In 1998, Eric Burns was an undergraduate with a summer job working for the dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. An e-commerce instructor wanted to make video recordings of his lectures that also integrated his slides. They asked Burns to take on the project.
“I cobbled together this thing,” Burns said. “CMU is a very scrappy place, so there aren’t actually big budgets. You just kind of have to be clever and resourceful.”
His tool worked. Burns was then tapped to help a project that was scanning millions of the university’s books to build a digital library. From there he teamed up with Bill Scherlis, then head of Carnegie Mellon’s software engineering department, to integrate the two projects into a program that created video lectures and managed them as a virtual library. The program kept building interest and momentum. Bill Guttman, another CMU professor, joined the effort.
After leaving CMU for a job at Microsoft, Burns reunited with “the Bills” and the three transferred the technology into a startup, launching the video platform Panopto in 2007. The Seattle-based company grew steadily over the years, building a customer base that includes more than 1,000 large corporations and universities, including many of the largest U.S. public universities.
Now, with the coronavirus pandemic and the widespread move this winter and spring to remote learning and work from home, Panopto is charting tremendous growth. Burns, who has been CEO since 2015, is gratified to provide what has become a critical tool for connecting educators with students, and employees with colleagues and customers.
“That’s the most validation you could hope for,” he said. “People are using the thing that you made and it has not just value, but it has value when it counts.”
Panopto doubled the number of active users on the platform in the last year, and they’re using it four times as much to record and view video.
The platform recently launched a free product called Panopto Express. Burns said they’re looking at how to support educators as they decide what instruction will look like in the fall, with many schools considering a hybrid of in-person and virtual classrooms.
“All of the administrators right now, they’re trying to figure out how do we balance pedagogy and safety and the type of instruction that we do so that students are feeling like they’re getting a great education out of it,” Burns said. The answer, he said, is a “whole spectrum of technology response.”
We caught up with Burns for this installment of Working Geek, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for his answers to our questionnaire.
Current location: I’ve spent the last few months in my home in north Capitol Hill in Seattle. I’m spending most of my workday in the dining room at the moment, which is nice because it’s close to a small patio garden.
Computer types: I’ve been using a Razer Blade 15 as my main workstation. It is a monster of a gaming laptop that’s great for demoing our video capture software, especially the AI-based presenter tracking feature that needs a fast GPU. I have an older Lenovo P51 set up for development so I can still code on occasion when I’m feeling inspired. I use a Surface Book when I want to move around the house or go outside, and I have a Macbook Pro I use for Zoom calls on the living room TV.
Mobile devices: I’m still using my trusty iPhone 6S. I just can’t bear to lose the AUX jack and it has fantastic hand feel. The new devices are amazing, especially the cameras and OLED screens, but there’s something about a button with a nice click and a wired audio connection.
Favorite apps, cloud services and software tools: We’re a G Suite shop so I spend a lot of time in GMail and Google Docs. I couldn’t live without GMail’s search, and Google’s shared docs and spreadsheets are great for collaborating. We use Zoom for our meetings, which we record directly into Panopto and search like we do GMail.
It might sound corny, but I really do use Panopto a lot for work, especially now. I catch up on recordings of meetings I miss, I record video messages to the company and to our investors, and I can watch videos that other people in the company are sharing from their homes. One of our engineering managers produces a weekly Panopto video using Tableau to chart how our customers’ streaming and recording patterns have changed as COVID has unfolded. It’s fascinating to see how spikes in Panopto’s usage charts track the progression of school closures and business work-from-home policies.
We also use Slack, which I don’t remember deciding to adopt but somehow can no longer live without. As a retired IRC (internet relay chat) junkie, I’m a bit ambivalent about this. It’s great to be back in the world of the /[command] shortcut, though, with everything from Zoom to Panopto to the perfect GIF one command away.
When I’m not working, I read a lot of news in the New York Times and The Economist apps, and I listen to SoundCloud often. I think SoundCloud is a treasure of the modern internet. YouTube is an amazing feat of video technology, but all the advertising and recommendations make it a bit noisy for my taste.
Describe your workspace. Why does it work for you? I had just managed to shrink my home workstation down to a single laptop when lockdown began, so I really wasn’t prepared to be productive at home. When it started, I grabbed some laptops and gear from the office to set up a seated workstation at the end of my dining room table and a standing workstation right next to it. I also dragged an old TV out of the basement and set it up opposite a recliner in the living room.
Panopto tests and certifies equipment from many high-end camera makers, so I liberated an auditorium camera from our lab and mounted it above the TV. Webcams and monitors make people look like zombies on Zoom, so instead I wanted to be able to sit far from the display and zoom in to frame a tight, well-lit newscaster shot. I can move between these spaces throughout the day to break things up, and I go out on my balcony with a laptop every chance I get.
Your best advice for managing everyday work and life? I feel very fortunate to have wound up in a field that I love, working with people that I admire and respect, and that goes a long way. It’s much easier to focus on my work and manage stress when I’m passionate about what I’m doing.
I try to balance my passion for work with hobbies and projects that I can get caught up in. I like to tinker and fix things, improve the house, and work on motorcycles, bikes and cars, and when I’m feeling creative I try my hand at producing electronic music. I’m not great at it, but it’s always fun to challenge yourself to be artistic. I think creative outlets outside of work are essential.
Your preferred social network? How do you use it for business/work? I try to avoid social networks. I don’t use Facebook or any of the newer networks, but I sometimes lurk a little on Twitter. There’s no dodging LinkedIn, but I mostly use it to look up the public profiles of people I meet with; I generally don’t post or message.
Current number of unanswered emails in your inbox? It must be at least 30,000. I’ve had the same account for 13 years and GMail won’t even tell me the real count anymore.
Number of appointments/meetings on your calendar this week? 48. I wish I hadn’t counted.
How do you run meetings? I try to establish a clear objective and shared context as quickly as possible. I attend a lot of review meetings where I need to quickly get up to speed on a plan or project, and in those cases I tend to try to move quickly through topics to find the things I don’t understand and learn more so I can give useful feedback.
In planning meetings, I try to keep things grounded in high-level patterns of discussion — dependencies, tradeoffs, estimates, priorities — to avoid getting too deep into specifics.
Brainstorming and design meetings are much more fun and free-wheeling, and harder to “run” — there’s nothing more fun than getting into a good groove with people who start riffing off of each other and jumping up to the whiteboard to help develop an idea, but that takes a particular spark that’s not always easy to find. Finding that fun groove with coworkers is one of the things I miss most about office life before COVID, and it’s been one of the hardest things to try to move online.
Everyday work uniform? At home it’s all about comfort and utility. I have a few different pairs of technical loungewear pants I’ve been cycling through, paired with whatever shirt the next meeting calls for. This is usually a t-shirt these days, but I keep a few button-downs handy. If I’m feeling extra sassy I’ll wear one of the two styles of Panopto tracksuits that we’ve made over the years.
How do you make time for family? You just have to get away from the computer or phone and make it happen. I’m lucky that my immediate family is all here in Seattle, and I have a young niece and nephew here who are always a great excuse for us to get together. My wife and I do a lot of hiking, biking, camping, motorcycling, skiing and other outdoor stuff, and we try to get out most weekends to do something fun together.
Best stress reliever? How do you unplug? I know it’s cheesy, but nothing beats gardening. There’s something about tending to a garden, even a small container garden, that’s incredibly relaxing, and you can do anything from puttering around pruning and staking plants to making up a big project for yourself. But exercise and video games are always great outlets too.
What are you listening to? Like a lot of nerds, I’ve had a lifelong love of electronic music. Lately I’ve been listening to the new albums from Caribou and Four Tet, and on SoundCloud I’ve been on a big Township Rebellion kick, but there’s just so much great stuff to choose from. I adore KEXP, especially Positive Vibrations on Saturday morning and Expansions on Sunday night.
Daily reads? Favorite sites and newsletters? New York Times daily just to get caught up on the news, and I love The Week for how well it surveys the press landscape. The Atlantic and The Economist are great too.
Book on your nightstand (or e-reader)? On my nightstand, I’ve been slowly chipping away at an older science fiction book called “Cyteen” by C. J. Cherryh. Like a lot of great sci-fi, it’s really a study of human nature.
Night owl or early riser? Definitely a night owl. I hit my productive stride in the evening, when things quiet down. The earliest days of Panopto were full of coding all-nighters. I have learned to love coffee, but I don’t think I’ll ever be a morning person.
Where do you get your best ideas? Free association. Most of my breakthroughs come from daydreaming, spacing out, just kind of wandering. I think a lot of that has to do with making connections and seeing patterns, and I find it’s impossible to force it by concentrating too much. My “a-ha” moments mostly come from freewheeling thought, not staring at an empty page. I also do a lot of my best work under pressure, which is not necessarily the healthiest approach — but it is very exciting.
Whose work style would you want to learn more about or emulate? I’m fascinated by venture capitalist John Doerr and the “Measure What Matters” idea of management. I think it takes incredible resolve and discipline to set up complex systems of people and goals, and then to step back and let things unfold, trusting in the organization’s ability to self-adjust.
Businessman and engineer Andy Grove also has a brilliant take on management: A leader should define an organization’s culture and values, then create conditions that let teams develop a well-considered consensus for the leader to ratify.
I picture these guys waking up at 6 a.m., running a 5K, eating a nutritionally perfect breakfast, and cutting through their days like a scalpel. I’d love to see how they navigate overcommitment.
