30 Years In: Chip Houghton & Denny Tu on Legacy and Reinvention

"Feedback is the military industrial complex of creative organizations." — Denny Tu At year 30, Imaginary Forces appointed its first-ever CEO. A hire from outside its own creative lineage. This is a rare move for a founder-led studio. The instincts that build a creative company are seldom the ones that scale it, and the usual outcomes are a ceiling or a slow decline. Founded in 1996 by Kyle Cooper, Chip Houghton, and Peter Frankfurt in the wake of the Se7en titles, IF spent three decades expanding its craft beyond what it was originally famous for, before handing the next chapter to a leader the founders trusted to both protect what they'd built and evolve it. In this episode of Object Subject Form, Simon sits down with IF co-founder and managing partner Chip Houghton and CEO Denny Tu to talk about how a change like this affects the people living through it. What does a founder have to let go of? How does a new leader earn trust? And why the friction between craft and business, the thing most studios treat as a problem to manage, might be the reason a few of them last thirty years. Denny argues that clients stopped buying creativity a while ago and now buy certainty, which reframes what a creative business is even for. Both interrogate the same reality: fear is eroding creative confidence across the industry, seasoned professionals are asking what they were made for, and people no longer get hired on portfolio but on point of view. This is a conversation about reinvention without amnesia. About what a studio decides to hold on to, what it decides to shake up, and who ultimately ends up feeling it the most. –– Connect with Chip on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiphoughton1/ –– Connect with Denny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennytu/ –– Imaginary Forces: https://imaginaryforces.com –– Connect with Simon: Simon’s LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/simonclowes Simon’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/simon_clowes Simon’s X: https://x.com/simon_clowes –– Connect with Object Subject Form: Website: https://objectsubjectform.com/ Object Subject Form on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/objectsubjectform/ Object Subject Form on Instagram: https://instagram.com/objectsubjectform