PJ Taei’s father could take a computer apart to make a point. As a teenager, Taei helped assemble desktop machines, fitting motherboards, drives and memory into their cases. Sometimes he skipped the little washers around the screws. His father would undo the work and check them. The customer was going to receive the whole machine. The small parts counted.
There is an awkward economy to that lesson. Leave out something tiny and somebody has to do the job twice. Years later, Taei would build a company around a similar inconvenience: people making videos were having to assemble the machinery of a business themselves. Hosting here. Payments there. A website somewhere else. Each piece might work; persuading them to work together was another occupation entirely.
Today he is the founder and executive chairman of Uscreen, which lets creators sell video memberships through their own websites and apps. The job title came after a long stretch as CEO. The route there ran through computer repairs, web hosting, conversations with customers and a willingness to discover that his first answer needed work.
The customer on the other side of the counter
Taei immigrated from Iran at seven, spending a year in California before his family moved to Gaithersburg, Maryland. His father introduced him to computers. At Best Buy, the fascination became practical: a customer arrived with a problem, and someone had to solve it. Taei remembers enjoying that part of the work. A working computer could be a surprisingly persuasive business education.
Technical jobs led him toward hosting. His brother, who was doing freelance web design, needed somewhere to put clients’ websites. That request helped bring Taei into the business that became WebNet Hosting. He eventually sold it to the Canadian company Entirely Digital.
WebNet offered an early rehearsal for Uscreen. In 2009, Taei described overseeing support, helping individual clients and working on e-commerce development. The company had started as a reseller in 2002 and partnered with Miva Merchant in 2004. Its appeal was the convenience of getting several jobs done by one provider: hosting, store development and the other work that keeps an online shop open.
A shopkeeper does not get extra credit for managing five suppliers. The customer wants the store to work. Taei’s account of WebNet keeps returning to that ordinary expectation. It helps explain why the later video business would gather so many functions under one roof. He had already spent years being the person customers called when the roof leaked.
A DVD is a surprisingly useful clue
The idea for Uscreen arrived through hosting clients who wanted to distribute their videos securely. Some had been selling DVDs. Moving the content online sounded straightforward until they reached the awkward questions: how would people pay, how would the videos be presented, and how would the seller keep a direct relationship with the buyer?
Taei’s personal account places Uscreen’s official registration and its customers’ first sales in 2014. There had been trial and error before that milestone. The ambition was to make the business of selling video available to people who did not have a large technology operation behind them.
An early customer, the swimming-instruction business Total Immersion, sharpened the idea. It had video hosting, but payments and presentation were pieced together. A subscription service offered a more useful direction. Taei rebuilt the early app around what he was learning. The customer’s complaint contained a product brief, provided the founder was prepared to hear it.
That is a less tidy origin story than a flash of genius. It is also more interesting. Taei had an adjacent business, some money to put into the idea and people willing to tell him what was wrong. He still had to abandon work he had paid for. A customer can supply the clue. The founder has to bear the cost of following it.
The business had to pay its own way
Bootstrapping gave those decisions a particular weight. Uscreen spent a decade growing without institutional capital. Customers had to find the product useful enough to pay for it. An attractive idea could open a conversation; it could not settle a hosting bill.
By February 2023, Uscreen had reached $20 million in annual recurring revenue, with 140 employees and 8.5 million end users across 95 countries. During that period, Uscreen ran an experiment with removing the credit-card requirement from its free trial. New self-service monthly recurring revenue initially fell 40 percent. Even an established business could try something and receive an expensive answer.
The distinction between a company's revenue and the money flowing through its customers matters here. Taei’s business sells the machinery. Its customers sell the memberships. A creator’s earnings are evidence of what that machinery helps make possible, rather than money that all belongs to Uscreen. Confusing the two would make the story larger and considerably less useful.
Uscreen registered; customers made their first sales.
Reported in February, during the bootstrapped years.
PSG growth capital announced on February 13.
Taei’s description of the early years includes nearly running out of money and giving up his salary. Those details make the later figures easier to understand. The company did not arrive fully formed, with a substantial team and an audience waiting. It had to keep earning the next stage.
Someone has to wait for the traffic
Customer understanding also shaped the marketing. Taei has described a year spent finding the platform’s direction, with the content strategy shifting along the way. The team then worked at making useful material for the audience it actually wanted to serve. Search traffic followed work that had already been done.
In 2021, he reported monthly unique visitors rising from 70,000 to just under 200,000 in six months. The marketing team had spent a year preparing before that jump. He admitted sometimes giving them a hard time while the results were slow to show. Patience is easier to recommend after the chart has turned upward.
He also listed books he had found useful, including Rand Fishkin’s Lost and Founder, Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. and Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game. It is a reading list with room for business mistakes and management problems. The clean numbers on a company page leave out the months when a team needs time and its founder would rather have an answer by Friday.
The office changed its address
Taei had another assumption to reconsider. At first, he resisted hiring remotely. He expected complications and doubted he could manage people effectively at a distance. By 2021, he was describing a fully remote team of more than 100 people spread around the world.
“I didn’t believe in remote work!”
PJ Taei, reflecting in 2021
It is an unusually cheerful admission for a boss to make. The person who had worried about the arrangement came to say he could not imagine doing it differently. He also wrote an open letter to bosses asking people back to the office. An opinion formed by running the experiment has more substance than one formed by admiring an empty desk.
His emphasis on accessibility remained practical: Slack messages, short Zoom calls and direct contact with the team. Distance did not remove the responsibility to communicate. For a founder whose early work involved individual customers and their specific problems, that responsibility was familiar. The room had changed; people still needed someone to answer.
A small encounter in December 2024 catches this side of him. Creator LaShonda Brown had arranged to interview a Uscreen team member for a video. When the booking changed, Taei’s name appeared in the correspondence. She was nervous about interviewing the founder and later described the conversation as delightful. The anecdote is modest, which is its virtue: the chief executive showed up for a creator’s questions.
What a bigger competitor can teach you
Competition supplied another adjustment. When Vimeo acquired VHX, Taei initially worried about a larger company entering his market. He later saw a benefit: its marketing helped explain the category to customers. Uscreen still had to earn their business through the product.
His response was to keep improving the software and listening. Scale brought its own danger. As the company grew, Taei found himself further from customer conversations and deliberately returned to them. Hiring people to run functions did not automatically preserve the knowledge he once gathered firsthand.
His connections extended beyond software founders. He visited homesteading creator Justin Rhodes’s farm and said in 2023 that he would like to own a farm himself. Rhodes’s Abundance Plus uses Uscreen. There is something pleasingly concrete about a video-software founder going to see the place where a customer’s videos begin.
The founder’s next job was to hand over his own
On February 13, 2025, Uscreen announced a $150 million investment from growth-equity firm PSG. Plans included improving mobile and television apps, marketing features, community tools and analytics. It was the company’s first institutional capital after its bootstrapped decade.
In June, Allison Yazdian became CEO, following leadership roles at LTK and Compass. Taei moved to executive chairman. He described his continuing work as long-term strategy, vision and support for the team and the new chief executive. His LinkedIn biography says he had bootstrapped Uscreen to $30 million ARR and sold the company in 2025.
Handing over a business changes the meaning of attention. A founder who once needed to hear the sales calls also needs to give the next leader room to lead. Taei’s public reflections make that transition part of the work, alongside hiring, product decisions and keeping the company lean.
Uscreen now reports more than $1 billion earned by creators on its platform and over 15 million end users across creator apps. Those are company-reported figures, and the earnings belong to the creators. Behind them remains the old, specific problem: someone has made a video and needs the rest of the business to work.
The washers in his father’s computers were small enough to skip and consequential enough to check. Taei’s career has kept finding versions of that lesson. Listen to the person who will use the thing. Notice the missing part. And, when the business has grown, allow someone else to turn the screwdriver.