On Time
Why it’s important to keep talking about a “25 Year Plan”
Pixar spends 6 years making a feature film. The first 3 years are spent getting the story right, the next 3 years on building out the animations.
An animated film, surely, could be made in 4 years instead but it would surely not be at Pixar’s level of quality. Pixar is not the only movie studio making animated films but it does appear to be the one most focused on quality. This premium on quality is sometimes called design. Good design happens when the details are done right and getting the details right is extremely time intensive (this is why good design is so rare: not because it is complicated but because it is hard and takes more time, i.e. more money).
Attention to Detail
If you haven’t seen this short video of BMW’s sound engineer team (they work on the car’s stereo and speakers but also the seatbelt indicator dings, engine sounds, etc.) it’s worth a watch …
I do not have experience building a BMW or Pixar brand but the next best thing I can do is devour as much knowledge as I possibly can about these companies and their origins.
Over the course of the past 5 years or so I have read every book I can find, watched every video, and read as many articles as possible about a handful of companies. Pixar & Apple mostly. I’m working through Disney right now, starting with a dense biography of Walt Disney’s life.
Walt Disney starting making films in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full length animated film ever. The Disney Studio lost money on their first few films not because they weren’t popular (Snow White was beloved around the world) but because they cost so much money to make. The first few Disney films are the ones we still talk about and still adore: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Dumbo (all made between 1937–42).
What made Disney films so expensive was the amount of animators & storytellers working on them. There was certainly significant additional cost in new equipment, studio space and so on but most of the work of an animated film was done tediously by hand.
Pixar, a modern film studio inspired by Disney’s, looks at projects through the lens of the number of “person-weeks” it will take to complete a project. This is unique. Most companies look through the lens of how much money it will cost to complete a project, and then adjust the person-weeks accordingly. Pixar seems to do the exact opposite.
Very few investors seem interested in playing the long game. Why? They want their money back quicker. And I want to give it back to them quicker. But I won’t sacrifice that for the bigger brand. I simply want investors to be prepared to be very patient. This company is one of the rare ones that will not sacrifice quality for money. Instead we’ll leverage capital as a powerful tool to help us make better products, not the other way around.
I keep talking this way and telling people this and I know that it is becoming annoying and tiring. I need to communicate better, we all do.
It’s just important that any potential partner understand that Blue Seat is a contrarian company in many ways. This means the way we want to operate will be truly different & new compared to most companies (See: Peter Thiel’s concept of Zero to One). The word contrarian means: opposing or rejecting popular opinion; going against current practice. These contrarian qualities of ours are hard to understand, even for us. It’s like walking into a party and knowing that you are different from everyone else but not sure why and feeling a little bit insecure about it. We’ve been wrestling with these things for going on 3 years now. It is the nature of a contrarian.
One contrarian statement:
Blue Seat is a design company.
Having design as an important aspect of a business is not contrarian but being a design company is. The reason: there are different rules for a design company.
- Product over profits.
- We will fail unless we invest equal resources into customer development (sales, marketing, branding) as we do into product development.
Most companies:
- Profits over all.
- Regarding product & customer development most have an imbalance, illustrated here …
In order to change society and make an enormous impact on the future (Steve Jobs called this “putting a dent in the universe”) you have to play the long game. You have to play the long game because you realize that it will take an enormous effort and you have to be prepared to persist through the short term for that bigger prize on the other side of a massive time investment.
A Note about Blue Seat
An eventual Blue Seat Inc. IPO? We actually think and talk about this a lot. I love the idea of being the first modern tech company IPO in Cincinnati, especially as a baseball tech company. To note: I am more than happy to see another great tech company go public in Cincy in the meantime. It would be a great thing for this city.
That is the endgame for me. Or something like that. It’s a long-term commitment to making a dent in baseball. Baseball is a huge industry in this country and it’s going to take a massive, longer-term commitment to change the course of it. But it’s the perfect time to do so (we are in the very beginning of the “mobile era”) and I want that baseball tech revolution to begin right here in this city. Blue Seat will become one of the best companies in Cincinnati and the preeminient modern baseball tech company in the world.
It just might take 25 years or so to get there. But it also might only take 9 or 10. We won’t know until we do it. One way to ensure it never happens is to never give it a shot.
-Chris
