Alice Loy is a Founding Partner at DaVinci Ventures and the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Startups, the leading global startup accelerator and company builder for design, food, immersive, and creative companies.
Victoria and Chad talk with Alice about what she means by creative companies, how much judgment she must pass as an investor with a love for the "weird and wonderful," and some of the challenges faced in bringing diversity to the rest of the accelerator world.
DaVinci Ventures (https://www.davinciventures.co/)
Creative Startups (https://www.creativestartups.org/)
Follow Creative Startups on Twitter (https://twitter.com/createstartups), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/createstartups/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/createstartups/), Substack (https://creativestartups.substack.com/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1SCTGPWdes6ArrYJU0YJ-g), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/global-center-for-cultural-entrepreneurship/).
Follow Alice on Twitter (https://twitter.com/aliceloy) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceloy/).
Alice's Blog (http://www.aliceloy.com/)
Etkie (https://etkie.com/)
Embodied Labs (https://www.embodiedlabs.com/)
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel.
VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Alice Loy, Founding Partner at DaVinci Ventures and the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Startups, the leading global startup accelerator and company builder for design, food, immersive, and creative companies.
CHAD: Alice, thank you so much for joining us.
ALICE: Thanks for having me.
CHAD: Can you tell us a little bit more about Creative Startups in general but also what you mean by creative companies specifically? Like, isn't every company creative? [laughs]
ALICE: Yeah, it's so funny. That's often the first question. And sometimes people I can feel their sense of indignation in thinking maybe I think they're not creative.
CHAD: [laughs]
ALICE: First of all, the creative industries are pretty well defined globally by the World Bank and entities like that. I'll come back to that. Yes, all human beings are creative. I like to joke that that's what got us out of caves in the first place. But more importantly, all entrepreneurs are very creative regardless of what sector you're operating in.
So when we're talking about creative, we're just referencing the set of industries that are measured as the quote, "creative industries." They include film, our museums, design certainly is a core element of that. Increasingly, we're seeing more and more people move toward the creative industries as mechanized labor takes over things like building cars or even running data analysis.
CHAD: Has getting support and funding and that kind of thing traditionally been easy in the creative space or hard?
ALICE: No. I know you know the answer to that question because you're a designer. [laughs]
CHAD: I usually don't ask questions that I don't know the answers to, so... [laughs]
ALICE: But it's a great question because actually what it uncovers, you guys, is that it has changed dramatically for people who I call creatives or creators in the last two or three years. It's a little tough to measure with the pandemic, but we know at least $2 billion have gone into platforms that support creators, businesses led by creators. The creative industry has really turned a corner.
So when we started this work 15-16 years ago, I co-founded the organization with a gentleman named Tom, who is now in his 80s. But he had come out of what's called the cultural economy, which was the precursor to the creative economy. And, of course, now we're all living in the