I’m a 25 year veteran of the feature film and TV Visual Effects industry - having worked on some of the coolest (and some duds) movies and TV shows out there. VFX is a wonderful blend of creativity and technology and I’ve been able to leverage my fine arts background, small business experience and Industrial Engineering education to carve out prominent leadership roles at some of the top VFX studios in North America.Leadership wires you for problem solving. Understanding the big picture and how all of the smaller pieces and relationships contribute to the success of a project overall. Entrepreneurship primes you to see opportunities. Some of those opportunities may be in the industry you were trained for. Other times, it is looking over the fence into a different industry and asking “have you thought about doing it this other way?”Having spent years leading creative and technical teams, I started to see patterns and opportunities to innovate how financial and strategic decisions are made. How to take the complexity and variability of business and reframe it in a more intuitive way.Visual effects is an incredibly visual industry. We make pretty pictures but we also use very visual, graphics-based technology to make those pretty picture. We think about time and timings and how different actions and operations connect and combine together to create pixels. We expect things to change and our technology has evolved to embrace change and speed and flexibility.A good financial model tells a story and I’ve spent the last 25 years that is all about storytelling and communication.The traditional finance world is rigid, static and the spreadsheet-centric technology is the opposite of VFX. Decisions and outcomes live in cells. The structure makes it near impossible for others to collaborate or participate.This gap was the inspiration for whatifi and the beginning of my own startup entrepreneurial journey as a Founder and tech leader.