sell. And so that's what we did.

Well, I'm just curious, what were some of those factors? Because I've talked to other people who have sold businesses before and people who have thought about it and haven't sold, like, for you, at least, like, at that time, what were some of the factors that made you choose that direction?

Yeah. So one, it was— I'd never had an opportunity like that before.

Sure.

I wasn't paying myself a lot of money. I had never paid myself a lot of money. I'd never worked at Google or Facebook or anything like that. And so I think it was meaningfully— meaningful financially. Another factor was we were really at an inflection point where we'd raised seed funding, but we'd never raised like a proper venture round. And if we wanted to keep going, that would've been the next step. And so we kind of looked at it as like, we can jump off the track right now, or we can commit to another 5 to 10 years of this exact same company. Honestly, both would've been good. And honestly, like maybe sticking with ZenCoder probably would've paid off. Nicely over the long run. But it was also a reasonable time to try something, to try something else. I thought I knew, I didn't know, but I thought I knew I could do it again. And so it was like, this was great. Let's lock it in and let's try something else.

Yeah, I think that's actually a really important point you bring up. Because for founders, you're always obviously pressured by your investors or venture capitalists like that are, you Wanting big exits. I mean, I'm in a venture capital firm with Vitalize, and we obviously want massive exits, and that's how the fund dynamics work. But when you really actually look at the the numbers for founders, especially like you said, if you haven't worked at Google or anything as well, like you're on you're pretty much working very cheap for years, and to have a multi-million dollar exit, you know, that's that's a game changer for everyone. It is pretty interesting to see how people decide to take that versus not taking it. And one of the people I had in the show, Rand Fishkin from Moz. At one point, he had a small, smaller, similar actually to yours in terms of small by VC standards. I'm gonna say he had a $20 or $25 million offer, I think, where he would have made a large chunk on the exit, and he did not sell. And then things ended up happening. The evaluation would have had to be hundreds of millions for him to get the same amount later on. Didn't end up happening. And it's just like, you never know what route's going to be best. So it is kind of fascinating to see what people decide to do and why. And what pressures are kind of influencing them with that. And you mentioned earlier that you, you thought you might be able to do this again in video. So going from that experience, selling the company, you obviously stayed on with the company as well. But then how did you decide to start Mux?

Yep. Yeah, I, so I spent a few years at Brightcove and it was a good place. It was good people. I learned a lot there. I was a, I guess one other factor here, like back at ZenCoder, I was, I was an engineer who had become a founder. I didn't know how to run a company. I didn't know how to manage people. Like, I knew how to— I think I knew how to like design good products and talk to customers. So I went to Brightcove and I learned a lot about the business side of the house. I worked— I learned a lot about how to grow a sales team for a business like this and other things too. But after a few years, it was time to go. Like, I was I'm much better as a founder than as an employee, in all honesty. So, so, so yeah, so then I took some time off. I actually took about 6 months off and just thought about a bunch of ideas. I didn't know if I wanted to do something in video again or do something totally different. But the thought just kept kind of nagging at the back of my mind that the same problem that I saw in 2007 was still there. It was still really, really hard to work with video. So ZenCoder solved a small part of that and made something easier. But even if you use ZenCoder, you still have to— you really need actual video expertise if you're going to do anything interesting with video. So tens of thousands of software companies out there basically have to hire video engineers or train video engineers if they want to work with video. And in the meantime, video's gotten more complex. Video was a lot simpler in 2007. than it is today. 2007, you took like one MP4 file and you put it in a Flash player and that was it. Remember Flash video?

Yeah.

And now it's just so much more complex. You have adaptive streaming where you have multiple renditions, you segment them up into little segments, you deliver over multiple CDNs, you go to web, but also Android and iOS. Maybe you go to Roku or TVs. It's just a lot harder. So long story short, I kind of, I kind of knew that like the same problem was still there. And we started Mux to solve that problem.

At that time then, so with founders, obviously seeing problems and solving problems is the core of any business, really any startup. But what was the landscape like at the time in terms of just like competitors? Or were there things out there that were trying to solve this in a way like that made you compelled to say, okay, We're going to tackle this because there's still space for us.

Yep. Yeah. So the video, the market for video infrastructure was really fragmented. There were hundreds of companies doing a small part of the problem. And we thought it was all focused in the wrong place. So almost everyone who was building something for like video transcoding or video streaming was really focused on the media space. So they're focused on selling to HBO and Disney and those kinds of companies. Which is great. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's competitive. And meanwhile, no one was building video for developers. Probably the most interesting thing we did at ZenCoder was build a developer-first API where we followed companies like Twilio and Heroku back then and just made a great product with great documentation, Good support, transparent pricing, all those things that developers look for. And literally no one else tried that for video. It was like ZenCoder knew it and then no one else. And so when Mux came around, it was kind of a wide open landscape for building the platform for the software engineers who actually want to bring video into what they're building.

Having a pretty clear understanding of that from your previous experience and understanding the problem then, What did that look like in terms of building that out, getting customer interviews or understanding what they wanted or what they needed? How did that go in the early days? I think it's always important to hear.

Yeah. So I'm a big believer in the Steve Blank school of thought, the Lean Startup customer development process, where probably the most important thing you do before you get to product market fit is just talk to a lot of customers to You tell them your vision and you listen. You don't ask them what they want. You tell them what you're doing, but then you listen and you really listen for passion. You don't listen for like polite, oh yeah, that sounds interesting. Because everyone will be polite. What you really want is people who are like, oh man, I need that. It keeps me up at night that I don't have it. I tried to build my own bad workaround and it's causing me all this pain. So we, in the first 6 months of Mux, we probably got on, I probably got on the phone with 50+ customers. Probably half of them were people I'd worked with in the past because I've worked in this video industry for so long. There's a lot of people who loved ZenCoder and they were like, oh, what are you doing next? That's interesting. And then half were new, which was important to you because you don't want to only listen to the voices that you already know.

From that experience, so that obviously got you to the point of understanding what you were going to build version 1. And I mentioned earlier the idea that you started this kind of data analytics layer first, and then the streaming came after that. Was that always part of the plan? Was that through these customer interviews? Like, how'd that come about?

Yeah, that was always part of the plan. You know, it might've been an overcomplicated plan. Maybe we could have done it more simply, but we really, from the beginning, we said we're going to build a suite We're going to build multiple products because there's more than one hard problem that developers have to solve if they want to stream video. So we debated, what do we do first? Do we do the analytics first? Do we do the video streaming first? Do we do something else first? And we decided to lead with data. And there were a couple of reasons for that. One reason was we wanted to build future products on the foundation of a lot of data. We knew from our friends at places like Netflix and YouTube how much investment they have made in really rich, robust analytics and A/B testing and monitoring. And from that, they've been able to build really mature video platforms. And so we wanted to do that. Another kind of a weird reason why we built analytics first also is we didn't know it. And you learn so quickly at the beginning of a startup. We kind of figured if we built the transcoding or streaming first and then tried to build analytics, we'd never be analytics experts. We'd always be the transcoding experts and the streaming experts, and analytics would always be like a bolt-on. But because it was the first product we did, we really immersed ourselves in it. We really got good at that. And we knew we could always come next to the streaming part, which we—

And from that, and those customer interviews, building this first part of it, those early customers, who did they end up being? Were you leveraging your networks? Or were there certain targets you were going after that you knew right away, we need these people on the platform first, and then we'll get to the next people? Like, how did you approach that in the early days? And we'll come back to now in a bit. But I'm curious about the early days, at least.

Yeah, yeah. So our first customers, probably half of them were people who we knew already, who had used ZenCoder. So we just went to our friends. We went to people who liked our other product and said, hey, we're building something new. Do you want to check it out? And not everyone did. A lot of people maybe took a call but didn't have a need or didn't want to. But that's where we got half of our first, probably 20 of our first 40 customers were that way. The other half, We built on reputation. So it's not people we know, but we told our story. We told the story of ZenCoder and then starting Mux. And we told stories about why data is so important for anyone who's streaming video. And we started to grow our reputation that way.

From that experience. So growing it in that regard, and obviously in those first customers, I think a lot of people Obviously, you're gonna rely on your friends or contacts. Like why wouldn't you? How do you go from that then in terms of the growth side and customer side to these massive names you have now? I mean, there's so many well-known names. If you look at your customer list on Mux.com, like there's so many people. Like how did you get to that point? And like again, back to the point of kind of targeting or knowing which ones you wanted. I'm curious as to how that kind of progressed over time last you know five or six years. It's been.

Yep. Yeah. So for the first 2 years, a lot of our growth was thought leadership in the video industry. So our first target customer was an engineer who's already working in video.

Yeah.

And so we went to the conferences they go to, we exhibited at the conferences. We, yeah, we just hustled to book meetings with people. leveraged introductions from existing customers to new customers. We hired our first salesperson about a year in. So before that, it was all me and I'm not a great salesperson. So that was, I can tell a story and I, that's kind of where I stopped. So it was great to hire our first salesperson. And then our second one was later that year. But for the first product, it was a little bit, A little, it was a lot of community and thought leadership and a little bit of top-down sales. With our second product, and this is always sort of the vision and kind of our sweet spot, the second product we really built bottoms up. So Mux Video is much more driven by self-signup, little startups that want to try it, play with video. Trying us out. And so the motion there is create a great product, support it well, make it easy to adopt. And over time, people tell their friends. So, you know, like you can't just use reputation as like a total, as a go-to-market motion, but it's really, really powerful. And there's things you can do to like over a long period of time, grow a really strong reputation. So most of our business today is inbound. We've grown the sales team from where it was. And we do, we have enterprise customers and you need sales for enterprise customers. You can't, you can't just do self-signup for a $100,000 customer or a million-dollar customer. But we see a lot of growth. We see a lot of little companies that turn into big companies over time.

Is that today with, I mean, obviously with COVID and everything, there's no like how it's evolved now with those different events you went to before. What happened in the last year? I know the growth was absolutely insane. And doing research, you know, just seeing like 300% in terms of the platform growth and like 3,700% just on revenue. Like there's so many things that evolved in the last year, year and a half. How did that go, John?

Yeah, it was So we were growing nicely the year before the pandemic hit, but when the pandemic hit, the first thing we thought was, oh no, what's gonna happen? Like, are we gonna lose all our, like, lose our customers? I think no one knew. So we, for about, for about a month, we were worried like everyone else. But it turns out that when, when people can't leave their home, people watch a lot more video.

Facts.

And what, what that What that did was it caused thousands of entrepreneurs to think, what could I do with video? And so we just saw a lot of really amazing innovation over the last year, like new categories just kind of emerging, like the live event category. There were ways to livestream an event in the past, but there's this whole new industry around livestreamed events that we were privileged to power a lot of. There's lots of people pushing for more video-based education, bringing video into more— I think like the creator economy is a really interesting trend right now. And video is a big part of that.

Yeah.

Video is a great way to communicate with an audience. And I think the pandemic probably helped the creator economy just because people were thinking of What can I do other than just go into an office or, or whatever?

Yeah, people got much more creative on ways to make a living, ways to get some side hustle money, whatever it ends up being with the last year and a half and kind of rethinking things in general and rethinking their jobs and their careers, which then obviously with the video side, there's a lot of opportunity within that. And with that growth, one of the things that my mind goes right away is like the team. Okay, so how did the team grow? How was that team growth over that period of time? As you're seeing this ramp up of so many people adopting video, how did that go? How'd you approach that when you need to scale up?

Yeah. Yeah. So we, I'd say we grew slow and steady up to about 35 people. And that's about where we were when the pandemic hit. And we built the team by investing a lot in hire and our hiring process. I think I think this is such a cliché, but hiring good people is almost the most important thing you do. So we've put a lot into that from the beginning and we've been able to hire a great team. Then when the pandemic hit, we were planning on going from that 35 to, well, no, we actually did about the plan. We went from about 35 to about 65 last year. Which was really interesting. Like, we hired 30 people that we didn't get a chance to meet in person. I've never done that. I've hired a lot of people remotely and almost every time, like, you visit them or they visit you, but we couldn't do that last year. So we hired 30 people and then this year we're gonna hire over 100 and we're well on our way to that. So it's been wild. Like, I've never aspired to Run like a hypergrowth company, but we're going to triple the team this year, and it sure feels like that right now.

I definitely want to dive deeper into that, John, because that's a unique situation for people who, especially like you said, a hypergrowth startup. Like, how are you thinking about that? Is it recruiting? Is it in-house? Is it you know?

Yeah.

How do you even start when you know that you're going to grow so fast, John?

Yep. This is something I didn't know two years ago. Because I'd hired a lot of people, but it was all, you know, it was 5, 10 people a year across a couple companies, and you can do that in-house. But if you wanna grow faster than that, recruiting is, as a function, is so important. So we hired our first in-house recruiter at the beginning of 2020, and she was great and she really made an impact. We grew that team. We brought in a head of recruiting this year in January, and The whole function is going really well. So I think investing, if you want to grow more than just a few people here and there, it's really important. We've used outside recruiters. They can be fine, but they're really hit or miss. There's some that are really good and there's a lot that aren't. So in general, we will use outside recruiters for really specialized functions. Like if we just don't have the capacity to hire, I don't know, like let's just say we don't know how to hire accountants ourselves. Like maybe we can find a specialist for that. But in general, at this point, I think I'm a believer in in-house recruiting except for execs. We've used outside recruiters for every exec we've hired over the last 2 years. And that's been, I think that's the right move as well. Yeah.

What was your process for then choosing the recruiters? You said it can be hit or miss, which, yeah, it's very, very much true. But how have you gone about that? How'd you evaluate who do you even want to have in terms of recruiter?

For the inside or outside?

I would love to hear both because I'm actually fascinated by the whole hiring process, especially with high-growth startups, because that's the hardest thing a lot of times.

Yep. So for outside recruiters, I think our approach is get credible referrals and recommendations. So I would rely on our investors, probably our investors first, and then peers, friends in the industry, other networks to find those. And even still, they're hit or miss, in all honesty. There's a couple I love that have been really good for us. I will recommend those every time someone asks me, like, you need a good ops recruiter. I'll say, call Phil Levine. He's the guy we use. But for building the talent team itself, I think in a lot of ways it's really just treating recruiting like any other function where you look for people who You look for a leader who's done it before. I think in a leader, it's really important to have prior experience. You want somebody who can really rely on their past experience to succeed. It's hard enough to be a— it's hard enough to be an exec if you're like learning it from the first time. It's, that's really, really hard.

Yeah. And then, yeah, I, Well, just, just one more thing on that with the earlier stage. I know you mentioned kind of slow and steady gains to that first 35 people, and you've hired people before you've done that. Like, what goes into that hiring process? Or what are some things that are helpful? Again, I'm just thinking of other founders out there, you know, starting a company, and maybe it's taking off, like how they go through that. And what should they be thinking about in the hiring process? I'd love to hear more how you think about that.

Sure. Um, so So here's our process. First, write what we call a MOC. M-O-C. This is language a lot of people in the recruiting world use these days, where every job you have a mission, outcomes, and competencies. So before you hire for a job, write down what the mission of the job is. It should be like one sentence. It should be clear. It should be really understandable. Then write the outcomes. Like, what is this person gonna accomplish? And it's important that it's outcomes. Like if you just write down the tasks they're gonna do, it's like, you are going to write software. Like, okay, fine. Like what is the outcome? But if you keep it outcome-focused, like this person is going to improve the user experience of this part of our application. This person is going to reduce the, increase the scaling of the system or whatever. It's much easier to hire people if it's not the tasks they're doing, but it's the outcomes that they're gonna create. Then the competencies, that's like the experience that's required. Like you must have at least 3 years experience and it's things like that. So from there, you, second step is sourcing candidates, which is where recruiters can come in, networks can come in. Referrals are great. Like there's a good side and a bad side to it. But a lot of our first 20 hires came from either people we already knew or people who were one degree removed from us. The downside there is you tend not to hire, you tend not to hire for diversity when you do that. And I mean that in both senses of the word.

Yeah.

Most people's networks look like them in some way, which both in terms of diversity, in terms of DEI, but also in terms of Similarity of experience. And so referrals are great. It's also really good to go beyond referrals as well. So yeah. And then the interview process really comes from that scorecard that you've written up, the mock, where you can take those outcomes and you can say, okay, this person needs to scale up our platform by 10x. How do we test to see if they can do that? We need to know, have they ever done it before? What kind of scale have they worked at? We need to know how accomplished are they at these particular technical systems that we need to do. And so we will spend, we usually do 2 screens. We'll do a first screen, which is a little more like, what do you wanna do? What are you good at? And a second screen, which is a little more a deep dive. So it might be a programming screen for an engineer, or it might be, maybe it's a talk through a marketing strategy for a marketer. And then we'll do a full day, which is usually like 5 interviews. That is like a deeper level. And then that's most of our process. Last thing to say is we put a lot into closing candidates. Once you've gotten someone to— once you've gotten someone to the last stage of an interview, you've put a lot of time in. Like you've probably put in maybe 10, 20 hours with this person, but maybe you've also interviewed 20 other people.

Yeah.

Just to get to this one person that you want to hire. And so we will do things like, like we'll send like a personal note from everyone who interviewed the candidate telling them why we're excited about them. We've just started doing something where we will pitch them on Mux. We'll say, here's why you should be excited about us and really take the time to do that. So that's our process.

No, I appreciate you sharing that. Cause I think, I think that's really helpful for people as you're kind of starting to think through this. And there is so much that goes into hiring great people and as you mentioned the DEI thing as well. It's like, even just to get different opinions and viewpoints and everything, it's hard when you're just in your circle, your network. To get beyond that obviously is helpful for your company for growth in the long term. And the other side of the growth, obviously with the people, that's a huge part of it. But even looking at the growth funding, you recently raised $105 million. And that was not too long after raising before then. Obviously, I'm assuming obviously because of the growth and craziness of pandemic, but You said you didn't need that capital at the time. Uh, how'd you decide to then go for it?

Yeah, yeah, we raised, we raised $37 million last year, which, yep, um, which I thought was a lot of money, and, and it is. Yeah, um, uh, but, but we really, when we raised the last year's round, the $37 million, we really, we put together a plan that said, hey, we can grow this company to be really big on this on this funding and not really need to raise money again. And that's the plan we were operating towards. So when investors first started coming to us this year, which really started, I guess it started maybe November of last year and then January of this year really picked up. We told the first, we told people, hey, we're not really interested. And it was partly because We, it wasn't on our minds. We were not thinking about fundraising. It's partly because we didn't want to, I've never aspired to raise a ton of money. Like I'm much, I like businesses that raise money. Raise money is fine. Like a lot of kinds of companies out there need some capital, but I like the ones that actually build something great and like sustainable on a modest amount of funding.

Yeah.

So that's kind of what we came into everything with, into this with. But as we thought more about it, we kind of looked at the scope of what we wanted to do. And we'd been really lean leading up to where we are today, where we had, we probably had, we really should have had probably 5x the team, maybe 10x the team on our products. order to really click as a company and do what we thought we needed to do to get to our vision. And we were able to get there in more of a slow, steady way with our last round. But it just got really intriguing. Like, what would we do if we had more funding? It's also an aggressive funding climate, as I'm sure you know. And we were able to raise in a way that wasn't wasn't excessively dilutive. And so, yeah, we, I probably said this last year, but I think I really mean it this year. Like we said, let's go raise the last round we're going to need to raise. And that's what we did.

That's funny. I'm going to see you next year, John. You're like, oh, they raised like $300 million or something. It's like, well, it was an interesting environment. It is. I mean, it is interesting to see that to your point of the environment where in now. It's like, take advantage of if you're in that position, at least, because if you see companies, obviously, like Clubhouse, you know, Andreessen doubling down on them, um, that's a whole nother animal. But other people are similar things. And with like Tiger doubling, tripling down on people, it's just kind of wild. And to your point, video is massive. And so obviously, it's something that, uh, you're positioned really well in. But I'd love to hear more of that. Because obviously, you the last number of years in working in video, Where are we at now just in terms of video? What's the growth? How big does this get? Where does Mux get?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think 5 or 10 years ago, a lot of when people thought video, what they thought was sitting on their couch watching television. And that's what a lot of people did. And that's actually a really giant industry. Like television's like a $250 billion industry in the US. And that's big. But I think what video actually is, is just a really high bandwidth way of communicating information. You can do a lot more with 10 seconds of video than with 10 seconds of reading text or looking at an image or other things like that. And so we think video just has applications All over. We think every software vertical has a clear video angle. We think most software companies will have video be a part of their product over time. And so we're excited about the growth, not just like TV moving online, which is actually a really big driver of growth, but all of the other creative things people will do with video. Think of like Twitch 10 years ago and Peloton 5 years ago.

Mm-hmm.

Those are, those are entire industries that just sort of came out of nowhere. Um, and we think those were like just 2 small examples of many, many more things that will happen.

Yeah, there's so much that's happening in video. I mean, I see it all the time now. Obviously the social platforms, but like you said, with the new categories being created, it's like, what is the next new category that would be created that still needs video? And then you're like the infrastructure for that moving forward. And, and from that too, so the industry is going to be growing continually and, uh, obviously you're growing Insanely fast. What's kind of next for you, for Mux? Like what's next for the company?

Yeah. Lots of investment in product is the first thing. I wrote up like a, I think in our funding announcement, I wrote a blog post. It was like why we did this. One of the things I said there is I think we've built about 10% of the software we want to build. And that's just what we know about today. I'm sure if you ask me in 5 years, I'll be like, oh, there's a lot more to build. But it's a lot of investment in product is sort of the first thing. And that's— both of our products are, they're great products. Customers love them. We have very, very high, like most of our customers are promoters of our products, which is really exciting. And we want to keep that, but we really want to keep pushing and just keep solving more problems there. And then the second thing we'll do is build new products. I think once you get a product to product market fit, you kind of have 2 things that you need to do. One is scale that existing product and you, maybe that's job one. Like you've taken all the work to get something to product market fit. You really want to capitalize on it. But job 2, I think, is to like stay fresh by thinking about what's the next product. And so that's something we're thinking about right now. And we'd like to bring more products to market.

I know you mentioned earlier as well with some of the challenges that you saw 5, 6 years ago that you wanted to solve with Mux. Been working on those a lot from that, but what are some of the other problems that you still need to solve or that need creative solutions to, or that people are coming to you with and like, hey, we need to do this. What are you seeing in the landscape, John?

Yeah. So just in terms of the technology itself, we haven't done anything on the device side. We don't have any client code for web players or iOS or Android playback for capturing a video, uploading, capturing a camera. There's a lot of hard problems there that we want to help make easier. That's kind of the obvious one, I'd say. And we'll probably lead with— probably do that with open source. We think open source is the right way to do client code. We have a video player that we built 10 years ago called Video.js that I think a lot of people use. It's maybe 500,000 websites or something are using it today. But there's still a lot of room to push and innovate there, I'd say. Then I think another way to think about this is what are the ways that we can help power video for not just the developers building software, but the builders who are maybe one circle out from the hardcore backend developers? A lot of what's happening right now in the way software is built is advances in low-code or no-code tooling. Jamstack kind of moves the center of gravity from the backend to the frontend. And I think there's a lot of really interesting ways that video can be brought to a wider circle of people who are doing interesting things with software.

One of the things I'm thinking about right away is with what you've done the last decade or so with video and everything and with your companies as well, is you mentioned, obviously, you stay lean with this company at the beginning, and generally don't love having to raise a ton of capital if you don't have to. From that, though, you had a decent exit, obviously, for you. And from that, what motivates you today? Like, what are you driven by today? How has that evolved from the early days when you're just struggling to get this thing going and now you're obviously in a much better position. What fuels you today, John?

Yeah, I'll say a couple things. I'll say one is our team. I want to create a great outcome for the 100 people who work for us today and the 1,000 people we'll hire over the next few years or however long. Another one is probably just pride. Hopefully pride in a healthy way, but it's satisfying to do something that's going And it's really, I really enjoy being a part of a company that's building great products. And then maybe the third thing, maybe this, I don't know, maybe this ties the last two together, but I get a lot of motivation out of building a great team. So thinking about how to construct a good company, how to construct a good team, how to motivate people and treat them well.

Yeah.

When you think about it, like there's a lot of software companies, it's a lot of big software companies that don't treat their people super well. And there's a lot of dysfunction in the world of tech. And it's really, it's motivating for me to try to build something different and maybe try to, hey, if we're really successful, maybe we'll try to model different ways of running a tech company. Yeah.

And people have so many different options for who they join in the first place. So it's like, if you don't take care of that, they'll just leave anyways. I mean, if you look at software engineers and other people. Like, there's, there's different options they have typically so they, they can go somewhere else if you're not having a company they actually want to stay at for a particular reason. And I've talked with hundreds of, of founders at this point, and like, that's a huge part of it. Like, people are staying for their mission or their culture and how they act day to day. And, um, it's like the Ben Horowitz thing of what you do is who you are, you know? It's like your actions speak louder than anything else. And so what that company is is all about that. And one of the last things I'm curious about Which was again, the last number of years. For other founders, I mean, it's so hard to build a company. The struggle is crazy. Like, what keeps you sane? What helps you keep going? Do you have a coach? Like, I'm curious about that side of things because you've done this for a while at multiple companies now. So I'm curious about that.

Yeah. So I think it's really, really valuable. for founders to have meaning in their life apart from their companies. Startups are such a roller coaster. Like the highs are really high, the lows are really low. In a lot of ways, if you're a startup founder or a CEO, like you really have like a, you have a lot of weight on your shoulders all the time. And so I would encourage founders to have more to their lives than just their work. So, yeah, I think that's— I rely on a lot of things. I have family, a lot of other things that give me meaning outside of my work. It doesn't mean that you don't also spend a lot of time thinking about your work because it really is a job that is demanding.

Yeah, things outside of work are important. And I know from, again, these conversations I've had, which is always kind of fascinating to hear different perspectives people have on what that looks like for them. And even like, I think something that's mentioned repeatedly was just going on like a walk in nature once a day if possible, multiple times a week if possible, having something where you're just not at a computer screen or whatever it may be. Because I think that's really Because important. otherwise you're just constantly doing that. And again, to your point of like, don't have your identity completely tied up in your startup. There's a lot more beyond that. Obviously people want to have great outcomes and build massive companies. And to your point, there's weight on their shoulders for investors potentially and other people. But if you don't take care of your mental, yeah, what do you have? You're kind of left with nothing at the end, which is why I love having these conversations to share those perspectives from people as well. I know we've talked about a lot of other things around what the company's doing, where you're going, how you've built it at this point. Any other just advice or things you wanna tell founders, aspiring founders, early stage founders? Because primarily a lot of the people who listen are early stage founders. From your experience, anything else you'd wanna share before we kind of wrap things up here, John? No pressure.

Yeah. Say, I mean, I think we've talked about a lot of things that That are important to me. I'd say if you're an early stage founder and you're thinking about doing something or are doing something, I mean, really look for that customer passion that we talked about earlier. I think the hardest problem about getting a startup to— about starting anything is actually finding a real problem and a real solution to the problem. So it's not, can you build something? Like, yes, you can go build something. Like a lot of people can do that. It's, can you really find a need that's big that you can solve? So yeah, early stage, I'd say do that. I'd say a little bit later, like really invest in scaling yourself once you get to product market fit and beyond. If you don't scale yourself, then the organization can't. Like, you can't build a giant company unless you're capable of actually being a founder who grows a giant company.

When you say scale yourself, what exactly do you mean? Just curious.

Yeah. Have a deep growth mindset. Always be, maybe be a little bit self-critical and recognize where you're not doing things well, where you're not doing something well, or the company's not doing something something well and attack it. So I remember I did this like 2 or 3 years ago. I made a list of like, oh man, I was just feeling the weight of like, there's so many things we gotta do. It was like, we gotta solve this problem and this problem and this problem and this problem. And I wrote a list of like 20 problems. And just doing that was really helpful cuz it like let me take a step back and say, okay, we have all this stuff to solve now. Let's go do it. And so, you know, I learned new things. I scaled myself as a manager, as an organizational leader. I helped give our company focus to scale and all of these other areas that we needed to grow. But if I was like, no, I got this, I know how to do everything, then I never would've done that.

Yeah. I mean, it's like when you're starting a company too, especially from talking to later stage companies and where they're at, it's like you almost have, you have so many different stages along the way of things you need to do and your role changes. Like early on you may be doing a lot of the coding yourself or doing all the, like actually building stuff yourself. But then later on you'd be like, wait, I'm doing doing like 5% of the thing I thought I would be doing later. And you're just like hiring people constantly and thinking about culture. It always seems to shift that way as you get to that stage.

Yep. Yep, definitely.

And where can people go to learn more about Mux as well and connect with you, John, if they'd like to?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So our website is mux.com. You can find out a lot there. We have a blog. I write on our blog about how I think about startups and what we're doing. We have a lot of amazing technical content. the blog too. And if you want to learn more about video, we run a conference called Demuxed, D-E-M-U-X-E-D. It's every October. And it's really, I know I'm biased, but it's really like the best conference in the world for video technology. So it's maybe 800 to 1,000 people this year, people from Netflix and YouTube and all the big companies, and also a lot of the startups thinking about video. So that's another way if you want to connect with the video industry.

What is that? Where is that going to be located or is it virtual?

It's, it will be San Francisco this year. It was virtual last year, but we are going to do it in person in October.

So exciting.

We'll also have a live stream. So if you can't make it, then you can always watch it as well.

That's awesome. Well, John, thank you so much for the time today. Really appreciate it, man.

Yeah, you too. Thanks.