Hi Vince!
Post #1
In 2014, a real estate agent walked me through a 30,000 square foot empty bowling alley and asked how much money Meow Wolf had to put down. I laughed.
"Dude, we don't have any money. We're not a business. I owe my parents $5,000. I'm sleeping on their couch right now."
But he wouldn't take no for an answer. "Well, who do you know who has money?"
The first name that came to mind was George R.R. Martin. He lived in Santa Fe. He owned a movie theater I worked at for $15 an hour. I barely knew him.
I sent him an email anyway. He wrote back: "Let's talk."
George fell in love with the idea. He bought the bowling alley. Became our landlord.
That was the first domino. From there we raised money. We hired people. We spent 18 months building the House of Eternal Return and finally opened in 2016.
What I didn’t know at the time was that in its first year, 500,000 people would walk through House of Eternal Return, generating $7M in revenue.
But none of that was visible from my parents’ couch in Santa Fe, $5,000 in debt.
You can't let the context of the current moment — what you have, what you know, what seems possible right now — compromise the possibilities of the future.
Post #2
From 2008 to 2016, the mobile internet trained people, at a Pavlovian level, 100 plus times a day, to look for unique things they'd never seen before.
Then we put our phones in our pockets and walked back out into the real world. And the real world had nothing.
Everything was copy paste. Everything was predictable. Everything was known. An amusement park you’d seen it a million times, for decades. If it showed up in your feed you'd scroll right past it.
Meow Wolf became something you couldn't scroll past.
A location-based, in-real-life thing that triggered the same novelty response we'd trained ourselves to look for on our screens. Except you had to go there.
Now AI is going to flood the digital space with content. Basic supply and demand — much higher supply than demand. Digital novelty evaporates.
But AI is going to have a really hard time building a physical space. The physical world becomes even more novel. The spaces where awe is still possible.
That's where we're going.
Post #3
Most people kill their best ideas before anyone else gets the chance to.
You have a what. You start to envision it. Then immediately — but how?
How are we going to fund it? Who's going to do it? That's going to take millions of dollars. How am I ever going to get that money?
In those moments, we let the how, the illusion of the impossibility of the how, disrupt the vision and we never do it.
I started in my 20s. Now in my 40s, I’ve come to know that you have to trust that you'll get to the how.
If you have a vision that's fully baked, well understood, that can be communicated to someone else, that excites people, that excites you, the people will come. The money will come. The investors will come.
But it doesn't start with the how. It doesn't even start with the what.
The foundation is the why. Being so passionately connected to why you're doing this that you can't let go of it.
You can't let the what compromise the why.
Why. Then what. Then how. In that order.
Entertainment Industry Ghostwriter
Turning entertainment founders, investors and execs into personal brands that attract clients, investment, talent and deal flow @ Loge Noir.