Get Mic’d – Episode 7: The New Era of Video: Digital Twins & AI with Dave King, HeyGen – Transcript
Below is a transcription of Get Mic’d Podcast Episode 7, hosted by Katie Zeppieri and features Dave King, Chief Business Officer at HeyGen. Listen to the full episode here.
Dave King is the Chief Business Officer at HeyGen, the AI video generation platform designed to grow your business. HeyGen enables businesses to create 10x faster, localize videos into 175+ languages, and personalize videos at scale, transforming visual storytelling for more than 40,000 enterprise customers.
As CBO, Dave oversees the development of HeyGen’s AI video and audio product suite for various business applications, including marketing, corporate training, sales, and education. Dave was formerly the CMO of Asana and held various marketing leadership roles at Percolate, Highfive, and Salesforce. You can connect with Dave King on LinkedIn.
Katie Zeppieri: Dave, welcome to Get Mic’d.
Dave King: Thank you for having me.
Katie: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.
Dave: I’m so excited to connect with you as I was preparing for this interview and looking into your background. I had such an adventure because you had such a diverse career and many different experiences behind your belt, starting in the investment banking world and moving into marketing.
Now, as Chief Business Officer at HeyGen. So, I mean, I know it’s probably a long story to go through the different chapters there, but it’s just kind of high-level. How did you start your career, and what led you to where you are today?
Dave: Well, I was an accidental marketer to begin with. I was working on a startup in college, and I was a liberal arts major, so when we came to launch our product, I drew the marketing straw. And I remember at that moment being like, Oh, marketing. I want to do something like build the product or sell it.
Little did I know that I found a life calling. I took a detour through Wall Street, that pinnacle of financial analysis. And there was this moment when we worked on a merger and acquisition. Despite all this analysis being made, the deal was done based on the CEO telling a story about where the future was going and how these two would fit together; all the analysis only matters with the vision. That led me to be at Salesforce in the early days of marketing, and then most recently, as the CMO of Asana, and now here at HeyGen, where we’re doing AI video for businesses.
Katie: Yeah, and how do you think these various experiences have shaped your current role?
Dave: In Salesforce, we spell marketing with a C. We learned from Marc Benioff at The School of Marketing that it was about identifying a problem and telling a story around it. He’s just masterful at doing that. They were on the early cloud, social, and everything trends.
At Asana, we were among the first to pioneer this new business model of giving the product away for free and making it accessible in 190 countries, and how that would feed into the enterprise. So when we would call on a large account, we weren’t trying to sell them anything.
We were just helping them better use the product they were already using. And I think that fundamentally shifted how you think of marketing and sales from promotion and sales to how we can be helpful. How can we help? How can we help you create an experience and then create better results?
Katie: So would you say, since you sort of drew that straw, the marketing straw, as it were, do you think that you’ve naturally started to approach solving business problems, and indeed, along the way, had this kind of like marketing lens to everything that you do.
Dave: Yeah, but what I misunderstood about marketing was, initially, I thought, oh, it’s about the promotion. It’s about the clever campaign. It’s about the creative; it’s not really about those. It’s about putting your finger on the pain and then being able to communicate how you solved that pain.
So my personal story is my wife, after my first child was born, got sick, and she was in the hospital, and all these doctors couldn’t figure out what she had. And you know, you get a little worried when the doctors have progressively gotten older and older and have grayer and grayer hair, and they go, ‘I don’t know.’
And we then went to the fourth doctor, and this doctor came in, and he said, I know exactly what she has; it’s this scarce thing. It was named after this Argentinian physician who explained the problem. I have no idea if he was a good surgeon, but we were willing to let him operate that day because he could articulate the problem.
And I think a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers focus a lot of energy on the creative and talking about their solution when they should spend a lot more time putting their finger on the pain, and when their audience says, Oh, that hurts, maybe they didn’t even know I had that pain, that’s when. You’ve got the foundation for really great marketing.
Katie: That’s a really powerful example. I’m so sorry to hear that about your wife, and I think you’re right. I could just imagine the fear of the unknown and not being able to understand what you’re dealing with.
And I think that that translates so well to your point to solving marketing challenges, and even businesses right like, I mean, you’ve worked at several startups. Startups have unique marketing needs, and I think a large part of those early days is that they’re trying to make sure that they are solving the right problem and that there’s somebody on the other side who’s eager and ready to pay for that solution they’re offering. What tips do you have for startups regarding how they can know when they have found the right pain?
Dave: Finding product-market fit is so key. And I know that’s a buzzword in Silicon Valley, but there’s a way to clarify it for your team. Here, we have this thing called the segmentation bullseye, a straightforward graphic where we lay out the very center of the bullseye.
Who are the customers for whom you have the best product-market fit? These can be from graphic details like the size of the business, the title of the buyer, the use case, or the department. It can be psychographic attributes, such as what behaviours these folks exhibit.
But getting clear on, “Hey, who is the audience we’re going after?” The next ring out are the folks that maybe aren’t Best Product Market Fit today, but if they come inbound, they may have a decent experience with the product. Then, probably the most important thing is the outer ring, which is one of the areas we won’t focus on. We’re pro.
We proactively want to avoid that market because maybe they will take our product in a different direction, or we know they will have a poor product experience. It’s best to clarify that those you’re not going after, you can concentrate the resources on who you should go after.
Katie: That makes a lot of sense. It’s like focusing on and zeroing in, which helps you make many better business and marketing decisions.
Dave: It helps you build a better product, clarify the pain you’re trying to target, and ensure your marketing and sales are not generic. They’re resonating with that audience. I think we’ve all kind of tuned out generic marketing these days. You have to be helpful to your audience and create an experience, and the best way to do that is to focus on who that audience is.
Katie: I’ve heard you describe marketing as one of the most diverse departments within an organization because you could handle many different types of things on any given day. And I feel like that’s only increasing with the explosion of digital marketing.
You know, there’s the SEO angle to everything. Now there’s paid ads. It goes on and on because you’ve had the experience of being in a senior leadership role as a CMO. I’m curious to know how you build a team from the inside to handle and manage all of these diverse areas and how you consider when to bring in agency partners or external partners to help solve the many needs of a marketing department.
Dave: Yeah, in a given marketing function, you may have analytics, you may have performance marketing, you may have copywriters, you may have product experts, and sometimes that’s all in the same person, and sometimes those are highly specialized roles on really large teams, and then also with agencies.
I think the critical thing is, do we have a clear North Star vision of who the audience is, what the story we want, we want to tell is, and then do we have a straightforward metric that we are trying to drive after that, you can pull in a lot of those helpful resources. Agency partners are fabulous freelancers. But what I find is that the marketing goal is not clearly articulated. You get a lot of random acts of marketing.
A great idea that another brand did that. Maybe we should copy what works for other brands. Probably isn’t going to work for you. And so I think it’s really important for the founder or the internal team to clarify who the audience is, what the goal is, and what the story is, and then get help from other folks you can. Get wonderful help with your arms and legs and folks to produce amazing stuff. You can’t outsource the, you know, the brain of who this is and what makes us unique and special.
Katie: I like that, because sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in, like the quick hits or trends. And you’re right, like marketing teams, there are so many memes online just showing how, you know, everybody thinks that they have a valid say in how to market and how do you sort of handle those various requests and ideas exactly?
Just because it’s working for another company doesn’t mean it will work for you. It also might not be part of your larger strategy of what’s working for the brand.
Dave: Everybody has an opinion on marketing. I learned this when my daughters critiqued the ads that we had produced for our team and wanted to relay messages to our creative team so everybody had an opinion on marketing.
And I think the key is to be proactive in the strategy. We will lay out what we call our big bets. This is why we’re trying to reach this audience and move this metric. Here’s the bet that we’re going to make against it, and that way, if you’re proactive, all the great ideas, oh, that’s a helpful idea. Maybe we’ll get to that later, but you can stay focused on the bet. I thought a good example here was Airbnb.
They fell victim to what a lot of us do is just chasing the competitors’ tactics with booking.com booking.com had a huge performance marketing operation with Google and Facebook ad spend, and Airbnb tried to chase it, and it didn’t work for them.
And they then pivoted back and said, what makes up? What makes us unique? We have this incredible, unique inventory. We people get to stay at remarkable places with wonderful hosts. And they said, we’re gonna we’re gonna cut the performance band, and we’re gonna invest in the thing that makes us magical.
And they did these wonderful partnerships with they did one like they did the Barbie Malibu dream house that they featured. They put it into beautiful photography on the site and on on really wonderful host experiences. I think that’s an example of when you know what makes your company or brand unique, double down on that, and then you have to say, we’ll let the competition do what works for them. We need to be focused on what we do.
Katie: I want to learn more about HeyGen by zooming in on some of your latest career experiences. Before coming to HeyGen, you were the CMO of Asana.
Talk to us briefly about the size of the company when you came in. What did it look like when you left? What were some of the key projects that you were really tasked with leading during that time?
Dave: Yes, when I joined, Asana had a couple of hundred people and maybe 20 million in ARR, and when I left, it was only available in English. We had one product. We didn’t even feature the premium version of the product on our website. We just had this little free task management application.
And then, towards the end, it was a public company, with over half a billion dollars in revenue available in 14 languages and customers in 190 countries around the world. I feel so grateful to work with such phenomenal product leaders, marketing leaders and creatives who just wanted to serve teams worldwide. And it was quite a journey. A few of the interesting angles is the business model.
It’s so important to design the business model that is right for your customers, and I think that starts with your mission at Asana. It was to help teams work together effortlessly, including all teams, not just large enterprise teams in the United States. And so to do that, we made a free product and a very low-cost product that could spread worldwide. We spent a lot of investment in helping them be successful, so many community programs and content on how they could do their jobs more effectively, and gatherings.
And then they became the best salespeople. They would share it with their teams. They would share it with other people. And again, all that fits into an enterprise selling motion, where the sales team. Were, you know, consulting. They were advisors. They were helping people solve their workload problems rather than buying steak dinners and doing sales pitches. I think designing the business model for your mission is really important.
Katie: What did you find to be some of the best marketing channels for helping grow the business? I think that if you lean into B2B selling, which has a different approach than you would B2C.
Dave: Marketing does two things. First, you must be helpful and help people do their jobs better. Second, you have to create a remarkable experience, meaning an experience that people want to tell their coworkers and their friends about. For each company, those two things may be different, but at the core, that’s what it is. I look at HubSpot, a very traditional B2B Company.
If you go to their YouTube page, they have incredible how-to videos on every aspect of marketing, how to use their product, and how to be better at their craft. At Asana, we did that. We hosted hundreds of free events per year worldwide. People could come in, get some hands-on training, and go back to the office the next day with something they built that will help their team.
And so lots of different channels. I think the channel that is emerging now is video. I mean, it is the most engaging format. It’s, you know, I like to say that the world has gone on video first. It’s the way that consumers consume information. It’s the way that when I have a how question, I’m going to YouTube, and I think if you want to connect with audiences, obviously that’s, that’s the preferred format of today.
Katie: This leads us very nicely into talking about HeyGen, which I will explain to somebody who hasn’t heard of HeyGen. It’s an AI-powered video tool. How does someone use this? What are the different use cases? How could this be relevant? How could this be important to their business?
Dave: HeyGen’s AI video for businesses. Our mission is to help all businesses grow by making visual storytelling accessible. Today, on YouTube, there are billions of hours of video watched every single day. The other day, my kids are now saying trends from the ’80s and ’90s are returning. They asked me, ‘Dad, do you know how to moonwalk?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know how to moonwalk,’ and I tried to show them. And they said, ‘I don’t think that’s right.’
We pull up YouTube, say how to do the moonwalk, and learn how to moonwalk together. We do this in our consumer lives, but we also do it at work. And 90% of businesses want to create video content, but traditional video production is so harrowing. You need to have a script; you need to cast. You need to find studio space or location. You need to produce the video. You need to post and produce it. Then, you need to localize. They need to do reshoots.
When I was at Asana, we had this incredible creative team and these video experts who dressed in all black. They showed up at the Adobe conferences, and they’re so good at what they do. Even with that, we could not produce 90% of the videos that we wanted to make.
And I think most businesses don’t have a studio or filmmakers. Now, with AI, there’s a whole new way. You can simply write your script and click generate video, and it’ll generate a beautiful studio-quality video 10x faster and at a 10th of the cost of traditional video production.
Businesses can move their storytelling and content from PowerPoint, PDFs, or text into the video-first world without wearing all black or being experts at video editing tools.
Katie: I think AI is the trending buzzword. Many companies can and should be adopting AI into their business practices, but there’s still a fear component. And I think this idea of an AI avatar speaking on your behalf sounds scary. Perhaps too many people hear it.
And I think it’s also interesting to balance the importance of storytelling, right? And the importance of making a real connection to a human. On the other side, you’re selling to humans. How do you sort of see that, and what’s your take on that regarding an AI avatar approach with video?
Dave: We help audiences do three things. First, we help them create videos from scratch without a camera or crew, and that’s the avatar, which I’ll talk about in a second. Secondly, we help you take existing assets, like an old video you made, and we will localize it into 175 languages, not dubbing, but with AI voice and lip sync.
It is your voice, everything you say to your face, and your facial gestures, but you are speaking perfect Japanese, German, or French, so there is no new way of making your content available to more people. The third is having personalized interactive experiences where you can talk to an agent you know through AI.
Your questions are excellent and essential; we have thought about them a lot. We are focused on making the offline experience more accessible online. That includes, if you were to shoot a film today, you would either hire an actor or use a company spokesperson, and you would shoot it in the studio.
The same thing happens in AI. We have very strict trust, safety, and identity protocols. So, for anybody who wants to create their digital twin, we go through a rigorous identity verification process to ensure that the person who is the digital twin has their full legal consent. We have verified that it is them, which is important to our customers because our customers are the range. McDonald’s and Workday are some of our customers. We work with large organizations where trust and safety are critical to the brand. You can also use one of our actors. These folks are real-life people with stories, exciting voices, and facial gestures that would be just like you. You can hire them as a company spokesperson and use them for free, but they’re not synthetically generated creatures.
These are like real-life human directors, like a manufacturer in Italy or a nonprofit in New Jersey, who have access to the same talent that the folks with the Super Bowl budgets used only to have.
Katie: I want to make sure I understand this. This might have unlocked something new for me. You can make this avatar look exactly like you.
Dave: Yes, it looks exactly like you. It is you. With about 90 seconds and a webcam, you can come into our platform for free and get a beautiful digital twin made of you. It’s your voice, your facial expressions, and your hand gestures. Once you have your digital twin, you can simply type text, just as you would an email or Word document, and it will generate that video.
You can create any background that you want, you can add slide content, you can put yourself on a beach. It is you. We have authenticated you, and we have verified that it is your identity. You can give your team an update and make it available in the local language. What’s so powerful is that it is your expression, it’s your voice and it is largely indistinguishable.
Katie: That is fascinating. This is the unlock for me. Because on the one hand, you can get actors and other people. Which is an option that some people may prefer. Or you can use you.
Dave: People do both, but using you is a special unlock. For example, we had this Wall Street analyst, the lead researcher, who spends all day behind a computer and wants to send updates to their audience.
They don’t want to go sit in a studio so they create their digital twin. Then they write their update, and it shows up as them on a studio set but they didn’t actually film that. We see that with owners of small businesses where they can just send updates to their audience, whether it is from the founder or the creator and don’t have to waste all day editing a video. And it is just that personal especially since you can do it in several different languages as well.
Katie: That is really cool. And teams of all sizes are using HeyGen. It’s not just big companies, as you’re saying. It’s nonprofits and startups.
Dave: Over 40,000 companies worldwide, ranging from startups to local nonprofits to local real estate agents. We had the Mayor of Yokosuka, Japan, using our platform all the way up to the Weather Network.
In your neck of the woods in Ontario, Canada, they’re using avatars to provide hyper-local weather and advertising for communities without a broadcaster. We have an Italian manufacturer that started in the 1800s that needs to create and translate training content for operating machinery and plants.
There are a bunch of nonprofits using this to connect with their audience. HubSpot, I mentioned, is using HeyGen to localize its YouTube content and reach a larger audience. So, really, the most exciting thing is that this is bringing a capability that used to be reserved for the top 1% of filmmakers who are exceptional with their craft and always will be. Now, the other 90% can make beautiful videos with just text in a few clicks.
Katie: That’s amazing. Give us some more use cases. That’s what’s so curious to me. Sometimes, you’ll hear about great technology, but it becomes really powerful and illuminated when you recognize how you could possibly be deploying it within your company. So, talk to us about the different ways that teams are using AI-powered video.
Dave: One of the teams is the marketing team. They’re using it for product explainers and how-to content you want to articulate the benefit of your product. You don’t want to hire a film crew every time that you have a new feature release.
This makes it very easy to quickly type and edit a beautiful video. We see a lot of sales enablement content. You have something you want to train the whole team on, or learning and development. Content, you want to take a PowerPoint and turn it into a really engaging two-, three-, or five-minute interaction. We see a lot of CEOs at small businesses using HeyGen as a way for them to introduce their products.
We have a feature where they can send a personalized video to everybody who, for example, shares with the product marketing community. They host events every month, and anybody who signs up for the event, the host of that event, sends a video from them saying, ‘Hey, thanks so much for signing up for the event.’ They call them by name. They tell them what’s going to happen. It just creates a nice connection between the leader of the community or the CEO of a company in their audience, and I think localization is a key part of it.
Now, even if you’re only serving a certain geography, you kind of speak the language of your audience. If you’re a Shopify seller or an entrepreneur or not, or an international nonprofit, you got to make your content available in many different languages that used to take weeks. Now you drop the video in and you know your your localized version is available right away.
Katie: As Chief Business Officer, what are some of the projects and departments that you manage and oversee?
Dave: It is about the customer, the end customer journey on the go-to-market side. It’s how we reach new audiences and bring them into the product to have their great first video experience. They can find us with the right templates, create and be really happy with their first video. It’s how we market the new features that we release, and then how the sales team can help larger organizations be more successful, and then community and support, which we view at the top of the funnel for us.
Really starts with the existing community. These are people who are creators. They love to share. They can share content, and if we can just serve them better, with better how-to content, and better education than they do. They do the marketing on our behalf.
Katie: What does your current customer acquisition strategy look like? Because HeyGen raised a $60 million Series A not that long ago. The company’s value is now at $500 million, which is amazing. You’re in this real growth go to market stage right? You’ve definitely, by this point, achieved product market fit, but you’re refining and growing and scaling at this point. How are you really thinking about approaching customer acquisition at this point?
Dave: We think of it, not as customer acquisition. We think of it as our primary driver is word of mouth. So how can we help people create more beautiful videos, easier, and faster, and help them share those videos? So much like Airbnb put a lot of their investment into the product experience rather than the advertising, we have very similar strategies.
What you’ll see with HeyGen is the most lifelike avatars, with facial expressions, tone and voice, gesturing, and emotive nature. If you use our translation feature, we render AI models over the mouth. And so it’s you speaking French, and you look like it. Your accent is distinctly you, but it’s distinctly French.
And then a community and content team that is about helping people who previously don’t have a lot of experience with video Make things that they’re really proud of and make things that they can share. And think that’ll always be a core part of our strategy is, if we make the community successful, they will share on our behalf.
Katie: You’ve talked a lot about creating this memorable experience, and that’s been something that you’ve been focused on. Your storytelling is definitely a thread throughout your career journey and the projects that you’ve worked on.
How do you sort of think about that in terms of creating this ultimate experience for customers? What are some of the pieces? What are some of the ingredients that go into creating this wow experience for customers?
Dave: The amazing thing is the customers have these ‘Wow’ ideas. They just haven’t been able to execute them. McDonald’s and their partner IW group came to us, they were releasing the grandma McFlurry sweet treat. It was designed to kind of recall the nostalgia of your grandparents taking you to get a sweet treat. They recognized a lot of people today don’t live physically close to their grandma or grandparents. A lot of times they don’t even speak the same native language as a grandparent.
We powered a campaign with them where anybody could go into the store on the mobile app and record a video message to send to their grandparent, and we localized it into the grandparents’ native language, and so 10s of 1000s of people were sending these wonderful notes to a grandparent and who had never spoken Hindi or Japanese before, and receiving those messages.
We would just be on YouTube, all the people who responded, the grandmas who responded, and how special it was to see their grandkids speak their language. A lot of these ideas the customers have, they just had, and they didn’t have a way to do it before, so a lot of us are kind of like helping unlock creativity rather than us coming up with all the creative stuff ourselves.
Katie: How do you see AI shaping the future of marketing?
Dave: I have never been more excited as a marketer because I think it unlocks more creativity. What it does do is replace creativity. I hear a lot of people say it is going to take jobs. Technology has turned everyone into a storyteller, with anyone being able to share text, ideas, and stories. Now, I think the difference here is video.
Storytelling is the most powerful force on the planet and video is the most engaging form of storytelling. To give everyone the ability to tell stories and reach out in any language is a tool that provides and unlocks. It is not going to take away the thing that makes us human which is understanding the pain point, understanding the product, building the product that solves that need and then coming up with a very compelling story to tell that story. It just makes it so much more engaging and amplifies that connection.
Katie: That’s amazing. Dave, this has been really fascinating, and I’d like to wrap up our conversation today with our lightning round. To get to know you better and get some of your top recommendations. First question for you, Building a notable brand means…
Dave: …Standing for something even when it is not popular. Especially when it is not popular.
Katie: What has been a memorable mic drop moment for a brand you have worked on?
Dave: At HeyGen when we first released our avatar video, the ability to create your own digital twin and share it. Our CEO, Joshua shared his and that got 3 million views. Because people could believe it was a life-like nature and that anybody could just go create their own.
There was another moment when the President of Argentina was speaking at the World Economic Forum and his talk went viral. Most people don’t realize he gave that talk in Spanish but they used HeyGen to make it available in English.
But I think the micdrop moment we would are the little day-to-day interactions. It’s when a real estate agent in Arizona was able to send a personalized video to all their clients. Or it’s an international non-profit opening their conference in multiple languages. Those are the moments we share around the office and say these people didn’t have access before and now they do.
Katie: What’s one brand that you admire and why?
Dave: I mentioned AirBnB, and I think their great example of knowing what matters most to them is these unique stays and taking care of the hosts and the experiences. That informs all their marketing and how they do things. During the pandemic, they paid the hosts for payments that weren’t completed because that’s a core part of the brand. I think they are a good role model.
Katie: What are three resources would you recommend for someone looking to build their personal or company brand?
Dave: The three books that I gift to team mates and colleagues the most. The first is The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. Unbelievable breakdown of how the human brain works what turns a story from good to great and how conflict plays a good role in the story.
There’s a great book on How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. It really debunks a lot of the myths about brands being all about being the most creative and having the biggest ad budget. When really, it is about having the mental and physical availability and distinctive brand assets and using them consistently over time.
The third and final is Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Which is about how to own a spot in the perception of the mind. All three have nuggets of wisdom.
Katie: What’s up and coming for you, and HeyGen? What’s next on the horizon and where can people connect with you?
Dave: We are focused on making visual storytelling available and accessible around the world, helping unlock the 99% who would not have had the most engaging format accessible at our time. We are looking for folks to join the mission. If you are passionate about visual storytelling, we are looking to grow the team at HeyGen.
You can find me on LinkedIn. There, you can see my digital twin as well as me in real life.
Katie: You have got me now so excited to build a digital twin.
Dave: The world needs your digital twin. I can see the podcasts available in different languages. This is a huge unlock.
Katie: That’s what I mean. I feel like I need to process the infinite possibilities of what you can do with a digital twin. That’s what is remarkable to me.
Dave: You can be in many places and in many languages. But it is still you, your ideas and I am a big believer that great ideas should be able to spread far and wide. And this is one way of making that more accessible.
Katie: Dave, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being here.
Dave: I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
Katie: Thank you for tuning in to Get Mic’d. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. I look forward to bringing you more engaging conversations with thought leaders, sharing their insights on building a notable brand. We’ll see you next time!