1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk me through a bit of a use case? For example, I’m just going to use our own video content as proxy. We have a YouTube channel, that is the 1M1M roundtable channel that’s full of entrepreneurship-related content. If I were to use your technology to distribute this content, what are you bringing to me? What is this company bringing to me?

Susan Stone: I’m not sure that you would necessarily want to use this technology because you’re using YouTube. If you’re already distributing on YouTube, you’vea little bit of this already because YouTube has a personalization engine. When somebody watches your video, they’ll give you the thumbnail of who you should watch next.

A good example is one of our early customers – The LA Times. The LA Times had a lot of news videos and some evergreen content. Some of it was brand new news videos and some of it was evergreen content. They would embed an article or a video, someone would be prompted to view it, and they would watch that single video and would probably leave. With this technology embedded in the online video player, that viewer gets served a little tag that says “Up Next” while they’re watching the initial video that they came for.

Sramana Mitra: Your customer in this case is LA Times. You’re basically mining that portfolio of video content and serving up more of what would appeal to a particular viewer.

Susan Stone: Exactly. What we found so exciting about it is, many of these publishers have old videos that they think are old and cold. They’re in the catalog and no one is ever going to want to watch these short-form videos ever again. For example, if somebody is watching a video about Justin Bieber’s birthday and we serve them a year-old interview with Justin Bieber, we know you are a fan. You’ll probably watch it. That’s a video that no one would watch because it’s old in the catalog and we can bubble that back up again. There’re some really neat things that this technology allows publishers to do.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another example of your portfolio.

Susan Stone: Actually, I was thinking for you. As I went through all the work you do in One Million by One Million, I thought you guys need Mighty Network. We invested in a company called Mighty Network based in Palo Alto that is run by Gina Bianchini, one of my favorite entrepreneurs in the world.

Sramana Mitra: I know her.

Susan Stone: So you know Mighty Network. You need a Mighty Network.

Sramana Mitra: I think for the audience you can explain Mighty Network. I think they would find it interesting. I know what it is. Go ahead.

Susan Stone: Mighty Network creates a way for niche brand and niche entrepreneurs to democratize their own entrepreneurship and have an experience in which its software brings your people together. What we found is that, around niche brands, everybody wants to have a conversation. Everybody wants to be able to interact with each other.

So it allows someone like yourself to interact with one to many, with your followers, your fans, your customers. It lets them interact with each other and have their own conversations around the content that you’re generating. So Mighty Networks is a software platform to allow any niche brand take advantage of network effects. We offer a bunch of different tiers. You can try it for free if you’re skeptical or if you just want to check it out.

We have a bunch of different features that you can add including online courses. You can charge for premium content for some of your users. What really attracted me to that business is something that I’ve noticed is embedded in One Million by One Million, which is the democratization of entrepreneurship. As a society, we see entrepreneurship as Silicon Valley venture capital. Everyone needs to be Mark Zuckerberg to be an entrepreneur.

Sramana Mitra: I’m working on solving that problem big-time.

Susan Stone: I know you are. I know you are. So are we at Mighty Network. So is Gina.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Susan Stone of Sierra Wasatch Capital
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