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While I appreciate the sentiment of this RFS with regards to the sclerotic dysfunction of the legal system of copyright (and the business models that perpetuate it), truth be told, as a life-long citizen of startupworld I've often found myself quite jealous of the Hollywood business model. Hollywood is a start-up machine that places huge bets and enables entrepreneurs to form teams, create product, and achieve success or failure 10 or more times in a decade. What a liberating notion! Looking at the talented nerd in their third or fifth year slogging away at a successful enterprise with the possible monetization of their efforts still years over the horizon, I find myself asking: are there ways to make startupworld more like Hollywood? Perhaps there is something to learn from the way that the 'talent' in hollywood works with the 'money'. As a thought exercise, what if doing a start-up was like making a film. Teams assemble, shuffle, and disassemble in an orderly fashion. Artisans are measured in a regular and public way and trade on their value. Quality results are rewarded in short iterative cycles. Its possible for the very best young talent to rise to the top of the profession in ~5 years. Entrepreneurs are funded by the 'money' with terms that are transparent, reasonably standard, and public, so shockingly free of embarrassingly predatory clauses. Shorter cycles, quicker valuation/monetization, a system that screens talent and quickly elevates the best. Oh wait a minute, PG and the Ycomb revolution is actually making all this stuff happen. Which is why I find this conversation amusingly ironic. "Kill hollywood" coming from the institution that is doing the most to re-make the money/talent relationship in startupworld in Hollywood's image. So what keeps them from finishing the job? So this is my real point. Startupworld has its own legal system with sclerotic dysfunction every bit as entrenched as copyright; it effectively bars start-ups from achieving a plurality of investors in common shares at any revenue level below $200m. There's lots of manifestations and motivations for this, but fundamentally, its bad for startupworld and to stretch just a bit, bad for capitalism and democracy. There was a time not too long ago when an excellent young company with $20m in revenues could sell common shares to common people. What a liberating notion! How can we put a SOPA/PIPA-like focus on this issue and sway lawmakers, change votes, write legislation and move governments. While I appreciate the 'kill hollywood' discussion of revolutionizing entertainment... I have to confess that its just not nearly as big a problem, and not nearly as broken as the world all of us work in every day. I'm jealous that Hollywood, through its own ignorance, has managed to marshal our industry's best efforts to midwife its own creative rebirth. What about us? |