mikeshreds

Love the video!

This a more important point than anything I've said in here. Thank you.

Yeah, I hear you, hindsight 20-20.

It was Mark's manager John Shimmin who made that request. John is a great guy, and Mark had (still has?) a great relationship with him. He genuinely wanted to help Shimmin, and did so faithfully for weeks.

It's not fair to pin this on Mark and dismiss it with a "rookie move dude." Mark (and I) had no idea that facts could be twisted and ignored to create this kind of legal conflict. A lot of people operate under the guileless belief that if they help someone, that person/entity will not screw them. Mark is one of those people.

The filing is public, and referred to in the lawsuit. I'll summarize here:

Smule has claimed we violated non-solicitation provision in our contract by recruiting each other to start a startup; that we appropriated Smule's code or methods to build Shred Video (though they don't make any specific trade secret claims); That Mark is guilty of fraud in his consulting relationship w/ Smule's engineers (this is detailed our post); and We converted Smule's proprietary information into Shred Video (far as I understand, conversion is a fancy word for "stealing").

The "non-solicitation" claim is laughable, especially in California. The fraud claim is fraudulent itself, as the email record clearly shows Smule itself asked for Mark's help, and he was wholly transparent in the way he provided that help. Everything else comes down to whether we used Smule's proprietary code or methods.

When Smith says "I'm fairly confident we will figure something out eventually...unfortunately...with a bunch of lawyers," seems a reasonable interpretation that "a bunch of lawyers" is code for legal threats, and "figure something out" is code for us paying him (in equity or otherwise) to withdraw the legal threat.

Of course, if one member in a couple has $40 million dollars and the other does not, and the rich one files a lawsuit against the other without even first talking to her, one might consider that the two are not equally culpable parties.

It certainly seems like a reach to just assume bad behavior on both ends.

Which actually, is one of the more insidious outcomes of making absurd claims against someone, even if they're completely false. People naturally respond "well, no one would be crazy enough to make something like that up, so there must be some truth to it."

Yes, thoughtful response, our lawyers are looking into this very strategy.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

Relevantly, Shred Video doesn't even compete directly with Smule for customers. Smule is building a network of karaoke singers and aspiring music enthusiasts to create music together. Shred Video is building technology to help athletes and adventure travelers make movies.

For example, it's unimaginable that a user would consider Smule apps and Shred Video to be competing substitutes that solve a similar need. She'd literally be choosing between "do I want to use this Smule app to sing karaoke songs or play guitar with, or do I want to use this Shred Video app to make a movie from my snowboarding footage?"

What do you mean by "right strategy" in this sense? Doing a 3rd party review of Shred vs Smule code/methods will give them a trove of relevant information if they intend to win on the merits.

In my understanding, refusing it is only the "right strategy" if your intent is to not have the case go to trial.

Just want to point out that Smule has not cited trade secret theft as a claim against us.

And on non-compete, Mark and I were just employees, not officers of any sort. Neither of us was a manager with direct reports.

thoman23. You so get me right now.

Yes, in legalese those would be considered trade secrets. Tellingly, Smule did not name "theft of trade secrets" as a claim in their lawsuit.

In our case, we did not develop anything Shred-related (ideas or otherwise) while we were employed at Smule. So invention assignment is not at issue, because we did not moonlight on Shred Video while employed by Smule. I knew I wanted to build products for the GoPro audience, which is why I left Smule. Mark left for his own different reasons, and we only began prototyping on things that turned into Shred Video after he left Smule.

Completely agree. We ourselves were very conscientious to never do anything Shred Video-related on any Smule machines, and did not build anything Shred Video-related until after we'd terminated our full-time employment at Smule.

Don't you think this will be absolved with a review of Shred Video's code/methods vs Smule's code/methods? And isn't it telling that Shred Video is more than willing to submit to such a review, but Smule has not yet acquiesced?

Hi Paul thanks for your comments.

In the code comparison, the 3rd party will also be able to look at methods (in addition to code copied directly). We're more than happy to include proprietary methods in the review.

On stealing "ideas," do you have some advice here? Smule has never specified what ideas they think we stole. What do you think is our burden of responsibility in proving we did not steal ideas our opponents won't even specify?

Yes, I completely agree. Thing is, we'd have to go through the full legal process before we could pursue that. Smule filed the lawsuit months before we even had a product or got into YC, they probably thought we wouldn't make it this far, let alone another two years.

My co-founder Mark Godfrey did go work full-time for another company before we started Shred Video. He didn't start working full-time on Shred Video until May 2015. Smule filed the lawsuit against us without ever seeing any of our work product, beyond an investor pitch video an investor we'd pitched. All Smith heard was a description of something we intended to build, decided he didn't like that we were doing it, and sued us without even speaking to us.

This is not a last nuclear option, and we're not in danger of losing our company to the lawsuit. Everything in the post is 100% true.

We did get a lawyer involved when we started Shred Video, and are 100% sure our IP is clean and usable.

It will take probably two years for the case to get fully adjudicated, and the legal recourse for preventing frivolous lawsuits like this is insufficient. Starting a startup is plenty hard enough without this kind of distraction, it's in all of our interest to dissuade larger companies from harassing startups in this way.

Thanks Lane, I'd love to hear about your experience. I'll reach out to you separately.

Financially we're going to be fine, we have enough already to fight this legally. Of course we'd rather not, and we want to expose this behavior for other entrepreneurs vulnerable through similar abuses of the legal process.

One of the best ways to discourage bad behavior is to shine a light on it, which is why we're publishing our story.

The risk here isn't that your former employer actually has a right to your company under the scenarios you listed. It's that if they have the resources, they can bleed you in litigation before your case is ever adjudicated. It's like a form of patent trolling, they're using the process to achieve an end they'd never get in adjudication.

Hi All

I'm a founder of Shred Video and the author of this article. Happy to answer any questions about our experience.

hi datamart not at the moment. for the kinds of movies Shred Video creates music is too critical to forego.

we're working on a recovery feature, so if you liked the previous shred better than a new one you can go back to it. we can probably use that to salvage the last shred in the event of the crash. thanks for the suggestion!

thanks for the detailed review - you're tweaked video was really good! gainers were sick. for readers, this will be a pretty common reaction w/ first time use: the first version will not be that great, but with a few tweaks can make it a lot better.

any thoughts on what we could do to make the videos better post-tweaking?

great observation, we don't have a setting for that yet. we do the downsampling for speed in UX, makes sense to add a toggle to give user that preference. thanks for the suggestion!

yeah it's hard for a giant industry like music to adapt to all the changes digital, internet, and now streaming in so short a time. I feel the music industry just wants the distribution it had w/ records: buy something you can share w/ your friends, but not distribute to the whole world at once.

I think Shred Video perfect aligns with the music industry's objectives here. Shred Video is not designed to help professional videog's make movies that will be seen by millions, it's designed to make movies folks like you and me can share with our friends. In this way Shred Video is a service that will encourage more music purchases, a win for the artists.

If you happen to make a movie in Shred Video that gets a million views (rooting for you!), YouTube has ways of making sure the artist maintains their rights to their content and/or gets paid. This stuff will evolve, but there's definitely a way to get the artist paid and the users able to make art with the music they love.

this is the very motivation that caused us to build Shred Video! "I paid $400 for this camera, and the footage sits dormant" is a super common experience with these cameras, one we felt personally.

thanks nivals!

send the crash details to mike@shredvideo.com? we'll try write a fix for you asap!

hey there! proooobably not a linux port right away, we want to get the UX fully dialed before we port to other platforms.

sure! want to know more about our video analysis, or the way we remix music? the short on each: video analysis is looking for changes in speed and smoothness of the video. music tries to find a seamless path through the song where the transitions fit each other, so you get a shorter version of the song that still sounds like the original song (i.e. has intro/verse/chorus/outro).