Guillaume Clément - COO at Dailymotion

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Guillaume, the COO at Dailymotion, and we discuss his transition from CTO to COO, advice for how to improve communication from the top down, and tough questions that must be answered when the data tells you one thing, but your heart and culture tell you another. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:00:25) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Hello. Hello.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:00:38) Hello. Hello. How are you, Joel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Good. It's good to see you again, Guillaume. It's been a—

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:00:44) Good to see you too. A year. Yeah. Yeah. More than a year, and what a year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) A crazy year. Yes. Are you in France right now?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:00:55) Yes, I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) Yeah. New York? Like, no one's in New York right now.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:01:00) Yeah. Well, you know, I'm busy in France, and we're traveling. Do this. Yeah. It's difficult. So where are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) I'm in Florida still, but I wanted to say thank you for the stuff you sent me last time we talked. You sent me like a whole little Dailymotion care package, and we really appreciate it.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:01:20) You're very welcome. I mean, it's no big deal, and thanks as well for the stuff you sent to me, the little books. Kids appreciate it as well, so thanks very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) Nice. Nice. That's good. I'm excited because, you know, you were in the CTO role last time when we talked, and now your role has changed to COO. Why did you make that switch?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:01:43) Well, probably because I don't know anything about technology, so I have to take care of operations, I believe. No. I think we we rushed up a little organization to focus on what matters the most. And to be honest, I still take care of the technology space because in a digital, very oriented company where your DNA is technology, your operations are all about making sure there is as little entropy between marketing, product, and technology from an execution standpoint. So this role might be very different in another company, but in, let's say, a web-based company with a strong technological DNA, that made sense for us as a next step of our development as we had to accelerate on everything related to growth and better commercialization of what we do. It was a necessary step.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) So did you promote someone to CTO? Did you go to COO and then put someone else as CTO?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:02:49) So that's the plan. The position is vacant at the moment. But as any company, when you do a reorganization, you have a lot of free, let's say, seats appearing, while you cannot staff all of them at the same time. Money is a reason. You've got to be careful. The other reason is that you cannot bring too many new folks at the same time either. You've got to be careful about managing that. So our focus right now, to be honest, has been on a C-level position, but it's a marketing position. So our focus has been set on the CMO position, which makes sense as per our new challenges of better marketing and better selling what we do and better telling our stories out there. So that made sense to prioritize the CMO role.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:03:33) How do I manage the fact that I don't have a CTO at the moment? I actually rely on a fantastic team of experienced VPs and senior VPs, and they've been doing an impressive job. So I'm not so concerned. Long-term, we need a CTO. It's a position that is required, and we need to figure that out. Maybe it's going to be an internal promotion with people developing talents. We'll see. We're not in a hurry. Okay? That's the chance we have. But long-term, we're going to need a CTO for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:06) Yeah. And a CMO is very important. Storytelling. I actually—I have this book right here. It's like one of my favorite storytelling books. This guy, his name is Robert McKee, and he's been a part of so many different movies and TV shows as a writer. And then he wrote about how to tell stories in the context of the business world. And so he's one of my favorite people when it comes to that.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:04:32) I need that book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) It's a good book. I recommend it a lot, actually. It's just one of those books. You know what it's like. You read it and it's so well said and it's succinct and it's on this topic of, you know, how do you tell these stories in the context of business? You know, it's just an interesting topic. Like, how do you take all the stuff that they've learned from making movies and TV shows on how story works and then boil that down into a 30-second ad and connect with people?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:05:01) I mean, at the end of the day, that's what we all want to hear. As a potential client or potential user, you want to hear a great story. As an employee, you want to hear a great story. Everybody wants to hear a great story to feel that they belong to something bigger or they have a, let's say, sense of an higher purpose to go after than just doing the job. And that's actually difficult. That's truly difficult.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:26) What's the story of where Dailymotion's at today?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:05:32) So from our last conversation a little bit more than a year ago, we grew in every aspect of our business. We grew our audience big time. We grew more than 30%, so we are beyond 330 million active users. We grew our partnerships. We signed a lot of great deals with the NBA, the NBA G League, NHL, Live Nation, Global Citizen, the NASA. We signed a lot of great teams, so we bring great content to our users. We improved our product a lot. We have a new homepage focusing on—and this is where the great storytelling comes in—we've built a fantastic homepage. I don't think any video platform has a homepage like we do have because that homepage focuses on bringing the most important and valuable content we believe, based on what we know from a given user, we believe you should be watching.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:06:32) And that covers the news, that covers sports, that covers music, but that's a key thing that, I mean, everybody's talking about in video. And we're the only one with such a homepage. Now we need to bring that homepage to the market and tell that story to users because they don't know enough what we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) And then do you have a team that just manages the content for the homepage, or is it algorithms? Like, is it editors or algorithms or a mix of both? Like, how does that work together?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:07:03) So it's, you know, in order to scale, it has to be algorithm-based. In order to scale, we've got to have it algorithmically driven. But the notion is something that is very, very difficult to do with an algorithm. An algorithm will help you push what is more popular or what everybody's keeping on—what is trending. But the quality of the content, the quality of the source, whether or not you can trust it, is something that algorithms are not good at doing at the moment.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:07:40) And what we use is an editorial team to help the algorithm understand the quality. So in a way, you might have been helping the algorithm to understand what quality is so the algorithm can make the right recommendation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:53) Oh, that's interesting.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:07:54) So it's a mix of both, in a way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) So you've got an algorithm sort of suggesting some things to your team, and then your team is giving that algorithm feedback so the algorithm's always improving?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:08:06) It's not exactly it. I cannot really say our secret sauce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:10) Oh, okay.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:08:11) That's the way it looks. Yes. But definitely there is a human touch. So the humans, people do not select the videos that you will see, but the humans help the algorithm understand what is an information that you can trust, what is a good quality content, how a given piece of content better represents something that is going on than another. If you take presidential elections, you have tons of videos about presidential elections. Which one should you watch, really? Which is the one in two to three minutes that gives you everything you should know about? There are tons of content out there. You're not going to watch all of them, but you want to be fed with something that is meaningful to you, and that is a complete challenge. And we believe that we are addressing it.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:08:58) We know how to tell the story, and we also believe that no other platform today does that well. Some of the platforms do a great job by doing different things, but that very simple purpose of bringing you what is very, very important that you should, let's say, learn about or be educated about or reinforce your knowledge about—we believe we're the only one to do it today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:21) That's interesting. I'm curious. Do you have thoughts about deepfakes? Do you guys have to think about that or detect it?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:09:31) So we do think about it. We work with a lot of—and there is a lot of, let's say, recruitment of journalists and associations that help us define when a content is fake or not. Okay? So we have some information that we can get. And we also rely on the ability of the platform for a given user to be able to report something. Okay? But detecting deepfakes—the technology is not there yet. So we have to rely on other processes, workarounds to manage that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) Yeah. In America, we have an organization called DARPA. They make futuristic military-type stuff, and they had some contest out. I saw on their website, you know, government agency contest to build technology to detect deepfakes, and they're failing at it miserably.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:10:35) Yes. So we have to use the old-fashioned style checking-the-truth approach that you've got to double, triple check, and you've got to make sure before you take a decision, you've got to ask whoever is involved in that piece of information to make sure it's trustable information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) Do you have any additional security concerns around election time?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:11:02) So yes and no on our side. As we always refused to have capabilities and features for given users to pay for a content to go viral on our platform—so there is no promoted content—in that sense, we're not that much impacted by what can happen on other platforms or what happened over the past years with Facebook, where you can pay for a video to be viral regardless of whether or not the video is trustworthy. So we don't have that problem.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:11:43) What we've got to be careful about always, and we saw a spike in the industry during COVID, is cybersecurity. The threat in cybersecurity is getting higher. I don't know why COVID relates to that, but we saw that in the industry there has been a spike in the number of potential threats and problems out there. And we've got to be careful about that. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:07) No, people inside. I mean, I think I did my worst stuff when I was a 12-year-old kid inside all day. Right? You put more people inside, you get more security issues online.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:12:18) Yes. People get bored, so you get more security issues online. I think there's a direct relationship between the two. It might be true, Tony.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:26) I think it is too. I mean, look, when I was 12, it was a little odd that I was on the computer as much as I was. But nowadays, not at all for 12-year-olds. And I was exploring just like kids—you have kids. I have kids. You see how they explore around the house and everything. It's just something that developing minds do. So I'm not surprised at all. They pull them out of school, put them in the bedroom, then they're going to just explore the depths of the Internet.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:12:56) Yes. Yeah. We—when we have a cybersecurity problem, our priorities, we always expect some sort of a government to be behind that, and then we discover it's a 16-year-old kid. No. But true story. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) Yeah. Oh, do you have any crazy security stories that you can share, or no?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:13:16) No. I cannot. But I can tell you that sometimes we believe it's something big, and that's just a very talented kid being bored about something and exploring what the hell we can do with a given API. So it happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) Oh, man. It's always fun talking with you. So what about—let's talk about VR. Right? Because there's a lot more VR video coming out on the Internet. Have you guys done anything with VR videos?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:13:44) So not recently. The VR or 360 or 3D video is something that has been, let's say, haunting us over the past years and way before I joined. So I think it's a topic that has been discussed at Dailymotion and for any video platform for 15 years. The thing is, for a video platform that is not dedicated to that type of content, where all the features are not made for that type of content, there is very little usage. That's the sad truth. So even when we did develop—and I recall conversations with the engineering team years ago—when we did 360 video implementation in an HTML5 player with a web-based library, and that was an absolute nightmare and probably the first in the world to release an HTML player compliant with 360. Back then, Facebook was compliant with a native player, so we were literally the first in the world to do so. Very little usage. Very little usage, probably—it's an assumption here—but probably because of the cost of production. It's—I mean, if you do that type of thing, you know the setup is expensive. You know the type of content you can do is not every type of content. It's not mainstream now. So we did the implementation. We are compliant. We were compliant with every different step in different, let's say, specs and versions in that space.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:15:06) But we always saw very little traction, very little usage. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:12) Got it. Yeah. That makes sense too. Right? Because I've—we do a lot of video here, both on the podcast and off, and it's intensive to get a video shoot. Right? Like, to set up the lighting and the environments and all of that. And then, let alone 3D video, then you'll see the use cases for brands is often, you know, cars wanting to do a 360 of a car.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:15:34) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:34) Right. But that's not going to be on Dailymotion video. That's going to be embedded on their website. So yeah. Yes. I just—I was just curious if there's stuff that I didn't see out there that's happening with VR, AR on the video platforms.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:15:51) Not that much. I don't think it is a big thing on any other video platform, to be honest, either. I mean, if you look at the content that is successful, it's still the same type of content. The music industry has not yet invested, it seems, a lot into that space.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:16:05) They're driving a lot of views on any platforms, but it doesn't seem that they invested into that type of content yet. So we'll see. We'll see. We're happy with the fact that we have new technology in the video space, and the team is always happy in implementing new fun things to develop, but it has to come with the usage at the end of the day. Otherwise, it's always disappointing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:28) What's the use case that's driving most of your revenue right now?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:16:34) We have a specificity for our business. Actually, Dailymotion is a B2B2C platform. The way we work is we have all our product that I mentioned and described, dailymotion.com, with this homepage and vision that I believe we're the only one to do. And we need to better tell that story and go out there and say it to the world, introduce our product. But what we also do in order to get that content on the platform, because content doesn't come for free. You need to acquire the content, and content is expensive.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:17:09) How do we deal with that? We provide technology to publishers, media producers, digital newspapers that produce this content. We provide our technology against their content in a way. So our business model is technology against content, and we make our revenue in two spaces. One is we have a revenue share model with our partners, and we also do monetize on dailymotion.com with advertisement.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:17:36) We do have another platform, and that's where our revenue stream is coming. It's pretty balanced in terms of audience and pretty balanced in terms of revenue as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:46) Nice. Nice. Yeah. When we were talking in our production meeting about Dailymotion and asking, I asked the team about how do you know Dailymotion? And everyone said, well, they're usually the videos on the news sites.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:01) You know, they probably do something with that type of business because we always see the Dailymotion player videos when we're reading some sort of article and they have a video in the article. So I was like, oh, I bet you that's part of their business model right there.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:18:13) It is. It is part of it. Because if we had to go out there and try to serve a promise of building that platform where you have the most important thing that drives the world in terms of news, sport, music, entertainment, the thing you should not miss, and then we bring that to you in a meaningful way, if we had to go and buy every single piece of content to fulfill that, that would be a disaster for us. And you have many examples out there. I don't want to mention any, but you have many examples out there of video companies that have invested upfront a lot of money into the content.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:18:43) First years and in the recent history over the past four, five years, you will find examples of platforms where more than 400 million have been invested upfront in a platform to get the platform and the content to start big with the content straight away. But this is such a difficult business to generate a positive ROI, such a difficult business to create, capture, engage, and retain an audience that if you start with such an upfront in terms of spend, it's dead in the water. So you're going to live a couple of years and then it's going to be over.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:19:23) So you've got to have a strategy that makes you have great content in exchange for your technology and not only in exchange for money. It's technology plus money, by the way. So when we work with the G League, for example, or Live Nation, I mean, we provide our technology. We do revenue share in addition to that, and then we can aggregate content and put that in a meaningful way to users on dailymotion.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:51) Yeah. Live Nation's a big one. Also, you mentioned the NBA. When you guys got the NBA, did you get to interface with their team at all or their CTOs or anything like that?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:20:01) So we got the, in the U.S., we got the G League. So we got the NBA G League. And yes, we have to interface with a digital team, monetization team, technical team. That's why the product we've built is not only, as I mentioned, the dailymotion.com product, which is our end goal at the end of the day. We believe in that space.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:20:20) We believe in everything that I've said, that there is room for a platform that is different in terms of mission than the others. If you look at everything that is happening in the U.S., TikTok and Triller and there is a lot of opportunities for this platform. That's great. And we clearly see when you open the app, I don't know if you have installed TikTok, Joel. I don't know if you're in this, if you're going to the TikTok right now.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:20:46) But if you install those types of platforms, and I'm not commenting whether this is good or not good, it is full of entertainment, full of things to escape from your mind and add some little moments filled with some entertainment and cool stuff and fun stuff, et cetera. But you don't really learn something at the end of the day. You might feel after 15 minutes of watching TikTok, you feel empty. We believe that the more this platform grows, the bigger the room for platforms that will help you still in an entertaining and smooth and fun and well-designed way, but will help you to feed you somehow with something you can retain from the video you've consumed. Either you learn about the presidential elections, you learn about Black Lives Matter, you get a spot on onto something that feeds you somehow.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:21:41) We've got to do it in an entertaining way. Nobody wants to watch a two-hour documentary about something on the go. But we believe there's space here. And to my point, in order to get those contents, we need to go to the big brands like the G League and the NBA G League. And the guys here, what they don't care about, and for a good reason is, do you have the technology, Dailymotion, that will help us to be more successful as a brand and a media?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:22:11) And that's why the Dailymotion team is so fantastic, because we're building that promise of the destination platform, dailymotion.com. And at the same time, we have to build some sort of a pure SaaS platform, with APIs, fully customizable, that scales, delivered globally to provide that technology to partners like the G League or the Live Nation or many others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) I like that. I like that you guys care about the content that you're curating on the platform.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:22:43) Very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) One of the comments we made when we were looking at the homepage and doing the research again was that it felt, you know, we're on YouTube a lot because we put our videos on YouTube. So just as a company, we have a lot of people, we visit the site a lot. But when we went to Dailymotion, it was like a breath of fresh air. I don't know if it was just the design, the layout, the content, maybe a little bit of everything, but it was different and I like that, you know, you're sitting here talking about you want it to be less fast food and more nutrient dense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:17) I mean, I am definitely for that, right? I think most people would be.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:23:22) Yes. We have to do it in a fun and in a nice and entertaining way. That's what we're doing. That's why we're going after. We're always improving.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:23:29) And I know we all know we can do better, but what we've built and what we've been focusing on the past four or five years has reached a level of maturity where I believe the team can be very, very proud. And hence the recruitment of the CMO where we now need to tell that story. We now need to show the world what we've built, and this is just the beginning. This is happening. We are hiring that CMO, and we hopefully going to close that position by end of the year.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:24:00) And 2021 will be the year when we tell the world what we've been. And I'm super happy to see that you enjoyed and saw the fresh style, the fresh experience, the different type of content. And you know what I say sometimes to the team, have you seen the social media documentary on Netflix?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:22) I have. I have.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:24:24) Sometimes I say to the team, you know what? We're great at our product, we're great at our technology, but we suck at our business. And I was having the conversation a long time ago with the recommendation team because we always focused on making recommendations that matter. So we sometimes push quality, diversity of content, and the ability for you eventually to take the lead on what you want to consume. We put that above just making sure we increase the click-through rate. And, you know, that comes with some difficulty because when you have a machine learning team and a machine learning expert, they want to do one thing.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:25:07) They want to find the KPI to optimize. They want to find time spent or engagement or click-through rate or number of views per session. And they're asking me, tell us what KPIs we need to improve. And this is actually more difficult than that. Otherwise, you just end up with algorithms that push stuff just to maximize the time spent.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:25:27) Maybe that's actually not the right thing to do for society. Maybe we need to think a little bit more about what we do from an algorithm standpoint. But this is what I meant by not taking the right business decision, because if we were focusing only on the very short-term business impact, we would only take decisions based on growth of the click-through rate or growth of the time spent. It's a little bit more complicated than that we believe. And what is going on out there right now about the platforms and the recognition and algorithms tends to prove that we were not that wrong in a way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) So what do you, so I would, I actually, yeah. I watched the documentary, and I was trying to figure out what the good questions were. Like, where to take it from, like, you watch the documentary, you end it. It's like, all right. Well, now what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:18) And so I was starting to try to talk around, ask different people about how they feel about the algorithms and what they're doing. And one thing that's come up a lot is ethics. Like, people are saying that they think there's going to be more data ethics or machine learning ethics roles or positions that arise so that companies can at least talk about it and discuss it and follow it better rather than just assigning it to the CTO's role. Okay. Now you have this thing too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:49) Right?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:26:50) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:51) New hat. Right? Do you think that that's the direction we're heading, or do you have anybody with ethics at Dailymotion?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:27:00) I'm not a big believer, but that's only me, of the one person or one role, not one person, but one role will solve the problem. I've never seen it happen for any type of problem. I mean, even when you have a tech team and you're struggling because of whatever problem and you, someone throws, we need to hire, probably the team can solve it if we do the right thing with the team that we have. I think it's a problem of culture of your company, and it's a problem of what is your long-term goal? And that, I'm basically saying two times the same thing.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:27:40) Sorry about that, Joel. Because at the end of the day, that's your future. And it has been difficult. We have been in position, you know, transformation four years ago where what the data would, I mean, what the data was telling us was to eventually take decisions that would favor some consumption engagement, but was not on the path of what we wanted to build. And this is where you have to take decisions to say, we're not going to build, we're not going to validate that experience. We're not going to go that direction.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:28:12) Even though the data tends to show that users will be more happy right now, this is not where we want to be in two, three, four, five years. Although the chance we have, and I don't know if it's none and it will be part of the story we will create, but the company that owns us or shareholding company is Vivendi. Vivendi owns Canal Plus, Havas, Universal Music globally. And the chance we have is they support our vision and our ambition to build something meaningful over years. So we are not typical startup mindset where you've got to grow immediately, no matter what. We have a higher purpose and we have years to get there with their support, and that has dramatically changed the curve and the trajectory for Dailymotion four years ago when we got acquired.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:29:13) We had the chance to shift from what is it that we do this year to survive to how do we want to change the world with video. But it's going to take time. That's just a reality. It takes time. And if you look at what happened, TikTok is really, really big right now, but TikTok was not that big. I think a couple of years ago, it was Musical.ly.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:29:36) And before Musical.ly was Musical.ly, if I'm not mistaken, they were trying to build an education app, and they pivoted to music.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45) I didn't know that.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:29:46) So it takes time to build something great. So if you have that time, that's fantastic. If you don't, then it's more complex.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:55) Yeah. No. You're telling me. All the good things in life take discipline, take a lot of time, a lot of adversity. But it's great, like you said, when you are able to align with a partner who has the resources to allow you to take the time necessary to build this ultimate vision. But help me understand a little bit better. Like, if we look five years out or ten years out, what's the ultimate vision of Dailymotion?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:30:24) Ten years. I don't know. I'll be old in ten years. But five years, five years, the ultimate vision for Dailymotion in five years is to be the platform that brings you meaningful content, that feeds you, that not only entertains you, that gives you what you need to know about the world to educate yourself and make sure you understand what is going on. Because there is so much information about what is going on out there in the world that this is actually difficult now to have an opinion, that it is actually difficult now to know if you should be on that side or that side or how do you understand what is going on? And no platform today fulfills that purpose. And we believe video is going to be the way to fulfill that purpose.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:31:12) I mean, we've got to be honest. The younger generation, they do not spend time, they didn't spend a lot of time reading. They have platforms in their hands. They got the content straight away. You need to be straight to the point. You can have their attention for eight to twelve seconds.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:31:30) You can no longer have their attention for, nobody watches a six-minute video anymore on their phone. You might watch it on your desktop. You might watch it at the end of the day, but when you're on the go, you want to have the shortest path to information possible. And you want to consume and be enriched with video as much as possible in the minimum time dedicated to it. And this is what we want to be.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:31:57) This is where we want to be. And that's why we decided to go on news, sports, music, entertainment, but we have to continue to improve our product, and we have to continue to deliver that promise. And the first thing we have to do, by the way, is actually to say to the world that we're going after that battle. Because we've been building it for the past year, but now it's time for us to reveal it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) I love it. Yeah. No. When you're talking about the clip length, we notice because we promote our episodes and everything through clips. So we noticed that, like, a two-minute clip—it's gotta be captioned, right? Because people don't hit the audio button. They read it. They scroll through LinkedIn. They see the clip, and they read it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) But then I was going on Instagram the other day after one of our marketing meetings, and I found a couple things that I really liked as far as these videos. I follow, like, business motivation type stuff or personal development to, you know, get my mind right. So I noticed that they had these videos that were like 20 or 30 seconds, and the captions were actually in the video. And it was just like the most exciting line, two or three lines that the person said, which was, you know, like 30 seconds versus our normal two-minute clip. And so now we're gonna be trying some of those, like, 30-second videos to see how those perform.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:33:22) I think it's a great idea. I think if you look at how the whole platform evolved, if you look at what IGTV brought and how IGTV is getting, let's say, your eyeball in their product—everything you do now is a trailer. You get—as a user, you have my attention for, I don't know, one minute and 30 seconds. Show me all the things you can show me, and I will decide whatever I wanna engage more with. I will eventually click on it and watch the 15-minute video because I very much care.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:33:53) I will follow, and then everything I will get from my dedicated follow space will be from selected matters that I care about, and that's fine if it's five minutes. But when I'm giving you my time for a minute and 30 seconds, you need the product or the platform to show me as much as possible—meaningful and different things—to try to see whatever I wanna engage with. That's why I believe going for shorter clips is a great thing. Shorter clips, subtitles or captions—that's the only way to get attention now. It doesn't mean people don't wanna engage with longer content, but the trigger needs to come from that type of content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:38) I fully agree too, because, like, alright, so if I open up—it's Friday night, right? And I open up Netflix, and they had this new thing up at the top where it's almost like Instagram stories, but they call them previews, and it's like 15 seconds or however long it is. And then you can decide if you want to, you know, go deep into that and watch it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:00) And so you kinda, like, you know, go through and you watch preview two, three, four previews, and you're like, "Okay, this is the thing I wanna spend the hour watching tonight." And that's actually pretty interesting because I'm curious if your homepage will ever be like that. Like, you see some previews, and then you get to go in, but I think it kinda is.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:35:21) It is. So we were the first to introduce autoplay on a homepage. When we talk to users, we thought that there is this—I mean, stepping back and said, you know, Netflix—the joke about Netflix was you spend more time trying to figure out what you wanna watch than watching. Yep. Because you're like, "Okay, we get this. We get this." It's been 25 minutes. Now it's time to go to bed. So okay, forget about that. So what we figured when talking to our users is the homepage where you do some sort of a showcase of everything you have and then people need to choose is over. What we built in redoing that homepage—and we're the first to get that type of experience—is there is not that many differences now, especially on phone versus desktop. Because the homepage on the phone, the real estate is so small. More or less, everybody has the same homepage.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:36:17) You scroll to play. It's, let's say, somehow driven by the real estate that you have. On desktop, it's a little bit different. You get a bigger real estate, and you have the opportunity to showcase more of your content. Every marketing person would tell you, "You gotta show what you have in your catalog, so showcase as much content as possible."

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:36:35) We actually decided to take a slightly different approach where, actually, even on desktop, on the homepage of Dailymotion, you have straight away the content that matters to you—around you, fresh, that is immediately available. Just about that, for example, having a technological supply chain that can provide on your homepage a content that has just been uploaded, immediately encoded and distributed, is a miracle. If you look at other platforms, you would never find a content that is three minutes old on the homepage. But if we know that's the quality content and that has been selected by the algorithm, it will be pushed straight away onto the homepage. And the homepage is actually a scroll-to-play homepage because the promise is that the homepage will send me whatever I need to consume now.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:37:26) That's the promise. And if you go on dailymotion.com on desktop, the first video will start straight away. And if you scroll to play, the other video will follow, even on desktop, because that's the acceleration of the consumption pattern that we see. This is no longer you see 12 previews. And even if you mouse over some of them and you see them moving, you will select one.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:37:47) We have, and that's very important—to shorten the path, I think it's something very important for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) I like that. I'm actually scrolling on the homepage right now. And, yeah, it's like it can tell whatever is in view and it's—

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:37:59) You're using the product. You're not listening to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:01) I'm so sorry. I am. I'm getting—like, there's no audio coming through because I have it off, but, like, I'm getting—it's like I'm living a dream, Guillaume. I get the world-class expert explaining how something works while I get to be scrolling through it. Like, that's—I'm a kid in a candy shop, man.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:38:22) Thank you, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:24) This is great. So I'm curious about—you had a lot of good insight and advice about, you know, personal health and work and things like that. How are you doing now with COVID? Are you guys in your offices yet? What's it like in France right now?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:38:40) Honestly, it has been tough. I'm actually very, very proud of what we've done, of the team, of my colleagues, because we decided to go full remote before—not before the COVID hit, but before any governmental recommendation. I'm so proud and happy for our people and their safety that we took the decision to go full remote before the lockdown or before anything super bad happened. And that has been a little bit of a challenge for some of the people here, especially the HR team, but we were already in the process of not doing full remote, but establishing better, stronger remote policies. So it wasn't a full surprise, and we were equipped. We had the software, the processes, the ceremonials.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:39:35) The mindset was there, but it's still a bit different from one day to another. The office is closed, and then many, many things change. But I'm super proud and super happy that we took that decision. Recently, we tried to partially reopen the offices when required for some people. We also observed—and we did not expect that—that full remote is a drawback for the people who need more socialization than others.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:40:03) And we have very different personalities. The introvert, the extrovert—they react very differently to being full remote and isolated. So that's something we have to take into account and try to reopen a little bit the office when possible. But every time we feel there is a case or someone has been exposed or et cetera, the first rule is take care of all people. So we close the office and we put everybody remote again.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:40:33) We have a chance, and we have a chance in this industry that, I mean, we got hit financially speaking, as everybody, by the COVID somehow. We're an advertising-based business. It's flying okay now. But at the very beginning of the COVID, every brand was like, "I don't know what's gonna happen. Hold on. I don't wanna advertise anymore." Okay. Then they realized, "Oh shit, that's the moment we gotta be very, very close to our people. So we need to advertise more." But there's been a moment in time where it has been difficult.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:41:04) And I'm actually happy for people that we are in an industry where we can actually work from home. We don't have to take extreme decisions for the future of the company because our workforce cannot go to the office or so. It's a fantastic chance. We're very lucky, very privileged to be in that industry. And I think that's important for everybody out there in that industry to acknowledge that—if you work in the software space or in the digital or technology space, you are very, very much privileged at the moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:40) And then so, like, other parts of the company that weren't, like, engineering—did you help them and, like, kinda coach those leaders about how to go remote with the people who hadn't been remote?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:41:51) Yes, we did. We put in place a lot of things. I would not say everything was perfect, but I would say that it was great and the intention—I mean, we did our utmost in that field. It's never perfect. You know, when you look at things after a couple of weeks, you're like, "Oh, we could have done this better. We could have done that better." But the support we had from everybody—from the management team, the different managers, the individual contributors—was fantastic. The engagement and commitment from the HR team to deliver the right tips in terms of "How do you manage a report? How do you give tough feedback remotely when you cannot go out there and then share a drink to explain or something was not so okay?" et cetera.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:42:32) You manage things that you never used to manage in a way—that was fantastic. And I think we observed something, that when everybody was remote, the problem of being remote is your partner in life is gonna be remote with you, and your kids are gonna be there if you have kids. And this is not just about working remotely. This is about managing your life while trying to do the job. And I said to the team, and that's part of the leadership, "We need to assess all the things we won't be able to do over that period," because there is no chance we can continue to deliver the same thing. Not because people are working remotely and we're big believers in remote, but because we're gonna have to manage the kids, et cetera. So we immediately said flexible hours: "If you need to work in the morning, not in the afternoon, let us know. We'll accommodate," et cetera. But we saw something that wasn't expected—the commitment of the individual into continuing to deliver the value and the creativity and the quality of what they used to deliver, no matter what. And I wasn't expecting that.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:43:45) I was expecting tough decisions about the product and saying, "Okay, this we cannot do. That's unrealistic." There is no magic out there. We almost saw an increase of velocity for a couple of weeks, which is not a good thing either because it means people are trying to manage everything at the same time and still continue to deliver the velocity. Nobody is superhuman. So at some point, we're gonna have to pay for it. So when we saw that, we started to be very, very careful about managing the fatigue and the stress—people being overwhelmed. But I'm super proud of the people we have and how they committed to continue to do the job. It was really, really outstanding.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:30) Yeah. When people step up, it's like a good feeling. But I totally understand, like, the concept of, like, you don't want them to get to the point of complete burnout and drop off, but it is—it makes you feel like you've got a really good team when a difficult moment hits and everybody bands together.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:44:52) Yes. We have a really good team. We've managed to put together a great culture, and I wanna thank my colleagues for that. And that was interesting to see how that culture and our practices with remote was impacting the new joiners. Because during the COVID, we had to hire. We had new joiners that actually never saw their colleagues—like never, never. How do you onboard these people? Because when you go remote, full remote, but you used to know your colleagues—that's a different thing than when you have someone coming into the boat with you, but you never saw them. It's the first time, and you might probably not see them for the next—I don't know, hopefully not so long, but we don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:39) So you had to think a lot around the culture of onboarding new hires.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:45:45) Yes. Onboarding new hires—there's been a lot of things put in place. The way we communicate, the way we say thank you. I mean, I apply it to myself. I'm the kind of guy who, when something is done, I'm focusing immediately on the next challenge because I'm starting with the challenge. And I usually say thank you, but I had to change the way I say thank you to people because it matters a lot to me. And this is very different than being in the office. So you have the empathy, the level of communication—it's right up and change. Because we all understand the situation. We're all human at the end of the day, and we just wanna work together and create something great. And that has been absolutely outstanding to observe the way we change as a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:36) And how are you growing? Like, what are you learning right now?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:46:42) Me, personally? Or do you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:43) Yeah. Like, you as a professional, because, you know, you made this transition at the same—you know, also, you've got this long-term vision. You're growing. The business is growing. You're thinking about all of these things, but, like, where are you and how are you improving yourself right now?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:47:00) So I think, personally, I think one was the necessity and the ability to better communicate, better explain the purpose, repeat it again and again, never being frustrated about repeating it, and making sure that any individual in the company from any team can be and feel free to challenge big time what we're doing. And there is no frustration coming from there. There is actually a lot of—I'm actually happy when I see a tough question coming into one of our surveys or meetings we do. We've created—I used to present things to the team on a regular basis, like on a quarter basis, but I very much rely on my team to continue to relay the message, et cetera. But we put together during this moment meetings where we ask people to send the tough questions upfront so we can come to the meeting.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:47:59) And then tough questions come anonymously, and we answer the questions. Because in any company, regardless of your growth, your market value, people have questions always. It's never super clear. There are decisions that have been taken—as an individual contributor, you don't understand why. It has not been explained properly, not enough, or the dots have not been connected.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:48:24) So there is always questions. And I think what we've learned and what I've learned is the necessity to step in front and clarify that and repeat that. And actually identify that the culture of, in a company, if you have a culture where you can raise your hand and ask a question and challenge what the board is doing or what the C-levels are doing, and you will get an answer, and you will eventually be asked to participate into solving a problem, is a fantastic future. And obviously, we already had a great future, but we saw an acceleration of those behaviors through the remote and the COVID phases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:04) I like it. You're so good. I love it that you say communication because I have you listed as one of my favorite people who communicate very, very well and clear and have good ideas. And I was so excited when I heard that you were coming back on. I was like, oh, you gave that autonomous team structures talk or conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) I've included you in talks when I go around and speak at companies, and I've included your advice and, you know, give you credit. I said, oh, I learned this from talking to Guillaume. And yeah, I just really like how your brain processes data.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:49:46) Thank you very much, mate. That's my latest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:48) So as we start to wrap up here, I've got last question. But then I was curious, is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to get out there to the world?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:49:59) No. I think we covered a lot of things. As I was saying, we improved on every area. We did some change, interesting change. You would love that.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:50:09) I will share the link of an article we published recently about the way we deliver. I think we've significantly changed the way we deliver. It's somehow close to what put together with the book Shaper. Not inspired because it has been started in parallel, but actually very close in the way we want to execute the things we do.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:50:40) And the reason is quite simple. We have, and as we talked about it, we have a huge product surface. So we have a lot of things to do. And we are, you know, a little bit more than 300 employees globally, so it's actually a small company. If you look into the video space, the size of the giants out there, we're very, very, very small.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:51:01) And the truth is, you know, this fashion in the software industry where you have to do feature teams and the autonomous moves and they take care of it, it's great. It is fantastic, but it works only if one assumption is fulfilled: you have enough people to take care of all your product stuff. Otherwise, if you have 30 features to execute and you have 15 feature teams, then you have a product that is not being taken care of, and that is a big problem. And that was our problem.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:51:36) So we shifted the way we deliver and execute. I will share the link and you'll be able to add it to the blog if you want. And we put together something that has created a lot of, I would not say happiness, but a lot of career paths for our engineers, product people, QA people. I think we elevated the fact that in a company like our company, learning and developing yourself in your own skill path is the most important thing. No matter what, you're here to learn, and you will learn.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:52:14) So we keep everything about, you're an engineer, junior engineer, and your boss is a product manager. It exists in some companies. We want if you are a junior, you're going to have a senior manager. The senior manager will have a principal engineer. The principal engineer might have a distinguished engineer as a manager.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:52:30) You will learn through the entire career in the company, and that's what we want to develop. And we focused on what we call the how to do things. There are the people who know how to do things. They might not know yet what to do from a product standpoint. It will come from other people.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:52:49) But how to do things, they know how to do things. And what we put together is some sort of mechanism where we identify, if you look at the product real estate, we identify the pieces of our product that are the most important to tackle right now. And what we do is we create missions from those product pieces, and we ask the people who know how to do to go onboard in a mission, deliver over six weeks, and then eventually reassess if we need to continue that mission or something more important bubbled up and needs to be addressed. And it turns out it works pretty well, and it has dramatically accelerated our capability to hit the market.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:53:37) So for us, because we don't have all the resources to tackle the entire real estate of our product, that has put us in a position to better identify opportunities, go after it, timebox the exercise. Although timeboxing has been a big game changer for us because nobody wants to work for a project for three years. Anything can happen in three years. You want to work with something short, clear, scoped, you deliver the value and then you reassess. If you need to continue, you continue.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:54:06) If you need to go to something else, you go to something else. And the mix of great cadence and strong career paths for our people has also helped creating this value and culture that we talked about. And that's what I wanted to share with you because I know you're into that kind of thing a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:22) Oh, yeah. For sure. No. And you have more of this in that link that you're going to send me?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:54:27) Yes. We have a full article. I will send that straight away to you. Joel will get this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:32) Nice. We'll put it in the show notes too. Guillaume, this is fantastic. I want to have you on again next year.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:54:38) No problem. Anytime. I mean, really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:40) And if there's anything I can do, if you're ever like, oh, you know, Joel would be useful, you know, maybe connections to other guests or anything like that, if you ever think of any way we can be useful, you just reach out, let us know, and we'll see if we can make it happen. Okay?

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:54:53) Wait. Thank you. That's so nice from you. Thank you very, very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:58) Alright. I'll talk soon.

(Guillaume (COO at Dailymotion) at 00:55:00) Talk to you soon. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:04) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.