Gen AI Series: From B2B to B2C and Gen AI, a conversation with Seattle serial entrepreneur Vikram Chalana

Follow the journey of Vikram Chalana, a Seattle based entrepreneur who started his entrepreneurial journey with an enterprise product called Win Shuttle that allowed MS Excel users to exchange data with SAP. He grew the company to significant revenues and ultimately sold the company to a Private Equity firm. More recently, he has started a Gen AI company Pictory. AI that allows creators to convert text into video that is the leader in the space.

Vikram is an engineer turned serial entrepreneur.  He is currently building Pictory to enable anyone to turn their message into engaging videos quickly & easily. He previously created and scaled Winshuttle, an enterprise software in the data management space, to over 300 global employees. He holds engineering degrees from Indian Institute of Technology and from University of Washington. 

Brought to you by TiE Seattle
Hosts: Shirish Nadkarni and Gowri Shankar
Producers: Minee Verma and Eesha Jain
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@fromstartuptoexitpodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:44

Hello everybody. Welcome to another edition of From Startup to Exit. My name is Gary Shankar. I'm a member of the board of Thai Seattle, a not-for-profit focused on fostering entrepreneurship. My co-host Sherish Natkarni, who's also a board member and uh serial author now, has published his second book, uh Winner Take All. Uh it's about marketplaces. I it's available where everywhere books are sold. Hope you'll read and enjoy that. And thanks to everybody who supported us in 2023. Uh, it's been a great ride for us. Uh, we started the podcast together and it's been a great ride. And of course, thanks to the Thai Seattle team for keeping this thing going. Uh, without much ado, let's uh uh let me turn it over to Sharish uh to introduce our guest. Uh very exciting uh for us to talk about AI. And uh over to you, Sharish.

SPEAKER_05 1:44

Thank you, Gavri. Uh like to welcome Vikram Chalana, uh, who is the CEO of Pictori.ai. Uh Vikram is an engineer turn serial entrepreneur. He's currently building Pictori.ai to enable anyone to turn their message into engaging videos quickly and easily. He previously created Wind Channel, an enterprise software station in the data management space. And he holds uh engineering degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and from the University of Washington. So welcome, uh Vikram.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Thank you, Sharish. It's a pleasure to be here and great to meet you, Gari, as well.

unknown 2:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:22

Great. So um, Vikram, uh, we are very interested in your career as an entrepreneur. Uh you started uh Wind Shuttle in 2003 and ran it for 14 years, long time. Uh what made you decide to become an entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

I I felt like it was always there. And uh I was working in engineering jobs and and it felt kind of unsatisfying until I actually started something and uh and was able to run it, and and I felt like that was what I was meant to do. So I I don't know. It's just been one of those things. Uh probably um I I saw my my grandfather was an entrepreneur and I just watched him, and probably that's what uh inspired me.

SPEAKER_05 3:10

Got it. So um so tell us more about uh what did uh wind shuttle do? Uh what was the solution all about?

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Um so wind shuttle was an enterprise software company, and uh the solution was actually really simple. It was something that connected uh in the beginning, it was Excel connected with uh SAP. So a lot of large companies use SAP, but uh most business users prefer Excel, and so we built a very easy tool that was largely an Excel add-in that uh was able to pull data from SAP, push data from Excel to SAP, and uh and we made it really easy. You don't need to be a programmer, you didn't need to be an uh ABOP developer, any business user could do it. So we used to call it um low-code way to kind of get data into SAP, but then then at one point it was RPA for SAP. So if we tried a bunch of different um positioning statements, but it was very, very easy. And uh uh and later we extended it to SharePoint and and other Microsoft uh products, but uh but it was yeah, largely connecting Microsoft Office and and uh SAP.

SPEAKER_05 4:31

Um so how did you come up with the idea of uh wind shuttle? Uh what is the pain point that you're trying to address?

SPEAKER_01 4:39

So actually, I'll I'll um give you the idea story after. First, I'll actually tell you the creation story, the uh because it's actually different from many startups that you probably talked to. Um most people kind of start with the idea and uh and build something and then try to find the product market fit. Um where I started was actually a little bit later. The idea was already there. There was an SAP consultant uh who I met uh who had developed this solution as a as a consulting solution for a couple of uh uh clients of his. And uh and he was looking to he was looking to continue in his SAP consulting role, and he was looking to for somebody to build the business, to take this product and build the business around it. So uh me and my co-founders, we actually acquired the the technology uh in 2003 from him. Um so the the initial product market fit was already established. We felt like he had a uh half a dozen customers or so who who had used the product uh and had paid him. And uh and we got it like almost I I would say at a pre-seed stage, and uh and then we uh and then we kind of scaled it from that point on to uh to to build a uh you know a$50 million company um over over that time frame. Um that's 14 years. So so the start was a little different. Um so it wasn't my idea, but the idea was validated uh before we made the acquisition. We we talked to a lot of sap customers, we talked to a lot of um um potential users uh who would be using this, and we we felt it was a really compelling solution for a problem that a lot of uh uh SAP users faced.

SPEAKER_05 6:38

Got it, got it, got it. So um how did you um bootstrap the company? Uh uh was it through your own funds or did you raise any venture funding for the company?

SPEAKER_01 6:51

So it was uh for the first seven years completely bootstrapped it. Uh because there were some customers already there, we were able to quickly uh sell to other customers. We didn't raise any outside capital, we just uh were hyper capital efficient and uh and and we we bootstrapped it. Uh we bootstrapped it almost to five million dollar revenue uh run rate. And uh and then we realized that actually there is a pretty interesting market to grow it further, though, we'll need to um we'll need to get some outside capital, we need to hire a professional sales team, enterprise sales reps, and so on. So so we then we by by that time we were already 5 million, so we were getting a lot of inbound interest from uh growth equity type investors, uh Insight and Bain Capital and Summit partners and and stuff. So we ended up going with Summit Partners uh and uh and then we uh we raised that that was the only round we raised, and then we grew the company from that from at about five million revenue to about 50 million revenue in the next uh seven, six, seven years.

SPEAKER_05 8:06

Got it. So in hindsight, uh do you uh do you think that uh bootstrapping the company was the right decision for you, or do you think you should have raised capital sooner and gone faster?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Depending on the market, for for for my current business, I don't think that bootstrapping would have been a good idea because the market is evolving really fast and lots of competitors and and so on. But in that space, in the enterprise software space that we were in uh around SAP, I think bootstrapping was the was the right way to do this. Uh we were able to it's a slower moving market and uh and we were able to still grow and and keep a lot of uh equity in the company and and uh um and still still able to we're still able to succeed and and um and build the technology and everything that we needed to do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:02

Um so what happened to uh you were uh you ran a company for about 14 years, from what I could make out from your LinkedIn profile. I don't know if that's correct or not. Um but what happened to Wind Shuttle at the end?

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Yeah, so by the end uh around 2018, so the summit was kind of nearing their end of the life for the fund, and uh and and as a founder I was getting kind of bored with with the same thing for so many years. So uh so we we said, okay, let's we'll figure out uh uh an exit story for this, and uh and we ended up selling it to a PE firm. Uh you may have heard of uh Symphony Technology Group, uh STG, and uh and they uh they acquired the company uh and uh and they they're a private equity firm and kind of they apply the private equity playbook. And uh but one of the things that was um that was nice was by the time that exit came, I I had the entire leadership team set up, so I was able to simply step out of the the company uh at the at the time of the sale. Um so so that's kind of how it it happened. It was uh it was a nice exit for for Summit. It was a nice exit for the um for the founders, for the uh for most of the team, the leadership team and the and the initial early team.

SPEAKER_05 10:32

So Win Shuttle as a product still continues?

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yeah, so they then they apply their Yeah, yeah, actually. So uh they uh Symphony then they apply their PE playbooks and uh and then they uh they grew it and I I think I I I I think it's five or six X what they bought it for. They sold it again in in the next uh five four years. So between when they acquired us and between when they sold it, it was they grew it about five five X. And uh uh and then they sold it uh recently to a company called Precisely, which is a roll-up of a bunch of this data quality data management solutions. Uh and uh and Wind Shuttle is a big part of that now. Uh and so the company is called Precisely, and it's still uh I it's not public yet, but but I think they will go public some some at some point.

SPEAKER_05 11:35

So would you recommend um I mean when you were five million dollars of revenue, um you could have also raised money from a VC firm versus a growth equity firm, and they have different playbooks uh in terms of how they manage these companies and so forth. Uh given what you know now, um having raised money from a VC firm for Pictori, do you feel that um that was the right decision at that point, or would you would you have been better off working with a VC company?

SPEAKER_01 12:04

VC firm? The needs are different at different stages. So when you're already 5 million, I think you're trying to kind of figure out the scale. And I mean, it's it's a series B company almost. So uh, and usually like you know, at that stage, um, you're trying to figure out okay how to hire the next CFO and and you know how you're gonna hire build an enterprise sales team and and and scale this up. So an early stage VC may not have been an ideal, like a series A uh team may not have been ideal. And and a series B player might might have been good. I mean, we actually were we talked to a lot of different VCs at that time, um, because as I said, it was get we were getting a lot of inbound interest. Um one of the other things that the growth equity firms are open to doing is uh is a secondary uh capitalization, so so you can take some money off the table uh at that time. And we didn't need all the money that we raise in our balance sheet, so we were able to take some money off the table because we kind of we struggled with it. We'd put our houses on second and third mortgage to acquire uh the technology, so so we were able to kind of get some uh liquidity out of that.

SPEAKER_05 13:24

Right, right, all right. All right, um, let me now turn it over to uh Gavri uh to kind of uh you have very different uh career paths with uh victory.ai, so let uh Gavri uh take us through that.

SPEAKER_04 13:40

Uh thanks, Shirish. So uh Vikram, that was uh you know uh almost a slow burn approach, right? Wind shuttle was this one, you jumped ahead of the AI hype, right? Right to by when I met you, you this was already on the on that path. Uh was this uh and was this uh idea to start an AI company because you came from traditional enterprise software, it's not like you you came from AI or uh etc. Where did this germinate? Uh you you have your entrepreneurial chops, but that means that you do something similar, but this one was blasting out of something which was unclear at that point, it'll get anywhere. So where where did this idea come start and why you decided this one?

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah, completely different. Um the uh one of the things I realized is um it was a challenge that I had personally uh making and editing videos, uh, because towards the um towards my last few years at Wind Shuttle, um I became more of a thought leader and and I was creating a lot of content and and webinars and all that stuff. And uh whenever I needed to edit the webinar or even create a new piece of content, one of the things we realized uh we all realized probably in the last like decade or that content has shifted, right? About 10 years ago, if you did a white paper, that was a great piece of content. Blogs and white papers were great pieces of content. Um now blogs are still good for content marketing purposes, but but people have gravitated towards different forms of media, and video is kind of the the media that is that is winning, right? So we we noticed like the to get the amount of traction and the engagement that we would get on text content had just like dramatically gone down. Um people wanted more videos, people wanted short form videos, and we've we've seen the shift in social media too, like it was Twitter, Instagram, then TikTok, all although all of that still exists, but but that there's been that phases of the journey, and and um so I I was personally struggling with it because I wanted to create more videos, but I uh like in this company that we'd built with 300 people, we had one video person, and everybody would be lining up in front of her cube to to help out with the video making process. And it was just I it it I felt that that was a pain point. So where the similarity came to me from from the wind shuttle days was in the wind shuttle days, we were solving this same problem for business people who were waiting for IT programmers. I need data out of SAP, I'm gonna line up in front of my uh ABBA programmer and and help him uh get that. And I saw the same pattern uh repeat in the video world as like, you know, I need a video, I'm gonna line up in front of this one designer who knows how to make videos. And uh and I felt like this is uh it can have a very similar impact if you make the process of creating videos and editing videos very easy, it can have the same impact as we had in the in the data management uh world of SAP. Um so that that was kind of my pattern uh matching there that I did. You know, um traditional video tooling is all this this timeline editors, which I have gotten lost in so many times. Like if you're gonna take this uh Riverside uh recording and and try to create little clips from it, um you're gonna probably bring it into Adobe Premiere and or Camtasia or something, and then and then there's gonna be this whole timeline, and you find the right start time, the right end timestamp, and and just it's it's so time consuming and it's so confusing that we felt you know that there has to be a better way than the timeline editor. Um, and we wanted to you have something that a PowerPoint user could do. So a business person who's familiar with Excel and and uh Word and PowerPoint should be able to do videos, and that's the paradigm we kind of started with. And uh and we realized that early on there has to be a lot of AI in the mix. Now, this was pre-GPT days, so but we had uh we started experimenting with uh uh models like Bert and Elmo and and the the ones that were coming out from Google and and uh AI too here in Seattle. Uh and uh and we started experimenting with those and how we could use that to understand somebody somebody's piece of content, text content, and and then try to uh find create a video from that or or help help you help use that to edit a video. Um so that's kind of it it was early stages, I I realized that, but I think we wanted to kind of bring that that uh uh productivity increase, uh significant productivity increase that uh to the users.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

So I I get the what problem you solve, but uh you spent 14 years in quote unquote legacy software SAP. There's still a ton of money to be made. I still people wake up thinking how to make mine that uh gold, right? Yeah, and you could have done any of it after the exit. And you had the credibility, you had grown the company to 50 million, but you decided you're gonna start something from scratch, largely white space, yet to be proven. Uh, do you feel like you because you already did this uh stint with wind shuttle, you had the energy to do it? Because most entrepreneurs we meet, after a long stint, just lack the energy to go after a white space problem. They they go after larger, large established problems where they can make me you know big impacts, or at least they think. Here you were taking in a at best emerging when you started. I remember talking to you, and it was even unclear it'll ever emerge into anything at that point when you you guys were so early, it was early almost TikTok-ish early. That you know, so how'd you pick this one uh to go after?

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Um, again, driven by the the problem, really. And and you're right, absolutely that uh uh and I started this by the way when I turned 50, so it was already kind of so you don't want to buy a Harley, you'll start a company, you thought. Yeah, exactly. Or you could think of it as the midlife crisis, crisis, but yeah. Um but I I I think um and I'll be kind of honest with you and the audience. I I felt like that buying the company uh previously, the that the technology, I kind of missed out on the early stage of the fun, the product market fit. So I felt like I wanted to build something from zero to one uh as opposed to kind of acquire something and then build it from one to a hundred. Um so so that that zero to one phase I wanted to experience, and and that was the I think that was the chip on my shoulder that that I needed to kind of heal.

SPEAKER_04 21:32

Great. So let's kind of move into Victory, right? Can you walk us through the journey of to what you saw was the one problem you could solve with the product, how it's evolved. Uh, then we'll get into who you're targeting next. First, let's kind of understand the solution and the evolution of your solution from you started to where it is now.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Yeah. Uh it's kind of linked to the target market a lot. So I'll cover both of those. Things in the same um same thread. So initially I was thinking, you know, hey, it'll be like these thought leaders, these content creators, product marketers who who need to create videos. And uh and the the thought always has been, how can you help repurpose existing pieces of content into video as opposed to thinking of video as a new piece of content? So because we're all sitting on tons of content. We've written stuff, we've recorded stuff, we've we have podcasts, we have uh webinars, and and how can we repurpose that? And um, so that was the the problem statement in the very beginning, and uh and the first uh solution set we started building was uh text to video, so a written form content like a blog to video. And uh and the way the way we did it was um uh we would understand the blog uh for with NLP, uh summarize it into a few sentences, then we take that that the summarized uh thing and uh and we search through stock library of images. Um we started with just Google uh image search, but but then we've kind of we've made that a lot more sophisticated. Uh so we've licensed content from things like Getty and Shutterstock and that, and then we search the right content based on the text that you've given, and and we stitch it together. And these are stock videos, so they they they each have motion elements in there, and uh and then we stitch say you say say it comes back with five sentences, you'll have five scenes, each one telling part of the story, and uh, and then that that becomes the basis of the video. Then we add uh voiceover to it. Uh if you want uh if you want your own voice, you can record your own voice, or you can uh apply a text-to-speech voice, and then we stylize the captions and and all that stuff and and put it all together, add add a piece of music. So so that was kind of the the initial solution that we built is that that text to to video. And uh and it's still the um and I'll tell you kind of the chat GPT story later on, and but but that is still the core of our product, it's still the text to video. Uh and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:32

So you started with creators, right? Because they were there were a lot of bloggers and emailed lists and all. So you started with creators. Seems like you're evolving from that, and then where did the shift happen in trying trying to find that product market fit, even though the target audience originally was creators with the going up the creator economy?

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah, I so go back if I because we hadn't come from the creator background, we didn't like we came, we came from in the enterprise background. So we were trying to sell to enterprises before, but the the product wasn't quite there yet. Uh so the early adopters ended up being the creators and the SMB market. So so we felt we we had a really good product market fit that we found in that segment among the creators segment. And that took us about a year to kind of discover that because we kept iterating to the enterprise marketers and the enterprise thought leaders, and that we were not quite getting it. But then as soon as we went after the creators, it clicked. We went from like in 2021, uh, we went from 50 paying customers to 5,000 paying customers in like in a matter of two months.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Um yeah, so that that's when we knew okay, we have something and and for this market. So that's not that may not be what our ideal long-term market is. Um so so then we kind of continued to service that segment, the small business marketers, the the small course creators, the educ uh you know, people who are creating um small agencies who are helping others create content and and so on. Uh, and then now we've started uh to say, okay, can we are is our platform ready to go up market? And can we go after the enterprise marketer, the LD professionals, the learning and development people, the uh so that's kind of our next phase of the journey is is uh helping move into the enterprise.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

So you're serving both now, uh the SMB creators, some sort of prosumer to SMB to small businesses, while you are exploring the B2B enterprise segment. Is that that fair to say?

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we have a handful of customers in the enterprise segment already. So we're using that as like a seed and and and trying to figure out okay, how can we grow this part?

SPEAKER_04 27:11

So uh, you know, uh Q4 2022, the world explodes with Chat GPT, right? And suddenly you what you do is the most uh every developer in the world wakes up thinking I can make video better with AI, right? Including that, including open AI. So how did you guys think of it? It could be one hand, it could be validation, but really uh they had a lot of money. I mean, lots of money.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yeah, yeah. So I'll I'll um we uh we had just reached uh our million dollar ARR run rate in November of 22. So when when uh Chat GPT came out. So we were like, okay, we're this and we'd been growing about 15% month over month. So we knew that you know we had we had some traction and stuff. Um and then some of our customers, uh because these are early adopters, like the creator economy is early adopters on every technology. So they uh created some of our customers created some um videos that they showed that hey, I can use Chat GPT and Pictory together and and create videos, create my blog, create my create my YouTube channel that way. So the idea is you know, have Chat GPT give you the script for the video. You put the script into Pictory, and Pictory will turn that into a video, and you can have basically a video in a matter of minutes. And then we did some campaigns around that as well, and uh, and that just like that imagination people people like went wild with that. So um, so November of 22 we were uh a million dollar run rate. By November of 23, uh we were at 7 million run rate. Um yeah, so we had an incredible uh 2023 uh and and driven by by by this whole generative AI uh wave. And and it wasn't like so so obviously there's a lot of people who saw that and and they say they could do it. So we saw a lot of competition emerge. We have seen a lot of new entrants in the market of video creation. Um obviously there is a lot of like generative videos now that are that are being looked at uh with companies like Runaway and Pika and stuff. So but our approach has been slightly different. We wanna we want we're not going after Hollywood and and the and the and the very creative uh segment of the market. We're staying after the business users and and helping you create your videos that uh like think about how you can might might create your PowerPoint slides more reflect more engaging, or are how you can make your you know your um uh storytelling narrative more engaging. But it's not Hollywood style videos. That's kind of what the uh runway and and the folks are going after. So what what my hope is now is you know a lot of the generative tools, the even the imagery and the video generative, we want to be able to use them in our videos because we've built the whole infrastructure around it. We we have great ways to stitch it all together into a nice video, we can understand the text, we can understand what you're trying to do. And uh and we've like we we've kind of built us a small brand in this space. Uh people think of us as the number one AI video creator tool out there, and uh, and so so we want to kind of continue on that path and and see how we can leverage some of the gen AI technologies more and more. And and we're already starting to do that in our text understanding. We switched from the Burt and Elmo models to the LLMs, uh, and uh even for the text to speech, we we were using some of the generative AI uh models.

SPEAKER_04 31:24

So uh this funding journey you had mentioned was different than your previous startup wind shuttle. So for our audience, can you walk through uh how you went through that journey here? Because you you're early, uh, you're still discovering a product market fit.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Uh so what was the funding uh journey for pictory.ai um so we did uh put some founder capital into place in the first uh couple of uh years because uh we were fortunate to be able to afford that. So that was our initial two years. Uh we didn't go for any outside funding. And then we did when we did get that traction, that 2021 uh story that I told you about from 50 to 5,000 customers. Um, and we felt like you know that there is some there is some advantage to scaling up here. Uh it's it's it's not a slow burn journey. This is not gonna be one of those things because the market dynamics are very different here. And uh and so then we started uh uh talking to um uh some some VCs and uh uh in fact, so we started talking in the spring, but but but then we got this uh this product market fit traction through the summer. So then I went back in the fall uh to start the conversations again, and then people saw the the the difference in the number of customers and the traction and stuff, and uh and it was very quick. Then after that, we were able to raise a seed round with fuse uh in Bellevue, and uh and it's been um um and and then the like because the business kept growing and the MRR kept coming, uh we didn't have to actually dip into the the funding that we raised. Yeah. So we've raised, although we've raised five and a half million total so far, we've spent only a million. Um so to get to seven and seven and a half million MRR. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:33

And were you uh is the company largely uh spread over the globe or very Seattle centric, or what's what's the strategy to keep it so capital efficient?

SPEAKER_01 33:45

Uh yeah, it's it's it's our entire engineering team is in India, so that that that really helps. And we started in the middle of the pandemic, so it's remote first, and even in India, like we were able to find engineers in like we we didn't have to just find engineers in Bangalore, we could find people anywhere. So we have people in Banaras, in Nagpur, anywhere in the country. So that that really helps uh uh having having remote engineering, and that's the same model we had at Wind Shuttle too. Uh it wasn't remote, but it was the entire engineering team was in India.

SPEAKER_04 34:23

Uh to dig into a little bit into this uh remote work, right? You're a startup, so and you're moving at at rocket ship pace in a very uh uh cutting-edge technology AI. Um so there's this battle of hybrid versus remote versus in-office, right? How are you as a as the uh leader of Victory.ai managing that from a from an employees perspective, right? Because this uh seems like a tricky one and seems to have an impact on attracting talent.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

Yeah, um, so far I feel like it had a positive impact on attracting attracting talent because um we've been able to attract people from anywhere. Um and uh and like our even like even if I take off the engineering team in India, we have a pretty globally spread out uh employee base. Like our customer success head is in Ukraine, uh, we have one of our designers who is in Thailand, and it's just we've just built, we've tried to find uh really good people anywhere. So to some degree, I feel that as an advantage. Um obviously the communication in the time zone is the biggest challenge. So somebody is always um compromising on on time zone. So uh so we start in Seattle, we start very early, the India team works late, uh, and uh and that's kind of how we make we we're able to manage it. Um we're trying to do more uh so the thing that you have to do is more over communication. So so I have like daily huddles, every team has daily huddles. Uh we were in on Slack all the time, we have uh uh monthly, online, and all hands, and then we're trying to do uh at least like physical all hands at least once every six months. We all get together. Um, so and different teams get together. So you have to kind of apply all kinds of hacks to to make it work.

SPEAKER_04 36:35

Excellent. That because that's uh that seems like a discovery, whether you're a small company or a big company, it seems like the culture that you're trying to build uh in this new uh world order is uh seems like a discovery a little bit, right? Um as you uh as a leader uh in the video creation space now, um you have the the big players of Microsoft, Google, etc., who all have lots of other tools and therefore videos to attack this market? Do you see them uh helping you grow as a company because they will spread the word? They may not have the same tools you have, uh for sure they'll spread the word. Do you see how do you see them? Do they see you um uh in good partnership? Uh is is there a go-to-market opportunity with the bigger uh AI players, whether it be Microsoft, Google, or anybody else that Adobe, etc., um, who all have this base?

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Yeah, I see that as like our uh key opportunity here on in go to market is is getting getting in front of the distribution thing. So one of the things that a lot of companies have done now is create these marketplace opportunities. So uh as an example, um actually I'll give you a very pertinent example. We're going live with uh Pictory GPT. So you know they they they have the custom GPT store now, and uh so tomorrow this week, tomorrow, we're launching uh Pictory GPT as a in the on the GPT store. So to us, it's a great distribution channel, it's a great place where people will hang out, find us.

SPEAKER_04 38:23

So this is the open AI's marketplace, right? That's what you're talking about. Just for marketplace, exactly. But they announced it a few months ago.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Just this month, actually. Uh in January early on, they announced that, and and so we were able to build that and launch it um on the store. So um, but similarly to that, like Canva has announced a marketplace. So we want to be part of the Canvas marketplace, we want to be part of um Microsoft has uh a marketplace for Teams uh product. Uh we want to be part of that marketplace. So I I see like I see very interesting opportunities to be in all these different uh marketplaces, and uh and and I see that as a good kind of distribution um channel for us. Uh and uh I want to be in the HubSpot marketplace, I want to be in the Salesforce marketplace, um, that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_04 39:17

Excellent. So um Vikram, you you uh started this early. The AI boom has propelled you into the leadership position. What's the vision that now you see for victory.ai?

SPEAKER_01 39:33

Yeah, so I think going back to why we originally started this, right? We um we felt you know it should be part of an office productivity suite, uh, video creation and stuff. And uh and part of the reason why I felt like there's been waves of video tools, including like the desktop tools like Premiere and stuff, and then things like Anamoto and which moved that same paradigm to the cloud. Um and and um the the thing that's been missing in most of these places has been the idea that you already have so much content, and the purpose of video is not video alone, it's actually to make your content more engaging. Whether you are a a BCG consultant who is creating PowerPoint slides, no end, or whether you are uh a marketer writing blogs, you want to make that content more engaging. People will watch it, people will spend more time on it. And and to us, that's kind of the mission that we're on is like, how can we help that? How can we be on every desktop right next to PowerPoint out there? That here's how you make your Word documents or your PowerPoint content more engaging, and add videos to that, by the way. So that's kind of the story here.

SPEAKER_04 40:57

Um awesome. Because you you're that inflection, right? We sort of you could one could argue TikTok is the largest media company in the world, growing at a pace that's dwarfs others, etc., which is all video, and there's a whole generation of people growing up just on video, right? And or consumption of it at a at a rapid pace, and YouTube is still still growing, right? It'll be it could be as big a company as Google, if it's it's a standalone company.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

It's the second, it's the second biggest search engine, right? As uh as you probably heard about, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So seems like you're you're in that inflection point, but this um you have this larger uh target audience you're serving, the prosumer to a enterprise buyer. How as a leader are you able to serve this vast majority of needs from a product perspective?

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Yeah, that's gonna be the the highest challenge, and and that's what we're gonna be kind of because you you can't you can't be everything to everyone, and uh and that will be the the thing. So so we are picking our ICPs very carefully. We are we're saying, you know, hey, there are these two or three ICPs that we want to serve really well. Uh the the marketer, the educator, uh, and uh and the internal communication person. And and we are um if we get those three ICPs right, and if we get their use cases right, uh we're gonna we're gonna have an entry into the enterprises, and we'll have a right to kind of play in a bigger space. Great.

SPEAKER_04 42:43

Vikram, thank you very much for your time. I uh really think that uh everybody out there should uh think of starting companies for a midlife crisis like you did. And you and you're proving one thing that uh age is but a number. You're starting a company when you could just be golfing or you know, doing something else, but you're saying, especially after your successful exit. So that's yeah, I think is the most inspiring part of uh uh part of your journey, but whether it be with wind shuttle or pictory, it's uh it's incredible, and I'm glad that you're in Seattle and adding to our ecosystem and uh of entrepreneurs and growing it. Thank you very much, Vikram.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Thank you, Gori. And I'm I'm really excited to be part of Thai and and however I can support it. I'm I'm the charter member and I'm happy to support entrepreneurs in the community and and help out any which way.

SPEAKER_04 43:39

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Shares.

SPEAKER_02 43:43

Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_04 43:47

Thank you for listening to our podcast from Startup to Exit, brought to you by Dai Seattle. Assisting in production today are Isha Jain and Mini Varba. Please subscribe to our podcast and rate our podcast. podcast wherever you listen to them. Hope you enjoyed it.