Kelvin Crosby: 0:06

Welcome to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast. We're not waiting for change, we're investing in it. Join us as we speak with entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are focused on creating a more accessible world.

Kelvin Crosby: 0:28

Hey, It's so good to see you, even though I can't see you. It's another beautiful day in the neighborhood and I'm so excited that you're here at Investing in Accessibility. And we're going to be talking about the captioning effect. I think we're going to upgrade it from the curb cut effect to the captioning effect today, but before we get there, let me introduce you to my co-host, Chris Maher. How you doing, man?

Chris Maher: 0:52

Good, Kelvin, it's good to see you and to be with you, my friend. We've both been a little bit busy.

Kelvin Crosby: 0:57

Oh yeah.

Chris Maher: 0:58

We've been burning the candle at both ends, and that might be a separate episode where we dig into that. But how are you, buddy, you've got so much on your plate, right now?

Kelvin Crosby: 1:05

Oh, I'm trying to survive between parenting, between running two different businesses, launching a new series on the DeafBlind Potter platform and then working the See Me Cane and just trying to get the last version of the prototype done. I'm just like I just need to breathe .

Chris Maher: 1:28

Your ears must have been earlier this week because I was at that conference, Disability:IN and I ran into our friend, Troy from Aira, who introduced us so, so grateful for that, and Mike May and we were, we were talking about you and and it was all glowing and so your ears must have been burning a couple days ago when we were talking about you at the conference.

Kelvin Crosby: 1:50

Well, that's awesome. Well, I tell you, we had an episode a couple months ago that we talked about upgrading from the curb cut effect to captioning effect, and I'm excited about today's conversation. So why don't you introduce us to our guest?

Chris Maher: 2:08

You got it. So our guest today is Josh Miller, who's the co-founder and CEO of 3Play Media, and before I kind of talk about how we connected, let's welcome him to the show. So, Josh, welcome to the podcast.

Josh Miller: 2:19

Thank you. Appreciate you guys having me on. I'm excited to have the conversation.

Chris Maher: 2:23

Well it's good to have you here, and so we, as we were talking before we started recording, we met at M- Enabling and I think it was the fall of October 2023. And I think I was walking by the 3Play Media booth and I caught you there and you were gracious, and I literally just launched the Samaritan Fund. And I think you spent like 15 minutes chatting with me and telling me like, oh, meet this person and check out this person. So you were incredibly gracious and kind to me at that time and then we stayed in touch and we bumped into each other at the conferences. And then again your kindness, recently you reached out because you recommended me to moderate a panel for a conference in Indianapolis in the fall, which I'm going to do by the way, and so thank you for that. But yeah, no, you've just been, you've been kind and generous and have become a friend over time, and so it's great to have you on the podcast and to dig into your business.

Josh Miller: 3:16

Oh, that's great and, I think, for everyone. I mean, I'm a huge believer in entrepreneurship and innovation and the more we can do, especially in the accessibility space, to promote that growth mindset and innovation here is such a good thing for all of us, and I know that we've certainly benefited from just general awareness growing in the market and if we can do more of that to help each other, we should.

Chris Maher: 3:41

Yeah, love it.

Chris Maher: 3:42

And so today we're going to get into a number of topics, but at a high level,

Chris Maher: 3:47

big reason why Kelvin and I wanted to have Josh on the podcast and to talk about his business is, as this podcast is the intersection of entrepreneurship, accessibility and impact investing, part of what we want to do is certainly talk about early stage innovation right, that's just kind of getting off the ground, but we also need to highlight the success stories, and 3Play Media, and you and your team, are absolutely one of those examples. And so we need to start shining a light on that, because we don't have a ton of them so far. Hopefully we're going to have a lot more, and so we need to be talking more about the companies that have scaled to that next level, or the next several levels, as examples for private capital that hasn't yet started to look at this space as an investment opportunity. So with that being the table setting let's first start off, Josh, because it's a little bit unique, I think, in terms of how the business started. Talk about, maybe, your background first prior to starting the business and, if you want to get into maybe your connection or lived experience around disability and then how the founding of 3Play Media happened, would be great, let's start there?

Josh Miller: 4:59

Yeah, definitely, and I appreciate very, very kind words. I think we would say we've made a lot of progress but we still have a lot to solve, but definitely excited to talk about it. So we started the company at MIT Sloan. There were four of us who co-founded the business. Two of us continue to run it today and the other two are still good friends and are actively in conversations about how things are going. I will say right off the bat having four co-founders is a real blessing, because you've got four people who are just working their butts off, we'll say, and just doing anything to see the business forward and make progress together. Certainly, who you have as your co-founders matters and making sure that that alignment exists, but we were really lucky to have a tight group of people who are just so focused on getting to the next step and pushing things forward together. So how did we get there? So we met at MIT Sloan.

Josh Miller: 5:57

Personally, I was in a consulting role out of undergrad. I had had some exposure to the startup world and entrepreneurship both in undergrad and outside of school, and so I had the startup bug. I also had the pleasure of being part of a startup that didn't have a very happy ending and realized quickly how much I had to learn. So my mission out of undergrad was actually to just learn, and so that's why I went into consulting. I figured that would give me some general business knowledge. Certainly got that and maybe more so which I

Josh Miller: 6:33

appreciated. I also knew that I needed a different experience and to give me an opportunity, a little bit more of a platform, to get into the entrepreneurship world and the tech world. So that's how I ended up at MIT Sloan. I was part of the entrepreneurship and innovation program there.

Chris Maher: 6:47

And one one quick comment on that experience early on with the startup that let's not call it, that didn't fail, but that didn't quite succeed the way you wanted to. Those experiences are so critically important as you move forward those learnings Right, and we can get into that a little bit later but I raised my hand.

Chris Maher: 7:08

I'm part of that group too, where I've had some ones that have done well and succeeded and others that have not. But those ones that did not, I might've learned more in those companies than the ones that you know did really well,

Josh Miller: 7:22

You're so right and it's you know, it's hindsight 2020 situation, right, where you you realize the things that went wrong and the flags along the way and even that, you still, hopefully, came away with something that you've learned from and grown from it. In the moment, it's pretty painful.

Chris Maher: 7:39

Yeah, a hundred percent, like Kelvin and I, just the other day we hopped on the phone because he's going through some stuff with with his company, See Me Cane, like exciting stuff but you know it's first time for him going through that, although he's run some other companies, cause this is a little bit unique and and you know navigating that and Kelvin's got this collection of kind of advisors that he's tapping it. Like he's being really smart and thoughtful about it. I mean, Kelvin, I don't know if you want to touch on that.

Kelvin Crosby: 8:08

Well, I can't tell all the details, but I mean one of the things, it's like you've got to have a team around you, because I wouldn't have gotten to where I am. I just think about when you invent a product, like with my end. This is totally off topic, but I mean we're on topic, but I don't know. But it was one of those things where it's like if I didn't have my team, I wouldn't have been able to draft up what I needed to draft up to make these conversations happen. And yeah, I mean it's exciting times and hopefully in the next couple months I'll be able to share with you guys what's going on and we'll table that for now. Josh, I think one of the interesting things that you talked about is working out the founders, like building up that core relationship, working hard. And would you say, as you went into this and started building this, like what were you guys's experience in the captioning industry or in making media accessible and all of that?

Josh Miller: 9:14

It's a great question, so the the honest answer is that none of us had real experience in the accessibility world directly, and what I can say is that we all recognized it as a very real issue that needed to be solved, and I think we all had different experiences on a personal level. Family members who might have had severe hearing loss or sight loss that we've been a witness to but certainly not experienced firsthand.

Josh Miller: 9:43

But even then that is an experience, right. Working with a family member who all of a sudden doesn't hear the same way that they did two years ago, I mean that's a thing that you have to work through and figure out how to navigate. So we were aware of it. I don't think we fully appreciated how poorly addressed it was in the market, certainly with technology, and so you know,

Chris Maher: 10:08

And Josh, this was how many years ago. What year is this?

Josh Miller: 10:12

We all started getting to know each other in 2007. And I think the legal papers would say we started in 2008. Some of the initial projects were starting in 2007., and so the first conversations that actually got us into this was one of my co-founders had a relationship with some people at MIT OpenCourseWare, and this was the first group putting lectures up online for free. And, probably not a surprise, MIT content is not exactly simple. There's some pretty complicated language in there, and one of the things that they were very proud of is just how real these lectures were. And the curveball they got thrown was that one of the funding institutions that were writing these grant checks to get the program off the ground, kind of out of the blue, said hey, by the way, we expect you to make the content accessible, and of course, that was met with. What does that mean? Because even they who were putting video up online, they didn't understand it. They weren't thinking about that because nobody was. YouTube was still pretty new at that point and the only place that you could find captions were on broadcast television, and even then it wasn't, it was almost ubiquitous, but not quite. The streaming world had not taken off. So we were in the early, early days of this, and so they started going out to the traditional broadcast television, film production type captioning companies, some of which still exist, and trying to get quotes to do this, and it was going to be half their annual budget. So, right off the bat, they are freaking out because they didn't know what to do, because there's no way they can afford this.

Josh Miller: 11:48

But that was the conversation that kicked us all off. Is us learning about this, what we would call absurdity on paper? Right, and what we had to do is learn about it. We had to figure out why is it so expensive? And at the same time, we started working with a professor in the spoken language lab at MIT who was part of the artificial intelligence group there and looked at different ways to use speech technology. So how could we use speech recognition to create captions? And the hope was oh, that's the answer. We're going to use speech recognition, we can do a few things to it and, boom, we'll solve this. We were very far from that, especially back then, very different from what we see in AI today. It was nowhere near usable for this use case, and what we started to see was that, one, we need to do something more interesting here and there's an opportunity to build something.

Josh Miller: 12:43

And two, if all these other schools are talking about putting lectures up online and having recordings online, this is going to be an issue and nobody's solving this well, so maybe we should see if there's something here. That's literally kind of the conversation we were having.

Chris Maher: 13:00

So the problem came to you?

Josh Miller: 13:03

Yeah, we were very, you said it, we were very unusual. We had a problem in a customer before we had a product. I mean we basically, we said we're going to figure out a way to get it to a third of the price of what you just got quoted, and like that's how we started.

Chris Maher: 13:18

And what's amazing about that is that if you could build that solution, you were starting off with product market fit, which is just so critically important.

Josh Miller: 13:27

Yeah, and we can talk about that. I mean, I think the risk of doing something big for one customer is that exact question, right? Is this solving their problem or is this solving everyone's problem? I think the good news was we actually had found something that was going to generally be a problem for a lot of people. How we solve it was going to be the big question. So we basically took that as inspiration and built our first piece of software. That was really about editing speech recognition output, and the concept still applies today. We've certainly evolved it over time, but this idea of you start with a speech recognition draft and then correct it and then have another method to QC it before it goes back to a customer and there's a whole bunch of machine learning and natural language processing that happens in between automatically to create the right line breaks and put in all the other things that are required for captioning so that we can do it more efficiently.

Josh Miller: 14:24

And so you know we think about this concept, what we call it XRT. So how much time does a human need to contribute to fully caption, say, an hour of content. So in the past and the way we measured it and analyzed it, it was getting around like a 10 X multiple, so 10 human hours per one hour of video.

Kelvin Crosby: 14:43

Wow.

Josh Miller: 14:44

And we've gotten that down much, much, much lower. That's ultimately why the price was so high.

Chris Maher: 14:49

Yeah, I was just going to say, hence why that initial it's 50% of their annual budget.

Josh Miller: 14:55

And so I'll shout out Larry Goldberg, because we'd be. You know, Kelvin, you said it, the curb effect, or curb cut effect being renamed the captioning effect. Larry was instrumental in getting captions off the ground period for all of us way back in the 80s, and he was nice enough to allow us to come to the Access Center at WGBH when we were just getting started, and learning to just see how captions were created.

Josh Miller: 15:23

He was nice enough to walk us through it. I think he questioned why he was showing us all of this, but he's remained a mentor and a friend for us, and it's just a great reason we got off the ground.

Chris Maher: 15:35

That story warms my heart. He's the best. We, as you know, we had him on the podcast recently and, yeah, I mean he's a pioneer in the captioning space and and even back then he was mentoring and advising and that's the bulk of what he does today for early stage companies which yeah he's the best.

Josh Miller: 16:00

He's amazing.

Josh Miller: 16:01

I mean, he has the mission in mind all the time and he knows that he can't alone solve it and so very much appreciate that.

Chris Maher: 16:04

Yeah, in the early on. It's a combination. It's this kind of hybrid model of software and humans that are doing it more quickly and, let's say, as accurately or maybe even more accurately, can you talk about the arc of the technology aspect of that, how that has evolved over time and obviously AI is becoming even more and more a part of that. We'd love to hear kind of how that has evolved.

Josh Miller: 16:30

Absolutely, and so it's, you know, lots of pieces to it.

Josh Miller: 16:34

So we look at this as almost like two operational challenges. One is the actual process of creating captions or whatever output it might be these days. It could be subtitles, it could be audio description, but the point is actually being efficient in creating a high quality output.

Josh Miller: 16:51

Then there's doing that thousands of times over, so that's all internal operations, then there's the operations for the customer, and so we had to also figure out okay, great, we just did this more efficiently for us, but is it easy for them? And so that was the other piece that came out really quickly from MIT and from all the schools we spoke to is that if it's not easy, we're just not going to be able to do it?

Josh Miller: 17:18

We don't have the we don't have resources, the human power to sit there and move files around. That's just not a possibility. So very early on we thought about how do we connect systems, how do we connect video platforms to actually make this easy, and like no joke, we put surveys out early on and we found that the barrier half the time wasn't budget, it was actually process. So we thought about that and that's evolved now quite a bit as well.

Josh Miller: 17:45

But to your point about AI, I mean, so for a long time we thought about how AI or back then, machine learning, so as speech recognition got better, that essentially would reduce the human time required to caption effectively for a few reasons. One, obviously fewer things to correct, but we could even be smarter about how to do the corrections and how to use the data that we would get from the speech recognition output and really kind of focus on certain areas and allow people to do research certain ways and collaborate in certain ways. So there's a whole bunch of things that we continue to evolve in terms of those editing tools. But then we also built more and more tools and heuristics around the process of quality control and deadline management and all these other things we had to consider as we scaled the business.

Josh Miller: 18:32

With the first few customers we could just say, okay, you'll get it back, great. But we really had this vision of creating an environment of on-demand and limitless scale, at least in the eyes of the customer. It's impossible to have limitless scale with people, but from a customer perspective, if they could come into the system and upload a file and pick the turnaround or the deadline without talking to us. That's when we knew we actually had something special. Now we still want to be there to support them, of course, but the point is they needed to feel totally empowered to do what they needed when they needed it. Ai has come a very, very long way and I think there's a lot we could talk about there, and it's certainly changed the way we look at certain things, and it certainly changes even our ability to go after other services which I think is the interesting part.

Josh Miller: 19:25

It's both threat and opportunity, depending on how you look at it. It also depends on the use case.

Kelvin Crosby: 19:30

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that you're explaining and I think I want people to see is that you were looking at the customer experience in two different areas. The end user and the person that's going to be paying the bill.

Kelvin Crosby: 19:44

And I think that's something that a lot of people in accessibility they go one way or the other. And and really thinking about, like even with my company right now, like I'm having to think about, like who can actually buy my product, right, and who is that? But my end user are blind people, right, and so that's where it's like you've got to really think that through, and I think people forget that, especially when they're developing a product like you were talking about that. I think that's something that is very kind of eye-opening and, in a lot of ways, like okay, so there's that. So that's how you're going to scale in that way, and I would love to get into this conversation with you and really kind of look at, all right, so you've got your software figured out, you got the customer experience figured out, now you've got to scale. How were you going to do that? What was that going to look like. To get to that point.

Josh Miller: 20:42

So you just hit on something I think is so important, especially in the accessibility space, and it's very applicable to us, where many times, most of the time, we are selling to a person or a team that has been tasked with implementing, but they're certainly not the ones experiencing the end product, and that is challenging, especially if they have no experience with any kind of disability.

Josh Miller: 21:10

They don't really appreciate quite often how important it is to do it a certain way. So that is a very real challenge and I think gets into this whole idea of like are you solving for compliance or for value? And the goal is can you combine them, right? Can you actually solve compliance and add value at the same time? And that's why we talk about these things like the workflow, the customer experience, and think about how can we save them time, especially in a case where they at least have committed to doing this, they know they're going to do it. How do we make their life easier? So I think we can find ways to add value there. Certainly, when we think about accessibility versus, say, like, localization, there is a very different conversation and team thinking about these two issues and how they go to market and how they prove the ROI or get budget for that.

Josh Miller: 22:00

So, I agree, it's a very real issue and if we back up even to when we were starting the company, one of the biggest issues we faced was people just didn't understand this stuff.

Josh Miller: 22:10

So they certainly didn't understand the value of it. Even the compliance value? Right, because there is value in being compliant. People always like to think of it that way, but there is value.

Josh Miller: 22:20

So we, we set out on this idea of educating the market and in saying, hey, we need to help people get there because they're not ready now.

Josh Miller: 22:31

So we're going to start writing, putting a blog together, and we're going to host webinars,

Josh Miller: 22:36

and we're going to go to conferences and we're going to basically start doing everything we could to get the word out as to why this is a good idea.

Josh Miller: 22:43

And I will even say one of the first things we talked about, before we even had a second customer, was the idea that captions, by definition, is time-synchronized text, and that is a very rich tool for video search. So we have tools, still to this day, where it allows you to click on a word, jump to that part of the video search through a whole video library, and it's still shocking to me how few organizations have implemented these concepts, whether it's ours or not. I mean, it's such a great user experience, but it's potentially challenging to implement from a UX perspective if you don't do it right. So that was something that got us really excited, though, because that was an opportunity to change this compliance and cost conversation to a pure value and user experience conversation, which was, you know, I think, something that we still strive for is like how, why is this a valuable thing.

Josh Miller: 23:41

And it certainly gets into this curb cut concept or conversation that most captions are on all the time. Right, captions are on because people have finally recognized the value of them. And I think when, for us, one of the first times we realized it was happening was when Facebook released the capability to have captions display automatically in the feed when video sound or the sound was off.

Josh Miller: 24:11

And so all of a sudden you had all these people watching video and realize, at work or we'll say on the subway, right, you know, on their way to work, basically realizing like, oh crap, I really like captions, right, and like these are great. And so you know, certainly the you know, netflix and Amazon and Hulu and all the streamers have helped in this by making their libraries compliant or well-captioned, so now they're available everywhere. And the idea of having good captions on content is kind of a table stakes now which is amazing.

Chris Maher: 24:47

So a few things just to kind of summarize there because that was just a master class for an early stage founder, an executive team, because you got to do a lot more than just have a good idea, and so much of what you just talked about is execution. And, at the end of the day, you can have a great idea, but if you don't have a good team and execute well, that great idea is probably not going to scale and turn into anything. And you could have a mediocre product with a really good team and really good execution and you could go crush it. And so you've done both. But that whole idea of compliance versus value and really getting to where they start to think about it as more as value than compliance or in some cases, like, oh, you're my insurance policy, so I don't get sued. And so I think that was important for you, and part of that was understanding your customer's workflow and their processes. And, by the way, this isn't just like an accessibility industry thing, that's every industry. I could give you so many examples of companies that have said, yeah, your solution's better, it just doesn't fit our process and workflow internally, so we're going to buy the product that's not as good, but it just fits what we do better. That happens all the time across many, many industries.

Chris Maher: 26:09

The educational part, like educating the market and your end buyer. It's your buyer in this case and the people who are executing it versus the user, critically important, and you guys invested in doing that, creating content, and we're going to talk about research later. It started with a blog, but you've taken another level there. And then you identified how you could make it beyond just disability, right, that it's good for the general market, and so you've expanded your TAM. Right, that total addressable market, and so, like, you just checked like half a dozen boxes about good execution. So, for the entrepreneurs that follow the podcast, God, I hope they listened to this episode because I think the insights that you shared are so critically important for an early stage company from an execution standpoint.

Josh Miller: 26:53

I appreciate that. I mean, so you just hit on something I think is so important, which is this idea that the best product doesn't always win. And I will never forget hearing that. And one of the other things, and why it matters, is we cared so deeply about having the best product and doing it in a way that was also balancing the cost, so we never tried to play the price game. That was not our differentiation, but thinking about our differentiation and how could we differentiate has been central to everything we release. So we care deeply that we are doing it differently somehow, some way. Now that could be operationally, so that we can do it faster. It could be the way the customer receives it, but the goal is not to just be the cheapest because that that doesn't end well, and we see what is happening with AI.

Chris Maher: 27:43

It's a race to the bottom.

Josh Miller: 27:45

Exactly, and so that that is something you learn in business school for sure. So, with that in mind, you know, and knowing that the best product might not always win, I mean certainly you know, myself and my co-founders cared very deeply about not letting that happen, to not have the best product win, and so we listened to our customers very carefully, and then from there, listening to your customer can be hugely important and beneficial, but it can also be dangerous, right? Because if you act on the wrong thing, that's going to take you down the wrong path. So we're constantly looking for pattern recognition and understanding. Okay is this a thing just for them, or is this a thing for everyone?

Chris Maher: 28:29

Is it the exception or is it the rule, right? And that sometimes it's hard to differentiate between those, especially when it's a big customer, right?

Josh Miller: 28:38

Especially early, when revenue matters a lot. So that is something you have to be really careful about. It'll pay those bills tomorrow, but what happens in six months? What is it setting us up for? We absolutely had some conversations where we had. I mean, there was one time we had a project put in front of us with pretty much guaranteed cash for several months. It was absolutely a different business and we walked away from it, even though we needed that money.

Chris Maher: 29:08

Good for you. That's really hard to do.

Josh Miller: 29:12

It was hard to do, but it was the right choice.

Chris Maher: 29:14

Yeah. So there's two more topics I'd like to get into, one of which is AI. Go a little bit deeper on AI and how that's really transforming your business, but also, as you see, across the broader market. And then we'd love to, after that, get a little bit into, as much as you can share, about how your business is going, because you've done a good job of raising money. You've acquired some companies. You are a success story in that respect, and I know you feel like it's more about, hey we've been able to progress. But I'd like to get into that as well, with as much as you can share. But let's start off with the AI and how it's impacted your business and just what you see in the broader market going forward.

Josh Miller: 29:53

Yeah, absolutely, and I think the stories are linked. They're very much linked in the evolution of AI is both kind of informing our future and also kind of the opportunities in front of us. So when we started we talked about it as machine learning and it wasn't really AI at that point. It was pretty much there's a sound wave and we have to get text out of that sound and hopefully it'd be accurate and there were things we could do with modeling to improve it. At the time we'd see what we call word error rates, you know 15, 20, 25% on pretty regularly, which means accuracy rates or the inverse of that are, you know, 80% or so. That's changed dramatically. So now we're seeing accuracy rates very regularly above 90%, which is significant, and it's caused this kind of perception change, if you will, kind of like what is good enough and how good is it actually. AI, I mean to simplify it when we think about this. Ai has been part of our business from day one and it's funny because in those early years people didn't trust speech recognition.

Josh Miller: 31:07

So especially for this use case and I think that's important is understanding kind of the application of it. That the idea that machines were creating captions people had seen it fail enough that if we said we were using speech recognition to create your captions, they'd say then we're not working with you. And so we actually hit it in some ways, we would find ways to show that we were more innovative, but and we had to stress the fact that there was a human involved all the time, throughout the file, everything.

Josh Miller: 31:35

So that's evolved. It's like the opposite. Now it's like if you're not AI, we don't want to work with you, right? So it's certainly flipped and we're becoming much more forward with how we use AI in our business or talk about AI in our business. But it is part of everything we do and we view it as a tool.

Josh Miller: 31:55

So our whole thing is AI is incredibly powerful. You have to be very thoughtful in how you implement it and how you apply it, and if you apply it well, you can do some pretty cool stuff with it and you can gain some very real efficiencies. But the beauty of AI is also the threat of AI, right. So it can do unbelievable things. It's very, very powerful. It does it very, very fast. And if you look at some of these chat agents, And if you look at some of these chat agents, the challenge is they're so confident in their response, right, . Oh of the response is like this is the answer, oh great, well then I'm done.

Josh Miller: 32:34

accurate unless someone checks it. So, for the customers that we work with, so for the customers that we work with, where the to or a brand to adhere to, or certainly a direct student accommodation that you know someone who truly needs it is the one person experiencing it, and it better be right Then you know we need to make sure that we're . doing this right, and so that's why I say the use case and the application matters so much. So in our world, we view humans as critical to the process. So the challenge is how do you build tools to insert the human in the most efficient way? And so we're constantly evolving our tools. As we think about whether it's the same process or new service, we're constantly looking at how do we continue to make the human more efficient to do a really good job while using the best of AI, and so we've actually stayed AI engine agnostic from the. beginning And

Josh Miller: 33:32

We've basically said there are enough dollars being spent by very, very large tech companies that we can't compete with directly, but we can benefit because the price has become so low that the real secret sauce is how do you source the right people and train the right people and monitor the right people and then put them on top of the AI in a really effective way. That's the hard part and certainly the most expensive part. So if we can get the AI and if that keeps evolving, we can basically swap in and out different models and make sure that we're using the best AI all the time.

Kelvin Crosby: 34:08

I mean this is fascinating because I mean, I think, when I use AI for my videos and everything I do and I humanly edit it, but what's interesting, as we grow and using resources, and I think this is something that as entrepreneurs, as individuals, like in startups, it's like use it, don't be afraid to go, use another product to empower your product. I still like, for example, like in my, my company, See Me Cane. My tube for the See Me Cane was for a completely different product and then I was like can I get this tube this long and this way? And I tested it, boom, perfect, it works like a blind cane. And I'm like, all right, let's build out the electronics. And then the rest is history. And I think that's something that's really crucial as you are evolving through this process is using other resources to lower your bottom line, and I think that that's something really powerful.

Josh Miller: 35:18

Yeah, it's a really good point, I think you know, recognizing where your strengths really are and kind of what it's going to take to compete.

Josh Miller: 35:27

And we've seen several companies in different spaces, both in the captioning, accessibility and in localization, already full or or kind of move on from from this path because they tried to build their own engine and it was just so expensive. It's very hard, and then someone surpasses them very quickly and they have to figure out who are we.

Chris Maher: 35:51

Yeah, your model, and I said where AI and humans to create your own solutions. But now you're taking that and taking that same methodology and framework by taking all the stuff that you're building with your software and people and connecting it to third parties like the Googles and the Microsofts and the open AIs that have built, as you said, put billions of dollars into these engines, that the way you get the best value out of them is you figure out how to use them to your specific customer or use cases. And so now you guys, your special sauce is that technical and human integration within and across your business to external parties and that's not easy to do, that's super hard. And also being agnostic you can kind of cherry pick the best in class, right?

Josh Miller: 36:53

Yeah, it's become really interesting in the last couple of years with Gen AI taking off, and especially with a good example is voice technology. So text to speech and what it can do, whether we're talking audio description or dubbing in multiple languages. That you know, certainly in the media space, where they care deeply about the quality of the mix and the voice, people want to know that you're using the best voicing, and we have to be able to say we. And so the service we're now providing in a funny way is actually being your curator of AI technology, and that's a very real thing and so you're well aware that we do this state of ASR report, which is state of automatic speech recognition.

Josh Miller: 37:37

We've done that for several years now and we're literally benchmarking all the engines against each other, because it's both beneficial for us, but it's actually really interesting data to share with the market to see into a level set that certain engines perform better in certain cases.

Kelvin Crosby: 37:52

Right.

Josh Miller: 37:53

The content, and it all depends on how they've been trained, and so that is something that we intend to expand. Now that we're getting more and more into localization. We're seeing some fascinating things with text-to-speech in these voices. Some do really well in certain languages, some do really well with emotion, so we have to take all that into account and let our customers really get value out of the fact that we're paying attention to that for them.

Chris Maher: 38:19

Yeah, and the byproduct of you doing that sort of research right is, one, it reinforces your thought leadership in the marketplace, which then leads to credibility for you, right, with the marketplace, but it's also driving your product roadmap and making your products better. So it's super smart.

Josh Miller: 38:36

Exaxtly. So that was one of the things that we figured out early on with the state of ASR report is probably now five or six years, at least, that we've been doing it. We were doing it anyways.

Josh Miller: 38:46

We were benchmarking the engines anyways because it was helping us create more efficiency in our process, and then we realized people want to read this. People actually find this really interesting and it's one of our most sought after pieces of content every year, so that's been very, very helpful for us.

Chris Maher: 39:05

Maybe, as we start to wrap up here, let's touch on with what you can share around how the business has grown over the years, and that's through having to raise capital, making some important decisions about whether it's targeting certain markets or go-to-market strategies. You've acquired some companies. You got into a relationship with selling a portion of the company to private equity. What sort of insights can you share about that process and things that you would want to tell the younger you or an early stage entrepreneur that's just embarking on that journey?

Josh Miller: 39:38

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so we grew organically for a long time. We started the business in 2008. We did an angel round in 2010, small one and then grew organically and we were profitable early on, which we cared a lot about and our early investors felt like that was very important. And lo and behold, it matters. So, that was great. We had a certain level of stability for a very, very long time.

Chris Maher: 40:07

Can I ask a quick question about that decision to focus on profitability versus growing top line revenue? Did you have investors and a board that were supporting you on that, or did you have to fight them on that?

Josh Miller: 40:22

So it's a great question. I think, early on, part of the challenge we faced was being in an emerging market. And being especially in one that was still relatively niche is the honest truth. As much as I'd like to think that the captioning market is billions and billions of dollars.

Josh Miller: 40:39

It's not, and that was part of the challenge we had, is kind of how fast can we actually grow? And we had to be honest with ourselves about that, both in terms of our capabilities but also the market. And that is something that is so important and as we think about our future endeavors, the market opportunity matters. So that was part of it. Part of it was driven by the timing and the market size and being real with ourselves about if we were to invest in more revenue growth, could we actually achieve it? Was it realistic? So we were trying to balance that and be really thoughtful about that. We never played the game of hire 20 sales reps and see who survives and like all that kind of stuff. We just didn't do that. It wasn't really in our DNA either. So we we kind of grew with the market and, as I said, you know we're trying to educate the market at the same time. So it was it was a pretty measured approach. We had a couple of key investors who cared deeply that we be profitable. I mean, their experience was actually with much larger companies where profitability is very, very important. So that was in their DNA. So it kind of like all came together and that's how it worked and I think it served us well.

Josh Miller: 41:50

I think understanding the market you're in and the type of business you have and whether it is capable of scaling quickly is so important. So I don't know that we would have done things that dramatically differently. We certainly saw competitors come into the market, in some cases, come and go in that timeframe, but you know, I think we did a good job of maintaining who we were in the market and certainly the perception of us in the market, and in making sure that we stayed true to ourselves and continuing to deliver a really good product. I mean, I think one of the things about the accessibility market which I hope people appreciate, and even our competitors, is doing a poor job it just feels really messed up, honestly. Like you gotta care, and if you can't get yourself to care, then you're in the wrong industry. And so that was something that we felt and cared about and you know, lucky for us, we're able to hire a really great team around us that also felt that way. So if you look at our team today even, we have a really passionate team. People really care about making a difference and doing this the right way. So I do think that's something that we've kept true to ourselves even through investment and acquisition, and I think that's a hard thing to do with acquisition certainly, so kind of skipping a few steps there.

Josh Miller: 43:19

We partnered with a private equity firm in 2019. And there were a few reasons for that. I mean, part of it was this market was evolving, this market was actually growing and proving to be a real market and we needed to go a little faster. We needed to have a little bit more expertise on our board and we had a few you know dynamics of you know our angel investors had been with us for nine years, so we needed to create some, you know, an off ramp for them.

Josh Miller: 43:46

And so there was a whole bunch of things happening at the same time and it made it for to be the right decision to to bring on a new financial sponsor and then with that that opens the doors into a whole bunch of other things. So we had the opportunity to acquire a couple of companies. It was kind of two at the same time in CaptionMax and National Captioning Canada and that was at a time when we were feeling really strongly that we wanted to expand into this live captioning use case and saw that as a market expansion opportunity. I will say, tying back to AI, the timing of it was interesting in that several months later, ChatGPT came out and all of a sudden, and even in speech technology in our measurements, we saw a step function change in what was possible and we kind of looked at ourselves and said oh wow, okay, this is interesting timing. And then, on top of it, the economy collapsed and there was a media strike and the resources that we acquired were very heavy in the media industry. So there was a lot happened that we learned a lot from, and so we had some, we've been through some bumps and I think you learn a lot from that.

Josh Miller: 45:00

It's certainly blood pressure rises at times in ways that are probably not the healthiest, but I mean, I will say we came out the other end. But you know, it certainly starts to inform like where, where are we going. Right? And really try to understand the market and what is AI now and how are people viewing AI? Cause it's one thing to have the best product, it's another to make sure your customers understand it's the best product and it's the best product for them and for their use case. So, that is definitely something that's happened with AI, and the evolution of AI is that people's perception have changed and that they want it to work. They want it to solve all their problems. Whether it can, you know, it's another story sometimes, but it's gotten a lot better and we have to be honest with ourselves about that and we have to recognize that and just be pragmatic in the way we run our business and where we invest.

Chris Maher: 45:52

Yeah, that was awesome. We could talk to you for hours here. We're going to have to bring you back and have like a part two of this.

Kelvin Crosby: 46:07

So hours Josh here we're gonna have to bring you back and have like a part

Josh Miller: 46:09

So, for better for worse, we try to be pretty open and available, and so we have a pretty solid web presence. We put a lot of content on our website and on our social channels with, like I said, trying to educate first and and be part of the community. You go to a number of events to be part of the community. I think that's really important, so a lot of information about 3Play is out there. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm around. I love having the conversations about other startup companies getting going in this space. I have made some great connections with other founders that are doing some really interesting things in this space even even, in some cases, very close to what we're doing, which is in some ways exciting because it creates partnership opportunities. But I think there's so much to do . here And and again, if we can continue that conversation of how we get from compliance to value with technology, I mean it's huge and it's definitely a situation where rising tides raises all boats, because people need to understand this before they're going to buy it. So very, very big proponent of that so we're out there and we we can be found.

Chris Maher: 47:14

. We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes for all of our listeners and, josh Josh thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. Congrats to you and your team and the company that you've built, and we wish you all the success moving forward, and we're looking forward to having you back on the pod so we can do a part two of this conversation.

Josh Miller: 47:33

But thanks for joining us. We have a whole future to talk through, what's going to happen next, so I appreciate you guys having me and I think what you guys are doing and focusing on this emerging world and the accessibility space is so important. So thanks for doing it.

Kelvin Crosby: 47:47

This wraps up Investing in Accessibility. Go live beyond your challenges and we'll see you in two weeks.

Kelvin Crosby: 48:00

Thank you for listening to Investing in Accessibility, a Samaritan Partners podcast where we invest in change for accessibility, not wait for change. If you want to follow us, you can find us on YouTube or LinkedIn at @Samaritan Partners. If you would like to invest in Samaritan Partners, email Chris at chris@samaritanpartners. com. If you'd like to learn more about us, go to www. samaritanpartners. com. You can take the first step in investing in change by giving us five stars and sharing this podcast with everybody that you know, so we can spread the word, so that we can give access to all by Investing in Accessibility.