Making videos is easy, but doing it effectively isn’t. That’s where Wistia comes in. Their end-to-end platform gives businesses the tools they need to create, host, share, and analyze their videos and webinars all in one place.
Carlie Smith, VP of People, shares details on Wistia and what it’s like to work there.
We discuss:
- Details on Wistia
- Customer examples
- The Latest at Wistia
- The culture at Wistia
- Why now is an ideal time to join Wistia
Video Transcript
Carly, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you, Keith and VentureFizz for having me today. Carly, I’m so excited to talk to you about Wistia, which is one of the anchor tech companies in the Boston tech scene. So, for anyone that’s not familiar with Wistia, what does the company do?
Wistia is a video marketing platform. With us, you can easily create professional videos, you can host webinars, you can organize and sort of market your videos. And then, very, very important, you can measure the performance of the videos. So we have an analytics platform that allows you to actually see the ROI of the content that you’re putting out there. So basically Wistia is that video marketing platform where you can do everything in one place.
And it’s a very powerful platform. So you deal with a very broad customer base, right?
We do. So our focus is on B2B businesses—could be SMB, could be larger than that. So anyone in a B2B business seat can definitely use Wistia as a platform.
So what’s the latest at Wistia that people should know about?
Let’s see. There’s a few things I’m excited about product-wise.
First, we built and launched our webinar platform that I just mentioned late last year. We essentially see webinars as an extension of the video platform and have really been focused on making webinars simple and easy because sometimes they can be very scary and a lot of work to put on. But also, even more valuable than the webinar in and of itself, is what you can do with that content after the fact. So you can think about cutting it up, clipping it, using it in other valuable ways to help drive ROI from there.
Another thing is dubbing. We rolled out dubbing a little bit earlier this year, and we’re now up to 60 languages. With video growing and becoming bigger and bigger, now you’re able to record all your videos in one language, but you can dub it with voice and lip sync in a high quality way in almost 60 languages now. Very, very exciting to see that. And you’re able to extend the reach of your videos and localize them as well.
Those are very cool from a product standpoint. And then, just generally at Wistia, AI is very big for us right now. We are certain that AI will transform the video industry and how we serve our customers, but also the way that we work at Wistia. Over the last several months, we’ve just been in this exploratory stage with AI and its impacts on the product and how we’re working as it relates to driving more value for the customers and increasing the effectiveness of our team. We started off that with an all-company hackathon where folks were just encouraged to use AI and build whatever they wanted. We have an AI allowance for all of our employees because we want everyone to be very proactively looking for ways that AI can help, and also be able to uplevel the team internally and give them the time and space and resources to learn new skills, because we expect that in the market without AI in the future, particularly in tech, it’s coming. So, we want our team to be able to have that, too.
And then we also just rolled off our annual off-site, which is a very, very cool experience that we have at Wistia. Every year we bring the company together. This year we did it in Denver for a few days of really connection and just kind of having fun and growing together as a team. We do this big event annually. We build deeper connections. We are remote, so we get to see folks in person that we might not see or folks that we work with on an everyday basis. And we really see this investment pay off.
Yeah, I saw the picture on LinkedIn for the company retreat. The whole company was at Red Rocks, which I was very jealous. It’s just something that when I think of Wistia, I think you take culture very serious. The platform has always continued to grow and add more value, but what powers a company is also the culture. And I’ve always, you know, some companies wish they had a great culture, but other companies actually talk the talk and walk the walk.
Yeah. With Wistia, a big focus is making the culture and the employee experience something that’s remarkable. I was reviewing our engagement survey results, and you can see from the feedback that people feel supported, they feel respected, and they feel inspired by other folks at the company. That’s a very, very special place to be, I think. And it’s very intentional at Wistia. We believe that to build the best B2B video marketing platform, we have to have the sort of environment that supports our people, that challenges them in the best of ways, and that also rewards them in that way. And talking about the off-site or other things we do on a regular basis, we are very intentional about building connection and investing in it. And investing a great deal in our people in that way is because we think it will lead to meaningful value, and it’s just frankly the right thing to do. We want to be excited about where we work and who we’re working with. So all those things together definitely make Wistia a special, special place.
Now top tier talent, regardless of market conditions, they always have options in front of them for their career. So why should Wistia be on the radar for job seekers?
I think definitely a couple of reasons. First is the video industry is only growing, and Wistia’s product is well-suited to continue to capture the market. We’re very focused, as you heard, on innovation and bringing creativity. You can see it in the product, you can see it in the brand. So I think that’s like number one in terms of folks looking for places that are going to win and that they can grow.
And then, probably even more important than that, is the culture that we just talked about. It’s really unique. We spend a lot of time thinking through what’s best for our culture, for our employees, for our business, and again, making that work experience one that’s remarkable for every individual. Other things that go into that—we look internally first to grow our teams. We focus on developing our team members. AI is a good example of that—a company that is giving time, space, and resources for our team to be able to uplevel in that way, because we want to be the best business, and AI is going to incorporate that.
And this also shows up frankly just in the culture, but also in our tenure of our employees. We have a pretty high tenure rate. We have a pretty high boomerang rate too, of folks who have left and then come back to Wistia. Just to give you a quick snapshot, about 25% of our team has been here over 5 years, and about 60% of our team has been here over 3 years. And in tech, that’s pretty amazing when you’re typically seeing stints more like two, two-and-a-half years. We’re kind of blowing those numbers away. And those folks aren’t staying stagnant in their roles; they’re growing. So it’s a great place to be. If anyone’s looking for something, please check out our openings. Again, industry, company, and the people—I think those are the three big focuses when looking for something new.
Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Wistia, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings. Go to venturefizz.com/wistia, and you’ll find their job listings there. Carly, thanks so much for taking us through all the details and the latest updates from Wistia.
Thank you so much, Keith, for having me.
