The following interview is a conversation we had with Philippe Petitpont, CEO and Co-Founder of NewsBridge, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: €12.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Media Management.

 

Philippe Petitpont
Philip, thanks for chatting with me today. Nice to meet you. Brett, thanks for the invitation. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. How’d we do there on the pronunciation of your last name? I feel like I butchered it. So I’ll let you correct the record here. 

Philippe Petitpont
Yeah, it’s Petipon, but actually it’s quite tough to say by non French speaker. Nice, nice. 

Brett
Well, super excited to chat with you here. So let’s dive in. Can you just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Philippe Petitpont
So currently I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of NewsBridge. So it’s a company I started a few years ago. Actually, if we go back in my previous career on evolved at school and I wanted to be a rocket scientist and rocket engineer. That’s why I started an engineering school. So I have a degree in rocket science. But actually I was not the perfect student. So the first thing I did going to my studies was not really to study rocket science because I think it was fun, but actually not as I imagined. So the first thing I did is creating my student TV station during the school time, and I was spending way more time in this student TV station. We were created rather than in the blowers to test the wind and the rockets. That’s actually the first thing I did, actually. I didn’t know that by the time, but that will probably drive everything that we do after that. 

Philippe Petitpont
So of course, when I needed to choose an internship, I won’t go into NASA, even if it was one of my dream, but I go into TV networks to be a broadcast engineer. And basically what a broadcast engineer is doing is making sure that signal processing and all the editors and the journalists, the infrastructure they need to broadcast their content, to produce their content all around the world. So I had the chance to work on all the infrastructure for the Soccer World Cup, for broadcasting news all around the world. So it was quite exciting and it was very technical. It was 1015 years ago around several networks. And what was quite complex is that when you come in this kind of organization, your role is not really to develop software, it’s not to address major pain point that the industry had. So you’re kind of blocked in, okay, you just need to solve this need of this journalist or this dozen of journalists and then it’s done. 

Philippe Petitpont
But actually by the time it was quite complex because we had lots of content, it was too complex for human to understand what was in the video and everything and there was some strong pain point and it was very frustrating to not being able to explore some other way of working on other organizations. So I quit the company and I teamed up with my train brother, that is from the AI and the big data industry. And well I said here’s the problem that we have in the media industry, there’s too many video, too much video and people are struggling with that. And while it’s complex, editing is very long and we do something together and it started building a network of people that could help us and then that’s how we get to found this company called NewsBridge. It was six years ago. 

Brett
Wow, sounds like a super fun journey and wild journey. A couple of questions that we like to ask really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur first one, what Founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

Philippe Petitpont
So it’s difficult to choose just one but I think one currently that I’m thinking a lot about. We’re hearing this question is the Founder called Modekayo. So she’s the CEO and Co-Founder of a company called GreenGood. Green gut is a green bank. Actually that’s not what they’re saying on themselves but you can think about that and they basically are thinking and they believe that we can save most issues of climate change with finance. And they created this kind of new bank experience, new banking experience. It’s A, B, two C. Company. So it’s very promising. It’s still very early but very promising. And she succeeded to do that without any funding. It was only called founding and I mean creating a fintech without money for visas is quite crazy. And what’s really quite surprising about her is that she did that a few years ago. 

Philippe Petitpont
She was very young actually. She was nominated Forbes under 30 and she had really no knowledge in finance, in banking. So she started to reinvent how banking can work in a climate change cris without having experience in that. And she had a success in that. And I think while she said it was quite complex because of regulations and a lot of big banks didn’t really like the approach of having another bank that is saying wow, all the money you are putting in your account will never be used to finance coal industry or oil industry. And it’s quite a big differentiator. And they said that it was very difficult at the beginning and what’s crazy is that she successed, she succeeded with that and I think what I’ve learned from her experience there and still learning from what she’s doing is the biggest skills she have is she has two skills. 

Philippe Petitpont
Her eloquence is totally crazy. The way she’s telling stories is very good. And also she’s able to bring faith into building a better future. So to me, the learning is that entrepreneur is all about building the story, a story you’re believing in. And then from this story, you can tell the best as possible. You will be able to onboard the best talent that will make this story a reality. And looking to the past is quite irrelevant. Meaning that I think an entrepreneur should always focus on what’s going to happen next. On the future, on the vision I love that. 

Brett
And it’s refreshing to hear about a Founder who’s not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. That’s what we hear 80% of the time and it gets a little bit boring and repetitive. So I love hearing about new entrepreneurs and different founders. 

Philippe Petitpont
Yeah, everyone knows a story about Elon Musson. Yeah, exactly. 

Brett
Now, what about books? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you? And these don’t have to be business books. These could be books that just really influenced how you view the world and how you think about the world personally. 

Philippe Petitpont
We pick up one that is not totally linked to business a bit, of course, but it was written by a guy called David Market. I think he was a former captain in the US. Navy. The book is called Turn the Ship Around and it was recommended during the onboarding of one key people within our company. And he used to be a big manager in a big company. And he said, Well, I read this book and I think that there’s a way that we can use what’s written in the book to adapt that to our modern organization. And basically, I won’t summarize the whole book. So it’s a story of the captain of a submarine that is discovering that when you’re saying to the people in the submarine, we need to go to Hawai and let them, totally autonomous, to take the good decision, the ship will go totally faster. 

Philippe Petitpont
And it’s in opposition with traditional way of working where the captain is doing. Okay, let’s dive at this depth and let’s go to this speed and et cetera. And what the learning of this book is that if you empower the manager or the people with really the vision on when you need to go, you will kind of unblock superpower of your key people, of the people in the company. And there’s a good example in the book, but what I learned in that is when people know what they are doing things, they are doing that better and it can even surprise you and go above everything you’re thinking about and saying, well, I think this milestone was way much more harder to reach than that. And saying, yeah, but we know how to do that. We know that we need to go to Hawai so we can take some shortcuts. 

Philippe Petitpont
If you’re saying take this road, then you leave not any opportunity to the team to take shortcuts. So I think this is one about the book is also interesting about learning thing on nuclear submarine and stuff like that. But for us, it became like a manifesto of our organization. Nice. 

Brett
I love that. I always love learning about business from non business books. And I feel like a lot of the best lessons I’ve learned about business have come from books that weren’t necessarily about business. So always fun to hear about those. 

Philippe Petitpont
Totally. 

Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So let’s just imagine that I’m a publisher in your target market. What’s the pitch for me? What are you promising that the product can do? And how does it work? How does it solve my problems? 

Philippe Petitpont
Yeah, so we’re mainly working with people that have trouble with video. And the pain point is quite simple. Having a draft of a blog article with GPC is like, what, one, two minutes? I won’t say it’s a perfect article, but maybe a draft. But to have a draft of a video story, it’s like hours to do that. And it’s hours to build a story for social media. It’s hours to build this podcast. It’s also hours you will spend. And when you’re working in some even more complex and longer format, like, I don’t know, a documentary for Netflix, it’s not hours, it’s months. And while your next holiday movie is, wow, maybe no one will do its next holiday movies because the rush are still on the GoPro and you don’t have time to build it because it’s too long. And the problem is that building video is long. 

Philippe Petitpont
It’s very long. It’s a three step process and you need lots of different skill all along the process. You need to sort the content. Okay, which rushes, which part of video will be the best to tell my story, then you need to tell the story. The editing part, it’s long. You need to choose the music that will go, maybe some voiceover. And then you need to publishing. This is the first step. And the third step is key because you want to make sure that your audience will find this video. So it’s all about SEO. And then you need to describe what’s inside the video very accurately. On YouTube. It’s 250 characters. If you are going under, the algorithm of recognition won’t work so much. So you need skills all along the process. And that’s why it’s very expensive and it’s very long. So what we’ve developed is all the tool we’re developing are helping in one of these three steps. 

Philippe Petitpont
And the first one about sourcing, used to be 50% of the time of building a video. And this first step, so that’s why we develop our last algorithm called MXT, one that is totally understanding what’s inside the video. So we are calling that video understanding. So we’ve made lot of AI tools to generate a natural language description so that you don’t need to watch a video entirely to know what’s inside the video. And with this plugged to a search engine, that means that any editors can find relevant pieces of rushes in seconds to then build the editor and publish it. And that make media organization or any people that are working with video way more productive and way more faster so that they can build more video. And also being able to generate more revenue with a better indexing, a better SEO on their content. 

Philippe Petitpont
So basically that’s giving superpowers on skills to people that have not the skills totally acquired. 

Brett
And if you look at your customer base, is it primarily local and focused in France right now? Or is it all of Europe? Is it expanded to the US? What does that look like? 

Philippe Petitpont
So today we have teams in Europe and the US. We’ve opened our US office just at the beginning of the year, and most of our customers today, we are targeting three kind of verticals. First one is sports media on brand content. Sports on media were historically the first one because they used to be more mature into producing content. They have a lot of video editors. But now brand content is totally booming and with influencer, it’s even going faster. There are half a million brand in the world, so it’s big. And we are working with sports leagues, sports federation, sports clubs, TV stations, post production houses, pure players. We have customers all around Europe, obviously in France, the company was running in France, in Spain, in the UK, in Germany, also in the Middle East. And we’re not far from having the first in the US. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now, I was introducing you as a cloud Media Hub platform and I want to ask you about market categories. So is Cloud Media hub the market category? Is the category Digital Asset Management, which I think I saw on LinkedIn. How are you thinking about your market category today? 

Philippe Petitpont
So it’s a new category actually mam and dam. So Digital Asset Management or Media Asset Management are tools that are here just centralized content. And to make sure that it’s like a super dropbox, our job is to make content findable and to make people working faster with their video editing. So there’s not exactly a category that used to exist for two or three years so we are inventing a new one. Sometimes you need to use words from the old world to be sure that people can understand what you’re doing. So that’s why we are using this kind of tag for SEO because we have different use case. But the main idea is to be able to provide video understanding algorithm whether it’s just metadatas or on search, to be able to integrate within a current mam system or a current dam system. So I would say it’s a new category that can integrate within the current ecosystem of video editing. 

Brett
And just to confirm, what’s the actual phrase? Do you have a phrase for that new category? 

Philippe Petitpont
For this new category? Yes, it’s making content discoverable. This is one of the things we love to explain but it will change very soon. 

Brett
Got it. Now, what about customer growth? Our audience loves to hear numbers and metrics. Are there any numbers that you can share that just demonstrate the growth that you’re seeing today? 

Philippe Petitpont
Yes, just in terms maybe. The side of the market is huge in video editing. Just the amount of money that is spending to producing video is more than 1000 billion dollars. So it’s a huge market on our side. We started to target media and sport vertical that are maybe just 30% of this market. Brenda around 30% to 40%. And so today where we hit the million dollar in recurring revenue early last year. And our pace is to double this turnover each year we’re around that. And with the US. Market expansion, we go definitely faster than that. So this is the mindset we are scaling very fast right now and the amount of video is so huge that it’s like a greenfield actually and there’s. 

Brett
A lot of noise in the market today and there’s just a lot of technology solutions out there. What are you doing to rise above the noise and what have you gotten? Right to connect with customers and to acquire customers in the way that you have. 

Philippe Petitpont
So our DNA is deep tech. We have two deep tech VCs so that makes half of the company. We are 50 right now. Is dedicated to research and development. So we file a lot of patents and our goal is to have the best product. To make sure that we can deliver the best indexing quality, the best experience. And we believe that we are providing this best experience for the video editing world. The thing is we also need to invoke our own terminology and that’s a way for us to be the first to explain to customer and to plant a seed into their brain to say okay, this is what we’re doing. And for example one example is multimodal AI. So multimodal AI started to be very popular at the beginning of the year where GPT four started to introduce, it was multimodal. Actually, we’ve been evangelizing multimodal since like three or four years. 

Philippe Petitpont
And it was quite painful to explain what multimodal is, where no one was knowing that. And that’s a strategy. And the last one, and maybe the most important one, is price. I strongly believe that innovation is always driven by price. And we need to make sure we are developing new technologies that it can meet business reality. And the price of AI used to be very expensive with standard traditional technology. And what we’ve developed is an AI that is able to be ten times cheaper than any other one, providing better quality and better results. And about innovation and price, to me that’s really key. If you have the best product, but it’s too expensive that no one will buy it needs to meet some PTIs. And I have a funny example about that. Let’s go back at the beginning of the 20th century, the first cars. 

Philippe Petitpont
At the beginning of the century, the cost was around $850. So it was dollars from the beginning of the century, so it was not the same dollars as today. A carriage with horses was 350. So at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no carriage everywhere. But in 1920, Ford invented the 40 and the 40 was $250. And we can see that the sales of the car after 1920 was totally crazy. And that’s why carriage with horses started to disappear because it was way cheaper to buy your car rather than having horses. Amazing. 

Brett
I love that analogy. Now, last couple of questions here for you. If we look at your challenges so far that you’ve experienced from a go to market perspective, what would you say has been the greatest go to market challenge that you experienced and overcame and how’d you overcome it? 

Philippe Petitpont
Yeah, there was one that was very tough. It was the very beginning of the company and were developing our first AI algorithm. And you know, when you are developing and you have sometimes opportunity to get into a corporate accelerator and it was one with a big, let’s say public media company and one of the biggest in Europe, and it was a public one. And we started to be accelerated in order to test our AI algorithm with journalists. And the welcome we had by that time were not so good, actually. And we represented as AI engineers that are developing tool that will replace people. And it was not introduction and we are speaking with maybe 2025 documentaries and when we started to add them, okay, so we want to learn more about your job. And trust me, what they said is are you crazy? You are going to replace my job. 

Philippe Petitpont
I will never share anything with you. And I remember Fred, he was a Co-Founder, was taking apart in the small rooms with lots of people around him and he was totally surrounded and you are going to reply us by robots and all the cliche like that. And it was very tough and we had to start over everything with them and explaining how look, the technology while it was five or six years ago so AI was really at the beginning AI is not so good, it’s not as good as you think. And actually do you like logging videos? Is that something you like to do in your life? No, I don’t like to do that and sometimes I need to come at the office on Sunday to transcript everything manually and stuff like that and say yeah, here’s what we’re going to do. We are going to do the heavy lifting for you. 

Philippe Petitpont
You are going to see how AI is working and you’re going to validate on trend AI. And when they started to understand what is going their job will be in the future. They said we had one young journalist that come back at the end of the accelerator and said sorry to be in this mindset at the beginning because now thanks to you, I know what my job will be in the future and I know that my job will be definitely better. So it was a challenge about proving and also a challenge about perception. And now that we are going things totally differently and our first people, our first personnel we are talking with are users because they need to understand what the tool will be doing for them. And actually users are key because top management will ask to the users, okay, does the tool will help having you better productivity? 

Philippe Petitpont
And if they say no, top management will never buy the tool. So the first people that need to be convinced are users. And that’s one of the learning I think we had since this experience. 

Brett
And final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years from today into the future. What’s the vision for the company? What are you hoping to build? 

Philippe Petitpont
We have an ambition that is quite limitless. What we want to achieve is to be sure that everyone can tell a story using video and that’s our mission. The path is along to that and the number of models we need to train and the amount of money we need to invest into Nvidia infrastructure to analyze this huge amount of data set we have is huge. We need also a lot of people though what I’m sure is that the size of the team will more than double more than that in the next years to achieve that. On being able to bring some kind of automatic video storytelling on something quite ambitious like that within maybe 20, 25, 20, 30, 20, 26, I don’t know. But this is the path we are going right now and I believe that maybe this famous holiday movie you want to do will be able to do with maybe a prompting experience or something like that. 

Philippe Petitpont
And we believe in this vision and we are now beginning. The three step are being automatized. The first step is nearly done. Let’s now deep dive on the two. Next. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. 

Philippe Petitpont
If people want to follow along with. 

Brett
Your journey as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where should they go? 

Philippe Petitpont
Yeah. newsbridge.io This is our website on landing page and we are sharing lots about what we’re dealing on a day to day basis and also a lot about our culture. We have an open prototype open demo with our MX T one lattice version that is available online so everyone can log in and see how impressive the generic description are being done on video. So it’s totally free and you just need to log in and then you’ll accept the demo part. So it’s very quick and it can give an idea of what’s possible with tenure. TBI amazing. 

Brett
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join the podcast and talk about everything that you’re building and share some of those lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I know the audience is going to as well. So thank you so much for taking the time, really appreciate it. 

Philippe Petitpont
Thank you, Brett. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode. You Sam.