58 l October 2013
www.psneurope.com
industrytalk
LOUIS HERNANDEZ JR took the reigns at Avid in February of this year, when the previous CEO, Gary Greenfield, departed. No stranger to the company, Hernandez had already spent five years on the board, watching as Greenfield reshaped and realigned, at times controversially, the media tools giant. At IBC, it was time for the new boss to shine, launching his ‘Avid Everywhere’ campaign and an initiative called ‘Customer Association’.
Hernandez has strong views on community, leadership and bringing souls together. “There are not enough companies being beacons and investing in areas that are better for the long term,” he tells PSNEurope in an exclusive chat. “If you don’t fight for the connection between two people, you aren’t going to win long term.”
Who is Louis Hernandez Jr? I grew up in Southern California. My parents are immigrants, I grew up as a technologist in Silicon Valley because my father was a professor of technology. My education is in economics and finance; the first thing I did was teach. Then I was an advisor to hi-tech companies; since then I’ve been buying, starting, running and investing in technology. Any time you can bring humans closer to technology, I try to participate. The last company I ran, Open Solutions, was a start- up. I sold it for a billion dollars on a Friday and I started here at Avid on a Monday.
You have quite the Midas touch! No, I just stay attuned to how to bring people closer. The reason I told you about my upbringing here is, if you have immigrant parents, you’re Latin, Catholic – you don’t worry about a lot of things – you just try to do something that matters. If you’ve read my books – I’m sure you have, they’re very romantic – they are steeped in ways of working better. And that’s the thesis for my work at Avid.
You came onboard with Gary Greenfield five years ago. He’s more of a cost person, I’m more of a creative, despite having
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Hungry for success One big thing we will
announce [will be] an ‘algorith- mic automatically-generated metadata tagging standard’.
Try saying that when you’re drunk. I’ve tried, believe me. [Laughs] No, the reason this is important, this is an automatic tagging tool for the creative and monetisation process.
Handling rights management, copyright protection, and so on. And this will be a standard we announce next year: our customers will descend on Vegas before NAB to see certain app modules presented there.
And what of Customer Association? We just feel someone needs to step forward and address the bigger issues in the industry – Customer Association I think is the most ambitious, largest community for creative professionals in the world. It will be run for, and by, our clients, and administered by us. There will be seven user groups, for strategy and standards and so on. If the right people get involved, Avid will invest its money smarter and better and have a bigger impact on industry needs.
Dave Robinsontalks exclusively to the man with, arguably, the most important role in pro audio – CEO of Avid, Louis Hernandez Jr
degrees in finance and economics. My joy comes from creating things that people want to join me in. My last company, Open Solutions, should give you a clue as to how I think technology should operate.
What should Avid do now/first? What Avid has had to reconcile is this: its brand is built on proven technology. Historically, to work well, and to do that historically you had to control most of the elements, à la Apple, but in today’s environment the tools exist for you to do both, where you can have a platform that meets the needs of the community and is still flexible. ‘Open’ doesn’t mean free, it means inclusive. Include more people: the more people in the
community, the faster it improves. That’s what I’ve learned.
For the first eight months with Avid, what have you been doing? Designing our current suite so it can morph into a way to address the largest issues in the industry. The new model, Avid Everywhere, is all about bringing people closer; about connecting the creatives with the customers. You should read the White Paper… [In short], you’ll have a stable,
efficient platform, and you’ll have these lighter, more interoperable components you’ll be able to work with. You’ll see creative assets, sharing, collaborating etc but you’ll see new applications that will allow you to protect the asset, repurpose it, enable multiple devices or channels… so
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if you finish an audio file and you have 16 distribution partners, working through toggle switches in one application, you can automatically reformat the asset without you having to work out the rights management issues.
How will this look in a practical sense? You are on the platform, you download the apps. If you are a Pro Tools user, you purchase the distribution device, you download the app that handles that. The point is that it’s all on the same platform – integrated, inter- operable, much more efficient – it diverts the time you spend on the technology of connecting with the customer/end user to more time spent on the joy that comes from your ideas, from being creative.
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We’ve heard ‘customer focused’ before – is this really different? Before, when I first joined, people used to say, not only do I not like Avid, I’m actively looking for a way to LEAVE Avid. They don’t say that any more. They might not be happy with everything we do, but there has been a dramatic improvement. You look at PT11, that was a 24-month effort, probably the most collaborative product ever. Look at S6: that came about [partly] because our users started talking to us again.
You seem very different to the last CEO, Louis. Gary had to take steps... I can appreciate a company that has to [do that] in order to invest in the right areas. And what has emerged as the right areas? A fantastic Pro Tools and S6 line-up, and Sibelius is alive, well and still being invested in. Had [Greenfield’s team] not made the changes, I’m not sure we would be able to say those things today.n
www.avid.com
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