 Hello. Hello. Hello. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. I've never seen so many Blender users in one place. This is amazing. So welcome. Welcome. This is the 18th Blender conference. The International Yearly Conference in Amsterdam, where we celebrate that 2002 Blender became open source. And I have a nice keynote, but as usual, you know, I start with a little warming up for the audience. So first question I have for everybody is, of course, where are you from? And I first want to see all the Dutch people. Come on, Dutch people. How many Dutch people are there? That's not a lot, right? It's okay. Let's go to our neighbors, Belgians. Come on, Belgians. Good. Yes. And then French people. There must be plenty of them. Yeah. Germans. Come on, Germans. Hey. And our friends from the UK. Did they let you go? Okay, fine. So I'm not going to go after every European country. I'm not going to a little bit more regional. But first, of course, Italians. You should never forget about Italians, right? Spanish people. There's another big group. So then the whole Nordic area, from Iceland to Denmark and everything. Sweden. Good. Southern Europe, except for Italy and Spain, like maybe Greek people. Portugal. Good. The whole Central Eastern Europe, Poland to Albania. That's cool. Russia, of course. Don't forget the Russians, the French. Excellent. Now, we go to the South with Africa. Are there people from Africa? One. Yes. Now, of course, we go to Asia, China, India. Come on. Australia, New Zealand. Are they here? That's one. That's one. That's two. Wow. Okay, South America. South America. Brazil, Argentina. Awesome. Central America. Mexico. Mexicans here. The best animation filmmakers come from Mexico. No doubt, of course. Now, United States. Come on, Americans. You. Canadians. Where are the Canadians? Fantastic. So what part of the world did I miss? That's it, right? Good. First, occupations. How many animators are here? Character animators. Come on, hands. The awesome people. Animators, right? You are very wanted people. Don't forget that. So, general artists, designers, people who make visual art in general. Wow, that's a lot. Or people who would consider themselves a modeler. Have you specialized in character modeling or modeling? Good, good. Or more like designer, industrial design, models, props, environments. Good. Then there are, of course, scientists here. People who do science. Working at a university, right? Something like that. Good. People who do teaching, training. Awesome. Other here are producers. Film producers or game producers or people who produce things in general. Awesome. Or people who are working for a studio where they make games or film. So who's using Blender in a paid shop? Who got paid for using Blender? Getting more and more. Awesome. Good. So who is involved with Blender as a C or C++ developer? The Blender developer. Show hands, Blender developers. We will see them on Saturday or so in the last event. Those people, everybody hands. Those people, you can harass them during the whole conference for anything. Right? Good. But then there will show Python developers. Or people who do add-ons. All right? Good. Awesome. Documentation, website work for Blender. Is add-on here? Okay. Who reported a bug last year? Did it get fixed? No? Yes? So who did not get a bug fixed? You reported. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay, you can try to get your attention here at this place and we will make sure that these kind of things are going to happen. Finally, for who is this the first Blender conference? Almost half, yes? The second Blender conference. We are going to count from three to five, three to five conferences. Six to ten conferences. Oh, we're getting the die-hard again. Or more than ten conferences, even. Yes? Then we get the ultimate die-hard old farts who have the eight-teenth anniversary of the conference. One, two. Good. I feel sorry for you guys. You have to come every year, right? You cannot skip. Otherwise you lose your status. Okay. So I was looking for a team for my keynote. What am I going to talk about? And of course, there's actually only one real topic, right? We won! Yes, you won. I won and Blender won, right? Yes, cheer for yourself. Look at this. The whole industry wants us to be on board. You have to be part of the industry. And not only that, it looks like Blender is going to be the new industry standard, right? Woo! So that's so awesome. But you know me, I start asking also some questions, right? Like, is it really, right? What does it mean really to be a winner or to be among the winners? So I was looking around for some counseling or advice. And I ended up with reading this book and watching a couple of talks. And this is a writer and journalist, Anand Giridharadas. And he's the world leading expert for winning. Really. He knows everything about winning, especially the winners who are on the top, right? The industry winners. He was giving a talk at Google about this, and the talk was so controversial that Google didn't even want to publish it for a while. But they did in the end. It's fantastic. So I want to show two little excerpts from what he said to Google people about winning. I think when I was growing up, I remember seeing on the news, you know, you'd see news of some war-torn country, and you'd often see, like, rebels in pickup trucks, you know, fighting this kind of ragtag army, fighting an unjust king or fighting a president that was corrupt. And sometimes the rebel army would win. And the guy in the back of the pickup truck would end up in the palace. And I think that's what happened to tech. This was, in many ways, an industry of renegades and hackers and tinkerers and people doing weird things. And I could imagine when some of these technologies, and some of you may be old enough to remember, these technologies were getting off the ground, I can imagine that to be up against General Electric or Walmart or IBM, you must have felt like rebels against an incredibly powerful establishment. But here's the problem. When the rebel in the pickup truck ends up in the palace, you know you're in trouble if they keep wearing that beret. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so he said it to Google, and of course people at Google think they are the winners, right? But they are not only that, they are establishment now. They are not the revolutionaries. So there's a difference between them. So are we now establishment? Are we going to be the conservative people who will only gather more power, get more money in and whatever that means to be on the top? Or are we still the rebels or the hackers or the thinkers or the community of blended users who will have fun? Can you do both, maybe? There's another thing he wants to say about it. Something that you probably have heard five times in the last week. The word win-win. How many of you have heard that term in the last week, would you say? How many of you have used that term recently? And what's your general impression? Win-win, good or bad? Good. Good, right? Positive. It's not just one victory, it's two, right? Double the pleasure, double the fun. What I want to suggest today is that win-win is a more sinister and dangerous ideology than we recognize. And I know that's a little mind-bending, particularly in an institution like this that has created some genuine win-wins for the world. But here's the problem with a lot of what happens when the win-win becomes our way of thinking not about business, but about social change. Win-win starts to mean that the only kind of social change that is acceptable or the kind that should get the most funding and the most attention is the kind of social change that kicks something up to the powerful. The only kinds of social change that are good are the kind that don't cause problems, don't ruffle feathers, don't blame anybody, don't accuse anybody, don't have perpetrators, just solves a problem in a way that is a win for the people you're helping and frankly a win for those who are helped. And what is... So, yeah, so there is a cat, right? So if you get all the support and all the people of the industry on board will be helped, they give you all the money you want and you can do everything you want to think, but there is a cat, right? So this is not so much the win-win thing. They have their own agenda. Of course they want to have something, right? They want us to join them, right? That's what they say, come on board. People were telling me things like, hey, Tom, are you now going to listen to us to the industry? Are you now going to do things that will help us? Are you going to give professional support, services, dedicate the private centers, the business class entry to the bug tracker, or are we going to have something that will help the industry? Are we going to do dedicated something for them? And I'm like... No? Right? No, right, we have to do something, but I don't want this thing to be twiddling up, right? We have to do the other way around. What it is to say to the industry, join us, right? Come on board with Blender, with us and the community. Of course we have to change, we have to grow up, right? Blender is common of age, so we are going to professionalize our own channels, improve our own organization, and make it a system which is accessible for everyone, free, online, but include the professionals and the industry. Then I ask myself another question. So why is it, right? Why are people using Blender? So why is this thing taking off so much? Right? It's not about the left mouse click, or about a little bit, maybe, or the 2.8. Of course it helped a lot. So I was at a festival this year, it's called NAC, and there were like 10,000, 15,000 animators and filmmakers celebrating animation. And in the evenings everybody was hanging out in places, cafes, and I would meet them with lots of people there, especially also young people. I was at the Santa Richard set, 17, 18, 19-year-olds, born in this century. And they were looking at me like, as if I was Santa Claus, or the abominable snowman walking around with big eyes, and like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom, they're all using Blender, of course they're using Blender for everything, but not in our schools. The teachers teach us Maya, but Maya is for old people, you know? So we have to learn it, for our own projects, and privately, we're all using Blender. So... It happened several times. At some moment I asked one of the kids, about why, right? So why is it? Because you're young, you know how to find your ways on the internet, and you can't get educational versions, or trial versions of Maya, or any software you want. So what is it that you use Blender? Well, you said community. That's community. What do you mean? Well, if you want anything with 3D online, as an animator, as a modeler, or as anyone who's interested in 3D, you end up with Blender. That's the whole social media, it's all the thousands of websites, this gigantic community of people online who help out each other, and who share their work. There's no way that you can get help from professional Maya users online, because there are only a couple of thousands of them, and they pay so much money, they have to work for the license and do stuff, they're not going to help out all the kids online. So Blender is part of the ecosystem of the internet. And don't people like that? A similar question I had for the professionals, because suddenly we had studios coming on board, and not only Tanzan animation in Canada, Ubisoft and others. Ask them why, why, why is it? Because I don't think Blender is the best software, right? We don't have the best people, the best CEOs or the best whatever, and Blender, we do our best, but Blender is okay, I think. You have choices to make. So why do we want to use Blender? They say, well, because you guys care, right? And that's right, because I care, I care a lot about what I'm doing. I'm super enthusiastic and passionate about 3D. And I know that everybody who's involved with Blender has that same passion and enthusiasm for what you do. We truly care, I care about the users, I care about the software, and I care about making awesome things for the software. And that's the main thing, and that's unbeatable. You will not get the Autodesk CEOs standing in front of the audience of Maya users and say, we care, right? We care. Everybody will start booing and throwing stuff at them. I think we can say that, we really care. The third thing I want to talk about what makes Blender unique and why people use it is because Blender has a story. That's a story of that little guy who went to L.A. showing a program, a 3D program that fitted on a floppy to the film industry there and not getting laughed at. It's about the community who brought back the sources when the company went bankrupt. It's about all the bold artists and developers that make open movers. It's about the Blender.org project who proved that you can make big leaps for 2.5 and 2.8 that you can actively innovate. It's about all the independent websites and businesses that are popping up everywhere around Blender. And of course the industry coming on board. But it's also the story of people who work in prisons and rehabilitation programs using Blender. I heard stories of people who are artists who are using Blender to get out of their limitations and start communicating. Or some boys in Africa in a little town make a science fiction film. That's just about all those people. It's about the story of people. That's what the Blender product is. Now I have to show you this diagram. This is the Golden Circle from Simon C. Neck. And this is like the holy grail of every branding and marketing person. They all have fantastic products. They want to make lots of money. But then they have the main question. Like why? Like why do people want this? Why do people want to buy our product? But I think for Blender we have this clear. The why. The why is the community. Our social ecosystem is our passion. We really care. And it's our story. We have many more chapters. The how is open source. Free software. And those things are beautifully connected together. And that makes the product. And this thing will keep being Blender. And this is unbeatable. That's why I think Blender is a completely unstoppable force. Let's talk about the future. So yeah, I have an announcement to make. So I will step down as chairman of Blender Foundation. Coma one day in the future. Right? I got you. You don't get rid of me that easily. But I have to be honest. What? I'm already setting up the Blender development project as almost an independent entity. I'm not developing anymore. I'm pushing a little bit, but we have a fantastic team who takes care of Blender and brings it further. And what? Well, give them an applause. What I want to do in the coming years, five years, something, I want to do the same thing for the Blender organization. To make sure that we have something built solid. I have a couple of things that will happen in the coming years. One is that the institute will become a real working company owned by the Foundation. That will be one unit. The institute is, for example, organizing the conferences, having the offices, making sure that developers are being managed and do all kinds of things to make sure that Blender is being organized very well. I want to find directors to join the Foundation, especially for operations, the person, and for development to lead development and develop relationships. For example, to keep the sponsors happy and keep them on board. And then I want to install a Foundation supervisor board as the people who can come in once per year to look at how things go, approve on the budget, and say it's good or right. We have to do something else. What I also want to work on is to further professionalizing development because there's a lot of things that we are behind on. We have to get a more welcoming portal, for example, for onboarding. We have to implement engineering practices. I find those horrible and boring, but it helps to get more developers on board, especially more professional developers who want to be able to understand how the software works without having to read 100,000 lines of code. Right, what we have to do currently. And we have to nurture new talent, and especially, we have to protect our key developers. Other people who are doing fantastic work, they are the best in the world, and they are full-time workers on the back track, for example. And they are swamped in work, so we have to organize ourselves better. So, in short, to solidify the blended project for the future. That will keep me occupied for a couple of years. What about me, right? Really, what about me? Because I have my own passions and desires as well. And I won't give up on that. For example, right, I still have this project going. It's the 803.7 without that spy movie. Whenever I have time available, I want to push this further and make sure that we can make this film, of course, with Opsource and Blender and in the Blender Animation Studio. The other thing is how to blend the cloud. We want to work on growing that further and really explain to people that actually the cloud is like the animation studio. And if you grow the cloud, you become an independent production company. That's a place where people can make high-quality industry-level content fully independent and supported by a community. So, I have another announcement, and that is we're going to work on Cosmos 2. So, there's a little disclaimer here. We're still working on getting the story to really fleshed out very well. But if the story works, then we will decide to pick it up. And that's what will happen in November and December. And we know how to do this. And then, thank you to our sponsors, right? They made, for example, those 4,096 LED lights possible. To fantastic screen what we have. And thank you for listening to me.