For me, it all started with the movies.
As a child born in the late 70s, I grew up in the 80s and 90s…which showcased a world of expanding possibilities, stories that grew greater with visual spectacles. You know the names…Tron, Star Wars, Highlander, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park…and so many more. Every new release seemed to top the one before it, elevating the art form at the same time the tech advanced.
I saw the beauty that came in the combination of math and art. These were crafted worlds of imagination, technology, art, even spirituality. The idea of modeling photons whizzing by, bouncing around scenes until landing in virtual cameras held me and never let me go. I loved that mad geniuses brought together equal parts physics, computer science, and artistic insight to create greater worlds.
For me, the computers were never an end…but a means to an end. I loved that the power to create so many amazing things was no longer limited to folks working in high end computer facilities…nor a select few folks that operated in the studios…but that everyone could get access to this power.
I cut my teeth learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 at the tender age of 6. My family used to get Commodore magazine, with huge reams of code printed on its glossy pages. I spent many hours after school typing through these programs. So many times, the act was equal parts madness and masochism, since a single error would throw the whole thing off…but still, I persisted. The graphics at the time were nearly beyond primitive, laughable even by 8-bit standards…and yet…they were something that I was able to do…I started also poking around with games, coaxing some different levels in Lode Runner, amazed at the idea that creation was opening to everyone.
After my parents’ divorce, my mom and brothers and I ended up moving to Providence, Rhode Island…not quite a notably place for a lot of things…other than being the largest city in the smallest state, with one of the most belovedly corrupt mayors. It did, however, have Brown University…which plays in a bit later on…
In high school, I ended up getting a Commodore Amiga 500, which was a significant upgrade. One of the things that I loved about it was the RCA output video jack…now I was able to create graphics….and get it out to VHS tape. And so many of my school projects ended up having some kind of computer graphics with it…though mostly my English classes.
Yeah, that was high end back then.
Yet at the same time, computer graphics were starting to find their way into low cost media, especially television. Folks of my age might remember the Listerine commericals of the early 90s, where a bottle of the liquid went swinging through the trees with a Tarzan yell…made by a pre-Toy Story Pixar… And while Star Trek, the Next Generation might have been powered by the models and genius of ILM (a beloved company), I loved seeing what was happening with Babylon 5. Babylon 5 went all in with computer graphics, rendering all of its space scenes using (initially) a cluster of Amiga computers.
In my final year of high school, I and one of my closest friends wrote and shot a 2 hr sci-fi movie (a sequel to one we created in junior year)…which had a heavy requirement of space battles. The computer teacher (who had a connection with Brown University) got a copy of Caligari’s Truespace. While perhaps not a full featured as many of its high end contemporaries…for me, it felt like a revelation. Now I had the capability to model, animate, and render true 3D imagery. Notably…it only ran on PCs at the time…and I didn’t have one…so I ended up beg, borrowing, and stealing resources from all my friends to get the shots rendered. And, ultimately I got to go to Brown’s CG lab (which was on the other side of town, so I used all the busses as my friends) to both use some of their equipment, which allowed me to get the scenes (yep, you guessed it) onto VHS.
It took me a year to edit that movie, but, in the end…I had sci-fi masterpiece.
From there, I headed off to Boston University on scholarship (technically, I did get into Brown, but we couldn’t afford it). Comically, I had read the course catalog incorrectly, and ended up in Computer ****Engineering**** vs. Computer **Science** (which actually had the computer graphics courses…though I made up for that later on). It was one of the best mistakes I ever made, because the Engineering courses ended up taking me all the way down the rabbit hole. From there, I went ground up, learning first about EM, then Quantum physics to building transistors from PN junction diodes in order to create logic gates, then to create small computer systems, learning assembly, before finally ending up C/C++.
At that point, the language seemed positively high level. And yet…there was still going to be so much more to know. Along the way, I shot a few more movies, jumped into some plays, and learnt some improvisational comedy skills.
I stuck around BU for a few more years, deepening my knowledge around Computer Vision, Image/Video Processing, and (finally) Computer Graphics. I paid my way through grad school mostly as a Teaching Fellow and a Research Assistant. At the same time, I also picked up a consulting job, working for Spears, Leeds, and Kellogg (which got acquired by Goldman Sachs while I was there). No graphics this time, but I did get real world courses in databases (I somehow missed SQL in college) and file parsing (being a bit naive, I used Java when I probably should have used something like Perl…but I didn’t know Perl back then).
Admittedly, I was a bit listless in grad school and while I enjoyed the coursework, it was tough to finish off my Master’s Thesis (which became a Master’s Project)…I squeaked by at the end.
From there I took off to LA to pursue my dreams of working in the movie industry…admittedly, without a job….and via crashing at my cousin’s place (for way longer than was okay). In the interim, I picked up a number of odd jobs, working as an assistant for a marketing company to do some a bit of technical consulting at places. Then I finally landed at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.
ICT was known at that time for the place where Paul Debevec did a lot of seminal work, including a lot of stuff with Light Stage. ICT also was a place that did a lot of cool things for the military by providing training facilities (i.e. you don’t want to waste ammo on doing call for fire so that folks can get the basics down right).
Where I ended up was this little place called “FlatWorld”. The idea behind it was to send a UAV through a site to collect point cloud data, quickly craft a 3D environment, then project that environment onto a set of projector screens in order to let troops do a quick training through an area before they actually deployed. At the time, they wanted to transition from an open-source game engine (OGRE) to a commercial one (Gamebryo). I ended up first learning Gamebryo and then rewriting the whole system, which enabled better support for our artists at the time to export assets. I also made a rather questionable decision of making my own scripting language…which was far from my first or last mistake (in the end, someone later replaced it with Lua, which is really just as well).
At the same time, there was a fun “Virtual Soldier” project that we ended up getting roped into. The idea was to hook up a speech recognizer to a primitive AI to a graphics client with a virtual human whose mouth we could move with either synthetic or real audio (in each case, we could generate the phonemes for the audio and map those to visemes). I ended up writing first a toy version to show we could do it, then incorporating a higher quality version for presentation at the 2004 Army Science Conference. We projected it onto this specially treated piece of plastic that, when lit correctly, looked like a full size holographic image.
After being there for a little shy of a year and a half, my dreams for something more remained undimmed. I ended up getting an interview with DreamWorks Animation for their compositing group (my Master’s project focused on doing better compositing using stereo cameras). After going through the interview…I ended up **not** getting the job. When I asked them what was missing, they said I was okay, but not a slam dunk…and that I need to have production experience.
Now, at the time…I actually had done one more interview…for a game company…and had gotten an offer. When I asked DreamWorks if games would count as production experience, they said “yes”. After we hung up, I immediately called and accepted the offer from the game company.
You are probably asking, what was that game company? Insomniac Games.
Now, to give a little bit of context, it is important to know that I was pretty high flying in terms of academics (despite some difficulties in grad school) and had a couple of jobs under my belt where I was the hot shit. So my initial thoughts were that I was going to kick ass again.
My God, how wrong I was.
Insomniac Games whooped my ass and really taught me how much I did and didn’t know about programming. I was a bit embarrassed by how much **I didn’t** know and how much I had to get my head whacked a few times to get up to speed with folks. After doing a bit of work on the tools side of the equation, I ended up getting roped into doing game work for Insomniac’s last PS2 game, Ratchet:Deadlocked. I learnt how to deal with limited resources in a way I never had before, how to make thing fast, and efficient.
For the next game, ********Resistance:Fall of Man******** (PS3 launch title)…Insomniac wanted to integrate a third party solution (think of it as a pseudo Flash clone at the time) to make it easier for artists to create menus and get those in game quickly. I ended up integrating the solution with help into the game…and then creating more menus. The things I learnt about memory management, localization, and healthy hacks…well, they remained scarred in me for life.
Also, I got to know exactly how much I could push myself…turns out…pretty far. Even though the hours and days and weeks and months were long…I managed to keep pace with everyone else. I learnt a lot about what it takes to make something amazing. For someone who had been used to be “doing it all himself”, I had to finally admit that you get more done, faster, with a team that you can count on.
At the same time, one of the people I ended up working with was this one Brit…who was a genius when it came to programming and graphics. Even though I was pretty intimidated, I really wanted to learn from this guy. As it turned out, he was also a tea drinker (this was well before I got addicted to coffee) and he ended up sharing with me a tea that I had never experienced (PG Tips). We got to know each other a bit…and he taught me a lot, especially when it came to diving into the details, all the way down to the assembly level. And I was forever grateful that on his last day at the office, he dropped off his stash of tea to me.
That person? Rob Wyatt. He ended up moving out to Boulder, Colorado not too long after that, but I made sure to stay in touch with him.
After ****Resistance****, I saw that there was a tools opening back at DreamWorks Animation (as well as an opening at Pixar at the time) on their rendering team. I decided to take a shot again and applied. Two years later…I got in this time. Comically, on the day that I accepted the offer from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar decided to call and ask if I was interested…to which I said I was already taken…
I’ll never forget the first day that I passed through the gates of DreamWorks Animation. The studio was (and still is) beautiful, a palatial wonderland with gorgeous fountains. It was a place where dreams were made and I was excited to be a part of it. The people there were amazing and the environment made it fun.
I’ll admit…once again I got a bit of a lesson on the technology side…but not quite in the way you might expect. Working with tech that was designed for making movies was a different beast than making games, where you wanted to eek out every ounce of power from the machines. For movies, I learnt that flexibility, quality, and repeatability mattered more than speed (speed still mattered, but scaling tools to a large organization for cranking out movies mattered more).
As with most things, I started off with humility in my new position. For the first few weeks, I was focused on doing workflow upgrades for the main lighting tool (it was what I had been hired for). Of course, having cut my teeth in games and survived…I saw some opportunities to really make some strides. Very quickly, I was able to make a big difference on the nascent small scale distributed interactive rendering system.
The success of that project helped to accelerate the lighting production of Kung Fu Panda and future projects. That led to other core rendering projects, working on augmenting the deep shadow rendered, adding improvements to the stereo renderer (turns out that we could render both eyes together faster than one at a time), and a few other items.
But one thing really loomed…the fact of the matter was that our movies were getting bigger and the tools weren’t keeping up with the scale. For my part, I ended up doing a deep dive into understanding why lighters were spending more of their time doing file management than their actual art form. Looking back, I learnt a few lessons around practical solutions and perfection…of course, I didn’t know them yet…I had gotten a big head again.
Ultimately, Madagascar 2 ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back and the decision was made to make heavy investments into the revamping all the tools. For my part, despite believing that I was destined for another path, I got tapped to lead the effort to rewrite the lighting tools. I became the project’s tech lead and a colleague became its manager. Eighteen months into my career at DreamWorks I was set on a different path of individual contributor to a lead.
The team started as small but mighty as we embarked on not only rewriting the tools from scratch, but also recreating the workflow. Once again, any sense of arrogance that “I can do this better” got quickly challenged as the size of the problem space came upon me. It wasn’t just the technical challenges…there was the cultural challenge. Building a toolset was one thing…figuring out how best to solve the problems…and convincing dozens of people to change their workflow was quite another. I ended up spending as much time in meetings as I did any kind of technical development.
To be sure, I failed on this quite a few times. I got in over my head and believed I had to figure out every problem on my own. At the same time, the team scaled relatively quickly over the years, ultimately more than quadrupling in size. Learning how to balance out leadership with technical acumen proved difficult. So much of it depended on surrendering…giving up making a system to keep an eye on the whole. There were no perfect answers…I had to learn to give up on perfection for practicality.
There were many more lessons uncovered in those years, but it is enough to know that, once again, I took a lot of lumps over the course of them.
While still at DreamWorks, I ended up meeting the love of my life and married her (twice, actually, but that it is a story for another time). Around the same time, I ended up getting recruited heavily by Google.
At the time, everyone had heard about Google, its perks, the prestige, etc. Personally…I was really happy at DreamWorks…after all, one of the few things that Google **didn’t** do….was making movies. But…I’ll admit…everyone had also heard about how hard the Google interview process was…and…I was curious whether I could pass the bar. Yep, a bit more of that arrogance creeping back through…
After the fourth time the recruiter reached out, I responded. I managed to get past the phone screen and get my way over to the in-person. And while I really feel like I blew one of the six interviews…I managed to get an offer. And I said: “no.”
As I said earlier…I was still relatively happy at DreamWorks and my role. The job over at Google…just didn’t seem as interesting. That said, my project at DreamWorks was beginning to wane and the love I had was not quite as strong anymore. And my wife was pregnant with our first child (we got started right away). I didn’t have as strong a vision. I loved what we made…but the work wasn’t quite as fulfilling anymore.
I still said no to Google as couple of times more after that…until I eventually said yes (the story here involves a psychic and might be something for another time). After chatting with the recruiter a few times, I managed to secure a position over in Google Photos.
I started at Google on the same day as my daughter’s original due date. Admittedly, I really didn’t know what to think, but starting a new job at the same time as becoming a parent allowed me to reset some expectations for myself. Onward to Google Photos and making a mobile iOS photos editor!
When my daughter was born, I took four weeks of paternity time. When I got back…I found out that my project had been canceled. That is, it was probably going to be canceled. Maybe. An acquisition was taking place that couldn’t be revealed until October of that year…and it was still only July. When I asked what I should be doing…I got back the answer, “Well, just keep working on that project and we will figure it out later on.”
It felt weird to be working on a zombie project, but there wasn’t much other choice. Having jumped to Google, I was determined to see it through for a while. And I did…over the next three years, I saw the acquisition of Snapseed, got to visit them in Germany, work on Autoenhance on the backend, then realize it on both Android and iOS. Along the way, I managed to eek out a promotion, although the gauntlet for this felt more like the combination of an interview and a PhD thesis.
Slowly but surely, I started to question a lot for myself and my place there…at Insomniac and DreamWorks and even Spear, Leeds, and Kellogg…I understood what my role with respect to the underlying business was. At Google…I was a part of a fun project…but it was very clearly a cost center and I had a hard time connecting the dots to the underlying business model.
Around the time of my twins’ birth…it hit me…Google’s Search Ads business was a then infinite money pipe that fueled all of the other ventures. My connection to the business model didn’t exist because..there simply was no connection from my project; we were a cost center at the largess of the founders. My mind started to wonder about the day that was coming (because the day always comes) when the money pipeline wasn’t quite so infinite….what would happen to the cost centers then?
So my next mission was to try to create a monetization story around Photos. Now, you might think of me as just hungry for money; but I had discovered a great quote from the late Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money…we make money to make more movies.” It had clicked with me that if you want to do cool things, then you needed to figure out that economic engine to sustainably do those cool things (or else just do them as a hobby and not a business).
Longer story for another time, but…spoiler alert…I failed in making a dent in crafting a positive monetary story for Photos. Ultimately I ended up working on collaborative albums for the Google Photos Apps, but…my time was quickly coming to an end again.
LA had been good to me. I got to work in the movies, got to do a lot of improv comedy, meet a lot of friends, and, most importantly, marry my wife and have (then) three wonderful children. But now that I was no longer connected to the movie industry…staying there was a tough proposition. Rents were high, my commute was terrible, and it was expensive trying to raise a family there. So my wife and I started looking.
Then one day a friend at Google in a similar position said, “Hey, you should check out Boulder, Colorado.” My initial instinct to this was, “that’s crazy, me in Colorado?” Some research that night, however, showcased how amazing Colorado was. And Google had an office there and some interesting projects.
And as fate would have it…my buddy Rob was there…we had kept in sporadic contact over the years.
So I transferred over to Google Boulder to start a new journey, buying a house “way out in the boonies” according to folks in Boulder (1/2 an hour away). Wanting to get closer to the money sectors of Google, I transferred onto the Payments team, which was responsible for the internal tooling for handling Google’s business around the world.
In the midst of this new group, I saw a new opportunity…why not make these external tools for a multi-billion dollar business? If we needed to handle Payments for the world, surely we could do this at scale. Spoiler alert: this idea **also** went nowhere. There still was then no appetite for really trying to turn some of the cost centers into cash flow positive business centers.
After getting through a massive project on Payments, I hopped over to an Ads research group, which wanted to get into receipt scanning. The opportunity took me back to my roots in image processing and reconnected me with mobile development. After playing around with some text detection and GPU acceleration, I built a pretty decent system for scanning text. Of course, this never got to see the light of day.
At this stage, I was a bit frustrated with the lack of movement at Google and my **many** failed attempts at something new and (gasp) driving monetary value. Now, one person I had worked with at Payments had become the CTO over a Major League Baseball and had started an office in Boulder. Although I’ll admit that I was never much of a sports fan…the opportunity sounded really fun…doing Augmented Reality at baseball parks. So I said goodbye to Google and made my way over to MLB.
It is worth pointing out that, more often than not, within a short time after landing at a company…the job changed pretty dramatically. It happened on Wall Street, at Insomiac, DreamWorks, Google. And yes, you’ve probably guessed it…it happened at MLB as well.
2018 was the year that the US Supreme Court vacated the federal law that criminalized sports gambling at the federal level…turning this into a state issue…and every sports league decided they needed to get in on the action, at least to regulate it. MLB was no different; I ended up getting an opportunity to start a new team and app at MLB…basically trying to be a gambling app…without being a gambling app (the laws here are delicate and are further constrained by the app store regulations.)
So once again I went from being an IC to a team lead…and more so, a lead and manager…and for a while…the product owner as well. No one had a clue as to how to actually build this thing especially while staying within the law. With many trips to New York, a couple of trips to Las Vegas, hiring a product owner, getting an app up and running…we got something interesting put together. Nowhere near perfect, but something that started to feel real.
Once again…so many lessons learnt along the way. Most importantly, I started to think through the connections between the business needs, what product wants, and how engineering actually goes about making it happen.
(I tried to keep the baseball AR dream alive…even tried to get MLB to hire Rob for this…but that didn’t pan out as I wanted…)
At that time my wife had become pregnant with our fourth and final child. Around this point, I was having lunch with folks back at Google, who had said that Google Drive was starting to take P&L seriously…and were looking for an engineering manager. So I decided to give Google one more try and landed back there in late 2019.
My final child was born in January 2020. I was on paternity leave for the next six weeks…and went I got back…well, there wasn’t very much time between that and mid-March 2020. And we all know what happened in mid-March.
Within a scant period of time, I went from returning to Google to suddenly becoming a manager during work-from-home in the midst of a global pandemic. And with a team now of eighteen reports…the next couple of years proved to be challenging.
In that time, I used my spreadsheet skills to predict migration timelines, attended constant meetings to keep projects on track, learned how to say no with grace, and really start to develop some practical understandings of cost vs. value. Over time, that transformed into a larger way of looking at the projects that I had worked on over the years…and I started questioning a lot of what we were doing.
After a couple of years, I wanted to try something new…possibly doing a startup. I had a very brief brush with one before deciding to try one more team at Google. A colleague of mine had decided to join the Risk team at Google and they courted me heavily to join them. After having effectively interviewed with them (and saying no a couple of times), I swapped over to the new team.
Risk was a lot of fun and the most receptive audience I had for my ideas around money and value. It took a little while (and didn’t happen until after I had left)…but they managed to figure it out…
Now, by this point in the story, you are probably wondering, “but whatever happened to working in the movies?” And you would have raised a good point…a lot of this stuff feels like…off track? Certainly is a good example of what happens when a person gets off a focused path and starts to explore, rather uninhibited. While I’ve not been working with images up to this point, I inadvertently had gotten a massive course (without a degree) in thinking through problems at a business level, managing folks, and learning how to focus projects in a principled fashion.
But I still yearned for something closer to media again. My heart still felt like I wasn’t in the right spot. Around that time, Twitch (the game streaming service) came out of the woodwork and courted me, to manage a small team there. The focus was around analytics, attempting to showcase to streamers how well they were doing and (hopefully) point the way to doing even beter. Additionally, I had hopes that my approaches around creating sustainable businesses in tech would find purchase at Twitch…
Joining Twitch in October of 2022, what I discovered was…most of Big Tech was really the same. Oh, to be sure, I found the overall culture at Twitch to be closer to the kind of excitement, kindness, and reduction of egos that I had experienced earlier in my career. But…the same kind of resistances to talk about the economics of the business and the same kind of affinity for promotion culture remained.
Suffice it say….this discovery was a bit of a sobering experience…and cemented the larger problems that exist in the Big Tech sector.
In early 2023, despite numerous assurances that hiring had been kept to a minimum, layoffs happened just the same. News broke in an official blog post due to a miscommunication with the CEO of Amazon…leading to a very strenuous week. This week was an emotional rollercoaster; while previously I had thought a lot about this as a possibility, the stark reality of a layoff became apparent. I knew something had to change.
Much to my surprise…I survived the layoffs (that round, anyway). With 20% of the company laid off at that time, I didn’t really expect to survive given the “last in, first out principle.”
While I went back to work as a manager, Rob and I started to lay down plans and actions for what would become the consulting business (including the podcast and blog for Tricky Bits).
For Twitch, the 2023 layoffs had created a very concrete understanding for my rhetoric around making the business solvent. My team started to think about it, too. It would be a great story to tell that over the course of the rest of the year, we were able to refocus on profitability and saved the day.
Well, that didn’t happen.
On Tuesday January 9th, 2024, in the midst of 1:1s with my reports where I was asking “What do you want 2024 to look like?”, a news article started to make the rounds…that Twitch was going to be doing another round of layoffs, starting at early as Wednesday (i.e. the next day). I convened my team for a meeting to try to bring up their spirits…but there was nothing for us to do but wait.
And then…the next day…the axe fell. For about 30 seconds, I felt bad. Getting laid off was a dread that had haunted me my entire life. I had feared losing it all. I had feared losing my family. I had feared never being able to work again.
In reality, my family was incredibly supportive of what happened. And the dread that I had once felt transformed into relief…having spent over a decade in Big Tech, the compromises to my soul could now be shed.
And on that day, I got to pivot completely into MCTO and Tricky Bits…and see where this adventure could go.
To be sure…I expect there still to be ups and downs…but looking back at the person that I had become within the morass that is now Big Tech…I vowed never to let the trappings and sophistry invade my life again.
More importantly…I vowed to reach back in time to the dreams of that young kid who loved movies, games, media…and see where we can take the realms of imagination again. Where tech is fun again, sustained not by false promises of growth and ads, but realigning oureslves back to value exchange, where we once again respect each other’s time, energy, talent, and dedication.
So here we go.