Come Back in 10 Years

I had just left Wavefront. This was early 2002.

I didn't have a plan. Didn't have a product. Hadn't met Kymberlee yet. No introNetworks on the horizon. Not even a whiteboard sketch of what was next.

I was wandering, really. But when your brain runs on systems and visual metaphors, it doesn't exactly sit still. Even when you want it to.

So when I ended up at a wildlife film festival here in Santa Barbara, I wasn't expecting it to become a scene I'd still be thinking about more than two decades later.

That's where I ran into my good friend Mike deGruy, whom I'd met a few years earlier at an organization I co-founded called SCAMP, The South Coast Alliance of Media Professionals.

Seems prescient that now I'm co-founder of another Alliance: Coastal Intelligence, The South Coast AI Collective.

The Brightest Light

Mike was a gem. Cinematographer. Ocean explorer. Wild man with a camera. He'd worked with all the big names, including James Cameron, but he was just Mike to me. Curious. Fast-talking. Brilliant.

Mike was always the brightest light in a room. Nothing stopped him, and his endless optimism and love of life probably became a big part of my energy in tackling what came next.

We'd talk for hours as he explained, from his point of view, what was wrong in his industry. And excitedly, I'd offer ideas for solutions, which we'd riff on together.

Mike didn't see challenges. They were all opportunities.

We all have a Mike in our lives, or we should. Too bad he passed away so soon, but it was doing what he loved, on a shoot with James Cameron.

The Problem That Wouldn't Sit Still

We got to talking about what it's like being out in the wild, trying to film that perfect moment.

An eagle is grabbing a fish. A leopard stalking a gazelle. That kind of thing.

The teams might wait a week for one clean shot. Maybe longer. They'd shoot tremendous amounts of film or video to capture that one perfect interaction between animals. Mike explained this with the kind of detail that only comes from twenty-plus years in the field.

But the real problem, he said, wasn't the camera work.

It was the headquarters.

Picture this: hundreds of crews scattered across the globe. Patagonia. The Amazon. The Serengeti.

Limited communications. No real-time visibility. Remember, this was 2002, no iPhones, barely any internet, and if you were lucky enough to have a cell phone, it was a flip phone.

You might have a half-dozen producers sitting in a conference room in Washington D.C., and someone asks, "How's the Patagonia shoot going?"

And nobody really knew.

It was paper. Phone calls. Gaps.

These teams had variables breeding more variables:

• Delays • Rain• Equipment failures • Political unrest • Budget overruns • People getting sick

Even if they wanted to report back in real time, they couldn't.

And I thought: That's a systems problem. That's my kind of problem.

And that's when it hit me. I could see it. Not just the problem, but the solution. It was right there, floating in my mind like a piece of art that could come alive.

If You Can Dream It...

Because I'm a systems thinker, and I'd been trained at Wavefront to believe that anything was possible, I remember seeing Walt Disney's quote over the entry at Disney Imagineering:

"If you can dream it, we can build it."

That's how I feel about life in general.

So I had this idea: what if you could see everything on a single screen?

A giant digital canvas in the executive producer's office. Something beautiful. Something interactive. Something useful.

In my mind, it looked like a Mondrian painting. You know, white background, colored squares of different sizes. Red, yellow, green. If you're not familiar with Mondrian's style, there's a hotel on Sunset Boulevard called the Mondrian that had artwork inspired by his approach covering the building.

I was fascinated by how the metaphor of size and color could easily be mapped to real data. Mondrian never actually used green in his early career. I was influenced by his approach, not copying it exactly. What mattered was being able to touch what was actually the top of a long rectangle and interact with it.

The Vision

Each square represented a field team:

• Big square? Big budget • Small square? Smaller operation• Red square? Behind schedule or over budget • Green? Smooth sailing • Yellow? On the edge, maybe in danger • White? Neutral, everything is normal

But here's where it got interesting.

Touch a square, and the whole painting tips sideways like a trapdoor. Suddenly, you're looking at what were really the