Interview with Visualyst Founder & CEO Miguel Silva (FI Oslo)

Okay, well, my name is Dustin Betts. I'm the Community and Content Manager at the Founder Institute, and I'm here today with Miguel Silva. He's the founder and CEO of Visualist. It's an FI-OSLA startup that helps video creators, regulators, and distributors to manage compliance checks faster than ever before. Miguel Silva, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you very much for the invite.

Yeah, so before we kind of dive into your startup Visualist, tell us, you know, just a little bit by way of introduction about yourself or your personal story. What were the experiences, professional or personal, that led you to founding this technology company that's helping film and TV industry creators to adhere to industry compliance?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So my background is I'm Mexican. I was born and raised in Mexico City. At the time, it was popular to study, to take your university degree in the US, so I went over to a small college in Iowa, close to Minnesota, I guess, where I took my 4-year degree. That college was full of Norwegian foreign students as well. So I met my then girlfriend, now wife, who told me about this beautiful country. And so I moved to Norway. I moved to Norway 25 years ago, with a small detour before that. We, we, we, I went to Belgium to get a master's degree. And after moving to Norway, I started working for several technology companies, small and large startups, as well as really large ones like Ericsson. And they sent me out on an expat contract to the Caribbean, and later we moved to Mexico for a while, but moved back to Norway, Jesus, maybe 12 years ago, and I've been pretty much here ever since. So working with technology, I've always been on the sales side of things, but I was initially in telecoms, and then I went into broadcasting. And in broadcasting, I was the CCO for a startup that was a spinoff of the largest commercial broadcaster here in Norway called TV2. And TV2 is actually a very innovative broadcaster. They do a lot of development in-house. They have very large technical teams. They like to develop, they like to experiment, they like to innovate. And every now and then the people that make those products, they ask TV2 if they can do a spin-off and TV2 does support them. So I was one of those, I was a CCO for one of those companies. And basically they had built the entire platform for OTT for that broadcaster. And it was my task then to build the sales team and a commercial operation and take them international from Norway to the rest of the world. We did that quite successfully. We ended up having contracts with Comcast, with a lot of broadcasters in the Middle East and in Asia, here in Europe as well. And one of the things I noticed as we were doing that is that, you know, the entire process of taking content, which, you know, I'll try not to use industry jargon here because I realize there's a lot of people that don't come from this background. Anytime there's a professionally produced video or program or whatever, the process by which it gets licensed onto somebody else to distribute takes a very, very long time. There's like many different things that need to happen, both in terms of reviews, in terms of licensing, in terms of rights that need to be in place, etc., etc. And the— it's just, you know, I saw that there's a lot of room for innovation here as well, because all of the different ways of reviewing things, they tend to be very, very manual as well. They're still using pen and paper, the entire industry. And so that's what, you know, I saw the opportunity. I figured, okay, now's a good time for me to embrace my entrepreneurial spirits and decided, you know, found the Founder Institute, which was a very good help in the process.

Awesome. Well, yeah, that really tees up kind of my next question here, which is because I mean, I know, I'm somewhat familiar with your company being a Founder Institute portfolio company, Visualist. You're developing tools to transform the way that compliance checks are performed for the TV and film industry. But I'm going to kind of hear it straight from you. The founder, please give us sort of your short elevator pitch. Like, what is Visualist?

Yeah, sure. So Visualist is a software provider that helps the film and TV industry conduct compliance reviews quicker than they do today. And just to give you an idea of the problem, it is so that, you know, the industry today is organized in people that make the content and people that license the content for publishing or distribution in a given market. And you can imagine that if you're a studio like Disney or Sony or any of the major studios or any of the networks that create the sitcoms the sitcoms that we all love and like, you can imagine that you make the film that you want to make. You like, you tell the story that you want to tell. You don't necessarily worry about its applicability in other markets. But the world is a really big place and just about every country in the world has a regulator. Those regulators set up the rules for what's okay and not okay to show on TV. And so then once a film gets done or once an episode of a sitcom gets done, Or, you know, there's all sorts of compliance reviews also for sports, for reality shows, etc., etc. But we'll put that aside right now for a minute. If you look just at the film and TV industry, there's all sorts of different checks that you need to do before you can publish it. Because if you don't do those checks, you can get in trouble with the regulator. And more and more, it's not so much the regulator you need to watch out for. It's more your brands, basically. Like, does this content really You know, really, really, is it really compliant to my own brand requirements, to put it that way? And more and more about the audiences that we have today. At the end of the day, you know, a lot of these movies that we've done, you know, unfortunately some providers like Disney can tell you, a lot of the movies that we've done, the back catalog, they were, you know, they were done at a different time. And audiences today, they're more sensitive to things that they see on TV. So anyway, all that queues it up for a very large process that usually starts once a license agreement is signed. Which goes into actually reviewing everything that's in the content that you've licensed before you can actually publish it. And as I mentioned, that today is done with pen and paper. So what we're doing differently is we're bringing technology to the scene. We're bringing the entire process into the cloud. That helps in cases like now where we're all sitting at home and working distributive. That really helps basically those teams being able to do that work from wherever. They may happen to be. And I also talk about the equivalent of like, if you're working with pen and paper, let's give you Google Docs, because now you can collaborate, now you can comment, now you can share those comments. You can assign a different event onto a different team or different member, and they can come in and they can comment, etc., etc. And then at the end of the day, we also automate as much as possible the process by applying artificial intelligence. AI is so good now that it can actually pick up very concrete things, in video. You can pick up if there's a gun, if there's a knife, etc., etc. So you can actually write a query that just searches for any type of weapon violence and you will get all sorts of different hits. And so that's what we're doing. And then we provide collaboration so that the teams are able to do these reviews much, much quicker than the way they're doing it today.

Awesome. Yeah, I want to kind of explore like the problem a little bit more because like sort of as you referenced, I think for those of us who are not, you know, insiders in film and TV and media, this kind of regulatory and legal compliance checks is probably something that, like you said, it all happens in the background. Just viewers of this content might not be familiar with it. So can you talk a little bit more about the complexities as far as how common are delays in the compliance checks, for example? What are the consequences if something is done incorrectly?

So first, to make this a little bit more real to you and to people that don't come from the industry, I'm sure everyone has realized, you know, that, you know, I'm done watching season 1 of my favorite show and season 2 isn't coming for another year. Or, you know, season 2 is available in this market but not available in that market. Or they don't have the episodes here but they have the episodes elsewhere. Like you have a very big, like, lack of synchronicity, whatever the word is. Yeah, yeah, the time delay, lack of synchronicity.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And there's many reasons for that, why that happens in the industry, but one of them is the compliance reviews. It's basically that they just haven't had the time to go through the reviews quick enough to be able to publish. And by many estimates, there's a, you know, let's not mention any names, but there's some broadcasters even here in this market that maybe have up to 20% of their entire VOD catalog stuck waiting compliance reviews. And that's a really big missed opportunity. Particularly now when like productions are stopped in the industry and everybody is looking for gems in their catalogs, no?

Yeah.

And what are the type of checks that they do? Well, so as I mentioned, the world is a very big place and there's a lot of cultural tendencies. Some of them regulated, some of them there, it's really nothing to do with regulation, but it's more like the law of the land. Some cultures that will frown on nudity, some, and violence, excessive violence, for example. Some of that is regulated through age classifications. And so every single country or sometimes per region, They've decided basically what age level people need to be before they can watch movies that have excessive violence, that have excessive nudity, or that have adult themes into it, or that have— they're kind of like dark in nature, the sentiment within them, etc., etc. They classify them into age levels. So that's work that can be to a great extent automated. Also, you have all these different rules, like for example, in India, whenever you have somebody on screen smoking, you actually need to display a real-time alert saying smoking kills or smoking is dangerous to your health. And so, they need to review every single piece of content that comes in. They need to actually review it and eyeball it and check that you have that in place. In other markets, they've got very strong regulation against the brands and that if you're going to be showing a brand clearly within a movie or an episode or something, you need to say that there's gonna be brand placement. And there's flat out some symbols that are outlawed. In the UK, for example, you also have regulation that you're not really allowed to show children riding a bicycle without a helmet. And you even have now an advertisement, the Advertising Standards Agency, they came up with regulation against gender stereotyping. So now you even need to review content all the time against all sorts of different criteria. Some of them have to do with, you know, legal, some of them have to do with regulatory affairs, and some of them just really have to do about your brand and your audience and how you want to be perceived. But all of this, this entire process is loosely called compliance reviews, and they can be very, very complicated.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's really elucidating, I think, for those of us who, again, come from outside this world. So what are the consequences, I guess, especially for the creators, the studios, for if this is done, you know, incorrectly, I guess, especially if the compliance error here is a legal one. I mean, presumably like the show can be pulled from the broadcast. I mean, they can have all kinds of costs associated with it, right?

Yeah, yeah. It can be a very, very expensive exercise in many— if it's caught during the production process, it may be that you need to delay productions. It may be that— because that's another thing, like compliance reviews, They happen along the entire process. They happen during the post-production. They also happen before distribution. And sometimes they even happen later by a regulator doing some sort of campaign to check that things are being complied to, no? They— and during production, it may be that you need to reshoot. It may be that you need to do significant edits. So you're like— you're delaying the— the release of the movie. If you're doing it as a broadcaster, it does happen actually that broadcasters get fined if they, in some cases, in some markets, we've actually seen that not only does the surprise tag come with several, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars or in their currency millions, but it can also lead to the suspension of their broadcast license for a given time as a penalty. They say now, okay, because you broke this rule and it was so severe, You're gonna be suspended now for a couple of weeks. You can imagine that's an enormous amount of money as well that is being lost during that process. More importantly, we think it has to do with potential damage to your brands. More than anything, what we call audience compliance is becoming very, very important. Things that 10 years ago just didn't seem very racist or didn't seem very, very sexist, or it was actually okay to stereotype people on movies. That's just no longer the case. You know, audiences do— societies do evolve, audiences evolve with them. They know what they like and they don't like to see on movies and they will complain when they see it. So even that needs to be an element of your review process if you're working today for streaming services or any type of modern broadcast system there.

Awesome, yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about Visualiz now. You kind of touched on some of this earlier, but so the product obviously like alleviates this compliance burden or the workload associated with the checking. So there's an element of team collaboration through the software, which obviously works well for the age of COVID and people being maybe more remote than studios or these teams used to work together. And then there's also like an element of automation to it, right?

Yes, yes, exactly. So I mean, it's a cloud service where you can upload your movies or we can ingest them in many different ways. I keep saying movies, but in the industry we just call it content, basically any type of whether it's a series, a documentary, a sports event, or whatever, we just call it content. You can ingest your content. We will automatically then apply AI to pick out the elements based on a digital policy that you've created. Let's say that you want to start reviewing content based on excessive nudity and violence, for example. Then you create the policy within our tool saying we want to look for— you can granulate it. We want to look for explicit nudity or we want to look only for bare torsos, or we only want to look for sexual content, which is different from nudity. Et cetera, et cetera. So, you select what you want to look for, you create a visual search of sorts, and then you start piping content through it. And then what we provide is we show you the movie where you can play it. And next to it, we provide a series of different flags of things that we found. Then you can start the review process. You can start marking every flag as this is okay, this is okay, this is compliant, this is non-compliant. You can write your notes in there, which is a really big part of the process as well. You need to end up with compliance notes, Some of those end up at the regulator, some of them are just kept in, you know, in the event that you need them later. And we document the entire process, so you have a very, very thorough reporting inbuilt into this. And that's essentially what the tool does.

That's awesome. Yeah, I can really see, I mean, I guess like from the transition from doing this on pen and paper and having a bunch of people in a room and how manual this process would be versus like using Visual Lift and how you can really just do it all through the platform. And yeah, it seems like it would definitely make it easier for me having never done one of these compliance checks, but I can definitely see how that would simplify the process. So tell us a little bit more about your customers or the types of users. And you've mentioned this a little bit, like studios versus networks or creative agencies and like broadcasters. Like, what's the kind of scope of people who would be interacting potentially with, um, using the product or the compliance checklist, like after the fact?

Yeah, yeah. So we're, uh, I mean, being an early stage startup, of course you need to focus. So we're going primarily after, uh, TV broadcasters right now because those are the ones that live in a very real way broadcast regulations. Streaming providers, they're also very interesting and they've got their own sets of complexity. But the streaming world is to a very large extent unregulated at the moment, right? It is, that is gonna change very, very quickly, you know. But right now it's so that different distribution mechanisms have, are more regulated than others, to put it that way. Cinematic distribution is highly regulated. Broadcasters as well, among different other things. And streaming is unregulated. And then you've got sites like YouTube, which are largely the Wild West, no? Or where regulation occurs by itself. YouTube is actually trying to self-regulate, to put it that way. So we're going primarily for the broadcasters. We're contacting already. We started development of this tool shortly after we did our very first pre-seed race that happened in February, we closed around February of this year, and we basically used the lockdown months to develop the product. We finished the MVP in July of this year. And basically, I've been using my time to reach out to my network and trying to get the early customers in place, primarily with broadcasters, but also reaching out to the studios and learning about their complexities and what they would like to see in place for a compliance tool.

Awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. And I definitely understand like having the focus, especially from, you know, where you come from. So focusing on the broadcasters first makes total, total sense. You've obviously worked really hard to like build the company to where it is. Congrats on closing the pre-seed round and launching the MVP earlier this year. You know, what are some of the biggest challenges that you've faced as a founder in launching Visualift and how have you gone about overcoming those big challenges that you've faced so far?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're a startup, so we're nothing but challenges, of course. You know, we're starting with like a big challenge that just needs to be solved. And so how do we go about it? I think the very first challenge was explaining to people that did not have my background or come from, from, you know, from the places that I've been working with, why this is a problem to begin with. And, you know, to give due credit to FI, they do help a lot in that respect. You know, the, the kind of like the pitch training that you get is really quite, quite good. I learned to explain this in very, very simple terms. To people that, that, you know, that don't come from the, from the industry. And they need to understand why this is primarily investors, I guess, that want to understand why is this a problem? How is the problem looked like today? What is the solution that you're proposing to this problem? What is potentially the size of that market? You know, all the questions that an investor will ask you. So initially it was, it was that it was finding a really good way to explain in simple terms, what the problem is that we're trying to solve. After that, it was more about building the team. You know, at the end of the day, I'm a sales guy. My background is very much in sales. I can talk about technology and I understand technology well enough to be able to conceive a product like this and dig into some of the details. But I can't write a single line of code myself. No. So already starting from, okay, we need to prototype this, we need to show it to people. Then we need to build an MVP and we need to do this in a lean way so that we're organizing that work, basically. It's just something that I wasn't able to do. So then it's about going out and finding the co-founders, finding people that kind of like the idea and are crazy enough to follow you into let's see where this takes us. Because at the end of the day, once you start the company, you can't really afford to pay salaries. And that can be a bit tricky in some markets, particularly here in Norway. It's fair to say that it's still a little bit conservative. You don't have that many people that are just willing to quit their jobs to follow you into a startup out of principle, out of like, we really like this project. It doesn't happen that often. So I have to look for those people. That takes time, of course. And then after that came just the funding round. And that's a new thing. You need to learn how to, how to talk to investors, how to pitch this in a good way. We know what are they looking for? What's the attractive things that the that you need to put forward, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that was also something I needed to learn, skills that I didn't have.

Awesome, yeah, I think those are challenges that probably most founders are aware of, at least when they start to get to those points. I mean, yeah, the clear communication, the team building, and yeah, getting to the pitching in front of investors as well. That's awesome. What advice would you offer to other early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly aspiring entrepreneurs who are just getting started? Any kind of generic advice that you wish you had known or somebody had said to you, when you were just getting started?

Well, the advice that I give to anyone that I've— I'm also, other than being an FI grad, I'm a mentor for FI here in Norway. And the advice that I get when any of the current cohort members come and ask, like, you know, is this something that is, you know, that is useful, not useful? What do you think about it? It's like, well, the idea is great, but you need to validate the idea. It's really all about validating the idea. Go out and talk to 50, 100 potential customers, potential customers. And if you're still excited about the idea, then it's worth pursuing. No, that's something that if I look back in my own, my own, my own work, basically, I could have done even better. Yeah, I think that we did pretty good validation, but certainly the early stage validation, I was reaching out to people that I know, to friends and family, and of course they're going to tell you the idea is great and of course you can do it. And of course, this is gonna be super useful, even if they don't know, because you'd have to be a psycho to, like, shoot down somebody that you really care about in the early stage. But that's exactly what you need. You need to find the people that will shoot it down. And if you're still excited about it, then you have something solid, to put it that way. That's one thing. And then another thing is like resilience. You need to be prepared to, you know, to finance your lifestyle or your own activities for at least a couple of years. Because that's how long it's going to take to build the startup to a level where it starts to become a business.

Yeah, that's great. Those are both really, really good pieces of advice, I think, for any entrepreneur. So yeah, thanks so much for that. So kind of in closing, you know, where is Visual List headed next? Do you have any news or updates to share with the FI community or any asks for our audience that might be watching today or the recorded version of this?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm using most of my time right now to look for the beta customers. We're going to be inviting anywhere from 1 to 3 broadcasters to be— or broadcasters or studios, production houses— to be beta users of this tool. We have a lot of really good discussions with broadcasters in India and some studios out in Hollywood as well, in Bollywood, some broadcasters in the Middle East, a little bit in Europe. But of course, any help that I can get from the FI community would always be very, very welcome. If somebody actually comes from this industry, and you think you've got some introductions that would be really, really helpful. And even if you don't, even if you work with a similar tool in this industry, by all means reach out because, you know, founders, we always get a lot from talking to one another and just building the community is something that we love to do. So please do reach out if you've got people that you feel we should be talking to, or if you just wanna learn more about this. But we're headed towards getting that kind of like that first traction, getting the beta customers in place. And we're also then building up towards doing our seed rounds, probably closer to the end of the year, because we first want to get some experience with the beta trials so that we can validate our business model, etc., etc. So that's gonna happen probably in September, sorry, October, November timeframe. By all means, if there's anyone in the community that finds the project interesting, you want to talk to us about joining the round, or you feel that we should talk to somebody who might be interested in joining the round, also feel free to reach out to us. We would really appreciate that.

Yeah, anybody who's watching this right now, anywhere this video goes, there's going to be a link to your website, which is visualith.co, and anybody can go over there and kind of reach out and make contact if this is you. Who's in the industry or a production house, or you know somebody who could be a great beta user, that would be awesome to connect with Miguel. This has been, you know, really interesting for me, you know, coming from outside this industry, was learning about the complexities in film and TV compliance and how your product is helping to ease that compliance check burden. I know we at Founder Institute are all really looking forward to keeping up with VisuList and where you're headed next. So Miguel Silva, thanks so much again for joining us.

Well, thank you very much, listen.