Dave Gullo
Co-Founder & CEO, VIDEATE
GET TO KNOW DAVE...
Hometown:
Las Vegas, then San Clemente in Southern California
Alma Mater:
California State University, Chico
Hobbies:
Snowboarding and collecting vintage drum equipment, specifically ride cymbals
Q: How did you get started in video?
A: I've been involved in video since 1995. I attended Cal State, Chico, and studied computer science, as well as instructional tech/media design—which was a unique program at the time. This sparked my love of education, computer science, and media; it was very foundational for me. I also worked through college at a company called Videomaker Magazine, which was all about consumer video production. So Videate is kind of the nexus of a lot of those early things.
Q: Tell me about your first job.
A: I delivered papers and mowed lawns when I was about 10 years old. I then used my earnings and invested in collecting rare coins. My other "early-stage" jobs included ski/snowboard tech, construction worker at Disneyland, a snowboard factory, and webmaster.
Q: How many companies have you started?
A: Videate is my fourth company – My first business when I was 24 was an online snowboard shop. The last two were both video related – including VideoAmp, which has grown to over 500 employees.
Q: How would you describe your chief skills?
A: I’m a self-described ethical hacker: I’m an inventor hacker, and I put stuff together. That's what I do. My strengths are on the creative engineering side of business. While I can run a P&L, I prefer the technical over the operations side of the business.
Q: What is the favorite part of your job?
A: Innovation in advancing the product is my favorite thing to do. In fact, Videate started because I was tinkering around. I had no idea it would be a company at that time. You could put a million, bazillion, gazillion dollars on my desk here, and I would still be doing stuff like Videate.
Q: Any advice you have for other tech founders?
A: For any startup, it’s imperative to have your Idea, Team, Execution, and Traction. In addition, make sure you have a defensible moat. If a key aspect of your product could be easily feature-flipped on by Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.; or if you've saddled your wagon fully to just one company like OpenAI—make sure you have differentiating factors in your offering.
Q: Who have been influential mentors in your career?
A: I’ve had many amazing mentors, but three come to mind. Mark Hellinger, my Videate co-founder, and Ross McCray, co-founder of my last company, VideoAmp, are both incredible leaders with different strengths and styles. They are complete dichotomies, but I have learned from both. The third person is Tomas Chavez, CEO at Krux, where I was a software engineer. For me, it’s been important to lean on people of different backgrounds, generations, and experiences, so I can take something from each to be more well-rounded. Now, when I sit back and contemplate or have a conversation with myself, I try to channel what they would tell me.
Q: Any other CEDs you admire?
A: I admire Artur Bregman of Fastly. He's a hardcore hacker—he's raw and tells things like they really are. With this authenticity, he captured hearts and minds in the tech community, and he took Fastly from startup to Akamai competitor and disruptor.
Q: Do you feel like you have a good work-life balance?
A: I wake up at 4:00 AM without an alarm clock to start my day, and I work very long days. However, I feel balanced because I can stop whenever I want. Working remotely, I take lots of breaks and do things around the house. When you have a long workday, you must change it up and take breaks—and when you do, you tend to have an epiphany here and there.
Q: What is your favorite band or genre of music?
A: I'm generally very old school, but lately I've been hooked on Afrobeat – a mixture of African and French kind of music from the seventies and eighties.
Q: You mentioned collecting drums as a hobby. Do you also play?
A: Yes, I do. And so did my dad. In fact, I’ve been playing drums since I was 10 years old, and I’ve been in a lot of bands. I hope to join another one when I have some free time!
Videate is the first platform to automate the production of software videos. Using a combination of AI, robotic process automation, and text-to-speech, its patent-pending technology enables companies to create software videos at scale. Customers use Videate to keep their video libraries always up to date, scale language translation, and generate videos from existing documentation.
“Advancing the product is my favorite thing to do. In fact, Videate started because I was tinkering around.”