LA Venture: Acrew's Richard Wolpert on Entertainment Tech's Problems (And How to Fix Them) – dot.LA
On this episode of LA Venture, Acrew Capital’s Richard Wolpert discusses the future of the entertainment industry, the metaverse and why social media needs to be fixed.
Wolpert saw the rise of the first online music service back in 2003, when it was impossible to sell the idea of streaming to consumers. Almost 20 years later, everything has flipped as video and music have fully embraced streaming.
“Disney Plus was supposed to get to 100 million subscribers in five years. That was the plan before COVID. And they launched just as COVID was happening and they got to 100 million subscribers that year,” said Wolpert.
But Wolpert sees a mess of content across these streaming services, and now subscribing to them all costs just as much as cable. There’s an opportunity, he said, to make that better for the consumer by creating a unified guide with dashboard recommendations from the services you subscribe to.
Wolpert also sees a mess, as well as massive opportunity, in the developing creator economy. Two years ago, he said, everyone was excited about AI. Two years before that it was VR. Today, the buzzwords are around crypto, the metaverse and NFTs.
Wolpert said a true metaverse experience existed as early as 2003 in the virtual reality gaming world “Second Life.” Companies are now going all-in on the same concept – and if enough people go with them, it could change how we think about virtual worlds, he added.
“If enough people are putting enough money into it and really digging into it. They force the timing to happen,” said Wolpert.
Wolpert also discussed his belief that tech companies should shoulder more responsibility for the effects their products have on the world. He pointed to recent studies that show some social sites can leave users feeling inadequate and spread misinformation.
“I know people that were early at Facebook who say, ‘I really want it fixed, because I don’t want my legacy to be the thing that was so bad for the social environment’,” he said.
dot.LA Engagement Intern Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Decerry Donato is dot.LA’s Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor’s degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Los Angeles continues to beat San Francisco in terms of the number of tech jobs that employers are looking to fill—with L.A. ranking fourth in the entire country last month in tech job postings.
There were 13,437 tech job postings in the L.A. metro area in January, according to data from IT trade association CompTIA. While that number was 791 fewer than in December, Los Angeles maintained its advantage over San Francisco, which ranked fifth in the U.S. with 12,147 tech positions available. Only New York City (19,265), Washington D.C. (17,499) and Dallas (14,916) had more tech jobs on offer than L.A.
That doesn’t mean Los Angeles outpaces all of Silicon Valley as far as new tech jobs, however. San Jose ranked 10th on the list with 8,498 job postings; when combined with San Francisco, that would take the Bay Area’s total tech job postings to north of 20,000, without accounting for other Silicon Valley suburbs.
L.A. tech job postings were led by employers like health insurer Anthem Blue Cross (340 postings), consulting firm Deloitte (219), aerospace giant Boeing (206), defense contractor Raytheon (157) and ecommerce giant Amazon (154), per CompTIA data. Software developers and quality assurance testers accounted for the largest chunk of all postings, with 4,013 positions.
The region’s robust tech job market is part of a strong tech hiring economy nationally, and a resurgent U.S. job market overall. Tech companies added 24,300 workers in January—the 14th-consecutive month of tech industry employment growth—while IT occupations throughout the entire economy grew by 178,000, according to CompTIA. On Friday, the U.S Department of Labor reported that the U.S. economy added a total of 467,000 jobs last month, with the unemployment rate standing at 4%.
“By all accounts this was an exceptionally strong start to the year for tech employment,” CompTIA Chief Research Officer Tim Herbert said in a statement.
Decerry Donato is dot.LA’s Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor’s degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Fans buying a ticket to next weekend’s Super Bowl will get more than just a seat to the Big Game in Los Angeles: they’ll receive their very own non-fungible token, too.
The NFL announced this week that it is providing Super Bowl attendees with customized NFTs, in the form of virtual tickets featuring their section, row and seat number. The league, in partnership with Ticketmaster, will also release a series of “historic commemorative” NFTs each day in the week leading up to the game on Feb. 13, while gameday itself will bring the release of an NFT featuring the Super Bowl LVI ticket artwork, designed by a local Southern California-based artist.
The two Super Bowl finalists—the hometown Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals—have also had specific NFTs minted in their honor for the occasion. The winner of the contest will see their own championship-commemorating NFT released later this month, the NFL said.
This isn’t the NFL’s first experiment with the booming digital assets. The league began offering “virtual commemorative ticket NFTs” during the regular season and “witnessed great success” with the effort, it said. This year’s Super Bowl will only feature mobile ticketing, granting the NFL another opportunity to experiment with NFTs.
“Offering customized Super Bowl NFTs allows us to enhance the gameday experience, while also enabling us to further evaluate the NFT space for future ticketing and event engagement opportunities,” Bobby Gallo, the NFL’s senior vice president for club business development, said in a statement.
NFTs are digital assets verified by blockchain technology, giving their owners proof of authenticity and ownership. Entertainment companies in the music, movie and gaming industries have been quick to sell NFTs—even if the jury is still out on whether they’re just a fad or a multibillion-dollar industry in the making. The sports world has joined the NFT craze, too, with L.A.-area startups raising millions of dollars to merge sports with crypto.
Yasmin is the host of the “Behind Her Empire” podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero’s journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what’s possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
On this episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, Melanie Strong talks about being a founding partner of NEXT VENTŪRES, a VC firm that focuses on building sports, health and wellness brands.
Strong has been a lifelong runner, always interested in the world of sports. After 18 years of global marketing and managing at Nike, she had the opportunity to break into the venture capital world.
She started from scratch as a first-time investor and founder.
“I chose the difficult path, which is not to join an established fund, which I had the privilege of having the option to do,” she said. “I decided to start a fund from scratch. That, intellectually, was the kind of challenge I was looking for.”
Having spent some time at Visco, a social media startup based in Oakland, Strong made connections with VCs that taught her about the industry. When trying to figure out how to do her first deal or negotiation valuations, she turned to James Joaquin from Obvious Ventures. He became a mentor to her.
“Those are scary moments. And I needed to know that I could call someone who wasn’t going to make me feel bad about not knowing,” said Strong.
As learning has been a big part of Strong’s experience, she also wants to make sure that the founders of the companies she invests in feel her involvement adds something unique to their trajectory.
One of the things Strong looks for in investors is a level of self-awareness. She believed that founders need to know when they’ve hit their own threshold.
“If I don’t get the sense that a founder is willing to do that work… That’s a flag that that founder might not be willing to understand when she has hit maybe the threshold of her own abilities when it’s time to ask for help,” said Strong.
Another thing Strong wanted founders to do is make sure they do their research on investors. A major point she made is seeing investors are open to letting founders talk to their existing portfolio.
“For founders, it’s such an awesome time to be in this space,” she added. “Because you have so much power—you really do—and you should feel like you get to choose who is lucky enough to invest in your company.”
Want to hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast? Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Engagement Fellow Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
Yasmin is the host of the “Behind Her Empire” podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero’s journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what’s possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
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