A few years ago I was at an industry event in Sydney when someone came up and introduced himself. He'd interned under me at The Mill, close to a decade earlier. I barely remembered the specific conversation, but he did — he told me that something I'd said to him back then was what actually got him his job, and shaped the rest of his career from there. I'd said it in passing, the way you say things to interns, not knowing if it would land or just evaporate. Turns out it didn't evaporate. It just took ten years to show me that.
That's the thing about a network. You never know which link in it is going to matter, or when. Sometimes it's ten years. Sometimes it's twenty.
The lecturer who said no
Go back further, to AFTRS, where I was studying 3D Animation. My lecturer was a guy named Alex Goodwin. Fin Design & Effects had approached him about a job, and he turned it down — but told them to reach out to me instead. I got my start at Fin because a man I barely knew as a student decided I was worth recommending for a job he didn't want himself. Alex and I went on to become good friends over the years that followed, but none of that friendship existed yet when he made that call. He just made it.
I think about how easily that doesn't happen. A different lecturer, a different mood that day, and there's no Fin, and the next fifteen years of my career look completely different.
The Plastic Wax thread
At Plastic Wax, early on, I worked alongside Damien Mahoney and Hugh Carrick-Allan. Just colleagues on a game at the time, nothing more deliberate than that. Years later, when I was building the VFX department at Collider from scratch, Damien was the first person I called — I needed someone I trusted to do the hard work alongside me, and he was it. Not long after, we brought Hugh on too.
That thread didn't stop there. Years after Collider, when I was building out the 3D department at Blowfish Studios, I hired Damien again — this time to run it. And somewhere in there we also brought on Chris Harris as our lead creature modeller, another colleague from Plastic Wax, ten to fifteen years after we'd first worked together.
Three completely different companies, over close to twenty years, and the same handful of people kept finding their way back into my working life. I didn't engineer that. I just didn't let the relationships go cold.
The friend who became my landlord in a crisis
Back at Short Fuse Animation, right at the start, I met an animator named Matt Estela. We were nothing more than colleagues at a small studio at the time. Years later, when my wife and I landed in London in the worst possible month to be looking for VFX work, it was Matt — by then running his own shop, The House of Curves — who had freelance work going. That job kept me in the game long enough for The Mill to find me a few months later.
None of that was planned when Matt and I were two guys at a small animation company in the early 2000s. It was just a relationship I hadn't let lapse, sitting dormant for years until the exact moment I needed it.
Why this isn't "networking"
I want to be careful here, because none of this happened because I was strategic about networking in the LinkedIn-event sense. I didn't collect contacts. I just didn't treat people as disposable once a project ended. Alex, Damien, Hugh, Chris, Matt — none of them owed me anything, and I didn't do anything for any of them expecting a return fifteen years later. You can't actually engineer that kind of return. The moment you're being generous or reliable toward someone because you're calculating a future payoff, it stops being the thing that works. It becomes something people can smell on you, and it curdles the relationship instead of banking it.
What actually seems to work is much less dramatic than "networking." Just: be someone worth calling back. Do good work next to people. Don't burn it down when a project ends or a company folds. That's it. The payoff, if there is one, isn't something you get to see coming.
Where it doesn't apply
This isn't a guarantee. Most of the people I've worked alongside over the years, I never crossed paths with again, and that's fine — not every relationship is owed a second chapter. And I don't think you should go through your twenties treating every colleague like a long-term investment; that's exactly the calculating mindset that kills it. Some of it is just the slow arithmetic of staying in one industry long enough for the same faces to keep appearing.
So who's it going to be?
You won't know, right now, which person in your current team is going to call you in fifteen years, or which one you're going to call. You won't know if the ten-second piece of advice you give someone today is the thing they credit their whole career to a decade from now.
That's not a reason to try to calculate it. It's a reason to just be worth remembering.