Silicon Valley veterans Will Harvey and Chris Hondl were no strangers to trade shows, but the 2009 Pyrotechnics Guild International conference was something else entirely. Gone was the $20,000 tab for a booth alongside fellow high-tech strivers; $60 got them a table in a barn filled with firework lovers at the county fairgrounds in Mason City, Iowa. Not exactly an SAP conference at the Ritz, but it was the ideal place to unveil their project: a computer simulation that allowed users to set a virtual sky ablaze with showers of sparks timed to music.
Their product, Finale, was a stab in the dark for two guys with programming pedigrees but zero experience in the fireworks business. "It's kind of embarrassing how little we knew about the fireworks industry at the time," admits Hondl, '94, MS '95. But for Harvey, '88, MS '93, PhD '95, the venture stemmed from a lifelong love of pyrotechnics. As a kid, he'd ride his bike to the local fireworks stand, laying down his paper-route money for an arsenal of whizbangs as notable for their smoke as for their fire. "I loved the smell," he says.
In later years, he launched a series of start-ups including IMVU, an online game site with more than 50 million users. But his firework fascination remained. While in grad school at Stanford, he had tinkered with a virtual physics engine capable of modeling the behaviors of exploding missiles. So after Harvey handed over the reins of IMVU in 2008 and found himself looking for a way to decompress, his mind didn't have to wander far before landing on the new endeavor.
Hondl, who was also looking for a fresh challenge, was a natural choice to join the enterprise with his former teacher. Frequent collaborators, the two had first met at Stanford where Hondl stood out in an assembly language class Harvey taught. For one project, Harvey had his students create virtual robots to pit in a battle royal. Hondl and a partner made a creation so lethal that Harvey pulled it from the competition to give others a chance.
Setting up shop in Harvey's Palo Alto home, the pair created a demo and whisked it to Iowa not knowing if anybody would want their offering, let alone be willing to pay $40 for it. But once they got to PGI, the program's potential became apparent. Mike Kroeger, a part-time fireworks choreographer in Alabama, was fascinated by its ease of use. Normally, it took him more than a week to choreograph a show to music and transcribe the details into a vast spreadsheet that turned his text into firing commands. But Finale made the work easier with features like the ability to drag trajectories with a mouse and to cut and paste effects over music. If only it could connect with the real world, Kroeger said, it would blow away costly and hard-to-use competitors.
Harvey and Hondl were all ears. Within months, they turned Finale into a mission control, allowing users to intuitively choreograph shows, and then send the commands to firing systems for live launches. For Kroeger, the result was astounding, slashing the time needed to create a 25-minute choreographed show from a week to hours. In 2010, Harvey and Hondl returned to PGI, watching as a Finale-choreographed show won first place.
With more feedback came more tinkering. Soon Finale's top-of-the-line offering ($999) could not only choreograph a show, but also create 3-D schematics detailing how to set it up—a constant struggle for choreographers dealing with prep teams. Then came the ability to order and track supplies for the show from within the application. As its capabilities have expanded, Finale's popularity has skyrocketed. Today Harvey and Hondl have more than 1,000 clients in scores of countries from Mexico to Moldova.
"If you see a fireworks show anywhere 10 years from now," Harvey says, "my guess is the show will be designed by Finale."
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.
