They had plum jobs at one of the best companies in the world. Their successes were the envy of their peers. But last summer, two peak-career professionals quit their lucrative day jobs to found a start-up. With no income or investment, they built their own studio, mostly by hand, and started working long odd hours, seven days a week, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California.
Typical Silicon Valley fairy tale? Hardly. These two make animation.
"I just felt like I had a lifelong dream to make art," Tokyo-born, 40-year-old director Daisuke "Dice" Tsutsumi said at a café in Berkeley in October. "And that if I was going to do it, I better do it now."