[CTQ Smartcast] The Future of Video in the Enterprise, with Shridhar Shukla
Shridhar Shukla is a co-founder and Managing Director of kPoint, a business-focused video sharing platform with easy creation, engagement, and analysis.
In this Smartcast with CTQ co-founder J Ramanand, we explore, among other things, the role of videos in learning, engagement, and cultural transformation, the major shifts in the adoption of videos inside organisations and lessons from creating the culture of a product company.
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Some of the other things we spoke about
Shridhar's move from academia to entrepreneurship
How kPoint was born as an incubated idea at GS Lab
Lessons from creating the culture of a product company
Dogfooding products
What leaders need to do to create a culture of sharing inside their teams
What companies can learn from B2C platforms when it comes to video
Making products in India
Enterprises using the power of videos differently
Obstacles for large enterprises in adopting videos
Typical ratio of video consumption to creation in companies
The art of deep engagement with employees
PLUS
Shridhar’s three pieces of advice to his younger self
AND
Resolving the tension between content that educates and content that engages/entertains.
If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like this video on How to get better at video meetings & recordings.
Read the transcript of this episode
[CTQ Smartcast] The Future of Video in the Enterprise, with Shridhar Shukla
[00:00:00]
Ramanand: Today, we have with us, Shridhar Shukla. He's the Co-Founder and Managing Director of kPoint, a business-focused video-sharing platform with easy creation, engagement, and analysis.
Ramanand: Shridhar, welcome to the Smartcast.
Shridhar Shukla: Thank you, Ramanand. It’s great to be talking to you.
Ramanand: Shridhar, let's rewind the clock a little bit. I knew a little bit about you, I was doing some research, and this intrigued me. Before you got into entrepreneurship, and the big bad world of business, you were an academic for a few years. Tell me a little bit about how you left that world behind for entrepreneurship and business.
Shridhar: Sure, Ramanand. Believe it or not, that first job of being a tenure track faculty member at a university was not as academic as one would think a university job is. The simple matter was, they said, look, we have a certain teaching load, you can carry teaching load for 12 months, or you can do the minimum, but for the remaining period, you have to find ways to pay yourself. The minimum load you had to carry was to teach six months, so two quarters of the year, and do research or whatever you want, provided that somebody is picking up your salary tab, and paying the university some tax on top, so that, they're able to provide you with all the support.
The academic job was not like our classical understanding of academics. It was pretty much something that had some entrepreneurial element to it [00:02:00] because you had to go figure out how to get funds for your own time. A lot of universities follow that model in the US at least, and so that helped me right from the word get-go. The shift was very easy.
Ramanand: Okay. Did you have to make a certain number of mindsets, which is, in going the entrepreneurial way? Or were you the kind who in college who would go and organize events? Did that bug bite early?
Shridhar: You know how it goes, right? All kids or all young men and women are asked, what are you going to do eventually? If you go to the US for studies, then people have a couple of more questions added to it. Which is, are you going to come back? Then if you say yes to that, they are going to say what will you do? You give those answers, without any backing to your answers, I used to say yes, I'm going to come back. Then I would also say when I come back, I'll start some business. No thinking to it. This was at the age of 19-20. You don't really think too much before giving answers to certain kinds of questions. It was as straight as that. What will you do when you come back? Coming back became uncertain for some time. In the end, I spent about 13 years outside of India. When that uncertainty was killed, there were a couple of options, maybe three options, since I was a prof., become a prof. Since I had a Ph.D., I could join a [00:04:00] Research Institute or pick up a job, or I could start a business. There were a number of other factors that combined to me deciding to start a business. It was also the economic environment at that time. This was in 1995. That's how, three or four years before I came back, I started thinking that when I come back, I would start some sort of a business and it stayed at some sort. That's it. That was the story behind it.
Ramanand: Okay. If you look back at things, it kind of seems to have worked out for you. If it was 1995, maybe we couldn’t send a video message, we would send a fax because that's 1995. What would you have liked or changed about the way you made that decision? How did you go about that decision making?
Shridhar: Nothing really. Thankfully, what happened was, first of all, both of us, my wife, Gauri, and I, was completely in sync on returning to India. That one usual hurdle to overcome was not there. She was by choice, also a homemaker. Again, that took out another hurdle that, it wasn't a two career shift. Our kids were young enough. That adjustment factor was also taken out. We took one more factor out about being in a strange place that we didn't know. Without any thought, I picked up on it, because even though I had never lived here, she had always lived here. That took out one more factor. What remained was, what I was going to do. If I were to look back and decide what I would change, no, and [00:06:00] this has got some, quote-unquote, operational answers, and some slightly philosophical answers.
The operational answer was, don't worry about equipment when you are coming back to India. Funny, you should say fax, right? I did some preparation about what would it take if I were to come back and start a company. People said, you've got to have a fax machine, in India, without a fax machine, you can't run a business. I took that seriously, and I bought a fax machine, you won't believe it, for $800. When I came back, I really didn't need it, because every corner store had a place to fax. I literally never ended up using it. That's something I would like to change if I were to rewind. On other fronts, I would say, the choice of what I would do, etc. That was pretty straightforward. I would say, I should have thought of a couple of steps beyond the first step that I had to take. That would have just given me a slightly longer perspective, and it would have changed my preparation a little bit. Who worries about something beyond the next step when you're young? I got the next thing done, and I'm done. That is one change I would make.
I would also make yet another change, and this is likely philosophical. Whenever you take that biggest step because the current was still flowing the other way at that time. People were leaving India, there were some who would be coming back, but by and large, the flow was much thicker going the other way. I would say, while I never for a minute, had a doubt about [00:08:00] returning and settling and doing whatever it took here, I would have said for the kind of work I was taking up, I should have believed in what I was doing a lot more than I actually did. That’s what I would change. Remove whatever little self-doubt that I had about what I was doing.
Ramanand: Interesting, because, there is still a lot of flow from our shores to other shores. Do you see this shift in confidence as that something is different? Or do we still somewhere, lack that little bit of confidence when it comes to competition, trust in ourselves, do you see that as having changed?
Shridhar: It is a very personal decision, Ramanand. Whenever it happens, it's extremely difficult to draw any generalization because then it doesn't apply in certain cases. You have counterarguments, etcetera, and there are various factors. I think the biggest factor is if somebody is trying to come back and it doesn't work out, or they don't even execute on it are looking for safety of all kinds. Whenever people have asked me while planning a return, Shridhar, what should I do? You did that, so tell us what we should do. I say, in your life, you're setting out on an adventure and just deal with it like you are doing that again. Beyond that, don't try anything else. You can't really prepare too much when you're going on an adventure. You can certainly take certain precautions, but otherwise, by and large, it is to deal with things as they come. [00:10:00] We were thankfully mentally prepared for that.
Ramanand: Okay. Let's fast forward. Right now, you're part of kPoint. In the last couple of decades, you've seen a lot of and you've kind of gone through your career journey in very interesting ways. Let's talk a little bit about kPoint. Incidentally, you're celebrating 10 years of kPoint. Congratulations to the entire team.
Shridhar: Thank you.
Ramanand: Tell us a little bit about the origins of kPoint. How did that idea emerge? I'm also curious to know while making the decision around kPoint, what are the kinds of things that you wanted to optimize for? What are the things that you learned that you wanted to stay away from?
Shridhar: Sure. It might take a little while to talk about all of this. You're aware that kPoint was incubated in GS Lab, which is a larger product development services company. It is running its 17th year now, whereas kPoint is running its 10th year. 11th, year rather, since we completed 10. Why did we incubate something inside the GS Lab? The reason was pretty simple. We started GS Lab with the objective of building intellectual property, and see what happens with it. That was a founding objective for us at GS Lab. All my colleagues at that time were completely in sync on that particular point. We just went about doing it. The person who actually began kPoint is Atul Narkhede. He had come on board at GS Lab to [00:12:00] develop new technology. He went about doing that. It was not that we just landed on the idea of kPoint, which I must say, has evolved definitely in form and shape, but the core of the idea has not changed.
Ten years ago, we began doing something because we wanted to solve one of our own problems. Why did we think of solving one of our problems? The answer to that is also very grounded and simple. It was that we tried to figure out other big important problems that we should solve and build some cool IP and maybe build a great business on top of it. We first thought of digital rights management. After thinking about it, for some time, we gave it up. We didn't have any individual feel to it. We were learning by doing our market research. Once we gave that up, we said, maybe we can build some authentication technology for public networks. Then we worked on that, and for various reasons, we decided to say we are not going to do that either. There are reasons, very valid, logical reasons we had.
One of the things we had kept in mind is that if we're going to make a change, we're going to make a change quickly. We didn't spend too much time making these two decisions. Then for the third one, we said, we've got to build something where we experience the problem ourselves. What are the problems we experienced? We went through the list, and we landed on this problem that we're always talking to people who are at different locations in different time zones, staying in sync, communicating, [00:14:00], etc., is a little bit of a challenge all the time. the standard way of doing that, if we're just starting out, I remember paying over $100 for one hour of a web meeting from Goto meeting at that time to hold a customer call. We said we would build a web meeting infrastructure, and take an additional step of keeping that meeting recorded. Not just keep it recorded, but make it deeply searchable. That would solve our problem because the next day you could look through it very quickly, and you can refer to it like an item in the library. So we built it. That was how it began. There are several other things that we had in mind at that time that we said until we defined the product-market fit, we will not go to raise venture capital. We still haven't raised it, not because we don't have a product-market fit, but now we don't feel the need to.
Ramanand: Shridhar, prior to kPoint, you spent a lot of time in services kinds of companies. Now you've worked with product companies, some of the best in the world, but let's say that the originating DNA is services. Was that a difficult shift for a lot of people? Or could people make that switch very well? I'm talking about the initial group of people who went to kPoint from the GS Lab. Can you talk to me about that shift?
Shridhar: Sure. First of all, I want to talk about the shift that I went from. It was a very slow shift; it was over many years. It was a very deliberate [00:16:00] and planned shift with a lot of experience. Therefore, since it was always studied as a problem in our minds, we didn't have any challenge there. Of course, there were some things that we didn't do as well as we should have, and some that we did well. That's part of standard learning. Every set of people go through their own unique experiences. For us, there were about 10 or 12 people who went to kPoint from the GS Lab. Eight of them are still around, after 10 years and the 11th year. That was one of the great successes. For us, that is one of the great successes. The reason for that turning out that way was that we didn't mix people. Even though we got incubated in a larger services company, and each person contributed to the other, we never said your primary job is sometimes this and sometimes that. We kept the primary job fixed for people. They shared their knowledge, but they did one thing. The people who went to kPoint from GS Lab, were people who were absolutely hired to do the work we were doing at kPoint. There were no shifts like that. That's why that didn't turn out that way.
Ramanand: Okay. Any other lessons from the shift to services to products that you can think of? In the sense that, culturally [00:18:00] for example, what is a product culture? Like, for a lot of these people who have been in services, are they going to experience a lot of different sets of ways to do appraisals? Can you tell us a little more about how you think in terms of leading services versus leading products?
Shridhar: There are many different aspects of this, Ramanand. In fact, so many that we would consume the whole hour. I will try to be focused on the key ones. First of all, I think most of the people either at a technology company are engineers. Engineers like to be treated in a certain way. What happens is that many times as services companies grow larger, engineers stop being treated like engineers, they start to get treated like quote-unquote, resources. As long as you don't do that, for the engineers, there is no problem. If you're doing outsourced product development, each engineer is anyway working on some product. From the engineer's point of view, there is literally zero difference. Where does the difference arise?
The difference arises in how you manage those engineers. That is different in the case of a business that derives revenue from the time the engineer spends. It could be based on hours, it could be based on months, but it's related to elapsed time, versus the value, the engineer produces in a product company. [00:20:00] An engineer by him or herself cannot produce value. In a product business, there are many other factors that come in such as, the product-market fit, your ability to market, your ability to sell your discipline and product management, your ability to support, ability to document and communicate about the product. These are all as important as building the product. In fact, building the product includes all of them. Whereas in a services business where you get paid for the time of the engineer, even though your customer may want you to think of the product beyond just writing code, it is very difficult for you to do that for the tens of products that you're building in your services company because nobody has that level of product management bandwidth. Plus, you're not in the market, so you don't get that appeal, and therefore you don't take on that responsibility. That's a big difference.
The third biggest difference would be just the risk and reward equation. They're very different in the two setups. It is the management team that has to understand this deeply enough and give the right kind of treatment. Both are very valuable aspects of the tech industry. If you look at it from the customer's point of view, there is no product that doesn't need service, there is no service that doesn't need productization. They are two sides to one coin. From the customer's point of view, if you look at them, then different perspectives emerge. You may make a decision to actually keep providing services instead of building a product. Whereas in the [00:22:00] other case, you may get wiped out because somebody produces a product or the service that you're providing. These are very specific decisions, but, by and large, I talked about the three things.
Ramanand: Reflecting back on my own career, I was a rookie software engineer once. One thing that folks in the services side of things, the advantage, should they choose to take it was that they were much closer to customers. They could get to interact, you got to hone certain skills. There is often a criticism made of engineers in product sort of environments, is that there are a lot of layers between you and the customer. You can live in a bit of an ivory tower of your own. Have you thought about this? Have you tried to do something different in terms of getting that channel of information to your engineers? Is that something that you're very keen on doing?
Shridhar: Yeah, actually, we fix that very easily. I just expose the engineers to deal with support requests, and they get very close to customers. It's a very easy problem to solve. In fact, there is a big difference there. In services outlet, and you are actually right that an engineer in a services business gets to see a lot of angry customers all the time. At least in the early days of a product company, you may not see that, because you know, your product is not yet out the doors. Once you have customers that changes. The reason why a customer in a services business will talk to the engineer is they are directly interested in what the engineer is producing, or what the team is producing. [00:24:00] However, in a product business, the customer talks to you about the product you have. That outlook is completely different. The nature of interaction there is also very different. I think that the difference actually completely changes in what can go wrong in the two cases. In one case you are being compared with, maybe your other colleague in the team who was more productive. In the other case, you're being compared to the best in the class product in the market, that the customer did not choose but chose yours. Then he's saying, what's going on here? Or they have their own demands on your roadmap. I think that the customer interaction bit does get taken away very quickly, depending on how you manage the product.
Ramanand: My final question before moving ahead to another subject, is that in terms of, if I'm an engineer or an engineering manager, what advice do you have for people thinking about their careers in the next five to 10 years, in a product sort of an environment? We have a lot of exposure to career paths in services in India but for say, a career path in products. What advice do you have for young engineers right now?
Shridhar: Well, that's a difficult question, Ramanand. In that sense, we are only a 10-year-old company, pretty young. There are companies that have products that have been around for decades. The first point here is that [00:26:00] don't get too enamored of the technology, understand the customer's problem better than the customer understands. Then produce whatever technology you have for it. That's the first piece of advice.
The second piece of advice is, make sure you are going to use the product yourself. By and large, companies don't do such a good job of it, we included. We are always trying to use a product ourselves, but sometimes we can't use it in the way a customer uses it because of the scale they have, and because of the business they are in. That apart, being forced to use your own product is very important.
The third is, never begin building until you really think of the experience you want to deliver. The user experience is not just the design guys, or UX guy’s job, it is every engineer's job. Every person's job, in fact. Those are the three things I would say. Those are all capabilities, there is no change in title, for example, that may ever happen for you. If you're working for a product company just keep becoming a better and better engineer. Don't look for changes in titles. In fact, great product companies are built by engineers who work on the product forever. There is no change in their daily life, just building the next improved version of the product.
Ramanand: A better version of yourself and a better version of the product is I think how I would put it. Shridhar, let's talk about videos now. 10 years ago, videos were seen as something that belonged to YouTube. [00:28:00] How did you see the shift of video adoption within the enterprise? Tell me a couple of the big use cases that you saw emerging. Then I want to bring you to 2020 and the shift that if it all has had one video adoption. Let's do the first nine years.
Shridhar: I think the big shift or big use case for videos has not really changed. The extent of usage has really changed, and we are only talking B2B. We never looked at consumer video, and you know, the changes that have gone through.
In the B2B setting, videos were always used for (A) marketing and (B) for internal communications, or in general corporate communications, and (C) for training and developing people. I consider knowledge videos or library videos to be a part of this learning and development. These are really the three functions in which video was getting used even at that time, that has not really changed. Early on, when we actually began doing this, we had a format of the video, and that format is today very common. We'll come to that when we talk about 2020. The format that we had was a two-pane. I, as a layperson, could create a two-pane video in which in one pane I would see my own face, and in the other pane, I could see whatever I was sharing. [00:30:00] This actually used to be the format in which the L&D industry would produce their SCORM packages, and they would give it to someone to develop them and pay them. It used to be a very classic L&D content service, may still be.
We automated that. We just made it, like, you connect to our cloud and login, no install, and have a camera and pull down our plugin, and there you go. You can create a video with two panes, and you can have a pointer and you can publish it right away. You didn't have to upload it anywhere. That actually was a real innovation at that time in the market. On top of it, we would make it searchable by looking through the text that the person was sharing on the screen or through the document. That actually used to attract people a lot in the early days. The objections were different. The objections were, who will do that, we don't have experts, people don't like to be on camera, that still is a problem, but it's going down now, and we don't have enough bandwidth. It will take a lot of bandwidth. These were the early objections, but the real challenge we were solving was for a person who knows something to be able to communicate what he or she knows, in an audiovisual form, without seeking external help. That was the solution we will give him. The other solution was, of course, to ingest your web meeting recordings and make that searchable. Both were in a way the same thing. The source was different, but the end-user value was the same. First nine years, I would say doing this [00:32:00] better and better was ready to go.
Ramanand: Did 2020 change this in any particular fashion? Did you see a lot more people turn your videos on, in a sense?
Shridhar: Something changed even before that. We have always been focused on the India market. In 2016, for us, a big event happened, that was Jio was launched across the country. The kind of bandwidth they provided, and the cost at which they provided, and the devices on which they provided it just changed everything. Now, this bandwidth issue went away. That changed things a lot for us, the conversations at sales time changed. People also were much bolder to decide, and because the bandwidth was high, and they were consuming YouTube, like nobody's business, and I don't know if TikTok was around there, but there was TED Talks, and all companies wanted to do their own YouTube, their own TED portal. Suddenly, everything changed in terms of the comfort of having video as a tool to do either marketing or corporate communications or training and development. 2020 took that to another level.
In 2020, what happened is, everybody was doing videos all the time. It was a video conference. The Zoom party came in, and it was just too much. Instead of being in a live meeting all the time, people started preparing on demand, especially when they needed to do it at their own pace, or on their own schedule, or do it again. Those were the changes that took place. In fact, using video became business-critical. Suddenly, in 2020, [00:34:00] you had no options. People couldn't get people into a training room, the town halls were all video, the scale became a problem. All of these changes took place in 2020.
Ramanand: Interesting. You mentioned Jio during 2016, there had been this steady trend of democratization of content. It could be content creation tools, sharing platforms consumption. Going by my own experience, and what we've seen around us, within companies, individuals behave differently. They perhaps are reluctant to create content, they don't see it as part of their business. When it comes to participation by individuals, has that challenge still remained the same? Do you see the ratio of creation to consumption, still not as great as it should be?
Shridhar: It's actually not, you’re right. It is not as great as it should be on average. Okay. Now the reason why it works well in certain companies and does not in others, is that there is a certain culture that every company has. If the sharing culture dominates, then a lot more people create videos. And sharing culture has other benefits too. In some cases, the nature of business is such that there isn't a whole lot people need to share with others. It's like a cookie-cutter, people working business and whatever they need to see can be purchased off the shelf. There is no need to create. In that case, it's a hard time to sell to such companies. More than the reluctance to do video, it is more connected with [00:36:00] how sharing savvy your company is. Before the video, there was text, web pages, and how many people created blogs to share inside the content? It was just the same charade, right? I remember running so many campaigns to get people to write blogs. Not many people wrote because if the culture was not there, they won't do it, you have to do something extra for it.
Ramanand: Since you mentioned dogfooding, is this a problem that you have tackled and solid at kPoint?
Shridhar: I would say it is getting better every day. I'll tell you personally, what I'm doing is, if I see an occasion for doing a knowledge transfer, of whatever time, I create a video. Then I would talk to people about it. You have to set the example; it flows from the top. Now more people do it. Within engineering for tech transfer, they have to do it. We are encouraging sending videos to customers. Sometimes security issues are there and people say don't record anything about me, just talk to me and don't even record it. Those issues are there when you are on the border of a company. Doing it every single time is also not possible, you have to be judicious about when you would create a video versus when you would write an email. There are two challenges with video.
One is on the creation side, and it's getting easier every day. More people create, and sometimes it gets created out of zoom recording like this. The other problem is viewing of the video is still linear. I can go up and down in [00:38:00] a document very quickly or look at the headings. We are also working on a product to solve the linear viewing of a video as a technology problem. We have made some headway on it, but we have not really solved it for the world, we have solved it in certain cases. Therefore, if you create a video where you're better off giving a paragraph or two to the person, then you actually have achieved less than what you could, but you have to be judicious about it. Then whenever it makes sense, create a video.
Ramanand: It sounds almost like you have to adopt a new form of literacy. It's like new media literacy, right? You've got to be savvy about what you chose, when, what context, and for what kind of audience.
Shridhar: Very true. I think the word you used, literacy, is very important because you call a person literate when they can read and write. We go through the entire schooling and college experience improving our reading and writing. Do we do that for video or audiovisual communication? No, it is looked at as a special skill, like public speaking or acting. Whereas now you're starting to use video at work, so maybe there is room to actually train kids and young people to do more video. Viewing a video to learn from is also a skill. There are these various things about using a new medium, effectively for work, which is coming into the workforce. It's not there yet.
Ramanand: That sounds like we're all on stage now. We can't run away from it, but we have to deal with it. Since we briefly talked about reluctance to be on camera, I'm sure [00:40:00] it is difficult for certain leaders to set the tone for example. How do you get the leader to start modeling it? Without naming names, can you think of examples of leaders that you've seen among your client base, who have managed to adapt to this world of being on stage? What are they doing right? How are they overcoming these challenges and these fears? Tell me a little bit about that.
Shridhar: There is only one simple thing, Ramanand. The leader that does not look at his own video does much better than someone who watches his own video. That is a primary problem. No leader has a challenge going in front of a roomful of people and giving them a message or facing tough questions. That's why they've got there.
Now what happens in case of a video is, suddenly someone may start thinking of themselves, now this has to look as good as a movie-caliber video. When they watch it, it doesn't come out like that. Or there are some simple problems to solve, I'll come to them in a minute. The mantra is, you record a video, if you're on camera or if you're doing a piece to camera, don't look at it yourself, let somebody do that and ship it if it meets their standard. If you look at it yourself, you will not like it. Now, things that go wrong, are very simple to fix.
The first thing that goes wrong is, you don't prepare a message, the way you would when you go in front of a roomful of people. You think you can wing it, and then it doesn't come out right. Preparation is important.
To the people who are shooting your video, and if you're doing it yourself, you're not careful enough about lighting. Lighting plays a [00:42:00] huge part. Even more important than lighting, and in fact, the most important part is audio. You have to do that.
The fourth part, which I think doesn't arise if the person has given it a little bit of thought is, our behavior changes when you are talking to someone as against talking to the screen. The extra skill that needs to be developed is learning to talk to the screen as if you're talking to people, that's a little hard to develop. Once you get that, then you're there.
Ramanand: Shridhar, it looks like you've been practicing all of these for a while now. Do you have a checklist? Do you have a certain quota of videos you're doing now? How do you get this practice in?
Shridhar: Well, it takes time. I would say it takes at least six months before you get so comfortable that you will do it in one shot. You have got to get your IT environment ready, then you also need to get comfortable with the content if you're going to show some screen because creating a PowerPoint to ship by itself versus creating a slide deck where you're going to speak to it. These are two different things. You have to get that part, right. The third is just telling yourself that you don't need to view yourself and just let it go out as if you would send an email. That takes some time. It does take time and it requires practice. It's an acquired taste.
Ramanand: Right. I mean, we talk about being learners for life. I think there’s no better opportunity right now for a lot of people and to learn something like this.
Shridhar: Yes. Very true, Ramanand. There is one [00:44:00] factor I've not even touched upon. It is, you may create a video, but what about getting people to watch it? How's that going to happen? Nobody watches a video just because you created it unless you are Shahrukh Khan or you are a Gangnam Psy, the dancer, right? How do you get people to watch your video at work? It's not enough to just create it. It's got to fit in somewhere. It's got to be messaged about. You have to promote it. You have to do something extra. That's half the story, perhaps a little more than half, because otherwise, it's like, a tree fell in the forest. Right? Nobody knew about it. You created a video. When there is a truckload of video and an individual gets a day, nobody notices it. That's a bigger problem. That also is a special skill.
Ramanand: It's almost in the realm of persuasion and influence. You cannot shove it down in someone's face. On that note, I actually wanted to ask, are there lessons from the B2C world, which has been using videos for a long time, and there's been a host of innovation. We briefly talked about TikTok, as well. Do you study these kinds of platforms and try and understand how they could apply to an enterprise world? Or are these worlds so different that there's not a lot of cross-pollination that we can do?
Shridhar: You know, this is a very important question. I don't think I have the answer, because we get both kinds of signals. I have seen customers asking us to produce the ability to create avatars in our videos. They say, if you give me an avatar, then I'll create a video in my avatar, then I'm not worried about how I look on the camera. [00:46:00] These are actual cases where a large global manufacturing company said, we were very effective at doing knowledge transfer because people look the way they were in real life. Others who are viewing the video lapped it up, because they felt like they're talking to a real person, or hearing it from a real person. Exactly opposing viewpoints. We don't know, it depends.
It depends on the company and the style of communication they have there. There are things to be learned from the B2C world, in how well they promote content. They just do a superb job of it. That has to be translated into the business world or video at work if you allow me to call that. There is an angle that comes in, which is not telling the consumer. In the consumer world, I am motivated to go watch the video. Whereas at work, I am there to work, I'm going to watch a video, or I'm going to do anything only if it's going to help my work. Otherwise, I will not do a single thing. Basically, it means that the video that you are going to give to people has to be something that helps them in their work. If it doesn't, it won't get watched. Nobody is there to watch a video, right? Unless they have nothing else to do. That's an angle, which is very sharp at work. That has to be kept in mind. That's not at all there in the consumer world. Creating relevant content, which has the context [00:48:00] the person wants, is the whole key in getting video to get used at work.
Ramanand: Right. I think there's also a relative lack of internal marketing channels. All our channels are output-focused, and the channels that are internal are used for tactical communication, email is an example. When you try and solve these and when you get your product into the enterprise ecosystem, do your clients need help with these sort of behavioral almost psychological issues? For the first time, you've been diluted by content that is so wonderful outside, that you compare it with what's inside, and you say, this doesn't hold up to that. Do you, therefore, have to hold the hand of your client in terms of solving these human problems as well?
Shridhar: That's one of the huge tasks for us every time we make a sale. Now, if we are not able to develop a champion for kPoint for our customers, we don't succeed. It's a given. We know that now, after so many years. We have to work hard on developing those champions. Sometimes there are champions that are already there, and that's why they buy kPoint. Or we have to convert somebody into our champion. Then we have to support them a lot with the programs they would run. How they will report. How do they make a business case for what they're doing. How do we train their users so that more and more people create. All of this is the hard work of getting video adopted in one company at a time.
Ramanand: Right. I want to shift gears towards talking about learning and development, which is another major reason why video gets consumed in the enterprise. This also ties in with increasing a synchronous sort of consumption, on-demand consumption [00:50:00], consumption that when I want to consume and not when you're telling me to consume this. The first question is that, is this truly becoming more mainstream inside enterprises? Or is this something that we think is going to happen?
Shridhar: It is getting there, Ramanand. As I said, video conferencing is an absolute must-have today. No business can live without video conferencing. For larger companies, they're also getting to a stage where they can't live without live streaming of video, just because of the scale. For various reasons, because there is a lot of video content already there, they are also required to have a video on demand. It actually goes in that flow, video conferencing, no brainer. If the company is large, then live streaming is also a no-brainer. On-Demand video takes a little time to get there because people have to realize that not all communication has to happen in a video conference. In fact, some communication is not good to happen in a video conference. We cannot always get people to watch purchased videos, because purchase video does not carry the context for my company, or my role, my job. Somebody in the company has to share what they know. When they realize that, then they start to use kPoint or a product like kPoint. That part about adoption, which is very important, requires this element of realizing what to use when [00:52:00] in the company. We can't push it down their throat.
Ramanand: Therefore, in this environment, what role do you think the L&D team now plays? Earlier it was a matter of getting a bunch of training vendors arranging for training and being the logistical partner in-house in a sense, but now with this shift, is the entire edifice under threat or how should they reinterpret themselves?
Shridhar: Training itself is segmented. I would say, there are three types of training that take place in a company. One is your standard induction training. Either you have campus hire, so new hires, and you have to induct them into the company. That's one. The other is calendar-driven training, which is for the core skills that most of the engineers or most of the people at the company need. So it’s a bank then, there is calendar-driven training.
The third is your customized training or custom training. Custom training is required when the company is on a new initiative or a large new project is being rolled out or when you have a new business client for a being done by the company. In those cases, you need a custom train. Now, the way to fulfill these three is different.
The logistics, procurement-driven training applies to induction and calendar. If somebody tries to apply that, to the custom training, then the chances of success are slightly lower. You may not get somebody to do your kind of context setting. Then it needs to be an expert [00:54:00] in the subject, along with someone who will give context for the company. Then that has to be created, and there your subject matter experts come in. You could get a subject matter expert from outside, but to give the context you need your own business expert or SME. What method you use depends on which one of these three it is.
L&D has a very standard, Kirkpatrick model in which to evaluate the effectiveness of training. I don't know, it's reaction learning behavior and outcomes, something like that. Only the outcomes really relate to the impact on the business. The level three behavior relates to whether the person's behavior changed as a result of the training, but evaluation of the training today in companies is only at the first two levels. One is what was their reaction and what they learned. If you're going to measure it at that level, and still, unfortunately, the bulk of the L&D teams do that, because you're guaranteed to be able to do that. Observing behavior takes time. Business outcomes take even longer. Therefore, certain companies, L&Ds, amongst our customers, for example, have taken the approach of being two facilitators and not providers. They would say, look, we have set up this, depending on you, the business unit, how you behave, you run your train and you run your L&D. In any case, 70% of the training happens on the job. [00:56:00] Some used to do a good job of it, some don't. That's how it goes. There is not a whole lot we can do.
Ramanand: Right? The trend in some newer, smaller companies is not to have a dedicated L&D team. It's partly financial, or sort of a philosophical way of doing it and saying, if you're an employee, I'll give you a budget, do your learning, get your fees reimbursed with us. This calls for an empowered individual taking charge of the learning journey, and so on. Do you think that's ultimately the right thing to do? Or will still you need guides within an organization to tell you where to go?
Shridhar: This depends on the person. By the way, this is not happening only in small companies. Even large companies are now adopting systems called Learning Experience Platforms, which have backend arrangements with Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and LinkedIn learning. There is one place in the company where anybody in the company can go sign up and do the course. Then the company will pay the content vendor directly and maybe give you an award. This is quite common now. Does it really change anything drastically? It simplifies some things for sure. Does it make people great learners in a company? Not really, there were libraries there earlier. Did people go and read books like crazy? No, they did it only when they needed to. That aspect of the necessity to learn something continues to be the most important factor. Again, I would go back to my point earlier that you would learn, when it's necessary for you to learn. I don't go to work to learn, I go to work to get paid. To get my pay, if I have to learn something, great. If all of that is great, [00:58:00] and I want to build my career, I will learn more. I always learn more from people. Going to Google and looking for stuff is going to happen anyway because all the content that is that needs to be there is free. It doesn't cost a whole lot also to buy it from some vendor. I think the real change to happen in a company is whether you encourage sharing inside the company. When people are proactively telling others what they should know, and people who don't know are proactively picking it from others who know and, there is a conversation between people, that's how everybody learns. Technology after the technology wave has come in, but the human process of learning has not really changed. They still learn from people.
Ramanand: Right. There's also this tension between content that is educative and entertaining. I think within our enterprise, it's kind of hard to be very entertaining around very everyday things. How do you see that playing out? In our companies, even getting content creators to kind of make something seem more engaging, and do you think it detracts from the core purpose of a video inside an enterprise?
Shridhar: Yes and no. Sometimes what happens is, you ask a subject matter expert to record some videos. With no people in front of him, his energy is low, he's not really an expert, so he doesn't get the lighting and audio right. The video doesn't come out the way somebody who asked him to create expects. That goes down. Once these little things are taken care of, and the person is given certain support and certain awareness is created. It is not how he performs. It is [01:00:00] what relevance this content has to the person viewing it. That is most important. It's not really about the video. It is a piece of content, be it a document, be it a diagram, be it a picture of the whiteboard. The context I have for it, and its relevance to what I'm working on now, are the two most important factors. Video is just one of the media.
Ramanand: One final question about videos is that we spoke quite a bit about sharing knowledge and sharing culture within an organization. Tell me a little bit about videos as cultural vehicles. We have spoken about engagement; we have spoken about learning. These little moments, especially in a world where all your team is distributed, everyone is different. Have you seen any interesting examples emerge about using this for cultural transmission?
Shridhar: Oh, yes, a lot. In fact, there is one thing about video, still, it's not become passé. It's not become the yesterday media. People are still excited when they say, hey, I'm going to make a video for that. Or somebody is likely to click on communication, which is a video, much more than just text. It's just so much there in the consumer world that they also like to see video at work. That factor is very strong, which is also why we are growing because it's still increasing.
Now, the point that you asked about, are you seeing interesting ways in which this is being used? Is it being used for cultural transformation? Yes, very much. I mean, I can give you a couple of examples. One of our customers ran a 21-day program, [01:02:00] with the video shown through kPoint, but which already existed on YouTube. This was a video of really famous people. Chances are that half the company would have already seen those figures. This particular company ran a 21-day program where some such video link was published through kPoint at 7 am in the morning. When the person is at breakfast, and the type of video was such that the person would like to watch it with the family.
This was pre-pandemic, so people were still meeting each other in the hallway. The leaders in the company would say, hey, did you watch that Steve Jobs’ video we posted today, what do you think of it? Or if there was a company meeting of a certain business unit, then before the meeting, they would play that video. Then they would post data about who's really doing things very well and promoting it further. They did that for 21 days. This was sort of a cultural transformation effort, driven entirely by video. It was very successful, all done on kPoint. However, building that program around it and executing that program was more important than the fact that the video could be uploaded and played, and data could be presented about who watched it. That's one transformation program.
The other one that we had was a war of perspectives. This was at a large oil and natural gas public sector company in India. the first one was at a telecommunications equipment vendor. In this company, they created a war of perspectives program, where everybody had to give their perspective on some issue, create a video post it, and then [01:04:00] it was being viewed by a set of well-respected leaders in the company. They had a culmination event about who’s perspectives got the most votes or something like that. A catchy name, some top-down support for executing the program, and some end event for concluding it. All of these are very important. They're standard in any cultural transformation event or program. Videos were the main centerpiece here.
Ramanand: It’s fascinating because, I think curation is something that we at Choose to Thinq, are very fond of. We do a lot of curation for some of our clients as well as for some of our subscribers. This reminded me of one example where, there was a finale, there was an event that someone had to talk about a future of work in their area. There was this lead up to it where they had to read articles, kind of have discussions, do all that melting pot thinking before that big day.
Shridhar: Yes.
Ramanand: That whole process of curation, that community coming together, talking about it every day, and then presenting it, echoes what you just said. I think it’s a very underrated form of cultural transmission. Interesting. Shridhar, we have about 10 minutes left on the clock, so I just want to ask a couple of questions around, just to kind of recap your experience of making products in India for India. That is another route that you seem to have deliberately taken. If there is a company now starting a product, what should they keep in mind in terms of selling outside India first or starting with India? What are the drivers that they should keep in mind?
Shridhar: Yes. There is a lot of knowledge around this these days, Ramanand. [01:06:00] We are still, I would say, a work in progress. We are not a unicorn yet. We would imagine that to be the ultimate. It would be difficult for me to say something that people don't already know. Even building products in India for India is now very common. A lot of people are doing it; this market is growing. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who want to do things here. Even B2B is very common. Some time back, it was all B2C, but now B2B is also common. What I will do is, I will comment on some common pitfalls that I've seen.
The first one is building the ark, and building the business is highly underrated. The value of that is highly underrated compared to fundraising, valuation, and becoming big. I would say, fundraising, valuations, scaling are critical, but never at the cost of building a business and building an ark. That's one of the points I would like to make.
The second point is, especially for those who are engineers first, okay, and then become entrepreneurs. I would say, build less and communicate more. A very common mistake. There is such a strong tendency, when you talk to customers who say, if you had that we would buy your product, then you actually take them at face value, and build more. Or a competitor comes out with something and starts to do really well and does a big fundraise and you say, I could’ve been that too. [01:08:00] There is some of that, which is true, but by and large, the principle is to build less and communicate more.
The third one is, and this was a hard learning for us. In sales meetings, talk less and listen more. If you are salespeople, then talk more and listen less. You have got to change their behavior. These are three things I would say to people who are going to do product.
Ramanand: I know. Nothing like hard-won, or hard-learned lessons, right? We don't forget them for life. I am curious, did you do something very deliberate with your communication, the ability to go into sales meetings? Is that something that came naturally to you or you had to work really hard at it? What did you do?
Shridhar: I definitely had to work at it. I was so tempted to start talking about what we have done. The minute I felt that the customer needs that, I was so tempted. I had to work at it, I had to work even harder to not make a demonstration in the first place. There is also a little bit about the Indian buyer behavior, especially if you work hard at getting a meeting and the person is not looking for such a product already, then it is a real skill to not do a demonstration, because many times the person says from across the table, you look for this meeting, you came here to sell me something so you show me what you've got. He does not want to talk and then the entire skill is in setting up a meeting in such a way that he talks or in the meeting make him talk which is very hard. You are very likely to get into a [01:10:00] comfort zone where something is going on in a meeting, you are at least showing and the guy is reacting. Many such meetings come to nothing. It needs work to not let this happen.
Ramanand: Very interesting. Shridhar, since we spoke so much about videos, do you have certain video channels that you absolutely love and you take inspiration from in terms of their content or in terms of how they're going about getting people to come and listen to them? Any favorites?
Shridhar: I used to have. First of all, I watch a lot of tennis videos. That's just my personal hobby. If I'm not doing anything, my YouTube recommendation algorithm just shows tennis there for me. Then there are some that my son recommends. I have not particularly subscribed to them. Lately, I've started watching the Atharva channel, about commentary on current events, and those guys do a reasonably good job. Otherwise, whatever comes through on WhatsApp, somebody sends the link, I would click on it and watch it.
Ramanand: I think we've spoken a lot about enterprise video and TikTok, but nothing seems to work. WhatsApp is the new email, right?
Shridhar: Yeah, that's good.
Ramanand: Everyone has it and no one can do without it. We all default to it in the end. Shridhar, we're going to close with a section we call the future relevance of X. I'll give you different Xs and you give me your hot takes on what you think is the future relevance of these. You're allowed to pass but only in the most extreme of circumstances.
Shridhar: Otherwise, what am I supposed to say?
Ramanand: You can just comment on the future relevance of these topics. Let me start [01:12:00] with an easy one. Bicycles.
Shridhar: Highly relevant.
Ramanand: Okay. Do you still have a bicycle?
Shridhar: I ride to work on a bicycle.
Ramanand: Great. Yeah. I think you've been doing it forever, right?
Shridhar: Forever, yes.
Ramanand: In a world where the cities aren't all that bicycle-friendly anymore? How do you see that?
Shridhar: I think we'll get there. We'll start living closer to work.
Ramanand: Okay, great. The future relevance of IT services in India.
Shridhar: Huge. Needs to be fully digitalized. Our lives have to be completely digital.
Ramanand: Is there a danger that there is just too much digitization? We're kind of leaving behind the real for the virtual, those kinds of techno pessimism? Do you subscribe to it?
Shridhar: No. I think that the things that can be automated must be automated. Otherwise, there are other problems. There is, for various reasons, a lot of opposition to automation, just look at the vaccination program going on. The part that is set up for automation, it's just not working, because it's being manipulated in various ways.
Ramanand: Do you have any thoughts on the digital divide? Do you think is real and we should be doing something about addressing it?
Shridhar: Yes, absolutely. I think the pandemic has really helped schools getting digitalized. There are people who are particularly in the poorer sections of the society, they kind of give up when something is not working very quickly. Something has to be done there, so that they [01:14:00] also think that accessing systems, accessing services, getting work done, getting benefits, all have to happen over digital systems, but there will be vested interests who delay that process.
Ramanand: I think videos do have a role to play here as well because you can scale them out a lot better. Hopefully, they'll contribute to it as well. Alright, my last question on future relevance is, we started talking about videos, but we love reading. I have to ask you the future relevance of reading and books according to you.
Shridhar: I'm not so sure, I think it is less. Listening to books is going to be much higher if I were to just go by observing young people around me. They are very visually oriented. They will read on the screen but not in books.
Ramanand: Do you think in some sense, we are reverting back to human nature, in the sense that we were always an aural species or a species that liked to see each other talk to each other, and reading is something we taught ourselves in the interim?
Shridhar: I would distinguish reading from consuming text on the screen. Opening a book with pages in it, and turning them or even on Kindle would be a skill, that in my opinion, will keep going down. Listening to things will keep increasing in consumption volume, and viewing things will also increase. Reading text on the screen will go down.
Ramanand: Alright, we've spoken a lot about video today, about reading, and I'm sure a lot of people have been listening to you [01:16:00] as well. Thanks a lot, Sridhar, for your time. This was a very intriguing conversation, a lot of things to take away from and think about them. Thank you so much.
Shridhar: Ramanand, I wanted to tell you about one thing that we do. You had asked me about engagement at work. In the pandemic days, how do you keep people engaged? One of the things that have worked really well for us, is what you guys do for a living, which is running a quiz at the start of any company meeting. It works so well. I wish there are more and more people to learn this ability to conduct quizzes, which really give people a fee for participation, and bringing out what they need to know in ways that are somewhat enjoyable. Right? We have taken that, we do it in the company. More power to you guys and running more quizzes.
Ramanand: Thanks, Shridhar. I'm so glad to hear that because I think the fault lies partly in how people have experienced it. Their first quiz is usually a very boring experience. We know it’s a very social experience for a lot of people. I'm glad that at kPoint, all of you're enjoying your quizzing. More power to all of you as well. Thank you.
Shridhar: Thank you.