Montreal Tech Watch

Last week, Xtrnaormal layed off 36 of its staff, as reported in this article.

The news made waves since Xtranormal was one of the biggest technology startups in Montreal both in terms of secured funding and number of employees, also due to the fact that it was lead by Richard Szalwinski, and also because they made bold statements in conferences like DEMO. A commenter even compared Xtranormal to Capazoo, maybe due to the fact that Xtranormal was, until October, one of the most secretive company in Montreal, and only a few in Montreal knew what they really wanted to do.

I did visit briefly late last week Xtranormal’s offices, after Richard Gratton expressed concerns that there were inaccuracies in the post.

Since the layoff, all the Xtranormal staff all moved to one big central room, where the engineering, product, administrative, and executive team all worked in an open setting.

They all now share the same furniture, meeting and conference rooms, with product iteration plans and drawing boards highly visible in the central area (you can see one in the left side of the second picture) … maybe to remind everyone of the company’s targets.

Richard Gratton directs product management, and is now busy overseeing the website product, released in October. They do have a CTO, CEO and a CFO, but he and Fred Brunel get most of the responsibility of their products’ design, feature sets, and also lead the projects.

Before the layoff, Xtranormal was doing intensive Research in natural language processing, designing automated cinematics (such as finding automatically the right angle and position for a camera in a user-generated video scene), voice generation, all done by a mix of researchers from academy and also engineers. A team was also in charge of “productizing” the results, and a few of the technologies were integrated in current Xtranormal product’s lineup.

It’s this departement that Richard Szalwinski decided to lay off last week. Xtranormal had very ambitious plans, ultimately offering writers & story tellers a tool that will let them create a short movie from their idea without any cinematic skill whatsoever (think garageband for movie creation), but it appeared that technology development was taking more time than previously planned. The website and also the desktop sofware were planned to get them enough revenues to fund the R&D section, but schedules were delayed, extra iterations had to be inserted, making them impossible to reach all their previous objectives with available resources, which came to last week’s decision. Richard Gratton said cutting back was necessary to get them more time for the website & desktop software, which is planned for release in April.

There’s something tragic in getting rid of a complete division, spending resources for this division for more than 2 years, getting valuable technology, know-how & IP, and to shut it down ultimately, without even getting a product at the end. That’s maybe the core of my comment in the last article. Xtranormal has (luckily?) secured enough funds to go past this, and re-focus in its 2 most immediate projects. Fred Brunel said cutting back was very stressful, but the team is now more focused, leaner, and everyone seems to have grasped the team’s immediate objectives, with a clear target on the product release in April last year.

Time will tell us if the lay-offs were a good idea or not. If you’ve ever heard of the sheer difficulties of building a start-up, and making up with limited resources, Xtranormal is a prime example. They have yet to release their desktop product & getting customers, and until them, the future is uncertain (and up for grabs). But I guess it’s part of the adventure, and why most of the engineers, programmers, artists joined the company. Good luck to everyone at Xtranormal then!

Update & Correction: The automated cinematics (or procedural animation engine), which was part of the long-term research division, has been integrated into Xtranormal’s current product. Not everything has been “scraped”

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