San Rafael resident pitches startup on ‘Shark Tank’

Mitch Braff has spent much of his life telling stories, from his young teenage years in Marin shooting photos for the Redwood High School newspaper to his career as a digital media producer and award-winning filmmaker.

This month, he got to tell the world about the company he founded on the Jan. 7 episode of “Shark Tank,” the venture capital reality show.

The San Rafael resident — who pitched “sharks” Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Michael Strahan, Robert Herjavec and Lori Greiner — asked for $250,000 for 2.5% equity of his company, LiquidView. Founded in 2021, the company creates digital windows that display ultra-high-resolution, 24-hour outdoor views on large screens.

The product transforms windowless spaces like hotels, senior living centers and office spaces into places of beauty and tranquility. Some of the views include Nice, France, the canals of Venice, Hawaii, the Farallon Islands and Rodeo Beach in Marin.

“I’ve always been a storyteller, and with LiquidView, as I say, we make abstract stories,” he said. “As you’re looking at the same view, a story unfolds. You’re looking at Rodeo Beach, and you see it from sunrise to sundown. It’s people walking on the beach or playing with their dogs, and people are fishing during the day, and then they’re going to look at the sunset and take pictures.

“You watch the whole day full of these beautiful abstract stories,” he said. “I see LiquidView as a continuation of what I’ve always done, which is tell stories.”

While the “sharks” praised the product, he didn’t walk away with a deal. But Braff is grateful for the opportunity and comments he received on the show.

“It has been very surreal and wonderful,” said Braff, who’s gotten hundreds of leads from customers and investors since the show aired and kudos from his kids. “It’s wonderful to get the product validation and the business validation from them. It really meant a lot that they were so complimentary.”

‘Dream come true’

Like many entrepreneurs, Braff had thought about applying for “Shark Tank.” And while he thought it would be a “dream come true,” he didn’t know if it would be possible. But after LiquidView was featured on the “Today” show last year, he got an email the same day from a “Shark Tank” producer asking him to apply.

“It’s a very competitive process,” he said. “I really loved the experience. The producers were incredible, the art department, everyone was great.”

Last June, Braff and his team spent multiple days preparing on a studio lot before the show shot Braff’s pitch on a sound stage.

“I got to nerd out as a filmmaker,” he said. “I studied film at the University of California at Santa Barbara. My first film I made in Santa Barbara, I was lucky enough to be in the Mill Valley Film Festival. I’ve had three films in the Mill Valley Film Festival. I’ve been a filmmaker, and I had a production company. I’ve always been doing film. For me, that I got to walk around on the Sony lot was a dream come true.”

How it began

The idea for what would become LiquidView came to Braff when he was working with a client for Liquid Canvas, his company he started in 2018 that made special video installations.

“I had a client in San Francisco who had a beautiful home, and I was working on this Liquid Canvas project for him. He had a nice view out of the front and back, but on the side, he was looking out at the side of his neighbor’s house. And that was my inspiration for LiquidView. Can we make a digital window to change this view? How can we transform this room?” said Braff, who used to work in a windowless office at a postproduction company in San Francisco.

When he started LiquidView, he wanted to create beautiful, picturesque stories on screen, but it started to take further shape and expand into other markets when the company teamed up with Stanford University to study its potential health benefits. A study by the university showed that LiquidView digital windows reduce stress, lower heart rates, calm the sympathetic system, enhance emotions and alter brain wave activity. Locally, they’re at the memory care sections of the Redwoods in Mill Valley, Rhoda Goldman Plaza in San Francisco and the Battery, a private club in San Francisco.

“As we expand our market and expand to other uses for LiquidView, we find different people getting different use out of it,” he said. “At Rhoda, they have a resident who loves seeing the seals in the LiquidView. When it goes to Sausalito, she comes every day to see the seals. I love that. I know people who have been in that type of care, and to have that kind of benefit, joy, calmness and stillness from it — that was something I never imagined.”

“I’m a creative,” he said. “I love the idea that we do something that looks and sounds great. As a human being who wants to make the world a better place, if we can do this with our windows, I feel fantastic about that.”

Kyle D. Ruth-Islas, chief executive officer of the Redwoods in Mill Valley, says the feedback has been positive about having LiquidView in its memory care wing.

“When I see it, I just want to pull up a chair and sit next to it. There’s something about it that makes me feel more comfortable and more at ease,” he said in a LiquidView video posted on social media. “It’s something that adds a new dynamic quality to the space where it’s currently installed. I’ve heard some folks say that the resident who’s living in the apartment across the way from it has the best view in the house.”

Braff never expected to be an entrepreneur. But he learned early on that sometimes to get what you want, you have to do it yourself.

While in Santa Barbara, Braff made a short film, “Jazz in the Classroom,” about an East Bay program that brought jazz musicians to school to inspire kids. Wanting to make a longer version of the film, which PBS agreed to air, he tried to get funding to do so — working as a temp, at a catering company on the weekends and a postproduction company in the meantime to get by.

“I couldn’t figure out how to raise money for this film. I started a production company and made films for companies. I wasn’t planning, like, oh, I want to start a company. It was just like, I can’t figure out how to raise money for the sequel to this film, but I think I could do films for other people, and then on the side, I’ll figure out how to raise the money for this other film, which I couldn’t do, because once I started the business, I needed to be successful, and I needed to spend all my time on it.”

He left the industry in search of something more fulfilling and started a nonprofit, the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which produces short films and other educational materials about the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

“I thought I would make a film about this, but then I realized the need was to tell their story, and then I thought I would start a nonprofit and raise money to interview these people while they were still alive,” he said. “I started that in 2000. I raised about $10 million for this nonprofit, and it taught me how to fundraise and it gave me some great relationships. I left that in 2015 as executive director to pursue other things.”

He said each step in his career has prepared him for the journey with LiquidView.

“I couldn’t do LiquidView without the ability to raise money and to hustle,” he said. “At Liquid Canvas, I did high-end video art, and LiquidView was combining things that I was very interested in. Everything I’ve done brought me here.”