Vidyard, YC Founder Story

Company: Vidyard Founders: Michael Litt (CEO) & Devon Galloway (CTO) YC Batch: Summer 2011 (S11) Industry: B2B SaaS / Video Intelligence / Sales Tech Founded: 2010 (as Redwoods Media) → Rebranded 2011 Headquarters: Kitchener, Ontario, Canada Total Raised: $75M+ Customers: 160,000+ companies | 12M+ users Status: Active, one of YC's top Canadian companies

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The One-Line Summary

Two engineering students in Canada, one designing toilets, one sitting idle at BlackBerry, used a day-trading windfall to buy a house, build a video company nobody asked for, and accidentally discovered the real product while trying to solve their clients' confusion. Then they drove 1,200 miles with a car covered in stickers to crash a conference and corner a keynote speaker.

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Lens 1, The Before State

Who Were They Before YC?

Michael Litt and Devon Galloway met at the University of Waterloo in 2005, studying Systems Design Engineering, one of Canada's most demanding programs. Waterloo's co-op model meant students alternated between school terms and paid work placements, which put both founders inside real companies early.

Michael's co-op placement landed him in a mundane but revealing role: designing toilets. Not metaphorically, literal bathroom fixtures for a product engineering firm. Devon, slightly ahead in his studies, had landed at Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry. At the time, RIM was still a technology giant, but the culture was slow-moving and the work left him with stretches of empty time he didn't know what to fill.

The two friends, bored, started day trading with small amounts of cash between shifts. Michael stumbled into a trade on a foot cream company awaiting FDA approval, bought at $1.60 a share, sold at $5.60. It wasn't a fortune, but it was enough for a down payment on a shared house in Waterloo, Ontario that quickly became something of a hacker haven, the same address where other notable Canadian startups (including Pebble's early team) crashed and built.

The Personal Pain They Were Living

The frustration wasn't a dramatic "aha moment." It was slower, more like two engineers noticing that the corporate world felt weirdly wasteful and uncreative. Michael was designing toilets with a systems engineering degree. Devon was watching meetings eat hours at one of the world's most prominent tech companies while it slowly lost its edge to the iPhone.

Their shared frustration was about proximity to the problem. They wanted to build something. They just didn't know what yet.

The real pain, the one that became Vidyard, emerged only after they started building their first company. When they began making videos for businesses and found that every client was completely lost about what to do with them afterward, that's when the actual product idea was born. The problem wasn't discovered in a shower. It was discovered on a client call.

Why They Almost Didn't Look Like "Startup Founders"

Litt and Galloway were not Silicon Valley archetypes. They were Canadians from a university town. They had no prior exits, no famous investors in their network, no Stanford or MIT on the CV. Devon's most visible credential was time at a company that was, by 2011, losing the smartphone war. Michael's was a toilet.

When their housemate, who had just gotten Pebble (the smartwatch startup) accepted into YC, suggested Michael apply, Litt's reaction wasn't confidence. It was something closer to: why would they take us?

The answer turned out to be: because they had already proved they could hit metrics.

Key Insight for Aspiring Founders

Your "boring" job is not a liability in a YC application, it's founder-market fit evidence waiting to be framed correctly. Michael designed toilets. Devon sat idle at RIM. Both experiences taught them to spot where complexity was being mishandled. Your day job is research. Pay attention to what frustrates you.

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Lens 2, The Idea Origin

How the Idea Was Actually Born

The story of Vidyard begins with a company that wasn't Vidyard at all.

In 2010, during their final year at Waterloo, Litt and Galloway worked on a Capstone design project focused on video. The project gave them an academic reason to explore something they were already curious about. Around the same time, Waterloo's co-op program allowed students to be self-employed for a term, so they launched Redwoods Media: a video production company that made instructional and marketing videos for businesses.

The pitch was reasonable: companies needed video content, and Redwoods would make it. Early clients signed up. Videos were produced.

Then the client calls started.

Every single business that received a finished video had no idea what to do with it. Where do we host this? How do we share it? How do we know if anyone watched it? YouTube was an option but felt wrong, your brand video sitting next to cat compilations and auto-play ads was not the experience any professional company wanted. And nobody could tell you whether a single viewer had actually watched past the 30-second mark.

So Litt and his technical co-founder built their own hosting. Then they built their own analytics. And then they realised: the platform they'd built to service their clients was more valuable than the videos themselves.

In January 2011, they made the pivot. Redwoods Media became Vidyard. They stopped making videos. They started selling the infrastructure for businesses to host, share, and understand their own videos.

The First Ugly Version

The first version of Vidyard wasn't beautiful. It was a hosting and analytics layer that was just good enough to show clients something YouTube couldn't: who watched your video, for how long, and where they dropped off.

That single feature, view-level analytics on business video, was the wedge. It wasn't transformative technology. It was data that should have existed, finally made accessible.

The Signal That It Was Working

When clients who were paying for video production started asking more questions about the analytics platform than the videos themselves, Litt knew they had something. The clients weren't confused by Vidyard. They were hungry for it. That inversion, the tool outshining the service, is one of the clearest product-market fit signals a founder can get.

The Pattern This Follows

Vidyard is a textbook example of the "tool built for yourself becomes the product" YC archetype. They didn't research the video analytics market. They built the tool because they needed it for their clients, noticed clients wanted it more than the original service, and pivoted accordingly. This is the same pattern that produced Slack (built as an internal tool at a gaming company), Twitch (a pivot from Justin.tv), and dozens of other YC companies.

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Lens 3, The Application Anatomy

How They Got Into YC

Vidyard's path into YC was sparked by a roommate, one of the Pebble co-founders, who had just been accepted, who looked at what Litt and Galloway were building and told Michael directly: "You should apply."

Litt applied. He was not a known quantity to YC. He had no existing relationship with Paul Graham. He was a Canadian engineering student with a small video production company that had just pivoted into analytics software. The application had to do the full work.

What got them in was a combination that YC has consistently rewarded: a clear pivot story backed by growing metrics.

Michael later described the key factor directly: "Thinking back to my acceptance into YC, I credit setting and hitting metrics targets as the reason for acceptance. It showed YC that I was able to pivot as needed, spot growth opportunities, and work against metrics."