First Pivot: Personal Tool to Industry Standard
- 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.
