vpod.tv is 2 years old
Yesterday, my company, Video Publishing On Demand SA (also known as vpod.tv) turned 2 years old.
I had almost forgotten about the date, and realized it close to midnight. Hence champaign at the office was today, instead of yesterday. We did a nice video conference session with our team in Madrid and celebrated quickly together (vpod.tv in Spain turns 2 on July 1st).
I have to say it's an impressive moment.
I still remember the days back in September 2005, when after leaving my previous engagement, I was wondering what to do next. I remember sitting on my small former home desk with a small laptop screen. My first decision was to order a new big desk with 2 big screens and a new desktop computer, so that I could think better and surf the web more comfortably:
became 
After surfing for a few weeks, I got convinced that there was a market for online video, and that it was hard (other well-known services today where in their infancy back then) to publish one's own content, that broadband was going to be big, that video-enabled devices where everywhere and booming, and that people were really getting into publishing self-produced content (think back then about blogs and pictures). Those trends led me to hire a first team member and build a prototype. At the same time, I asked my partner from RISC Partners, Ivan Communod, to join us with his team in Spain as he was working on core video technologies.
(A few pix of us 2 running around the world:Cannes, Menorca, Helsinki, Budapest, San Francisco, Las Vegas)
At the ETRE'05 conference in October 05, we had a simple prototype that allowed us to upload a video, and we would get back an email with the embed code of the video. That evolved into a full-blown prototype by December 05 that allowed us to upload by webcam and email, and publish with APIs to blogs.
With that in hand, we started fund-raising in January 2006, after some hesitation about going the business angel route. By then we were a small team of 10 people in Paris and Madrid.
We closed our 4 million euros series A with Frédéric Humbert, GP at Innovacom 5, who understood the potential of the online video market and our vision of facilitating the creation of personal TV channels. We incorporated on May 15, 2006 in Paris, and got our funding 4 days later.
We were back then working in the corner of the offices of Cashstore.fr, thanks to the welcoming spirit of fellow entrepreneur Catherine Barba, who hosted us for 6 months in Paris. Many thanks to her. Eventually, we got our own offices in the same building on the 1st floor where we are today. Along the way, 2 well-known entrepreneurs joined our team of shareholders as business angels after the VC round and have provided us with great advice since.
What happened next was one year of R&D and promotion of our service: our team worked hard into building the great software platfrom that we have today (upload by any means you like), and build all of the social features of the tool. At the same time we went on a great tour of events in Europe and in the US, presenting our vision and winning great awards such as Supernova 2006 top 12 innovator, Red Herring 100 Europe, Innovate Europe, Mobile Peer Awards, etc.
On our 1 year anniversary, we opened up for business after 1 year of R&D. We had to move now from evangelizing the market to signing deals and contracts. My blog started to suffer as I had no more time to write about it.
One year later, if I look back at the work we've done as a team in 12 months, it's pretty amazing:
- we now have customers in all of our 4 main target markets : brands (Fanta, L'Oréal, Danone, BNP Paribas, Steelcase...), Government (French Minsitry of Agriculture, NGOs, Cities), Media (20minutes, 01net, SVMmac, Marianne2, France24...), mobile carriers (SFR), ecommerce site (Priceminister), and many more to come that are about to go live soon !
- our team has grown and has been adjusting as we've been focusing more and more on the B2B market (a shift we took almost immediately after the Youtube acquisition in october 06). A big thanks to all of them for all their work.
- we now have our own carrier-grade data center, with great capacity to adjust for our new customers.
- we've built a completely new software platform (called v2) that manages any kind of multimedia file (video, picture, music), on any connected screen (TV, mobile, PMP, web), with a new back-office to support carrier grade issues such as moderation, configuration and advanced stats.
So what's next for our year 3 ?
- Our roadmap is now full for the next 18 months, with gazillion new features we've collected from our customers to further enhance our product.
- we're moving 100% towards a B2B service provider. Tune in for more details in the upcoming weeks.
- we're delighted to start bringing in more senior people to the team, with lots of experience. We'll be announcing them soon.
Final reflections as an entrepreneur:
- I'm still surprised and excited that customers use a product we dreamt of on a piece of paper 2,5 years ago; that our tools show up on the homepages of very important brands and on global sites
- and I really enjoy meeting candidates who believe that what we're doing is cool and funky, and that they'd like to join the team.
- there's no real reason why an entrepreneur can't successfully implement a vision and an idea, if he tries hard enough. With the help of the right people, and lots of energy, so much can be achieved !
What a ride !
