Strada is a company that is improving workflow efficiency and automation by developing the first AI marketplace for creatives. The company was founded by CEO Michael Cioni. Cioni is a four-time Emmy Award winner, and he was the co-founder and CEO of the post-house Light Iron (acquired by Panavision) and served as product director for Panavision’s Millennium DXL 8K camera ecosystem. As Senior Director of Global Innovation at Frame.io (an Adobe company), Cioni also led numerous workflow innovations, including the transformative Camera to Cloud technology. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Cioni to learn more about the company.
Michael Cioni’s Background
Cioni’s parents were both creative entrepreneurs. For example, Cioni’s father was a cartoonist, and his mother was a pianist, so they exposed him to art at a very young age. Cioni said:
“And they taught me how to build a reputation around being creative, which inspired me to start businesses in the cinema space that focus on where art and technology intersect.”
Becoming Involved In Filmmaking
How did Cioni come to be involved in filmmaking? Cioni shared:
“My father had an animation studio and did commercials for brands like Disney and the Chicago White Sox, which fostered a fascination with post-production as an adolescent. I attended film school at Southern Illinois University but dropped out and headed to California, where I was thrust into an emerging world of digital cinema technology. It was from there that my desire to use the latest technology to help filmmakers and led me to several startups. My brother, Peter, was in investment banking in New York and decided to move to LA to take his knowledge of business and combine it with my innovative technologies approach and combine them to build Light Iron.”
Formation Of Strada
How did the idea for the company come together? Cioni reflected:
“Light Iron was our first business together which was born out of a prediction we made about imminent changes to the entertainment industry. In early 2008, RED Digital Cinema made the first 35mm digital sensor readily available. This camera paved the way for high-resolution digital technologies and large hard drive arrays to eventually overtake the process of celluloid 35mm film. We built a business that oriented exclusively around emerging digital cinema technology, including 4K resolution, digital projection, 3D, mobile computing, and iPads as viewing devices, which allowed Light Iron to quickly grow very large and touch hundreds of major motion pictures in a short time. This eventually led to its acquisition by Panavision in 2015.”
“Our current business, Strada, follows the same train of thought as Light Iron: we’ve identified machine learning and AI as ripe areas for innovation to help creatives have better control of their content and up-level the quality by using new AI models to perform automated tasks on their footage.”
“The idea (to build in public) actually came from a friend of mine and actress, Haeleigh Royall. She had seen a few examples of companies that took the risk to build their businesses in public, and she provided the early encouragement I needed to get it off the ground. Education has always been part of my career, and being able to help other entrepreneurs and artists find answers to information is very important to me.”
Why This Technology Is Needed
What will this technology do, and why is it needed? Cioni noted:
“As creative professionals, we’ve been taught for decades to learn a creative tool and learn the 500 buttons so we can import all our work into it and manipulate it the way we want. The problem with this is it requires countless hours of time dedicated to learning how each of these buttons works. And no tool can do everything, so users are forced to buy or subscribe to another tool for a new feature, then another and another.”
“As reliance on the cloud expands, this problem will expand and artists will find themselves subscribing to dozens of tools and dozens of clouds with media scattered all over the internet. Strada solves this problem by building a marketplace – like Spotify or Etsy – where users can have one subscription and search for specific tasks they need done. For example, transferring files, transcoding, transcribing, translating, color correction, rotoscoping, noise reduction, enhancing and image restoration.”
“Strada’s marketplace surfaces AI models trained on these tasks and requires no training to activate since AI models are superior to most manual toolset processes. Strada also allows you to combine all these tasks together and save them as a workflow so every clip will automatically be processed through your custom workflow and delivered to the cloud of your choice. This ultimately saves time, increases control, and democratizes complex tasks previously too difficult or slow for many users.”
“As we show prototypes of Strada to the community, we were surprised by how vast the interest is. We already have several hundred early adopters that span every possible market. We’ve had interest from sports teams, houses of worship, feature film production companies, commercial agencies, special events shows, and education. Because Strada focuses on leveraging democratization of complex tasks to users, we see this as a creative companion for virtually anyone who creates content with video, audio, or stills.”
Challenges Faced
What have been the top setbacks for you so far, and how did you overcome them? Cioni acknowledged:
“A friend recently asked me, ‘How do you plan each day when starting a business?’ My answer was, ‘Problems find you, and there is no shortage of them.’ Starting a business is a series of constant setbacks and problems to solve.”
“One of the most frustrating parts of startups is having to decipher the sequence required to complete tasks without knowing which must be done first. Many times, the excitement of accomplishing a goal is gutted at the last minute when an unknown issue shows up prohibiting you from being able to complete it.”
“Banks won’t let you open a business account without a name. You can’t have a name without registering it. You can’t register it without paying a lawyer. And you can’t pay a lawyer without a bank account. It’s these cyclical problems that sound easy but end up being extremely difficult to get in the right order and take months before you have an actual functioning business that allows for things like payroll and hiring.”
Evolution Of Strada
How do you expect the technology to evolve in the next several years? Cioni noted:
“We already have a 4-year roadmap. It’s common for entrepreneurs to visualize short-, mid-, and long-term plans – even if they pivot partway through. I believe in talking about plans in a realistic way because it allows the team to align on the future, which solves several problems: first, it makes employees feel invested in the future.”
“It doesn’t actually matter if you change course, but if everyone feels there is a multi-year path, employees are more likely to anchor in. Second, this allows engineers to make decisions in the construction and orchestration that may be inconsequential to the product today but will come back to serve the business when new branches of the product are born.”
“Without any foresight to the future, they might make infrastructure decisions that need to be re-built or rethought in the future. And third, future plans help the business continue to innovate. For me, examining the future requires constant scrutiny and long-term planning opens up opportunities for employees to feel it’s okay to bring up things that are not critical to the business today. There are many examples of companies that made great products and then failed to innovate new ones – forcing sharp turns which create stress on the business and can lead to churn, turnover, or both.”
Funding
After asking Cioni about funding, he revealed:
“Our first pre-seed round of funding went exceptionally well. A total of nearly $2 million gives us a year of runway so we can hire more talent and spin up more cloud computing.”
“What I didn’t plan on is that the money came from people within the business. I find having investors that come from within the business accomplishes two major things: first, it proves our idea has value for filmmakers with a lot of experience. If it was insignificant, they wouldn’t have bet their own money on it, especially in a strike.”
“Secondly, it provides us with access to productions that can be early adopters and beta testers. By having filmmakers within our investment pools, they’ll put Strada on their shows and allow us to capture significant feedback and improve the product with direct access to users.”
Target Market
What market is Strada addressing? Cioni assessed:
“As Strada’s marketplace grows, I am confident it will touch every market segment. The creator economy is a key area of early adopters for us because they are traditionally very eager to try new things, have smaller teams, and are looking for ways to up-level their content. But the tools we build will continue to expand which will give users of all markets a new world of resources to solve problems, speed up workflow, and increase quality.”
Next Steps
What is the next step for the company? Cioni emphasized:
“The next step for Strada is to deploy our alpha. There are already 350 users signed up for the program, and we are actively building the initial product as we speak. Building software is hard to do – even when you’re good at it – but our team is designing and building front-end and back-end elements so we can start populating the feature set. This is what I’m most excited about today: delivering an alpha so people begin to capture a glimpse of what we’re building and how it will change workflow forever. Our alpha is targeted for the earliest of adopters in late January, which will allow us to begin capturing valuable feedback on the early features and help us improve the product as we begin the haul towards beta.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates you from competition? Cioni affirmed:
“I find that when it comes to competitive advantage, the best companies may not always have a unique product – or in some cases, the better product rather they have the better brand. My approach to differentiation comes in the way I communicate. I have always been transparent and freely provided information to customers, which increases trust and visibility.”
“When I came to LA and started a post house, I had very little money, experience, or credits. But by building a brand that connected with the community and focused on helping people solve problems with technology in a transparent way, the customers came, and eventually we started working on films that used to be controlled by competition 100 times our size. We were literally 100x smaller, but it was our presence that tipped the scales in our favor. Because AI software for creatives is already a tricky subject, it’s important to establish trust in an area that people are largely suspicious of.”
Future Company Goals
What are the company’s future goals? Cioni pointed out:
“The ultimate goal of Strada is simple: to provide a new type of creative companion so artists can improve the quality of their work in less time. The initial roadmap is set, and our velocity is exceptional. If we are able to achieve our initial goals, people should start experiencing Strada in numerous ways over the next 24 months. After that, we have some really big ideas I can’t wait to share.”
Additional Thoughts
Anything else to add? Cioni concluded:
“I’ve now been here for more than 20 years. My mission hasn’t actually changed much. To increase creative control to the people who need it most. I’ve been lucky to work on over 150 feature films, and the #1 lesson I learned is a bigger project requires a more complex workflow, which breaks down the creative process. I’ve dedicated my life to building technology that helps remove the barriers to creative people so they can be closer to the stuff they do best. My vision for Strada is to be the best example of solving this problem, and if I’m right, creative control is about to be dramatically increased for artists everywhere.”
