Interview with James Tran – Founder, vidThat [2023]

Hi my name is James Tran and I am the founder and CEO of vidThat.

I think having a varied background allows you to build a skill set in cross-functional leadership. Leading others in disciplines that may not be your strength or in your comfort zone.  I think the most important thing when you get this kind of experience is you really learn how much you do not know. And therefore, there’s a heightened importance on finding people with the right skills to fill in those gaps.

My approach to a start-up is to find people with good skill sets and very strong character traits that we all align on. And then give people the room to take risks and take on more and soon you realize what people are good at and what people are not. And the most important thing is to feed the part that everybody’s good at and then fill those weaknesses with new people.  This is especially important in the early going when you don’t want to get too hung up on job descriptions and the kind of things you do in large organizations. I think this freedom frees everybody to align more with the vision and be fluid that way.  Because as you know things change fast.

I think what doesn’t show up in my background is my ability to discern high-quality creative work and my ability to contribute in that way as well. I am self-taught in UX and UI. And I am a self-taught painter and photographer. So vidThat really does align with my passions.  In this area it is important to set the bar is very high.  Be very discerning

Built into vidThat are a lot of insights from the communication industry itself, studying how users make traditional video and the use of a good solid technology. 

Both on the front end as we coded in swift and native to the iPhone and in the backend which we built to ensure solid user experience and efficiencies on the scalability side. 

One of the foundational truths I believe in creating a product is the axiom limitations encourage creativity. So it is very important to impose a limitation on starting the new product development process. This limitation should be based on solid insights and for us that limitation was three. The reason three was selected was it goes way back in the communication industry where phone numbers were designed in groups of three and often three digits so that people could remember.

The other thing about three is it is good for explaining something and you want to have three points of rationale. And in my prior experience in a Silicon Valley start-up in the peer-to-peer space in video creation, I observed that when people were left to their own devices they made video far too long. So three becomes a training wheels to making a very understood video. So along with three we also imposed very short timing for the video. Originally this number was quite long and we kept reducing it because videos continue to get shorter and shorter and the execution side it’s a much lighter file size. 

After limitations we studied the production process of making video. And we looked for ways to synchronize some of those processes to save users vast amounts of time. In this regard, we have a patent pending on our technology which essentially has the user creating an instantaneous animation event at the instance of recording.  The key to our success was the amount of effort and time we put into designing the UX/UI before any coding ever took place. And we had many people attacking that to make it better and better.  And we never gave up on our vision to create instant video on the fly out of anything that exists on the iPhone in mere seconds.

The difference is the synchronization of a user’s voice at the instant the animation event is created with the video. This process allows a user to be spontaneous based on the content they’re looking at. And thereby do everything in one take and be inspired by what they are looking at. Much like being face-to-face with somebody and they’re pointing at something they like and getting all excited when talking to you. This is a major time saver for video creation.

Now this kind of video creation is more spontaneous. Versus going into a studio and doing many takes and being an ultra-perfectionist to get everything just perfect for the video. It’s kind of like there’s a time you like your family’s home cooking and say to yourself I’d rather have this any day versus going to a restaurant. But then there’s time to go to a restaurant and appreciate what a great chef can do on that experience. We are more in the home cooking realm. That’s not to say that vidThat can’t be used in a perfectionistic way and do many takes and execute in a studio quality kind of way. We did this to make our product more every day in its usage.

The other thing is our video is different. We enable a user to immediately create video out of a still image and even combined that with a premade video that they can then talk over and even leave in the existing audio in the background. And staying true to our ready set go speed orientation everything is instantly transcribed which is great for people that don’t want to turn up the volume or for the hearing impaired. So bottom line, our key point of difference is speed, spontaneous voiceover execution and immediately deployed.

And we created a draft system so that the video process can be chunked out. If you were for example flying on a plane somewhere and saw three good pieces of content you could save that as a draft. And then you see three more you say that as a draft. And you can sit down somewhere and make two or three quick videos and immediately send your contacts.  The other thing this is good for is if you were using the same imagery or video content but having to send to multiple people. You could do multiple voiceover versions in a personalized way to your many different contacts.

Finally tied all this into an instant messenger like iMessage. But where this is different is that our video creation process is part of the messaging system. And our auto reply system automatically deploys the same visual assets that the sender used in their original video message to the recipient. This speed to reply system is unique and one-of-a-kind. It will be the reason why we are able to dovetail into Web3. Our ultimate vision is to be able to NFTize  any user’s videos.

I know that should’ve been a short answer but there’s a lot packed into with vidThat that is unobvious.

To make the whole product vision kind of fun I always said this should be like James Bond‘s car. Easy to drive with a steering wheel, brake and gas pedal. We have the three circles for hold and release talking and pausing for instant video creation. If we left it there the videos are made fast and super easy just like driving James Bond‘s car. But on top of that we have many features that are kind of hidden away much like the gadgets in James Brown’s car. Makes it all kind of fun.

And I do believe our approach to the UX and UI and its uniqueness is our defensibility. Because ultimately users get used to a new way of doing things and that is an important brand truth.  But for a new way of doing things, it is all also important to leverage the court of familiarity. The court of familiarity is what users are used to doing for certain things so we built on this in a little bit without going too far.

I think a person achieves balance by honoring facets that are important to maintaining that balance and I think it’s important to live a creatively inspired life. I have hobbies that honor that from photography to video making, painting and just bringing creativity to anything. And then I lose myself.

Second, daily meditation and having important intentions that are thought of daily. And exercise which is a combination of stretching, resistance training and cardio. And I think it is important not to compete, because you always want to put out your best self to the world. And for a happy life it is also key to maintain higher level states of being, being grateful and being of service to others.  All this allows me to be my best self which even more than work serves my family even more. Because having energy for everyone is important.

Successful leadership I believe is modeling being of service to others. Not the kind of leader that tells people what to do. But to be the kind of leader that provides resources and help to enable and inspire teammates to perform whatever needs to be done. There’s no better way to be a leader than showing others you’re willing to get down in the trenches and help out. The other thing for being a good leader is to be able to give inspiring feedback so that the recipient believes it is their idea to take something to a higher and better standard of execution. There’s nothing more satisfying when someone comes back to you and almost pulls you up to another level. I also think good leaders create other good leaders. That is a leader’s job.

I also think it’s important that if a leader makes a mistake that leader highlights their own mistake and what they did to improve it. But it should be done in a kind of matter-of-fact way devoid of any kind of shame or old-school ways of looking at things. I think that is important to encourage risk-taking.

But I should also add that innovation leadership is key. With innovation there has to be a framework to inspire that. And I believe there’s no better way than meta-thinking.  Meta-thinking is thinking about thinking. I know this sounds a bit like BS but thinking about a framework on how to attack a problem is key.  Because without new ways of approaching a problem everything will be stagnant. Everyone has to be nimble and adaptable to new ways of doing things. 

When I came up with the idea for vidThat I studied books on architecture and believed that that framework could be applied to UX development and UI development. I got that expression “limitations encourages creativity” from those books.  With mobile apps you have to dig deep to surface what those limitations are.  The lean start-up methodology of user stories helps.  For pure architecture limitations are more easily surfaced.  For example, we only have a 15 feet wide lot.  A 15 foot wide house does influence the design thinking of the architect.

Have been literally and metaphorically drinking through a firehose for web, the meta-verse, blockchain space, and NFTs to learn and speculate on where things are going. Like in the physical world where people have their dwellings people rent and people own. Likewise, I believe web3 will take the current renting environment of the digital space and re-balance it to be like the physical world with both renting and owning. I know a lot of it sounds outlandish right now but it is real.  And I think if we compare it to the implementation of the Internet, it is 1994. Then things really took off in the early 2000s.

My advice to entrepreneurs is to know yourself. All your strengths, know your weaknesses and know your values. And go after partners that compliment your weaknesses with their strengths.  And focus on the character trait area and in your shared values. And I believe it’s always important to find T shaped people. The top of the T is common interests where you can have great conversations and get along fabulously. The vertical part of the T is deep experience in a particular skill set.

It’s important that everybody be a bit of a Swiss Army knife in the early stages so it’s good to see people who bring other things to the equation in the very early days. And I think in evolving it’s important for the entrepreneur to be able to let go and backfill with people better than themselves in certain areas so they can focus on key actionable items that moves a business forward.

As a founder what I enjoyed most was making something out of nothing and inspiring people to come on that journey and contribute in the best way they can. As a CEO I think it’s important to have a “not to do list”. What that does is it provides extraordinary focus on what should be done and executed with excellence. I think focus and patience are highly underrated attributes.

In the hustle culture focus can get lost but focus makes all the difference in the world. So currently engaged in web3 activities to enable us to pivot into that world. We are launching a sister organization to sell over 11,000 NFTs (digital art) on the open market on the block chain. Our hope is that those resources will contribute to aggressively expanding out vidThat.

Our current priorities are orienting ourselves to the world of web3, generative art and then the potential implications are we could re-launch as a social media app for web3 using generative art and make all of our videos NFTable with a Web3 wallet-connect. Alongside this we would launch our own token (digital currency) around the idea too.

In five years I see our app as a way to instantly videoize any image as though video or animation was originally created in the first place. Contextually I believe our app will be part of web3, used in the metaverse and possibly allow users to earn income from spontaneous content that they create using a vidThat.