Here's why I decided to join Hedge

Right from the start of my so-called career, I learned that if I followed the things that fascinated me, work would never seem like work. Not everyone is lucky enough to have such a choice, and it doesn't happen every day: more like every few years, but it can and does happen.

My other guiding light could more reasonably be described as an obsession - with new things and modernity. For me, this comes from always asking not what a new product does, but what it means. Every time I see something new and important, it opens up a whole new segment of future possibilities, which I love to explore in my mind.

I'm old enough (just!) to remember when the first stereo consumer audio arrived in my local department store. I knew that what it did was let you hear a wider sound stage. But what it meant was that more people were going to demand better audio equipment.

A decade or so later CDs burst onto the scene, which were not only in stereo but in digital as well. Digital audio blew my mind. It didn't just sound great , but it transported me into a new and brighter universe, where sound and video could be represented by numbers and processed not by capacitors, inductors and resistors, but by mathematics, and where a copy was not an approximation, but a clone.

I spent the next decades working in the field of digital audio and then digital video - beginning at a time when rendering a half-second dissolve could take forty five minutes. The latest Mac Pros will play multiple tracks of 8K video in real time. That's not just a big improvement: it's miraculous.

Except that it's not. Instead, it's the result of an almost inconceivably huge amount of engineering and design work, imagination and optimism.

Today, and in the future, we all have a new technology partner in production and post production: the cloud. Other fundamentally important technologies like 5G, edge computing and even quantum computing are soon going to take us into places we have yet to even dream about. After that, AI will probably do the dreaming for us.  The rate of progress is truly astonishing.

When Hedge asked me to join them, it made me think about the sort of company I'd like to work for in the midst of this white hot tornado of technological progress. I realised I wanted to work with positive, progressive people who "got" the concept of exponential change. Who had a strategic vision that was cognisant of the "exponential gap". As I got to know Hedge better, I found another thing that was on my list of essentials:  respect gained though outstanding technical support.  And of course the products have a gold-plated reputation.

I also found an ability to solve age-old problems with extremely clever answers. Like remote collaborative editing even with limited broadband. And like making cloud storage seem as simple as plugging in a local drive.

What ultimately convinced me is that Hedge just received a substantial investment, the best possible evidence that other people think like me about the company.

So that was it. I said "yes".  Let's see where the next decade takes us!