How Carta's creative team stopped being the bottleneck—and started scaling branded video

Josh Durst-Weissman spent years before Carta developing and selling TV series at Lionsgate. When he joined Carta as creative director, he built an in-house studio that eventually drove over two million YouTube views—exceptional for a fintech B2B company. For a while, the model worked: a dedicated creative team producing quality video at the pace the business needed.

Then the pace changed.

Carta, like most enterprise software companies navigating a rapidly evolving product, started needing video from everywhere. The CEO wanted constant documentation of product innovation. Product teams needed demo videos that were outdated almost before they shipped. Social feeds required steady content. The creative team, which had previously served as the primary production engine, suddenly couldn't keep up without hiring significantly.

Durst-Weissman joined Capsule CEO Champ Bennett in Session 1 of the Video First Summit to talk through what happened next—and what it took to solve it.

Why enterprise video demand outpaced Carta's creative team

Durst-Weissman described the pressure as a collision of two simultaneous trends.

"Companies are sort of being forced to become publishers in their own way," he said. "Your content arm has to be constantly pumping out written and, more so now, a lot of video materials."

At the same time, video was becoming the primary mechanism for explaining and selling the product itself—animated product explainers, demo content, feature launches—all of it requiring fast turnaround as the product evolved.

A small creative team, however talented, can't serve both demands without becoming a bottleneck. At Carta, that's exactly what happened. The signs showed up before anyone called them a problem:

1. Other teams were making videos in QuickTime without telling the creative team
2. The production queue was measured in weeks, not days
3. Creative was doing more ticket-taking than craft
4. Brand standards were inconsistent across departments—inconsistencies no one had capacity to catch

"We needed a way to let other people edit video without taking a blowtorch to the brand system we'd built."

What enterprise video content tiering is—and why it matters for creative teams

The solution Carta moved toward mirrors a model Capsule hears from a lot of enterprise creative teams: tiering video content by type.

Tier one content is bespoke, brand-forward, studio-quality work—the kind that ends up in a creative portfolio and requires the full attention of the creative team. Tier two and three content is the blocking and tackling: product demos, internal comms, PMM launch assets. These need to look on-brand, but they don't need to be built by a creative team from scratch.

The insight from Durst-Weissman is that the people best positioned to make tier two and three content aren't the video editors. They're the domain experts—the PMMs and product managers who actually understand what they're trying to communicate.

"The editor doesn't understand the story they're telling," he said. "We need the people who understand the story to also be able to apply the brand."

Carta's brand quality framework for non-video creators: hot sauce vs. weak sauce

To help non-video people calibrate quality, Carta built a framework Durst-Weissman calls "hot sauce, weak sauce." The concept is gut-level simple: does this feel like a hot sauce experience, or a weak sauce one?

The example he used had nothing to do with video. Walk into an event and you're greeted with plastic cups and a generic hotel ballroom? Weak sauce. Walk up to the elevator and it's branded Carta blue, with a person inside holding a tray of drinks? Hot sauce.

The framework applies to every output, including video. A Carta PMM making a product demo asks: is this hot sauce or weak sauce? That question is easier to act on than a formal brand guideline, and it gives the creative team a language for feedback that travels across the organization.

How to structure a distributed enterprise video org

On team structure, Durst-Weissman described the model Carta has landed on as a federal/state split. The brand team acts as a federal government—setting standards, holding brand compliance, approving outputs. Individual departments act as state governments, with enough autonomy to move quickly.

In practice, that meant embedding a dedicated freelancer inside the product team who handles the "last mile" of video production—someone who works inside the department but reports up to the brand team for standards.

What decentralizing video production made possible for Carta's creative team

The reason this matters isn't just operational efficiency. It's what the creative team was able to do with the time they got back.

"We've gotten budget for specifically two bigger projects that we never would have been able to have that conversation about before," Durst-Weissman said. "It's because we can say: look at all this stuff we're pumping out. Here's an idea. We should pump out something bigger and cooler."

That's the dynamic that tends to get lost in conversations about democratizing video production—more volume from the org doesn't replace the creative team, it gives them a case for doing the work that actually builds their careers.

Session 1 of Capsule's Video First Summit was hosted by Champ Bennett, co-founder and CEO of Capsule. The Video First Summit brought together enterprise creative and marketing leaders to share what they're learning as video becomes a company-wide function.