Strategy
Video Production
Creative Direction
3 years
While a captive audience has existed for over a decade, Y Combinator has historically treated video as an after thought. No defined strategy. Inconsistent publishing. Poor production quality. In many ways, I was starting from scratch. By building the ground work for high-quality video content, YC quickly became a powerhouse in the tech media world.
The biggest change in strategy was moving away from one-off videos and instead focus exclusively on distinctly branded series that cater to different people's taste in subject matter and style. Conversational podcasts. Educational videos. Documentary storytelling. This serialized, repeatable approach also led to more efficient production with batch shooting and templated editing.
Youtube is a personality-driven platform and the collective of former founders turned YC advisors were the natural choice to adopt the role of hosts. However, their experience with filming varied wildly. My job was to help cultivate their on-camera presence and craft formats built around their unique backgrounds.
Their involvement in the Youtube channel has been so successful that many have become recognizable figures in Silicon Valley and beyond. Being mobbed in public by aspiring founders seeking photos and advice is commonplace for them now.
One of the first things I did after joining was build a robust pipeline that allowed us to produce content at a scale normally reserved for teams with significantly more people and budget. Everything ran on templates, connected together with Zapier automations and a Slack bot affectionately named "HAL 9000". Our long term editor, Amanda Deisler, once called it "the most organized production process I've ever worked with."
The demand grew for more videos of even higher quality which meant my one-man band operation also had to grow. I recruited talented senior producers Ryan Loughlin from Wired and Matt Kang from Forbes in addition to a team of freelance cinematographers, editors, animators, and designers. We never lost our scrappy nature, only scaled it.
The effect of this new direction for video was almost immediate. Our Youtube audience grew exponentially. More importantly, video jumped to the second most cited source of accepted YC applicants—just behind referrals from past alumni. In the decade prior, video never broke into the top five.
While seeing our numbers go up felt great, it was just as important to learn exactly how effective our efforts were with our core audience of new YC founders. We used detailed surveys to collect qualitative feedback. This informed which series were working and where to experiment next. These surveys are where we also began to understand the impact of our work on this next generation of founders. Some highlights featured below.
Exactly one hundred episodes were published during my time at Y Combinator. I wore almost all hats in the process of making the first half of these. It was not uncommon for me to write, shoot, edit, and design all during a single week. As we grew, I was still involved in most facets with the added responsibilities of leading a team and managing a full publishing schedule.
Since the YC gear I inherited was almost a decade old, I had the rare opportunity to spec and source an entire studio worth of upgraded equipment. The possibilities for shoots quickly opened up with our new collection of Sony cinema cameras, G Master lenses, Aputure lighting, audio hardware, and grip gear.
People won't watch a video if they aren't first intrigued by the title and thumbnail. This was so much of a priority for me that I personally designed most of the thumbnails from the past three years. A contract designer was eventually brought on to scale this process using the style guides and templates I created.
While most of our social content consisted of repurposed clips from our longform Youtube videos, when there was extra time in our production schedule would experiment with various forms of original vertical video that often performed quite well.
I had the pleasure of collaborating with talented motion designers on several YC projects, but occasionally I animated scenes myself due to timing or budget constraints. The work featured below were an opportunity to flex some rarely used creative muscles.
Live events play an important role at Y Combinator. From time to time, I jumped in to help. This included Startup School East which was attended by over 500 of the most promising technical students from MIT, Harvard, Yale and others. I was the lead producer for the on-stage show including the first ever live stage recordings of YC's most popular podcasts.
For most of my time at YC, shoots were relegated to makeshift rooms and rental locations. However, when Y Combinator moved its headquarters to San Francisco, it presented the perfect opportunity to create a dedicated filming space for our growing video ambitions. Rows of desk in one large corner of the building would soon be replaced by five versatile sets to cover almost all of our shooting needs. I started by designing the floor plan for this space.
Y Combinator's Mountain View office is home to a now iconic orange wall which has become the backdrop of YC's longest running educational video series and the home of many talks by well known startup founders.
Ryan and I recreated this famous set piece in the San Francisco studio for more convenient filming in the city. This involved building faux columns and custom foam panels. Some founders who discovered that we film against this set wall have remarked how closely it resembles the old space with a little more cinematic flair.
The Dalton & Michael Podcast has gone through many iterations over the years and we could now give them their own dedicated space. A lighting grid was installed in the ceiling to house permanent lighting and audio. Filming new episodes is now a quick and easy process that requires almost no set up or breakdown.
When filming more casual interviews and conversations, I envisioned a set that gave us lots of flexibility in a warm, almost-residential atmosphere. In collaboration with DropWorks, we designed and built a white oak paneled space that opened up many new options that would otherwise be impossible in a normal office building.
Sets aren't the only element of a studio build. Now that most of our filming would be taking place in this one space, we could finally refine the organization of our gear and production process. Everything will revolve around a series of gear carts, including this production camera cart I designed and modeled from scratch.
Y Combinator will soon have one of the most streamlined studio spaces in the entire Bay Area and I'm excited to see the YC team use this space for years to come.
