Magic

As a child, I became obsessed with sleight-of-hand magic, spent countless hours on top-secret magician forums, and began to create some of my own tricks.

To my surprise, a large magic company offered me a deal to produce instructional videos teaching my tricks, and at 15, my first DVD went on to generate $150,000 of revenue in its first year. It was in the creation of that video that I discovered that I loved to teach. The proceeds funded a much fancier video camera and summer school at UCLA's famed film school.

For my next project, I decided to take things into my own hands and self-produced and published another DVD aimed at the professional magician market. That ended up being about a hundred times as much work as I expected, but the thrill of creating my own (very small) company kept me going through the many setbacks.

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Film

So there I was with some video skills and a video camera, so I thought, "Why not try shooting a film?" As it turned out, I loved filmmaking even more than magic, and my second obssession was born. I've made dozens of films over the years, but one of my favorites is a fine art piece, Portrait of Macerata. I made this short film of an Italian hilltown where I studied for the summer in 2012. It has been viewed a hundred and fifty thousand times the last I checked, mostly by Italians.

Portrait of Macerata from David Kong on Vimeo.

On the documentary side, I've filmed interviews with Grammy and Oscar-winning singer John Legend, film director M. Night Shyamalan, Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, Sal Khan of Khan Academy, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and many more.

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Photography

As I explored the world of cinema, I discovered that many of the skills of the photographer overlap with those of the filmmaker. In doing so I also discovered the virtue of rapid prototyping, since the amount of time it takes to capture a photograph is roughly one gazillionth the amount of time it takes to create a film. Most of my favorite photographs are portraits.

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Teaching

Having learned the crafts of the magician, the filmmaker, and the photographer almost entirely through the internet (and, for the most part, for free), I decided I wanted to give back a bit to the resources that I had benefited so much from. I produced a series of video tutorials on how to make professional films with the ever-cheaper tools of digital cinematography. At the time of going to press, they have been viewed more than three hundred and fifty thousand times.

How Codecs Work from David Kong on Vimeo.

My love of online learning eventually led me to a job at Khan Academy, a non-profit with the mission to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Among other tasks, I was blessed with the creative challenge of designing marketing campaigns on the meagre budget of a non-profit. Crazy ideas abounded.

One of my first projects at Khan Academy was a complete guide to college admissions (free, like all Khan Academy content) which supports and encourages students who come from low-income backgrounds as they apply to college. This tutorial series (which I created with two colleagues) contains 120+ videos and dozens of articles which cover every aspect of the college admissions and financial aid process. They have been viewed more than four million times and were publicly endorsed by Michelle Obama (First Lady at the time).

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Marketing

I spent several wonderful years at Khan Academy, where I jumped into whatever task needed to be done - I created courses, shot promotional videos, oversaw our email marketing, developed tools for social media promotion, and lots more.

I discovered the thrill of terror when you click "Send" on an email to 3 million people, and I experienced a profound joy in meeting dozens of people whose lives were changed forever by access to free education through Khan Academy.

In creating video courses, I found myself using a fantastic called Frame.io, a startup that was one of the first to bring the film and video creation online. I loved it so much that I decided to join the company as their first marketing hire.

My first task at Frame.io was to build out our content marketing platform which generated more revenue than any other marketing channel. We did a lot on the content team, but one of the projects I'm most proud of is a massive 120,000-word guide to the film world's complex technical workflows.

When I joined Frame.io, I was the 16th employee and the entire marketing team. By the time I left two years later, the marketing team had grown to 9, and the company had grown to 100.

I didn't go very far, though...

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Product

As much as I enjoyed my time in the marketing world, I've always been drawn to product design. I had the honor of studying under some amazing entrepreneurs at Princeton and had been devouring books like Creativity, Inc., Zero to One, and The Design of Everyday Things ever since.

When I made my next career move to the product team at Frame.io. I had the incredible opportunity to write my own job description. I built a new team, in partnership with Design, which combines UX research, deep subject-matter expertise, and data science to generate a holistic and deeply-nuanced understanding of our product and its users. We then use those insights to make product design and strategy decisions.

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Sales

Once I'd built out the team and processes for product research and strategy, I jumped into another big gap in our company's processes: sales engineering.

The sales team at Frame.io were masters of their craft, but they didn't have a deep knowledge of the technical details of the film industry, and that was causing problems in the sales process. I stepped in to help out as a side project and worked on Frame.io's first seven-figure deal, a major Hollywood film studio.

That side project soon became a main project, so I hired a team and eventually promoted one of them to manager. We paired closely with our sellers to lend technical credibility and help ease along the deal. I learned to intuitively understand where a deal is, to tease out the unspoken hesitancies, to read the relationships on both sides of the table, and to finesse the give-and-take that gets a deal over the line.

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$1.275 Billion

When you're at a startup, you're always racing against the clock. You build, you grind, you fight to survive.

You don't think about the exit. You don't have time.

Five years into my Frame.io journey, we recieved an acquisition offer that was hard to believe from the creative tools company, Adobe. It was strange, surreal, the kind of outcome that we hoped for but somehow didn't think would ever happen.

At Adobe, I continued my product leadership role, with four teams reporting into me as we learned to navigate the new waters of corporate life.

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Engineering

I've always been tinkering with little apps and scripts on the side, but I'd never written code as part of a formal job. Now on the engineering team, I'm sharpening those skills and learning how a large engineering organization operates.

You may be noticing a theme, here. I've changed departments about every two years throughout my career. There's the excitement of something new, but I've also had the goal to gain personal experience in each major department. In my years as manager and leader, I've found that empathy is the most powerful tool of leadership. My hope is to lead a company someday, and to do that with empathy for every single employee.

In the meantime, I'm having a blast building a massively-scalable backend in Elixir, and I do a bit of angel investing and consulting for early-stage startups, to scratch the entrepreneurial itch. If you're an early-stage founder and want to chat product and growth strategies, hit me up! I'm always happy to chat and do some problem-solving.