[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone, welcome to The First Customer podcast today. I'm lucky enough to be joined by Adam Trachtman, partner at Lucid Circus. recently just found out author and illustrator of a new book that's out. Adam. Thanks for joining me, buddy How are you?
[00:00:39] Adam: I'm good. Good to be here.
[00:00:40] Jay: And you're over in the Czech Republic. Is that correct?
[00:00:43] Adam: That is correct. Almost 30 years now.
[00:00:46] Jay: for dumb Americans like me Where in Europe or in the world is the Czech Republic?
[00:00:54] Adam: Well, it's Central Europe. A lot of people actually refer to it incorrectly as Eastern Europe, but it's Central Europe. if you were to go directly north, you're in Berlin, and if you go east and south, you're in Vienna. But, yeah, if you actually have a map of Europe and you take a pin and you smack it right in the middle of Europe, you're in Prague. In fact, you're really only a couple blocks away from me.
[00:01:19] Jay: I want to get to how you got there, but where did you grow up originally? And did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?
[00:01:26] Adam: I think so. I grew up in Haverford, outside of Philadelphia. but then when I was about 14, I was able to move into town and go to the creative and performing arts high school there, which, really was kind of a life changing experience.not that Haverford wasn't great for academics, but, the art school really taught me how to think and work like an artist.
So, I think that also kind of taught me not to be afraid to go after what I wanted because it was so different from what life would have been like if I had been in Haverford.
[00:01:57] Jay: how long were you in the city before you shot across the ocean?
[00:02:01] Adam: about five, five and a half years, so from about fourteen to nineteen and a half, and that's when I headed over.
[00:02:08] Jay: And so let's answer the obvious elephant in the room. How did you end up in Prague from Haverford, Pennsylvania?
[00:02:15] Adam: Well, I knew that I wanted to live in Europe from You know, early on, like 14, 15, I thought more that I would end up in Rome or Madrid because I was, I was really into classical painting. I studied under a Caravaggioist at Capa and his influence on me had me more in the direction of, but culturally I was looking more at Spain, but actually it was meeting someone in Philadelphia whose family was from Dresden.
And she just kept on saying, no, your sense of humor, your dark black morbid sense of humor, you belong in Prague. And she was right.
[00:02:52] Jay: So how did you go about making the move? I mean, that's a big move for a 19 year old.
[00:02:57] Adam: I I,
basically, first of all, I had this book called the world for free, which was like an anarchist couch surfing before the internet. And so the idea was the only way you could get it was if you were in it. Luckily I lived in a building in center city with a lot of kind of, it was a cooperative and there were only a few co ops. And so one of my anarchist neighbors had a copy of the book. She never traveled, but she liked to have people from the book, stay with her. So I used her book. traveled around Western Europe with the intention of kind of settling in Prague. And I got to Prague, and I was there for about a week, and I saw all of these Americans who were there, trust fund kids who were just there to drink cheap beer and, you know, live a European lifestyle, but not really kind of immerse themselves or kind of connect and dig themselves into it.
So, yeah. I actually moved down to southern Bohemia to a little village called Český Krumlov. Nobody spoke any English there and it really forced me to learn the language, to learn the culture, and to really get a feel for my new home. And then once I got back to Prague six months later, it was very easy to kind of connect with the locals there who, you know, who I was able to speak with in their native tongue.
Because there weren't many foreigners in Prague that were able to speak Czech at the time. So, I should say there still aren't a lot of foreigners in Prague that speak Czech. I know people here 20 years and they can't order a tea, so.
[00:04:27] Jay: where did all this come from though? Like, I mean, it seems like such a, it's like a movie or something like you, like, not a lot of people would like make that big of a leap and just like leave everything behind. And where did you
[00:04:42] Adam: Well, I
[00:04:43] Jay: that spark from?
[00:04:44] Adam: quite honestly, I think that my mom was faculty at Drexel in materials engineering, and she was very analytical and very, kind of, very precise and planned out with what she did and how she lived. And then my father was a real risk taker, who kind of was an entrepreneur and not a very good one, but he wasn't afraid to kind of take chances and, you know, Make these kind of, leaps.
And so I think that, I think I was lucky to have a good combination from, you know, to have both an analytical, but artistic mind that was willing to kind of take these chances and kind of follow the adventure of the early nineties.
[00:05:23] Jay: So,you co founded or you're partnered with Ezra Cohen, who was also in the show. he was, I think refer, I was referred to him by somebody who's like, Hey, you should, if you're looking for software development companies, you know, nobody better to talk to than Ezra. So how did you and Ezra link up?
How did you guys merge companies? I mean, how did you kind of get to just this guy who traveled around Europe to, to kicking that journey off?
[00:05:50] Adam: So, Ezra and I knew each other a bit from Philadelphia. We were both designers, but we both kind of got into code around the same time. And then, I headed off to Prague, and he stayed in Philadelphia. But, a couple years later, our careers kind of had a bit of a parallel. I was working in film. But I ended up, starting a media division of a film company here. And it was roughly the size of Lucid Circus in Philadelphia. And we both got investment around the same time. We both grew our companies to roughly the same size. And then the dot com bubble burst years later. And we both kind of took the approach that we were going to Take our best people, ask them if they wanted to work from home and run a virtual office.
And so we both had the same idea and we figured it would be better to be able to work off of each other's developers and, and work off of each other's portfolios and clients and so forth. And so we were able to kind of. grow the company, but also keep it two separate companies that we were both able to control ourselves and not step on each other's feet.
[00:07:01] Jay: How do you do that?
[00:07:03] Adam: Well,
[00:07:03] Jay: step on each other's feet?
[00:07:04] Adam: well, you know, we were friends, so, you know, we took our friendship seriously, but also we, You know, we never tried to poach each other's developers. We never tried to, you know, we had a mutually beneficial thing going and there was no reason to not utilize it. So, you know, I was able to give him Czech developers at a fraction of the cost of the Philadelphia developers and I could speak to them in Czech.
I could manage them and so forth. So, you know, it was win for everyone.
[00:07:37] Jay: Who was your first client once you guys, or maybe first shared client together?
[00:07:43] Adam: That's a good question. You know, I think that we, started sharing clients while I was running still king media and he was running lucid circus. In fact, you know, he even came to Prague a couple of times to my office and met with some of my developers and so forth. so I think that in those early years, you know, we did some stuff for MTV with them and they did some stuff for, a cable operator in the Czech Republic called UPC. and they had some stronger flash animators. We had some stronger database developers. and so we, we actually, our first clients were You know, just sharing little bits and pieces. We didn't hand each other off an entire client, but I would say, and I know Ezra spoke about AOL,on, when the podcast he was on, but AOL was the first really big, long project that we worked on together, which went on for, I don't know, a year and a half.
and there were really large projects. We were doing stuff for the space shuttle, Beyonce. Sports Illustrated, our Sports Illustrated Flash site, got 55 million hits the first week, you know. so, you know, we were building out optimization and interactivity, but also having it be animated and, So me and my team were working around the clock on that with him for, you know, upwards of a year and a half.
So, I would say our first big client together was AOL.
[00:09:14] Jay: How did you guys fare, or how did you personally fare with the, Flash going offline?
[00:09:22] Adam: Well, you know, I, I kind of, I have a love hate relationship with Apple. And, I kind of believe that a lot of Flash's insecurity on Apple had to do with the fact that Apple wasn't opening certain things up for Adobe. And as a result, the runtime player had to render things two and three times, to actually be able to play.
And so everything was much slower frame rates And, it wasn't a very good experience, and it felt pretty obvious to anybody paying attention that Apple was doing this because Flash came in and stole the QuickTime. QuickTime had a, you know, had 85 to 90 percent of the video on the internet, and I think Realtime had the other 10, when Flash started doing video. But QuickTime was just kind of set in just video, you couldn't do anything with it, whereas Flash you could embed the video as a layer and make it interactive. You could, you know, incorporate things, elements that you could upload onto a server that would then be embedded into the video and so forth. So it was a much better technology. And the whole idea that Apple was kind of saying that it's insecure or using too much CPU, I never bought it, because truthfully, you can gauge dynamic HTML5 CPU usage, compare it to Flash. You can look at file size, Flash optimized much better because it was able to use repeated symbols with different types of effects and so forth. Obviously, Javascript has caught up and everything you could do in Flash you can now do in Javascript, but at a cost. Flash was a much tighter package as far as only having like a meg and a half downloader, installer, and then everything was really tight and small. Now, You know, one framework for doing one little thing can be a Meg.
So,I think that Apple did that not for the best interest of the users and their experience, but because they wanted to kill flash so that they could go back to having more of the video, you know, for streaming servers and CDNs and so forth. So.
[00:11:29] Jay: Not Apple. the, not Apple. No way.
[00:11:34] Adam: But, you know, it was sad for me because I still use Flash. I mean, now it's Adobe Animate, but I actually still use older versions of Flash sometimes for animations, just because the interface was so tight and so effective. And I, I teach animation at a film school here in Prague, Prague film school.
And I'm still using for an introduction for animation because animate has gotten a lot more functionality. And so it's become a lot more complicated. So for introducing filmmakers to making animatics and making title sequences that, you know, are not needed to be made in after effects, but might have more animation, You know, I still teach it in Flash, I think CC6.
[00:12:19] Jay: Wow, that's beautiful. You're keeping the dream alive, keeping it alive. so how are you guys getting customers today? I mean, how does this joint kind of two headed monster work? Like, are you guys both out there smashing the ground trying to get customers? Does one do more than the other? How does it work?
[00:12:33] Adam: Well, we do a lot of different things now. So I do a lot more of the post production, the video animation and, TV commercials and so forth. And I had a project that was going on for about eight years, which I did have a couple of Ezra's developers working on and off. For a bunch of years during that project, it finished.
And so the developers who were working on it all kind of went off and did their own things. So right now I have a tendency to send the development work to him. And he sends the animation and video work to me.
[00:13:09] Jay: Interesting.and how, how is that, how will that continue to progress? Do you see that changing? Do you see
[00:13:17] Adam: Well,
[00:13:18] Jay: just staying in your own lanes. Like, how do you see the next five years of working together? 10 years.
[00:13:23] Adam: well, you know, the interesting thing is that, you know, we started off kind of as a design and flash house and then we adapted and so, you know, with the iPhone in 2007, we started doing applications and we did, you know, at that point we had already been building flex based applications and your standard PHP, ASP, early, Azure SharePoint style applications.
And, you know, we did a lot of large projects for everyone from Google to, you know, Massport, the airports in, in America, Nashville, MTV. I mean, we did a lot of different work, but as what was needed from us changed, we changed, and so, you know, a lot of the times if we needed more designers or we needed more, database, Developers or animators, we just would, we would try to change with what was needed, based on what was coming in.
And, like, For example, we, here on my side in Prague, I was doing a lot of work with Deloitte. I was a, preferred partner for Deloitte for several years and we were building out e learning solutions. We were building, Oh, anti fraud campaigns. So we were doing everything from coding to animation and so forth. And, as they needed things, you know, like we, we kept on maintaining our reputation. So, if they said, well, Do you guys have someone that does sass or do you have someone that can do, complex SharePoint or whatever we would find the people bring them in and, and work with them as long as we could.
So we're constantly changing, you know, if the metaverse is the direction that things go in the next 5 years. And we have a, you know, a strong background in 3d and design and programming, then that's the direction we'll go, you know, like we're not going to just sit still and stay focused on one technology because we know it's constantly changing.
[00:15:23] Jay: Do you think the metaverse is going to
[00:15:26] Adam: You know what, I don't know if you saw the Lex Friedman Zuckerberg podcast that dropped a few days ago, but,I think one of the reasons it is going to take off is because. Well, first of all, bandwidth, right? Like right now we're doing transatlantic video where we need to both have really high quality, you know, feeds. But if I were able to kind of send a three d model and a scan, if I had that kind of already in my browser so that any metaverse site that I went to that needed it could just pull it out and didn't need to scan it each time. So I have my digital likeness there. Well. then, you know, you download it and that's it.
So our hour long conversation would only be audio with a handful of, you know, X, Y, and Z points and kind of tracking, the movement of my mouth and so forth. But we would have a photo realistic experience that would be more immersive than what we're doing right now with less bandwidth. And if we needed to show, you know, if we were doing something for work where we needed to go over schemas or. or look at things and we could do that in a three D environment, it would be more effective than just having a little window underneath our chat saying, well, I'll send you this, blah, blah, blah. So I think it's not smart to underestimate Zuckerberg.now of course this demo, they couldn't have used two more robotic looking guys to demo it, but it's really impressive if you watch it.
and even though it's just kind of in,Friedman's kind of dark space. the fact that you're watching 3D models that don't have to, you know, like, they'll often split the screen where you see the model by itself as a, as a kind of bitmap texture, and then as a, a wireframe, and, and then the actual person doing the trick.
The talking. And so I think there's a lot of potential for it. And, you know, I think that somebody wanting to work in Ecuador for the winter is going to be able to have a lot easier time if they're limited to the bandwidth that they're going to have in a remote area, they'll adapt it and, you know, think of a zoom call for school.
You know, do you want 30 little windows you can't see? Or do you want an actual virtual classroom where you're all? Actually able to look around and feel like you're in it. And, if you've ever used Oculus or any kind of really immersive experience like this, you know, I think, like, I, I'm not a big fan of AR. I kind of find augmented reality to just be maybe because I'm so used to working in animation and layers. I just can't not look at it as just kind of a. A layer of, you know, a 3d model superimposed over video. It just, that never really impressed me, but what I've seen so far of the potential of the metaverse, even if it's three or five years from now, I could see it definitely, taking off.
Yeah.
[00:18:28] Jay: And going back to Apple, I think anytime Apple is putting out a product, they're not
[00:18:33] Adam: doing it without knowing that there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be able to utilize it.
[00:18:37] Jay: right. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. there's something about the book, man. you tease a little bit before we started, you're using AI before it was cool, use a little bit of a different flavor of it. what was kind of the thought behind the book and what was the process of putting it together?
[00:18:51] Adam: Okay, well, it goes back people that knew me from like 20 years ago. If they met me, they heard me talking and rambling on about a graphic novel that I wanted to do. And so finally, like my first few years in the Czech Republic were really crazy. And I wanted to do a graphic novel about those years in that turbulent crazy changing time. And so finally in about 2007 when I was really getting burnt out from work. It took about half a year off. And I biked around the Middle East. And I didn't use any screens. I didn't, I didn't get on computers. I had a Nokia 3310 that had room for like 12 pictures on it. So I wasn't taking pictures. The phone was just in case of emergencies. So I basically just had journals of paper and pen that I could write out the graphic novel that I wanted to do. And, I get back to Prague and I'm like, I'm going to change. I'm not going to be a workaholic and I'm going to work on this graphic novel and everything. And of course, a couple of big projects come in and I'm back to my same old, you know,working like a madman.
So,between 2007 and 2017 I really only got about six or seven pages done drawing it by hand because each page would take four or five days and it's just, it's a tremendous amount of work. And in fact, A friend of mine just passed away last week, Joe Matt, and, he, he used to work five, six years on each graphic novel he would make. And, if you really want to put yourself into it, it really does take that long. So after 10 years, I've only got six, seven pages done, and I'm thinking, okay, I'm never going to get it done like this. And I started studying this thing called neural style transfer, which is NST. And, there was a paper written in the University of Stuttgart, about it and how it worked.
And it was kind of the engine, the neural style transfer engine behind apps like Prisma and, Leica and so forth. And, Basically what it does is it uses a data set of like 85 million pictures to learn how to draw. And then it's default is Van Gogh's Starry Night. And then you can write your own Python scripts to define the different drawing styles you want it to make.
And so with me, I wanted it to make this kind of cross hatching, noir feeling graphic novel. and, so I had been taking reference photographs for the novel and what I did was I just fed them all in. to the neural network and I had them render them in five different settings based on the scripts that were kind of more intense, noir, dark, and lighter, contour line, and then different shades of crosshatching in between. And so, After the rendering, I then, you know, I have everything outlined for the book and I spent whatever free time I had just kind of organizing the pictures so that when I could finally start, you know, I would have interiors, exteriors. Czech, Russia, Bulgaria, all the different locations and all the different objects and, you know, nature and cars and so forth.
So when I went to do each page, I could find my references easy enough. And then COVID happened. And even though I've been running a virtual office, I still am a social butterfly. And I just never, you know, I never made the time until COVID happened. And then I saw COVID as an opportunity. And so, From the time COVID really hit, I spent about four months every day working between 10 and 12 hours on it. And that was enough to get all of the core artwork for the 268 pages done. But then I had another problem, which was, I showed it to my editor, who said, He said, Well, it looks gorgeous and I really like the balance of text and images, but your writing sucks. So I appreciated the honesty and I went back and I changed it and I showed it to him and he was like, Nah, it still sucks. Third time, he was like, Look, you're getting better, but you're still all over the place. You're going from first person to third person, you know, you're reflecting, but then we're in the story. You need to find your voice. And so third version, he's like, okay, now it's good, but now there's too much between the artwork and the words.
So, you know, let the artwork do the heavy lifting and just kind of speak to the reader in your own voice. So then by the fourth version, he was like, okay, now you've got a book. Now you just have to cut the fat. And so fifth version, I really just trimmed it and tightened it as well as I could. And then I had a version ready to go.
Okay.
[00:23:47] Jay: That's a long story for, I mean, a long journey, not a
[00:23:50] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:53] Jay: wow. and then what, so you got it published and then what do you do with it once it's published? Yeah.
[00:23:57] Adam: Well, so right now, I, well, I also, had it translated into Czech and I worked with the translator and then we also worked with kind of like a copy editor to make sure that it was really tight in Czech as well. And so there's an English version, which is called Immersion, but Immersion doesn't really translate well for a book title into Czech.
you know, it's, ponoření, it's Czech. It sounds a bit like penetration, which, might not sell well for the kids. So, the Czech version is called Do Hloubky and that means like into the depth. And it kind of translates better. But, yeah, the publishers here were a bit problematic because I wanted to print it really high quality.
I wanted heavy 150 gram paper, and I wanted really dark black blacks, and I wanted bright chalky whites and everything. And, and so the cost for printing here, Still much cheaper than in America, but the bookstores or the publishers here all were handing me these contracts saying, well, we want to be able to drop the price and if the bookstore takes half and it's less than what it costs, you have to make up the difference.
So I self published it here. I found a publisher in the US that also did print on demand. And I'm at a decent enough amount of sales now that I'm starting to talk with publishers about a second printing that would be on a larger scale. But it's available in bookstores in Philly, New York, Paris, Berlin, definitely in Prague. the website www. immersion. cz. you can see samples of the artwork. You can find out about the process and so forth there.
[00:25:38] Jay: I will, we'll definitely link that, in the show notes. Well, well, this is awesome. Ezra was dying for me to get you on and I see why, there's probably, we probably have 10 episodes to go over just even half the stuff. I have one, one last question, non business related. And for somebody who kind of just goes for it, I'm very interested to hear your answer.
If you could do anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?
[00:26:04] Adam: Well, cure autism.
[00:26:09] Jay: Well, there you go. That's the first of that. I like that, short and sweet. Beautiful. I agree. It's that's a, some people go with some far out ones. That's a good one. I like that.
[00:26:18] Adam: I mean, maybe cancer is a number two, but, I've got some people in my life that, I would be selfish and choose autism first, but.
[00:26:26] Jay: that's how it always works, right? I think that's where like the big foundations and stuff come from is like, they don't happen unless it happens to somebody in their life. So that's, but that's fine. I think we're all, we're lucky to that happened, but, yeah. All right, well, if people want to find more about you, Adam,or about Lucid Circus, or about your book, you already mentioned the website for the book,
[00:26:42] Adam: Well, also there's, well, www. adamtrachtman. com And so on that website, you've got links to my photography. I do, the other thing is I'm really into street photography. And so, my favorite thing to do is to hop on a plane to India, rent a motorcycle, and drive up the coast and take street photography in rural areas where, you know, you don't get to see very often.
And, and so, on adamTrachtman. com you can see there's a link to photography as well as my Instagram. And, you can check out the photography there.
I do a lot of Humans of Philadelphia there as well, so.
[00:27:25] Jay: Okay. Awesome, dude. You're a very interesting guy. and I can see why you and, Ezra are good friends. Well, thank you for being on. I wish you the best of, the best of the rest. I guess, is it fall over there as well? I guess we're in the same,
[00:27:37] Adam: Yeah, Philadelphia and Prague, same size, same climate. It used to get a bit colder here, but now it's really very similar actually.
[00:27:46] Jay: It used to get colder everywhere, I think. It's almost like the globe is warming or something.
[00:27:50] Adam: Well, I'm more mean that like it used to snow here and it would stay white for like weeks, whereas in Philly it would always snow like a meter and a half and then it would all be melted slush the next day or two, whereas here it would I remember the first winter I was here, I went like 42 days without seeing the sun. And pretty much like 35 of those days it was snow covered and, you know, it just didn't melt and you really felt like you were, you felt like a real proper winter. Whereas Philadelphia, you know, like, it gets bitingly cold but then you're wearing a t shirt two days later, so.
[00:28:29] Jay: Yeah, and then it's just, gross, like, brown snow everywhere. It's not a very pi picturesque, scene. Well, alright, Adam, you were awesome, man. I appreciate it, brother. Have a good rest of your week, alright?
[00:28:39] Adam: You too, man. Take care.
[00:28:41] Jay: Thanks, Adam, too.