Ludicrous Fund

Fund for Emerging Comedians backed by future Earnings (FECEs)

(we're ignoring the 2nd F bcs it's funnier that way)

  1. Find a pool of amazingly talented comedians
  2. Provide funding so that they can focus on their comedy
  3. and provide non-financial career support (mentorship, networking, agents, etc...)
  4. In return for a % of their future entertainment-based earnings
  5. Link future earnings to a token
  6. Allocate tokens to (i) initial investors and (ii) other pool members (comedians, scouts, agents, etc...)
  7. Share any future earnings with token holders

Lots of details to work out. But the basic structure is sound imo.

Obv could do this for specific entertainers (or any person).

Building the structure is the key. Would be ideal if we could have very high confidence that all of it is legal, but I doubt we'll get that. We will be 100% honest and act in good faith. Full transparency. Acknowledge areas of uncertainty and risk (as best we understand them). And create the Fund in that spirit.

Random thoughts:

  • Recruit very early stage comedians: UCB + Groundlings. Local standup.
  • Have a decentralized team of scouts that goes around rating/reviewing comedians
  • Explore DAO structure
  • Recruit other participants: Scouts, agents, mentor-comedians, film/tv connections, etc...
  • Obv once we build out the basic structure this can be translated to any discipline/field - there's lots of room to grow this
  • Need to do some financial modeling on the projected returns, play around with:
    • Past UCB + Groundlings classes (i.e. Year of 2012 or 2008)
    • What is the likelihood that a UCB student went on to have any level of success as a professional comedian? Is it 2% or 20%? What % of students go on to make more than $1M over their career in entertainment? 0.1%? or 1%?
    • What would returns look like if we:
      • (i) signed a random 50% of the UCB class of 2008? and gave each $10k. or $25k. and obv estimate earnings of graduating/participating comedians. What's the math on that?
      • (ii) signed random 90% (or all 100%) of UCB class of 2008? and gave each $10k. or $25k
      • (iii) set a repayment threshold of 30% of everything after first $1M? for the next 10yrs? 20yrs?
      • (iv) set a repayment threshold of 10% of everything after first $500k?
      • What does a comedian's career income curve look like?
  • Are we including things like endorsements? side-businesses that are based on their star-power?
  • Would we offer a buyout option?

Misc