Where Technology Meets Art: Maxon’s Dave McGavran on Creative Curiosity

Dave McGavran isn’t a digital artist. He doesn’t spend his days animating characters, sculpting 3D worlds, or editing cinematic masterpieces. In fact, if you ask him, he’ll tell you he “doesn’t have an artistic bone” in his body.

But as CEO of Maxon, Dave’s passion isn’t about being the artist; it’s about empowering them. His leadership philosophy centers on one idea: build tools that help creators bring their visions to life – faster, easier, and more beautifully than ever before. “I’ve spent my career listening to artists, then building the things they need to bring their imagination to life.”

In Dave’s own words, most of his career has been a series of happy accidents. That may be true. But as his story unfolds, it becomes clear that curiosity, persistence, and a love for creation have been the constant threads weaving through every twist and turn. 

In his early collegiate years, an initial stint in aerodynamic engineering went wrong, prompting Dave to “run away to Maine” to become a forest major. When that also didn’t go to plan, he found himself learning basic programming at the University of Maine at Orono, following the astute direction of the Dean of Sciences.

Through a connection, Dave met Mike Scott, director of an on-campus student organization called ASAP Media Services, which aimed to bring multimedia to universities. The one snag? Mike only hired artists. “I wasn’t an artist,” Dave says. “So I stood outside his door until he let me in.”

It was there that he first experienced the magic of programming that enables art. He even figured out, with a classmate, how to “hack the web browsers to make the first* animated GIF.” That same student group also designed one of the first touchscreen kiosks for the historical Owls Head Transportation Museum in Maine, experimenting with gestures and scrolling long before smartphones existed. “It was 1995 or 1996,” he says. “We were trying to figure out how to make touchscreens scroll the way you’d expect on an iPhone today.”

“It was a unique time,” he reflects. “We didn’t know it then, but we were standing at the edge of a digital revolution.”

*Unverifiable

After college, Dave’s path, true to form, refused to follow a straight line. He was supposed to start at Apple after graduation, “but four weeks before I graduated, Steve Jobs laid off a ton of people. So those jobs disappeared.”

With no plan and slim savings, Dave went to Portland, Maine, and started programming software that would “beep you if your server crashed,” he says, laughing at the memory. Eventually, he got hired at Claris, an Apple company, to work on embedding video into web pages out in the Bay Area. “I was there for about three and a half months,” he recalls, “before Steve Jobs came in and fired us all.”

With only two weeks of living expenses left, Dave found himself, yet again, at the mercy of fate (and his growing network of connections). That’s when Adobe called.

Adobe in the early 2000s was everything you’d imagine a Silicon Valley dream to be: a company bursting with creativity, energy, and camaraderie. Dave worked first in San Jose and then remotely from Germany as a programmer, building out new features and capabilities for tools like Photoshop and Premiere.

“This was a time when the concept of work-life balance looked entirely different,” Dave says. “Our life and work were intertwined, and it was a blast. It was a group of people who worked hard all day, creating new stuff – things that had never been done before. It was a very exciting time to be there.”

Adobe set its sights on new creative territories (broadcast, sports, drama, film) and Dave became one of the key people responsible for helping professional creatives make the leap. His team spent years sitting side by side with editors and directors, helping them bring stories to life. They worked with major film studios and directors – including David Fincher, the Coen Brothers, and the team behind Deadpool – supporting them through every edit.

“I think that was the defining moment, when I realized what it meant to work with artists, hand in hand. What really happens when you're sitting on the other side of the screen is different from what you might expect when you’re programming. You can’t tell an artist how to use your tool; you have to make the tool work for them.”

That experience – learning to serve creativity rather than try to control it – became the foundation for everything that followed.

After over 20 years at Adobe, traveling the world and collaborating with artists, Dave found himself back in Germany, looking for ways to stay. Becoming CEO of Maxon was not one of them. “I’m an engineer,” he says. “I never thought of myself as a businessperson, much less a CEO.”

What he found was an organization with deep roots and immense talent, ready for transformation. And while Dave may try to convince folks that he really didn’t know what he was doing, his wealth of experience building products that ignite ideas, combined with his unique understanding of the creative process, amounted to a rare sense of business acumen that would allow the company to flourish. “I may not be a creative type,” he says, “but I know how to create the environment where creativity thrives.”

With the right support and a clear vision, Dave helped evolve Maxon from a single-product company into a creative ecosystem, united by a simple mission: empower artists through technology.

Over the next several years, Maxon grew dramatically, not through transactional corporate deals but through genuine partnerships that brought founder-led businesses into the Maxon family. From Redshift to Red Giant, and ZBrush, each team shared Maxon’s DNA: community-driven innovation and a commitment to artists. “All of these companies were born in the same era, and they were all deeply tied to the artists that fueled their growth.”

“Maxon has a genuine desire to maintain that close connection with the artists,” he says. “It’s what drives us. We feel pride when we see something made with our software. Our customers are amazing people with amazing visions. When you see the art they create, you feel a strong connection to that final product. That’s the best part of this job.”

When asked about the future of creative technology, Dave’s eyes light up. “We’ve started referring to AI as Artistic Intelligence,” he says. “That’s the AI we want to talk about.”

Ultimately, to Dave, true artistry comes from the connection between mind and medium. “The tool can be a pen, a paintbrush, software, a ball of clay…” he says. “What matters is the interaction; the brain-to-tool connection is what brings a vision to life. That’s where the beauty comes in. Generative AI is just one of such tools”.

Maxon embraces technology when it helps artists work better, faster, or more intuitively. Maxon’s Redshift, for example, uses AI for denoising and upscaling.

“But what I’m really excited about is how the creative industry is increasingly embracing 3D. We now have whole generations growing up in video games that, by nature, are three-dimensional. This makes a new breed of talent that brings 3D worlds everywhere – from social media to advertising,” Dave says.

“Maxon will soon be launching a solution that will be transformative for brands, agencies, and creatives,” Dave announces and pauses for a dramatic effect. “It combines AI with Maxon’s complete 3D toolchain, building a content flow that taps into the endless potential of generative AI while respecting product integrity and brand guidelines.”

“Today’s creative workflows are fragmented and difficult to master, and it’s easy to lose control over brand consistency. But what if I told you that you can use AI while maintaining precision across all surfaces – social, packaging, website listings? I can’t wait to see the creativity it will unlock,” Dave concludes.

After a career defined by detours, chance encounters, and relentless curiosity, Dave’s advice for the next generation is refreshingly simple: “Don’t lock yourself in too early,” he says. “Not to a job, not to a tool. Be curious and creatively interested. Play with everything and explore art in other mediums. Every opportunity I’ve had came from saying yes to something new, and then working really hard to make it count.”

If there’s one thing Dave’s story proves, it’s that curiosity might just be the most creative tool of all.