Next week will be a very special one for me. After seven years of hard work, I will take my first complete 1-month break, I will turn 41, and most of all, my first child will be born. As you can guess, it will be a massive shift for me.
I know you're not here to listen to my concerns, but this new step in my life is an opportunity to pause and reflect on what we did with CGWire and where we are heading.
First and foremost, for the first time, the project will grow by itself. Our team and I bootstrapped the project. So I can safely let it live on its own while I'm doing my parental leave. CGWire, led by Gwénaëlle Dupré, will continue to fulfill our mission.
But now, the question is, why build a resilient organization? What do we aim at? To understand our goals, let me first introduce you to five organizations that you may have heard about:
Miyu (France): They do auteur animation movies. They won the Annecy Cristal Award for the best animation movie and the Palme d'Or for the best short film at Cannes. They have elevated animation to the rank of art.
Blender Foundation (Netherlands): They build Blender, a Free software to do high-end 3D in any form. They are used by artists all over the world. Their goal is to bring anyone the freedom to create.
El Reino Infantil (Argentina) They built the Hispanic YouTube channel with the most subscribers. They bring joyful and educative content through music videos to Spanish-speaking children worldwide.
Yuga Labs (United States): They manage the most famous NFT collections and build creative IPs from them. They demonstrated that with blockchains, anyone can create and grow their creative brand.
Zuru (New Zealand/China): They build and distribute new toys and personal care products. Through innovative designs, they could thrive at a large scale in markets locked by major brands.
While being fundamentally different and sharing distanced goals, these five organizations have three things in common:
- They challenge the status quo
- They move the creative space
- They use Kitsu
They all question the behemoths' reign and bring new ways of doing and sharing art. Contributing to their efforts and being part of the change they carry make us proud.
When we started working on Kitsu, we designed it as a project management software for animation productions. We made it free and open source to allow anyone to benefit from our technology. Building a business model around it via hosting was hard, but it worked.
The beauty in this is that over time, challengers, in any creative space, chosed Kitsu as their primary collaboration tool for their artistic work.
With emerging technologies like real-time rendering or AI, making complex creative productions has never been so accessible. We are at the dawn of a new era where creators will be everywhere. Seeing new challengers will become more and more common. And to achieve their goals, they will need proper collaboration tools.
That's why today, as a team and community, we must broaden our perspective. We should now see Kitsu as a whole infrastructure that allows anyone to build ambitious creative projects. Studios need to be able to work together and aggregate talents from anywhere. The communication has to be seamless, the iterations faster, and the collective intelligence maximized. It will allow them to build outstanding productions way beyond expectations.
That way, we will foster a diversity of stories and points of view never seen before. By allowing studios and teams to work as distributed organizations, creators will be stronger and won't need to comply with a norm dictated by the giants. Better, they will be able to compete with them and create new narratives and dreams.
We are already supporting this with Kitsu, and we will go further by enabling more interactions between Kitsu instances and providing artists with their own spaces. Spaces that will connect to studio installations and thus help manage their relations with multiple studios, make the hiring smoother and facilitate remote work. The collaboration will be brought to the next level.
Federating teams and talents is our mission, and we will go further in that direction in the upcoming years. Because when we act together, we are all winners!
