Ben Houston's Blog

By Ben Houston, 2024-12-20

Open Core combines the viral growth of open source with the revenue potential of enterprise software – but most founders get the balance wrong. Drawing from my experience building both open source and enterprise products, I explain why this model particularly shines for developer tools, and how to execute it without alienating either developers or paying customers.

By Ben Houston, 2024-12-06

From solving a unique rendering challenge for a single film to becoming an industry-standard tool used in blockbuster movies like Avatar and Harry Potter, the origin story of the Krakatoa point renderer.

By Ben Houston, 2024-12-05

Sometimes big opportunities come from solving what seem like minor problems. In 2002, fresh out of university, I accidentally co-created what would become one of the most widely-used tools in Hollywood visual effects - all because I needed a better way to run fluid simulations.

By Ben Houston, 2024-12-05

After learning the hard way that chasing startups and SMBs was a dead end, I discovered why the path to sustainable SaaS growth lies in mastering enterprise sales and the 'land and expand' strategy.

By Ben Houston, 2024-12-04

How a pioneering web-based 3D editor pivoted from trying to revolutionizing visual effects to finding unexpected success in enterprise product visualization.

By Ben Houston, 2024-12-02

A startup journey can naturally be split into two phases, each driven by a different question: survival and then maybe scale.

By Ben Houston, 2024-11-05

Kubernetes often represents the ultimate solution for container orchestration, but my experience has led me to leave it behind in favor of a simpler, cost-effective solution using Google Cloud Run.

By Ben Houston, 2024-10-23

RISC-V is currently quite slow compared to modern CPUs in 2024.

By Ben Houston, 2024-09-01

Web3DSurvey is a tool for 3D web developers that tracks and aggregates WebGL, WebGL2, and WebGPU capabilities providing valuable insights into real-world support for these features.

By Ben Houston, 2023-05-30

Graph-based materials, while innovative and flexible, pose significant costs for run-time dynamic loading in Web and Games. We delve into these costs and propose alternative solutions.

By Ben Houston, 2022-10-25

Understand the background and potential future of the evolving Khronos glTF PBR material definition.

By Ben Houston, 2015-05-06

With Physically-based Rendering (PBR) becoming the new standard, we need a simple standard interchange format.