Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious" startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness, they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.)

> Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel.

Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire (not Apple, as most people assume). How often does Steve Jobs invest in companies? Virtually never. But he knew (correctly) that Pixar was on to something.

I'm dealing with the Pixar bootstrap-problem at my own company, Fohr. Fohr is the live-action version of Pixar (photography, not animation, is what gets computerized), and requires $32 million in capital to do the process today on a feature film (well over half of that is for hardware - $2 million alone for electricity!).

Fohr is only constrained by capital – the R&D has already been done (it took nearly 13 years to develop the tech) – so you'd think Fohr would be ripe for funding. And you'd be dead wrong. There are no Steve Jobs left to pay for it.

The startup world today seems to only want tech innovation on the cheap, and that includes Paul Graham and all the rest.

So if I wanted to do PixActing like I wanted to breathe, my five year plan would be a) get VC funded for anything, b) achieve a modestly successful exit, and then c) recruit one similarly situated person and just shake the money tree. Without making disparaging comments about identifiable businesses, it is not a controversial observation that proven entrepreneurs with existing networks have vastly superior access to capital compared to first-time entrepreneurs with no network, independent of idea quality, target market, or execution ability.

$40 million is not a number that is unachievable in 2012. The password is just a bit different than for $200k, $700k, or $5 million.

I'm basically doing that, actually. Fohr has ridiculous technology, and I'm parting it out (feels like chopping a car) as you describe.

I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets cheaper and my own net worth goes up.

18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is on my side.

Pixar did it for 16 years (1979-1995) before they released a movie.

1986-1995 is a bit closer, I think; from 1979-1986 they were in effect an R&D division of Lucasfilm, and it wasn't their job to even think about making films. They were supposed to develop new tech and do special-effects in films, which they did do for quite a few prominent films.

btw, Fohr looks really cool. However, the pull quote at angel.co/fohr is a little unfortunate:

  “Our dream of building a Pixar for films that are
  photographed is just weeks away from being realized.”

  (Posted 4 months ago)

A good laugh.

Thanks, I've updated AngelLest with the latest news:

> Pre-production continues on the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia, and production begins on June 1, 2012 in Los Angeles.

At the time, we were very close to going through with a deal. (Obviously, that fell through.)

It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to (what became) Pixar:

http://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-19...

> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.

> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.

So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.

You're right that VCs tend to be leery of the most ambitious ideas. That's another of the obstacles in your way if you pick one. But you shouldn't let your ambitions be limited by what VCs will fund.

(In any case you can trick them by only telling them about the initial few steps.)

Looks pretty interesting but I find myself having to guess what you're doing. It's important to be concise and reference things people already know ("Pixar") when you want to convey information quickly, but it's unclear what the value of the technology is in the 2 paragraphs I could find written about it. Everyone knows "Pixar" by name but I'm struggling to understand what you're doing. Is it animation software that maps photographs to the virtual world and renders it "almost-real"?

Please see my reply to @ricardobeat in the parent post.

Part of the issue is that Fohr has two sources of funding. One source is for the technical side of the company, which I expected tech funding to pay for. The stuff on AngleList is basically only about that.

The other source is film funding for the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia. I have a completely different talk for that, which is more about how the tech is actually used to make a live-action film.

Point is, AngleList is only a small (but expensive) part of the story.

It's likely that even Steve Jobs would not have invested in Pixar if he knew how much it was going to cost to make it successful. He originally put up $10 million ($5 million for Lucas and $5 million to finance it). It became a money pit that either pride or faith compelled him to keep funding.

Sand Hill Road is just one source of money and money is the most fungible representation of wealth, so if they won't help you, go to somebody for whom 32 million is chump change or who are used to pay way more for a movie. Hollywood way be more receptive to your ideas (making a block buster isn't cheap and there is always a risk, so they should be used to taking them).

I'm curious. How does that work? You transform the film action into 3D and can then manipulate the animation?

The video on AngelList looks like just a rendering demo, and I can't find any other references.

See: http://erichocean.com/fohr/index.html for more info on how the tech works.

Filmmaking is a technical and artistic discipline, and only the films themselves are sold to a mass audience, so my pitch really only makes sense (and is tailored to) those in the industry.

Thanks for the link, that clears it up nicely. Maybe the video could explore the production workflow a bit more, it looked like a simple tech demo to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com