AIMinds #016 | Jeremy Toeman, CEO and Founder of Aug x Labs

About this episode

Jeremy Toeman is an accomplished tech innovator and the CEO and Co-Founder of Augie, a leading AI video technology startup changing our perception on video editing efficiency. With over two decades of experience, Jeremy's career includes executive roles at WarnerMedia, Etsy, CBS Interactive, and Viggle, shaping the future of content creation and storytelling through AI, blockchain, AR, VR, and more. As an entrepreneur, he led product development for over a dozen innovative products, while his consultancy, Stage Two, transformed concepts into successes for clients like Dropcam, Boxee, and Sphero. Jeremy's goal is to empower creators through Augie's AI-driven video editing capabilities, making high-quality content creation more accessible and efficient than ever.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

In this AIMinds episode, Demetrios, is joined by none other than Jeremy Toeman as they talk about his tech journey, the inspirations fueling his tech endeavors, and the phenomenal technology behind his company, Aug x Labs.

Aug x Labs, with its incredible product Augie, is enhancing the video editing experience. Focusing on meeting the needs of professionals and novice users alike, Jeremy and his team are creating tools that will make video editing simple.

They also tackled rapid evolution of machine learning, the impact of the 'GPT revolution', and how it's not just presenting challenges but also opening uncapped potential for businesses worldwide.

Here are some highlights from this great episode:

1. How Jeremy’s interest in tech since the third grade turned into a thriving career building products that revolutionize industries.

2. The beginnings and evolution of Aug x Labs which aims to simplify video editing – making it as easy as writing emails.

3. The inception of Augie, focusing on empowering their users to create content with ease and being versatile for any advertising needs

Fun Fact: Did you know that Jeremy has been to the CES 20 times? Find out his experience and reflections on the tech festival from the 2000s to the present, filled with great anecdotes.

You can also check out Part 2: A live product demo of Augie on Youtube!

Show Notes:

00:00 Intro to Jeremy Toeman and his vast experience.
05:29 Early 2000s CES had fun gadgets.
07:04 Started podcast during pandemic, focused on growth.
10:39 Key to success in new company.
15:04 Exploring product growth and visual content creation.
18:52 Customize video content with your unique material.
21:52 Assisting content creation and video editing with Augie.
25:13 Augie is versatile for various advertising needs.

More Quotes from Jeremy:

Transcript:

Demetrios:

Welcome back, everyone, to the AI Minds podcast. This is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow built AI. First, I am your host, Demetrios, and this episode is brought to you by Deepgram, the number one text to speech and speech to text API on the Internet, trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders, enterprises, and startups like Spotify, Twilio, NASA, and Citibank. And we are joined in this episode by Jeremy, the CEO and founder of Augx Labs. They've got an incredible product on the market, Augie, and I hope to explore all about that and see it in action in a bit in a special YouTube exclusive. But first, let's have a conversation with the founder. Jeremy, how you doing today?

Jeremy Toeman:

I'm doing great, Demetrios. How about you?

Demetrios:

Yeah, I'm good. I'm excited to talk to you about your story, get to know you a little bit better before we jump into what Augie is and what that does and how it works and the inspiration behind it. But maybe we can first start with what got you into tech.

Jeremy Toeman:

Woah, I've been, you know, look, I'm, I'll be, I'll fess up. I am 51. I've been into tech since the third grade when, because I was good at math, which, remember third grade, that's like long division or something, right? I was good at math. The school got their first Apple II plus computer, and they literally went to the kids who were top of the math class, third grade. And we're like, maybe you guys know what to do with these. And we had a, we had turtle graphics logo, if anyone listening remember, has heard of that. And, look, I guess they were right. I was obsessed from moment one on.

Jeremy Toeman:

I learned basic pascal C++ programming in the eighties and nineties and have sort of, it's been a part of my world ever since, one way or another. Wow.

Demetrios:

So you got into it early and you stayed with it. What have been some of the things that you've built with tech?

Jeremy Toeman:

Its been a fun journey, ill be honest. Ive enjoyed building stuff. I think thats sort of at my core. So in the late nineties, pretty much the first product I built and brought to market was something called Palmtastic. It was a palmpilot dedicated website, again, talking about some old tech. But, yeah, that was sort of me learning how to become an entrepreneur. From there, I moved to the Bay Area. In the late nineties, I co founded a company called Mediabolic.

Jeremy Toeman:

We were actually, but, but way too soon. We, we launched in 99 with a vision of the connected digital home. We built products with companies like Denon and Pioneer and HP. We built the first ever streaming media box. We won best of CES back in 2004, and the company ended up getting acquired by Macrovision, which became part of Tivo and has gone on other places from there. I was the first employee at the company called Sling Media, where we built a product called the Slingbox, which was pre YouTube, pre Netflix, the first way to watch tv over the Internet. And it was a physical device that you'd hook up to your cable box and then you could watch your home tv from wherever you might be traveling to. That was acquired by Dish.

Jeremy Toeman:

And if you've heard of the Sling TV streaming brand, that is an evolution from that product. Way back when. From there. I spent a few years as basically a fractional product leader, helping a bunch of startups bring products to market. Companies like Dropcam, which became part of the next product line from Google. And Google Home helped launch companies like Waze, Sonos, Dropcam, Voodoo, and others. I had my own startup again in the mid 2010s called Dijit with a j. We built an app that was called Next Guide.

Jeremy Toeman:

It was the first ever tv guide app to combine live and streaming all into one view. We sort of, back in 2012, felt that the world was going to be a little less all tv and a little bit more hybrid. And then sending a pattern here. Yeah, after we doesn't stop. After we sold the company spent a few years at CBS running product for their CBS interactive team, then went to WarnerMedia for a couple of years running product innovation. And basically two years ago this past January started Aug x labs. And now we're here with Augie.

Demetrios:

Wow, what a rich history you have. I have so many different questions of where I could take this conversation, but for me, the Internet wants to ask, what was CES like in 2004?

Jeremy Toeman:

Awesome. Oh, my goodness. I will say, like, as much as it's amazing tech we have today and iPhones and et cetera, from like, like, I've been to CES 20 times. So from. From 20. From like 99 to about 2010, even after the first iPhone came out, like, the products that people made were so crazy. I remember there was an mp3 player slash breathalyzer, right? And it was like. And they really pitched it, like, listen to your favorite tunes in case you fail your breath, your alcohol test.

Jeremy Toeman:

You can listen to your music before you drive your car. And there were these pavilions out of South Korea and Taiwan back when Samsung and LG weren't what they are today. This was in the era where Sony and Phillips and LG kind of rose with Samsung. So the Korea pavilion would have all these crazy, funky, cool gadgets. So CS back then was a ton of fun. I think it's become a much more polished event over the past, like, decade, actually more media and sort of traditional tech focused. But the inner nerd in you would have appreciated the early two thousands CES a lot.

Demetrios:

I just want to know where is that breathalyzer music player that feels like, how did I never.

Jeremy Toeman:

I have a photo.

Demetrios:

Oh, my gosh. That is classic. Wow. So there is another direction that I kind of want to take this. And that is all about the inspiration behind Aug x Labs. It feels to me like you have been deeply inspired to play in this content creation field, whether it's in the homes and making sure that people have the right content in their homes or it is working with big production studios or these companies like CBS's to create the content and all of that. Can you tell us about the inspiration of Aug x Labs?

Jeremy Toeman:

Absolutely. So interestingly enough, back in the pandemic, you know, you recall when, when we all had to pick one of the paths, you either had to learn to make bread, learn a new language, or start a podcast, right? And so I said I did the podcast path. And one of the things, it was just me and a friend, by the way, fast forward. That friend is one of my co founders. We just had a fun podcast just talking about movies. We just enjoyed doing it, but we kept reading articles that were like, if you really just want to grow, even if it's a hobby, you should make promos. You need to make like a trailer for your episodes and things like that. And then there was this wave of like, and now make video trailers, right? Market your podcast on TikTok and YouTube, because candidly, the number one way a podcast grows is on TikTok and YouTube.

Jeremy Toeman:

It's like, okay, we should make a video. And I was like, you know, I have a little bit of time in this thing. I'm working from home. I'm going to learn how to make video. I was like, I'm going to take this challenge on. I did I don't know how many hours of tutorials on trying to use some of the professional grade tools out there because it's amazing technology. What you can do with the avids and premieres and et cetera is amazing. But I just kept hitting that wall.

Jeremy Toeman:

I couldn't get over the hump to actually do anything. It was just really frustrating. I turned to a gentleman who was my other co founder, and I said, I want to give you an mp3 file. It's me talking. What I want you to do is whatever we say, look up matching images based on the context of the words from, I don't know, google images. I was like, just, can we do something like that? He's one of these guys where he did the tech equivalent of hold my beer and basically was like, sure can, buddy. And we did it with Giphy at the time just to do an example. And I started showing it to people, and the reactions were like, wait, you just did this by recording yourself talking and like, yeah, it's unpolished, but it doesn't work anyhow.

Jeremy Toeman:

The reactions were off the charts. Everybody I showed you was like, I know I need to make video, and I have no idea how to do it. As a product guy my whole career, those are the kind of things you're looking for. You're looking for, do you show a person the thing and they're like, can I use that, please? That's signal. There's smoke and where the fire might be. And so it sort of concluded with, I showed a demo to a friend of mine who is actually more of a mentor to me, and he basically looked at me, he's like, Toeman, this is your startup.

Demetrios:

Go, nice.

Jeremy Toeman:

I'll say I pretty much did.

Demetrios:

I want to get into the product itself, but it feels to me like there's some tricky technical challenges that you probably had to overcome, especially in 2020 as you're talking about. It's not like that was like before the chat GPT era. And so was it you just taking the mp3, transcribing it, and then pulling out some of the keywords with some kind of sentiment analysis. I dare to say, like AI in those days, because it's almost like, it's not that there was no AI. AI has been around for a long time, but it is more like not something that people were just dibby dallying in. And so was your co founder very deep in that, or was it just like he got really deep in it because he saw the need?

Jeremy Toeman:

No, you nailed it with the first guess. The, you know, my first, the first gentleman I mentioned, his name, JT White. He and I worked together over a dozen years. He's, hes also a product leader in the tech media conversion space, and one of the few people I know that I just knew could take this vision all the way. And the other gentleman was someone I used to work with at WarnerMedia, and he had left the company, and we had always enjoyed building products together because he was an AI video expert. So when we were at the company, I cant tell you the kind of things were doing, because they were all internal, but a lot of the stuff that we're all doing now, and almost like, oh, look, I could just write a prompt and I get it. This guy was building those systems from scratch back there. So when we started the company, and actually, it was January 2022 when we started the company, the things that we all see as easy now most companies can do.

Jeremy Toeman:

So doing the transcription, building the storyboarding, doing all those things, that was like a special sauce for us. And then the, you know what? I don't know what we're going to end up calling this the GPT revolution, whatever this thing is happened. It was interesting because some barriers that we had came down, right. It got a lot easier to do things that only we could do, but then it also empowered us to do things that we couldn't have done before. Right. So we took it as a, like, we already had the wind in our back, and we're just going to kind of pull this momentum with us. So, yeah, long answer, but yeah, I had a CTO who knew how to do those things in AI. You know, we were playing with DallE, too.

Jeremy Toeman:

We were playing with all of these technologies when they were really like, kind of lab, lab tech, you know?

Demetrios:

Yeah, before they were cool.

Jeremy Toeman:

Yeah, before, you know, we had it back when it was on a b side import from, from Japan. All right, that's a reference only older hipsters will get.

Demetrios:

So talk to me about these barriers that some of them, it's like your moat was shrunk, but then other areas, you were able to really extend your lead or do things that you only imagined you could do in your dreams a few years prior.

Jeremy Toeman:

A lot of it comes to one of the things that Scott's been an expert at is around using what's called extractors. So these are the things with, like, you know, and your phone, by the way, if you don't know this world, it teaches some of your audience. And the cool thing your phone could do, it turns out like 80% of phone users don't know. You can already lose. If you just go to your photos library on your iPhone or Android phone and search for, like, dog or lake or beach, you will find photos you've taken of those things. Right. That's. That's kind of been in our phones for about three, four, five years now.

Jeremy Toeman:

And a lot of people don't know about it, but that's through a technology called extractors and machine learning and all that cool stuff. So Scott has a deep background in that. So our ability to do things like find every time there's a balloon in an video became really easy for anyone to do. Right. It's pretty much like I'd be facetious to all my programming friends. It's kind of in the, like, a line of code level of tech these days, right? It's no longer, you must be a master at this thing to do it. Now, it's a pretty straightforward thing to build. So those are some of the examples of things that got easier for everybody else.

Jeremy Toeman:

For us, though, it let us accelerate futures. Like, one of the things our vision is to help people who don't make video, and 70% of businesses today make nut. So there's a lot of people tackling this problem in different ways. But fundamentally, the way we think about it is we're trying to give people a skill set that they must have in the modern world and probably don't have in the modern world. So when chat GPT became available, we put together a script writing feature, because we were dealing with so many marketers who know how to market their product, but they themselves had never written an ad before. Right? They'd always had subproduction team to do that. But now we're opening and leveling the playing field for midsize enterprise, et cetera, to be able to make video content. So we built a script writing feature that really complements the rest of our feature set very well.

Jeremy Toeman:

That would never have been on our radar as something to even do had it not been for all the GPT and LLM stuff.

Demetrios:

Yeah, I can see that. And just basically trying to expand your mind on how can our product grow. And as you were mentioning it before, how can we get that experience of when people say, I got to have that, I need that, can I use that? That type of signal is very strong, and you've been trained over all these years to look for that type of thing. Can you break down what exactly Augie is? I feel like you've kind of given us a few breadcrumbs, and if I were to put the picture together in my mind right now, it's like, oh, I have a podcast, and I can give you my podcast recording, or I can give you a clip of my podcast recording, and you can add visuals to that on the different things that we say. So if we are talking about machine learning, reverse image search, maybe there is some kind of a picture that will go with that.

Jeremy Toeman:

First of all, Demetrios, I always want to put you in charge of explaining my product because I think you might even do it better than me by now. But I'll try to make it very simple. And a non visual way to start is, you know, our goal is to make video editing. And I'm not being facetious here, as easy as writing emails or using chat GPT. Like we are really focused on, not just like, not an easier premiere pro. In fact, that's not our vision because premiere pro is too good a product. But it's designed for the pros, right? We want something that you and I could be using, or any rando and any business could use. So what we do is we let you start with any.

Jeremy Toeman:

You can upload, for example, a webcam recording, right? So maybe you are the CEO and you want to do your weekly update to internal, external, whatever, and you want to turn your basic webcam into more of like a John Oliver weekend update kind of thing. We let you do that effectively in one click, right? Or you only have audio. So maybe you've recorded a narration or your ad script, or you hired a voice actor to do something or use an AI voice to do something. Or you could have just the scripts. Maybe you've already written a, you know, come on down to Jeremy's taco shop. We'll put all the best tacos, right? Whatever you've done, you already have your script. And then the final one is you have literally no idea. And so you can come into our scriptwriter and start with make an ad for Jeremy's taco shop, right? And that's, that's where it'll go.

Jeremy Toeman:

What we then do is basically we get to audio no matter what. So it's either your voice or an AI voice that we get to. Once we have that audio, we, as you were guessing before, we use machine learning, we use AI. We do a couple of things. We get a transcription, every word to the millisecond for the entire piece of content. We also analyze, using our own AI, the cadence of the speaker's voice. And what we do is we basically, if you could picture in your head, if you, whether you've ever done video editing, the concept of a storyboard, most people can sort of think about like, you know, from a to b to c to d, the, et cetera. We make the first storyboard automatically using the cadence of the speaker's voice.

Jeremy Toeman:

And then what we do is we analyze the word spoken to build an automatic match for the video. Now, today we use that using stock video. So we have partnerships with both open source stock content, content from sites such as pexels. But we also have a deal with Getty images that has about 100 million clips and stock music and stock animations and so much more. So if you're starting to talk about Jeremy's taco shop, we'll probably find some clip of maybe a taco shop or maybe a taco or et cetera. The AI tries to figure out what to put in there. Now, this is where we are today, but let me explain, because this is so key is our vision. And over the next few weeks, more and more of this will start coming live.

Jeremy Toeman:

We don't actually want your video to be all stock because that doesn't make sense, right. Your video has to be for your company, your brand, your identity. Right. And Jeremy's taco shop and Demetrios taco shop can't quite look the same. Right. So our vision, though, is that you're uploading your own footage, your own b roll, all the stuff you might be doing with capcut or other tools like that, stuff you're doing on your phone, stuff you might be generating, stuff you're doing in canva, stuff you're doing in all these other places, we want you to be able to give us all of that content, and we will intelligently find inside your content the right things to match. So when I say, welcome to Jeremy's taco shop, if there's some clip in all of your b roll of, you know, someone opening the door to it to what looks like a taco shop, we would automatically find and insert that clip at the beginning of your video. And then if the next bit is, it's, you know, situated, you know, and the on the down, I'll use where I am now situated in downtown White Plains, New York.

Jeremy Toeman:

Well, what if I don't have b roll for that? So in that case, it'll go to the Getty catalog, grab White Plains, New York, put something into your video, right? And so the idea is whatever you have, whether that's just a prompt and nothing else, to hours and hours of footage that you put into a Dropbox store somewhere, and that you're. You've already got a pro marketing team that knows how to do things that no matter what, we have made your ad creation, promo, video creation, trailer, video creation, whatever it might be radically faster and easier than you could have done manually. And so that's us in a quick nutshell.

Demetrios:

You're augmenting everything. Like, I have a bunch of holes in my content, in my b roll, in what my final product looks like. And you're saying, we can help you with that. And we're not only going to help you with it, we're just going to make it really easy because we'll try and suggest things for you so you don't have to go scour the Internet. And then if what we suggest doesn't work, maybe you can keep looking, or you can ask for a new suggestion, I imagine, and say, give me something different. You can probably tweak the prompt a little bit if you wanted to make sure that you had something more original. But that union of my own footage with stock footage and it all just magically appearing is very enticing for me.

Jeremy Toeman:

Thank you. I mean, that's, that's what we want to do for people. Because, look, we've been doing user research since day one, so we have two years of data now. And it's folks like yourselves, it's cmos, it's enterprise, it's mom and pop shops. We're talking up and down the food chain. And they all have the same need, which is if I have content, I have too much of it, and I don't know how to sort through it, and I don't want to take the time to do that, even if I have the tools to put together the video. I've got 5 hours of b roll from last week's shoot, and I don't have a body to go through it. All right? So just being able to search your own video through keywords makes a huge difference.

Jeremy Toeman:

But there's also the other end of the spectrum of someone who's the opposite of you, who's got, like, all they have is, like, their homepage, right? And they've got, you know, they made a logo in canva, and they do some stuff on Instagram, and they really need a lot of other supplemental content to make it all come together. We want to help kind of both ends of that spectrum just to be able to do things they could have before. The other key thing here is we also envision where, and we already are seeing this happening, where actual pro video editors can use Augie for what we call a rough cut, for making a first pass imagine, and this is what they love about us, is that they're saying, like, I can go to my client the next day with five different ideas for video, all using stock, and say, before we go shoot a single second of our own footage, before we book a plane, flight, or whatever, does this look right? We'll get our own sunset, we'll get our own walk in the beach. We'll get around this. But this is kind of what I had envisioned.

Demetrios:

Where are you seeing the most traction? Because I could see this going plenty of different ways. I know that faceless or Persona less YouTube videos are very popular these days. I actually watch a ton of them where it's all stock footage, but there's a strong narrative. There's someone that's speaking, and so the video is just kind of supporting the talking, and you can tell that it's all very stock footage. That's one avenue that I could see this being particularly interesting for. But then also, like you're saying there's that maybe there's these b, two b companies that want to have a video of their most recent off site, or they want to have a video of the latest conference booth that they had, et cetera, et cetera. Or maybe there's b, two c, where they get to infuse their product into something with all different kinds of storylines there. Have you seen one particular avenue where it's definitely gaining traction?

Jeremy Toeman:

Absolutely. Great question. It's actually interesting. As you were describing it, I was like, yeah, we got those. We got those. We got those. You know, our vision, like, at a macro level, is, as I was saying before, prosumer video editing tool. Right.

Jeremy Toeman:

Video editing for the rest of us. Not, not at the. Not like imovie for my personal stuff, like, great tools already. Not even like Capcut, but something completely different, like, to fill a different kind of void. That said, look, I've got. We've got people making everything from, from podcasts to storytelling to CEO's making webcam recordings and things like that, where we're seeing the most traction of those, of those who are giving us the feedback. Where it solves the most current day problems is around marketing and creative advertising. So we have, for example, several publishers using it in their creative ads team because they're finding companies who want to advertise and who want to be constantly making fresh.

Jeremy Toeman:

You can't sell the same 15 2nd ad on TikTok for three weeks. It's, you know, by week two, it's getting stale. By week three, it is done. Right? Right. And so creative ad teams love Augie because it lets them do a lot of that work very quickly. As you said before, like, a lot of the content that is faced, like, we think about this, and I don't want this to sound like a pejorative, but there's a tremendous amount of content that gets created. That is, for, like, a better word, disposable. It's not.

Jeremy Toeman:

It's not meant to last, right? It's not meant to be the godfather that we will watch until our generative kid grandkids. You know what I mean? It's meant to be, like, here today, gone tomorrow, here today, gone this afternoon, and probably a year from now, be here today, gone five minutes later. And so we look at it as the effort and the output should match each other. Right? So if you need to make your Jeremy's taco shop and you want to just have a fun little TikTok ad every week, Augie is a really great solution for that kind of thing. If you want to make the ad that's going to go in the Super Bowl, Augie is a great way to prototype it. But again, go hire your pro video team and go use all the. All the great tech that's out there.

Demetrios:

I see. Yeah, that makes sense. It gets that rapid prototyping done, and probably at the end of the day, it helps you save money because you don't have to go down a path. And then after all this work, whatever, 24, 48 billable hours later, you are realizing that this isn't really the direction we want to go in. Let's try something else. So, all right, Jeremy, I'm going to stop it here, and we're going to move it over to the product demo. We're going to have an extra bonus video where you get to show me Augie in the visual sense and show me the product and click around in it. For anyone that is not watching this on YouTube, I highly encourage you to go to YouTube and watch the product demo with Jeremy and I.

Demetrios:

So now let's go check out Augie. And thank you so much for doing this.

Jeremy Toeman:

Awesome. Looking forward to showing.