My Peter Jackson Moment
Today the announcement of the acquisition, by Adobe, of my company Allegorithmic, has been made¹.
Today I feel I am having a Peter Jackson moment.
The director, after starting his career with cult, gore flicks like Bad Taste and Braindead, shot in New Zealand with very limited budgets², became recognized enough to be handed the keys to a mega project the entire world had been looking forward to: bringing the Lord of The Rings trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien, to the big screen. The rest is history but the similarity (in relative proportions of course!) in this shift in dimension for both the director and the original books, is striking and illustrates how I feel today:
Today, I have been given the opportunity to lead Adobe’s 3D initiatives, and to help take them to the next level.
After having developed Allegorithmic, the adventure I started 17 years ago³, and its ‘Substance’ product range (cult-enough in our niche market of 3D texturing), my team and I have been recognized as capable- and inspiring-enough to help grow a rather new initiative for Adobe, and to bring the world’s most awesome 2D creative tools company full steam into a new dimension.
In order to do this, Adobe is building an expanded team to focus on the incredible opportunities in 3D and immersive design, and is offering me to become Vice President, 3D & Immersive, reporting to author / entrepreneur / investor / executive Scott Belsky⁴, Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud at Adobe.
I am not sure how Peter Jackson felt on that famous day he was confirmed as the future director of Lord of the Rings (even though not everything was decided and set up in one single day, obviously), but my feelings today are a strange mix of “Is this real?”, of “I feel sad that this is the end of the Allegorithmic story”, of “I am scared as frack”, and of “This is incredible, I feel so energized and honored. Let’s start writing this new book!”
“Is this real?”
Adobe is a company I have admired my whole life, and if somebody had told me 17 years ago, when I launched the Allegorithmic adventure, “Seb, the company you are starting now, the team you will gather, the products you will all create, will one day be recognized by Adobe (yes, THE Adobe), so much so that they will come knocking at your door and ask you to lead their 3D initiative for them”… I would have coughed and laughed, I guess. In my own New Zealand — in Auvergne, France, a quite rural and remote place in France where I grew up — I was only envisioning us building ‘cool software for artists’, not quite this kind of outcome.
But yes, in fact, this is what we are talking about, for real. Adobe is bringing Allegorithmic on board so that we can, along with the incredible talent at Adobe which has already been working on 3D projects and research, invent the next generation of 3D creative tools, with Substance as a flagship product, but also combining Adobe’s own current 3D initiatives like Adobe Dimension, and more. The synergies between Adobe and Allegorithmic when it comes to technology, user experience, products, know-hows, marketing, distribution and communication forces are enormous. I can’t wait to make these synergies a reality and present to the world what we have in the backlog.
“I feel sad that this is the end of the Allegorithmic story”
I guess this is only natural and that, with time, this feeling will transform into positive nostalgia and pride, but today I must admit that there is a bit of sadness in the air. Allegorithmic has been with me for 17 years and it was great: the greatest adventure I’ve been involved in (parenting aside :) ). Tough at times, messy in the middle, harsh on the edges, exhilarating, crazy, and everything in between — but overall, it was simply great.
While I am closing ‘book one’ of Allegorithmic, the team, the products, the community of users, the creations made with our products, all that has been awesome and will stay.
At Adobe, what will not change is our passion for making great products, our attachment to our core values, our respect and care for our customers, an absolute focus on quality and support, and the high standards we strive for. All of the values I see in Adobe, in fact.
At Adobe, the Allegorithmic DNA and values will be in the seeds we are planting to give life to that new initiative. We will make sure we grow a beautiful tree out of it.
“I am scared as frack”
Oh yes, I am! Who wouldn’t be? The ambition of the project, the level of trust Adobe is putting in us and in me personally, the complexity of our world, the speed at which things are evolving and at which 3D is becoming a true medium, all the new ways to experience virtual worlds, the potential scale of the ‘new web’ (as some people like to label AR) — all of these elements and more make for a ridiculously gigantic challenge. Also, the fact that I will have a boss for the first time, that we’re switching from a 140-strong team to a family of 21,000: this is all very exciting, full of unknowns and opportunities, and like all changes in life, a bit scary at first. Still, I am definitely willing to take the plunge and the risk.
First, the people I met at Adobe are all passionate and great to work with. Having them as investors for two years has only confirmed that. The top execs are also exceptional, passionate and open. Scott Belsky, who I mentioned earlier, is really inspiring, and I am grateful I will have him as my boss because, a rebel at heart, I have a hard time listening to people I don’t respect, or who I don’t feel inspired by. I am 100% confident here.
Then, Adobe is famous for knowing how to turn acquisitions into successes. They don’t acquire to destroy, denature products and teams or lock markets. We can see what they have done with some of their acquisitions in the past, with After Effects, Behance or… Photoshop. A lot of founders remain long after the integrations are completed, sometimes leaving but coming back (this says a lot about Adobe). Adobe likes to embrace new companies and their cultures to help improve and evolve Adobe’s culture as a whole. We have our own culture, which I am particularly proud of, and I am definitely willing to push it and mix it with that of Adobe.
Finally, when you think about it, Adobe is the only software company in our field developing tools for digital creatives like us, tools that are platform and pipeline agnostic as our tools are, that has millions of users for its products (like us… soon! :) ), and that is so close to our DNA.
Adobe is the best possible option for Allegorithmic, for Substance, and for its users.
“This is incredible, I feel so energized and honored. Let’s start writing this new book!”
Adobe is the best possible option for Allegorithmic to keep up with its mission of transforming the landscape of digital artistry. Our fundamental mission of creating tools for artists, helping them reach new frontiers in their creative endeavors, can only be strengthened with Adobe. We want to invent the next camera obscura for 3D artists and immersive experience builders. We want to keep being blown away discovering the creations of our community.
So this is it. This is how I feel today: closing book one of Allegorithmic, starting to write book two, facing the biggest challenge of my life (again, parenting aside :) ). The theme of this new book is the same, only with a larger ambition. We will keep evolving and changing, struggling and succeeding as we have over the past 15 years, only with a new logo. I have absolute trust in my team and Adobe to make of this opportunity something special.
Now, if you’re in for a new challenge, ping us — we’re hiring ;)
¹ See this blog post from Allegorithmic, a PR from Adobe, and Scott Belsky’s blog post.
² “Bad Taste” was shot for US$ 11,000, over a span of four years!
³ I decided to create a company, for which I would come up with the name ‘Allegorithmic’, on December 22, 2001, the very day after I defended my Ph.D. thesis, about a mathematical model for stochastic, self-similar processes called ‘td-MAP’, that would later be implemented as the ‘FX-Maps’ in Substance Designer.
⁴ The founder of Behance, the largest community and portfolio platform dedicated to digital artists, acquired by Adobe in 2012, Scott is also the author of great books like ‘The Messy Middle, Finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture’.
⁵ ‘Allegorithmic’ is the combination of ‘Allegoric’ and ‘Algorithmic’, the meeting of two somewhat opposed ideas, combined into one. The initial logo, that later evolved into more of a bird, is both a bird (evoking the ‘allegoric’ side) and pi (enforcing the ‘algorithmic’ side). The logo was designed by Julien Benassi, son of my PhD advisor and scientific mentor, mathematician Albert Benassi.
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