On Fast and Slow Failure and Success

I knew only the most basic business strategy of Tech Pro. This was a company that my parens started in 1983 that much later I owned with them and my cousin. The reason I knew so little was that I was only 9 years old. The reason I knew any at all was that I didn’t have to go far that year to learn about Tech Pro. The room, formally a playroom of sorts, had become the “Tech Pro Room”, as it was home to a new dedicated telephone line,  a computer with 64k of RAM and surprisingly a modem to order parts. Our garage was a workshop where my father took in the first of a series of old instruments from shuttered factories, with the purpose of restoring and computerizing them. The kitchen table was not only where I ate my breakfast, but where I worked on my first start-up job, doing Quality Control testing of Tech Pro instruments. The company was financed through seed money from my parents and a small loan from my grandfather. My parents have pointed out that while this seed money was not a lot of money, it was all of the money they had. This money went directly to buy these old instruments. Within the first year of business the company was modestly profitable. Within the first 5 years, the business was comfortably supporting my family, and had managed to computerize a small industry.  Tech Pro was never large, but Tech Pro was international. It employed a great group of talented engineers, many who did not have college degrees but did have creativity and dedication. Tech Pro took me and my family around the world, and introduced us to most of our friends for 25 years. We then sold the company in 2008.

All of this is likely of little interest to you, as Tech Pro is not Hewlett Packer, Apple or Google. It was just a family business that was able to see technological trends early, and create a thriving business based on them. What is interesting to me is to try to understand why this model is not a particularly common one anymore, and where it falls in the spectrum of “expert” advice from tech industry gurus. My friend and fellow board director of our new company (Nanotronics Imaging) Gerry Ohrstrom,  trying to describe our new business and me in particular said  something like “Matthew is a bottom up guy mostly, but also kind of a top down guy too”, which he of course knows. By bottom up he meant that the company was funded initially by us and through revenue like Tech Pro was.  My father is again my partner. We did follow a bit of the Tech Pro example, but this time I felt that we should bring in outside investors (Gerry included), hence being  top down too. It is too early to tell, but this seems to be a nice mix, though not as clear as the one my parents used with Tech Pro. The goals for the new venture are much larger, and therefore the perceived risk and the cost are greater. At least this story provides me with a good justification for being bottom up and top down. I have though been wondering if this is at all common anymore. It used to be. HP, GE, Intel and most early Silicon Valley companies worked in somewhat this fashion. I told the story of BF Goodrich here, where a man with an idea, some patents, a little money and some helpful investors started a 19^th Century business that would become global and very large. The corporate histories of DuPont, Monsanto and countless others of that era are very similar. Despite the overwhelming odds, these companies are still in existence. So why is this model now not considered normal?

I was recently invited to a lunch to discuss an idea a friend has for a science business. I wasn’t the only one invited, but it was clear why I was, since I am the CEO of a science business, not too dissimilar from what the friend wanted to start. The problem with these kinds of meetings that involve any form of advice  is that I am in the middle of the process myself and therefore it is very difficult to have a prospective from the outside, even if it is about someone else’s idea. I have extreme myopia, which I break best from when I am talking about businesses that are completely unrelated to mine. That said, I tried to remember common wisdom about launching a business, which isn’t terribly difficult to do at this moment as I am in the midst of this myself.  I consider my bottom up  and top down approach somehow very old fashioned, and yet very uncommon at the same time. It is not documented as neatly as other models by most contemporary start-up strategists that I have read (though I don’t read all for sure.).  I first assume the things everyone assumes. That is the validity of the disruptive idea (yes, despite saying that I don’t get my advice from gurus, I did read and liked very much the Clayton Christiansen books), the inventions themselves, the basic competitive landscape and all else that seems common sense now.

There is though a view exemplified by the almost cliché concept that since it is not as expensive to start a business as it used to be, due mainly to cloud servers and rapid open source development platforms, everyone should do it. (As a bit of a side note, this is really only true for certain companies. It is still expensive to start companies that make complicated "stuff" rather than those that rely on internet resources only). As the risk is small, the thought is that there is very little downside to trying. Also, because of this a young person can try many ideas in one lifetime, as failure is less risky. Though he may not have been the first to say it, the blogger and prolific book author Seth Godin famously wrote “fail fast and fail cheap. Fail in a way that doesn’t kill you.” This advice was repeated in a recent conversation between Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman, where Taleb stresses this as a fundamental strength of Silicon Valley start-up culture. He was, I believe, thinking of this as a risk mitigation plan. From the Taleb perspective this makes perfect sense. It is true that most businesses fail, and even if the odds were better it would be unlikely that the odds would be so good as to eliminate luck playing a critical role in the success or failure of a business. He is right in this very rational way, and if I wasn’t looking at this from a lifetime on the inside of start-ups, I would take the same rational view. The problem though is not one of expectations from the outside but the one from the inside. It is that position my parents were in in 1983 and that I am in now. It is also the position that more young people ever in technology are in, and from that perspective, every day that we wake up and think about failing fast, or even failing cheap we are failing in a much more profound way than Godin or even Taleb are suggesting. We are failing to risk what we should be risking. For every customer who buys a product that might become obsolete from our failures our failure as a business is a failure to them. This is true for every employee, no matter how much the employee knows she is taking a risk by working for a start-up. We are also failing the investors, even if those investors expect that they may lose the money.

When I think about the cheap part of Godin’s statement, I am reminded by the how little Tech Pro cost to start. Still, it never felt to me like failure was even a mildly uncomfortable option. It seemed dire. Even though my father had excellent career opportunities if Tech Pro did fail, it is hard for me to imagine him thinking about this much as he installed instruments that his customers were relying on. The stakes were too high. Though this is a very personal thing to recall, and may very well have lead me to large enough psychotherapy bills over the years to finance a start-up itself, I remember my mother’s panic the Christmas that Tech Pro was started. They gave me my dream present, an Atari 2600 video console, but not without instilling a feeling of dread which hung over the machine. Mom said “I hope you enjoy this, because Dad just quit his job to start Tech Pro. We may not be able to buy you such a nice gift again.” This comment was not a joke, as her tears were not tears of laughter, but rather it was a statement of commitment. She wasn’t saying this because she felt that Tech Pro would fail. If Tech Pro failed fast and failed cheaply my father would have gotten another job right away, and the following Christmas I would have had another nice gift. Instead the passion became an innovation, the innovation became a company, the company became a responsibility and ultimately that responsibility became success and created far more for far more people than just more Christmas presents for me.

So as I write this I wonder if there is any point of disagreement with contemporary common wisdom. What I come up with is that failure is of course a strong possibility, and that possibility should not stop someone from starting a business. That same failure though, no matter how cheap it appears can never be thought of in those terms. There is a ripple effect in all of the lives we touch when starting a business. That ripple can capsize boats, or guide them like an explorer’s ship to new lands. There is nothing more exciting, but if done right it is both slow and expensive. It is a lifetime that we are lucky enough to likely fail at.

The New 19th Century Venture Model

While Tom Perkins may be considered an early venture capitalist, the necessity for early stage funding of entrepreneurs is of course not new. A recent trip to Akron reminded me to look up an old pitch session which resulted in what would be several rounds of investment in a company that would go on to employee 50,000 people. The story goes back to 1870 when a physician turned industrial entrepreneur Benjamin Goodrich was struggling with a rubber manufacturing company he had started in Hudson New York. The struggle was for a number of reasons, the main being a lack of financing. Some advice from Goodrich’s banking friends led him to Akron Ohio, where Dr. Goodrich gathered a group of successful manufactures and bankers, turned investors, for a pitch session. The pitch was approximately 30 minutes, not too different than an entrepreneur would face on a first meeting with Kleiner Perkins. His idea was a rubber hose company. This was important, he argued, as leather houses cracked. This he felt was a (undefined at the time) disruptive technology. Of the 6 investors in the room 4 invested immediately at very favorable terms to the investors (actually giving them a voting majority) while the other two agreed to a secured loan against the factory that Goodrich would build. The team of investors was lead by a Perkins (not Tom Perkins of course, but Perkins of 19th century Ohio fame).

The story so far sounds not so different from a VC investment of our modern era, where investors count on entrepreneurs for creativity and vision, and a degree of management, while the investors take over a lot of financial risk and interest in the company, as well as provide managerial support, which Perkins did, by finding heads of manufacturing and development for Goodrich. Just to skip ahead a little, BF Goodrich Corporation also had some other traits that a VC of modern times would like. They had double digit profits, and a multi-billion dollar 100X plus exit, with the eventual sale to Michelin. This is where the appeal to the modern VC model would likely end however.

BF Goodrich took 12 years to earn a profit, which was only 2 years before the death of the founder at age 47. During those 12 years of loss Perkins and some of the other early investors kept funding the company, looking towards long-term gain, rather than towards a short term exit. Eventually BF Goodrich would employee 50,000 people, and make that exit, but it would take over 100 years!

This raises a few key questions for me.:
1. Since the company added so much to the American Economy, and was profitable was it a success?
2. Would it have been funded  in today's financing climate?
3. Are Angel Investors the Perkins et al of our time, not the VCs?

I really don’t have an answer, but I do have a sentimental perspective.

In 2008 I was involved with selling my family company Tech Pro to Roper Industries. While negotiations and due diligence went on for nearly 6 months, the final closing of that deal occurred in a beautifully renovated Akron law firm, which was a former BF Goodrich office building where my Grandfather had once worked. While we were signing the exit sale of our 25 year old business, and I was preparing to start a new company, history and responsibility were on my mind. The legacy of BF Goodrich, and of Tech Pro show that things had changed, and now the new company Nanotronics shows even a further evolution of my thinking, towards rapid success. The challenge is not so much in making successful companies but making sure that we know what success is. A quick exit is only successful if it brings wealth to investors and entrepreneurs, while a business is only successful if it brings employment and an environment for creative innovation. On this personal side I look forward to seeing if Nanotronics achieves this, and how that relates to newer models of pressure and financing. Just to be clear, so far Nanotonics is funded by a combination of my family and a group of Angel Investors who are completely supportive in every way. This has made the experiment a success in my mind already as we have been able to employee some extremely talented people, who work very hard towards the vision of creating a large disruptive business. So in that way we are still not much different than Dr. Goodrich when he started his company. I do however hope that profits and success come sooner than 12 years, and that we mange to disrupt sooner rather than later.

How to win a chili making contest

Sammy Davis loved to cook. When I first heard how dedicated he was to cooking it surprised me, because he was always traveling on tours, and filming. Usually this lifestyle is a restaurant based existence, but Sammy traveled with all of his pots and pans and knifes. Many of his friends commented on what a good cook he was, including Bill Cosby, who said that Sammy was a true gourmand. He never used recipes or wrote down what he had done. Instead Cosby said that if Sammy made a truly remarkable meal you had to merely live with the memory of it, as he would never be able to recreate a dish. I heard this quote when I was a teenager, which was the same time I was having similar experiences at home, where my father (who was new to the kitchen) began to approach cuisine with a gusto of invention, which was inspired by his travels to Mexico, Asia, Europe and Israel. At the time there was only one thing repeatable in Dad’s cooking which was that everything was extremely spicy, which served to separate the men from the boys, or in our case those that had ulcers already, from those that would soon be getting them. Dad was not the only improvisational cook around.  I was soon to discover underground chefs in my home town of Akron, many of them men, who were not simply weekend baroque beer drinkers. This was before the cooking television craze, which seems to have made gourmets of couch potato corn dog eaters. In my view though this small unsung group of hard working friends from my community was much more interesting, as was the food they made. Someone who comes to mind was a long time engineer at our family company Tech Pro. This engineer Don Watson and I would spend a lot of time at company parties, not talking sports, or technology, but rather cooking. Don had tweaked traditional Akron cuisine like Picasso did African masks, making it his own expression. Though I should in good taste keep Don’s reputation intact, as well as the other great cooks at Tech Pro who were in the same tradition such as Harold Vunderlink, I cannot go without mentioning the fact that I married someone who was more than up to the challenge of competing in an area which these others were truly experts in; chili making.

I had of course eaten chili my whole life, but my wife Marine, being from France had not, nor had either of us ever made it before. We entered our company chili making contest as extreme underdogs for the Halloween contest of 2005. To our surprise, Marine and I won. A competition like this is subjective of course, and it is not certain that we deserved the award against such formidable competitors, but I did learn something from this which I keep in mind in most things I do. Marine didn’t have preconceptions of a good chili, only a rough idea of the ingredients normally used. Therefore she made impromptu substitutions, which made the chili unique. She used black beans, instead of red. She used Cilantro and crème fresh. She used tofu burgers instead of hamburger. This was a proud day for us.

This is why I don’t like cooking shows. They are like those old painting television shows I remember as a child, where a very boring artist teaches how to paint a beautiful landscape. They are false, and lack spontaneity. Cooking is now like every prepackaged food, only slightly longer to prepare. My suggestion is an outing of the closeted cooks in companies, who labor by day and invent masterpieces in the kitchen by night. As I have said about free-jazz, poetry, origami, graffiti, science and living in general, the true innovation will come from a mix of intellect, intuition and chance. For this reason I keep picking out new vegetables and meats hoping to stumble across the next great meal or even a chili.

Experimenting

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

Thomas A. Edison

If you are an experimental scientist, your days are likely to be either incredibly frustrating, or incredibly exhilarating. Actually for many of us this oscillation of emotions is the natural bipolar state of the work that we are driven to do. Everyone has a slightly unique process for experimentation. I tend to start with improvisation, while other, more organized scientists begin by systematic preparation. An improvisation is by its nature different than an experiment. It is more like psychoanalysis, with free association of ideas, without any conscious direction. I remember this being called brain storming in business and school meetings. For me an improvisation can clear my mind, so that I can see what is already in front of me, rather than be trapped by outside thoughts. As I said though, this is not really an experiment. An experiment requires more than improvisation, it requires an idea, or hypothesis, so that a proper test, and set of testing conditions can be designed. In cases like the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN labs in Switzerland, 15 years have been spent preparing for experiments. One of the key experiments at LHC has been sculpted by the world's leading physicists over much of this time. The Hypothesis is that a unique particle, called the Higgs Boson, can be detected by colliding protons at high energies near the speed of light. Most physicists expect this particle, called by many the "god particle", to be detected, confirming one of the 20^th century's most famous, yet improvable theories in particle physics. This is what is generally thought of as experimentation. At the 2009 Origins Conference in Arizona, two physicists Laurence Krauss and Brian Greene talked of an even more rewarding, or exciting possibility. Dr. Green said "what would be even better than finding the Higgs at the LHC, is not finding it. It would show all of us that there is something else to be discovered. Of course this wouldn't be good for financing another large experiment like this."

Greene was on to something that is generally misunderstood about scientists. Even when an experiment is well planned, and a hypothesis well formulated, we are even more enthralled by the possibility that the experiment leads us to entirely new places. The reason for this is that we trust that nature is inherently more interesting than we can first imagine.

Small technology companies are no less of an experiment than one run in a lab. Like the scientist in the lab, the entrepreneur is putting all of his mental capabilities into a hypothesis, believing that his idea is of value. The good entrepreneur, like the good scientist, is even more moved by the idea which he didn't have. In other words when the experiment of trying an idea fails, he assumes that it must mean that there is an even better solution. This can make for difficult days, quarters and years, but ultimately the openness to reinterpret the experiment can lead to more beautiful places than the original design.

One area of the start-up which is often misrepresented, or at least not thought of in this light, is staffing. When I was a theatre director I was given a common piece of advice which is that "90% of the director's job is casting." This is true of course for directing and hiring engineers, but it is not as rigid as might be implied. When the director Mike Nichols hired Dustin Hoffman for "The Graduate" his choice was mocked throughout Hollywood. Hoffman was too old, to small and too Jewish. The role of Benjamin Bradick should have been given to Robert Redford, by all of the loose metrics of casting wisdom. Nichols was participating in an expensive Hollywood experiment, and one that ultimately paid off with one of the most successful films of its era. In hindsight Nichols is seen as a genius for this decision. When asked about it though, he doesn't see it this way. He claims that the reason for choosing Hoffman was not based on an imagined box office success, but rather just because he thought Hoffman was good. He chose to experiment on Hoffman, not knowing for certain how he would fit in the role, but believing him to be a good enough actor that somehow he would.

"The Graduate" casting example is exactly what plays itself out when hiring the first few engineers in a company, and probably everyone after that. Sometimes it is not always best to hire the MIT Ph.D. with a specialty in your field. Sometimes that is like casting Robert Redford in "The Graduate". It would work probably, but it might not be as inventive as you would like. There was also one other small advantage to the casting of Dustin Hoffman, which at first may seem like a compromise. Hoffman was an unknown, and was not as expensive as Redford. I don't think this was Nichols reason for casting him, but in the end it didn't hurt either. Because the production was under budget in casting, they were able to reallocate some of that money towards the scenery, which included the famous modern and post modern monochrome homes of the Bradicks and the Robinsons. It also didn't hurt Hoffman, as he is now one of Hollywood's top paid actors.

The early years of Tech Pro were much leaner than "The Graduate" pre-production days, but there were some similarities. My parents were looking at doing something that shouldn't have been able to be done with a small amount of investment capital. They were trying to open a software, and hardware company to create completely new technologies, in order to compete with Monsanto, which was at the time a Fortune 50 company. Although it is obvious that this experiment was a risky one, and that there would be challenges, the challenge of hiring seemed easily approached by following common business wisdom: if a company has only a few dollars, at least those dollars should go to the obviously most qualified person. But, what if there aren't even enough dollars to work with, or if it means changing your financing model in order to raise additional funds?

The story of Jeff

The summer of 1985 was a period of transition for Tech Pro. The company itself was experimenting through improvisation and hypothesis, starting as a garage refurbishing shop. That is really all it was. My Father had worked in Akron, the rubber capital of the world (at least then), in many areas of the industry, from manufacturing rubber, to working in a testing lab, to working for Monsanto, who made testing instrumentation. During this time period Monsanto had a near monopoly on a type of instrumentation called rheometers, which were the only practical way of evaluating vulcanization of rubber. In the mid 1980's there was a transformation in the industry occurring. The large tire companies were being acquired by foreign firms, and local factories were being closed. At the same time smaller US companies were filling some of the gap left by the departure of the major players. These smaller companies couldn't afford the rheometers that were by natural supply and demand standards expensive from Monsanto. My parents made a logical bridge between the factory closures, and the need for low cost instrumentation. They purchased used instruments from shuttered plants at auctions, and rebuilt them to resell to the new companies needing cheaper instruments. This was, not surprisingly, welcome news to the industry. It was also a lot of work. Tech Pro hired first a night maintenance man from Kmart to help with the rebuilding. Joe Bulman was a superb tinkerer, and even though hired mainly as a technician, showed creative interests, and abilities. So, he became a design partner, and was the first person to design, along with my father, an original rheometer, not just a refurbished old one. Actually, I will digress for a moment on this story, as it is a perfect example of an experiment that needed adjusting.

In 1985 Tech Pro was actually happy, and even profitable in its business of refurbishing and reselling rheometers. With Joe building, my mother doing the administration, and my father doing sales and installations, it was a nice, very small business. The way the process worked was that Tech Pro would find the old, usually not functional instruments, at an abandoned factory and cheaply acquire them. They would then strip the instruments to only there bare physical structure. They would buy all new parts, from Monsanto, rebuild the instruments, paint them, test them and resell them. This was the entire business at the time. Then a shock that could have stopped Tech Pro at this stage happened. Monsanto refused to sell Tech Pro any more parts. Since Monsanto was the only supplier, there were no other choices. That is except the one that now seems obvious. Tech Pro started to make its own instruments. At this point my father moved from being a salesman, and installation man, to a designer, and Joe became an engineer.

Once Tech Pro had an equivalent, but less expensive instrument to Monsanto, the idea of being just a second supplier lost its excitement. My father was an experimenter at heart, and wanted to experiment with the most exciting technology of the day, the personal computer. Personal computers in 1985 had started to find their way into corporations in many ways. The large main frames of the past were no longer necessary for many applications. Spreadsheets and word processing were being used by nearly everyone. Accounting departments and human resources were starting to use personal computers. In the rubber laboratory, however, analogue devices, called recorders, were the only way to acquire information from rheometers. Personal computers seemed like a perfect fit. A computer would be able to acquire data from the instrument, and store the information. It should also be able to do mathematical calculations to help with the interpretation of that data. The problems in pursuing this line of experimentation were: 1). Joe, my mother and my father had never programmed before, and 2). Computer scientists were scarce and expensive.

Though Joe was the only engineer at Tech Pro in 1985, the work load for building and rebuilding instruments had increased to the point where some hourly employees were necessary to help with the manual labor involved. When a company is as small as Tech Pro, every hire is important, and risky, no matter how unskilled, or low paid the job appears to be. My parents even had a test, which was not so much based on knowledge but instead based on problem solving and creative manipulation. An example from this was putting together a pizza box quickly. Another involved an aspect of design. The only knowledge based questions were ones of electronics. It was important that every early Tech Pro employee know some basics, as everyone needed to multitask. There was also a search for a computer geek. For people who spent time building their own computers, and coding video games. Tech Pro was looking for people who had fun with computers and electronics, not people who were educated in them.

One of these early shop hands was Jeff Archer. Jeff was in his early twenties, high school educated, and clumsy with tools. In such a small firm, where the ability to use a broom, and a drill were more important than your ability to do differential equations, this could have been a problem. Instead months went by with Jeff working hard, but not extremely effectively as an assistant of sorts to Joe. Jeff's potential during this time was growing, as he was indeed leaving work to build his own computers, and doing programming. When my father decided that he wanted to create the first PC applications for rheometers, he did not search for capital, and computer scientists, he instead looked for the geek with the broom. Jeff, and my father worked together to make the first ever PC driven rheometer system. Jeff was not just good technically, he was creative, and smart, and understood, like my father did, the psychology of the user. Together they created a system which was such a smooth transition from analogue to digital, that within 5 years the entire industry had embraced it.

Jeff was an experiment that paid off for him, for Tech Pro, and for the rubber industry in ways that were never hypothesized when he was hired. Still the flexibility and insight to see in him as a potential partner made something unique possible. Only in a small company where the owner knows the worker can this discovery be made.

The Micro Feature

I have trouble thinking too big, even when I am trying to change the world. That sounds like a paradox of course, but what I am admitting to is a basic inability I have to really comprehend the inner workings of societal macro-structures. In that I include not only the running of countries and economies, but also large corporations. Though I do feel that there must inherently be something useful in large corporate cultures (as millions are employed by corporations) yet the impersonal nature, and betrayals of greed from them have left a bad taste in my mouth. I used to be one of the owners of my family business, Tech Pro, which was a small high tech scientific instrumentation firm. Though we had global scope, we always thought very micro in a sense. We focused on understanding our limited, but important customers, our few dedicated, and wonderful employees, and the technology that we invented and made. This didn't produce a large business, but did produce a profitable small one. This is not the way most people think of small businesses. Tech Pro was not a family store. It was computer science, material science and international business. Yet we were relatively small. This is a model that I think could apply to a number of businesses including our new business Nanotronics Imaging. The question I ask myself is whether in an age of instant media, it can also be an effective model for the movies.
Like so many people of the last hundred years, I grew up not only living with movies, but wanting to make them. I even studied acting, directed plays, and shot a television commercial. There is nothing unique in dreaming of being a filmmaker. It is though somewhat like dreaming of being president, or being an astronaut. Being a filmmaker has always been left to a very few. There have always been hobbyists, making home movies, or low budget features, but until very recently making a movie required a lot of money. Even now when talking to film producers, or listening to interviews an auteur will remark "this was such a cheap film. We made it for 10 Million". Of course it goes without saying that to do anything that cost a mere 10 million, you must either be working for an enormous corporation or already wealthy yourself.
Painters and composers have always been fortunate. If you had a canvas, some paints, or pen and paper you could do your art. I admit that even that was difficult for some artists, such as Van Gogh, who had to beg for housing, or money for paints. Still, the painter could express himself with a few easy to get tools. At least that has always been my impression. The reality for painters is however that they need to know a lot. They need to understand color, lighting, perspective, as well as have a unique vision in order to not just be doodlers but recognized professionals
For the first time in films history, the filmmaker is like the painter used to be. Nearly everyone can make a film. There are multiple sources for production, from HD Video to cell phones. There are also a growing number of distribution methods, which even at the beginning of this decade didn't exist. There is of course You Tube, and HuLu, but also Facebook and Myspace. There are cinemas that show films, computers to watch films, video on demand, and a growing amount of I-Phone content. So this is indeed an exciting time if you have dreamed about being a film maker. No longer are film makers reliant on studios, or even the film festival circuit. The one thing that we tend to forget though is that like the painter, anyone can do it, but it is not easy to do it well. Most people know this to an extent. They realize that they need to learn how to use the camera, and some basic editing software. They may even become very good at this. What is often missed however are some basics, which the great film makers of the past did an excellent job with. I am not an expert on filmmaking, but as a scientist, technologist, and amateur in film production, I have some opinions on how the micro budget feature might become a reality.
The following two areas that are not considered by many people to be mandatory, but that I consider being important to creating quality film:

1. Theatre and story – In an interview at the Apple Store in SoHo Francis Ford Coppola recommended that young film makers should not just shoot little films, but put on one act plays. I think this is an excellent idea. After all, Orson Wells started in theatre, and learned drama from learning Shakespeare. He learned how to work with actors while directing and acting in the theatre. Theatre uses cutting in a different way. The director allows the audience to see multiple things at once, because he has no choice. This makes you aware of composition in interesting ways. You tend to see where your eyes are repeatedly drawn to. The film director can use that experience to make choices for the camera.
   
2. Optics and lighting – An understanding of optics was a necessity for the film maker of the past. Only with understanding magnification, depth of field, and spectral variance could a film maker capture a quality image. With HD video, many assume that this knowledge is not as important. This has cut down on budgets, as directors are not as reliant on expensive cinematographers. This is a good thing of course, but the quality, in my view, has suffered. Films look like amateurs shot them. This could be compared to 19^th century naturist literature, except for a very crucial difference. The naturalist literature dealt with real life in more natural ways, but the writer was still an expert at his craft. Emile Zola was as artful as Victor Hugo, even though one was Romantic and one Naturalist. The reason is that the both understood writing. For an understanding of filmmaking, the tools need to be an understanding of how optics work, and how lighting can be exploited, and manipulated.
   

These two points may sound obvious, but I am not sure they are. I think that new film makers can learn a lot from the struggles of the founders of the medium, which were lab scientists in France and New Jersey, as well as story tellers who came from the stage. The most rewarding thing about living now however that is with knowledge, not money, a vision can be realized. There is no technical reason why a film needs to cost so much.

As I finish this essay, I wonder why I am writing this at all. I am not a film maker, and not likely to become one. The reason is that I am a romantic. I want to live in a time where humans have a unique and profound understanding of the universe and can create great art. I think that the ability to do a lot with a little does two important things. It makes it possible for more people to invent (or make movies), and it takes away a huge amount of financial anxiety. The anxiety that comes with raining and managing Millions of dollars not only prevents many people from doing things, but also makes those that do it often unhappy. So, I hope that someone can figure out how to do white balance on a cell phone, distribute it for free, and make a living. This is not yet possible, but only will be when the people making the cheap movies are better than the ones making the expensive ones. Lucky for them, most big budgets movies are not "Citizen Kane" anymore. There is certainly room for genius.