Hollywood and Fintech: a Perfect Match

We just had the annual Oscar jamboree and congratulations to Anora for its five Oscars, and particular respect to Sean Baker who picked up four personally, something that’s never been achieved before. But Hollywood has an issue. No one knows where the money goes. I’ve just joined some friends to fix that.

It came around by accident, because I recently wanted to invest in a movie starring most of the British treasures you can imagine (Dame Judi and co). I floated the idea past a friend who is an expert in this area, and he said it would be stupid. What?

As the conversation progressed, it turns out that the whole movie industry is pretty opaque, with investor money wasted and only those at the trough of feeding profiting. It’s called The Waterfall Effect. This ‘effect’ means that those at the top get paid first and take the largest cut. Then there are the others who get paid next, most often the actors and producers; then there are those who get paid last.

A “Hollywood investing waterfall effect” refers to?the structured way in which profits from a film are distributed among different stakeholders, like investors, studios, talent, and distributors, where each party receives their share of the revenue in a cascading order, with the highest priority (like senior debt investors) getting paid first, followed by others in a tiered system, similar to how water flows down a waterfall.?Putting it more simply, Investopedia summarises this waterfall as a pyramid of buckets cascading where the water represents money, and the buckets represent investors, partners, or stakeholders. The water fills the first bucket first. The second bucket will fill only after the first is completely full and spills over. As water flows, more buckets are filled in the order in which they appear.

The problem is that no-one can work the accounting as to which bucket is filled first and last in a transparent way.

There are many examples from Bohemian Rhapsody to The King’s Speech – movies that were hugely successful but many lost their pants investing – and you can find out more in this beginner’s guide to film financing waterfalls.

I didn’t know anything about this and didn’t invest in the movie, but it led to some interesting conversations and lunches, so much so that I’m now the Chair of a company called Stelarator? that wants to bring transparency to this space and solve this problem.

You can find out more about Stelarator here https://stelarator.com/

and our aim is to bring light to the dark of film financing through fintech. Seed investors welcome!

Anyways, in the interests of diving deeper into this space my friend Vlad Hunter https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/vladlodzinski/ , CEO of Stelarator, introduced me to Thomas Kingston https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/thomas-kingston-a62bb3a/ , publisher of the Media C-suite and an expert in everything to do with law and media. Here’s how the conversation went:

Thomas Kingston:

One of the very first things I realised going back thirty years now is that people inside the media industry really don’t know how to speak to professional investors at all. Venture capital, private equity investors … that communication skillset doesn’t exist. When a media executive or a media entrepreneur is in the room with a professional investor, they speak completely different languages.

They approach everything from a completely different way, and quite often they walk away from each other saying: I never want to meet another one like that again.

Having said that, the media and entertainment industry is robust growing, highly lucrative. It’s more than three trillion a year in global revenues. It’s also in transition from a traditional business model, a traditional environment. It’s all about the studio system and the creator economy, but growing into something different – a new business model – and that affects almost every aspect of content creation, distribution, and exhibition or delivery of the content.

So that makes this industry incredibly interesting to large investors, large asset management groups that have increasingly more and more liquidity. Their jobs are to take cash and turn it into an asset, not cash, that they can then sell for more money later or earn performance from. That’s their job, and their day-to-day existence.

This means that there is so much money coming into the management industry – whether that’s private or public equity funds – there’s so much money coming into that space from the private capital markets. They can’t invest fast enough and the war chest, if you will, the dry powder within the industry is accumulating, and it’s a problem for the most part.

Professional investors have effectively been excluded from equity investments into the media and entertainment industry. Because of the way it was structured. If you wanted to invest in the media and entertainment industry, you either invested in a technology that provided infrastructure or you invest on the public markets into one of the conglomerates.

However, the transition that’s taking place – the disruption that technology has unleashed on this industry and the way in which the audience has embraced that technology – has changed the game completely.

So now, private equity investors, venture capital investors, the professional asset management class institutions are really able to reach into this industry. It’s been cracked open, if you will. The publicly listed media conglomerates are really in trouble. They’re still making money hand over fists. They’re still incredibly valuable. They have incredibly valuable balance sheets, with the IP that they’ve acquired and accumulated, but they have no strategy whatsoever. They have no vision of the future of this industry.

That is being taken up by media entrepreneurs and the audience themselves, and that’s why this creator economy has begun to take on a life of its own, and it’s a real challenge for the established traditional legacy media groups.

This has completely turned finance upside down.

The way in which films have traditionally been financed is that somebody will develop a script into a film project. Let’s call it a business plan. They’ll assemble a team of behind the camera – a team of experts, directors, producers, line producers, costume manufacturers – and then they’ll attach talents to it; and they’ll package that business plan as a single project with their own money. They’ll get it to that point. That’s the equity components.

Then they’ll go out to a distributor, and the distributor will say that they will distribute this picture for you. I’ll give you a contract to that, maybe even an advance, a minimum guarantee or something else. And so that either means cash money upfront that they can apply to their production budget or it’s a commercial piece of paper that they can lend or borrow against, rather borrow against.

And it’s that borrowing against the commercial paper that has driven film finance for the last twenty years, and there was one driving figure in developing this as an industry. If you were a lender or a bank or a specialist financial group that understood the film industry, understood distribution, understood some of the risks involved – and you had a promissory note or you had a distribution agreement or a negative pickup deal from a major studio – that piece of paper was worth every zero written in the right place. You lent against that – probably 90 cents on the dollar – and that’s how people got their pictures made, right?

That’s changed a lot, primarily in the last two years. It’s really hit almost rock bottom. I don’t want to say rock bottom because there’s still room to fall. It’s incredibly difficult to borrow money now. It’s incredibly difficult to get pre-sales agreements. It’s incredibly difficult to get a negative pickup deal. The reason for that is that the big media majors, the multinational distribution networks owned by the conglomerates that are listed on the exchanges.

It is their suffering, their lack of vision, actually, it gives them a myopia. They don’t understand what’s going to happen five years from now. So they’re not spending money on anything other than what they own already.

This is why they make so many remakes. They do reboots of IP that they already own. That’s been happening for a long time now, and has become the primary policy in the C-suites of these big groups: do not acquire somebody else’s IP. We’re not interested in anything that’s been written by anybody that we don’t already have a contract with, and where we don’t own the IP – the copyright – from inception. This is why the number of films that are getting picked up at the movie markets has fallen off a cliff.

Chris Skinner:

As you’re talking it strikes me, because I’ve been watching the Oscars today, and an independent film made with $6 million picks up five Oscars, a record for the director and producer because he’s got four on his own. I’m wondering if that illustrates your point, because it’s an independent movie and now a lot of the voters on the Oscar nominations committee are no longer the former establishment. It’s been widened internationally. How does that change everything you’re saying?

Thomas:

Well, to a degree, yes. I mean, the Academy of Motion, Picture, Arts and Sciences, that’s the body behind the Oscars. They’ve been around for a hundred years now. This is the 97th Oscar ceremony. They’ve been around for just over a hundred years. It is an interesting concept. It was established by independent filmmakers who needed to develop new techniques, new technologies. They needed to bring in investors. They needed to showcase how this is advancing, and it was an immediately lucrative industry.

Technology was always the biggest driver in the development of new content, new storytelling methods, new delivery methods of communication of content and new delivery methods. So technology has always been a big part of this.

What you see in the academy is that it was taken over, if you will, by the studios and, for a long time, if it wasn’t a studio produced film it didn’t get an Oscar. It wasn’t even considered from Oscar.

That started to change before the strikes, before the pandemic. It started to change.

You also then had this movement back in the 1970s of independent filmmakers getting together and trying to set up their own studios and trying to counter the likes of Disney, trying to counter the likes of Paramount. Paramount in particular was the big bully on the block for a very, very long time. In fact, the US government got involved in the 1940s and created what’s called the Paramount Directives, which effectively broke up what the government, the Justice Department of the United States saw as a cabal. A monopolistic agreement between the studios to control everything from production to distribution to exhibition, and it was broken up. After that, everything went independent, and you saw the Oscars begin to be a little bit more open.

Now, back then, there were a were few thousand members of the academy. What we’re seeing right now is a membership of the academy that’s grown from 7,000 a few years ago to over 13,000 today. They’ve really pushed international members into the academy. The academy had to reinvent what Hollywood is. Hollywood can no longer be a place in Hollywood County in Los Angeles and California. Hollywood has to be a global industry.

What the Academy is trying very hard to do right now is to internationalise the Oscars and internationalise film production. It will eventually start to embrace more and more independent films, more and more foreign independent films, and it started to do that some time ago. This is why Anora got five Oscars. Now it’s doing that now but, when they first wrote Anora, it was probably a $30 million budget. They made it for $6 million because that’s all they could get. They always want more. Every producer, every director wants a bigger budget.

Chris: This is one of the questions I’ve asked before Thomas, because Anora raised $6 million to film and has made $41 million at the box office, apparently. You then have the costs of distribution and marketing and everything else that goes into it. How do you see the breakdown of the costs and the profit, because you can have a great movie that gets an Oscar, but nobody who invested makes any money.

Thomas: So there’s an infamous historical precedent within Hollywood, let’s call it Hollywood Accounting, and Hollywood Accounting results in zero profits. There is no obligation to distribute net profits to the net participators. The artists, the actors, the director, all negotiate an agreement to get a little bit of money to live on while they’re making the picture, but what they really want is if this thing goes to the Oscars and makes a couple of hundred million dollars in the box office, we want a piece of that. So they negotiate points or they negotiate a backend deal where they share in the profits.

Now, Hollywood reporting and Hollywood accounting is specifically designed to make sure that no picture ever hits a profit, and they do this through contracts with distribution companies that then take on the burden of marketing. So, let’s say you have a $6 million picture. It’s distributed through Universal, Global, and Universal has the obligation for all marketing. The distributor needs to have some marketing obligations are talking to the cinema owners, right? The cinema owners want something that has a big draw, because of the marketing spend that’s been going into it. This means that Universal will say, we spent $50 million on marketing. The result? This $6 million picture makes $35 million in profits, and ?theoretically it should be net profits of this much but, because $50 million went into marketing, that still has to be paid. The net gets reduced down to almost nothing and, sometimes, even a loss. This meant that it was one way in which the studio system effectively rendered creatives as employees, right?

What this means is that, through contracts or through practice, creatives never really participated in the revenue streams from the distribution and delivery of their content. Now, the revenue streams have become really important when you look at this industry today. We are talking about $3 trillion in global revenues. It gives you an idea of the size of this industry.

Chris: I was just going to ask, because gaming is massively bigger than Hollywood these days, is that covered by the same rules and disciplines, or is that different?

Thomas: No, it is different. But there is a convergence taking place. There is a conversion. So the creative element within gaming has also been exploited to a certain degree by the publishers. In gaming, a producer would be called a publisher. So publishers do a very good job of making their way through that because they are coders. They’re the people that are in there writing script all day, writing code all day. They get paid a salary, but not necessarily a piece of the profits. And gaming is hugely profitable.

You also need to think that it’s sometimes a shared IP. So that IP aspect is where there’s a lot of convergence as well.

Chris: Well, that’s what I was wondering. If you’ve got Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit or something, and then you’ve got the gaming version, then isn’t that the same thing?

Thomas: No, there’s a licensing aspect to the intellectual property behind the Hobbit or behind the game. If it mirrors the film, then it has to take a license from the owners of the IP for that film, and it’s not necessarily the writer or the director or the producer with code. It’s different. Code is slightly different. It’s treated differently in terms of intellectual property, and so the gaming industry has always been a little bit different than the Hollywood industry in terms of films versus games. There are a lot more opportunities for a group of really talented coders and creatives within the gaming industry to leave an oppressive publisher and set up their own title, and that happens. That’s a lot easier to do in gaming than it is in films.

Chris: so, now you’ve got streaming, gaming and so many other digital distribution structures and it sounds like, from what you’ve described, there’s not one all encompassing legal structure. They’re all different targeted to the different media and distributions.

Thomas: There are fundamental similarities within all of them. They all belong within the same industry. They’re all segments of the same industry. But there are differences in the way business practices, corporate structures, legal structures, and revenue streams work.

For all intents and purposes, the commonality across all entertainment, news and other content, is the way that it gets consumed in the way in which the revenue streams tend to work, and there are two primary revenue streams. One of them is consumer spending on access to content. The other one is advertising spend on access to the consumers.

Think of the consumers spending money on tickets. That’s the audience, right? Those are the people that are putting the money in and, until now, consumer spending has been the deepest, widest, most lucrative revenue stream to the industry. Film, games, you name it. That’s just changed.

Now, to tie this all back to what you see in the Oscars and the film industry and the history and all of this, the big studios control, distribution and delivery to audiences. Therefore, they control receipt of revenues from consumer spending, and it is a monopolistic type of control. It is a cabal. They do have arrangements; they do have agreements; they understand how this works.

Whether it’s receipts from the box office or whether it’s subscriptions from streaming customers, those receipts come in to the media majors. And Netflix is a media major. We would’ve called it a technology company for the longest time until very, very recently. Now, you can’t call it anything, but it’s one of the media majors. So is Amazon. They make their money from consumer spending on access to content.

What’s changed is that the advertising spend has never declined despite the fact that, just before the pandemic, almost everybody from Google to every major publisher owned by a media conglomerate were talking about massive reductions in advertising revenues. And it’s true, they all saw declines in advertising receipts, advertising spend to them but, as an industry, the advertise as a segment of the industry, advertising spend never went down, ever. It’s now going to hit a trillion dollars a year.

Chris: How would that trillion dollars break breakdown, Thomas? Is it mainly through Amazon and YouTube and direct to consumer?

Thomas: So, that’s the really valuable question. The answer to that is that, until recently, most advertising spend went to the big social media platforms on programmatic advertising,

Advertising on billboards, advertising in newspapers, advertising in magazines. That never went away, and it’s still an incredibly lucrative spend path, but then programmatic advertising rose fifteen years ago with the social media platforms. It starts with Google in particular. Google dominates this, but they’re not the only ones.

Look at Facebook and Amazon. Their surge means that advertising agencies began to die, right? Brands didn’t have to go to advertising agencies. They began to acquire creative agencies, and they would have their own marketing departments come up with their own advertising campaigns that were going out on programmatic advertising platforms.

This is why we’ve all seen these banner ads and they are ridiculously simple. There’s very little strategic, intellectual, psychological work that goes into building an advertising campaign for a programmatic advertising spend. It is too simple.

So, advertising agencies began to suffer. They began to go away. They began to decline. Then brands started to realize that, on these social media platforms, there were individuals that were gaining millions of views of their content. They were gathering followers, numbering in the millions. In some cases, these influencers began to be approached directly by the brands and they said: rather than us spending money to the platform, we want to give some money to you. It’s much more cost effective for the brand. It’s much more welcomed by the influencer.

So, they began to build campaigns around sponsorship of influencers around ten years ago.

It then expanded into other areas like podcasting. You began to see the likes of Joe Rogan, who has several hundred million followers with millions of views for each of his episodes. Sponsors were running to him, and he was able to strike a deal with $200 million deal with Spotify, as long as the sponsors stayed. That was unheard of.

Chris: I want to get back to that point about film finance really quickly and how it’s changing.

Thomas: So we talked about film financing, financing and independent picture by an independent film producer. It’s all being turned on its head right now for one thing. There’s more money out there than there has ever been, and there’s more money out there searching for a good investment opportunity. An independent film project standing on its own is rarely going to get the interest of a professional investor anymore. Unless that producer has acquired commercial paper valuable enough to lend against, nobody’s going to put money into it. Even if it’s Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola struggled. He had to sell his own assets to fund his latest picture Megalopolis.

Francis Ford Coppola wins Razzie for 'worst director,' slams Hollywood - Los Angeles Times

So, the days of being able to leverage and build a single independent film project, in my opinion, is done. They’re not dead, and there are exceptions that tend to be touted as the rule, but the rule is these days, no professional investors are going to touch an equity portion of any single film project. It’s not a smart move, right?

However, a film producer who’s got five or six really good scripts as a catalogue, has assets. If he’s produced one or two of those into income producing product, he has a track record and he can begin to build up his production company in the same way that a tech company has to build itself up. It’s got a product, he can make more product. There’s an audience out there for it. He’s got a management team that knows what it’s doing. It’s got all the fundamental characteristics of a business, with balance sheet assets in the form of intellectual property rights.

So, any company that’s able to build that proposition up, there is money ready to pour into it.

Chris: Could you talk around the capital stack and what that looks like and who’s got the risk capital? Who’s got the, let’s say, non-risk capital in that??

Thomas: A traditional independent film project has a capital stack. If you look at its total budget – from acquisition of copyright through an option to delivery of the picture to the distributor – there’s a budget there. That budget is filled with a capital stack. The development portion of that project’s life cycle is almost always equity capital. So that person has to go out, just like any other founder, and through friends and family, through mortgaging their house, they come up with the equity to develop this picture into what’s called a package. A package is what they go around to sell to distributors and streamers, right? It’s the package that includes who the actors are, who the directors are. It’s all set. It’s the pitch deck and the business plan with everybody locked in, right? That’s the package. So the development is everything up to that point.

That’s almost always equity. Equity is usually about 30% of the total budget. You then have the costs of production; the cost of principal photography; hiring the actors; the production costs. Those are almost always funded through finance, through debt, and that debt is almost always backed by commercial paper. So it’s an asset backed finance deal.

Then you’ve got a negative pickup deal from Netflix, so we’ll give you Netflix as a credit risk at ninety cents on the dollar. Then you may have a negative pickup deal from some crazy guy who calls himself a distributor who has never done anything before we can find anything on. Then the credit risk is huge, so we’re going to give you five cents on the dollar for that, right?

If it is a good size film with a $30 million budget and the film has a negative pickup deal, which is basically you deliver this picture the way we want it to be delivered, we’ll pay you the full budget plus 30%.

That’s the classic negative pickup deal, right?

You then have to hit the compliance side of this. You have to deliver it on time, and if you do, you get what it’s cost you to date – you cover your negative costs – plus we’ll give you a premium of 30%, but you sign everything over to us. That means you no longer have any intellectual property rights in the property at all, right? That’s a classic negative pickup deal.

Then we get to the rest of the capital stack, which is 30% equity and 70% debt. That debt ranges anywhere from a negative pickup deal with Netflix, which is really low risk, or the crazy guy which is high risk. You get a completion bond on that project and it’s zero risk. The completion bond will either guarantee that it gets completed on time and delivered to Netflix, or it pays out what Netflix would’ve paid out.

So, you get a completion bond, you get a high value negative pickup deal. If you’re a lender, you’re not taking any risk on this whatsoever. It’s an eighteen month lend, and you’re guaranteed with a completion bond to get paid.

That’s the capital stack on a traditional classic film project.

Chris: So, who gets paid first and who gets paid last, because there’s a cascade?

Thomas: You’re talking about waterfalls, and that’s another one hour discussion, but waterfalls are important to understand. There’s a lot written on it. You can find a lot of material to educate yourself on waterfalls, and then it’s worth having another conversation about waterfalls. But typically a capital stack is divided up like that.

What’s changed is who’s delivering the contents to whom? So you’ve gone from a studio system where the studios or the middleman control distribution and delivery to today, thanks to the internet and computers and AI, where anyone can create any content and deliver it to 5.6 billion active users on the internet. 5.6 billion people. That’s the total of able audience around the world. So if you’re a content creator and you go out there and you market yourself; you build up an audience yourself; you can deliver content to that audience with a value attached to it; and, through technology, we have data on who’s watching your stuff. We can collect that data.

If we deliver that data to an advertising agency, and these agencies are coming back into their own now, they become much more important because the brands are paying the agencies to understand how all this works and to build a campaign for them. So if you’ve got a content creator out there; they’ve built an audience; they don’t need the studios anymore at all. They’ve got their audience. That audience will pay in either time or they’ll pay for access. They’ll subscribe. The advertisers will pay for access to that audience. If you can show them the data, you can raise the money.

It used to be that you would get a distribution deal if you had Brad Pitt in your film. Brad Pitt, a known quantity. People will go to see a Brad Pitt movie just because he’s in it. That’s what their agents will say. What Brad Pitt has is his own audience.

Nowadays, what Brad Pitt is doing, and what a lot of these guys are doing, is they’re saying: I don’t want to be the talent. I’ll still be the talent, but I bring the audience. If I bring the audience, I can go to these sponsors and brands that I love, and I can tell them whatever picture I want to attach myself to, you need to be there. I want you to put $X million bucks into it. As sponsors, you do that. We’ll figure out how to make it good for you in terms of your marketing, your promotion, but then Brad Pitt brings the money. He’s a producer talent and he’s an executive producer.

Chris: Effectively, you build up all the network of the people who have to be involved in the movie, and particularly when you get to a Brad Pitt or someone of that ilk, they become a producer. So the cascade, the waterfall, is that they all get in the dip first, and I get there last. Is that right?

Thomas: Well, yeah. I mean, there’s growth participation, there’s net participation. Waterfalls can get complicated. The definition of producer has widened and diluted tremendously. It used to be that just to get Brad Pitt to act in your film, there was no other contribution beyond being paid to act. He’ll say, look, you’ve agreed to pay me this much. That’s great. You didn’t want to, but you paid me what I’ve demanded. Then the talent added caveats such as, instead of doing forty-five days of shooting, I only want to be on set for fifteen. We’re going to write this into our contract. And by the way, I want a producer’s credit right now. As soon as he gets a producer’s credit, he gets several fringe benefits. As a member of the American Producers Association (APA) he gets better retirement benefits out of them, because he’s got so many credits. As a producer, he’s able to go and push something over the line with Netflix, and therefore agree to a few more points in the waterfall. And he might even be able to say, I want gross, not nets. I want a percentage of the gross, which is everything that the studios don’t want. They want everybody to get a piece of the net.

Only things change, because you can now go direct to consumer. The direct to consumer distribution model is gaining so much traction that people are now able to make a feature length film and put it on YouTube and make a profit on that film.

Chris: Is this the whole reason why artists, whether it’s music or movies, media, are really worried about artificial intelligence?

Thomas: Yes and no. This is a longer conversation but, as concise as I can do it, artificial intelligence challenges things in several ways. Recently there was a court case. It was one of the first court cases against an AI company for scraping data for training purposes. Last month, it reached its conclusion, and the conclusion was that this was a violation of copyright law, which everybody knew, but it took the courts to make that a settled piece of law right.

The further back you go, before that decision, the more AI companies were just saying, we don’t care. We’re going to scrape anyway. They’ve gotten to the point now where it’s recognised as copyright theft and they have to pay.

So, what are AI companies doing instead of paying? They are striking license deals with publishers, licensing deals with other IP owners, and they are becoming – instead of a drain on revenue streams to the industry – they’re becoming a source of revenue streams to the industry, and this is going to eventually be a significant source of revenue to the industry.

What artists fear from AI, and what was behind the actors strike in Hollywood, was that a lot of the studios were saying: we’re going to scan your image and we’re going to create artificial characters, artificial voices. You never have to show up to the sets, and yet you are a main character in this film. That’s the future that they’re terrified of because then you are an actor with no power, with a bad agent, having to sign away the right to their image in the context of this character.

By way of example, you have a film being produced, let’s call it The Mandalorian, being produced. The AI future is just a bunch of TV screens behind the actor, with the background generated by computer; and they will be using just a bunch of AI generated images of people in that background running around; and a lot of those images were captured through auditions across the industry. This means that these actors aren’t being paid a penny for their appearance on The Mandalorian. They aren’t paid anything. That is why they went on strike.

If that AI was generated from their image or their performance, they own the copyright to their performance, unless they’ve signed it away. This is becoming more and more of an issue. As the creator economy starts to rejig the way the economics of the industry work, that’s going to change. That power is going to come back to the creator of the works, the creator of whoever owns that copyright, the creator who created it in the first place. So there’s a lot to be afraid of.

With AI. The law is pretty settled. We know what the law has always been. It took a while for the courts to catch up, and the AI companies are now reluctantly doing the right thing.

Chris: This means our biggest argument going forward is going to be about intellectual property and copyright?

Thomas: Of course. Intellectual property is the fundamental core of this industry that allows people to make money. You can’t make money unless there’s a copyright and a chain of title from that copyright. Without that, you’re not legally allowed to make money.

About Stelarator

Stelarator is a new middleman providing the due diligence framework, credit risk management and packaging of deals. The problem we solve is that there is no clear financial accounting in movies. There is no one route forward. There is no A follows B follows C. There’s just a start and an end product and, how you get there, is completely free formed in between. Stelarator solves this by applying distributed ledger technology to track and trace the flows of finance across the industry.

Find out more here: https://stelarator.com/ and?seed investors welcome!

About Thomas Kingston

Dr. Kingston is an American lawyer & private equity professional with 30 years of international experience in investment strategy. He is the founder of Cyprus Capital Partners, the first private equity firm in Cyprus and Coherent Media Group a corporate holding company dedicated to media and entertainment businesses globally.

He is a corporate and political speech-writer and has ghost-written numerous Op-Eds, political/espionage thrillers and science fiction novels. He has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Nicosia as both advisor and executive to several of the world’s largest family offices, institutional investors and State-owned investment companies.