Vojta Ciml at SlidesLive: Creating the Virtual Library of Alexandria
Imagine this: The Library of Alexandria never burned to the ground. Instead of long hallways leading to thousands of books filled with information, there are handy links and urls redirecting you to informative conferences and lectures.
This is the goal of SlidesLive, a video production company co-founded by Vojta Ciml.
Vojta is originally from the Czech Republic and studied Computer Science at Czech Technical University.
“Initially, I wasn’t super interested in video production because I was studying computer science,” Vojta said. “I was supposed to be a programmer and I had no idea that we’d end up having our own company. I wanted to finish University and start working for some big corporation, perhaps Google or Facebook or something like that. And then somehow it turns out that this little project started to become bigger and bigger and we started a company.”
The company’s roots can be discovered by taking a look at Vojta’s time at University.
“We were recording presentations and videos of lectures at the University,” Vojta said. “And I added this feature where you can see both the speaker and his presentation (the slides) and I put it on the website in my free time after school. I wanted to automate the whole process because it’s very time consuming.”
And voilà: the recipe for SlidesLive was completed. Almost.
“I knew I couldn’t make it alone,” Vojta said. “Then I found my co-founders, Tereza Horakova and Vojta Drbohlav, and we haven’t even planned that it’s going to be a company; it was just we’ll see out the project. And the goals were the same from the start, you know, like, it’d be cool to record all the videos, all the presentations in the world and create an archive and for future generations to have this knowledge for thousands and thousands of years.”
SlidesLive took on a life of its own, transforming into a successful company with clients from all around the world. However, it wasn’t until Vojta and his team traveled to California that he caught the bug that is the American mentality: think big and think global.
And the bug was hard to shake off; he needed to succeed. And he needed to do so globally.
Vojta has contained the bug, allowing it to motivate him in creating the virtual Library of Alexandria that this world so desperately needs.
And with the team he has formed, Vojta is confident that SlidesLive can succeed at any event they work on.
“In bigger events, there is always something that’s going to go wrong with some trend,” Vojta said. “So you have to have a team that you trust in, that you can rely on, a team that is acting as a team helping each other. Only together you’re able to pull it off.”
The future of the company is bright, much like the computer screen that glows with hundreds of conference recordings on the SlidesLive website.
“I think it’s a bright future ahead of us because we still have so much room to grow,” Vojta said. “Right now, we transformed a little bit because of Coronavirus. So we do not do just physical events, but also virtual events.”
With all of the transformations that are bound to come for the company, Vojta assures that the mission remains consistent: information from all over the globe for people all over the globe.
In the near future, Vojta hopes to announce new features for the website’s archive, including new technology that allows a lecture to remain available on the site for 1,000 years. And it doesn’t stop there.
“In the future, a few years from now, when we grow bigger and have more presentations, we want to experiment with 5D storage technology which will allow storage for a billion years,” Vojta said. “So one day, when people discover this little crystal and say, ‘What was it like in 2020?’ You’re going to see everything we have recorded. So that’s the future.”
With clear goals in mind and a hardworking team, Vojta hopes to achieve a new level of public knowledge.
“We’re building a digital library; we call it the Library of Alexandria for the 21st century,” Vojta said. “If you have a physical library burned down, you want to have backup, you want to have some plan. So that’s why we store all the exports in multiple locations.”
With a team consisting of members located around the world, Vojta emphasizes his gratitude.
“I want to say thank you to the entire team because, you know, you would never be able to do it alone,” Vojta said. “So thanks to all. Thanks to everyone that is working hard in all time zones, on all continents, whether it’s an editor, or a salesperson, or on social media; we are all in this together. And so I’m really grateful for the team that we have and I hope that they will continue to work with us in the future and expand.”
