Moving to New York

I was sitting in my childhood house in New York when it landed on me. Not a plan, a realization: this was a new beginning, and I was already inside it. I'd left Microsoft. The job that kept me in Seattle was over, a new one in New York was starting, and somewhere in that gap it became obvious that VisualBytes would make the same move, because the studio has never lived anywhere I wasn't.

It started in the art building in Ann Arbor. Stamps is inspirational; what can I say. VisualBytes came out of that building in 2025 as a studio for founders whose ideas deserved to look finished before they were.

Then it moved with me. Seattle was where I worked, so Seattle went on the nav bar. San Francisco was where the clients were, so it went on too, and for a while the studio ran on the flight between the two cities. It wasn't a bad flight. It was fine. But fine is a strange thing to build a company around, and at some point I went: screw it, New York.

New York became real the way most real things do, sideways. The job came first. Then the question of what the studio would look like from here, and the answer turned out to be bigger than a change of address. More people are joining on the production side, filmers and producers who can be in the room while the thing is being made, which for a studio that sells motion and film is the whole point. Seattle gave VisualBytes a founder with a day job; New York gives it a crew.

San Francisco stays on the nav. We've left too many crumb trails there to pretend otherwise. The work we did there mattered, and we'll be back whenever it makes sense for the collective. The address changes; the clients don't.

So that's the announcement, such as it is. A studio that started in an art building in Michigan and learned to work from an airplane is now setting up in the city where I happened to be sitting when I understood all of this at once. The house is still here. The beginning is too.