creative-economy
(6)
Bridgeway Capital bets on the businesses a balance sheet can miss
A childcare center, an old factory, a grant that pays too late. In the industrial towns around Pittsburgh, Bridgeway Capital finances the awkward gaps between a useful idea and a working business.
Feira Preta built a market. Then it had to build the machinery.
A São Paulo fair became a network for Black entrepreneurs, linking training, creative spaces and customers. Its most revealing lessons arrived when the festival could no longer pay its own way.
CcHUB Is Building the Parts a Startup Cannot Download
The Lagos-born innovation company has spent years assembling the people, capital and institutional connections behind African tech ventures. Its most useful lesson: a promising app still needs somewhere to go.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter made the crowd a gatekeeper for creative work. Now it is trying to solve the less romantic part of the bargain - everything that happens before the campaign opens and after the funding meter turns green.
ARTOTEL Group
ARTOTEL Group is an Indonesian hospitality company that turns hotels into cultural platforms by pairing hotel design with original work from emerging Indonesian contemporary artists. Founded in 2011 by siblings Erastus and Christine Radjimin, it has grown from a single art hotel into one of Indonesia's largest hospitality operators, managing 100+ properties through four business pillars - Stay, Dine, Play, and Shop - across boutique, midscale, and premium brands.
Craig Swanson
Craig Swanson is a Seattle-born serial entrepreneur who co-founded CreativeLive with photographer Chase Jarvis in 2010, helping build the platform into a $60M-backed live-streaming education company that served 10 million creators before being acquired by Fiverr. Now based in San Francisco and working as CEO of a stealth-mode startup, Swanson has spent his career operating quietly behind high-profile brands - turning influencers and educators into multimillion-dollar businesses while accumulating $92.5 million in digital goods sold across all ventures.