People who work in venture capital and people who work in film finance tend to occupy separate professional worlds, and they do not often compare notes. That is a missed opportunity, because the structural and psychological parallels between the two disciplines are striking — and understanding one illuminates the other in useful ways.
The same portfolio logic
The most obvious parallel is the return profile. Both film finance and venture investing operate on a portfolio logic where most investments return less than expected, a meaningful minority return nothing, and a small number of exceptional outcomes carry the whole. You do not go into either field expecting every bet to pay off. You go in expecting your judgment about which bets to make to be right often enough, and the magnitude of the wins to compensate for the frequency of the losses.
"That is a particular psychological disposition, and not everyone is suited to it."
Backing people, not just ideas
In venture capital, the received wisdom — borne out by experience — is that you are backing people more than ideas. The idea will change; the team's capacity to navigate that change is the variable that matters. Film finance is identical. A script is an intention, not a guarantee. The director's ability to realise it, the producer's ability to hold the production together under pressure, the relationships that will determine distribution — these are the real determinants of outcome, and they are all human.
Where the disciplines diverge
Where the disciplines diverge is in liquidity and structure. Venture capital, at least in its institutional form, has developed increasingly sophisticated secondary markets and structured exit mechanisms. Film finance, historically, has been far more binary — you wait for the film to perform, and the path to return is narrower.
What film financing has given me, which I carry into every other context, is a very clear sense of what speculative capital looks like when it is well-structured versus when it is not. The discipline of thinking carefully about downside protection in an inherently high-variance asset class is not unique to film — it applies wherever the range of outcomes is wide and the timeline is long.
This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.