Ben Crawford from Epipheo Studios

Ben Crawford is one of the co-founders of Ephipheo Studios which is one of the most popular and successful producers of explanatory videos.
They call their videos “epipheos” which is a combination of the words epiphany and video.

Since they released their super popular epipheo “What is Google Wave” they have been able to sign some of the top web companies in the world as their clients, including, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, NBC, etc. and of course Google on several occasions.

Ben found about about Grumo a few months ago after I released my grumo for flight search startup Hipmunk.com and about two days ago reached to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I knew about Ben and Epipheo way before he did about me. Since their Google Wave hit I have been a total fan of their work.
I took this opportunity to reach out back to Ben and have a chat about Epipheo and to get some advice on how to grow and scale Grumo.

So I just got of the phone with Ben. Ben is in Seattle and has been to Vancouver several times so he is familiar with the city I have been living for the last 15 years since we moved from Bilbao, Spain.

As I expected Ben is a very cool guy and offered some good advice to help me handle growth wisely.
Basically he said, don’t allow growth to compromise the quality of your videos because there is a reason why people like your product, discover what is that magic and make sure you keep delivering it.
In other words, Ben told me to concentrate on quality and not quantity to what I must agree.

Epipheo Studios has over 25 employees and according to Ben scaling and finding good talent has been one of the main challenges his company has faced.
Luckily for Ben, he started the company with three other very trusted partners and friends which all had a common shared vision.
Having a solid team from the beginning has made scaling for Epipheo a lot easier.

Scaling Grumo will be a greater challenge because I don’t have the luxury of working with a team of co-founders, Grumo at this stage is basically me and my ability to attract the best talent possible to execute my vision to produce the best possible demo videos.

Ben has a very unique history behind him. He started as a struggling waiter living off french fries to one of the top Black Jack card counters in the nation. All explained in detail in this 8000 word manifesto.
Ben and his partter became so good at card counting that they started their own website to teach people how to become phenomenal card counters.

Going from being a Black Jack professional to producing demo videos for some of the top companies of the world seems like a hell of a pivot.
We did not have time to delve on the hows and whys of such a radical transition so we left that for another occasion.

Thanks Ben, it was an honor getting the chance to connect with you and I hope we can meet in person next time I go down Seattle, cheers!

I leave you with the famous Google Wave video that made me fall in love with their epipheos: