 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS startup showcase. And this episode two of season two is called Data as Code, the ongoing series covering exciting new startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Today we're excited to be joined by John Dahl, who is the co-founder and CEO of Mox Hot Startup, building cloud video for developers, video data. John, great to see you. We did an interview on theCUBE conversation, went into big detail of the awesomeness of your company and the trend that you're on. Welcome back. Thank you, glad to be here. So video is everywhere, you know, video first, pivot to video, you hear all these kinds of terms in the industry, but now more than ever, video is everywhere and people are building with it and it's becoming part of the developer experience in applications. So people have to stand up video into their code fast and data is code, video is data. So you guys are specializing in this, take us through that dynamic. Yeah, so video clearly is a growing part of how people are building applications. You see a lot of trends of categories that did not involve video in the past, making a major move towards video. I think what Peloton did five years ago to the world of fitness, that was not really a big category. Now video fitness is a huge thing, video in education, video in business settings, video in a lot of places. I think Mark Andreessen famously said software is eating the world as a pretty good indicator of what the internet is actually doing to the economy. I think there's a lot of ways in which video right now is eating software. So categories that were not video first are becoming video first. And that's what we help with. It's not obvious to like most software developers when they think about video, video industries. This industry shows around video, NAB, others. People know the video, folks know what's going on in video, but when you start to bring it mainstream, it becomes an expectation in the apps. And it's not that easy. It's almost the provisioned video is hard for a developer because you got to know the full, I guess, stack of video. It's like low level and then kind of just basic, high level, you know, just play something. So in between, this is a media stack kind of dynamic. Can you talk about how hard it is to build video for developers? How is it going to become easier? Yeah, I mean, I've lived this story for too, too long, maybe 13 years now when I first built my first video stack. And, you know, I'll sometimes say, I think it's kind of a miracle every time a video plays on the internet because the internet is not a medium designed for video. It's been hijacked by video. Video is 70% of internet traffic today in an unreliable sort of untrusted network space, which is totally different than how television used to work or cable or things like that. So yeah, so video is hard for, because there's so many problems from top to bottom that need to be solved to make video work. So you have to worry about video encoding, which is video compression and encoding, which is a very complicated topic in itself. You have to worry about delivering video around the world at scale, delivering it at low costs, at low latency with good performance. You have to worry about devices and how every device, Android, iOS, web, TVs, every device handles video differently. And so there's a lot of work there. And at the end of the day, these are kind of unofficial standards that everyone's using. So one of the miracles is like, if you want to watch a video, somehow you have to get like Apple and Google to agree on things, which is not always easy. And so there's just so many layers of complexity that are behind it. I think one way to think about it is if you want to put an image online, you just put an image online. And if you want to put a video online, you build complex software. And that's the exact problem that MUX was started to help solve. It's interesting, you guys are almost creating a whole new category around video infrastructure. And as you look at, you mentioned stack, you know, video stack, I'm looking at a market where the notion of a media stack is developing. And you're seeing these verticals having similar dynamics with cloud. And if you go back to the early days of cloud computing, what was the developer experience or entrepreneurial experience? You had to actually do a lot of stuff before you can do anything, provision a server. And this has all kind of been covered in great detail in the glory of Agile and whatnot. It was expensive. And you had to actually engineer before you could even stand up any code. Now you got video, that same thing's happening. So the developers have two choices. Go do a bunch of stuff complex, build in their own infrastructure. Like building a data center or lean in on MUX and say, Hey, thank you for doing all that years of experience building up the stacks to take that hard part away, but using APIs that they have. This is a developer focused problem and you guys are solving. Yeah, that's right. My last company was a company called ZenCoder that was an API to video encoding. So it was kind of an API to a small part of what MUX does today, just one of those problems. And I think the thing that we got right at ZenCoder that we're doing again here at MUX was building for developers first. So our number one persona is a software developer, not necessarily a video expert, just we think any developer should be able to build with video, it shouldn't be like, you gotta go be a specialist to use this technology because it's such a, it should become just a primitive of the internet. Video should just be something that any developer can work with. So yeah, so we built for developers first, which means we spend a lot of time thinking about API design. We spent a lot of time thinking about documentation, transparent pricing, the right features, great support and all those kind of things that tend to be characteristics of good developer companies. Tell me about the pipelining of the products. I'm a developer, I work for a company, my boss was putting pressure on me. We need video, we have all this library, it's all stacking up. We hired some people, they left, where's the videos, it's stored somewhere. I mean, it's a nightmare, right? So I'm like, okay, I'm cloud native, I got an API. I need to get my product to market fast because that is what agile developers want. So how do you describe that acceleration for time to market? You mentioned you guys are API first, video first. How do these customers get their products into the market as fast as possible? Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing we do is we put what we think is probably on average, three, four months of hard engineering work behind a single API call. So if you wanna build a video platform, we tell our customers like, hey, you can do that. You probably need a team, you probably need video experts on your team, so hire them or train them. And then it takes several months just to kind of get video flowing. One API call at MUX gives you on-demand video or live video that works at scale, works around the world with good performance, good reliability, a rich feature set. So maybe just a couple of specific examples. So we worked with Robin Hood a few years ago to bring video into their newsfeed, which was hugely successful for them. And they went from talking to us for the first time to a big launch in, I think it was three months, but the actual code time there was like really short. I wanna say they had like a proof of concept up and running in a couple of days. And then the full launch in three months. Another customer bar is Bandcamp, I think switched from a legacy provider to MUX in two weeks end-to-end. So one of the big advantages of going a little bit higher in the abstraction layer than just building it yourself is that time to market. Talk about this notion of video pipeline, because I know I've heard people talk about, hey, I just want to get my product out there. I don't want to get stuck in the weeds on video pipeline. What does that mean for folks that aren't understanding the nuances of video? Yeah, I mean, it's all the steps that it takes to publish video. So from ingesting the video, if it's live video, from making sure that you have secure, reliable ingest of that live feed potentially around the world to the transcoding, which we talked a little bit about, but it is on its own is a massively complicated problem and doing that well, doing that well is hard. Part of the reason it's hard is you really have to know where you're publishing to and you might want to transcode video differently for different devices for different types of content. The pipeline typically would also include all of the workflow items you want to view with a video. You want to thumbnail a video. You want to create clips of the video. Maybe you want to re-stream the video to Facebook or Twitter or a social platform. You want to archive the video. You want it to be available for downloads after an event. If it's just, if it's a VOD upload, if it's not live in the first place, you have all the things and you might want to do simulated live with the video. You might want to actually record something and then play it back as a live stream. So the pipeline typically refers to everything from the ingest of the video to the time that the bits are delivered to a device. I hear a lot of people talking about video these days with its events, training, just want peer-to-peer experience. Video is powerful, but customers want to own their own platform. They want to have the infrastructure as a service. They kind of want platform as a service. This is cloud talk now, but they want to have their own capability to build it out. This allows them to get what they want. And so you see this like, is it SaaS? Is it platform? People want customization. So kind of the general purpose video solution doesn't really exist or does it? I mean, because this is the question. Can I just buy software and work or is it going to be customized always? How do you see that? Because this becomes a huge discussion point. Is it a SaaS product or someone's going to make a SaaS product? Yeah. So I think I think one of the most important elements of designing any software, but especially when you get an infrastructure, is choosing an abstraction level. So if you think of computing, you can go all the way down to building a data center. You can go all the way down to getting a colo and racking a server. Like maybe some of us used to do, who are older than others. And that's one way to run a server. On the other extreme, you have, just think of the early days of cloud computing. You had App Engine, which was a really fantastic, really incredible product. There was one push deploy of I think Python code, if I remember correctly, and everything just worked. But right in the middle of those, you had EC2, which was EC2 is basically an API to a server. And it turns out that that abstraction level, not colo, not the full App Engine kind of platform, but the API to a virtual server was the right abstraction level for maybe the last 15 years. Maybe now some of the higher level application platforms are doing really well. Maybe the needs will shift. But I think that that's a little bit of how we think about video. What developers want is an API to video. They don't want an API to the building blocks of video, an API to transcoding, to video storage, to edge caching. They want an API to video. On the other extreme, they don't want a big application that's a drop-in white label video in a box, like a Shopify kind of thing. Shopify is great, but developers don't want to build on top of Shopify. In the payments world, developers want Stripe. And that abstraction level of the API to the actual thing you're getting tends to be the abstraction level that developers want to build on. And the reason for that is it's the most productive layer to build on. You get maximum flexibility and also maximum velocity when you have that API directly to a function-like video. So we like to tell our customers, like you own your video when you build on top of Mox. You have full control over everything, how it's stored, when it's stored, where it goes, how it's published. We handle all of the hard technology and we give our customers all of the flexibility in terms of designing their products. I want to get back to some use cases, but you brought that up. I might as well just jump to my next point. And I'd like you to come back and circle back on some references. I know you have some. You said building on infrastructure that you own. This is a fundamental cloud concept. You mentioned API to a server for the nerds out there that know that. That's cool, but the people who aren't super nerdy, that means you basically got an interface into a server behind the scenes. You're doing the same thing for video. So that is a big thing around building services. So what wide range of services can we expect beyond Mox? If I'm going to have an API into video, what could I do possibly? What sort of experience could you build? Yeah, I got a team of developers saying, I'm all in API to video. I don't want to do all that transit. Got it straight there. I want to build experiences, video experience on my app. Yeah, I mean, I think one way to think about it is that what's the range of key use cases that people do with video? We tend to think about six at Mox. One is kind of the places where the content is the product. So one of the things that you have video is you can create great video. I think of online courses or fitness or entertainment or news or things like that. That's kind of the first thing everyone thinks of when you think video, you think Netflix and that's great. But we see a lot of really interesting uses of video in the world of social media. So customers are as like VSCO, which is an incredible photo sharing application really for photographers who really care about the craft and they were able to bring video in and bring that same kind of VSCO experience to video using Mox. We think about B2B tools, videos. When you think about it, B2B is a high bandwidth way of communicating. And so customers are as like HubSpot use video for the marketing platform, for business collaboration. You'll see a lot of growth of video in terms of helping businesses engage with their customers or engage with their employees. We see live events, obviously, have been a massive category over the last few years. We were all forced into a world where we had to do live events two years ago, but I think now we're reemerging into a world where the online part of a conference will be just as important as the in-person component of a conference. So that's another big use case we see. Well, full disclosure, if you're watching this live right now, it's being powered by Mox. So shout out, we use Mox on the CUBE platform that you're experiencing this in real time. And that's just one application. There's many more. Video as code is, data as code is the theme. That's going to bring up the data ops. Video also is code because it's just, like you said, it's just communicating, but it gets converted to data. So data of ops, video ops could be its own new category. What's your reaction to that? Yeah, I mean, I think I have a couple of thoughts on that. The first thought is video is a way because of the way that companies interact with customers or users, it's really important to have good monitoring and analytics of your video. And so the first product we ever built was actually a product called Mox Data, which is the best way to monitor a video platform at scale. So we work with a lot of the big broadcasters. We work with like CBS and Fox Sports and Discovery. We work with big tech companies like Reddit and Vimeo to help them monitor their video. And you just get a huge amount of insight when you look at robust analytics about video delivery that you can use to optimize performance, to make sure that streaming works well globally, especially in hard to reach places or on every device. We actually built a Mox Data platform first because when we started Mox, we spent time with some of our friends at companies like YouTube and Netflix and got to know how they use data to power their video platforms. And they do really sophisticated things with data to ensure that their video streams well. And we wanted to build the product that would help everyone else do that. So that's one use. I think the other, the other obvious use is just really understanding what people are doing with their video, who's watching what, what's engaging, those kinds of things. Yeah, data is definitely there. You guys mentioned some great brands that are working with you guys. And they're doing it because of the developer experience. And I like you to explain, if you don't mind, in your words, why is the Mox developer experience so good? What are some of the results you're seeing from your customers? What are they saying to you? Obviously, when you win, you get good feedback. What are some of the things that they're saying and what specific developer experiences do they like the best? Yeah, I mean, I think the most gratifying thing about being a startup founder is when your customers like what you're doing. And so we, you know, we get a lot of this, but it's always, we always pay attention to what customers say. But yeah, people, the number one thing developers say when they think about Mox is that the developer experience is great. That, well, I think when they say that, what they mean is two things. First is it's easy to work with, which helps them move faster, which software velocity is so important. Every company in the world is investing and wants to move quickly and to build quickly. And so if you can help a team speed up, that's massively valuable. The second thing I think when people like our developer experience is, you know, in a lot of ways, I think that we get out of the way and we let them do what they want to do. So well-designed APIs are a key part of that. Coming back to abstraction, making sure that you're not forcing customers into decisions that they actually want to make themselves. Like if we, if our video player only had one design, that would not be, that would not work for most developers because developers want to bring their own design and style and workflow and feel to their video. And so, yeah, so I think the way we do that is just think comprehensively about how does, how APIs are designed. Think about the workflows that users are trying to, trying to accomplish with video and make sure that we have the right APIs, make sure that they're with the right information. We have the right web hooks. We have the right SDKs, all of those things in place so that they can build what they want. We were just having a conversation on theCUBE, Dave Vellante and our team. And I'd love to get your reaction to this. And it's more of a riff real quick. We're seeing a trend where videos code, data as code, media stack, where you're starting to see the emergence of the media developer, where the application of media looks a lot like kind of software developer, where the app, media is an app. It could be a chat. It could be, you know, peer to peer video. It could be part of an event platform. But with all the recent advances in UX designers, coders, the front end looks like an emergence of these creators that are essentially media developers for all intents and purposes. They're coding media. And what's your reaction to that? How do you see that evolving? I think the- What do you agree with it? It's okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think a couple of things. I think one thing that I think this is, I think this goes along with your saying, but maybe it's disagreement is that we don't think you should have to be an expert at video or at media to create and produce or create and publish good video, good audio, good images, those kinds of things. And so, you know, I think if you look at software overall, think of 10 years ago, the kind of DevOps movement, there was kind of a movement away from specialization in software where the same software developer could build and deploy the same software developer maybe you could do front end and back end. And we want to bring that to video as well. So you don't have to be a specialist to do it. On the other hand, I do think that investments in tooling all the way from video creation, which is not our world, but there's a lot of amazing companies out there that are making it easier to produce video, to shoot video, to edit. A lot of interesting innovations there, all the way to what we do, which is helping people stream and publish video and video experiences. You know, I think another way to think about it is that tool set and companies doing that let anyone be a media developer, which I think is important. It's like DevOps turning into low code, no code. Eventually, it's just composability, almost like just, you know, hey Siri, give me some video, that kind of thing. Final question for you while I got you here. At the end of the day, the decision between a lot of people is build versus buy, I got a developer. Why not just roll my own? You mentioned data set. I want to build a data set. So why MUX versus do it yourself? Yeah, I mean, part of the reason we started this company is we have a pretty strong opinion on this. When you think about it, when we started MUX five years ago, six years ago, if you were a developer and you wanted to accept credit cards, if you wanted to bring payment processing into your application, you didn't go build a payment gateway. You just probably use Stripe. And if you wanted to send text messages, you didn't build your own SMS gateway, you probably used Twilio. But if you're a developer and you wanted to stream video, you built your own video gateway. You built your own video application, which was really complex. Like we talked about, you know, probably three, four months of work to get something basic up and running, probably not live video. That's probably only on-demand video at that point. And you get no benefit by doing it yourself. You're no better than anyone else because you rolled your own video stack. What you get is risk that you might not do a good job. Maybe you do worse than your competitors. And you also get distraction where you've just taken, you know, you take, take 10 engineers and 10 sprints and you apply it to your problem that doesn't actually really give you differentiated value to your users. So we started MUX so that people would not have to do that. It's fine if you want to build your own video platform once you get to a certain scale, if you can afford a dozen engineers for a VOD platform and you have some really massively differentiated use case, you know, maybe live is, I don't know, I don't have the rule of thumb. Live videos may be five times harder than on-demand video to work with. But, you know, in general, like there's such a shortage of software engineers today and software engineers are frankly are in such high demand like you see what happens in the marketplace and the hiring markets, how competitive it is. You need to use your software team where they're maximally effective and where they're maximally effective is building differentiation into your products for your customers. And video is just not that. Like very few companies actually differentiate on their video technology. So we want to be that team for everyone else. We're 200 people building the absolute best video infrastructure as APIs for developers and making that available to everyone else. John, great to have you on with this showcase. Love the company. Love what you guys do. Videos code, data is code. Great stuff. Final plug for the company for the developers out there and prospects watching for MUX. Why should they go to MUX? What are you guys up to? What's the big benefit? I mean, first just check us out. Try our APIs, read our docs, talk to our support team. We put a lot of work into making our platform the best. You know, as you dig deeper, I think we'd be looking at the performance around the global performance of what we do, looking at our analytics stack and the insight you get into video streaming. We have an emerging open source video player that's really exciting and I think is going to be the direction that open source players go for the next decade. And then, you know, we're a quickly growing team. We're 60 people at the beginning of last year. You know, we're 150 at the beginning of this year and we're going to, you know, add, we're going to grow really quickly again this year. And this whole team is dedicated to building the best video infrastructure for developers. Great job, John. Thank you so much for spending the time, sharing the story of MUX here on the show, Amazon startup showcase season two, episode two. Thanks so much. Thank you, John. Okay, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is season two, episode two, the ongoing series covering the most exciting startups from the AWS cloud ecosystem, talking data analytics here, video cloud, video as a service, video infrastructure, video APIs, hottest thing going on right now. And you're watching it live here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching.