From VFX editor to software developer to onscreen personality
Talk to anyone who’s made the leap from employee to entrepreneur and they’ll talk about fear. The fear of leaving behind the safety of a 9–5. The fear of what people will think. Hell, even the fear that they’re not good enough. But when they finally face that fear? Almost every single one will tell you how it turned out to be more bark than bite.
Video director, actor, and entrepreneur Adam Lisagor faced the fear early on in his creative career.
Born in Camarillo, California—a quiet town in Ventura county—he grew up with the bright lights of Hollywood blinking a mere hour and a half away. And like so many kids in that place at that time, from an early age you’d find Adam walking through town with camcorder in tow, or back at home editing together videos on his family’s two VCRs.
“The ones that were a hit were the ones that used funny editing. We did—this is super embarrassing—but in my economics class in the 10th grade you had to team up with three or four other students and come up with a fake product and do a fake ad for it.”
“So we came up with a bar of soap that had a handle on it and it was called ‘Don’t drop the soap’. We put it to Dixieland—almost Benny Hill-type music—fast banjo, and it was my buddy in the shower and then the soap slips out of his hand and somehow takes on a life of its own and every time he tries to pick it up off the ground it slips further away until he’s chasing it down the street. He chases it into a museum. And then chases it into the supermarket.”
“It ended up probably being 90 seconds long but it was funny with tight editing and when we showed it to the class there was uproarious laughter. It felt really awesome.”
That first taste of an audience reaction turned into the spark that sent Adam across the country to New York City for film school. When he made his way back west in 2002 he landed a job at visual effects studio Hydraulx, working on big-budget Hollywood films like The Day After Tomorrow and Aeon Flux.
And while this sounds like a dream job for the small-town kid with big city dreams, Adam was looking for something different.
Unlike the Bay Area to the north, Los Angeles at this time had a pretty subdued startup scene. But somehow Adam had found himself spending more and more time with entrepreneurs and software people.
And this is when the fear struck.
The more time he spent at his dream Hollywood job, the more he realized that maybe it wasn’t exactly what he wanted. The thought of creating something for himself kept going through his mind.
“But then I talked to my dad about it. And my dad is a retired children’s dentist and he found his own contentment by doing his own thing and doing it in his own way.”
“And he recognized in me that I had this something unique and he said ‘you know, capture that and go and find yourself. Now is the time to do this. Now that you’re young and don’t have a family is the time to take those risks’ and he basically gave me his blessing.”
“Not that I needed it. But he gave me his blessing to go off and be bold and do something and it was really honestly the best decision I ever could have made.”
With his newfound total freedom, both in work and in life, Adam’s first idea was Birdhouse—a notepad for Twitter that helps you keep track of ideas for Tweets and then post them later. And like most startups, when it came time for marketing the product, there was no budget.
So they turned to Adam’s background in film.
Only this time, instead of being behind the camera, Adam was in front of it as well.
“So I put myself on camera because that was my only option. And I sort of played this character of an almost tongue and cheek-suave spokesperson because I know I don’t feel like a confident spokesperson. So if I’m going on camera and pretending to be a confident spokesperson, I know that it’s kind of a goof.”
The video was low budget comedy at its best. A suit-wearing Adam sits cross-legged in his backyard filled with lawn furniture and tomato plants and explains why you—the ‘tastemaker’ and ‘very important businessperson’—need Birdhouse to a soundtrack of fuzzy, blipping synthesizers.
“It was almost as if I was doing a car commercial, but it’s for a dorky little iPhone app and I’m wearing a suit and sitting in my backyard and my dog is roaming around.”
“It was almost as if I was doing a car commercial, but it’s for a dorky little iPhone app and I’m wearing a suit and sitting in my backyard and my dog is roaming around. And the fact that I sound like Eeyore makes it even a little bit funnier.”
“So that was sort of the character and the persona I took on, but I never thought this really has legs, baby. Wait till Hollywood calls.”
And he was right. Hollywood never called. But Silicon Valley did.
The Birdhouse video had been making the rounds and ended up in the hands of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, who was looking to do a promotional video for his new company, Square.
Adam put together a story and an image for Square, with Jack as the spokesperson, but when he went up to San Francisco to actually film, the script changed drastically.
“Jack said he wanted me to be on camera and I questioned him, but who am I to decline? I didn’t even do something sensible like trim my beard or get a haircut or launder my clothes. I just kind of sat on a couch and did that spokesperson thing again and it ended up going kind of well. And so I thought that was a fluke.”
But momentum is a force to be reckoned with. And as soon as the Square video was up, Adam’s phone rang once again.
“The next client that I got on the phone with was Flipboard when they were in stealth mode. They invited me to Palo Alto and I went up there and got a demo of the product and it was a thing that nobody had ever seen before and it was so well made I was floored by it.
“So I thought ‘ok, this is this elegantly styled, well-designed, visually beautiful product. I’m going to have to find some really handsome people to do this.”
“And then Gloria, who was the marketing manager at Flipboard, I was talking to her on the phone while I was taking my dog to the dog park, and she said ‘we were wondering if you would do it’. And again, you’ve got to be kidding me. This is such a bad idea.”
To this point, Adam’s onscreen persona had been limited to web videos—short promotional clips for startups and tech companies. Outside of a small group of people, he wasn’t a recognizable face. But after a few more videos for clients such as AirBnB, Yahoo, and Jawbone, TV came knocking.
“I sought him out after he did his first AirBnB thing. I saw that online and I fell in love with it” explains Jennifer Park, the creative director of TrueCar. “Because TrueCar had 0% brand awareness at the time and had just come out with a front-facing name.
“He actually didn’t want other people to be in it. He was humble. Very humble. But I really wanted him to be in it. He just has that very casual, but relatable to the millennial audience, look. But makes you feel comfortable with high-tech things in a very smart way.”
Adam had been trying to move away from his spokesperson role and more into the position of director, but with the limitations of the video, he felt himself pulled back into that familiar place.
“The intention was never for me to be the spokesperson. We were trying to cast an actor. And a non-union actor for a TV commercial is not the easiest task in the world. We had like 3 options and none of them were great.”
“And then they just straight-up asked ‘will you do it?’. And now I’m the True Car guy.”
From film buff to Vfx editor to software entrepreneur to TV personality to sought-after commercial director—Adam’s career trajectory has taken off over the past decade.
And it all started with facing that fear of creating something for yourself—of taking the passion that you feel inside of you and saying no to the comfortable, easy life. If Adam’s story teaches us anything, it’s that the only way to truly know what we’re good at, and what value we can give to the world, is by just closing our eyes and stepping over the edge.
To keep up with Adam’s work, check out his production company, Sandwich Video, or follow him on Twitter.
