Introducing Vikram Chalana, Co-founder and CEO of Pictory

Sara:

I'm Sara Lindquist from Fuse. We're an early-stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability, more of everything. And we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio companies in the Fuse family to date.

Today, you'll hear from Vikram Chalana, Co-founder and CEO of Pictory. Join us as we discuss the making of the product, the team's journey thus far, and why Pictory can turn anyone into a video editing pro in minutes. 

Let's get started!

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Sara:

Well I appreciate you taking the time to be here, Vikram!

Vikram:

Thanks, Sara. It's awesome to be here.

Sara:

Well, I'm super excited for you to share a bit about your background and your story. So awesome to have you here - and to get started it would be great if you could share a quick overview of what Pictory is and how it serves customers today.

Vikram:

Yeah, absolutely. So Pictory is all about taking long form content, things like blogs, or white papers, or webinar recordings, or podcasts even at some point, and turning them into short videos, because short videos is where all the action is. That's what we all want to see - is short videos, and that's what we're doing.

Sara:

Love it. And when did you first have the conviction that you needed to build Pictory?

Vikram:

It's been in our mind for a long time, even while I was doing my previous startup called Winshuttle. One of the things that I realized is that I was creating so much content, so many white papers and so many blogs that we were creating. And 10 years ago, they used to get a lot of traction. We'd get lots of leads. We would get lots of business from white papers. And then over time, everybody was turning towards video, and video was just very hard for normal souls.

Sara:

You said that kindly, "Normal souls." Us, non-savvy video editors, hah. Yeah!

Vikram:

You have to find the people in capes or with long hair and you have to employ them to make your videos. So we wanted to make that easy for anyone.

Sara:

I love that. It really is bringing the power to any user. And so, can you explain a little bit more about the secret sauce in Pictory AI? Let's say I, Sara, want to go and edit this interview with you. How would I get started?

Vikram:

What you would do is you would load this into Pictory, and there's tons of different AI components in there. So one of the AI components is transcription. So it actually transcribes it all into text. But then the beauty of Pictory is that every word in the transcription is linked to the timestamp. So we know exactly where that exists. So when you are editing that video, you just need to worry about words and text and you just select the parts of the text you want to keep or delete. And that's it. So you don't have to think of timestamps. You don't need to think of waveforms. You don't have to think of any of that stuff. You just have to think of text.

Vikram:

And then there's a lot of other AI around text that is part of our secret sauce, too. For example, we can summarize the text automatically, find the most punchy parts of this podcast, for example. And we can do that automatically. We can summarize blogs; we can summarize white papers. And then for every part of the summary, we can find the right visuals if you want. So, there's a bunch of very interesting AI components that we've brought together in the service of our users, who are basically trying to make short videos.

Sara:

Well, it's really cool. And you've explained this before, but it really does seem in so many use cases, the world is really going towards video, whether social instead of white papers, for e-learning, etc. So the ability to put the power in the hands of any user is awesome. And so, Vikram, in your own words, how would you articulate, "Why is your team the team to do this?"

Vikram:

We worked together in the past. I think that in terms of team, I feel the chemistry is the key. So we worked together in the past. We have a combination of a variety of skills. We have engineers on our team. We have marketers. We have sales people. And some of us act "as all"; I'm an engineer and a sales person-

Sara:

Wearing all the hats!

Vikram:

All the hats. But having the diverse set of skills and having worked together before, you can take and solve any problem. We'd never done video before, but we said, "Hey, we can bring this team together and we can solve a video problem." And it's software. We have to build algorithms. We have to build AI. We have to build all that stuff. And we built it all. We built it all.

And I think coming into a brand-new field, there's two advantages that outsiders have. The two big advantages are you don't know what's impossible. That's the first advantage. So you can take on anything. And second you are coming at it with a sense of humility and learning. Because I don't know this field, I'm going to start at the very bottom and learn it and get better at it. So those two are advantages for outsiders getting into the field. So being outsiders and having a team that has worked together, having a diversity of skills, that makes us a killer team here.

Sara:

Oh, that's great. Well, we certainly believe that you are the team to do it for sure. And I'm curious if you had to sum it up, I mean, you essentially just did, but if you had to pick one word to describe your team's culture, what do you think it is? And maybe it's two!

Vikram:

No, no, actually I have one word for it. I have one word for it and that is “respect”. We all have tremendous respect for each other. That's kind of how we operate and you'll see that in our meetings. You'll see that in our communications. You'll see... Yeah. That's the one word.

Sara:

Well, that's awesome. And that certainly speaks to your leadership Vikram. And it actually ties in nicely to the next question I was going to ask you. So being a leader of a startup comes with its own particular set of challenges. And this certainly isn't your first time down this road, given your time at Winshuttle. So what keeps you going? Perhaps in moments where others maybe would've thrown in the towel, what really keeps you going?

Vikram:

It's the customers and when I see their lives changing.

Sara:

Yeah.

Vikram:

And really them being able to do something they were never able to do before. In our case, many of our customers are small entrepreneurs. This is livelihood for them. And when we see that this is impacting somebody's livelihood and making a difference in their lives, that's what keeps us going. And we get feedback from customers - that keeps us going. Good feedback and bad feedback, both. Because the bad is kind of "okay, our opportunity to improve here".

Sara:

Right. And back to your earlier point about being humble, right? There's always ways to continue shifting and making things better. So that's awesome. Appreciate that. In closing here, one last question for you. What do you need more of right now? How can listeners get involved or help?

Vikram:

Of course, we always need more customers. So go ahead and try Pictory.AI. Try out your next video project with that. And then of course we're constantly adding, we want to add really good people to our team. Right now I'm looking for a head of growth marketing. Then we'll be looking for a usability expert. Then we'll be looking for QA people. So we have a whole pipeline of team building that we need to do over the next few months. And that's what we'd need help on. So get the word out about Pictory and help us get the team members that we need.

Sara:

Awesome. And so where do you recommend people go to find the latest job postings? Should they reach out to you directly? Go on the website?

Vikram:

We will be putting it on our website. Yes. So Pictory.ai is the website and we'll be putting all our job openings there.

Sara:

Well, that sounds great. Vikram, thank you so much. That was really awesome to hear the story from you. And gosh, we're so grateful to be a part of this journey, and help support along the way, and watch you go build a world-class company that you're already well on your way to doing.

Vikram:

Great. Thank you, Sara. It's a pleasure talking to you. This was a lot of fun and we're excited to be joining Fuse as well. The Fuse family.

Sara:

Fuse family, that's right! Right, thanks Vikram.

Vikram:

Awesome.

Sara:

As Vikram said, be sure to try out Pictory for your next video creation needs. And check out job openings directly on the Pictory website, Pictory.ai, or right here on the Fuse website. Thanks for joining! We'll see you on the next one.