After over a decade of work as a brand marketer, writer, and creative director at Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton, Karam Singh Sethi is looking to take his experience in corporate marketing to make video storytelling more accessible with a new venture called Terra Digital.
Co-founded by Sethi and his Columbia Business School classmate Eran Ganot, Terra is a video storytelling platform that automates video editing to empower marketers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs. Terra is made for businesses that need high quality narrative-driven social content, but are unsure of how to create compelling and authentic videos. “Our feeds are full of noise and one-off pieces of content. Digital marketers and social media managers are trying to create more editorial style digital stories, but it’s prohibitively expensive to create premium videos. That’s where Terra comes in,” explains Sethi.
Noting that he was inspired by creative software giants like Squarespace, Canva and Figma, Sethi says he wants to, “provide people with an easy way to take their raw content and turn it into a franchisable video series – like Explainers or How-Tos.”
Sethi and Ganot have been building the company first as a part of the Columbia Technology Founders Track and then in the Greenhouse Accelerator, a selective program for Columbia start-up founders. The pair are now diving into the project full-time after raising a family and friends financing round.
In his quest to make storytelling more accessible, Sethi has also written a book that explores the current boom in user-generated content (UGC). “Millennials spend, on average, 6-8 hours a day consuming digital video content. That’s not a trend that’s going down any time soon.” As we consume more content, demand for better videos will only increase. The book details how that demand for better UGC will have ripple effects across business, politics, and our personal lives in the future.
“Everyone has a story to tell, we just need better tools to tell them.”
You can pick up a copy of “Digital Storytelling: The Rise of User-Generated Content” published by New Degrees Press on Amazon today and follow Terra’s journey on Instagram and LinkedIn.