Report: Minimum Viable Video at Silicon Valley Bank

Can a group of bankers learn video?

Well, this is a trick question. Silicon Valley Bank is not your average bank. The bank has built their brand around the “innovation economy” and their primary customer is startups. So they were already a forward-looking bunch.

We spent two weeks running an internal version of Minimum Viable Video with sales, sales enablement, and market insights teams there.

It was a joy to work with an organization that “gets it”.

They understand that learning video is more than influencers and Youtubers. At the team level, learning video is how teams scale their ideas inside and outside the org. At the individual level, it’s the medium to build, sustain, and increase opportunities in a professional life.

The participants created dozens of videos around topics such as women’s health tech, ultramarathons, venture-backed startups, and econometrics.

These videos formed the core of what we call a microseries—a short sequence of videos readymade for Linkedin and the perfect “building blocks” for learning video.

We covered production, i.e. the art of setting up your audio, lighting, and backgrounds:

How it started vs. how it’s going

We covered the upsides of creating a body of work and how distributing your stories in the right format creates an education-based approach to opportunity creation:

Simple and effective structure whether it’s for Bob from accounting or strangers on Linkedin

We covered a lot of material:

Two weeks of frameworks, methods, and best practices

But that’s not why the engagement was such a success.

It was a success because we stayed true to the MVV mantra:

The core of the answer to almost every question about video. Learning-by-doing over everything.

The sessions always move beyond theory and pie-in-the-sky strategizing directly into the practice of video creation.

(Technically, it’s a little more complicated than “Make More Videos.” Rapid feedback, quick iteration, overcoming perfectionism, and defeating imposter syndrome are core pillars. But the north star to all of these elements is still make more videos.)

We’re already planning on an expanded version for more SVBers in 2023.


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