Startup studios go Hollywood as CAA launches Creative Labs
Mount Lee, Hollywood Hills, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Continuing a tradition that began with the incubation and launch of Funny or Die (alongside Sequoia Capital and Will Ferrell’s Dirty Sanchez productions), one of Hollywood’s top agencies is partnering with a group of Canadian investors to finance a new venture studio, Creative Labs, with $12.5 million.
“We have been incubating companies at CAA over the years,” says CAA’s head of business development, Michael Yanover.
For Yanover, the creation of Creative Labs was a response to the shifting expectations of later stage venture investors — including his own CAA Ventures, he said.
“Every time we came up with one of these ideas we had to put the money together and raise the money… it was somewhat tedious to build this stuff from scratch,” he said.
To ensure the alignment of interests, employees of the studio have an equity stake in the venture studio and will be able to receive equity in all of the businesses that are spun out from it. They also have the option of graduating from the studio to participate in the development of the individual startups as those businesses mature, Edwards said.
“The premise of anything that we incubate is that we want to bring a piece of CAA’s DNA into the mix,” says Yanover.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/27/startup-studios-go-hollywood-as-caa-launches-creative-labs/?utm_medium=TCnewsletter