Jason Beem Transcript
Clint Betts
Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are working on something that I find particularly fascinating. You've had a really incredible career around software as a service company, but tell us about Panopto. You are the CEO of this company. How did you come to be the CEO?
Jason Beem
Well, yeah, let me first talk about Panopto. So excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Panopto was founded in 2007, so it was created as a just-from-the-ground-up, higher-education video capture tool. So, create capture videos, share those videos, and manage that video content. As you can imagine, it captures the lectures, lets the students go back and watch those lectures again in their dorms and their apartments, et cetera, to get another swing at the data, swing at the information.
All of us have been to university before and realize we zone out; we don't pay attention full-time, and it gives us another opportunity to learn that information. So I joined about two and a half years ago, and maybe a little bit about me. So I've been in software for a long time. I've been in software for about 28 years. Nine of those years were in higher education before I came to Panopto, so it made a ton of sense as I was looking for my next project. When I met K1 and met Panopto, it just made a ton of sense. So, back into the higher education industry, back into learning, and it has been an amazing adventure here at what, 26, 27 months.
Clint Betts
Yeah. So what was it like coming in and taking over and being the one in charge of this company? That's a long time. This company has been around for a while.
Jason Beem
It has. It has. 2007. It's a long journey, and they've moved themselves into the leadership position during that journey. So it's been great. The people here are amazing. We have very knowledgeable, deep industry background employees in this company. People who've been here 14 years, 15 years at Panopto and doing this kind of work. Our engineers, our product managers, customer success, and customer support have all just been doing this for a long time. And so it's a big family here of people that are just really committed and passionate about what they're doing. .
So, coming into a company like that is exciting. You have these people that are absolutely passionate about video, passionate about learning, and to get that kind of feel, that energy when you come into the company, it was just absolutely amazing. I've been, again, two years here, and it has just expanded. We're growing the company, we're adding customers constantly, and that passion continues to start kind of filling me up, too. So it's been great.
Clint Betts
So, are your main customers basically educational institutions or the bulk of your customers? Or are you expanding outside of that? As I looked at your website today, it seemed like you have the opportunity to go wherever you want with this thing.
Jason Beem
Yeah, so traditionally, we started at Carnegie Mellon University back in 2007, where they were a partial investor in this company. It was all higher education. That was the focus. How do you help students with their learning outcomes? How do you help faculty and staff improve the graduation rates and the pass rates of those courses? It has since expanded considerably. Now, we are the largest provider of this type of software in the world for higher education. We have the most number of universities. We have 22 of the top 25 universities in the US. We have the biggest names you can think of in higher education globally.
But we've absolutely expanded into the corporate market. So, just like in higher education, corporations need learning as well. So they need to take employees that just started, whether they're junior employees right out of school, and they've got to teach them how to do the role within the corporation or continue to retrain. So, just in time, learning to retool and reskill these people as they move through their journey, their career, within that corporation.
As we have moved forward in modern times, that retooling is shrinking and shrinking. It used to be like every five years, I just remember my younger days, I'd go to a training center, you'd fly there, you'd spend two weeks in a training center, and you'd learn this new thing. You can't do that anymore because it changes so often every two years and now every year. You've really got to continue to retool your employees constantly. It's almost like continual learning for that group of employees. So our product is right there for that. It's very good for that.
Clint Betts
Given your extensive experience in the SaaS industry, I wonder what you think of the future of SaaS currently; that's a big topic and a big kind of debate, particularly as AI has come in. I would say Panopto is an AI company, but it's also a SaaS company. So, what is your sense for the future SaaS? And obviously, there are different models being tried now. Like consumption versus subscription, all that type of stuff.
Jason Beem
Yeah, so SaaS is here to stay. So when I joined the workforce back in 1996, 1997, SaaS wasn't really a thing. It was all on-prem. It was a client-server; there were big S400s and main firms and all that. Since it has moved the SaaS route where it lets somebody else host your data, host the processing power, and that's even come farther with AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, all these big cloud providers, it's gotten easier and easier. So I don't think that's going to change.
Yes, there may be different models. Is it user licenses, or is it consumption? Is it processing? For example, it is all consumption-based. We pay via the consumption of the processors how much processing you're going to do on these servers with these AI chips that they're plugging into these servers. And so that will continue because that's where the cost is right now. It's electricity for processing those AI renders.
So I do think that will continue to transform. I do think the processing technology, those chips, Nvidia is obviously the biggest one right now out there making the AI chips. I think that will continue to evolve and get cheaper and cheaper, and then the other types of processing and other types of consumption will come out and continue to improve and get cheaper over time as well.
Clint Betts
Yeah. What is your sense of AI? Tell us how you're using it within your company. Obviously, part of your product is this, and just your overall sense of where we're heading here, which obviously nobody knows. That's a pretty big question. Suppose somebody knew that it would be worth a lot of money. Tell us how you're feeling about it and how you're using it.
Jason Beem
Yeah, so we've been using AI before AI was even the term; I mean, before ChatGPT had come out, we were using AI technology for auto-captioning for language translations. There's a lot of stuff related to that. We have AI search capabilities that allow when you go look for a video that was recorded and put into the Panopto platform, and I use this example all the time. It was a lecture on the pyramids of Giza. I don't remember which lecture it was. You can search on the pyramids of Giza. Not only will it show you the video that it was in, but here's the two minutes it was in that video that was; they talked about that, and the professor wrote pyramids of Giza on the board during minute 13, and he saw it on the board from minute 13 to 15. And so it can bring you back to that. So we've had the OCR capabilities and the AI search.
More recently, we have just been expanding through AI. We've been innovating internally for summarization and better ways to learn. So how do you take that content that's already there, convert that content in an easy way for people to consume, so summarization of the lectures, auto-chaptering, easier ways to go find that content?
And then, most recently, we bought a company called Elai. So it's E-L-A-I or E-learning AI. We bought that company back in October. It is a very innovative text-to-video company. And so what this does is it allows you to very quickly take either text you type in or a PowerPoint, plug your PowerPoint presentation into it, and it will generate a video with an avatar that looks just like me. You can probably see me out there with my avatar in my voice, speaking Japanese. But it generates learning content very quickly and then quickly converts it into multi-language. As you think about the corporate use case, you have to go train 10,000, 100,000 employees in 10 different countries, build it once, convert it into multi-language, and then send it out and be able to do that very fast, be very nimble.
Clint Betts
The way you guys are using it, I think, is pretty incredible. And the whole text-to-video thing still feels like magic. I'm still not over that. That still feels like magic.
Jason Beem
Honestly, to me, too. In the early days of ChatGPT, that felt incredible. We all used it when it came out. You're like, "Wow, this stuff's amazing." It has come a long way from there to be able to say, "Hey, create a presentation that is about this, like how to ride a bike." It generates the chaptering of it and then generates a video with my avatar talking about it, and that's like, in five minutes, I can have that video done, and it rendered and out and ready to go for somebody to watch.
I ran learning and development back in, what was it, 2013. Back in those days, I had a team of people who were content creators who created learning content for my own company, and it took them 20 to 40 hours to generate an hour of learning content just through to the normal act of building the collateral, building the PowerPoints, doing the voiceovers, all that stuff. It took 20 to 40 hours for every hour of content created. This changes the game. This brings it down to an hour or two for that same full-hour training course.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it's wild. That's actually so crazy. What does a typical day look like for you as CEO?
Jason Beem
Well, so you're going to get into my nuances here. So I get up somewhere between; well, it's variable because I never hit my alarm, but it's somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 AM, which is usually when I'm rolling into bed, and I have to have my coffee. But the first thing I do is once I have some caffeine, I sit in front of my computer, and I empty my inbox. I do not like starting the day if I have an email in my inbox that has not been responded to, processed, and dealt with. So I start there, clear out my day.
This is where I get a little weird. I look at every meeting I have, and I did this this morning and I set an alarm for five minutes before every meeting. And it's an iOS normal alarm you have on your iOS device. I set the alarm because what happens to me is I get into what I'm doing, and very few things can distract me from what I'm doing. Not a beep from my computer telling me I got to go to a meeting. So I set these alarms to get me to go to these meetings, and so I set those alarms, and then I start looking at my day. I look back at my priorities from last week. So, every Friday, I write my top priorities I need to get done during the week. And so then, before I go into my first meeting, I'm looking at my priorities and whether I am spending enough time today working on those top priorities, what I said were the most important things. And then I kind of cruise. Then I'm in meetings most of the day.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Yeah, that's smart. I've never heard of anyone doing that. That's actually really smart because I agree with you. Like I'll be sitting there at the computer, and then I've heard dings, but I don't care. And now I'm looking up, and it's like, "Oh, there's been a Zoom going on for the past 10 minutes, and I'm supposed to be on," like that happens to me all the time.
Jason Beem
Yeah. If I didn't set those alarms, I bet I'd be late to three or four meetings a day. And I'm very particular is maybe a good way to say it about starting meetings on time. And so my entire management team understands that we start to the second, and I can see three clocks from my desk right now, and they're all atomic clocks. They're all to the second. I start my meetings whether I can or not; I start with the second. When that second-hand hits the top, I start talking. And the reason I do that, and I've experienced the other side where we're always three minutes, four minutes before we start meeting, you have 10 people in a meeting, even three people. And if you're five minutes late to kick it off, take that 10 people times that five minutes. We just wasted five minutes of productivity for the company and for us individually. We're so busy as it is, we don't have that kind of time to waste even on that five minutes being late.
Clint Betts
How do you structure your meetings? I assume they're not as long as most, given that.
Jason Beem
Yeah, so I have a very strict cadence. I'm going to sound like just a horrible CEO. I'm very strict on the cadence. I follow. Do you know who Patrick Lencioni is?
Clint Betts
I do, yeah. Okay.
Jason Beem
So The Advantage. Death by Meeting, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. How it's structured, the advantage, and how I've been doing this since probably 2009 at different companies. So I do a weekly tactical every Monday with my whole management team, and it's about 90 minutes usually> we schedule 90 minutes, and in that 90 minutes, we focus on tactical topics. We come here, we talk about our priorities, and we go into the tactical topics. We review metrics and all the things that we need to run the business for the week.
And then I have daily check-ins. The other four days of the week, it's 15 minutes. It's fast, it's really tight. We go in and what's important today, quick topics we can just cover. And what that allows us to do by having that meeting cadence is not have all sorts of ad hoc meetings because we, as a management team, can catch up and answer quick questions rather than trying to figure out how to get on someone's calendar. How do we get these three people together? Usually, in that quick 15 minutes a day, you can solve a lot of problems, which frees up your calendar for other things.
We also block; this is going to sound like a lot; we each block an hour a day as an ad hoc window, and we keep it blocked no matter whether we use it or not. Nine times out of 10, we don't use the spot, and it just stays there as a block for yourself. But we have that available. If we come up with a topic in DCI, it's like, "We really need to spend time on this thing." We'll use the ad hoc later in the day and utilize it. Most of the time, it just is time for you now to use it on your own without having to meet with us.
Clint Betts
Oh, interesting. So tell me what you read, and give us some reading recommendations. You obviously mentioned Patrick Lencioni, who's great. He's actually come and spoken at a couple of our events. He's a great speaker, has an incredible podcast that I think people should check out, as well, and has written particularly The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; I think that's just a phenomenal book. But he's written many phenomenal books. Outside of him, what else do you read? And it doesn't even have to be nonfiction or business-related.
Jason Beem
Well, yeah, the other one I reference a lot when I'm talking to employees. I do a new hire orientation for every employee that comes, and we sit down and talk about things. I reference Great by Choice a lot. So you know who Jim Collins is. He has Good to Great, Great by Choice. So when Great by Choice, you talk about shooting bullets versus cannonballs. So, there are some themes in there that just I absolutely adore about not diving headfirst into a new initiative. Let's go test, let's go test quickly. Let's fail fast or be successful fast. And then we shoot cannonballs. We just load up on money and investment. So that's a great one.
If we go away from business books, what I try to do is read a business book and then read something fun. I love science fiction; I love fantasy. I just absolutely adore that stuff. I'm a big nerd when it comes to that kind of reading. But that's kind of some of the way I also decompress is just listening to; I use Audible a lot, so I probably blow through a book a week on Audible.
Clint Betts
Yeah, audible is so great for that purpose.
Jason Beem
I think I bought 400 books the last time I looked. I had like 400 books in my library there.
Clint Betts
That's awesome. You do the same thing I do. I just keep buying books, and then you're like, "When am I going to get to that?"
Jason Beem
Everywhere I drive, when I'm going to the airports, when I'm sitting on planes, I always have my headphones in, or when I'm driving, I'm just listening to a book everywhere I go.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. That's great. Where have you landed on the whole work-from-home, hybrid, everybody in the office, that whole thing that every CEO has had to deal with over the past two years?
Jason Beem
Personally, I would love to work in an office every day. I'd love to get in my car and drive to an office 20 minutes away, sit there for some amount of time, and then come home. And what that normally would do for me is I can shift out of family mode to work mode, and then on the way home, I shift back into family mode again. And it's good for my family to see me not thinking about work. I don't have that anymore. I'm working from home a hundred percent of the time.
So even though that's my personal preference, I spent a lot of time really early at this company trying to gauge the employee's interest. So I came in late '22, so we're at the tail end of Covid, the pandemic. We had three floors in downtown Seattle, a really nice location. It was a great office. And so, for the first six months, I flew there every other week, got on a plane, and lived in Austin. So I got on a plane and sat there three days a week, every other week, but nobody wanted to come in. I would throw like a happy hour, and we'd go places to try to get people to come in and meet me and interact, but nobody really wanted to commute into downtown Seattle or into Pittsburgh; we have another office there.
And so I met everybody. I said, "Okay, what do you guys want to do? We can either keep the office or come into the office. It doesn't have to be full-time, but at least three days a week or something like that, just so it's worth spending the money." Nobody wanted to do it. So I think we all realized during Covid, during the pandemic, that we can make working from home work. It's not simple.
You have to change your attitude; you have to change how you interact with people, but it does work. And so we are a hundred percent remote company. I have an office in Pittsburgh that is used just part-time. We have an office in London that they use more for sales than anything else, but we've made it work. This actually works well. I think the employees are happy. You see our glass door going up; it works for us.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's incredible. That's a big win, actually, if you can make it work. Do you find yourself that you're having to overcommunicate with your employees now that it's all work from home? Like you don't have that kind of random connection, as they say, like around the water cooler bumping into each other in the halls? Like do you find you have to overcommunicate, or how do you manage it?
Jason Beem
Yeah, so this has been a little trial and error for us. We have Slack; if you know what Slack is, it's a technology. We use that a lot. We are heavy Slack users. We have lots of Slack channels, and there's like every two minutes, I see somebody posting something on one of the channels. So we have a lot of great community there. Yeah, there's a lot that got done before when you just walk, as you said, walking to the water cooler, and you bump into somebody, and then you solve a problem, say, over the course of five minutes.
So what happens now is we have Zoom integrated with our Slack. I quickly, if we need something, pop up a Zoom that pops into Slack, and we jump on for literally five minutes, and you can talk to anyone on my team. It's like, "Hey, do you got five?" We pop onto Zoom; we do it face to face because there's nothing like seeing people's eyes and seeing their facial expressions to understand what they're really feeling when you're asking them something. So we do a lot of that.
It has taken some time. One of the things when we went full remote was that we started doing weekly town halls, and at the beginning, it worked really well. We were staying in contact, but then all of a sudden, it kind of lulled, and there wasn't enough to talk to every week. And so we've shifted back to a monthly. So we've changed our cadence a little over time as we've realized there's a balance to being too much and too little. So I think we're at a good cadence of monthly town halls where we give people the forum to ask questions. We present on the numbers, we present on what's important, people's promotions, all those kinds of fun things.
Clint Betts
Oh, interesting. Yeah, I like that. That's super cool. How are you thinking about the economic outlook of this year versus particularly like last year, the beginning of last year, 2024, a lot of uncertainty, elections around the world, elections in the United States, all that type of stuff, which added to some uncertainty. Maybe some things are a little bit more certain now. How are you looking at 2025, and what's your approach that might be different from what it was last year? Maybe it's the same.
Jason Beem
So last year, corporate was a little more uncertain. Yeah, you had high interest rates. There were layoffs that had happened through '23, a lot of layoffs during '23. In early '24, we didn't know if that was going to continue or if interest rates were going to come down and boost the economy and corporate investment in themselves. So we were very nervous about that part of the market and had to be very careful how we were investing and where we were selling software to make sure they had budgets, and we could show the value of what we were doing.
Education was okay. You're always going to have an education. One of the things we saw last year, kind of the beginning of it, was enrollment, low enrollment. Coming out of Covid, a lot of the universities are not full. As you look at the university tiers, you look at the top, the MITs, the Harvards and Stanfords, all those guys, they're always full. They're never going to have a problem because everybody wants to go to the best school they can go to, the highest notoriety, all that. But it's the tier two, the tier three schools. Those ones started having 80% enrollment or lower. We saw universities close down last year, and they're not opening a lot of universities globally. But we actually saw universities start to shut down the smaller ones because they just couldn't keep making ends meet.
So that was, as we rolled through the year, that was some concern. It's like, "Okay, how do we help these universities to get more enrollment? How do we help them to do distance learning?" A lot of times, I was in Australia, and they were having problems with visas and student visas. They have a lot of students that come from China and some other areas of Asia Pacific. And they were struggling with delayed student visas where these students enrolled, got accepted, but then couldn't get their visa quickly enough. So how do we give them remote learning capabilities for that first semester so they could have just the same experience as being in the room as they would be back at their houses in some other foreign country, and then also give them the translation capabilities so they can learn in their native tongue as opposed to Australian English.
So that was last year. This year, I see the corporate side being better. I think there's less uncertainty; they lowered interest rates three times last calendar year. We're seeing some optimism. You see it in the stock market. We see optimism, at least on the corporate side, around investing and hiring. So, I would expect to see that much more positive than we did a year ago. Education is still in the same boat. There are still some concerns, especially with current events, the way they are, whether they are going to cut funding, the Department of Education. There are a lot of things going on politically, at least in the US that obviously are making at least higher-ups in these universities and institutions concerned about whether they need to cut budgets. They're uncertain about what's going to happen there. So that is where we're at right now.
We're obviously partnering with all these schools that are our customers to ensure that we give them value for what we do, and we charge a fair price for that value, make sure that we help them when they're in need.
Clint Betts
It does seem like the future of education is changing, maybe even coming for those tier-one universities as well, at least in terms of how they distribute education and how they do it. It seems like we're, particularly with AI, obviously, again, that's changing education maybe as much as anything. As you look at this and you're in this space, what do you think? How is education changing? How will it look 10 years from now? That's different from today?
Jason Beem
That's the million-dollar question. If we all knew how it was going to look in 10 years, we'd be investing our money in a certain way to benefit from that. So yeah, it is changing considerably. Again, Covid was a major change in how people taught. They realized they could teach in a remote or hybrid environment. I see a lot of universities in Europe, Asia, and the United States that have hybrid learning now. Some students, half and half, some students purely remote, some purely on-site.
I do think AI is going to be a massive disruptor here in a good way. I think when ChatGPT came out, I think a lot of the universities were scared. Immediately when it came out, early on, I met with a lot of universities, flew around the world, talked to them, and said, "Okay, do you guys have an AI policy?" And the biggest thing they talked about was academic integrity. "I don't want my students using ChatGPT or tools like that to answer the questions and deliver homework back that they didn't do. They don't understand. They didn't learn anything from it."
So it's been, these last few years, a trial and error where schools are testing some theories on using AI in certain ways and trying to block and find cheaters and stuff like that. I do think AI is here to stay. It's going to be part of education. It's not going to replace professors, not in the near future. It just can't do that. It's not reliable enough. But it can be an amazing tool for creating learning content fast, for aiding the faculty more than the students but aiding the faculty at creating content that improves student outcomes.
As I've said before in many other interviews I've done, when you're in your lecture hall listening to your professor, you probably retain about 70% of what you hear. Again, you lose focus, your phone beeps, somebody near you talks, and you pay attention somewhere else. So you lose a lot of information. So how do we help the professors and the faculty to create content that's first of all more interesting in smaller tidbits that are more consumable, that allows those students to retain more of that? Part of it is you're going to do the lectures no matter what, but then after that, how do they take those bits and package it up in a way that allows those students to go back and consume that? Instead of 70%, it's 85 or 89%, and higher retention is higher pass rates, higher graduation rates, etc.
Clint Betts
Tell us about Austin. It's one of my favorite cities in the country, a wonderful city, but it really has become a place where tech is leaving; a lot of people are leaving Silicon Valley, or they may not as much anymore to go to Austin. Austin's one of those destination places that a lot of tech companies have kind of relocated to or at least set up offices in. What is the city like now with as much tech influx as you've seen?
Jason Beem
So, I was working for a company based in California. It was in Santa Monica, California, a company called Accruent. I joined in 2007. In 2010, we moved our corporate office from Santa Monica to Austin, and I picked up my family, and I moved here in 2010. I've been here for about 15 years. It is massively transformed from 2010 to 2025. A lot of companies have moved their home offices here, and not only home office, but they've actually hired the employees, a mass of the employees here.
When I think about a headquarters for a company, you want tax benefits. Obviously, if you're just thinking pure shareholder, profit, even, etc. You want tax benefits, and Texas is a great state for that. And then, you want to make sure you have the right employee base, so you have the right skills in the area that allow you to hire the right employees at the right cost. And so Texas has a lot of top-tier schools. We have UT Austin here, right here in Austin. We have Texas A&M, UT Dallas, and Rice University. There are a ton of great universities in Texas. So it's a great hub of incredible employees who are very smart and well-educated at a good cost. It's not as good a cost as it was 15 years ago, but it's a pretty decent cost, considering when you look at Seattle and San Francisco and all these other places.
And it is known for tech. So we have Oracle here, we have Apple here, we have Tesla and SpaceX, and you've got all these really top-tier technology companies here and making it their home. And so what that does is it just breeds more innovation because the people want to be around that. So the best people, I think, in the country are picking up from places they traditionally grew up in. I grew up in San Francisco, and they're picking up and moving to places like this because the opportunity is amazing.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. For a variety of reasons, that makes a lot of sense. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at ceo.com; we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Jason Beem
So it's a very simple answer. Don't have to think about it at all. So there was a gentleman by the name of Mark Friedman, so he was the CEO and founder of Accruent. He's the current CEO and founder of a company called SD6 here in Austin. He gave me my job in 2007 at Accruent. He mentored me for 11 years at that company when we took it from, I think it was like $15 million of revenue to $300 million of revenue. And I became an executive during that time, and I ran M&A, and I became a GM and an SVP, and I kind of worked my way up through the executive route.
He was my mentor and taught me things that I never thought I would learn, and he changed the whole trajectory of my career. I never wanted to be a CEO. I had this career path in professional services I thought was going to be where I was going. In my experiences at Accruent and under his mentorship, I absolutely shifted 90 degrees to the right. I never thought I wanted to be in sales. I did sales. I never thought I wanted to be in a lot of different roles, and I did it, and it just absolutely opened my mind to new things.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Well, beautiful. It's always awesome to have those types of people in your life, and he sounds incredible. Hey, thank you so much. Seriously, what you're working on, your company, your product, it's wonderful. Congratulations on everything you're doing. Let's have you back in as things continue to progress. But Jason, thanks for coming on the show.
Jason Beem
Thank you, Clint. It was wonderful.
Edited for readability.