Where it started
A hundred hours of footage. Ninety minutes of story.
I came up in documentary film. I loved the storytelling, and I loved the technical side even more: the database management, the editing, the post-production.
The job was building a story out of a chorus of voices. We'd shoot 100 hours and cut it to somewhere between 10 and 90 minutes. Most of the work is understanding the story well enough to know what to leave out.
A lot of those voices belonged to scientists and inventors. Brilliant people, deep in the lab, who needed help telling their story when it came time to market and sell what they'd built.
Each square is an hour of footage.
Then I kept going
Every answer opened the next question.
Learning to sell something properly means learning how it works. Learning how it works means seeing how it could be better. Follow the chain.
The honest part
Constraints breed creativity.
None of this happened with a big team behind it. It was a very small group, and I relied on every person in it. I wasn't handing out assignments and reviewing them. Most of it fell on me. That's where I did my best work.
- No grant money.We didn't have the luxury of funded R&D. Every build had to justify itself.
- No bench to check the work.No department of engineers to validate each decision. If I didn't understand the code, nobody would.
- Doing, not delegating.Building and leading, yes. But leading from inside the work, not above it.
What happened next
Tell the story well and people show up.
At HNO I was just telling the story of what we were building. It turned out to be the thing that moved everything else.
- People wanted to join.Engineers and partners wanted to build with us.
- Customers asked for things.They came to us with what they needed built.
- Investors came in.We helped raise the money to build it.
Why I keep doing it
Maybe I'm a hopeless altruist. I still think the work should leave things better than it found them.
The people I filmed built things that solved big problems at scale. That's still the bar. The difference now is that I get to work on the build, not just the story about it.