OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.
Read Previous → Episode 5: Risking Everything
It’s time. No more fucking around. Time to chase my dream. Time to recapture my spark. Time to reinvent funding for creators!
I quit my job. Clear the decks. Full focus. One, two, three—GO. But I got nothing. No product. No idea where to start.
Don’t panic. Stay loose. Smoke a joint. I pick up the Oculus DK1 my friend Mike gave me to try. It’s like strapping a brick to my face. I launch Titans, a virtual tour of our solar system. It’s rough—pixelated planets—but as I float past Jupiter, the universe suddenly opens. I am a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Small, yet expansive.
And I know—this is the future of art and storytelling.
My bet is simple: if I want to reinvent how creators fund their work, VR is the place to start. A brand-new industry, wide open to new rules—the perfect petri dish. And if we crack the code here, we can scale it up to fund all kinds of art, science, and technology.
Selena and I start a VR meetup. She nailed every detail of our wedding, so I know she’ll crush it as an event producer. And she does. Every week at the old Mozilla HQ, creators show up. Dozens turn into hundreds, driving in from LA, flying in from across the country.
Tyler Hurd premieres BUTTS—two bald men pulling confetti out of their ass. It’s ridiculous. It’s genius. Skillman & Hackett demo Tilt Brush, the immersive painting app destined to be acquired (and killed) by Google. Tony Parisi, the godfather of VRML, drops wisdom. The air is electric. We’re giving birth to a new art form.
We want the world to see our baby. So, we launch a traveling VR film festival. Selena comes up with the name: Kaleidoscope.
We rent a U-Haul, cram it with hundreds of VR headsets, and hit the road on a DIY tour across America—scrappy, renegade, bootlegging the future. Every stop is packed. Lines snake around the block. People want to experience the transcendent beauty of Tana Pura and the haunting brilliance of Notes on Blindness. The press eats it up. The New York Times, LA Times, every major outlet covers the “first VR film festival.”
Somewhere in the Nevada desert, I get a call. My roadie—a homeless, schizophrenic I picked up at the last stop—pumps gas, muttering to himself. We’re on a brutal 43-hour drive from LA to Boston, halfway to nowhere, when Maya Draisin, head of marketing at WIRED, rings me out of the blue.
“Would you like to partner with WIRED on a world tour?”
A real tour. With a real budget. No more U-Hauls. No more wondering if my roadie will murder me in my sleep. “Hell yes,” I say.
My friends Anthony and Nev at Wevr kick in $500,000, and the Kaleidoscope World Tour sets sail—ten cities, four continents. It nearly kills us—arrested by the French, sued by the Israelis—but we meet hundreds of brilliant creators and learn two brutal truths. First, events are a shit business: high stress, low margin. Second, most creators suck at raising money. They hate pitching. They don’t know how to find investors, negotiate partnerships, or close deals.
But I do. And if I teach creators the mechanics of fundraising, over and over, maybe—eventually—I’ll figure out how to rebuild the whole damn machine.
Fame and fortune
I know the market—virtual reality. I know the mission—help creators raise money. Beyond that, it’s a blur.
I meet up with James Beshara, an old friend from Austin. Back then, we were both broke, chasing the startup dream. Now? James has raised $65M for his company Tilt from giants like Sean Parker and Alexis Ohanian. Silicon Valley is a thunderstorm—lightning strikes enough friends; sooner or later, it’s bound to hit you. Right?
“Apply to Y Combinator,” he says with relaxed confidence. “I’ll flag your app.”
Only the top 5% of startups get interviews, but we make the cut. On pitch day, Sam Altman hunches over a laptop, absorbed by his screen. Paul Graham—the prophet himself—stares through me. Desperate to break the ice, I turn to Jessica Livingston, the only friendly face in the room: “I loved Founders at Work. The Wozniak chapter is dope.”
PG narrows his gaze. “So, which Steve are you? Wozniak or Jobs?”
My soul hangs in the balance. Wrong answer, and it’s over. I freeze. “Both,” I blurt. “Got two Steves in me. Probably more. Steve Ballmer, Steve Case. Hoffman too. Just Steves all the way down.”
Rejected.
But Lenny—my old SXSW rival—believes in me enough to write a check. His startup, LocalMind, got acquired by Airbnb, and he’s ready to share the love. It’s his first investment—a far cry from the killers he’d later back: Figma, Anduril, Substack. Other friends step up. Aaron Koblin, Mike Lewis, Elliot Cole, Paul Kanyuk, Jonathan Rosenberg. My old boss Phil Soffer. My old co-founder Eric. Family chips in too—parents, aunts, and uncles. My in-laws, Mark and Kate, are the first check in.
With money in the bank, we’re off to the races. I team up with Selena and my friend Yelena to launch DevLab, an accelerator for VR films, games, and immersive experiences. Over the next three years, we work with hundreds of creators—visionaries like Josephine Decker, Cabbibo, Tender Claws, Funktronic Labs, and Marshmallow Laser Feast—and help fund breakthrough projects like Vestige, Mad God, APEX, Testimony, and Terminal 3.
I become a truffle pig, sniffing out money for our creators. Meta, Google, Samsung, Unity, HTC, Intel—any company dabbling in VR. Public funders in Canada, France, Britain, Taiwan—Arte, CNC, CMF, NFB, BFI, TAICCA. Private investors and random rich folks. If they’re funding VR, I root them out. Then drag them to First Look, where creators pitch and deals get done.
Curators tune into Kaleidoscope—Shari Frilot from Sundance, Blake Kammerdiener from SXSW, Loren Hammonds from Tribeca, and Liz and Michel from Venice. We become a feeder for the festivals. I live on the road, flying from one premiere to the next—a whirlwind of wild art, champagne parties, and high-intensity friendship.
I land the first 7-figure deal for a VR film: Spheres, a cosmic odyssey produced by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jessica Chastain, Millie Bobby Brown, and Patti Smith. We win the Grand Prize at Venice! We expand the frontier of immersive storytelling with Battlescar, a punk rock masterpiece about two runaway girls in the gritty streets of 1970s New York. And Evolver, a bold exploration of life itself, executive produced by Terrence Malick, starring Cate Blanchett, with original music by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.
All told, Kaleidoscope raised over $34M for creators and helped fuel the artistic renaissance of virtual reality. Trudging through the snow in Park City to pitch RZA a project for the Wu-Tang Clan, it feels like I’ve arrived. After a decade lost in the wilderness, the promised land is in sight.
Then the ground gives way. I slip, tumbling once more into the abyss.
Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen
