[mgkimsal]

> We truly believe in storytelling, but we don’t see a working long-term business here.

Lots of thoughts on this one point. Could they not have done some market analysis beforehand? Given the pace of change over the last decade, when you see something with lots of competition and still no one having an actual viable business with profits yet, what drives someone to think they can just "make it happen" (yes, obviously with a lot of work)?

If it's a "highly competitive market" there should be some profitable company by now that you can simply copy. There isn't. I sort of suspect there won't be for a long time - perhaps ever. Or... at least not 'profitable' to the degree that VC/investors want to see.

Why should storytelling have a business model? We have business models around 'storytelling' in the form of book and music publishing, and they're going through dramatic changes. Loads more people can self-publish - very few are profitable, and most aren't really doing it to be profitable in the first place - they're doing it to express themselves.

One of the few ways to do storytelling on anything other than a very local scale had to involve those with access to the publishing tools, and therefore many more 'stories' (music, books, poems, etc) had to fit within the business model of a publishing middleman. That's model is dying/morphing, and 'storytelling' facilitators may never be the business model that it once was.