Ten years ago, Pierre-Louis Théron dreamed of changing the internet. With two classmates at a top French engineering school, he created software that improved the streaming of content. The dream became portfolio company Streamroot which was acquired in 2019. A great story about three guys who made the internet smarter.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Pierre-Louis Theron
Streamroot: the Problem it Was Solving
"... What's interesting with our approach is it wasn't like we're going to remove completely the traditional or the CDN out of the picture, what we're doing is that we're going to sit on top..."
"... Your genius idea was to come up with software that you could load onto peoples' set-top box, let's say a Roku, or whatever, over the box, they have local business..."
Pivot Point in the Execution Phase
"...We should also mention to listeners that the platform doesn't leave a footprint on the set-top box..."
How the Idea of Streamroot Came About
"... It took you a long time to develop your technology, but by 2017, it was rock solid, you ended up raising $6 million..."
Pierre-Louis's Background
"... I think it's being relentless, not only in your own dedication but also in building up the relationship with your partners, to have them excited and motivated year after year even though it's not an easy path..."
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript: A Smarter Internet
Guest: Pierre-Louis Theron
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship, and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty for its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab, out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful with some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Pierre-Louis Theron
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations of Boston's most interesting founders and Angels. Today, we are really, really excited to be speaking with a very successful founder, Pierre-Louis Theron. Welcome, Pierre-Louis.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Thank you, Sal. It's good talking to you again.
Sal Daher: Pierre-Louis was one of the founders of Streamroot, a company that did some very interesting things in the content delivery network area, and I'll let him explain exactly what he was doing. Brilliant. It's a genius idea. It worked really well, and he exited. It was a very nice exit, the Angels were very happy, and now he is basically done with his obligations for the acquiring company, and so we thought we would have a recap of the adventure that we had with Streamroot, and what Pierre-Louis is looking forward to be doing in the future. Pierre-Louis, tell us what problem Streamroot was solving.
Streamroot: the Problem it Was Solving
Pierre-Louis Theron: I think it's all in there. It's been almost a 10 years journey, so it's a perfect time to do that recap for me.
Sal Daher: Well, I got in, I should say, but Angel investors were running for the doors, because 10 years all, that it was too much for it. I invested about 4 years ago, but your concept and so forth, it has been going for, it was 10 years.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Yes. 10 years. I mean, 7 years before the acquisition and 3 years post, so it's a really nice story to look back. The idea of Streamroot at the very beginning was to improve the way the internet is working, which is pretty ambitious because when you think about internet, actually, the vast majority of the traffic going through the internet is video content, is video streaming. Over the past 10 years, since the beginning of streamings in the 2000s, obviously, streaming has been completely overtaking traditional TV, and now the vast majority of traffic is video content.
There's a big question about how you actually deliver that content through the internet through all these devices, to all these people, and obviously, content delivery network has been solving that issue. As we're talking to a lot of the Boston community, Akamai has been one of the leading player in that field by solving that issue, basically by putting a bunch of servers all across the globe, as close as possible to the end user.
When you're watching a movie on YouTube, or Netflix, and you're in New York, you actually stream it from a server in New York and not from California, and the other way around. This technology has been improving in solving greatly this problem, but there's a couple of problems with that. The scalability issue first, like when you have millions of users that suddenly want to watch the same movie, or they want to watch a live streaming of football game, political events, whatever it is, you cannot just add so many servers at a time, and at one point, you hit the ceiling and have bottlenecks.
Looking at that, back 10 years ago, we said, "Well, there should be a better way of delivering this massive amount of content online, especially as during peak traffic, people are mostly interested in the same thing, so how can we solve that problem?" Well, peer-to-peer technologies usually decentralized mesh technology, whatever you call it, this immutable way of saying it is a pretty efficient way versus centralized because CDN, even though they are, in a way decentralized, because you put servers everywhere, but it's still like one too many distributions, so you have one server and many people getting the content from it.
The idea is like, "Well, why don't we deliberate peer-to-peer technology to do that?" This is, basically, what was the founding idea of Streamroot that never really changed since the first few days, which is how do we leverage all these years of watching the content so they can share and send bits and bytes between each other instead of all going after the same server and hitting the server and trying to get the same content. By doing so, we solve the scalability issue because the more users you have, suddenly, the more source of the content you have, instead of having more and more people hitting the same server, and you can also solve some of the performance issue.
We all have experienced issues during big events, big releases, when you have buffering and you cannot have access to the content and you hit the refresh button a thousand times before you can actually get the contents. When you have a distributed way of delivering the content, you avoid that, and usually, you are able to push higher quality to more people for one server.
"... What's interesting with our approach is it wasn't like we're going to remove completely the traditional or the CDN out of the picture, what we're doing is that we're going to sit on top..."
What's interesting with our approach is it wasn't like we're going to remove completely the traditional or the CDN out of the picture, what we're doing is that we're going to sit on top. Basically, some users is going to get the content from the servers, but if the content is available from your label watching the exact same content, we are going to try to fetch this content from them instead. It's always this hybrid dynamic approach, getting basically the content from the best source possible dynamically.
That's basically a lot of software technology that we developed to do that, and that we built to sell to the streaming platforms and the broadcasters which are the people that are benefiting from the technology and the people that are spending a lot of money in their content delivery network. The last advantage, which I haven't talked about yet, but it's very consequent, especially from the investment perspective in this company, is that we help these broadcasters, these streaming platform save a lot of money in their content delivery cost, and basically, your CDN cost is one of your cloud or item on your bill, and it's one of the largest operational costs that you have when you're bringing a streaming platform.
With peer-to-peer technology, obviously, you remove a lot of the traffic that actually is being delivered by the CDN, so you save a lot of money on that deal, and out of that, Streamroot is taking a cut on that saving. That was the business model idea behind the whole the whole technology. Improve the internet, help optimize the streaming platform, have a better financial structure, and improve the user experience for the end user so they don't experience the buffering anymore.
Sal Daher: Yes. To recapitulate, the state of the art that existed 10 years ago before Streamroot came online, was that people like Akamai, which are content delivery networks, would run servers in locations near where a lot of people live, and these servers would deliver the content to those areas, and so it's still one server to many users.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly.
"... Your genius idea was to come up with software that you could load onto peoples' set-top box, let's say a Roku, or whatever, over the box, they have local business..."
Sal Daher: Your genius idea was to come up with software that you could load onto peoples' set-top box, let's say a Roku, or whatever, over the box, they have local business.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Small, small TV, Apple TV, whatever it is.
Sal Daher: Yes. That box is in the business of downloading content, and it's all optimized for the content delivery downstream, but it also has capacity to upload, and you're using that little use capacity with upload to upload this to neighboring boxes, that instead of getting the content from the CDN, instead of duplicating this thing traveling over this very long pipe, they could get it over the local wire from the neighbor
Neighbors were helping neighbors to receive and deliver the content efficiently, and so this ad results for much, much better service for the user in a sense that the more users of the network, the more capacity for delivery the network has, because it's using the user set-top box for delivery, and this little use upload capacity, that's slack in the system, so that you don't have the spinning wheels and all of that stuff. The CDNs are the ones that are a little bit out of luck in this because there's less traffic for them, but their traffic is still growing.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Massively.
Sal Daher: Massively. There's an explosion in the video content being delivered, and the content providers love it, because all of a sudden, the cost of delivering content is much, much lower. You created the right constituencies, the other technology that had the right constituencies, and you executed it really well. Excellent. Was there a moment where you made a major pivot? We always like to talk about pivots in this podcast. Was there a big theory that you had going in that you guys had to change directions in order to make the business work?
Pivot Point in the Execution Phase
Pierre-Louis Theron: Yes. It's a really good question. I usually say that we are a little bit unlike any other startup, the product idea never changed from day one to the last day.
Sal Daher: The execution, yes.
Pierre-Louis Theron: The execution changed a lot. We really stick to the idea, obviously, we evolved a lot and we didn't know. I mean, the way we developed it changed along the way and the industry was changing so fast around us as well with the explosion of video streaming, video application, new streaming services, new devices, a lot of things that we had to adapt. The execution changed a lot.
I think one of the things that, at the beginning, we were perhaps and you mentioned it a little bit like the relationship with the CDN, at the beginning we're like, well, we're going to get in and we're going to try to get as much money out of the CDN pockets, and that's going to be a way to go. We ended up being acquired by CDN and actually, partnering by a bunch of CDN in the meantime.
Sal Daher: It makes sense the CDNs would buy out the competition.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly. I think the way that the vision changed is like this technology is really well suited for several use cases, but not all of them. There's like these places in the area and moments that it makes a ton of sense to use it. You're going to release the next Game of Thrones episode, you're going to have the big Super Bowl coming. I mean, all these events, the football World Cup starting in a couple of weeks, these are the events that you know in advance that you're going to have capacity planning issue.
Now that I've been sitting on the other side of the wall by running a CDN for the past three years, I actually understand very well that it is a challenge for the CDN themselves to actually manage these big spiky events. Because obviously, you have a fixed capacity that you cannot just withstand overnight.
This is where we actually found a good combination and this is where our approach to the market, by talking with the customers, understanding better how a CDN business was actually operated, that we could find a sweet spot, say like, listen, you have these big events coming up. Obviously, you should try this technology as your main way of delivering or maybe as a safety package as well. Because if something goes wrong, you have actually this technology that's going to offload a lot of the capacity down to the network and have less reliability issues if something goes wrong with one of your CDN.
I've seen that this is where we change a little bit of you in mind over the years and that's been pretty beneficial. We've seen even CDNs receiving our technology before we go to acquire because listen, we're really good at what we do, but for these specific events, we like to bring in this technology because we believe this is the way to go.
Sal Daher: You are a man who can say he changed the internet?
Pierre-Louis Theron: Well, I changed the internet for some events, for sure. There's one story that I like to tell. As you can tell, I'm from France originally, and we had some pretty big customers back there. During the 2018 Football World Cup, we had some pretty big games. France was going very far in the competition. One day, it was a Friday afternoon and the game was at that time in France, and most of the people were actually at work, so they were not in front of their TV or cable, they were all on their phone or putting up on the computer.
The Internet is being smashed, I think, it was incredible. We broke all the record we had, the streaming and it worked really well. The day after, the customer that was streaming the football called us like, "Well, thank you, I don't know if we've been able to make it without you guys, so we're so proud." Five minutes later, I have the main internet provider of friends calling us like, what the heck was that? Because unlike, usually, they have all the traffic going from up to down. From these servers down to the users, suddenly, they've seen traffic going up.
Sal Daher: Up all over the place.
Pierre-Louis Theron: All over the place.
Sal Daher: Water climbing up a hill.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly. That's the day we say, okay, well, we're now in the big house. We were talking with these big guys, meaning that we went to something and we really have a big impact on these big busy Internet days. That was really a nice moment to me.
Sal Daher: Would you have an objection if I titled the episode "He Changed the Internet?"
[laughter]
Pierre-Louis Theron: It's a bit overstating, but no--.
Sal Daher: I'm saying it. You're not saying it, you objected. It was kind of overstating the point. Listeners should know that it's my idea. Pierre-Louis is going along because he's a good sport. No, but I can just imagine how the Internet providers, the ISPs in France, these big players saying, "Whoa, what's going on?" Because, normally, it's all downstream. I mean, upstream bandwidth is usually restricted, much less I have supposedly megabyte internet here. My download speed is 975 Kb/s. My upload speed is like 40 Kb/s. Even that 40 KB--
Pierre-Louis Theron: It's still a huge capacity.
Sal Daher: Yes, huge capacity to provide the content locally. Especially when it's self-reinforcing.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly.
Sal Daher: As the demand grows, the capacity grows automatically, which is cool.
"...We should also mention to listeners that the platform doesn't leave a footprint on the set-top box..."
Pierre-Louis Theron: Again, you will be sharing what you can share. It's not like you have to share. You're not a server, right? You're not serving thousands of people. If you can just share like half of what you're sending, it's already a huge part of the whole, if everybody does that, well, you offload 50, 60, 70, and sometimes 80 plus percent of the whole traffic down to the peer network. Even if it's 50, it's already a huge improvement from where you were in the beginning.
Sal Daher: Yes, we should also mention to listeners that the platform doesn't leave a footprint on the set-top box. While you're receiving and transmitting and so forth, it's using set-top box and then it erases the footprint, the same as the Zencastr platform that we use for recording because it records locally on devices and then it cleans it up as it uploads the different tracks to the cloud.
Pierre-Louis Theron: That's a good point to mention because obviously, we had a lot of questions. That was one of the big challenge of building this business, which is peer-to-peer has bad reputation because of the way this technology has been used for piracy and downloading content illegally for many many years. That's been a huge barrier to the entry that we have. I think once we overcome it with what you said it's like listen, we're not like a Trojan horse something that's installed and downloading your machine.
This is just something that is part of the video walkthrough. When you're watching a content, you're part of the mesh network, when you're not watching a content, there's not even a single line of code that remains in your machine that's going to do whatever in the background. That's definitely been something really important and that's something that no way super easy to get the legal folks agreed to. After getting references and getting the first customers adopting it, there's been a much easier.
Sal Daher: I wouldn't be surprised if this has an environmental impact in a sense that there's a lot less digging, installation of fiber, and all that stuff. If you use the existing infrastructure more efficiently, you have a smaller footprint on the globe.
Pierre-Louis Theron: It's very interesting you say that and I remember before we got acquired we were like in discussion with some VCs to raise more money and some of the VC I tried to say, "Well, you should position yourself as a green company and not only improving the internet". I would say "Wow, that's interesting".
We actually made some pretty good calculation around that, especially over the past couple of years, that it's become more and more of a big concern and people start to look after the big tech company being like, well, you two should be not only the oil and gas company, but you two guys should be careful about how much you're actually consuming in your data centers to cool off all the servers that you keep adding and adding and transmitting a bit from far away consume more than transmitting a bid from a closer location.
We made some pretty cool calculation where you actually calculate the overhead that you have on the device because you consume a little bit more locally because you do now up and down instead of only going down.
Sal Daher: The overhead of having this additional software resident in your local device.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly. The overhead of running this software in local device versus reducing and potentially at the end, shutting down servers, plus the cost of transmitting this bid over a very long area. Especially usually during these spiky events, you can save 50%, 60% of the consumption because at the end, it's just like--
Sal Daher: 50% of the?
Pierre-Louis Theron: Of the energy consumption.
Sal Daher: Energy consumption, okay, so you're reducing energy consumption by 50%. I can see this. Also, in the long term, the reduced capacity has to be built because you have a network that's more stable, fewer spikes, and therefore you need less buffer for these extremely spiky days.
Pierre-Louis Theron: It's mega ton of sense to have your infrastructure built for your day-to-day traffic, something that's going to be feared almost all the time, but everything that goes above a certain threshold of number of users that want to watch the same thing, and spiky conception is much better being in the last mile and decentralized.
Sal Daher: Pierre-Louis, is it fair to say that this is an arbitrage transaction in the stock market where you are buying and selling something, and in the end, you make a profit without risk, without-- It's a costless thing? Or better put, the Italian economist, Wilfredo Pareto, who's not an admirable person, but a brilliant thinker, he had the concept of a Pareto optimal move in a sense that you make a change in the organization of economic factors that lowers costs and improves quality at the same time.
I think this is one of those rare situations where you came up with this brilliant idea that it really is a Pareto optimal move for the market where even the CDNs, I thought they'd be ticked, but the CDNs are happy. The customers are happy, the content providers are happy.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Yes, exactly. Again, it doesn't make sense to run it when you have only one user watching one video. If you use it properly, you really going to optimize. As soon as you have enough people, you're going to optimize the network and the service for everyone. Exactly.
Sal Daher: Phenomenal. Smarter internet.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly. That was really the vision. Like I said, we want to make, and when we started this company, remember with my two co-founders, Axel and Nikolay, we sat down and said, "Well, where want to be five years from now?" I said, "Well, we want to see this technology deployed for the biggest event, the largest releases." We got there, and the day we've seen these big events and the numbers going through the roof, internal metrics was really where we were like, "Okay, well--" It was just the beginning because we had to do it in all the countries in the world, but it was a big step
Sal Daher: Maybe an alternative title for the episode would be a Smarter Internet.
Pierre-Louis Theron: [chuckles] Exactly. Yes.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Basically, you ran the company for seven years. How did the acquisition come about? You were working closely with the CDN and then they thought it would be a good idea to buy you out.
How the Idea of Streamroot Came About
Pierre-Louis Theron: Yes, exactly. It was really interesting for the-- I think the discussion started in 2018 and ended up signing the deal in September 2019, so about a year of discussion. That was really when the company took off and started to have more customers, more proof of concept with larger organizations that were integrating and deploying the technology in.
Obviously, some of the CDNs are going more intrigued and introduced about the technology so we started to sign a few partnership, do some demos together. At the time, CenturyLink, who's been renamed Lumen in the meantime--
Sal Daher: Just for the transcriber, CenturyLink, and it has been renamed Lumen, L-U-M-E-N. Yes, so please continue.
Pierre-Louis Theron: CenturyLink at the time was really interested in reselling this business along with their own traditional CDN offering. We started by receiving partnership agreement, which is pretty often the first step before you have acquisition discussion. At that time, we were really in that, say, "Well, should we raise a bigger series A or series B, latter rounds, or should we go to after an acquisition?"
We had both the options on the table. One of them struggle, and the thing that we were not sure at the time, even with latter rounds, we will have enough time to do it, is that the streaming industry and the content industry really are concentrated ensuring pure players. You have a lot of consolidation in the market, Disney acquiring Fox, launching their own business like CBS and Viacom merging, all the big, basically, streaming player and which is still happening right now.
You see HBO merging with Discovery right now and it's going to launch a new platform together. The challenge is that you're getting into a place there where, basically, your whole revenue potential is in the hand of 5, 6, 10 really big customers. The small retail of that can generate some good revenue, but it's not going to scale your business dramatically. That was one of the issue with the market.
Even if we started some diversification with all the products in the meantime, especially by launching-- We didn't launch it before acquisition with post-acquisition to do the same thing for game downloads updates. Instead of just doing streaming, you do it for when you have a big game update for Fortnite, you can do the same way using peer-to-peer technology.
We hesitated between the two, and because of this constitution of the market, we believe what makes more sense, we actually probably going to be able to go after these big guys only if we are part of a large organization that has direct access to them, that talk with them every day, and that can really force them into launching a proof of concept with a new technology or deploying this technology at scale versus all sales even if we raised $20 million. That was the move.
I think he ended up really well. I was really, really happy for the investors, really, good outcome for us, and we stayed for three years and continued that mission and got this technology adopted by more and more customers over the three years, so we're pretty happy about that as well.
Sal Daher: That's great to hear. Now, a couple of questions. Are you comfortable talking about some metric that indicates how far along you got before you got acquired?
Pierre-Louis Theron: Meaning in terms of revenue or--
Sal Daher: Or customers and so forth. Just a hint to founders, just how developed they have to be. Of course, it varies industry by industry.
Pierre-Louis Theron: I'll give a few ideas. I won't give the details but I can give a few ideas.
Sal Daher: Sure.
"... It took you a long time to develop your technology, but by 2017, it was rock solid, you ended up raising $6 million..."
Pierre-Louis Theron: Well, basically, the point we got before the acquisition was we raised two round of funding after we did textiles in 2014 which is how we arrive in Boston with my co-founders back in the days, and the second round in 2018 where we raised more money to accelerate the business when we were getting more traction with customers. The thing with this company as well, and I think that might be interesting for fundraisers is that the good and bad about our technology maturity and business maturity is that it took us a very long time to be ready for the market.
When we are starting in 2013, all technology was only working on the beta version of Chrome because we are using very, very advanced technology, HTML 5 was the technology we're only using, and Flash at the time was the default way of watching a video online. It took us from 2013 to probably 2017 almost, to really be in a position where we can sign big contract because, before that, the maturity of our customers was not there for them to even deploy our technology at scale.
We were signing small deals, we were signing proper concept, so it was good in a way because we were almost before everyone in the market, very early, very advanced, and by 2017, our technology was rock solid. It was pretty bad in a way because we had to take these three, four years journey that was pretty long with limited funding and to wait for the market to be ready. That was pretty interesting, and then it went really fast, '17, '18, '19 acquisition. That was really two different part of the company.
Sal Daher: Outstanding. It took you a long time to develop your technology, but by 2017, it was rock solid, you ended up raising $6 million, but you probably needed to raise at least another $10 million in order to continue this business independently without any promise or any certainty that you'd be able to compete in an extremely difficult environment, selling to very large and demanding customers, so you thought it was a good idea to hook up with one of the CDNs, CenturyLink at the time, now Lumen, and then just work with them for three years to really get this off the ground?
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Now, is there anything else that you want to talk about, the experience with Streamroot because my thought here is I will do a brief promo for the podcast, and then we could launch and talk about your-- how you decided to become an entrepreneur, a little bit of your biography.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Yes, of course. We can move on to that.
Sal Daher: This kind of conversation that we're having here is done with the explicit purpose of helping people learn, or helping me learn and also helping listeners to learn how to better build startup companies. I think Pierre-Louis has outstanding lessons in the discussion we've just had. I think it's really valuable to share this content with other people.
The way you can do this is by, number one, follow us on your podcast listening stream to make sure that you get this kind of content consistently, and get the cleverest and most capable founders and angels that we can because of my selfish interest in learning. This is sort of throws off benefit to listeners as well. Another thing you can do is to leave a written review and a reading at Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. I think Google Play also has a possibility of reading reviews.
Written reviews actually have a surprising more weight in the algorithm. Pierre-Louis, you'd be surprised, we have about 170-something reviews. Every time somebody leaves one or two reviews, that particular episode gets put in front of people who normally wouldn't listen. There's a lot of discovery going on. Anyway, if you found this valuable, if you found this interesting, do everyone else a favor and help to promote this excellent content. Very good. Pierre-Louis, you're from France, tell me your history. You studied in France and how did you end up in the US?
Pierre-Louis's Background
Pierre-Louis Theron: Basically, I studied mostly science and mathematics, and physics in France. I've been through one of the best college in France focusing on engineering in Paris.
Sal Daher: Which school is that?
Pierre-Louis Theron: That's called Centrale.
Sal Daher: It's called Centrale, okay.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Basically, this is where I met my cofounders, Axel and Nikolay. We met at the ball and we had some many different projects together and really going through the whole thing. I remember one of the first week when I joined the engineering school, I had one of this entrepreneur coming in and talking and pitching and telling his story, and he was still in his company and he was working. It was great business. I said, "Wow. He sounds like an exciting life and pretty risky, but very rewarding." At that time I think the whole entrepreneurship way was just starting in France.
I think now the maturity of the ecosystem is really, really much better than where it was 10 years ago. The people who were actually launching their business right off after college was very, very smart people, and consider us a bit of crazy people. [chuckles] That was really exciting for me and my two co-founders, we had an entrepreneurship major for the last year of college. We went into that and started to think about a bunch of different business opportunity and what can we do, but we really wanted to try to start something right after college.
There's always these two ways of thinking like, "Okay. When I launch when I'm young, I don't have a lot of cost of life to support, it's easier, but on the other hand, you have no experience." It's kind of the two things that you have to balance. At that time, we were consuming a lot of streaming, we're consuming a lot of content, watching a lot TV shows and movies. It was in 2010, 2011 and none of the streaming platform were available.
No Netflix in France, no streaming platform where you can actually consume content by watching it online, you had to watch TV. Obviously, you're big consumer of piracy and downloading and bit track. You had no money, so you just gave, and it was not available. Today, you have no excuse, because there's a bunch of streaming service where you can pay a little fee and you can watch the content. At that time, there were actually no other way, especially in France, which I think was lagging a little bit compared to the US, in terms streaming and content available online.
We said, "Well, we should perhaps launch to streaming platform, because this stuff are really good and everybody loves video content," but going back to the student life, we have no money. I say, "How can we manage this whole crazy thing about content rights and spending this huge amount of money in bandwidth that you have to buy from the CDNs, all of that? There's no way we going to manage to raise enough money and do that in the meantime, but we're pretty good at technology. We are pretty good at building software and perhaps offering something that can be of an interest for these big streaming platform that are launching or about to launch globally."
This is where we looked at different problems and the bandwidth and the CDN conscription was one of the main issue. We came up with this little peer proof of concept of peer-to-peer technology. We had this POC, it's like "You know what? What do we do with it?" [Chuckles] It's walking between two computers on the better version of Chrome, but can we actually build a business around it? The thing we've done is that we look at the alumni list of people from our school and we say, "Okay, who's working in the video industry?"
We were pretty lucky because the founders of the VLC media player, which you might be looking video player that installed in billions of devices across the globe, actually has been a non-profit project from students from our school. Coming out of this story, many people that were working for broadcasters, many people that were working in video industry, we basically went there and meet with every single one of them and presented what we built and try to have some feedback around, but is it worth it? Do you think there's a business that we can go behind it?
Can you introduce us with the next person that we can present that project to, like that. In two months, three months, I think we built up our own conviction that we were into something because all these smart people were actually in the industry and working for these big streaming and broadcasters liked what they see, when we presented it, that's really how we all started the company. We are pretty ambitious from something get-go and said, "Well, this is an industry that's very US-centric, both in terms of providers, in terms of streaming platforms, obviously, the US is really powerful for all the content and the video and the studios. Also, very powerful for the technology providers, Akamai--
Sal Daher: Here in Cambridge. Akamai I drive by all the time.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly. We started apply to a bunch of accelerating programming the US and you sees how we got into Boston. The people in Texas in Boston really liked the story because Akamai has been such a big story for Cambridge, such a big company for the whole ecosystem. It was really nice for us because I remember pitching back in the days, some of the VCs in France and they had no idea how to spend half an hour explaining how the internet was working before actually getting into, what do we do, why is it interesting and why it doesn't have money? Then I arrived in Cambridge where everyone is actually--
Sal Daher: They knew they got what you're doing. They just said "Whoa, that's a cool idea you French guys have a pretty cool idea here this is peer-to-peer thing, you actually have software that works and the proof of concept stage and so forth"
Pierre-Louis Theron: That was fun and there was a little bit of plug obviously because you arrive in an ecosystem that's very mature about your business because one of the biggest, company in the industry is actually right there, that helped us a lot. That's how we, arrived in Tech-Stars and it was supposed to be for three, four months and I haven't left the US since 2014. It's been for a little bit more than that.
Sal Daher: [Chuckles] Well, Tech-Stars will do that for you. Do you have any entrepreneurship in your family or is this first?
Pierre-Louis Theron: Not really in tech. I have a bunch of family that has their own small businesses, a battery agricultural, I have people in the wine industry as well in the south of France.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Not a lot of entrepreneurship, I think it's really came out about, I don't know, from seeing these people that are willing to take risk. Also, I was in a position where young entrepreneurs it's, if you fail, it's not a big deal. Especially if you have a good degree, you can just go back and have a normal job and just have a good life. Yes, you're taking a lot of risk because you're putting a lot of your time and your 20s time that are very nice years working 80, 90 hours a week. At the same time, if you fail, you will have learned so much and you can go back and if you're smart, you'll find a good job as well. It was a really nice time.
"... I think it's being relentless, not only in your own dedication but also in building up the relationship with your partners, to have them excited and motivated year after year even though it's not an easy path..."
Sal Daher: If you enjoy working with the team that you are together, that really makes the whole difference.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Exactly. The founding team really helped a lot that we were good friends, we knew all strength and weaknesses and I think we also build, of all the three years of college or four years of college, such a big trust between each other and I think the trust is really the most important thing. Because you got to know that you should put a huge commitment in the work and you have your partner that does the same and that you're not alone in that boat. We have many fights. We didn't agree about everything.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Pierre-Louis Theron: We stayed together until-- I think we all left now, the business acumen. Yes, we spent nine years altogether in the business. I think it's being relentless, not only in your own dedication but also in building up the relationship with your partners, to have them excited and motivated year after year even though it's not an easy path.
Sal Daher: Awesome. What next, Pierre-Louis Theron?
Pierre-Louis Theron: Well, I just become a father a year ago.
Sal Daher: Congratulations, yes.
Pierre-Louis Theron: I got the chance to spend a little bit of time with my baby girl and my family, and unplug for the first time in 10 years is, it's really, really valuable. I am lucky to have the opportunity to do that. We concentrated in a bit on myself and in my family. That's what I do right now. At the same time, I'm opening up to the ecosystem, especially the startup ecosystem.
Because of the startup, I am spending time with founders trying to share my experience, give some advice for what it was, mentoring, investing a little bit as well, doing some Angel Investments, which is nice to do to give back again to all this community that helped me over the years. I don't think I'm done for entrepreneurship. I start to think about my potential next gig, there are some in these three topics that I like, and start to think about it.
Sal Daher: Well, it's keeping you on your list. Even though my investing focus is really the life sciences now. When a successful founder goes back for a second round, a second venture, I find it very hard to say no.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Well, it seems for sure.
Sal Daher: Let me know. Excellent. Unless you have any other thoughts? Or is there anything else that you want to say to our listeners, founders, Angel Investors, and people who are thinking of founding companies that you think would be valuable?
Advice to the Audience
Pierre-Louis Theron: Well, process one, I think, obviously, I think it just takes time to build great business sometimes, especially over the past couple of years has been crazy. Without that building and raising a ton of money in six months was the new normal. I don't think it's just real life. I think building business takes time, it's tough, there is up and down. If you look at our story, again, it's almost a 10-year cycle before and post-acquisition. This is more standard than when you can imagine.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Dedication, being patient, even though you want to go fast, obviously. Being relentless. Never give up is very important. Between investors, founders, employees, I think in this new world where everything goes very fast, we got to acknowledge the fact that, well, you're not building a business over a day. Especially when there's a lot of underneath technology, really good technology. Deep tech technology takes time to be really good. You just got to accept it. I think it's good to see. In one way, it's scary to see the current tech environment but in the other way, it's good to see people going back to normal and real life.
Sal Daher: Well, Pierre-Louis, when someone comes up with such an elegant solution for a major, major problem, even in the worst of times, there's going to be a need for it. Okay, I mean, what you're doing is, it just makes things better. It doesn't matter that right now valuations are down and everything is down and so forth. You're going to make things better.
There's value for that. Brilliant, it's really a brilliant solution. Pierre-Louis Theron, co-founder of Streamroot, which was acquired by CenturyLink, just now Lumen. I thank you very much for making time to be an Angel Invest Boston Podcast.
Pierre-Louis Theron: Thank you very much, Sal. It was a pleasure.
Sal Daher: Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
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I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.