Ready, Shoot, Aim: Strada CEO Michael Cioni’s Guide to Building in Uncharted Territory
Written by: Alex Sventeckis
Original photography by: Irina Logra
Summary
- College dropout turned serial entrepreneur, navigating from secret PBS shows to Hollywood dinners with Spike Jonze and Beck by age 21
- "Ready, Shoot, Aim" philosophy: Built two successful post-production companies by betting on digital when Hollywood still worshipped film and videotape
- Pivoted Strada from failed AI tools to P2P revolution after listening to customers—jumped from 100 signups/month to 100 signups/day
- Building where giants fear to tread: Created filmmaker-owned cloud alternative to sidestep AWS, Azure, and Google's expensive monopoly
- Lives for the 1-in-a-million odds, turning competitors' "go away" emails into fuel while building the "HubSpot of professional video production"
Introduction
“It’s like being a sailor of cyberspace discovering territory that has never been explored before.”
Leif Erikson landed in Canada. Zheng He connected China with East Africa. Ferdinand Magellan (well, his crew) circled the globe.
Michael Cioni navigates the wild waters of the internet.
A college dropout, Cioni left Carbondale, Illinois, for Los Angeles’ choppy waters. He found success—strong connections, multiple exits, and genuine passion—amid tears, fears, and doubts. Having mastered the cyber-seas, he’s now challenging the skies, betting against the cloud orthodoxy with Strada.
Founders and their funders love proven playbooks. Cioni’s never cared for what’s known. He sails into uncharted digital waters, treasure gleaming on the horizon.
I’m much more comfortable working in startups and small companies, even though they’re way harder. I love that exploration.” ~ Michael Cioni
Here Be Dragons: A Digital Explorer Sets Sail
Exploration caught Cioni early. At Southern Illinois University, he and his pals joined WSIU, the local PBS affiliate. This merry band borrowed the station’s cameras and experimented with a half-hour TV show. Being teenagers, they kept it quiet.
“Fight Club had come out that year, and so we were kind of like the Fight Club groups, where nobody talks about it. It was the secret society that we had,” said Cioni. “And I realized, by building a community of creative people and organizing them into how to shoot, edit, plan, and produce, I started a business. I just didn’t realize it because I was, like, nineteen.”
Image courtesy Michael Cioni
Cioni and his friends took their society from Carbondale to Los Angeles and formed a “more proper” post-production business supported by Christopher Coppola (Nicolas Cage’s older brother and Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew). Coppola opened Hollywood’s inner circles to Cioni. At 21, he didn’t appreciate the oddity of dining with Spike Jonze or Beck—“I guess this is a Tuesday night,” he says now—too focused on the next opportunity.
In the years of scaling companies and billion-dollar exits following those glitterati dinners, Cioni followed his explorer’s heart. Film school dropouts don’t need predetermined maps, he believes. They navigate by the stars alone.
That trait rarely intersects with shareholders and stock markets. Public companies adore clear maps and happily concede the fringes (and the dragons within) to startups. Big business demands steadiness—the doldrums where exploration withers.
He loves startups that shred investor-friendly maps and venture into unknown territory, dragons be damned. Blank maps hide new lands for Cioni to plant flags and build the future.
Sometimes I use the phrase ‘Ready, Shoot, Aim.’ If you’re an entrepreneur and you know what I mean, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s sometimes the right decision.’”
The “Ready, Shoot, Aim” Navigation System
In April 1492, Christopher Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs of Spain signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe to fund Columbus’ westward journey. This was a wild bet, but Spain’s leaders saw massive upsides and gambled on a sea route to wealthy Asia. Instead, Columbus found a different continent, enriching Spain and helping launch the next 500 years of Western history.
Few ideas translate from the fifteenth century to today, but the fear of betting badly does. Cioni often sees entrepreneurs trapped in a paradox: investors want sure bets, but ideas that redraw the world aren’t obvious winners. “The best ideas are the ones that have no proof they’re going to work—not yet,” he says.
Spain’s monarchs let faith guide their hand; entrepreneurs must also believe in themselves. Cioni turned his subject-matter expertise into his compass, following its pull and trusting his instincts.
“If you wait to be sure that it's gonna be safe, you're too late,” he says. “There's always going to be an entrepreneur who got ahead of you because they didn't wait. They went ‘ready, shoot, aim.’ And if you're ‘ready, aim, shoot,’ you're delaying your opportunity.”
Cioni lived this principle when he and talented partners left Coppola’s project to form Plaster City Digital Post. In 2003, film and videotape owned Hollywood’s production houses, but Plaster City built Apple-centric, all-digital cinema workflows, hoping to catch the swelling digital wave.
They caught it. From 2003 to 2009, Plaster City attracted young creatives tired of traditional methods. They wanted contrarians as convinced as they were of digital’s eventual victory.
Plaster City earned these filmmakers’ business and respect. Amid the many movie and TV deals, Cioni recalls people wearing T-shirts with Plaster City’s logo, the company’s cachet growing before his eyes.
But sometimes, your compass wobbles. The needle points elsewhere, and you must follow it.
In 2009, Cioni and his partners stalemated with Plaster City’s major investor; the needle wobbled. Amid a horrendous recession, he started another post-production service, Light Iron. This was no mere course correction. He “burned his boats,” leaving Plaster City with no personal safety net.
Images courtesy Michael Cioni
Money was unforgivingly tight. Conviction kept Cioni on course, but it hurt.
“I remember not having a salary for almost two years,” he says. “And I remember not being able to afford to fix the tires on my car, which were bald. The metal brace was shining through the rubber. And I just remember being like, ‘We're never gonna make it.’”
The bet landed. Light Iron offered digital-first cinema workflows right when high-resolution digital cameras and file-based post-production environments went mainstream. Light Iron supported over 200 films, including David Fincher vehicles and big studio titles like Avatar, Thor, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
In December 2014, Panavision acquired Light Iron. In five years, Cioni went from balding tires to a big exit.
Even now, the speed astonishes him. “If you would have told me after six, seven years of Plaster City, which was brutally hard, that you could start over and sell the business in less time, I'd be like, ‘Sign me up.’”
Images courtesy Michael Cioni
I’m simply a good steward of customer feedback, and I’m willing to put something out there that is embarrassing.”
Customers Point the Way—If You Listen
After five years at Panavision (as part of the buyout), Cioni joined the team and Frame.io, as Global Senior VP of Innovation. Frame.io was a leading video collaboration platform used by all the major studios and Fortune 500 creative agencies. Then, in 2023, after Adobe's acquisition of Frame.io, the cyber-seas reclaimed Cioni. Along with his brother Peter, and cousin Austin Case, he co-founded Strada as its CEO.
They chose family members wisely. Peter brought managerial expertise, and Case could code. “You need that tripod—innovation, management, engineering—if you want to move fast,” says Cioni.
And move fast they did. Artificial intelligence was emerging as a global phenomenon, with ChatGPT releasing publicly in November 2022. Plaster City and Light Iron caught the digitization wave; Strada sought AI’s swell.
The company prototyped AI film collaboration tools and tested them with early adopters. It flopped. But within failure swirled whispers of opportunity.
“After a year of listening to customers, we learned that what we were building with AI wasn’t resonating,” Cioni says. “What users told us is that the biggest pain point they feel in cinema workflows is uploading to the cloud.”
Here’s the thing about professional movie files: they’re massive. Captain Ahab’s white whale’s got nothing on ProRes files.
For comparison, a 1080p high-definition video at 30 frames per second on your iPhone requires 130 megabytes (MB) per minute. According to Cioni, professional video files can run one gigabyte (GB) per second. Digital storage also got better and cheaper. When Cioni started Plaster City in 2003, one terabyte (TB, or 1,000 GBs) of memory on disk cost $1,055. In 2023, that terabyte cost $11.
Wi-Fi and 5G’s spread made faster internet ubiquitous. Distributed access required a central “place” to store and share information. Enter the cloud. Many companies have migrated workloads to cloud platforms, shedding on-premises maintenance for remote storage’s scalability and convenience.
But how do you get data to and from the cloud? The internet’s data pipelines haven’t grown alongside storage capabilities. Filmmakers uploaded 8K video footage, only to stare at endless progress bars—then repeat the torture to edit their files. Plus, cloud providers charge for storage capacity (about $40-80 per terabyte per month) and “egress,” the per-gigabyte toll to retrieve your data.
Strada found an opportunity. That came from launching an imperfect product and donning “sober eyes and ears” for customer feedback, as Cioni says.
MVP testing and feedback collection are Startup Advice 101; but Cioni knows it’s tough; he regularly wrestles with criticism. Ever the Illinoisan, Cioni draws inspiration from Michael Jordan’s ability to transform criticism into fuel.
“I look for people who make criticisms,” he says. “And they don't realize how much passion and fuel they put in me based on their, ‘You'll never have that work,’ ‘That'll never materialize,’ ‘That's not right.’”
His critics’ hot air becomes the wind in his sails.
"That’s actually a sign that they’re scared of us, and that’s kind of cool."
Build Where Giants Fear to Tread
“That’s actually a sign that they’re scared of us, and that’s kind of cool.”
Storing movie files in the cloud is expensive and time-consuming. But filmmakers can’t lug wagons of hard drives between shoots.
Strada found the middle ground: the convergence of reasonable storage costs, fast transfer speeds, and global portability.
Early internet denizens may remember Napster, LimeWire, and BitTorrent for sharing content across 2000s-era molasses-speed connections. Those services popularized P2P.
P2P, or peer-to-peer, is a network architecture where “nodes” (computers or devices) act as both clients and servers. You share resources directly without centralized servers.
Strada uses P2P for media access and transfer between nodes—no cloud required. Users can stream or transfer original, high-resolution media to and from their own hard drives. Files maintain near-real-time latency (impossible with current cloud architectures), letting filmmakers work uninterrupted.
If Napster “freed music,” Strada freed professional videos.
Strada’s contrarian play? Sidestepping major cloud players. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud could summon storms that’ll capsize startups. So, Cioni figures, why not build around the monsters?
“You are your own cloud, because you have your own drives instead of renting Jeff Bezos’ drives,” says Cioni. “You have your own computer instead of renting Jeff Bezos’ computers. And you just plug that into your internet at home or the office, and that’s always available.”
In 2024, Strada’s AI tool struggled to get 100 signups per month. The company launched its P2P system in April 2025. By summer’s end, Strada was drawing 100 signups per day!
Strong adoption shows the tide shifting toward Strada. But an even better signal? Pissing off your competition. Cioni savors recounting Strada’s recent removal from another company’s event, the “go away” email oozing fear.
“There had to be a meeting, and these people got in a meeting, and they said, ‘We don’t want Strada there, so we should not have them there. Who’s gonna send Michael the email?’ We love that stuff,” says Cioni. “We actually changed something, and they spent money on a meeting debating whether or not we should go…I can’t describe how satisfying it is—even though I’m losing money and time on the investment—because it tells me, let’s keep doing it.”
“Doing it” means growing Strada beyond its P2P solution. Inspired by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Cioni’s stretching past “point solutions” into a “platform” framework.
Discovering an island is an achievement; but discovering a continent? That’s world-changing. Point solutions solve a specific problem—valuable, but limited on their own island. Platforms promise more.
“Platforms are harder to build, but they can grow way bigger, and they can be more highly valued,” he says. “If you can successfully build a platform, you get other people developing for you, developing into you.”
That’s Cioni’s goal: an entire creative ecosystem nurtured within Strada’s architecture. Imagine the “HubSpot” of professional video production.
The market will decide Strada’s fate. But explorers live for those 1-in-a-million odds.
“Since I've been a part of point solutions in the past, I wanted to try a platform play. It's tougher, it's harder, and you're less likely to be successful…but that's enough,” says Cioni before quoting his favorite film: “You're saying there's a chance.”
Billionaires bet hundreds of millions to get to be a billionaire. But if you’re not a millionaire, you probably aren’t willing to bet much at all.”
Dreadfully Cracked About the Head
Melville’s sailors in Moby Dick were “dreadfully cracked about the head,” slightly mad, but willing to push into dangerous seas. Cioni’s “calculus of entrepreneurship” taps that same energy to capture logarithmic growth early and win more when the tides shift.
The film school dropout illustrates his “logarithmic mindset” through a film-related example: Kodak.
As Cioni recounts, Kodak had digital video production technology in the 1970s but parked it. Hollywood loved videotape, remember?
A curious trend then emerged. Every two years, digital video resolution doubled: 0.01 megapixels became 0.02, then 0.04. Once that hit whole numbers—2, 4, 8 megapixels—Kodak finally saw digital’s value far too late.
In August 2025, the 133-year-old Eastman Kodak Company reported it may shutter for good soon.
Cioni frames Kodak’s failure to see the vision as a vital lesson for entrepreneurs establishing their ideas and choosing addressable markets:
“Our calculus has to identify opportunities that are going to improve logarithmically in a fast or a short amount of time,” he says. “So that when you place your bet and you show those VCs the total addressable market, it actually is a market that's increasing in scale versus decaying in scale.”
Cioni bets big. Leaving college, building startups, eeking out another mile on bald tires. Big risk, big reward.
But how big is the bet that banishes regret? Cioni hasn’t found it, but it’s a perpetual itch. His journals laid bare the many futures he foretold but didn’t pursue. The times when the roulette wheel spun, and he held his chips. When asked if he’d do anything different, he recollects all the times when he didn’t listen to his instincts. “My subject matter expertise was leading me to bet the farm on number six, and I didn't do it,” he says. “And I have kicked myself year after year. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I called it.’ I literally have a journal entry or a blog entry that said exactly that. And then it materializes.”
Cioni isn’t Ahab. He bet wisely and knows opportunities carry risks. Every entrepreneur has reasons to hold back: families, mortgages, fear of failure.
He hasn’t “given up his last spear.” Yet, Cioni can’t shake the “red angel” on his shoulder, whispering, “Go crazy, go in.”
“If I would have just gone all in, I would have been so much further along,” he says. “All of us have an experience in our life where we say, ‘I knew that was going to happen. I called it. I could have built that product.’ But we didn’t do it. Why? Because of some crummy excuse or some fear.”
No entrepreneur escapes fear. Cioni faced it not with perfection but with passion. He notes the Latin root of passion: passio, meaning “suffering or enduring.”
“People who are truly passionate are willing to suffer on purpose for a greater cause,” he says. “And if you have that…then you should bet more on yourself, and I bet you'll end up going further faster.”
What Waters Await Tomorrow’s Digital Sailors?
After “Call me Ishmael,” Moby Dick continues: “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
Cyberspace offers nearly limitless “watery parts” to explore. Granted, the digital sailor’s life isn’t easy: tears, fights, and self-doubt are Cioni’s “normal ingredients” of startups.
But isn’t the struggle beautiful? To shoot, then aim? A thousand unlived lives echo in Cioni’s journals, some bolder, many less so. Still, he set sail—trusting his instincts, wagering on his imperfect, passionate search for something more.
Cioni’s ocean of 2003 is unrecognizable today. And you can’t predict tomorrow. But in his estimation, tomorrow’s digital sailors must ante up anyway.
“Are you willing to bet at all? Because if you’re not, you’re never going to be a millionaire. That’s impossible.”
Author: Alex Sventeckis
Alex Sventeckis is a content strategist and marketing instructor at Ball State University. Through his consulting work, he helps startups and brand teams turn smart ideas into meaningful content that delivers results. He writes frequently about AI, marketing, and how people connect today. Off the clock, he’s probably walking his rescue dog, Dimples, or sipping a strong cup of coffee.
