Today we’d like to introduce you to Nu Butthajit.
Nu, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Being immigrants from Laos, my parents had difficulty relating to youth in America. The vast cultural differences taught me to be self-reliant and resourceful at an early age, leading into the development of critical thinking skills. Throughout most of my childhood, I was an average C student. It was not until the start of high school that I set out to disprove how it was supposed to define me. With a routine of better study habits and discipline, I went on to become an honor roll student for the entire year. It was all I needed to develop a self-belief system and build a foundation upon.
I chose to get into IT consulting for the freedom and control over my career path. Every contract presents a set of new challenges and an opportunity for personal development. It allows me to steer clear of corporate politics and the fear of overstepping my boundaries. As a consultant, I only have one job and that is to never let my clients doubt their decision in hiring me.
After 12 years as a consultant, I landed a contract at Fox as one of their video platform engineers. You just know when you land into someplace special. It was a great team of talented individuals. It was the first time in all my years of consulting that I felt at home. Unfortunately, the entire project was abruptly abandoned a year later. It shocked everyone. A few coworkers created their own companies, others found work elsewhere, and I went on to work as a consultant for our video platform vendor Kaltura.
This is where my admittance into entrepreneurship started to take shape. It was here that I finally found myself with like-minded individuals. Their “can do” approach to any problem re-enforced my own belief that persistence beats resistance. Watching these guys introduce new services, growing departments, shifting resources from one unit to the next, and always adapting to new requirements was a great crash course into thriving within the startup world.
I became their main video platform engineer for the entire west coast and was always traveling to client sites to implementing custom solutions, and hosting training sessions. After a few years, my experience in the video platform space skyrocketed. The all-around IT consultant was now specialized in video content delivery solutions.
Things got a little more interesting after discovering how each component of this ecosystem landed itself to create a self-sustaining business model. Analytics supplies the intelligence to structure marketing and ad campaigns. Video content brings in the user and ad slots are sold to advertisers. More or less, this is how it works and I was involved at every stage. I wanted to explore more of the business aspect and that was when Nezzoh was founded.
Over the next couple of years, we went on to become an official vendor for Sony, Fox, and Beachbody.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It was anything but smooth. Being a pure developer to running a company independently are two different disciplines.
We had to match our service to the same level as those already in the industry. Creating standard operating procedures was our way of countering it.
Then I had to ramp up my knowledge running a business and spent a lot of time reading books. But no matter how prepared I was, something always seemed to come up.
That’s when I decided to step back and audit all of our issues. After the assessment, I began to realize that we were putting in too much effort towards initiatives we had no business doing. It proved to be too much of a distraction with modest value. We decided to close those initiatives and roll things back.
These were invaluable lessons and has helped me prepare Nezzoh for the future.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Nezzoh – what should we know?
Orchestrating video delivery can be difficult as content publishers often times subscribe to 3rd party software. While all these services specialize in a specific requirement, it’s up to the publisher to bundle them into one cohesive package.
Nezzoh’s extensive experience in this industry allows us to make an immediate impact on any team. We cover end-to-end content delivery that includes but not limited to: video framework development, integration with analytics and monetization suites, digital rights management, cross-browser interfaces, OTT implementations, and video encoding. With the viewing audience always in mind, we carefully craft all these services to fit your business need. And best of all, love a great challenge.
In the past year, we took a step back to address the common pain points of our clients and are now preparing to launch our Uptime platform. Uptime aims to provide real-time and historical insight on session streams across all devices. The goal is to position publishers ahead of the curve by providing a unified interface for managing all streaming devices in granular detail. We are confident of the value it will bring and are excited about the release!
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
These are the people who I admire and attempt to structure my personal growth.
Casey Frith-Smith – Is a role model in leadership. He instills confidence in the people around him while managing political relations with calm, collective, composure.
Sheri Green – Her pursuit for excellence is infectious. She sees the bigger picture and goes the extra mile to ensure success on all sides…
Yehiam Shinder – His stoic demeanor in tough situations instills confidence in his leadership role. He accepts, adapts and executes with seemingly little effort.
Eitan Avgil – An excellent engineer with an ability to structure elegant solutions to difficult problems. I’ve always admired the way he detracts noise to focus on sound solutions.
Joe Devon and Robert Cuadra – Founders of Diamond Web Services. Their reputation for creating rock solid software is the reason why seasoned developers gravitate to their team. They are great a study in transitioning from engineers to entrepreneurs.
Ryan Pangilinan – Has a go-getter attitude with an appetite for knowledge. He’s a doer that figures out ways to get things done.
Contact Info:
- Address: 10880 Wilshire Blvd.
- Website: www.nezzoh.com
- Phone: 3105606550
- Email: [email protected]
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/9357803/
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
