 Hi everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here featuring John Dahl, an entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of MUX, one of the hottest video platforms and fast-growing startups in the industry. They've been selected for this upcoming AWS startup showcase in April and April 5th. John, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. Thank you, John. You know, we've been following you guys for a long time, a couple of years now, and a customer of your product, so we do the video here. Video is at the center of the pandemic and the way where people are using it for video conferencing, we're seeing all the success, but video has been this dark art. It's been hard to use, it's been very difficult unless you were in the business. But now you guys are bringing a new model, making it easier to use, and making it developer-friendly, which I think is really compelling. So congratulations, love the story. First question, what is the business of MUX, the tech, the consumption model? Can you take a minute to explain what MUX is all about? Yeah, for sure. We are a video platform for developers. So we are APIs to all of the different hard problems that you have to deal with if you want to stream video online. Like you said, the video is growing. It's a really important part of the internet today. It's a really important part of the future of the internet, and yet it's still really, really difficult to work with. The kind of status quo is you hire video experts and you build your own video platform if you want to stream video online. And so we built MUX in order to do all that hard, heavy lifting for thousands of other companies. So we are core infrastructure for video streaming for companies like you and any software company really that wants to work with video. What's interesting is when you look at the rise of the video creator or the influencer or media company or any business, cloud computing has shown the way of a new business model, standard up quick, be agile, and fast DevOps is infrastructure as code. You guys are kind of like videos code. I mean, simply just API enable and you're up and running. Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. When we started the company actually is we're thinking about how do we want to shape the products? We actually thought about our experience. The founders are all developers. We thought about our experience. If we were going to design, if we were going to build software and just think of an abstract API to video as an entity, how would you design APIs that give you that kind of functionality? So we spent a lot of time thinking about API design and the developer experience of what we're doing really in order to let developers build the way they want, build as anything they want with video in as easy a way as possible. You know, it's interesting and I love to get your thoughts on this because this brings in the whole data aspect of it. You know, building better video data is something that you guys talk a lot about and that's a background you guys have come from. You kind of vected in that way as developers. So you combine data analytics with developers which want to make it easy and fast and get it out there. As you bring that together, what is the real benefit that with this model of the cloud? Can you share your thoughts of how you bring that video and data piece together? Yeah, for sure. It's the kind of thing where if you're a software developer and you want to deploy software at scale today, you have to invest in good observability, good monitoring, good analytics, good data. You know, if you're a dev team and your company's like, okay, we're just going to turn off all of our monitoring for our software, you're probably not going to be very happy. And yet a lot of people are streaming video today at scale at high volumes without really great insight into what actually happens when they stream video. So the first product we actually built was a product called Mux Data which is an analytics platform for developers operating video platforms. So the user is a DevOps engineer, whoever's on call for the video stack as well as marketing teams who want to see how his video being used. So we built that because we knew how important it was. We built video platforms before for ourselves, a company called ZenCoder, for a company called Breiko that we ended up spending some time at after selling ZenCoder. And we saw firsthand how impactful data is to building great video streaming. What's the role of cloud in all this? How do you guys see the cloud playing into this? Yeah, I mean, at a simple level, we run like everyone, we run our software in the cloud. But I think really what the cloud is and does is a way of abstracting really hard problems from developers. So if you look at the world today, there's actually more demand for software than there are software developers to build it. There's just softwares growing like crazy. There's just huge need for software. And so in that kind of situation, one of the most powerful things you can do is make it easier for developers to build things. So that's why DevTools are so important. That's why you see so much growth in that area. And we do that for video. We replace tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of hours of engineering time to build the same thing everyone else has to build your own version of Netflix or YouTube or whatever. So that's kind of how we fit in. But I really think that's a lot of what the cloud is is a way of accelerating the growth of software. Andy Jassy always says on theCUBE, we want to do all the heavy lifting. And that sounds like what Mux is doing. I know you guys have that analytics culture. What influences that have on your business decisions and the product roadmap? Yeah, a couple of things. So we really directly use data in our technology. So as we build video streaming, which is our Mux video product, as we build other products over time, whenever possible, we want to build them with data first. So we actually have a lot of data into how people stream video, and that can inform the way we design products. As a business itself, we also, as we've grown, we've stood up our own analytics team, which has just been hugely important. I have so much more insight into our business now than I did two years ago before we really invested in our own internal analytics team. How hard was that to do? How hard? It's the kind of thing that, I think you benefit by hiring experts. So I know how to, I kind of know how to look at data and make decisions from that, but I'm not a trained data analyst. I'm not a data scientist. I'm a software developer, turn, turn founder. And so, I think early when we were small, we were a 20 person startup. We aspired to be data driven or data informed, but it's hard, honestly, at that scale. So as we got bigger, we actually hired, it was hard to find great people, but we built a really strong analytics team, BizOps team, data engineering team. And I think what we're doing now, we've done over the last years, is just learn how to use that data, learn how to leverage all those, that expertise and the data that we have to make better decisions. Well, speaking of data, and you got a lot of coming in because you guys have been highly successful. And again, your product has really hit the right time. Because people want to code, they want to build into the applications video, video first as everyone's going in, data first, video first. What kind of data do you guys have on the use of the video, on the rise of the consumption side of it? Especially as you're seeing it in every application now. Yeah, I mean, we have a couple of things. We have our own growth of video streaming, which has grown really quickly. Probably no surprise, but I think we saw live video grow by, just like you measured, by like 3,000% in 2020. We just saw a huge explosion of new companies doing live streaming and existing companies that were doing other kinds of video really lean into live. So I think we've seen the fastest growth in the world of live. But really we've seen growth across the board on different platforms, different types of video. What's your advice to folks out there because you guys now are our key building block. And again, love the API approach, easy to integrate in. Again, we're customers, happy customers on our end. When you see applications being built, what's the trend? What are people doing? Are they rolling their own video apps? Is it, do you guys see you guys as a platform as a service? It's not a tool because you got the platform, but there's tools out there. So you get the emergence of more tools and the need for more platform. How do you see this kind of shaping out? Yeah, it depends on how you define the different categories. The way we think about it is we're infrastructure because we sit low down in the stack. So if you build on top of MUX, you're still building your own, you still operate your own video streaming. We just do that. We just do the heavy lifting under the hood. We move the bits, we do the encoding. So we're infrastructure. We also see ourselves as a platform because you can build flexible things on top of us. And we have each of the different parts of the video stack. We have live video, on-demand video, data, player, those kinds of things. So I think, like you said, there's really a lot of different related categories that are a little different. So we see tooling being something like MUX data, where it's not really the operational flow of something. It's more on the side to make it better or to give observability or to increase developer productivity. Yeah, data's key. And hybrid events are big too. You've seen that. Simulive is a big growth category, I'd probably imagine. What about reliability and uptime? I can envision kind of an SRE role emerging around video. I'm sure you guys are dealing with it every day because you're the transport, you're moving bits around. No one wants downtime. Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, I think the infrastructure of video streaming, like we really need to deliver that with exceptional uptime. And everyone that we rely on and we build on top of other cloud platforms and we build on top of other tools. So we certainly invest a lot in that. I think the other side of that is we are that to our customers in some ways where we give them real-time data about what's happening on their platforms. So there's stories I can't tell because of NDAs, but we've had major events where live video has kept streaming because someone detected a problem early using MUX data and was able to remedy the problem before it actually impacted users. But absolutely, I mean, SREs are- The cloud helps because you can spin up all kinds of queuing and all kinds of cool things. I mean, new microservices could be built as the future's limitless here around video. What are the biggest surprises do you see? Looking back, I know you guys are kind of a humble startup, I would say. You guys aren't going out there too hardcore and hyping things up. You guys are good products. What's the biggest learnings you'd look back over the past two years with MUX and video? I mean, I think some of what has been unexpected is the uses of video. I think we didn't, no one expected the pandemic and we didn't expect all of the ways people would adapt. And we've seen some really fascinating things from offline businesses very quickly building their own digital arms, which you'd think they couldn't, but a lot actually really successfully did back in 2020. And then now a lot of companies going in that hybrid direction where maybe a yoga studio will forever have in-person classes as well as live-stream classes or a university will have in-person and live-streamed or on-demand. What are some trends that you'd recommend people to look at they want to get into some video development? Where should they stay away from? How should they double down on obviously cloud scales? Obviously easy to stand things up in the cloud. Role of data is important. How should someone roll their own with MUX? What's the best practice? And do you have a playbook or things developing? Yeah, yeah. So I think, I mean, we think about a video is just a high bandwidth way of communicating. Communicating with one-on-one or with a group or learning or whatever. And so, first understand what your audience cares about and understand how video can help drive that communication. And then as you're building, I mean, I think obviously take this with, I'm heavily biased here, but we don't think anyone should build their own video infrastructure today. And unless you can devote maybe 200 full-time engineers to it, I think that's a reasonable benchmark for like really starting something from scratch and going all the way. You know, as a small company, maybe a team of five can do something, but you really need to decide what's most important to your users and how do you avoid doing the undifferentiated heavy-lifting that Andy Jassy talks about? Yeah, and I think you guys have, the founding team have the years of experience, decades of experience collectively between you guys. What's the secret sauce? I mean, you guys look at MUX. If someone asked you two questions, what's the secret sauce and what's the culture like at MUX? Yeah. Yeah, secret sauce. I think for us, it's two things. One is, again, developer experience. So really deeply understanding how do people want to build, understanding how developers like to bring APIs in their platform or tooling into their platforms, investing a lot in API design and documentation and finding the right abstractions over these hard problems. I think the second is performance. So if you're going to do something like video and this applies to any number of other technical products, you really need to go deep. So it's really important for us to do things in order to publish via better and higher quality, publish via faster, more higher reliability and all that. So lots more, if you want, lots more we can dig into there if we have time, but those are probably the two most important. What's the culture of the company? Have you had to define it? Yeah, if you'd ask the team, probably the first answer you'd get is be human. That's one of our core values is be human. So we tend to have a culture of caring about people in the company, caring about our customers, treating people like people and not treating people like just means to an end. I think we also have a culture, we have another value of care obsessively. So we have a culture of really caring about doing great work. So we try to hire excellent people who are excited to build great products or to serve customers well. So probably those two would be the most important. Well, great to have you on, John. Congratulations on the success of MUX. Thanks for building the product. And again, infrastructure as a service for video, whatever you want to call it, it's the beginning of a big wave. Video is not going away. It's just has to get easier and easier. Awesome, thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the conversation. Keep it right there for more coverage from theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.