#90 - Jessica Brillhart

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's episode is with Jessica Brillhart. Jessica is the founder of Vrai Pictures, and they're an independent, immersive content studio in New York. Before founding Vrai, Jessica was the principal filmmaker for VR at Google. You can see her work at vrai.pictures.
All right, here we go.
So you started your company this year, and why?

**Jessica Brillhart** (0:27)
Great question. So this actually ties into my past, actually. So I was at Google for eight years.
I started as their first filmmaker with the Creative Lab. I moved on five years later on the Google VR team, which is now the Google AR VR team. I don't know. They might be different now. I don't know.
So I became the principal filmmaker for VR at Google, which, again, talk about titles, it's like the fanciest of titles. It was very cool. So I helped develop Jomp, which was their VR live action capture ecosystem for live action VR footage.
And I was making stuff and working with the engineers, and the more that I was working there, I think I found it was very, very tough to be reactive. In the beginning, it was super easy, because VR was still pretty new and no one really knew what we should be doing with it yet. And then once it started to solidify, it was much harder to turn the big ship towards the things that I thought were important.
Namely, I thought that there was something, some really interesting parallels between the machine learning team and the Google Brain team and also what was happening on the VR team. And just in terms of the mediums, how similar they were both in how they've become more present in our lives, how they both kind of were like, everyone was really excited and then, oh no, it doesn't work. And then it was like, wait, we found this weird thing that actually makes it work great. So like for VR, it was like cell phone technology. Actually, we have it in our pocket. We can make this stuff work. And with machine learning, it was like, right, logic is wrong. Like it's actually preventing us from doing the right thing and teaching these systems how to learn. And so suddenly they both are on this trajectory. And from a creative standpoint, you could see some really interesting stuff coming from both teams.
And I felt that there was a lot of ways that we could work together on stuff. I also felt that there were lots of interesting pockets of artistic pockets where we could create content. It wasn't going to be like, you know, with the big studios. It wasn't going to be like the big IPs. It was really going to be in these places that needed it probably more than Hollywood and, you know, like thinking about ways that it could be functional and helpful for people, but also be artistic. Like it didn't have to be boring.

**Craig Cannon** (2:47)
It's not just functional.

**Jessica Brillhart** (2:48)
Yeah, precisely. Like function is actually good because like films actually serve a function, serves a purpose, you know, and so VR could also do it. Any sort of immersive content can.
So I thought it was all, and I had before also like worked with, I had worked on some stuff kind of envisioning what the future would be like when glass was around.

**Craig Cannon** (3:05)
Yeah.

**Jessica Brillhart** (3:06)
And it clearly worked because everyone now is wearing glass, so we're great.
But the, so for me it was like, I'm really interested in this other layer of immersive stuff, but I also believe that it's not one technology or another technology. I believe it's all kind of going towards something. They're all gonna work together. And so a combination of that belief and wanting to be more reactive and honestly just working on the stuff that I felt was important to me to work on, I, you know, once that all sort of became more clear, I felt that once I had left Google, the best course of action for me was to actually create my own company. And so Vrai Pictures is the company, Vrai for short, and has all the letters in it.

**Craig Cannon** (3:49)
Yeah, meaning V-R-A-I.

**Jessica Brillhart** (3:51)
V-R-A-I. So I didn't want all the letters in my name because I always thought that was a little weird. For me, I mean, it exists in the ecosystem and some people wear it really nicely. For me and my company, I was like, I don't know. I don't know if I want that. And then I was in Paris with my partner and I had asked him, what's the word for true? And he had known I was looking for a name. So he immediately was like, hold on, and he took a pen and he wrote it down. He goes, that's what it is. And the word for true in French is Vrai.