Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

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I used to work at Blackmagic, wrote some of the peripheral code around BRAW and did some work with the Resolve guys up in Singapore.

Used to have lunch regularly with one of the owners too. Need to check in with him again!

At least back in 2019, BMD made a lot of money selling professional licences for DaVinci Resolve. I don't know exact figures but that part of the business was healthily profitable of its own accord. Very, very healthily profitable!

Most parts of the business were profitable standalone, AFAIK. Their model didn't revolve around loss leaders, burning VC money or anything like that; just selling good products at fair prices and making bank.

I think a big part of it was a fairly lean culture (whole company was bootstrapped and grown sustainably), and specifically in the case of DaVinci they bought out an existing business that had already done a lot of the development and marketing work for absolute peanuts.

Very smart team doing good work.

I'm just a satisfied customer (Resolve and hardware), but it probably helps that it's a private company run by a cofounder CEO that seems to both understand and care about the company, its products, and their market.

From an outside perspective, "selling good products at fair prices and making bank" sounds about right for the hardware, but I always assumed the Resolve software itself was, if not a loss loss-leader, also not a major profit center.

Then again, there's something to be said for volume, especially in a market that includes lots of independent operators and dedicated amateurs worldwide who are willing to spend what good money they have on their craft.

Were you there when BM produced the macOS compatible eGPU units in collaboration with Apple?

Yep, I don't remember a whole lot about them though.

(Actually, anyone else from BMD here? Was that the product that the Industrial Designers won second place in the design awards for, losing out to the accessible playground?)

I didn't work at BMD but worked for a cine distributor supplying lenses to be tested. But yes, lean clean company that works well.

Idk it was a great, super underrated product.

I’m an avid user of Fairlight for almost a decade now. The accelerator card has an interesting history (as does Fairlight).

Do you have a link to learn more about that history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_(company)

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