 How are you all today? Great, so I just really quickly would like to get to know you a little bit. How many of you are working in startups or technology right now? Great. How many in creative industries? Design and okay, and any filmmakers in the audience? Three. Awesome. Okay, cool. Thank you. I'm gonna try to make sure that this makes sense for what you're doing. So Seed and Spark is a crowdfunding and digital distribution platform for independent film and Our goal is to build audiences. I'm just so oh, that's so weird. What happened there? Okay, so Our notion is that we're building a fair trade film making future and the notion of fair trade very specifically to me means creating a relationship between the creator and the audience and I'm so thrilled to be sharing the stage with Julia today because I Think the music industry is light years ahead of the film business on this relationship between creator and audience and she's like an amazing shining example of Of what we still all actually can learn from this creator audience relationship And now it doesn't work. There we go How many of you are familiar with this term MVP not most valuable player, but minimum viable product So as you saw in the previous slide This presentation is a little rough and that's because this is not a fully formed idea I launched my company just nine months ago It's still astonishing to me that I would be invited to speak In in front of such luminary people and along with such luminary people when I haven't really done anything yet I am in the process of doing But I have a theory and so this presentation really represents a sort of minimum viable product of this idea And I would really encourage you to come and talk to me afterwards About what this makes you think what you agree with what you don't agree with Because we're we're gonna iterate this over time And I just had to put this up because Twitter is where I go for a lot of wisdom these days When I was worried about oh god, it's an ugly presentation There've been all these beautiful presentations this read Rossfeld quote was tweeted if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product You shipped too late, so I was like I'm not gonna work on it anymore. I'm embarrassed by it, which means it's right So I want to get real for a moment Here is what I think we're talking about Here and I was so thrilled At Cindy's presentation yesterday because she's talking about the businesses of the future, but what does that mean? We're talking about building. Hopefully I think for all of us and whether you're a filmmaker musician a startup or any Really thing that you do you're looking to build a sustainable business Something that works and what does that mean that means you have to get real people in the world to part with their real money Right to pay you to do the thing that ostensibly you would like to do in your sustainable business and to me what I think Is is gonna work in the future and if if if we go the way of Cindy will do really well because we're a women-run business This is about real connection, right? This is about taking the lessons of person-to-person connection and scaling them What is social capital? This is a this is the frame that I want to use to talk about this Social capital was first written about in English anyway In 1916, so this is an idea that's been around since the turn of the last century It's about goodwill fellowship and sympathy and this notion that the community as a whole will benefit by the cooperation of its parts This is really interesting to me because there is something about a virtuous circle that's implied here And social capital is a notion that we might be able to quantify it Or at least we have a notion of how it can be transacted, right? That means you can earn it and you can spend it So let's take some examples of real-world social capital And I like to think about these in terms of short cycle and long cycle Helpfulness Helpfulness is sort of a short cycle thing. I help you move Next week I call you because I need you to look at something that I have for work and you're happy to comply now Here's the thing it depreciates quickly If you helped me move 15 years ago and this week you call me and you're like buddy you owe me I'm not gonna be that interested in helping you. That's gonna seem a little unfair So this is a virtuous circle in which the earning and spending happens in sort of short cycles I earn it because I'm useful to you and I spend it right away And that's useful to me and so on and so forth Then there's long cycle right and this is about building loyalty and trust And this is where I'm gonna focus more of my attention today It takes a lot of work over a lifetime to build up loyalty and trust as a human With friends that's really sort of what friendship is about But it doesn't depreciate so once you've built trust it's you would have to do something egregious to break it usually what you can do is just reinforce trust as opposed to Mess it up and so you can cash in whenever you want so in this case you're a really good friend you help me move Like 17 times and I knew that I could count on you and after the 17th time you helped me move I was like I would like you to be the best man in my wedding and then you come be the best man And now for the rest of my life I think of you as somebody who's sort of essential to me as part of my identity And so this is a bigger virtuous circle, right? This is one that includes now your families your near community things like that But this is still not scalable when you talk about business and Okay, so I want to talk about how social capital can become scalable We wouldn't I don't think I have to argue that we live in the age of participation. This represents I don't know As if every person on the planet were looking at things a couple of times a month But many many billions of views on these social media platforms every month and I'll give you a I'll give you a concrete example of the age of participation I was going to the to the airport last week and I got up to and I was in my hometown because I was visiting my parents and I got up to the top of the escalator and there was a woman sort of Often the distance shopping and her silhouette looked familiar to me and I got closer and she saw me and I saw her and I said Jen Richie and she said Emily best and she said how seed and spark going and I was like, it's great. It's really fun I'm doing a lot of traveling When are you do right? She wasn't showing mind you Jen Richie and I have not seen each other in 16 years and yet we have been participating in one another's lives Thanks to Facebook and there are you know millions of examples of this every single day We live in the age of participation people want to Get involved and share in the things that interest them So I'm really interested in how we can take social capital these notions of these virtuous circles that we live in our real Lives and skill them using social media And it's other people other effects So what we're doing right now is actually a live social capital demonstration Julia is a young artist. I am a first-time entrepreneur. This Represents a tremendous opportunity for us to build social capital And part of why it's important to me to do well here is so that maybe you like me That's my dog his name is Alistair Beauregard Puppington the third So if you don't like me just look at that and then you'll associate him with me and that will work well So it's important to me that you like me. Why well because afterwards it would be great for me and very additive to my life If we had a conversation about social capital about what you're working on we had an exchange Maybe we've become friends and that is an example of the non scalable social capital that doesn't extend beyond this room You were here. We participated together in a physical way however this is streaming online and for example, maybe if you like something I say you would Post it on Twitter and then I might gain a few new followers now that is starting to scale outside of this room or You'd be interested in what seed and spark is doing and you tell a few people about it And we'd get a few new users and that would help scale my business or you're so phenomenally impressed with me That perhaps you want to get involved to the tune of Emily best take my money at 6% interest and 20% discount to invest in seed and spark so you can scale your business big time No, seriously talk to me later And if Cindy Gallup's presentation actually convinced you that female informed creativity is the way of the future You should come talk to me because we're gonna be a big deal Anyway, this is an example of how we can start to scale beyond the room So I want to talk to you a little bit about how the hell I got here because I still don't know so I'm gonna tell this story and hopefully Learn something myself in 2010 in August I was acting in a play in New York City called the head of Gabler. You might be familiar with it and In the course of that play I met this unbelievable group of women who were the creative Community that I had been seeking my entire life and We one of my friends her name is Caitlyn Fitzgerald. She's about to be a huge star her show Masters of Sex is about to premiere on Showtime She was reading for all these sort of big indie movies and TV shows And she would come in and we would see what the sides said the sides are the you know Little bit of script that you have to read in your audition and they were Horrific representations of women and did nothing to exercise the person that Caitlyn was Creative funny smart interesting these these parts were one of two things that we see at least in American cinema Yeah, the Europeans are much better about this The very mouthy big vocabulary 16 year old who's too smart for her own good and the utterly emotionally incompetent 35 year old whose who's world problems can Only be solved by finding a man. I actually believe there's more to women than that funnily enough It's very un-American So we were really interested in bringing some of those representations to the screen So we set about to make this movie like the water and it was a Community effort And the top left photo there. That's Caroline von Kuhn with her mother if you can't tell Caroline von Kuhn was a co-writer and director of this film Her mother was in it next to that is Caroline on set with my father who is also in the film He's gives a brilliant performance and we had a very very small crew. We shot it in Caitlyn Fitzgeralds hometown on some of her family's properties But let me tell you when you are going to The New York indie film producers to Hollywood to finance years and you're saying I have an all-woman Cast mostly woman crew. It's an independent drama that has no sex and no relation no male-female relationships in it They're not funding you I wonder why so we had to do something differently and What we did know is that if we were really inspired to make this the story that of why we want to make it might be Inspiring to our immediate community now Kickstarter had just launched and certainly was not then the Kleenex of crowd funding That it has become So we needed a creative way to reach out to our community that not just our friends had heard about but our friends Parents had heard about And we thought that a wedding list would be something familiar that everybody sort of knew how to use So this is a screenshot of the incredibly silly wedding list that I typed into a WordPress website in early 2011 Hmm That included a list of all of the things we needed This is just one portion of the list how many we needed how much they cost And then we let and I put a little PayPal link and we let people Contribute to our film based on what was interesting to them So if you wanted to buy us the cake mix actually somebody showed up on set and brought us the cake mix If you wanted to pay for the booze that was a popular one actually to no one's surprise But and what we found that was really interesting is people started contributing actually kind of based on their profession And things like that and here's what was really exciting So we needed to raise twenty thousand dollars in 30 days. We raised twenty three thousand cash money dollars great cool That's not a ton of money, but literally hundreds of thousands more in donations and Loans and gifts of locations goods and services so much so that we rewrote the script to accommodate some of them Because the production value that we got for the tiny amount of money that we spent is Unbelievable we made a five million dollar film for under two hundred thousand dollars So that was really exciting the community really showed up This was what was more interesting When we finished the film and we premiered the film in Maine where we shot it one year to the day From when we started shooting Which if you've ever made a film, you know is kind of a miracle and I would never do that again. It was really painful Here's what's more interesting That community of about 750 people all of whom are named in our credits by the way The credits are almost longer than the film. I'm just kidding We've sold out every screening in advance of publicizing the film everywhere We have toured this in every festival all over the world somebody who contributed to the film or somebody who knows somebody who Contributed to the film has showed up Why well we think we found a way to get people personally invested, right? They cared that people saw this film and that's when we sort of thought maybe we were on to something so This notion of why well, here's the thing There's this notion of sort of the magic of movies and We burst through that by providing a list of here's all the things we need to make this movie There's no magic here It's just gonna take a lot of stuff and a lot of work and then at the end of it You'll have really pretty pictures we were very Transparent about our process and then we delivered one year to the day from when we started shooting We premiered this film we took your money and we did something with it We did our very best to make you proud with what we did transparency and trust now I don't know what the film business is like in Sweden But if there's one thing the film business lacks in the United States, it's transparency and trust When I first started getting into film as a producer I really couldn't believe the stories that you would hear about a Producer who sold his film to a distribution company that promised him the world and the distribution company Promptly went bankrupt and that film is now tied up in a bankruptcy and can't be seen anywhere in the world Right. There are tons of stories like this and here's the thing about the lack of transparency and trust It creates a culture of scarcity so What I find is people don't want to talk about their ideas They're nervous about going into deals And they should be because they've had a lot of really bad experiences And some people will say that the culture of scarcity is the thing out of which innovation is born And I think to some extent that's true. I also think the culture of scarcity Makes people violent and backstabbing and competitive in ways that are bad for the business as a whole and Right now in the United States the culture of scarcity is threatening to squash the independent film business forever And I really don't want that to happen So in January of 2012 I took the wireframe of a website It was the underwear of our website to Sundance Film Festival And I showed it to anybody who would talk to me and I said and it was called the Independent media wish list, which is a terrible name for something does it's not even a good acronym And I said would you use this? What do you think about it? And I talked to all the filmmakers who had already raised money on Kickstarter and from there I found my first advisor I who led me to the development company we ended up working with and much to my surprise We got a few investors for the seed round and a year to almost the day from when I showed up in Sundance We launched seed and spark in December of 2012 As the first end-to-end platform supporting films from crowdfunding all the way through distribution But here's the thing much like when you make a film And build a company what you actually need our customers or audience, which is what I'm here to talk to you about I don't know if you're familiar with this movie The movie field of dreams is a movie in which Kevin Costner has a field in like Iowa And he goes out into the field and he hears So he's going nuts, right? And what happens is he builds a baseball stadium and these ghost baseball players come out But there's this sort of notion in the world of like if you build it if you just build the thing they will come no No, they won't you can make the best film you've ever made you can make the most genius platform You can build the coolest app, and if nobody knows about it. It just doesn't matter So So we went about something a little differently and my lessons from this today, which are gonna change You know in another two months three months five months Are about how we accidentally earned a bunch of social capital And we've learned a lot from it We didn't know how to get really drive people to the site And so we wanted to make a splash at Sundance 2013 and we partnered with a couple of other organizations also startups and film to Kind of make a splash and what we did is we started we launched something called the innovators brunch And the nice thing about doing something called the innovators brunch is nobody doesn't want to get invited to something called the innovators brunch So so we launched this we invited all the most innovative people in the industry We could think of we got a bunch of calls from people saying wait. I wasn't invited. Can I come and we were like? Okay, and they came and here's what was really cool about that event P other people met each other. This was not about seed and spark meeting people This was about helping people meet one another and they went away and they said I loved that event There were all these people in the industry I've been meaning to meet who I got to meet there and we realized that Facilitating other people meeting one another was going to be really important for us and We applied this to our platform by building tools to facilitate our users meeting one another And what's really cool about that is that they're already starting to work together So somebody who an actress and a film on the cinema side of our platform that was watched because somebody who was raising money Had sparks we have a gamified environment in which you earn sparks for participating that you can spend to watch films He spent his sparks to watch this film He loved this actress and he hired her right into his movie that he was raising money for on our platform It's like the best thing ever So that's facilitation was really important then we did an innovators brunch at Tribeca and this time We asked Nancy Schaefer who is the one of the founders of South by Southwest Film Festival and Mark Schiller of Bond strategy These are sort of luminary indie film producers and minds in the States To present a case study about a European film called the cosmonaut that raised a bunch of money and They provided a bunch of really useful information and that seeded the conversation and got people talking and those people could Then use that information in their lives, which was really exciting to them So what we did is applied that to our business in our in the way that we present on social media We try to provide a lot of useful information to our users, but doesn't have anything to do with seed and spark It's about filmmaking. It's about audience building. It's about working together Then at the innovators summit at Los Angeles Film Festival, we tried something different I ran a scenarios to strategy Facilitated meeting because of my previous life. I was able to do this In which we asked people to show up and talk about the biggest Uncertainties facing the future of film we asked 50 luminary innovators in the film business to take a Thursday Workday in Los Angeles and spend it with us and they did which was remarkable in itself And then we asked them to actually admit to one another what it was They didn't know and that was even bigger because we were asking them to be really transparent and to trust one another in this moment so they had this amazing they had these amazing discussions and We took this into our Practice because we started hosting weekly Twitter chats We started noticing that if we got people in the industry talking to one another about the big uncertainties the big questions They felt very additive they started collaborating and that was going to be better for everyone Here's what's really interesting about the scenarios to strategy discussion I don't know how many of you are familiar with this scenarios our stories about the future that help us inform our intuition about the present and The two biggest uncertainties that they felt like we were facing were this Where where are we going right? Are we getting is the world getting more transparent or more secretive? more fragmented or more consolidated and you know you have a good uncertainty when the answer about the future is probably some of both But the interesting thing about this matrix is if you think about Heading far in one direction and building out that future You would learn a lot of things about what you think about where things are gonna go And here's what the room said that I think is the most interesting everybody agreed We think we're moving really rapidly towards transparency and fragmentation. There's it's pretty hard to do Deny that at this point But what they said their takeaway was was that social capital was going to emerge as the trade currency for filmmakers and Brands that it's in order to get funding and audiences. It was about really participating in the world like real people with real people Why is this important? Well, if you earn social capital, you'll be able to spend it And how do you spend it? In the things that we really need we need feedback to make our businesses better. We need help if that's you know location for your film set or Somebody to hopefully help me with distribution hacking for example You'll you can go out and ask for money which Julia will talk about and the thing that we're all looking for all the time Which is shares please share will you share my thing? I really need you to share it So what we did after about six months was we ran a crowdfunding site a crowdfunding campaign For our crowdfunding site on our crowdfunding site was the inception of crowdfunding campaigns And this was really interesting. We went to our community and utterly transparently said We have enough money to operate But there's about six things that we we would like to do that We think would make it better that we don't have money for we were very transparent about that We want to know from you Which are the things you think we should be doing and do you care enough about them to vote with your dollars that we do? And they did thank God because it would have been really bad if a crowdfunding site couldn't successfully crowdfund on their own site And that was interesting. Yeah, we raised the money more importantly. We had we grew 30 percent in that single month Millions of Twitter impressions generated Now we have a steady flow it represents the inflection point in our growth at this point We have a steady pipeline of projects and films coming to us a steady pipeline of users And more importantly the community said what they wanted from us and now they're really invested in those outcomes Well, why is this important? Because I think we are getting we are moving away from the virtuous Circle that is that the unscalable economy of social capital and we're moving towards Yes, this is the Fibonacci sequence golden spiral We're moving towards a place where we can scale this virtuous circle into a virtuous spiral And the center represents what you do on the ground building face-to-face with real people And that gets talked about and starts to build a little circle of trust at which point you can spend a little bit of that Social capital like maybe we did with our crowdfunding campaign and that means you then have to deliver on your promise And once you do you've generated trust and once you've generated trust that leads to advocacy because people who trust you will Absolutely advocate on your behalf So if you take anything away from this what I hope I'm trying to say here is that this is not a universe where we're talking about Eyeballs we're talking about people and this is not a universe where we're talking about building your customer base It's about building your community And that means you have to focus on what you're offering to others as opposed to what you're trying to get out of it And that means you have to do what you say and say what you mean And if each of us and this I believe is some sort of poor Graphical representation of the future that Cindy Gallup was imagining yesterday if each of us in our businesses and our personal brands and our creative lives is engaged in Generating social capital that is additive for our community and everyone in their individual is is generating social capital It's not a fixed resource. It grows for everyone and and creates what I hope is The culture of plenty in which I want to work and went in which I want to do business that would be better for all of us Thank you