Podcast #30: Brightcove, Big City—Talking video with David Mendels
Podcast #30: Brightcove, Big City—Talking video with David Mendels
Our all-video future: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to David Mendels, the CEO of the video-hosting platform Brightcove. They discuss video’s rise and its current dominance on the web, eSports, “snackable video,” Rich’s relationship with his cable bill, and Pokémon GO. (“There’s a Bulbasaur by our bathroom,” Paul says of Postlight’s offices. “That’s our recruiting strategy.”)
Rich: Does Facebook terrify you?
David: No. The great thing, in a self-serving way, about the fact that there is not just Facebook, but Facebook, and there is Twitter, and there’s YouTube, and there’s Snapchat, and the other, is that creates complexity for anybody who wants to reach an audience. And as a software company, we’re here to solve complexity, so it creates an opportunity. If there was only YouTube in the world, or only Facebook in the world, there’d be less complexity. It’d be an easier problem to solve; we would be less valuable.
Rich: I think you could drive a cult. He could lead a cult, I think.
Paul: He’s very —
Rich: The responses are just dead-on and I’m trying, I’m trying to…
Paul: No —
Rich: Get him to sweat a little bit.
David: Can I take that as a compliment — that you don’t think that we are a cult already?
Rich: I don’t think that you are… [laughter] That’d be really interesting if Brightcove was a cult.
Paul: It kind of has a cult name. I mean, you just put a space, “Come to the Bright Cove.”