AGL 274: Jim Jachetta
About Jim
Jim Jachetta, CTO & Co-founder at VidOvation
Jim Jachetta is the driving force behind VidOvation’s world-class technology that makes the “impossible” and “never been done before” a viable solution within your daily business operations. Using modern, easy-to-support technology, Jim and the talented VidOvation team creatively design, implement, and support wireless, cellular, IPTV, video over IP, and fiber optics installations that meet your organization’s business goals and at a price point that fits any size, scope, and budget.
Today We Talked About
Jim Jachetta's background
VidOvation
IPTV
Broadcast Technology
Hiring post COVID
Sales
Security
Multi-cast Networks
Connect with Jim
Twitter
LinkedIn
Website
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AGL 274: Jim Jachetta
John Rouda:
This is A Geek Leader Podcast, and I'm your host, John Rouda. This show is all about helping us grow as leaders, become better technologists, and improve our lives both at work and at home. I hope you enjoy the show and learn a lot.
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All right, Geek Leaders, today on the show I am honored to have Jim Jachetta from VidOvation on the show. He is the CTO, co-founder, and they do some really cool stuff when it comes to the broadcast and media technology realm, which is the industry that I work in, so it's very self-serving to have him on the show today. Well, anyway, we're going to talk about leadership, we're going to talk about new tech that's going on, especially in the video world, and with all that being said, Jim, welcome to the show.
Jim Jachetta:
Hey, John, thanks for having me. I'm honored to be one of your guests. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
John Rouda:
Yeah, me too. If you don't mind, just tell the audience a little bit about how you got to where you are in your career, what your background's been like, and what is it that you guys do over at VidOvation.
Jim Jachetta:
Well, I hope you got a couple hours, John. I could go back pretty far. As a kid, my dad was an Italian immigrant. He came to this country with $12 in his wallet and met my mom, got married at a young age, and he was very proud of the 30 to 35 different jobs he had over the years. He started as an HVAC repair man. He welded windows. He got a job at Emerson Radio manufacturing radios, and eventually ended up in the television industry, the broadcast industry. His first job was in the industry was the very early days the WWF. Is it John McMahon or Jim McMahon?
John Rouda:
Jim McMahon, yeah.
Jim Jachetta:
Yeah, Jim McMahon, the founder. I remember years after I go to my dad like, "Was there a guy, Jim McMahon, there in those early days?" He's like, "Yeah, he always bought us pizzas at the end of the day. Very nice guy." So, my dad was from Italy and he didn't understand why grown men in tights were hitting each other over the head with chairs. Then that led to him working at NBC, ABC. His last job in television before starting his own company was at NBC. He worked at 30 Rock for about 12 years. He was just a technician. You know, my dad took a couple of engineering classes in Italy but didn't really take to the structure of class. He was kind of a self-taught person.
He started his own company called MultiDyne in the late seventies. The company made the first portable color bar test signal generator, and so it was like 1978, 1979-ish, and then CNN came on the scene in about 1982, I believe, 1981 or 1982, and they bought hundreds of these color bar generators, test signal generators. NBC bought them, CNN bought them, and that's what launched the company. My brother and I were always involved in the business as kids. We soldered circuit board. This was before things were surface mount. I don't know how much you know John, but everything's made by robots now, but circuit boards were made by hand back in the day, and it was my brother and I were involved in that. It was always a business marketing engineering conversation around the family table as a kid.
Then about actually June 27th of this last, June 17th of this last month was our 13th anniversary, so VidOvation. My midlife crisis was to... My wife's from California, so my wife wanted to move from New York to California, and what do they say? Happy wife, happy life.
John Rouda:
Yeah.
Jim Jachetta:
I also felt it was time for a change. My dad had passed away, so you really can't have two CEOs of a company, so I think one of us needed to take the primary leadership role in the lead of the company.
John Rouda:
Awesome. I still have a soldering iron, because I remember soldering stuff when I was younger, as well.
Jim Jachetta:
Yeah.
John Rouda:
I had a 8086 and I remember soldering more ram into it because it wasn't like chips back then. It was [inaudible 00:05:34].
Jim Jachetta:
Yeah. According to my dad, I was an excellent solderer. You know, you have the right amount of heat, the right amount of solder, right amount of flux. Then you got to clean the boards. You know, it's a whole. It's all automated now. So, one of us needed to step away. My dad wasn't, towards the end of his life, he really wasn't involved in the day to day, but on the rare occasion where I wanted to go right and my brother thought we should go left, my dad was the tiebreaker. So, I wanted to move to California, so my brother bought me out of my share and I started VidOvation.
John Rouda:
Awesome.
Jim Jachetta:
At the time, the company was fiber optic communications based primarily, so I wanted to get into IP. That was a new thing. So I wanted to get into IP, wanted to do more with wireless. I wanted to do things other than fiber. Then my brother realized like, "Well, wait a minute. You're not supposed to sell other people's fiber. You can sell MultiDyne fiber." So early on we did this crazy contract with the NHL. The NHL approached Dustin and he's like, "Hey, you got wireless expertise. Can you design an in-net camera to watch the red line in hockey?" And when I was at MultiDyne, we did a lot of the fiber optic infrastructure for the venues for the NHL. So, it's kind of all in the family, so the NHL was like, "We got Jims. We got Frank Jachetta who's the wire fiber optic expert, and then we got Jim Jachetta doing all our wireless." So they had everything in the Jachetta family
So that was our first big project. That was the NHL. And then IP, you know, we have a very successful IPTV offering, and IPTV is kind of a broad concept. Our definition of IPTV is enterprise IPTV. So you might see John in some of these stations that you bought, they might even still have coaxial television distribution in the plant. You know, I'm talking about a cable TV kind of a distribution. So if they want to watch video feeds in another office or on stage or in another studio without having to go to master control to watch videos, they would distribute like cable TV in the facility or like cable in your home. Well, a lot of new buildings now are not being built with RF coax in the wall anymore for television purposes. It's just all IP. So we have an IP offering where we can distribute DirecTV, dish, cable. We convert everything to IP. Studio feed, stage feeds. So these were areas I wanted to get into with starting VidOvation, and we've been doing it now for almost 13 years.
John Rouda:
Awesome. Yeah, it seems like the more I learn about broadcast side of technology, that there's been so much that are moving into IP. It's more moving into networking, and it sounds like the line is being blurred between like network infrastructure and broadcast infrastructure.
Jim Jachetta:
For sure, for sure. And then this poses challenges, like the older engineers are forced to learn IP, but then a lot of the tech folks coming up don't have the fundamental video skills. They might be an IT expert or they got IT training in school or from Cisco, but the video element is lost. So, that's been some of the challenges with personnel, marrying those two skills together. I have some really good people working with me that understand both sides of the biz. You know, the video and audio basics, and then the IT side of it. So you almost have to have two degrees, an engineering degree and an IT degree, to survive.
John Rouda:
Yeah. So how is it like when it comes to managing and leading people in an area like this that's changing so frequently and has changed significantly over the last decade and is continuing to advance and move into areas that are kind of the unknown?
Jim Jachetta:
Yeah. Yeah, it does pose its challenges. You know, I like to lead by example. I'm not the kind of manager that likes to point, "Hey, you go do this. You go there." If we're doing a big installation with a new customer, I always try to be on site. You know,
