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The Future of Work
February 11, 2021

Video Superpowers for All

Our Investment in Reduct

What if working with video was as easy as editing text in a Google doc?

Instead of operating off of lifeless docs and emails, companies could leverage context-rich, deeply engaging videos as a core communication and storytelling medium. This is already happening in our personal lives, where most of us watch, record, edit, and share video constantly. The stark difference between the ubiquity of video in the consumer world, and its relegation to a rare, expensive and expert medium in the professional worlds bothered me — it had to converge.

In late 2019, I met Prabhas Pokharel and Rob Ochshorn. Prabhas was doing work on human-centered design with David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford DSchool, and Rob (himself a video artist!) had been researching the intersection of video and machine learning at Alan Kay’s institute. Together, they saw the promise of using cutting edge machine learning behind the scenes to create an accessible, intuitive and collaborative interface to video. When you see founder-problem fit, you know it, and we immediately signed up to lead the seed.

Prabhas and Rob have already started to bring that vision to life with Reduct. They started with the industry-standard transcript aligner that Rob wrote and integrated it with interactive-speed video rendering, real-time web collaboration, and a shared video repository. To address large volumes of video, they built a search engine with advanced language modeling and trained ML models to suggest likely tags for highlights.

With Reduct, you can:

  • Search and edit video as if it were text, eliminating the need to go through video recordings manually.
  • Share a highlight or reel of highlights with a public link, or just embed in your favorite cloud doc.
  • Help anyone in the org understand the most important points of a conversation they missed with a few clicks, and you can do everything from your browser. Reduct makes it 100X easier to work with video.

The Reduct team had a hunch that easy video storytelling would be useful to many business personas, but they began with User Experience Research — the people whose job it is to have user empathy and tell user stories to the rest of the organization. However, they discovered that empathy for the customer is the job of founders, product people, designers, marketers, customer success, and many other teams. Today Reduct is helping hundreds of leading companies like Facebook, Intuit, People.AI, Spotify and Superhuman get value from their video and build more customer-centric cultures.

Using video to tell impactful stories – both within your company and to your external community – is a superpower, and we’re excited to see companies become more empathetic, better aligned, and more customer-centric when they use richer, more engaging video communication. Reduct is currently adding to their small and mighty team: engineering, design, and a Founding Account Executive. If you’re interested in joining the journey, apply here.