Chris Savage

Chris Savage is an entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, the video hosting and marketing platform for businesses. He is known in founder circles for turning down a sale and instead taking on debt to buy out Wistia's investors, keeping the company independent and profitable.

Savage started Wistia with his best friend Brendan Schwartz, who began the company in his living room in 2006. They spent years figuring out the right market before focusing on video for marketing teams, and built the company with modest outside investment rather than large venture rounds.

The defining moment came in 2017 and 2018. Rather than accept an offer to sell, Savage and Schwartz raised about $17.3 million in debt from Accel-KKR and used it in a tender offer to buy out early investors and employees who held equity. According to the founders, Wistia was on track to lose about $3 million in 2017 and instead made about $6 million in profit in 2018. They refinanced twice and paid off the debt in mid-2023, and in a July 2023 Mixergy interview Savage put Wistia's revenue in the mid-$60 million range.

Since then Wistia has kept shipping on its own terms, including AI translation and dubbing and the Remix AI video editor. Savage also co-hosts Talking Too Loud, Wistia's show about building businesses, brands and products. Some experiments did not stick: the founders have said that spinning out the Soapbox screen recorder as a separate product was a mistake, and its features were folded back into Wistia.

For bootstrappers, Savage is the best-known example of using debt rather than an exit to give early backers liquidity, a playbook he has explained at Business of Software and on many podcasts.