The No Exit Strategy: How Wistia’s Co-founders Chose Independence Over Easy Money
From rejecting HBO to buying back their company—the anti-unicorn playbook
Written by: Phoebe Gill Original photography by Elli Bock
Summary
- Turned down HBO's $750K/year with only $3,000 in the bank—impressing investors who saw they were building for vision, not quick cash
- Lost their way chasing growth, burning $200K+ monthly until depression and acquisition offers forced them to confront the truth: they'd abandoned what made Wistia unique
- Bought back their company for $17.3M in debt instead of selling for life-changing money, realizing they'd "just rebuild Wistia anyway"
- Swung from losing $3M to profiting $6M in one year, proving constraints and focus beat venture capital funding
- Built on "friendship first, business second", enabling radical honesty between co-founders and courage to reject conventional wisdom
- Post-buyback, created award-winning content like "One, Ten, One Hundred"—bold creative bets impossible while chasing investor expectations
Introduction
In 2007, Chris Savage and Brendan Schwartz walked out of HBO’s Los Angeles offices, leaving behind a plastic motorcycle-shaped Ducati USB stick as their parting gift.
They had spent their last $1,200 on plane tickets to meet with a company that, to them, embodied Hollywood itself. Inside, they sat across from HBO’s head of production, who Chris still describes as “the coolest guy I’ve ever met.”
At the time, Wistia was barely a year old. The product was a scrappy private video-sharing tool, bringing in about one sale a month. Then HBO came knocking, offering to license their technology for $750,000 a year. For two founders in their twenties, that was a life-changing number.
And still, they said no.
Turns out, that wasn’t a one-off for the pair. When it comes to the conventional startup rulebook, Chris and Brendan seem determined to make their own rules.
The HBO Moment: When $750K Felt Like Everything
The Setup
Wistia’s backstory has the makings of a scrappy indie film. In 2006, Brendan Schwartz called up his college friend Chris Savage and said he’d quit his job; he was all in on starting a company together. They stumbled through a handful of online ideas before landing on a private video-sharing service that let businesses securely send videos internally.
They were the definition of a boot-strapped start-up, and things slowly happened. Their first client was a medical device company, followed by a video production company that wanted to use them for sharing in-progress work instead of DVDs. These customers were generally small businesses, each paying around $500 a month.
Things ticked along until a talent agent in Hollywood heard about them and was interested in introducing them to a “big name.”
HBO was trying to get dailies—the daily raw footage from movies and shows used for review—to executives around the world. The process was painfully analog, with DVDs being delivered in person.
According to Chris, it was called the “Tom Hanks problem.”
“Tom Hanks has this supposed castle in Ireland, and he's a producer on these shows. And to get content to him, someone literally goes off the set in LA, gets on a plane with the DVD, and hands it to someone who brings it to Tom’s house. And that happens every day.”
It’s easy to see how, in 2007, Wistia’s early prototype offered an attractive solution to stream those videos securely online. HBO started testing it, even uploading unseen footage from The Sopranos!
The next step was an in-person demo in Hollywood. For Chris, who had once tried to get his student film to HBO, hoping they would distribute it, this was more than a meeting; it was a dream come true.
After more talks with the talent agent, they arrived at the offer of $750,000 a year, which HBO “doesn't balk at.” Both Brendan and Chris share a joke here, knowing in hindsight, that the number was probably far too low.
For two guys in their twenties, though, it was a staggering amount.
There was only one catch: the two founders had only $3,000 left in their account, half of which they had to spend on a mini-Mac to use for showcasing their demo to HBO.
But, of course, no ex-film student is ever going to turn down the chance for a good story, so they bought two plane tickets to Los Angeles.
The Meeting
And the meeting didn't disappoint Chris. “The guy [head of production] came in a leather jacket, super suave. Everyone else is sitting at a conference room table. He just bounces and sits up on the bar behind us. It was like something out of a movie or a show.”
The independent sales agent had insisted they bring a leave-behind gift, and the only thing to hand was a motorcycle-shaped Ducati USB stick.
Ridiculous as a gift it was, the achingly cool head of production received it and proclaimed, “This is sick. This is so sick.” Who knew that would be the perfect gift?
The rest of the meeting went well, and HBO was interested in moving forward.
“We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is happening,” Savage remembers.
The Decision
After a couple of months, HBO was keen to close the deal, but Chris and Brendan were starting to realize what saying “yes” would entail.
To win the deal, they would have to relocate to LA, build and maintain an entire on-premise system, and essentially turn Wistia into a service company built around one massive client. It was safe money, but it was not the business they wanted to build.
Eventually, they decided to turn down HBO, politely declining and bracing themselves for an angry response.
They expected fury, but instead, HBO shrugged.
Building on Principles, Not Precedent
The Early Philosophy
Around this time, Wistia had just closed its first Angel Round, and surprisingly, it turned out that not partnering with HBO worked in their favor.
Years later, when Chris spoke with those initial investors, he learned the decision had actually impressed them.
“When we saw you walk away from that, we knew you were the real deal. You were willing to take this very long-term view and build to your vision versus kind of end up building the business around just some customer, who is a great customer, but wasn't actually the right fit.”
For investors, this was a powerful signal that Chris and Brendan were in it for the long game. But that story is a great lesson we can all learn from. Life is not about chasing short-term gains. It is about holding fast to your vision, even when the immediate payoff might look irresistible.
Turning down HBO might have left Chris and Brendan with less money, but they had a clear conviction: if Wistia was going to survive, it would be on their terms, built to serve customers in the best way possible, not to impress investors or win flashy partnerships.
The Friendship Foundation
Underpinning a company history that spans nearly 20 years is the strong friendship between Chris and Brendan.
From the start, it’s clear just how important they believe protecting their friendship is for the success of Wistia, with Brendan sharing their philosophy of “Friendship first, business second.”
He goes on to explain, “We kind of came at it with friendship first, business second, even though the thing we're trying to do is build a business together. And then counterintuitively, that has, I think, built a stronger business partnership and a stronger business. We have disagreements, or we have stuff that we need to work on, but we will solve that first, and like even change some of the ways the business is operating in order to make sure that that is working.”
It is rare to find radical honesty in the workplace, but it has been the foundation of Chris and Brendan’s partnership.
“Our feedback for each other when we do formal feedback, is very raw, very direct, and it’s, I think, super healthy.”
Chris adds, “If you care about them and you want them to succeed, you want to give them feedback. You want to help them, and it turns out [that] by helping them and giving them feedback about how they work, they do better at their job. The company does better.”
For Wistia, the early years weren’t about chasing fame or becoming an overnight success story. They were building a company anchored by two guiding principles, customer obsession and friendship.
“Friendship first, business second.”
— Brendan Schwartz, CTO and co-founder of Wistia
The Success Trap
For the next 7 or 8 years, Wistia’s founders wore profitability like a badge of honor. When investors and industry colleagues asked how things were going, Chris and Brendan would smile and say, “It's great! We're so profitable.”
But much to their surprise, the response was rarely congratulatory.
As Brendan recalls, he was told by his peers, “‘Companies like you are valued based on how quickly you’re growing. You’re mismanaging the business. Take that profit, put it back into the company, and grow faster.”
At first, they resisted the mainstream startup mentality of growth at all costs; but then Brendan goes on to explain how the pressure started to affect them.
“Eventually, you kind of start to doubt yourself or the way that you're running the business. So, we started taking all those profits, and then some, and pouring them back into the business. And basically, what happened slowly, over the course of a few years is, we went from having this really long-term view and outlook, and working on these creative projects that were really meaningful, to getting really short-term focused. We went from a place where we're profitable to where we were losing money because we were investing so much into the business, expecting that growth to come. And we were growing a little bit faster, but not commensurate with how much was being put into business.”
But still, they kept hiring faster, launching more products, and spending aggressively in the belief that growth would follow. Instead, every month brought deeper losses: first $100,000, then $150,000, and then $200,000 every month.
What they got instead was a slow unraveling of the very thing that made Wistia unique. The long-term outlook that had carried them through the early years gave way to short-term pressure.
“You get really short-term focused.” Brendan says, “And so we basically got to this point where both of us were depressed, like quite unhappy with how the business was running, what we're doing.
But they didn’t talk about it. “That was the big mistake,” Brendan explains with that classic 20-20 hindsight.
“If we say it out loud now, it's real, and it's like a thing we have to deal with and so we’ll ignore it.”
The Crossroads Epiphany
In 2017, they reached a crossroads. Several acquisition offers landed at the same time, each promising life-changing money. Finally, it forced the conversation they’d been avoiding. Brendan recalls. “And so that was this moment, where we're like, ‘we're unhappy. why are we unhappy?’”
It was the first time they had said the truth out loud, and once they did, the logic of the next steps became unavoidable. If they were miserable running the company, maybe it was time to sell.
Brendan goes on to explain how the conversation unfolded, “We probably should sell the business and then, okay, what we would do? We'll retire. Okay, we'll do that for like a few months, and then we'll be bored. Well, we have a really unique working relationship. So, we'll start another business. What will the business be? Well, we know video really well, there's like so many problems we haven't solved here. There's so much opportunity. It'll definitely be in video.”
They realized that if they sold the business, they would just rebuild Wistia again.
Brendan continues: “There's this moment of clarity where we can see what we actually want to do. Where we are in control. We can change the way that this business is running, and we can become profitable. We can focus on and get back to longer-term thinking that really powers us.”
That decision, to keep Wistia but reinvent how they ran it, was radical as it led them to buy back their investors’ shares that would land them with $17.3 million in debt.
Back On Track
For this part of the story, the numbers do the talking. Chris excitedly recalls what happened next.
“And so the cool thing about the story is that it worked. We had a huge swing in EBITDA. We were on track to lose three million dollars the year that we did the deal. We ended up with a positive six million by the next year—a nine million dollars swing! That changed confidence in the team. It changed focus on how we were building the product.”
For Chris and Brendan, the debt was more than a financial instrument. It was a forcing function.
Chris explained that the magic of the debt was that it gave a return to everyone who wanted it, angels and early employees. It forced them to become profitable, which made for better long-term decisions, which helped grow the business.
It was the opposite of an exit, and to most people in the startup world, it wouldn’t be seen as a win; yet, it set Wistia on the path to one of the most remarkable turnarounds in SaaS history.
Not all investors choose to exit, preferring to “let it ride.” Within the company, a new surge of energy was evident. The team was no longer chasing growth for its own sake. They were building with conviction, purpose, and clarity again.
Of course, carrying $17 million in debt was still daunting, but it got them hyper-focused and sharpened their priorities. The business grew, and the debt became cheaper. Eventually, it was paid off entirely, and Wistia emerged stronger as a better product, better brand, and better company.
The Creative Renaissance
That renewed focus unlocked space for the kind of bold creativity that had defined Wistia in the early days.
“It was after that that we did One, Ten, One Hundred, which was our feature-length documentary that won a Webby Award,” Chris recalls. He’s referring to the unusual marketing campaign for a SaaS company. Wistia hired the world-renown video agency and startup SaaS darling, Sandwich Video, and challenged them to produce three ads, one with a $1,000 budget, one with $10,000, and one with $100,000. Then they documented the process as a series.
Even though there was no way of measuring the ROI of that, they went through with it because they believed it would be profitable, focusing on the long-term vision. In an interview with Foundr Mag, Chris pointed out that thanks to the documentary, there was a sustained increase in web traffic, branded searches, and sales.
“There is no way we could have done that before we did the buyback.”
Then in 2022, Wistia took another step to align incentives for the future. After years without an equity program, they reintroduced stock options for the team. The timing felt right.
The market, reshaped by the pandemic, felt like an early-stage opportunity again. More businesses than ever were embracing video, and Chris and Brendan wanted every team member to share in that upside.
The message was clear. Wistia was no longer chasing growth on someone else’s terms. Chris and Brendan are now flanked by a team that has ownership in the journey ahead.
A Lesson On Focus From The Journey
The underestimated power of focus has shaped Wistia’s story from the beginning.
Turning down HBO meant resisting the temptation to build for one flashy customer. The debt buyback forced them to concentrate on profitability and their core product.
Even their boldest creative bets, like the One, Ten, One Hundred series, worked because they remained rooted in a simple truth—do fewer things, but do them exceptionally well.
While most startups take a spaghetti approach, spreading themselves thin chasing growth, Wistia keeps its customer at the center. As Brendan puts it, “We want to make sure we can offer customers the absolute best.” And this clarity enables them to consistently deliver.
"We are leading by example. We're a video company. We need to lead in the videos that we make, on the site, in all of our design."
— Chris Savage, CEO and co-founder of Wistia
The Long Game
Today, Wistia is a 200-person company, still profitable, still independent, and still led by the same two friends who started it nearly two decades ago. It retains a startup feel, with an intentionally small board of five members: Chris, Brendan, one other member, and two board advisors.
It makes me wonder how much happier we would all be if we all stuck to our most authentic paths, even when they look unconventional. The decision to walk away from HBO’s $750K offer was the first test of that philosophy. Buying back the company to the tune of a $17.3 million debt was the second. Both decisions could have ended the company, but Chris and Brendan listened to their guts and focused on their foundation, friendship first, business second.
In an industry obsessed with growth at all costs and the promise of cashing out, Wistia has shown that staying in the game can be the boldest move of all. They’ve built something worth holding onto that makes them want to turn up each day and give it their best.
Maybe the Ducati USB stick worked because it was unexpected, just like Wistia’s founders. By leading with authenticity, they’ve proved that the biggest wins don’t always come from selling out.
Author
Phoebe is an SEO specialist, content marketer, and host of The Beginner's SEO Podcast, based in Sydney, Australia. She spent her twenties traveling across South America before settling in Sydney, where she’s spent the last seven years helping businesses grow. When she's not talking or writing about digital marketing, you’ll likely find her at a dance class or soaking up the sun at one of Sydney’s many beaches.
