I am excited to share Greylock’s Series A investment in Scenery, a collaborative video editing software company. There’s no better team tackling this problem than co-founders Mike Folgner (CEO) and Ryan Cunningham (CTO) — a dynamic duo teaming up to build their third company in the video space.
I first met Mike when he and Ryan were busy helping to save Twitter’s bacon.
Their previous company, SnappyTV, was acquired a year before my own, and I had recently been promoted to VP of Product over all business-facing initiatives. To create a rallying motto, I named the team’s collection of efforts “Businesses Love Twitter” – aka BLT (there’s a theme here!) – and our new monetization strategy centered on licensing live video. The cornerstone was with a deal with the NFL, and we had mere weeks to execute before the start of the fall season. Thanks to SnappyTV’s long standing relationship and incredible reputation with the NFL’s production team, Mike and Ryan helped us navigate the plan and worked tirelessly to pull it off.
Mike was a welcome force of positivity during what was a very tumultuous time for the company as we led two layoffs and the major restructuring of the product roadmap. Despite peak engineering attrition of almost 40%, a pummeled stock price and a wholesale changing of the executive guard, Mike had this infectious can-do energy that made him a pleasure to work with.
I believe he and Ryan have the leadership skills that times like this require, and I’m proud to be back in business with them.
Mike and Ryan have deep experience creating video tools and communities for millions of consumers and professionals. They first joined forces to create Jumpcut in 2005, a leading video sharing and editing site (acquired by Yahoo!) where they led video products for the largest streaming audience in the world. After that, they started SnappyTV to help professional editors create real time video highlights for social media. Licensed by the NFL, NBA, ABC, Premier League and most premium TV rights holders, SnappyTV was acquired by Twitter, where the team stayed on to lead the publishing and live video teams. Recognizing that the world was shifting away from desktop software, they saw an even bigger opportunity to transition video editing to the cloud, and started Scenery in 2020.
Scenery lets teams collaborate in real-time to storyboard and ideate concepts, then upload and manage source media – all in one platform. With Scenery, you first land on the canvas mode, where you can plug and play or drag and drop a scene in and around the canvas before heading to the timeline editor. Once you’re ready to edit a series of scenes, the timeline editor is used for adding extra features like titling and sequencing. Teams can choose where to dive in, either working around early drafts on the canvas or heading to the editor to add in their shots to an existing draft. Whether you’re solo editing or jamming with your team, Scenery is designed to work with you as the team has championed low latency, multiplayer video editing and review in a suite of production-grade editing features.
From documentary-length videos to political campaigns to student projects, Scenery has seen a variety of use cases over the last six months during its beta testing phase. As the product opens to general availability today, we expect to see enterprises adopt the technology as a next first step. In the future, we think there’s potential for Scenery to dominate a growing market of video creators – from Hollywood to Tiktok and YouTube influencers and more.
At Greylock, we’re passionate about finding software that transforms the way we work and create. Scenery joins a distinguished group of companies we’ve partnered with that are doing just that: from Figma to Coda to Tome to name just a few. We’re thrilled to support Scenery on their journey to make creating and sharing video fast and easy. Be sure to try out the product at scenery.video.
