Our Story
When Mike Met Sherry
In 2011, Mike had just become the CEO of Metromedia Technologies. Sherry, representative of its “Outdoor and the Arts” program, decided to pay a visit to the office one day. She and Mike were introduced by the elevator. Almost instantly, a new friendship was born.
As a fan of Sherry’s work, Mike wanted to find a way for her art to find the right channels and avenues for success. When a painful heartbreak hit Sherry’s life, her writing and multi-media expression naturally hit an all-time productivity high, and she decided to form an Advisory Board to map out her career path forward. Having laid out a creative heartbreak recovery system in a 38-page “manifesto” for discussion at her first Board meeting… It was there that Mike walked in, sat down, and said, “This is a radio show.”
After meeting with CBS Radio and SiriusXM, Sherry was asked to build a podcast as a pilot.
She began by interviewing people about transitional times in their lives and how they got through them, from cancer to betrayal to the death of loved ones. She joined forces with top sound engineers, award-winning jingle writers and photographers and began Season 1 development for a multi-media podcast that included creating costumes, spoken word performances, and video art about the people she was interviewing.
Pictured:
Sherry Mills
Still, Sherry began to ask herself, “How am I going to grow an audience large enough to be able to monetize my show and support myself?”
It became very clear that not only was it costly to produce one high-quality multi-media episode, it was going to have to become a full-time job if the shows were to be released with the frequency proven to yield the best growth results.
By this time, Mike and Sherry realized that together they had a depth of knowledge in both the radio and podcasting mediums. Further, they discovered that Sherry’s problem was actually the same problem most podcasters were experiencing. “Content is King” was the prevailing credo across the industry, but Mike and Sherry quickly saw that content would never completely solve for the monetization issues at hand because the main issue wasn’t content, but the distribution of that content.
This led them to: “Maybe this distribution issue needs a new technology solution.”
Pictured:
Michael Kakoyiannis
An idea in the making:
Sherry went home to her studio and revisited her podcast files. She started exploring what would happen if she segmented her episodes into topic-based units and made each unit visually engaging, like a micro story that could be shared independently of its whole form. What she and Mike realized was… there was something about this process that simply made sense.
The real question became, “Could we invent AI that would come to understand conversation and speech well enough to intelligently divide it up by topic?” The answer was yes.
Naturally, goats in trees just felt like the right representatives for their brand. After all, “they go where you don’t think they can,” and that’s what Mike, a Greek in love with haloumi cheese, and Sherry, a “double Capricorn,” are all about.
And so, Treegoat was formed.
Welcome to our Tree.