Imagine a train leaves San Francisco at 9:00AM. This train is carrying a bunch of content to the Internet. It arrives safely and everyone is super happy!
Now, if you will, imagine a second train leaves New York three hours earlier carrying a whole bunch of other content to the Internet.
Now imagine they let me drive that train. OK, don’t imagine that. We’ve seen how that goes. Um, imagine… uh…
What I’m trying to say is we should have more trains. It’s time to expand. It’s also pizza time.
Next week I’m going to be heading to New York to join Alex and launch this Giant Bomb East office into the stratosphere. I’ve played Kerbal. I know how this stuff works.
I’m extremely excited. Having multiple bases of operation is something we’ve talked about forever. It was actually a real plan kicking around for the last three years. We wanted to wait until we had secured resources in San Francisco before expanding out. We’ve got some new blood coming, we’ve got Patrick killing it in Chicago, and now it’s time for Giant Bomb East to throw its hat in the ring as a major contender.
Of course, there is the part where all of my family is in New York. Living out in this pretty, yet expensive, little town has always been temporary. After having a kid it became pretty obvious that my time out here was ticking down. I was headed back home regardless, and it has made us really think about what we want to do about this whole Giant Bomb thing. It became clear that lumping a bunch of new people onto the same content in the same office with the same point of view wouldn't be that interesting, and we quickly happened on the idea of creating multiple Giant Bombs. As Jeff put it:
"Like a franchise, but not one of those weird lawless 'locally owned and operated' franchise things, more like a Kentucky Fried Chicken that serves homemade burgers when no one else is looking."
Anyway, having offices recording simultaneously throughout the day hopefully lets us do a greater variety of content. We remove the issues of competing with ourselves for studio time and people. Alex and I have been spitballing a bunch of different pieces of content, and ways we can ease the load for Jeff, Brad, Drew, and Patrick so they have more time to make the content we all want to make.
Most of all, this is something different and we’ve needed some something different for a while now. All of us, the staff and the community, we’ve been through a lot over the years. Some of it fantastic, some of it terrible, but we made it here, to today. Now we have to look and say “What’s next?” Hire a bunch more people? Sure, but how does that work on a very personality driven site? Are we happy with the content we’re making? Can we do more? Can I afford to buy a house and raise a family in San Francisco? How much do I really like pizza? Some questions are easy. I really like pizza. Others are extremely hard. Hiring new faces without giving them an opportunity to shine seems like a terrible waste. We need to expand Giant Bomb, bring awesome new people into the mix, and take over the world. It seems pretty clear to me.
Is it scary? Hell yeah! Alex and I are basically starting from scratch out there, but that’s just the kind of challenge I’m looking for. I didn’t start with Giant Bomb because it would be easy, I started because I love making and building things. It’s going to be a lot of hard work to get up and running, and it might be bumpy and slow going for a bit, but crazy has always been our way. At least this time it will be on my home turf.
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