Jessica Ryan

"Our goal is to build the best turnkey media operation in venture: a single place where founders acquire the legitimacy, taste, brand-building, expertise, and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online."

The traditional model is: make a thing, sell a few big licenses, call it a day. Now it's: make a thing, sell what you can up front, then go wide—AVOD, FAST, TVOD, SVOD, and social video; so the audience can actually find it.

The economic center of gravity has shifted from courting corporate buyers to serving consumer demand at scale.

The biggest startup opportunities often live in the grey. Bill Gurley calls it regulatory friction — rules built to protect incumbents, not consumers…Uber and Airbnb played in the grey — breaking laws around safety and licensing, but creating so much consumer love that regulation eventually bent to them. Now we’re seeing similar patterns in:

It’s not just that creators use the internet

It’s that they were raised by it.

Their feedback loop is instant

They understand internet culture

They publish, adapt, and evolve in real time.

They’re more attuned to thinking like product designers than studio executives

They test ideas, respond to feedback, and ship what connects.

They understand momentum.

They’ve already absorbed the logic of bottom-up SaaS, intuitively.

This is why the next great storytellers won’t come from film school.

They’ll come from YouTube, Discord, & Substack

All thats missing is proper infrastructure.

Given this whitespace for venture investing via DAFs, in May 2019, MIT Solve launched Solve Innovation Future, a dedicated venture fund structured as a DAF. The structure is unique in three ways: 1) It is dedicated entirely to social venture investing, 2) it will re-invest profits in future entrepreneurs, and 3) it uses semi-standard, entrepreneur-friendly term sheets to minimize transaction costs.

“In the entertainment industry, the various genres tend to live in separate and isolated ecosystems,” Isaacs said in a statement. “As a producer and builder of worlds, I’m interested in bringing people together. The artists we work with refuse to limit their vision to any one sector, and Octoverse Media will be there to support them regardless of genre.”