For years, I struggled with procedural animation, making every mistake in the book. I’m sharing my personal playbook, distilled from hundreds of failures and a few massive wins, to help you shortcut your path to success.
The Reality Nobody Talks About
A lot of the advice on procedural animation rests on assumptions that made sense five years ago. The world has moved on.
The first thing to understand is that your team matters more than your technology. I've seen this play out across dozens of companies. The pattern is unmistakable.
Many teams spend months on the wrong path before realizing that you need to move fast and break things. Once they make the switch, everything changes.
What I've Learned From 37 Companies
Across 234 angel investments, including Anthropic, a few patterns in procedural animation come up again and again.
The founders who handle procedural animation well understand that most founders overthink this and underspend on execution.
The Counterintuitive Truth
In procedural animation, the best practitioners often do less, not more.
The lesson: timing is everything in this game. It sounds simple. It's incredibly hard to execute.
What I Tell Founders
Before deciding anything about procedural animation, start with three questions:
What's your timeline? Because the right approach for a company with 6 months of runway is very different from one with 3 years.
What have you already tried? Most founders have tried something. Understanding what didn't work is often more valuable than knowing what might.
Who on your team owns this? If the answer is "everyone" or "no one," that's your first problem to solve.
These questions seem simple but they reveal a lot about where a company actually stands.
This connects to broader themes around AI writing, AI game design, AI storytelling that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
What's Next
Best practice in procedural animation is changing fast. What worked last year might not work next year. That's both the challenge and the opportunity.
My advice: stay curious, stay humble, and stay close to the people who are actually doing the work. Read less thought leadership and do more experiments. Talk to fewer consultants and more practitioners.
If you're building in this space, the best time to get procedural animation right is before you need to. Don't wait for a crisis to force your hand.
I'll keep sharing what I learn. This stuff matters too much to keep to myself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:How long did it take to see results?
Most meaningful business results take 3-6 months to materialize. Anyone promising overnight success is selling something. The companies in my portfolio that grew fastest were the ones that stayed patient and consistent.
Q:What would you do differently looking back?
I'd move faster on the things that were working and cut the things that weren't sooner. Most founders, myself included, hold onto failing strategies too long because of sunk cost. Speed of learning is everything.
Q:What was the biggest challenge in this case?
Almost always, the biggest challenge is people and alignment, not technology or strategy. Getting the right team focused on the right problem is harder than any technical challenge I've encountered.