Episode 68 · 8 December 2023 · 38:58

68: Chris Savage: Why Wistia Chose Culture Over Quick Profits

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Welcome and episode preview
intro#podcast #intro #preview
How Wistia started — fun baked in from day one
interview#wistia #startup #founding-story
Realistic goals vs. grand ambition
interview#goals #ambition #mindset
Why culture mattered to Chris from the start
interview#company-culture #leadership #values
The hot air balloon analogy — Al and Leanne on their own dynamic
interview#team-dynamics #analogy #partnership
The word "fun" — how often it came up in conversation
interview#fun #company-culture #values
The story behind the "We're Wistia" page
interview#branding #storytelling #fun
Core values — why fewer is more
interview#core-values #company-culture #simplicity
Wistia's values: staying noble, keeping it simple, making products customers love
interview#wistia #values #product-development
From small company to "you Zoom things"
interview#company-culture #tolerance #accountability
Communication and the all-hands meeting structure
interview#communication #all-hands #meetings
Remote work — Wistia was remote-friendly before COVID
interview#remote-work #wistia #covid
If you don't trust your employees, why did you hire them?
interview#trust #employees #management
Growing world-class talent — you can't hire it, you have to grow it
interview#talent-development #hiring #growth
The HBO deal — and why they walked away
interview#hbo #deal #decision-making
Making hard decisions by consulting core values
interview#core-values #decision-making #leadership
Where to find Chris and Wistia
outro#contact #wistia #resources

Show notes

Why Wistia Chose Culture Over Quick Profits — with Chris Savage

Guest: Chris Savage — co-founder and CEO of Wistia, the video platform that's helped over 400,000 businesses use video to connect with customers.

When HBO came knocking with a deal that would have put Wistia in front of millions, most founders would have signed without blinking. Chris Savage said no. Why? Because it didn't fit the company's core values.

Chris joins Al and Leanne to share the story of how Wistia went from two founders learning to work together to a multimillion-dollar business — without ever compromising on the things that made it fun in the first place. They dig into how setting realistic goals beats grand ambition, why "fun" is a business strategy (not a perk), and the uncomfortable truth that great talent is grown, not hired.

Top 3 Takeaways

Set goals you can actually hit. Chris and Brandon started Wistia with realistic milestones, not moonshots. Slow and steady didn't just win the race — it kept them sane and solvent long enough to build something real.
Culture is a decision-making tool, not a poster. When HBO came calling with a deal that didn't fit Wistia's values, they said no. Core values only work if you use them when it's hard — not just when it's convenient.
World-class talent is grown, not hired. If you want exceptional people, you have to build the environment that develops them. Hiring for "toxic superstars" is a shortcut that costs you more in the long run.

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

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Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.

Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.

Chris SavageNice.

Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Chris SavageYou are what you tolerate, you know, like a culture. You can say all these things, you can write them down, you can do it, but the, the reality on the ground is you have to deliver it. So if you have Toxic people and you don't get rid of them, the signal is it's okay to be toxic. If you're always late to meetings, the signal is you can be late to meetings.

Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to the Truth, Lies, and Workplace Culture podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a business psychologist.

Al ElliottMy name is Al. I'm a business owner.

Leanne ElliottWe are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace culture.

Al ElliottYeah, busy episode this episode. We've got a fair bit to get through. Uh, so just a quick one, we're going for some shorter episodes. Uh, we've asked a few listeners and people have said potentially that an hour and 20 minutes of listening to us is a bit too much. So we're going for around about the 30 to 45 minute mark. Um, give us feedback, tell us if you like it, tell us if it's for you. So today we are joined by the co-founder and CEO of a company I've followed for many, many years. In fact, most of the setup you can't see here because is behind the camera is down to this guy and his team because they have taught me so much about cameras and setup. He studied film at Brown University. He won the Western Fine Arts Award for Excellence in Filmmaking. He started Wistia with his co-founder Brendan Schwartz in their living room, and now Wistia is a multi-million pound company with over 175 employees. In 2018, they turned down an offer to buy the company and instead raised some money and bought out their original angel investors. Uh, he's a documentary maker. He's awarded Top Entrepreneur by Businessweek, New England Entrepreneur of the Year. He has the most badass video setup and the enormously successful podcast Talking Too Loud. It's my genuine pleasure to tell you we have Chris Savage from Wistia on the show. Woo woo! Woo woo!

Leanne ElliottAm I also right in thinking that Talking Too Loud has just joined the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals?

Al ElliottIt has. But also, I, I avoided saying that from, you know, the whole nepo baby thing and the nepotism.

Leanne ElliottOh, this was recorded long before they clearly got—

Al ElliottExactly. Exactly. So they are part of the show, but I didn't want it to look like they were part of the show, and that's why he came on. I just— I was nobody. I just randomly reached out on Twitter and he was like, yep, I'll come on.

Leanne ElliottYes. No, we saw— we saw the value there long before the HubSpot Network did. That's probably not true, and that'll probably get me in trouble, but let's see if they listen. Marie, hi, how are you? So back to Chris, back to Wistia. I remember you telling me about Wistia And I did start doing some research before the interview, and everywhere I have looked, Wistia are talking about workplace culture. Then I listened to the interview that, that Chris did with Al, and it really is evident that this has been— culture has been a conscious decision from the very, very start.

Al ElliottAbsolutely. We're going to start off by talking about how Wistia started. Uh, we've talked about how fun is baked into the culture, why creating values doesn't always work. Uh, how COVID influenced their remote working policy and why they turned down HBO as their 4th client. So let's start at the beginning. How did Wistia start? Here's Chris Savage.

Chris SavageBasically, it was straight outta college. It was, uh, my co-founder Brennan and I had, we met at Brown University, which is in Providence, Rhode Island. And, um, we'd always schemed together. We'd always had a bunch of skee— get rich quick schemes in college that we wanted to do. And, um, partially driven by seeing people around us successfully have some, um, And, uh, it, you know, we thought we then— we saw video changing online in a big way and thought, you know, video is finally here. And so we, we saw YouTube starting to take off in late 2005, and the interesting thing was they did all the encoding for you from any format so it could play back and anyone could see it. And it was very clear that that was different, and we looked into it and it turned out that it was open source tools that they were using to do all that encoding. And that was a light bulb for us. It's like, if they can do it, we can do it. This is going to open up this whole market. And that's what caused us to start. And I won't tell you the whole story about that, but like, I will— but keeping on the, the, uh, get rich quick scheme thinking, we thought we were going to do this for 6 months and then we would sell it. And that was just being utterly naive. And having no idea how businesses work or anything works, uh, because obviously been doing it a lot longer than 6 months. It's been 17 years now. And, um, it turns out that companies take time and that's part of the fun. And that was not what I expected when we started. And that turned out to be very much like where things are, which is great.

Leanne ElliottIf they can do it, we can do it. I love that about Chris. He likes to solve problems, but he's realistic. I, I enjoy that. I think that there are plenty of founders out there who set these huge goals. I mean, I'm not looking at anyone in particular, But yeah, you know, I'm a firm believer in setting smaller achievable goals. I can't remember who said it, but most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10. Chris seems to be a believer in this and started with a pretty conservative goal.

Chris SavageAnd I remember talking to my dad about that and I'm like, Dad, we have these big goals. We're going to try to get $60K a year. He's like, I think you should shoot higher. So, but you know what's funny about that is like I've joked about that many times, but I actually think that having a goal that we actually could achieve, that actually $30K a year meant we would be able to survive and it would cover all our expenses and stuff. And we ended up doing that in a couple years. That was actually helpful. Because it was like a realistic thing. And once you got there, you're like, oh, I can do this. Like, I can do something bigger too. And that's continued to be a pattern that happens. And I, I think it's kind of a very normal entrepreneurial thing. It's like, I don't know how I'll run a million-dollar business. It's like, I don't, then I don't, I don't know how I'll run a $10 million or a $50 million, whatever. Um, and it turns out if you're doing it at $10 million, you can probably do it at $50 million. And, uh, yeah, but it's, it's hard to imagine that at the beginning.

Leanne ElliottI was keen to learn why culture was so important to Chris and Brandon. Turns out, It started pretty early for them.

Chris SavageThe first thing is when we started, it was just the two of us for 2 years and we had to learn how to work with each other. And so we figured out that we should divide up ownership. We should have clear roles over who owns what. I know it sounds simple, but sometimes you don't do that. And there was a period of time when we weren't doing that and that was— it was definitely much harder to be accountable, to know what to work on. And we from the very beginning had this very balanced approach, like he's going to build the product and I am going to market and sell the product and we're going to divide things like that. And then we raised a round of funding, we hired 2 more people and we stayed at 4 people for 2 years. So 4 years in, we're 4 people and it was about 4 years in when we really started to get traction. It was You know, we went from 30 customers to 200 in like three months. Thirty, this is all paying, and we'd made some pricing changes. We'd launched some new features. We'd kind of the marketing we were doing started to connect, and we're like, this is what it's supposed to be. Then, you know, we we hired and we we hired folks, and we were still really careful about how we were spending money. We wanted to be profitable, all this kind of stuff. So it was like five people and six people. It was Probably 6 years in before we really started to hire more quickly. And at that moment, we started asking ourselves this question of like, why are we still doing this?

Leanne ElliottAl, see, see, slow and steady does win the race.

Al ElliottYeah, fair enough. But like, we've always got this analogy of this hot air balloon in that I'm the hot air balloon and without the basket—

Leanne ElliottYou are full of hot air, Al, I'll give you that.

Al ElliottVery good. But without the basket, I'm just basically going to disappear into the atmosphere and burn up. And you're the basket. You make sure that I don't do that. But without me, you'd still be on the ground having a picnic.

Leanne ElliottOh, absolutely. I would, I would not be self-employed, let alone have a business without you. It wouldn't, wouldn't even be a thing.

Al ElliottAnd I'd have gone bankrupt yet again.

Leanne ElliottMultiple times.

Chris SavageYeah.

Leanne ElliottI mean, in our, in our RX7 blueprint, which is all about the foundation, 7 foundations of amazing workplace cultures, one of those, and one of the most important of those, is role. Understanding what your role is in the business. As Al said, He's the, he's the, the dreamer. I'm the grounder, and both are needed to, to get the balloon up in the air and keep it there sustainably. It pleases me to hear that Chris also took this very seriously.

Al ElliottOver the hour that Chris and I talked, the recurring keyword that came up was fun. And in fact, I did a quick count and he used the word fun 17 times in the hour, whereas the word revenue he used 3 times. It turns out when you enjoy your work, it's so much easier to build a great workplace.

Chris SavageIt just put the idea of culture in our minds really early of like, hey, the work itself is actually fun. And so we're not burning out, we're not getting tired of it. It's that we really love working with these people. We love this kind of having a total blank slate on how you're gonna solve a problem and really being willing to like, to solve it from first principles and That was just so exciting and so invigorating. And so we started thinking about culture really then and started to write it down and think about it then. And, you know, once we had that as a North Star, it was helpful. And the, and the other thing that happened was around that same time, so about 6 years in, is when we started to make videos to showcase our culture as a part of our marketing. And none of this was intentional. It's basically all by accident. It was Let's make some fun videos too so we can show our parents like what we're up to kind of a thing. The videos take off. There's no content in it that has anything to do with our product, but it gets us a bunch of traffic and people come and sign up for the product. And it was this weird lesson in brand and this weird lesson in marketing. And we realized the more we are authentic, the more we let people connect with us as individuals, the more we showcased like what was working and often what wasn't working or things that we had just learned or whatever. The more things seemed to resonate. And so it became this idea of for our marketing to be good, we have to put our culture center stage, and that means our culture has to be real. That was like the driving force, I think, behind it. But, um, the actual learning was just like anything— experimentation. We got a ton of stuff wrong, tons and tons of stuff, uh, that we thought we were, you know, so smart about and just so innovative, and it was just disastrous. But eventually we found our way to, you know, a lot of the tried and true things that you need to do and some different things. And yeah, it's just a— I honestly, we're still learning. Like they're still evolving, we're still growing and it's, it's not a journey that ends. And I think that's actually what makes it fun.

Leanne ElliottChris shared a great story that sums up this idea of fun and actually turned out to be one of the best things they ever did for growth.

Chris SavageThat page is actually a good, a good example of something that was like, we did that purely for our own joy. It was someone's birthday on the team. There were 6 of us. We took photos of us, put it on the website, and we did a serious version, which is the one we thought we'd share. And then we did 2 silly versions. And my co-founder Brennan thought it'd be funny to put an Easter egg where if you typed dance, it would do this ran— it would randomly show the different photos of everyone, make it look like we're dancing to play music. And that was for the birthday of someone on the team. It was just a little joke he did. It took like 10 minutes to do and it went viral. And it was the least professional thing we'd ever done. It got us the most customers up till that point of anything. And so when that starts happening, you really start questioning everything. You're like, this is the opposite of what I thought. I thought we were supposed to be super professional B2B thing. And this authenticity and this realness and this willingness to take a risk, people could sense it and feel it. And that's what they were attracted to.

Al ElliottI think a lot of people, particularly when they start out first in business, they worry about how they're going to be perceived. They dress up in Borrowed suits to sell to people they don't even like, really. And that comes across as really inauthentic. Instead of trying to be someone you are not, why not identify the core values of you and your founders and your core team and build a culture around that? But be careful when you present these core values, it can actually backfire.

Chris SavageIt was definitely that year that we did it, and I'm, I'm kind of remembering, I think we'd gone from maybe 6 people to 9 people that year, and I remember showing it. To the team. We're like, do you have other things we should add on to this? And, uh, designer on the team was like, what are you guys doing? Like, what the hell is this? Like, are we like some big company now? Is that what I just joined? I thought I was joining a startup. I'm like, no, listen, I think this stuff matters. Um, yeah, and I, I think the things we got wrong in that first iteration of the, of the values was too many. Couldn't remember them, couldn't actually help you with decision-making. They weren't all unique. Some things you'd want to be true at any company versus the way we think about values now, which is you want values that help you make a decision and you want values that are uniquely Wistia where our values could be used. You could take the opposite of them and they would be good for another company with a different strategy that that you need strong values and I think you need to say what they're not too and so. We've been through a few iterations. I could go on a whole thing on values if you want, but yeah, I've learned a lot over the years because it really is— let me put it this way— values and how you make decisions are really the representation of your culture. So what you praise, what you punish, what you promote for, what you fire for, all those things, the decisions that people make. And culture is how you enact strategy.

Al ElliottThere are so many examples of how products and services grew from core values. About 10, 15 years ago, there was that cool advert from the Dollar Shave Club, um, where I think they were saying, stop paying for shaving tech you don't use. What was the other line? They said something like, um, your granddad had one blade and polio, you know. But the whole point of that, the core value of that was baked into the name Dollar Shave Club. That, that was the idea behind it. And also the idea obviously was fun. Now, obviously, they went on to sell for, what, $1 billion to Gillette or something like that? But the lesson stands. Core values, keep them simple.

Leanne ElliottYeah, key in the word core, I think. You know, you shouldn't have 10 core values, not so core anymore. So, it is the same when it works in terms of product values, in terms of culture values, building cultures. Every employee at every level of your company should be able to recite, or at least, at the very least, name your core values and giving you an example of what that looks like in action without having to look at a fancy chart in the foyer. It does come down to the idea that how you do something is how you do everything.

Chris SavageWe focus on the core of the problems we're trying to solve. There are some places that will sacrifice simplicity for revenue, often enterprise. You know, that's, that's often the name of the game is like, you're gonna add more features, you're gonna make sure your checklist has every single thing on it. It's not just about simplicity. It's it might be about like getting the RFP done, and so you know you would want different values in a culture. I'm not saying they're bad actually for that business. If you said only keep it simple, it might be the opposite of what you want in enterprise. But you you want it to match back to the behaviors look you're looking for people to actually have and do in the business. Another one for us is stay nimble. We take action even when things are ambiguous. We pivot fast and we find a better approach or new information. That's a value because we're launching a lot of new things. We're trying a lot of new things. There's a lot of parts within Wistia that are like startups. We need people to be willing to throw out the thing they just did if it didn't work. We need them to be willing to try again and change or what have you. And if we weren't in a space that was changing so much, we might not want that because sometimes you have the right thing. And if you're too nimble, you can break everything and break all the systems and things stop working. And so I'm just a really big believer, you need the values that are matched to your company and you need your values that are also matched to the strategy that you're enacting. So if you change your strategy, you need to change your values, um, or change your customer segment, same thing is going to happen. You're going to need to look at like, how does this impact how people should be making decisions day to day?

Leanne ElliottStaying noble, keeping it simple, and making a product that customers Love. These are Wistia's values, and they make decisions so simple, even when the decision is to rip up 6 months of hard work and start again.

Chris SavageAnd the last year for Wistia, we launched a webinar platform, we launched an editor natively into the product, and we launched recording natively into Wistia. If you know Wistia, you know we've had an external recorder Soapbox, but we're building a better version into the core product. And so it's all in one. So you can get in there, you can upload a video, you can record a bumper, you can edit it, you can change all that stuff. You can do a live event and have it pump into your account, all that kind of stuff. Well, when we launched the recording product, we decided to make a separate part of the app called the Studio. And the reason was so you could have all your unfinished recordings in one place. And then it would be charged differently. So you have unlimited unfinished recordings. But if you add more videos in the Wistia where you pay more, then, you know, you're only adding finished videos in and so you'll pay more. And the team was trying to balance what's right for the customer. They're trying to make it simple, all these things. They're trying to stay nimble. They're trying to get this to move. Well, lots of people start using this feature. They like it, but they are actually confused because the studio, why are videos in the studio different than videos just in the rest of your account? This feels weird. Why are there recordings? It's created too much confusion. It's not simple enough. So they're like, all right, staying nimble. They very quickly— this thing has been out there for like 4 months— they're like, we're gonna change all of that. We're switching it so that goes directly into the account. We're willing to kill the thing, a bunch of parts of what we just made, but we have the new stuff that's going to make it even simpler and better. It's gonna be a better customer experience. Um, we're making a hard pivot. We're admitting we're wrong on this thing, and it's just happening. To me, I look at that and it's like the other values we didn't talk about are like Take ownership and descriptions, but I look at living our values. This is living our values. This example, and it's that the organization is doing this by themselves. They're making these calls. They're figuring it out, and I have a million examples like that. It's just everything everywhere I look—the things that are built, the messages that are going out to customer, how we treat customers when it's a hard situation—all this stuff is very much just like you can go back and you can see it's tied directly. the core values.

Al ElliottOf course it's hard, but if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. When was the last time you used Skype? I know that's a word I haven't heard for a little while. If you have, you'll find out that it's buggy, it's laggy, it's— the UI is just not cool. And you compare it to Zoom. Zoom's just like point, click, done, chat. You know, it's just so simple. Microsoft didn't seem to have the balls to rip up Skype at the beginning of the pandemic. Fair enough. They might not have known it was gonna go on for so long, but Zoom, Well, look where they've come from, from a smallish company to now you talk about as a verb, you Zoom things. Now, I'm not saying the culture at Microsoft is bad, but I do know that Chris strongly believes that your culture dictates everything you do.

Chris SavageYou are what you tolerate, you know, like a culture. You can say all these things, you can write them down, you can do it, but the reality on the ground is you have to deliver it. So if you have toxic people and you don't get rid of them, the signal is it's okay to be toxic. If you're always late to meetings, the signal is you can be late to meetings. Like, if you don't treat people well, uh, when things are good and when things are bad, like, people notice. And so we have just always tried to optimize for doing the right thing and doing the right long-term thing. And I, I think that's why hopefully it shows up like that. And it's worth saying, like, you know, I— it's not me. It is, it is the whole team. It's the senior management team. It's the directors. It's, you know, it's the new employees who come in, they get excited, they want to defend and build a culture too. And that, that's the only reason why I think it shows up like that.

Leanne ElliottOn to my favorite subject, managers. Great managers and leaders not only know how to communicate well, but they also have a good grasp on where they're going. Having a clear destination makes it easy for their teams to follow.

Chris SavageCommunication is what matters. You gotta communicate. A lot. And if you were to look at our all-hands meetings, you would see that the first 50%, we do them once a month. That's like a kind of leadership-led all-hands meeting. Do once a month, that's, uh, employee-led. Anyone can get up and talk about anything. But the leadership one, the 50% of it at least is exactly the same every time. It's like, here's our strategy, this is why we're doing what we're doing, here are our goals, here's how we're doing against our goals, here's the next level of our goals on everything, here's what— how we're doing against them. This is what's working. This is what's not. And we repeat over and over and over. So honestly, I think it's kind of boring. Like, I think if you're in every one of these meetings, you're like, I get it. Like, I get what we're trying to do. But that's actually the goal, is to make it such that it's so clear that people really get what it is we're trying to do, that then in their world, they have freedom to actually make decisions. They can feel confident that they're doing it in a way that aligns back up to the strategy and what we're trying to accomplish. And I think That's something that has been a big lesson for me in like the last 5 years where I used to think that leading was about charisma and like telling stories during all hands and, you know, telling anecdotes and stuff. And of course there's stuff like that in there, but it is actually the actions that you're taking to get people aligned and to learn.

Leanne ElliottNo founder story would be complete without finding out how they dealt with the pandemic. But even before COVID Wistia embraced remote working and included remote workers wherever they could.

Chris SavageWe had become very remote-friendly before COVID We'd hired our first maybe 5 employees fully remote, and we were getting a lot of pressure, especially from our engineering team, to go remote. So maybe 10% of the company was remote before COVID and that was working for us. So what that meant is when we did an in-person all-hands, we would always have a mic in the crowd, and we wouldn't take a question from somebody unless they spoke into the mic so people remotely could hear the question. We would ask the remote folks, like, do you have questions and stuff like that? But I think the thing that's so different about now is, and this is what feels very, really weird, is we have incredible people all over the place. And a lot of them, you know, one of our biggest challenges so far was convincing people to move to Boston. And even though Boston's a great city, it's expensive. And, you know, it was, if someone's going to move to a city, it's like, why Boston? Why not New York? And, you know, it was just like, it was always like this hard friction point that's I was talking to a guy called Rory Sutherland yesterday who's from Ogilvy.

Al ElliottHe's fairly high up.

Leanne ElliottFairly high up. Freaking name drop, Al. Is he not the chair?

Al ElliottHe is the chairman. Uh, really interesting guy.

Leanne ElliottI was talking to Rory yesterday.

Al ElliottYou know, me and Rory, we chat all the time. He often rings me up for advice. And I think that if you are listening, Rory, that was a joke. Uh, please, can I talk to you again? Lawyers.

Leanne ElliottStand down.

Al ElliottBut he was saying something quite interesting. He was saying that the return to office message, it might be coming from the actual property owners themselves because they're actually, let's be honest, shitting themselves that if people don't go back to the office, then they will lose all their tenants. The message they seem to be peddling is that if people aren't in your office, then you don't know what they're doing. How can you check they're doing all the right work? Chris totally disagrees with this.

Chris SavageWe actually never used our office as a way to micromanage, at least I I hope that managers never did that, but it was never about like, are you here at this time? Are you doing this work? I'm watching you do this work. I don't think that's a good way to get really talented people doing great stuff. Like, if that's what you're resorting to, I feel bad, like, for you and for the employee because that's like, that can be a rough way to go. So we've gotten really clear on the goals and outcomes, which gives people the freedom to actually figure out how they want to solve the problems themselves, which I think is really important. The best remote companies do a bunch of stuff in person, and they will tell you, you know, my friends at Help Scout or CustomerIO, which have been remote forever, very strong cultures. COVID was really hard because they couldn't see people. And, you know, so for us, we've tried to say like, what are the things that, that we really should get people together in person for? So for us, we do these 3 times a year. We call them triannual business reviews, and we get basically the directors on up. It's about 40 people get together in person. We spend a couple days going through how things just went and what we're going to do next. And we do all-company retreats a couple times a year. We've done them at the office. We're taking the company to Austin, Texas next month. The whole point of this is like we could do that stuff remote, but these long meetings are easier in person. You build more trust in person. It's easier to have a back-and-forth conversation. It's easier to have that little moment after, uh, like a hard conversation, be like, hey, are we good? Did— or does that make sense what I'm saying? Or like the clarifications, the hallway talk, and that permission and that trust you build in person makes it easier to actually have that trust remotely. And then we also have found that if you want to connect online, you need to use online-first tools, at least for us. And I don't know how many other people do the same thing. We had all these events and stuff we did in person, We tried to translate them all online and they sucked. They were really boring.

Leanne ElliottI think that can really be summed up by, if you don't trust your employees, why did you hire them in the first place? This is key and why hybrid has the potential to be an ideal solution, so long as we're intentional about what can be done remotely and what has to be done in person and why. But also, let's not forget our lovely and sometimes lonely Gen Z, where most of them have only been at work for about 6 years and 3 of them were forced to work from home. They may be craving in-office working for social reasons.

Chris SavageIt's funny, we have teams at Wistia who they work remotely most of the time, and then I'll see them come into the office. I'll have it be there. They'll come into the office, you know, like 4 o'clock, and they'll work together for 2 hours, they'll go get dinner. And it's like part of— it's the social aspect is the reason why they're doing it. So yeah, but it's— it is very universally understood now in a way that it wasn't before. So I think it's— you're making a trade-off in either direction. If you are in person, you know what you're giving up, and if you're remote, you know what you're not getting.

Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number one management podcast— that's us, by the way— and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?

Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.

Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)And 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good looking.

Al ElliottAnd you're not gonna say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s—

Leanne Elliottthe HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Seamless, seamless.

Al ElliottTell us about your latest episode, Phil.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Uh, we've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff, and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.

Leanne ElliottIt is, it's such, it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that will be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)It can.

Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?

Al ElliottI am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

Leanne ElliottBut come back.

Al ElliottYeah, come back.

midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge)Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back. I'll cut that out.

Chris SavageKeep that in.

Leanne ElliottOkay, on to my second favourite subject, recruitment. I've talked about toxic superstars on the podcast before, and it's true, having a room full of superstars is not always the best idea. But Chris has a great strategy for having an office full of world-class talent who aren't subject to the superstar effect.

Chris SavageIf you want world-class talent, you have to grow it. It's almost impossible to hire because if you have world-class talent in a company, they usually know it and they compensate those people such that you can't hire them. Or if they leave, they do their own thing. So you have to take risks on people. And this is not just for me. I've learned from other people and read and watched a lot of stuff. Peter Chernin, who worked with Barry Diller for a long time, did a great interview once just about this that you should search for and find. But I think what that means, you might have world-class talent in your business. You might be world-class talent. You might have leaders who are world-class talent. You might have a new employee who is world-class. They just don't know it yet. You don't know it yet either. To figure it out, you have to give them bigger and bigger opportunities. And you have to push them and yourself to give feedback and like correct and try to see if if they can grow to the level that you want them to grow to. And I think a really common pitfall that we've certainly fallen into at different periods of time, really try to avoid now is when you're hiring someone very senior. The people who at least who I've seen who end up being world class are people who there's something about the opportunity. that they're going to have to grow into as well. And usually if you could find that, that's what gets the A-players, like they're looking for really hard challenges. That's what gets them motivated and excited is like that extra challenge. It also, the thing you want to look for when hiring any, I think any manager, any senior manager is, is this person, can this person be both a great manager, but can they also be truly great At being an IC for the job, individual contributor. The longer that people have been in management roles, the easier it is to talk the talk and not actually know what it takes on the ground to do great work. And you don't want your managers just doing individual contributor work all the time, but every once in a while they're going to need to do it. They're going to need to, you know, get next to the troops and like fight through something really hard and figure something out. And if you could find someone who's really great act that, you get both. You get like inspiring confidence on the ground, you get inspiring confidence by leading, you get someone who understands when they're taking on a project what it really means to the team in terms of like how complex it is, how hard it is, what the pitfalls are going to be. And so those are just 2 things I think, like thinking about how you grow the talent and then also thinking about the raw elements that you look for, because the things— this is one of the easiest things to screw up in your business as you're scaling. is to hire the wrong person. And you're never going to get 100% right. But at least for me, these things have really helped push to a place where I look around, I'm like, man, there's world-class talent everywhere. It's like incredible. But you need people who can be autonomous, who are going to overcommunicate when there's a problem or raise the flag when there's an issue. People are going to think outside the box. People are going to push you to great things. And if you want to hire adults, you need to treat them like adults. And that means, again, more trust.

Al ElliottSo let's spin back to 2007-ish. It's about a year into Wistia. Chris and Brandon got the opportunity to pitch for HBO. If you've not heard of HBO, you've almost certainly watched something they produce. Sopranos, Sex and the City, um, the one with your man who does the drug dealing in Mexico. You know, they do everything. You know the one. You know the one. So surely that's a no-brainer to take them on as a huge client.

Chris SavageThis is how crazy things are. At the time, I thought things were going so slowly. We're a year into the company, or maybe 15 months in. Took us a year to get our first customer, like 3 pivots in that first year, but we got them. They're using us for back then private video sharing and like media management. And we get one customer one month, we get a second one the second month. I'm thinking this is taking forever. And in hindsight, I'm like, actually, that was not so bad. But we get introduced to HBO, and they were looking for somebody to manage all the dailies for them. So they're, you know, the dailies, everything that's being shot that's before it's been edited, right? And I couldn't believe that this was happening. I was in complete shock. So we set up— HBO is like account like number 4 in Wistia. You set up an account for them and they start uploading footage from behind the scenes of Sopranos that no one's ever seen. And like, we're like, this is crazy. And we ended up, you know, going out to LA and like really pitching the deal and we're working with an intermediary from a talent agent that brought the deal to us. It's such a long story, so just that's the part that matters. And they— we were ready to charge them, you know, I can't remember what the price was. Like, we made up some price. It was like $15,000 a month or something like that. That's what Brendan and I would charge HBO. And the guy we're talking to is like, no, no, no, no, no, this is— and it just makes up all this other stuff. The intermediary comes up with a price that's like $750,000 a year to start. And we went in there and pitched them and they're like, yeah, this looks good. And, you know, went out to some crazy dinner after and there's like Hollywood hugs from the talent agent. And I'm like seeing celebrities when we're at dinner. It's so bizarro, you know, to go from toiling away and 4 months later this is happening. We started to ask ourselves the question like, well, if we get this deal with HBO, they're going to want us to move to LA and we're going to have to. Because they, while our thing was already SaaS, it was like SaaS basically barely when SaaS was called SaaS, like software as a service. They want to, they're gonna want like an on-premise version of this thing. So we're gonna have to figure out how to do that. Remember, we're 2 people. We're like, okay, we're gonna have to move out there. We have to do this on-premise thing. We're like, how big is this market? If this is the whole HBO deal for all of HBO, like how big is this market? We're like, Is this like an $8 million market total? Like, what is this? We couldn't really fathom how big the market was. It didn't seem like it was going to be that big, really. And I think maybe also because of my experience doing film and video and knowing all these like niche providers in that space, it just kind of felt like that's where we're going to end up. So we were looking at, should we do this or not? And we basically convinced ourselves if we did, that'd be the only thing we could do. Because we also wouldn't want to let them down. We really were—we were good boys, and we didn't want to screw over a customer. That's like the last—we just would—we would want to uphold any commitment that we got. And so, if we said we're going to do this, we're going to do it. And we decided that that was like too small for us, and didn't make—we didn't want this whole entrepreneurial journey just to be that, just to be dailies for the studios. And so. We decided we would say no to them, um, and just back out of the deal.

Leanne ElliottHere's what makes my psychology soul sing. A difficult decision was made by consulting their core values. This is like a true, real example of putting your people first, even before your customers, even before HBO. But the issue was at the time they'd raised funding from angel investors based on HBO being a client. Was this going to wreck the deal?

Chris SavageThe initial pitch to the angel investors was like, here's our first customers. We have Nestlé and we have this billion-dollar telecommunications company and we have PBS and we're talking HBO and I'm talking to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And before the round closed, we're like, we went back to the investors like, hey, I know we told you there's this big deal. We've decided not to do it. And I remember the feeling when we told them and I was like terrified, like they're going to think we're idiots. They're going to think we're so stupid for doing this. And I— and the first investor we told, I remember him saying like, hmm, really? Okay. And then just like went forward and we like did the deal, we raised the money. And then later he's like, that was— that was what I thought was a good sign, is that you had the confidence that you knew you did what you didn't want to do and you wanted to do this other thing. And maybe we were just crazy enough. I don't know. But yeah, it was— it was a very weird, wild experience and Ended up working out, so no complaints.

Al ElliottWhat a story. And I bet now with 375,000+ customers and household names like Zendesk and Mailchimp, turning down the HBO deal doesn't seem like such a bad thing after all.

Leanne ElliottYes. What a company. What a guy. They have so many great sections as well on their website when it comes to people and culture. They have a whole section on DEI. They have a Better Workplace series with the VP of People and the most beautifully designed core values page.

Al ElliottSo to learn more about Chris and Brendan and Wistia, go to wistia.com. If you loved his story, his way of presenting things, his excitement about stuff, then go and search for Talking Too Loud, which is his podcast he does with Sylvie. Um, really great podcast, lots of interesting people, and obviously now part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Leanne ElliottHey, network buddy! Join us next week. We are talking about— we're Talking about the perils of stress, Christmas, and how to manage that, we are bringing you a special 2-part episode series talking about individual wellbeing and how you can build your mental fitness over Christmas so you don't end up poking your Uncle Kevin in the eye.

Al ElliottUncle Kevin's a knob.

Leanne ElliottHe really is.

Al ElliottOkay, see you next week.

Leanne ElliottBye. Oh, don't forget to subscribe, do your things, click, you know, by now, leave a review. 5 stars, thanks. I've got a right itchy nose.

Al ElliottYeah, maybe you got boogies.

Leanne ElliottMaybe, you know. Anyway, on to my—

Al ElliottI hear you. Preach, sister.

Leanne ElliottYou weren't listening.

Al ElliottNo, I wasn't. I was just correcting a little note I saw coming up that we could do better.

Leanne ElliottYou can, uh, well, you can take that out because I knocked the microphone with my massive chin.

Al ElliottI wish I had a chin. Now, what I'm not necessarily saying here is that the culture at Microsoft is bad. I'm not. But it does mean that I don't know what I'm talking about.