I visited Kai in the castle he bought after moving back to Germany and renamed to the 'Byteburg'. I think this was around 2001.
Kai was hosting pitch nights for startup ideas for young people; but really anyone was welcome.
Apart from Kai there was his buddy, Uwe Maurer, and two 'staff' guys who were kinda running things in the castle. I.e. upkeep, cooking/food and beverages.
Kai was just all over everyone, running around with a little tablet serving nibbles and making sure everyone always had a fresh beer.
A kind, humble and deeply interesting person.
There was chit-chat and board games (mostly strategy stuff like Go & co) before the night deteriorated and we went to the castle's cellar for pool and foosball; until the early morning hours.
An untold story relayed to me first hand, that night, is how KPT got so popular.
No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority.
Sales were meh. The story goes that Uwe hired a bunch of students that phone-bombed all major US department stores and chains that were selling software at the time.
They pretended they were all studying graphic design and needed KPT "for their assignments".
After that sales started rolling in.
This was relayed to me as more or less the "founding myth" of what later became Meta Creations.
> No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority.
That was me. Kai's tools were invaluable to me learning graphic design (via doing flyers/posters for local raves), which then got me proper graphic/web design jobs and kickstarted my career. I look back on Kai's plugins/tools as iconic as Winamp, mIRC, etc for the era.
I was just visiting Byteburg with a friend who was a big Krause/KPT/Bryce etc. fan and had told his partner about him, a few years before.
She was working as a journalist for German Max magazine at the time AFAIR. So she convinced her editor and they did a piece on Kai.
This friend and her flew to California and interviewed Kai in his villa. Max also booked a super hip local photographer to shoot him.
Now the photographer brought some perspex sheets or the like to do a setup where Kai would walk 'like Jesus' over the surface of his pool.
Kai told the guy he should do it in Photoshop instead, no setup required, no one getting wet.
The photographer said it wouldn't be the same and one could always tell.
To which Kai replied that he could show him how and you wouldn't be able to tell.
This led to a discussion and the photographer loosing it and ultimately leaving in anger (he likely thought he was just shooting some unknown C-level celebrity geek but Kai was quite famous at the time).
So the shoot went sideways because of Kai having offered his superior Photoshop-Fu. :P
AFAIR my friend himself took the pictures that were ultimately used for the article. But I may misremember.
Kai and him became friends over that interview and that's how we ended up at Kai's castle, a year or so after.
In any case, months later, when the photographer found out whom he had been booked to shoot, he wanted to re-negotiate his compensation after the fact with Max magazine.
They refused ofc. Go figure.
> To which Kai replied that he could show him how and you wouldn't be able to tell.
You would probably be able to tell. You know what else you would probably able to tell? Someone walking on ao perspex sheet :)
> In any case, months later, when the photographer found out whom he had been booked to shoot, he wanted to re-negotiate his compensation after the fact with Max magazine.
Lol :) after they have blown their own shoot? Mind you it is the photographer’s job to make their subjects comfortable with their ideas.
I don’t know about Kai but if it were me my first question would be “what made you think i want to project that image of myself publicly?”
This might have changed. There was a time when he wanted to create a startup hub in Germany and invited people. I remember an interview with him, which I cannot find anymore, where he expressed his frustration with German banks and their lack of openness to new ideas. I've never heard about his startup project and neither the software project he was working on back then (TimeDoubler IIRC) again, so I assume they didn't materialize and he retreated from public life.
I also once read in a thread that his home castle and the one he was receiving guests for the startup hup where separate ones. I could not find reliable source for this, so it may or may not be true.
EDIT: I just found that his website has something to say about it:
How sad, maybe he was ahead of his time. Nowadays it seems like the institutions (mainly governments at all levels) are slowly but intently waking up to the idea of supporting new companies being valuable for society.
Agreed. At least in Germany it is totally feasible by now to get your seed funding from local community banks, e.g. Sparkassen. Federal and country banks are covering up to 80% of the lender's risk nowadays, so getting a 100k EUR to get started has become rather easy and fast. You need a business plan and a pitch and off you go. (For perspective, we are still talking a few months of paperwork, but it is a marked improvement over the get-out-of-my-office of only a decade ago.)
Sure, not all of the money is in grants, but you don't have to sign over half your company to some investor either just to get started.
that is the problem. you cannot get significant money to get anywhere. 100k is nothing to start a business. if you try to get 1MM you will personally be liable for 200k which is a huge deal in europe where salaries are low and it might ruin your finances for life and you cannot get rid of it. meanwhile banks play very risky in the market and when they screw up nobody is liable.
I never met him, but hat some good talks per mail with him. All that sounded not like he don't want to answer emails.
But the talk started with 'Your website is really meh, are you serious with that?' and he answered with 'yeay, you are right, it's just a overstated placeholder, here is the link to the real website, it's nearby done'....and then came a link to a website looking like a book, really cool in 1999.
No one ordered anything. The stores didn't know about KPT.
So they couldn't even take orders for it when the calls hit them.
The intention of the phone-bombing was that the stores would order a bunch of boxes each, of KPT, so that they hit the shelves.
KPT was one of those things that as a Photoshop user, you just had to have in your toolbox at the time.
I.e. even if you just did boring graphics design or classic compositing, there was always a moment when some filter from the plugin would come in handy.
After that KPT hit a critical installed base. I.e. word of mouth and piracy did the rest as far as marketing goes.
Shelve space for software was auctioned-off at the time. Microsoft was number one in buying shelve space ofc.
The closer to the entrance of a shop (or the software area of a department store) and the higher up the shelve your boxes would end up, the more you had to pay.
Now KPT wasn't on any shelve anywhere at all when Uwe pulled this one off.
These kinds of guerrilla techniques can work, but they only work once or maybe a few times. I'm inclined to believe they worked at that time and in that context but you're right it wouldn't work today.
If you want to read about some things that wouldn't ever work today, but that absolutely worked when they were first tried, read about Marc Benioff's guerrilla marketing for Salesforce when they were just getting started.
Remember, immigration spam actually worked back in the day!
That’s actually super illegal, at least in America. There’s a lot of very tight restrictions against buying your own product, as it can lead to false sales numbers, etc. Something tells me that if this story were true, it would be very much something he’d want to keep hidden at the time.
Are you sure about that? Presenting false sales numbers sounds like a regular false statement to me, which may be subject to SEC rules etc if you are listed.
But actually buying your own product ... I can't find any sources yet on the web.
IANAL (though I do read Matt Levine, and I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night) but my understanding is that yeah it's securities fraud if you are a public company because you are reporting sales numbers that are essentially fake, thereby defrauding the investing public.
Is it just regular fraud if you're not a public company? Or if you are a public company and do juke your sales stats this way, but are open about it in your public filings? Not sure.
> Is it just regular fraud if you're not a public company?
I don't think it is regular fraud in and of itself.
I think it is likely to become fraud when you use sales figures including undisclosed self-dealing to support any financial transaction or anything else from which you receive something of value from someone else, and where those sales figures are a material factor.
Kai was hosting pitch nights for startup ideas for young people; but really anyone was welcome.
Apart from Kai there was his buddy, Uwe Maurer, and two 'staff' guys who were kinda running things in the castle. I.e. upkeep, cooking/food and beverages.
Kai was just all over everyone, running around with a little tablet serving nibbles and making sure everyone always had a fresh beer.
A kind, humble and deeply interesting person.
There was chit-chat and board games (mostly strategy stuff like Go & co) before the night deteriorated and we went to the castle's cellar for pool and foosball; until the early morning hours.
An untold story relayed to me first hand, that night, is how KPT got so popular.
No one knew what a Photoshop plugin to make fancy procedural patterns etc. was useful for. Certainly there was the crowd of people doing flyers for techno clubs/parties; but that was a tiny minority.
Sales were meh. The story goes that Uwe hired a bunch of students that phone-bombed all major US department stores and chains that were selling software at the time.
They pretended they were all studying graphic design and needed KPT "for their assignments".
After that sales started rolling in.
This was relayed to me as more or less the "founding myth" of what later became Meta Creations.