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 6: Kaleidoscope
Canceled and broke
Rumors swirl. At our last event—Impact Reality in Seattle—attendees are getting sick, but we don’t know why. Then, two days before SXSW, the festival cancels. COVID is here. The world shuts down.
Events drive all our revenue. No events, no business. Desperate, I call my friend Robin Stethem, founder of the Museum of Other Realities—a stunning virtual space. “Wanna be the exclusive venue for Kaleidoscope?”
Next, I recruit Ana Brzezińska, a ferocious producer who takes no prisoners, always ready for a knife fight. Me, Ana, and Robin form a guerrilla squad: I run sales, Ana orchestrates the chaos, and Robin builds our exhibitions.
It works—on the surface. After hundreds of calls, I land deals with Tribeca, Cannes, NewImages, and VIFF. We produce jaw-dropping virtual events, showcasing stunning works like Minimum Mass and Kusunda. But behind the scenes, we’re bleeding money.
Turns out, high-quality VR events are a financial black hole. The demands are relentless, stretching us to the brink. Bills stack up as body bags fill the news. Oregon wildfires turn the sun into an orange haze. Portland riots. So this is the apocalypse?
Then, a flicker of hope: the Black Realities Grant.
A few years earlier, we launched a small-dollar grant program—$1,000 to $5,000. We expected a handful of submissions but got hundreds. The grants were wildly popular—even with established creators—but a nightmare to curate. I get buried in project proposals.
Maybe, the community can help? Let them pick the winners.
I hire Ruben Campos—a full-stack dev I met on AngelList—to hack together a prototype. We spend months iterating—one person, one vote; ranked choice; quadratic voting. We hit dead ends, break things, piss off the community.
It’s a wicked hard problem: how do you get a diverse group of creators—often in direct competition—to select the best projects? And how do you make it feel fair, so even the losers walk away believing in the process?
Then, in the summer of 2020, we partner with academy award-winner Viola Davis, to launch the Black Realities Grant. It goes viral, raising over $100,000 for black artists at the frontier of immersive storytelling.
I look at Ruben. This is it! The breakthrough we’ve been chasing!
Time to bet the farm. I invest my savings, then start taking on debt. I max out credit cards to keep the grants flowing. It’s terrifying but our growth engine picks up speed. More creators, more fans, more sponsors, more money. The day we hit $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue I text Lenny to celebrate. It’s working! We’re gonna make it!
Less than an hour later, we’re dead. I get an automated email from Stripe, our payment processor. Too many chargebacks. Our account is canceled. No warning. No appeal. COVID killed the old business. Stripe killed the new one. And now I’m drowning in $437,000 of debt.
No options left. Bankruptcy.
Like a phoenix, motherfucker!
Selena has every right to pack her bags. We’ve got a three-year-old and a mountain of bills. But she never wavers. Ride-or-die. And for all the pain, bankruptcy is survivable. A cheap lawyer, 15 minutes on the phone with a judge, and my sins are absolved. Tabula rasa. A clean slate—mostly.
Our creditors torch everything—the codebase, the product, the brand. But Ruben and I have got conviction. We’ve seen the future: crowdfunded grants. So I ask Ruben to be my co-founder, and together, we rise from the ashes.
Artizen is born.
But this time, we do it right. Never again will we build our home on shifting sands. Artizen will run on crypto rails—powered by NFTs, blockchain magic, and immutable freedom. Ruben codes like a madman while I hit the road to raise money.
Li Jin is my first pitch. I zoom in cocky, unprepared, rambling through the deck. Hard pass. The rejection wakes me up like a slap in the face. I grind through 100 iterations, fine-tuning the pitch until it sings. A few friends chip in: Elliot Cole, Brian Lio, Brad Weiers, Amy Zimmerman, Adam Myhill, and Paula Pettit. Just enough to keep the music playing.
Then crypto rages into a bull market, juiced up on stimmy checks. I parachute into Beyond Basel—an NFT exhibition hosted by Trippy—to infiltrate crypto culture. Someone hands me a Polaroid camera that spits out chocolate photos laced with psilocybin. Alex and Allyson Grey hold court. Asad Malik and Jake Sally glide through the crowd, fresh off Jadu Jetpacks—a metaverse play that raised $37M.
I walk through Central Park with Nick Ducoff—old friend from the Austin tech scene. “Apply to Tachyon,” he says. “I know the director.” Another accelerator? Really? But we get in. Day one, Gabriel Anderson tears us a new asshole for botching our elevator pitch. Oh shit. This guy’s for real. I’m hooked.
Gabriel whips us into shape. We raise a $1.2M pre-seed from Protocol VC , Animoca Brands, ConsenSys, Juan Benet, and Path.
We are so back. Like a phoenix, motherfucker!
Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen
