TQ Interviews – Michael De Monte, CEO and Co-Founder of Scribble Technologies

By: Kuljit Grewal  |   July 3rd, 2013   |   Business, News, TQ Profiles

TQ Editor-in-Chief Kuljit Grewal recently had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Michael De Monte, co-founder and CEO of Toronto based Scribble Technologies. Scribble is the company behind the wildly popular and undeniably disruptive ScribbleLive platform, a real time engagement management platform that is used by some of the largest media companies and brands in the world as well as ScribbleMarket the world’s first online marketplace for high quality syndicated content.

 

Among the myriad of things discussed, Michael shared what the company plans to do with their recent $8 million funding round, the journey that has led them to where they are today as well as their plan to continue to shake up the way real time content is shared and delivered moving forward. You can follow Michael on Twitter @demonte.

 

TQ: Congratulations on your latest round of funding, how does it feel to have a deal in place with some VCs that you have a strong history and track record with?

 

This round was led by Georgian Partners who are actually the newcomers of the group, but it is always comforting when your existing VC’s come in for another round. Actually, in the case of Rogers Venture Partners, this is now the third time that they have backed us. In 2009 they came in with a seed round around Christmas, the timing of which was pretty cool as well as our Series A in November of 2011, so in their case this is their third stamp of approval, which is great. In all we are extremely pleased that all the firms have come back.

 

TQ: What do you have planned for this new $8M in funding?

 

You know, the company is growing fast and one of the things we did right out of the gate that has worked out very well for us is that we did not restrict or limit ourselves to Canada. We had a lot of interest, even in the early days of 2008 and 2009 from organizations outside of Canada; through the United States and even Europe, so we did expand quickly into those regions.

 

Even with that, a good portion of this money is going to be put towards international expansion, which makes Series B investor Export Development Canada (EDC) such a valuable resource. They will help us get into countries that we are not in today. Right now we have an office owned by ScribbleLive that we operate in the U.K. which opened about a year ago that we will be expanding as well as partnerships that we have established this year in Australia as well as the Middle East. A good portion of the money is going towards expanding these partnerships.

 

We will be looking to establish some offices in New York City because obviously media and brand are quite big in New York, which is certainly brand central. We will also be looking to expand onto the West Coast, mostly for technology partnerships. We do a lot of work with some of the big brands like the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, so it would be great to have a presence in that neighbourhood. Of course we will also be expanding here in Canada with the sales force and development team which we do want to keep here at home and continue to employ Canadians.

 

TQ: Describe your relationship with Georgian Partners, how your strengths play off each other and what do you think makes your relationship with them such a synergistic one?

 

We hit it off extremely well with Georgian when we first met them in March of this year. What we really liked about them is that they have a very analytical take on not only their processes in reviewing a potential investment but also in what they call Applied Analytics. It’s really about looking at the data that we collect, and we collect a lot of data as our customers obviously create a lot of content on any given day. As an example, we just finished June and the platform has generated 1.5 billion minutes of engagement on the month so there is definitely a lot of data being collected and what they really love to do is figure out how to use that data to make better products. This includes but is not limited to using the Applied Analytics to help our customers create more engaging events; perhaps we can help them determine what kind of content is more engaging than other types. That’s what they really bring to the table; they want to productise those kinds of opportunities around all of this really rich important data that we have been collecting for five years.

 

TQ: Taking it back to the beginning how did the idea and concept for ScribbleLive come about originally?

 

I’ve been in the news and online media business since the ‘80’s believe it or not so for me I’ve always worked in an area that was all about storytelling and publishing. This was at a time where the first Macintosh was introduced and revolutionized desktop publishing and of course everything that subsequently followed that. This led me to taking a job with Chum, which became CTV here in Toronto in 2006. That’s where I met my business partner Jonathan Keebler, and we were fortunate enough to be working on a project for City News. Not only did we work closely, but we also lived very close to one another which allowed us to walk home together. We were always talking about work and how we believed the news business was fundamentally changing and driving that change was social media and its impact on how people were consuming content. It was moving to an idea where it was – here’s a picture, here’s a status update, here’s a bit of text, here’s a link.

 

The content management systems that we were using at City News just weren’t built to deliver content in that manner, and they certainly weren’t built to publish it your website in real time and to do so in any sort of collaborative way. With a few walks home and a few discussions on how we could do things better we came up with this product that would allow us to publish with the real time speed of social media but maintain a workflow that is inherent and needed within the news business. We believe that everyone would eventually have to move towards this real time or ‘always on’ model and knew that news and media were the ones who needed it most as they were feeling the pressure of news being broken by users of social media.

 

Now brands are beginning to experience the same challenges as they too find themselves in a real time space through their growing social media presence. This has led to us speaking with them and having them use our technology for all kinds of different levels of engagement and with our technology we really do provide this platform for managing engagement. We have all these connections to social media as well as various methods to gather content from within your organization in order to ensure that it is correct and consistent and then instantly publish it. Brands are really starting to embrace this idea in a time where brands are really trying to become media companies. For comparative purposes if you look at a media site right now and again in 10 minutes it has probably changed in some way but if you look at a brand’s website right now and again weeks from now I bet you that in most occasions pretty much nothing has changed. If brands are really trying to embrace this idea of being content creators and moving into this idea of storytelling rather than simply pushing ads at you and maintain any type of engagement, then we believe a platform like ours would have to be integrated into their use.

 

TQ: Does ScribbleLive have a very specific target market or are there a wide range of companies and users who could it benefit from it?

 

We are in essence what we call a real time engagement management platform and anyone can benefit from that. We started out in the realm of live blogging but really that’s an outdated term now. We were in the vernacular of live blogging years ago and people used us for that purpose but we have grown much bigger than that. To your point, we do believe that there is a large market out there, be it brands, or media or online only sites. All of these people can benefit from being able to control the conversation and have real time engagement all within their brand or website.

 

Beyond this we have our syndication market place called Scribble Market which we hope becomes the iTunes of real time content. The impact is twofold as news and media is obviously being squeezed which beg the question; how can we provide them an opportunity to still have rich and authoritative content without having to necessarily be the creator of it? Good examples are local newspapers that may have the opportunity to cover a fantastic story locally that a national news source might not necessarily commit resources towards. Now through technology like ours they’ll be able to share that real time coverage, sometimes for a fee and sometimes not. Why not charge a fee? Maybe you are looking to expand the reach of your local newspaper.

 

On the other side of the fence, brands are always looking for opportunities to amplify their message; it’s why they use PR newswires. They create a piece of content and then put it out on a wire. We believe that this is definitely ready for disruption and our concept would be I am the brand, I am going to create the content or hire content creators to create it for me and I am going to have a more engaging and rich experience around a product launch or earnings call or HR exercise. I am going to control the content and where it appears within the media by putting it into the syndication market place and hopefully have authoritative media sources pick up those feeds. That’s where we really see a blending between the brands and the media businesses through syndication.

 

TQ: Do you feel that some of the features you just mentioned are what separates you from other similar services such as Storify and ChatRoll?

 

Yes. ChatRoll is more of a chat engine and there are many reasons for that. Something like Storify was mostly about taking the social web and curating it. It has now just recently launched what they would call live blogging. Fundamentally we at Scribble have some very specific game changers in house. Certainly the syndication market is one of a kind. It is our concept and the basis of our growth over the next few years as this market becomes and already has started to become extremely rich with very good content from authoritative sources like the Associated Press and Reuters among others and that is fundamentally ingrained in what we are trying to do. Furthermore, we have spent an incredible amount of time around the user experience in order to make it extremely intuitive and certainly the integration level, at least in my opinion is certainly higher with our customers as we provide white label opportunities. We have a very robust API that allows our customers to build against. We also have embedded technology as well and these are the fundamental big differences between us. Even out of the gate, we were built around the idea of how we can help people tell stories in real time. We weren’t about a chat, which often can be a fast and disorganized mishmash of people trying to get their opinion across or when you look at Storify it’s about looking at what the social web is saying and augmenting that and that is absolutely fine.

 

Our take is that our clients themselves are the best content creators so let’s provide the best tools that we can and also understanding that they want to go into the social web and augment their story through Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, YouTube and Instagram which is great so we built that integration in. Then obviously given that they are not the only ones working on this we had to provide opportunities to collaborate around the world potentially and of course this all has to happen in real time. Our products are about story telling.

 

TQ: On a more personal note, what are your views on Big Data and how it is impacting business landscapes world round?

 

Well personally, it’s something that I feel we fundamentally can’t run away from. These websites on the social side are generating an immense amount of data on a daily basis, resulting in something like a petabyte of storage a week, which are just incredible numbers. We’re sort of on the same page as we have generated upwards of 1.5 billion minutes of user engagement this month. That engagement means that people have been sitting somewhere on our network watching updates and engaging with the particular brand that’s having that experience whether it’s a news product or a corporate brand and all of that is generating data on our back end. This is where the partnership with Georgian is really going to pay off for us. I think that with those principles around Applied Analytics we are going to see some really big opportunities in the future around really massaging that data.

 

TQ: What has been your proudest moment to date as co-founder and CEO of Scribble Technologies?

 

That’s a good question and I think that people often refer to things like the day they first received funding or sign their first contract, but I have something that’s squishier if that’s the right word. I walked in one day and looked around our office of 30-40 people, considered the others around the world and thought to myself – that’s 40 homes that I’m helping pay for or 40 kids that were helping put through school and 40 people that are employed in what we hope is a really great place to work. That moment of realization, that we are responsible for all these people was it. Of course we have a responsibility towards Reuters and others but we are more responsible to the people that work here every day in the company that we have built. That has been my proudest moment, that moment of realization.

 

TQ: How large is your current team and how would you describe your corporate culture?

 

Right now the team is about 50, most of them are here in Toronto with about 8 who are in the UK. I like to think the culture is somewhat playful in some ways but often when I am talking to people, in passing or when they come into my office for an interview, I do say something like this; don’t misinterpret the noise and fun level as there not being a lot of work to do here. Even though we try to do a lot of things socially both in the office and out that are well attended I think that even though when you come in here and its noisy and there is plenty of stuff going around and there’s a dog and it is a fun place to work, there is always a lot of work to do as well. I’ve always believed and continue to instill the following in the people that work her; I do not want work to be your life. I want your work life to be enjoyable and want you to want to come into work and succeed, bring your A game and be here but not necessarily having to work 50-60 hour weeks to do so.

 

I believe that you should do your job and do it in your time allotted and sure there are times when things need to get done, but your work life should not completely encompass your overall life. Time should always be there for your kids and family and to do whatever you need to do. I find that even with doing that people do still occasionally email me or text me on a Sunday about a really cool idea that they had and it’s not because they are working but rather because they are comfortable where they are and they enjoy what they do, and when something comes to them they just want to share it because they are busting at the seams.

 

TQ: What has been the biggest setback you have experienced to date and how did you use that experience to propel your company forward and make your company better?

 

All companies have growing pains and I think that especially when you are dealing with what a lot of times is uncharted territory from a technology perspective they are more common. A significant Google search will show that a few years ago, many platforms had issues with scale. When big events were occurring we ourselves had what were basically brownouts, and these were not my proudest moments. Anytime someone takes to social media ripping you, it can really get to you in a very personal way.

 

We took that and what we learned from that is that we have to build a better system that can scale in a much better way, and that is what we did. We basically hit the books about two years ago and essentially re-engineered our back end to scale in real time so that we never have those challenges again. It was a really tough time though, especially for my business partner Jonathan who is our CTO. You pour your souls into something and then someone takes to Twitter without knowing anything about you or what you do and just starts insulting you to no end about how bad your system is or that they can’t believe that this happened it can be really hard. I think we really took that, ran with it and now we have an extremely stable system that’s used by hundreds of big brands and news sources and now were are on track to do 5 billion user engagement minutes this quarter which means we should do 20 billion minutes a year. Those are big numbers and this is compared to when we look back to one of our original events back when we were hosted on something that was literally called Discount ASP; a $19.95 a month plan. This Apple event had us ecstatic that we had 30,000 page views and something like a couple of hundred concurrents. Things have definitely grown since then.

 

TQ: If you could share one piece of advice with Canada’s aspiring tech entrepreneurs, what would it be?

 

Don’t quit. Is that too short? You have got to keep trying and failures are learning experiences. For me this is probably my fifth or six business or company. I want to establish that this is the first where I have had a substantial number of employees. Most of the time when I have had businesses it has been me and a partner or partners and I learned from each experience. Chalk those initial failures up to learning experiences and don’t quit otherwise I mean I would have given up when I was thirteen or fourteen years old and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today.

 

I also found value in having a lot of part time jobs and each little thing taught me a little bit more about working with people, how to sell stuff and get people to buy things. Even if something seemingly blows up in your face there is something to be learned and it is all valuable, just don’t quit.

 

TQ: Where do you see yourselves in 3-5 years?

 

We are building a big company here and we are in my opinion redefining what it means to be a content creator and how to distribute that content in a way that is cost effective and can potentially generate more revenue and can offer substantial reach and amplification of whatever message you are trying to create. Although we essentially license a product, I see our business and what we are trying to do as helping people tell stories and the part that is going to be more valuable is the network we are creating and the opportunity for our customers to leverage that network. In three to five years, fundamentally that will be our business. It will be more about content than technology. As a great example again if you look at iTunes, it is a platform for delivering content and the reason that it is successful is not that it figured out an interesting way to download a song or video to you, but rather that content itself. People go there because it has every song, show or movie they are looking for. I think similarly that will be our experience in another three to five years where people will look to ScribbleLive as a connection point and a network more than a piece of technology.