About Max Dunn
President
Since August 2000 I have run one company on one platform, which is the opposite of the advice most founders are given.
I co-founded Silicon Publishing with Alissa Whitney, now our CTO. There were two of us. We are over twenty now, and in all that time we have never moved to a second platform: everything we build automates Adobe technology. The conventional warning is never to tie your business to another company's software, because the vendor can change its pricing, its direction or its whole product line without asking you. I took the opposite bet and went deeper, and I can say what a quarter of a century on someone else's platform actually demands of you.
Before that I was a software engineer at Bertelsmann in the 1990s, building early systems that combined automated pre-press and database publishing with workflow management. I have worked in publishing automation since the mid-1990s, which means I watched the last great upheaval in this industry from the inside, back when layouts were still assembled by hand. It is the closest thing we have to a rehearsal for what AI is doing to creative work now, and I am candid about what that earlier shift cost and who it passed over.
The part of the business I am proudest of is the bench. Some of our engineers are the people who originally created InDesign. Hiring is what decided whether we could scale, far more than any technology choice.
What we build has changed shape completely along the way. Most people picture AI as a person typing prompts at a screen, but at scale it runs the other way: jobs go into Firefly Services, Photoshop, InDesign, Express, Frame.io, Premiere and After Effects in the cloud, and finished assets come back without anyone opening an application.
I also speak regularly to the InDesign user community, on automation, on scripting from the ground up, and on where all of this goes in an AI world.
I enjoy talking about starting and growing a technology company, hiring, the case for a long-term platform bet, what breaks when personalised documents scale from dozens to thousands, and what happens to a brand the moment non-designers are handed the templates. If any of that is useful to your audience, I would be glad to come on.
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Creative Automation With Adobe's Cloud Services: How Firefly Services, InDesign and Premiere run image and video production at scale without manual steps
Max Dunn has automated Adobe technology since founding Silicon Publishing in 2000, and his team of more than 20 includes engineers who built InDesign itself. Most companies picture generative AI as a…
Lessons From the Desktop Publishing Transition for AI at Work: Thirty years automating publishing, and what the 1990s shift says about how AI lands on the people doing the work
Max Dunn has worked at publishing automation since the mid-1990s, which means he watched the industry's last upheaval from inside, back when layouts were still assembled by hand. Most leaders treat…
Depth Over Headcount: How a twenty-person company holds senior engineering talent and wins enterprise-scale work
Max Dunn has automated Adobe publishing technology since the mid-1990s and grew Silicon Publishing from two people to over twenty. Some of those twenty are the original engineers who created…
Database Publishing at Volume: What breaks when thousands of personalised documents are generated from structured data, and what must be automated before the run starts.
Max Dunn has automated Adobe publishing since the mid-1990s, and founded Silicon Publishing in August of 2000 to do database publishing properly. Most companies start personalisation the same way…