1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting and quite different from a lot of the perspective that we see because there is a huge question mark around the media industry’s evolution. I’m quite involved in a bunch of things. We have at least one partnership with a large media company.

All that aside, I’d like to understand how many investments you have made in this sector with this investment thesis. Could you walk us through what each of those ventures are? I normally would ask for just maybe one or two examples to get a sense or feeling for the thinking.

In the case of the media industry, it would be interesting to see where you see possibilities of sustainable businesses emerging. I’m very interested in working through that with you and bringing that to our audience.

Susan Stone: Absolutely! In this case, the list is not long because part of why we raised a small fund as a proof of concept is because we come from a family office. We really like to get involved with our companies and that has meant bigger checks into fewer companies.

Sramana Mitra: How many companies have you invested in?

Susan Stone: There are five companies in the portfolio.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about those five.

Susan Stone: The first investment that we made was in a company called Iris TV that is an AI machine learning company that ingests video content. It actually ingests the meta data. We don’t actually have to ingest all the video content. That would be ton of ton of data. We ingest just metadata around video and we surface personalized recommendations for publishers of video online and on mobile.

What that means is, it increases engagement in video particularly for these publishers who have owned and operated sites where they will really love to have their video viewed, but instead they’re publishing it on Facebook or YouTube. They’re not actually getting to have that direct connection with their consumer.

I first invested in Iris right before Chad joined me. I made this investment by myself. When I first invested in Iris, I was excited about the personalization and the fact that it increased ad inventory for some publishers of video. They could turn a single visit to their homepage or an article with an embedded video that would have a single video view. If we could serve that viewer contextual videos that made sense to them and that they really wanted to see, they would watch more. That created more ad inventory and supported publishers.

That was the original thesis and why I liked that company so much. That remains true but what it got me thinking about is something much more powerful for that company. It creates a feedback loop between that publisher of video and their consumer that they just didn’t have before. That’s an overarching scene for me within the space.

We have a lot of creators and even publishers and distributors of content that have no idea who’s reading, watching, or listening to their content. That’s a little bit broken. You have Netflix that has all the data in the world. They use it really well. But if you talk to some of these older media companies, they have no idea who goes to see the film, who watches their television show, who reads their article. Iris is the first investment that we made that helps media companies start to solve that problem.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital
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