• I started by solving technical problems right in front of me.
• Those solutions turned into products used in film, gaming, and enterprise commerce.
• The biggest wins came from following market pull, not protecting my original vision.

• Fluid simulations took days, so I built a distributed scheduler to use idle machines around the office.
• The studio had a bigger pain: unreliable render management on a 60-machine farm.
• We repurposed the same core idea into Deadline, a robust render manager built for reliability.
• Blizzard became an early external customer, and the product later spread across hundreds of major productions.
• Deadline was eventually acquired by Amazon.

• In 2012, I bet on browser-based 3D editing with Clara.io.
• The vision was compelling: cloud-native, collaborative 3D creation on any device.
• We launched to strong enthusiasm, grew to more than 100,000 users, and attracted respected investors.
• But students and hobbyists loved it more than professionals, and they were not the buyers who could sustain the business.

Traction proved the idea was interesting. It did not prove we had product-market fit.

• Steelcase asked whether our web-based 3D technology could power product visualization online.
• For creative professionals, browser delivery was a limitation.
• For configurable commerce, browser delivery was exactly the point.
• The same core technology suddenly fit a higher-value, enterprise problem.
• That became the path to Threekit.

• Once we had real enterprise pull, a new bottleneck appeared: me.
• I knew product and technology, but not systematic enterprise sales, fundraising at scale, or rapid operational growth.
• In 2018, we brought in an experienced operator who had already won in this market.
• With a stronger leadership team, Threekit raised $65M, grew from roughly 20 to 100+ employees, and achieved strong revenue growth.

The best technology does not always win. The best overall company usually does.