About me

I am Siddharth Khushalani. Online I go by Sidd, or TGSIDD, which started as a handle and stuck.

I build agencies in short-form video and media. I started at fourteen with editing work for people who needed clips faster than they could make them, and that turned into a company, and then into several.

What I build

VALORAE is the group. Under it sit three things I run directly.

VALORAE Arc is a clipping agency. Podcasters and founders send us long-form recordings and we cut the moments worth watching into vertical short-form, caption them, and distribute them. The whole job is judgement about which forty seconds of a ninety-minute conversation a stranger would stop for. Everything else is production.

VALORAE Media is a video-first social media management agency. The distinction I keep drawing is that it is not an editing service. An editing service hands you files. Media owns the page: what gets made, how it is titled and packaged, when it goes up, and what happened after. If nothing posts on Thursday, that is our problem, not yours.

VALORAE Cast is a community for editors and clippers. It teaches both crafts in the open and posts paid work to members who have shown they can do it. It exists because the hardest part of running the agencies was finding people who could deliver to a standard, and the hardest part of being a new editor is getting the first paid job. Cast sits in the middle of both problems.

Alongside those is one alias agency with its own team and its own site. NovaTechRay works on getting businesses named inside AI answers, which is a field full of folklore that I find more interesting to do honestly than most people find it to sell.

A couple more things are early enough that they do not have names worth publishing yet.

Why separate brands

People ask this a lot, usually with the implication that one big brand would be simpler.

It would be simpler for me. It would be worse for the customer. A podcaster buying clips, a founder buying a managed page, and a nineteen-year-old editor looking for a first client are not the same person, do not want the same promise, and do not respond to the same voice. Putting all three on one site produces a page that is vague to everyone.

So each brand says one thing plainly. Underneath, a lot of the same people and the same systems do the work, and Cast feeds editors into Arc and Media as they get good.

What I believe about the work

Output over potential. I would rather show you something I made than describe something I could make. That is why the agency sites lead with work rather than with story, and why this site has a writing section rather than a manifesto.

Builds, not decks. Most of what I have learned came from shipping something too early and fixing it in public. Very little came from planning.

Be plain about money and rules. Clipping and editing are both fields where the people doing the work get exploited by vagueness. Rates, contracts, who owns what, when payment happens. Writing that down clearly is a large part of what the Cast community is for.

What this site is for

The writing here is working notes. Pricing, hiring, contracts, what breaks when an agency grows, the legal wall you hit when you start before you are old enough to sign things. I write it while it is still happening rather than afterwards, which means some of it will turn out to be wrong, and I would rather be corrected than polished.

If you are building something similar and want to compare notes, the door is open. If you want work done, each agency's site has a booking link that goes to the person who will handle it.

The profiles in the footer are mine, and I read them.