All posts by Jade Kurian

On a sunny day, I walked confidently into my first day at work for one of the bigger television stations in the US, feeling pretty good about my new reporting job. A photographer welcomed me and with a smirk and a smile, he said in a whisper, “Welcome to the lion’s den, kid. You’re fresh meat. Be careful.” It was his warning that I had to have my own back and being the new person didn’t mean I would get any breaks. That was the television world at that time. Get it done, get it done right or move aside. Your competition was everyone. My journey as a broadcast journalist was one that tested me in almost every possible way until I became an entrepreneur.

It was a real honor to share the tests of entrepreneurship with the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) Tech Talk in November. I love talking latakoo every chance I get. We’ve come quite a distance since my co-founder and I created latakoo in 2010. It’s always my hope that someone will hear something that speaks to them and it helps them in their journey and success.

The DWEN talk, with Intel’s Global Sales Director Sarah Wieskus moderating, focused on the topic of How to Position Your Business for the Future. That’s something most entrepreneurs are thinking about. At latakoo, one of our goals is to build the future of content collaboration and sharing.  Our video workflow company is always working to meet the ever-changing needs of the largest broadcasting companies in the world. 

Please do watch our full Empower Hour chat here. A big thanks to Sarah, Intel and Dell!

If you can’t watch, I put together a list below from our chat of my tips for entrepreneurs and best practices that have helped me and our company grow. I certainly haven’t done it alone and I’m still learning. My co-founder Paul Adrian and I share these three qualities: We love to learn, we’re big on research and data, and we don’t like to quit.

I really do wake up every morning and think, “I can’t wait to go to work!” As a business owner, yes, I’m always working, but what I mean is I can’t wait to engage with my team, and I can’t wait to solve problems for my clients. 

That doesn’t mean every day is full of roses. There have been many challenging times along the way. As I said during the talk, I knew starting a business wouldn’t be a cakewalk, but I didn’t know how hard it would be to build a company starting with an idea and taking it to profitability within 5 years. I hope these tips and lessons learned help you and your future. Best of luck!

MY BEST PRACTICES AND TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS

• Try to do something every single day that grows your business
• Listen intently to your clients’ needs, and work to come up with solutions 
• My main ingredients to survival and success:

             • Persistence

             • Grit

             • Not backing down

             • Not letting go entirely, but enough so that others can do their jobs

             • Taking a step every day toward a goal

             • Tackle one problem one at a time, and don’t let them overwhelm you

             • Having realistic expectations

• When should you ask for help?

             • We bring in help for two reasons: When you or your team become inefficient, and tasks are taking too long, or when we need a specialist.

IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO START A BUSINESS

• It’s important to have an idea of how much bandwidth you have to contribute to it.
• If you can’t give it your full focus, it’s likely to be much  tougher. Also, investors generally don’t invest in part-timers.
• When it comes to the financial investment, bootstrap for as long as you can.
• If you can, find a way to build your business, instead of spending all your time trying to raise investment.
• If you’re creating something that’s a solution for your clients, then focus on the clients and what they need.
• Success means having the freedom to create and make your own decisions. Don’t rely on others to make your decisions. Listen to everyone who gives you advice with a mind to evaluate the advice before acting on it. 

• It’s important to have mentors you can go to for counsel who are always cheering you on, but also not afraid to be honest and give you a reality check.
• Make your decisions based on research and data first, but don’t ignore your gut feelings.
• If you’re an entrepreneur because you want to provide a solution and you are dedicated, then you’re going to figure it out.

I think about missed opportunities, often giving a good deal of thought to things I didn’t do well and how I could improve next time. At the DWEN talk, someone asked about books that helped me. I answered that I have a ton of  books. Lots of Malcolm Gladwell. None of them were top of mind at the time so I spoke about finding people who are actually doing something and understanding their examples. I want to add to that here. I enjoy being a learner. I try not to make decisions without data and research. Reading and listening are obviously integral to learning. I don’t always want to read a book that’s self-help or business related because I need an escape. My current read is a psychological thriller. Having said that, my favorite read in 2021 was “Breath,” by James Nestor. A fellow female entrepreneur friend gifted it to me. James Nestor is again, someone who is out there doing what it takes to change his life and the lives of others. He did research on himself to cure his illness. In this book, he provides research and methods on the healing power of our breath. Whether we want to deal with stress or improve our performance, breathing the right way and focusing on the breath, makes a difference. Here’s more about Nestor’s mission and how it can help you deal with stress. 

I also read lots of blogs on Medium, check the New York Times and Washington Post daily and I have several podcasts that I frequent on my runs, including The Rich Roll Podcast and Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman. Roll is an ultra athlete and a vegan. I’m a runner and a vegan. Roll brings on guests who are inspirational in their quests in life, people who are trying to change the world, save the planet, help animals, live longer, live better. Rich Roll is one of the reasons I am a vegan. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, meanwhile focuses on how founders scaled their companies, telling the origin stories of companies that scaled successfully, with people sharing their challenges and lessons. One of the reasons I enjoy Masters of Scale is Hoffman’s genuine love for entrepreneurs and what they do. One of my favorite quotes about entrepreneurship comes from Hoffman, “An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I am definitely that kid who asked “why” a lot, defying some of the rules. Why does it have to be this way? Why can’t we do it better? Why is this the rule? Not every rule is right or efficient or good. Sometimes to change things, you have to step into the lion’s den and figure your way out.

From our office in downtown Austin, Texas, there is a clear and often meditative view of the popular Lady Bird Lake and Trail, where on most days, you find hundreds of people enjoying the water or the trail. As Covid-19 began to permeate into Texas, it was like a valve suddenly shut off — the people disappeared. State and local governments issued lockdown orders. We sent our employees home. Our clients cleared out their newsrooms, production facilities and studios. Journalists began reporting from their living rooms instead of broadcast centers. Todd Bynum, KXAN-TV’s Chief Photographer told me, “We made sure laptops had the latakoo app installed, then handed them out to our crews and said, ‘you’re not coming back here for a few months, use latakoo to send us your stories, latakoo will be your friend.”

latakoo is a native cloud company celebrating our 10th anniversary this month. Our clients are some of the world’s largest broadcasters. Their staffers were already comfortable using latakoo to transfer files quickly and securely from around the world. As the pandemic set in, they began to count on us more than ever.

What we saw in the wake of the shutdowns was unprecedented usage by current clients – with uploads from users growing 172% year-over-year in just one month. In the case of one major broadcast client, users from one of its divisions, uploaded an explosive 1800% more minutes of video than in May 2019. latakoo’s cloud offers a platform for collaboration, downloading and viewing. One client streamed nearly 150,000 minutes of video in a single month, up an incredible 8,000% over the same month last year.

“We had been using latakoo as a one-way street prior to the coronavirus pandemic, taking files from the field, to the cloud, to the asset manager,” said Rick Erbach, News Director of WGNO, in New Orleans, Louisiana during a webinar in April. “Now we’ve turned it into a two-way street. MMJs will say,  ‘I need this video or that video.’ And so what we are doing now is putting that video up to the latakoo cloud so they can bring it down to their desktop at their home.” Erbach says latakoo has been a “newscast saver” during the pandemic.

As we were scaling our service and adapting to the demands of increased traffic, clients started asking to use latakoo to enable novel remote workflows. We have always nurtured a very collaborative relationship with our clients. I was not surprised when they called us with questions like, “What if we used latakoo to record live feeds coming in from press conferences?” 

We responded with rapid innovation. We set up workflows to create files from live streams, enabled cloud editing in beta and launched a unique disaster recovery workflow. And, our team pushed out a new service called Manifest to help teams discover, follow and request stories – ensuring delivery to multiple locations. Manifest integrates with AP’s ENPS and literally helps news teams manage stories from birth to broadcast.

The question that always comes up, “Did you already have a plan in place?” We did have an emergency response plan, but if we’re all being honest, we have to admit that we had never faced a pandemic. It’s like a breaking news story where the facts as you know it will change in an hour, in a day, in a month. You are forced to operate with only the here and now. Our marketing efforts, which included two major conferences, had to be shuffled as NAB and IBC cancelled shows. We’re sponsoring and producing more webinars and using public relations teams in Europe and the U.S. to supplement marketing. 

My heart sinks and I feel pangs of guilt when I hear about companies that have shuttered. We are growing and adding staff. I remember the days when buyers were skeptical about “cloud” solutions. Now people are pandemic-proofing by using cloud companies. We don’t know for sure how it will all shake out, but we believe the way to continued growth is to listen carefully to our clients, intelligently and efficiently build what they will use, pivot as needed and continuously be ready for change. 

Our view is back, hundreds of people once again in the lake and trail here, but as the pandemic rages on, it’s clear that nothing will ever be the same. 

The news anchor you’ve been watching report from their living room or kitchen, may be there for a while, as the coronavirus infection continues to set new records. Most television news broadcasters have dramatically limited the number of people in newsrooms and studios in order to protect their employees and prevent the infection from spreading. 

According to The At-Home Studio And The Future Of News Workflow webinar hosted by TV News Check on July 23, a majority of the attendees plan to keep more than 50% of their staff off-site permanently.

Broadcasters are increasingly turning to companies that facilitate their teams’ ability to work from anywhere. latakoo is one of those solutions, enabling the fast transfer of files from anywhere to anywhere, whether it’s to the broadcast studio or to a colleague for collaboration. latakoo users can transfer a file one time and have it arrive at multiple destinations with multiple workflows. 

“Hats off to the journalists out there who are doing this important work,” said Jade Kurian, president and co-founder of latakoo. “These news crews are out there, protecting the rest of us and we are so happy to be able to support them.”

Austin-based latakoo has seen explosive growth in the usage of its file transfer and cloud-based system. In just one instance, a single news division is sending more than 32,000 files a month, or 1800% more files than in May of last year.

For many clients, latakoo was a known software tool that became the preferred way to move files when the pandemic began. “As far as sending video, latakoo was already a well-established workflow for us. We just expanded upon that once we started working from home and it has been super successful,” said Keith Barbaria, VP of Technology for NBC Boston, NBC Sports Boston, Telemundo Boston and New England Cable News.

Not only are customers sending more video, they’re using the cloud-based platform for collaboration as well. One latakoo news client streamed 147,570 minutes on the latakoo platform in May 2020, an 8,000% increase over the same month the previous year.

Cloud collaboration is the way dispersed teams are continuing to be productive, since the appetite for news coverage has only grown since the pandemic began.

“(We’re) leveraging latakoo a whole lot in terms of getting material to and from home base,” said Brendan Falco, Senior Director of Operations for Spectrum Networks, on the collection of software tools or hardware ‘kits’ his team is using. “I think we’re in a groove on how those kits are set up and we’ve been happy with the result.”

latakoo’s Kurian thinks that the pandemic has not only brought lasting change to the way news crews work, but to the technology they use. “What I keep hearing from our customers and potential customers is the need for a solution that’s sophisticated enough to integrate with  other platforms and technologies they’re using, along with the simplicity in user interface, so you don’t need to be an engineer to use it effectively.”