- Duration: 27 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JRGBN3M3M2BHY5F6QYK5QV8G (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JRGBN3M3M2BHY5F6QYK5QV8G)
Transcript
[Sarika Batra]: Hi there. [Michael Houck]: Hey, marc. Hey, Sarika. How are you guys doing? Good, good. [Sarika Batra]: How are you? Anastjepa is coming in soon. Hi, marc. Hey, nice to hear you. [marc scarpa]: Yes. [Sarika Batra]: Sorry, I’m not on camera. I decided I was going to take a spring break since everyone else was. [marc scarpa]: Well, considering the amount of travel and the amount of work that you’ve been doing, I think you’ve more than earned it. [Sarika Batra]: I was like, just because I don’t have kids, why don’t I get spring break? That’s not fair. [marc scarpa]: That’s right. That’s the Silicon Valley rule. Everybody’s treated fairly. [marc scarpa]: So anyways, hi, Michael. [Sarika Batra]: Hey, good to good to meet. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think you were on our first call with with the very first call, maybe with Jatha and marc. [Sarika Batra]: No, I haven’t been on these social calls yet, but I’ll introduce myself and then you can tell me about you. So I run all of Tim’s media assets for Tim, which is Meet the Drapers, Draper TV, and anything that falls under those two umbrellas. So I’ve been working with Tim for eight years now, and that’s pretty much it. That’s me. So if you could tell me about you, and then marc, I think you had a purpose or Michael behind the call, so you guys could then take over and we can all I’ll have a conversation from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Good to meet. Um, so for me, uh, I’m a founder, uh, a couple of different things. Uh, one of them is sort of a content writing and strategy agency. We work with a bunch of founders and some VCs, uh, recently started working with Tim, um, and sort of excited to be diving in and partnering with you guys on this stuff. Um, I’ve been in Silicon Valley for a long time, both, uh, in SF proper, and then just sort building things around the world. So I’m in, I’m back home in Philly right now with my parents actually, but traveling around the U.S. At the moment. So you’ll see me with a lot of different backgrounds on different calls for the next couple of months if we’re on them. [Sarika Batra]: Okay, awesome. And then so tell me, so you’re helping manage Tim’s social. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so basically Tim and Michael brought me in to help with social strategy and then we’re also producing content for Tim’s LinkedIn, Tim’s Twitter, and also the Draper Associates LinkedIn and Twitter, at least to start. I think the idea is to sort of broaden that over the next few months. But the first priority on our side is just nailing the voice for Tim. So that’s our priority this month. And then from there, building like a more comprehensive strategy for the accounts. And then, you know, taking it from there, basically. [Sarika Batra]: Yeah, OK, great, because, you know, for our Meet the Drapers show, we would love to have Tim talk more about it and Draper TV in general and the different content we produce on Draper TV, like Adam’s podcast. And like we just had a season finale that’s about to air for Meet the Drapers, like the winners, everyone Tim invested in, all of that stuff. So when you’re ready for that, I know you’re still working on his voice. Let us know because we can start sending content your way. In addition to Draper Decentralized, obviously, that’s already gonna be sent to you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it’ll be a good idea for us to set up like just a workflow between all of us. Here’s where our content ops team on my side can go in and pick up assets from you guys. I know marc, you already shared that for some of the Draper decentralized videos. So thank you for that. And so I think formalizing that across all the different assets you guys create will be super helpful as we sort of build that out. [Sarika Batra]: So yeah, so we can start a spreadsheet now. Are you going to edit the content or do you want us to edit it? I don’t know how or do you want to give us guidelines to Tim’s voice and this is how it should be. [Michael Houck]: And then we edit and send you things. How is that process going to work? Yeah, so we’re going to see how that evolves. I think whether it’s whether it’s through something like what you said, or whether it’s through. Scripting or whether it’s through just higher level guidance. I’m not totally sure where that’s We need to figure that out with with Michael, probably over the next couple weeks I would say. So I have more for you there kind of soon, but in the meantime our focus is just initially like let’s make sure that we have the voice exactly right. So we’re doing some test posts right now and Tim’s like what we’ve sent over. So I think we’re on the right track. So just want to nail that before we before we take on too much and then you know disrupt anyone else’s workflows or anything like that. [Sarika Batra]: Would you mind sending me the test, what you sent him that he likes, so we can just kind of start thinking along those lines, because we’re continuously creating content. [Michael Houck]: Yep. I will send you the first batch that we sent him and that he approved. So we can start there. [Sarika Batra]: Yeah. OK, great. Sounds wonderful. So marc, I’m guessing you had a reason for setting up this meeting. And so. It was Michael that set up the meeting. Oh, Michael, you set up the meeting. Okay, so was this the reason? [marc scarpa]: Yeah, he was getting back to us and I had emphasized to him that it was pretty important that you two meet. Yes. And that you run all of content for Tim globally. So I think that’s important for him to kind of connect with you. And for just also, Michael, as an update, we have initiated on the Draper Decentralized show, the cuts that you and I talked about last week. So those are now, it’s exactly what we discussed, which is, you know, it’s like, hi, I’m Tim Draper’s digital twin. It goes right into the story. And, uh, yeah, so we can send you, you have access to that box and you want to test some of those. That would be great. We’re continuing to publish them on all of his other platforms. Um, as we talked about, so, and Draper TV, so keep in mind, meet and all the other shows, including Draper Decentralized, will ultimately go under this Draper TV banner, if you will. And that launch is coming pretty eminently, I would say, by the end of the month. So there’s a lot to talk about. As Sarika mentioned, it’s not just the individual shows, of which the most prominent one right now is Meet the Drapers. That’s a weekly Draper decentralized as a daily. Um, then Draper TV will launch as a channel, as a network, and then there’ll be other content on that platform over the course of the next year. Yeah, I think we definitely want to strongly support the launch. [Michael Houck]: Um, and so once we have a firm date for that, just give me a heads up and, uh, I can have our team create some content, uh, around that, that will, that will post across, across channels. I think that’s a, That’s sort of a big event that we want to drive some traffic to and emphasize. And yeah, good to know about this sort of video intro that we were able to cut that down. I think the next thought for me about how we can, because, you know, and Sarika, maybe this is, I’ll share a little bit of background here. So my mandate is basically maximize visibility, maximize like coherence about the Draper philosophy, the Draper brand, what Tim wants to be investing in, maximize impressions for that basically on social. That’s my kind of top level mandate. And so as I’m thinking about the way to do that, I think video and especially the digital twin are a big part of that. Getting Tim in front of people is the best way to sort of get his message out there. And, you know, obviously he’s built a ton of trust over the years with his brand already, but it’s just sort of reinforcing that trust more and more. So high priority for me. And the way I’m thinking about that is like, how can we utilize the digital twin asset to create the most compelling, short, clippable, social optimized video? That’s how I’m thinking about it. So I think, marc, if I sent it over to you, if we just talked about on a call, there are a few accounts that do this really well with digital twins right now. Not so much on Twitter, because I don’t push them there as much, but on basically every other platform. And I think that we could be one of the first on Twitter to really nail this with the digital twin. So I’m trying to take inspiration from what they’ve done well on Instagram, for example. And I can, let me drop in the one guy’s account because he in particular does it really well. This guy has built a newsletter, an AI newsletter to like hundreds of thousands of subscribers just with more recently with these digital twin videos on on Instagram. So I think creating these type of things that have high viral potential will be the best way for us to maximize impressions. And we’re not always going to, you know, hit right. Some of these videos will will not perform well, but the ones that do hit will have an outsized impact on everything from impressions to conversion to followers for the accounts and you know, just brand building. So top of mind for me is like I would love to do some sort of test with the digital twin around assets like this that we can create a little batch of and test out that are like vertical video, split screen, quick edits, Tim sort of talking direct to the camera, partial part of the time about these like very interesting topics and companies that Tim is excited about and investing in and that maybe we’re having like being tied into the Draper decentralized news announcements in that way. I see this as a really valuable potential channel for us. So we’d love to figure out a way we can do a test. [marc scarpa]: Sure, we could do that. I would ask you what is different about the video that you’re showing me now from Rowan Chung and Draper decentralized? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so a few things. [Michael Houck]: So the Rowan video, they’re vertical videos, right? So they take up full screen. Screen on the phone. That’s that’s first thing. Also, I really like the sort of I don’t know the the first couple seconds are very optimized and most of them, especially the high performing ones with like good hooks. And I think that we need to figure out a way to get that to happen even while we are sort of acknowledging the legal requirement of this being Tim’s digital twins. So the split screen view I think works really well for that. And then there’s, they also have the captions show up, I think, in sort of interesting ways in some of them. And I think the scripts are just very optimized for no word. Yeah, exactly, for social, like no word wasted, anything like that. So I can put together some more detailed thoughts on that, but I would love to do a few in this format that we can test out over the next couple of weeks. And see how they perform. [Sarika Batra]: So Michael, have you had a chance to watch Meet the Drapers yet? [Michael Houck]: I’ve watched Meet the Drapers. I watched a bunch of the Draper decentralized videos, but I haven’t. [Sarika Batra]: I haven’t watched Meet the Drapers yet. OK, go on draper tv.com and watch a couple of episodes of Meet the Drapers when you have time, because then you’ll get some ideas of how to show Tim’s personality through his TV show as well. So you have a mix of content. Content, not just straight. The digital twin is awesome, but then you can have also content of him talking entrepreneurs and how he makes his investment decisions. What kind of companies he likes? Because we have all of that content. We have a wealth of content there. [Michael Houck]: Cool, yeah, I think I will do that because I have a flight tomorrow so I can have a bunch of free time to watch through a bunch of this stuff. So I’ll make a note to do that tomorrow. And yeah, I think. Taking some of these video clips of him talking to entrepreneurs could be good. Those do really help, especially when they have, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Twitter account Startup Archive. I’ll send this over to you too. This is my friend’s account. They do a really, really good job of this. They also have 200,000 on Instagram. They’re basically on every platform now. But they take clips of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and whomever. Here, I’ll drop it in the chat. Um, and, uh, they just write up little like text based things, insights, uh, from the clips, um, on top of them. And these posts perform really, really well. Like here’s a, here’s one in particular that got like 42,000 likes. Um, I’m Tim draper’s digit. Is that on my side? [marc scarpa]: Um, I’m just showing, I was just going to show you something, but go ahead. [Michael Houck]: Uh, so yeah, so I think, this like wealth of in here, we should totally make use of these because this is original content that yeah, exactly. Yeah. [Sarika Batra]: So I think that I think that you’ll find a lot if you start watching his TV show, you’ll find a lot in there. Yeah. Michael, the spreadsheet that I sent you last time we met the fast channel spreadsheet has all of the links to that footage. [Michael Houck]: Oh, perfect. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, great for TV. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I’ll make a note of that. [Sarika Batra]: You can also just watch it on Draper TV, either way. If you need to download or play with it or cut anything, that’s what I meant. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That’s where we get the views, Michael. [Sarika Batra]: Yeah, we’ll get one more view. [Sarika Batra]: We’ll get one more view. [marc scarpa]: Well, you’ll get a couple more because I’m going to send it around to my team and have them all watch. Oh, great. We’ll get a couple more. Send it to all your friends and have some bots watch it too. Just one thing about your comment on Draper Decentralized. Keep in mind, the reason why the the assets currently are in 16 by nine is because these assets are going out to a lot of different social platforms, but more importantly, they’re going out to TV. That’s the reason. For budgetary reasons, we looked at nine by 16 when we originally discussed this. We can make them again or reformat them as nine by 16 for certain platforms. It would just be that we just have to reconfigure them in that way. So the split screen would be a fine way to do that. And it’s totally, totally possible. I just wanted you to have background as to why they’re 16 by nine. And then all of them are the purpose of them is to report on, you know, his current investments. And that’s something that is important to him and critical to keep his investments out in the forefront of the world. But we can certainly make additional shoulder content using the digital twin for other things. So what we’re trying to do, Michael, is just stick to a format so we can adjust the voice a little bit on the editorial side of the Draper decentralized, maybe change the scripting. That’s totally simple. The way that we’re doing them right now I don’t see really any difference between what you’ve shown me and what we’re currently doing, other than the 16 by 9 versus 9 by 16. And doing a derivative work for 9 by 16 is totally fine. They do have closed caption in the ones that you’re looking at. We looked at that. We can add that. That’s not a problem. But then we would remove the graphic elements have in there now. So if you look at them now, we’re actually adding actual graphics to emphasize certain keywords in the video. That could go away and be replaced by closed caption, because you wouldn’t want to have both, basically. Closed caption also is automatic feature on a lot of social platforms, as you know. So we just felt like emphasizing certain things in graphics were the way to go. But removing that graphical element is in terms of the text graphical element that’s baked into them right now is totally doable. What I would do is expand the videos for multiple languages in a much easier way too. That’s great. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think we can probably lean into the closed captions. And then we can still emphasize certain words by highlighting them or having different backgrounds on those particular words that help them stand out a little bit. Like the name of the company, for example. Like the name of the company. Or the name of the founder or something else, some achievement that they’ve had or something like that. So yeah, I totally, I wanna be super clear. I don’t see this as like replacing the Draper decentralized videos for the news syndication. I think that’s a pretty important channel that we should continue to do exactly what we’re doing in. This would be sort of either trying to take those videos and cut them different ways for social or for creating totally new type of videos with the digital twin on new topics also for social. So we can start with maybe the first one there. So maybe step this way. And then if that goes well, or even if it doesn’t go well, we can try the other one as well after that. But yeah, I don’t see this sort of interfering with anything you guys are doing on the syndication side, because I think we should keep doing exactly what we’re doing there. [marc scarpa]: Yeah, but to your point, just reformatting them from nine by 16, give us your notes on what you’d like to see. We’ll create some test videos based on the current format of the editorial that we’re doing. And then we’ll go from there. And then if you’ve got some new ideas on top of that, great. [Michael Houck]: All for it. Cool. Love it. I will go through all the Draper TV stuff that I possibly can consume over the next couple of days. And I’ll follow up with you guys probably, I would say, either Sunday night or Monday, just with thoughts and takeaways and maybe we can set up some process to get those clips, identify the right clips, and then get them onto social, get our writers writing pieces for them too. So yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, okay, great. [Sarika Batra]: Well, thank you so much, Michael. It was great meeting you. Yes, it’s great to meet you too. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for having us. [Sarika Batra]: Absolutely, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Meet the Drapers and what we’re gonna do with Draper Decentralized and the Draper TV content on Tim Social. And if you have any ideas for our social or if you want to take on that as well, go for it. Look at all of our social accounts and add it to what you have to do. [marc scarpa]: Absolutely. I mean, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s a really good point, Sarika. Doesn’t it just make sense for for all of it to kind of be one plate? [Sarika Batra]: Yeah. Because then the voice can be the same throughout. [marc scarpa]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think we’d love that. And I think that Michael and Tim seem open to that as well. I don’t want to sort of throw too much at them too soon in terms of changing things up. But I think that’s very much something we could take on in the, I’d say, short to medium term, just not quite immediately. [Sarika Batra]: Maybe you could just look at it at least and tell me ways in which we could improve and then eventually take it on. OK, awesome. Thanks so much, Michael. Yeah, OK. Bye. Bye, guys. Take care.