Investing in farmland regeneration. @farm

The Great Opportunity

Paying creators with clarity.

Music technology company with Shawn Fanning

Music Collective

Researched and maintained an early version of Berklee Online's music business database.

Restoring America's Great Plains is a responsibility and opportunity that starts with the soil.

Being creative and collaborating with people isn’t difficult, yet making a living as a musician tends to be very complicated. I’ve been playing bass and working in the music industry since high school, consistently frustrated by the absence of options to collectively distribute and manage music online.

Our panel of leading early-stage VCs selected companies based on their readiness to raise pre-seed or seed rounds based on the business idea, team, and early-growth indicators. Finalists’ pitch decks are shared with our network of investors, and we introduce potential investors when they express interest.

This latest round was incredibly competitive, with a significant increase in both the number and quality of applications, accepting 53 startups from 3,000+ applications.

Another firm integral to my interest in this topic is Farm. I've sat down with Tim Luckow, the CEO of Farm, a few times now, and he's turned me on to some big ideas surrounding farmland. America's farmland is one of its many riches. Still, much of it has degraded over time due to overgrazing, monocultures, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and more (all of which also threaten biodiversity).

This fintech dealmaker wants to restore America’s Great Plains by combining investors, land purchases, regen ag, renewable energy leases and the right boots on the ground.

Farm is an innovative investment management platform that seeks to rejuvenate land in the U.S. by channeling investments in projects, geared toward land stewardship. Its work aims to deliver tangible benefits that will lead not only to revitalized ecosystems, but also by returning the carbon capture ability to restored soil. In addition, the projects it funds include repurposing the land for sustainable commercial activities, like solar and wind energy generation.

Troy Carter, formerly Spotify’s global head of creator services and Lady Gaga’s manager for the first five years of her career, has teamed up with his longtime friend and business partner J. Erving to form a “new, modern music and technology company” called Q&A. The pair, who formerly worked together in Carter’s Atom Factory company, are joined by co-founder Suzy Ryoo (Atom Factory, OMD) and Tim Luckow (Stem, GHouse).

Stem, a startup that helps musicians from Frank Ocean to Childish Gambino collect digital revenue, says it has raised $8 million in a series-A funding round. Stem collects money earned from platforms such as YouTube and Spotify, quickly splits the payments among collaborators, aggregates and analyzes a user’s share of earnings from each distribution platform and prevents money from slipping through the cracks.

When Frank Ocean’s album “Blonde” came out in August, it went straight to No. 1 and became the talk of the music business because it was released completely outside the usual channels of the recording industry. One answer was revealed on Sunday in an online ad promoting “Blonde” as one of the most acclaimed releases of 2016 and noting that it was “powered by Stem.”

Transparency reigns supreme at GHouse: we’re dedicated to showing our artists what happens behind the scenes on the business side so they can focus on their music. We want them to know exactly how much they’re making from digital sales, how many people are streaming their songs online and what each venue contract really means. It’s good both for the artists and for us: we’ve doubled our profits quarter-over-quarter since the start of 2012.

GHouse is a music and events company based in Boston, MA, that books tours for artists and digitally distributes music/video internationally through The Orchard, and markets each release with Gupta Media. Started four years ago by Tim Luckow while attending Berklee College of Music, GHouse has grown to incorporate a music label group and booking agency. The company is based in Somerville, MA and is currently working a number of music events here in Boston including a city-wide music festival and on developing a Spotify App with The Echo Nest.

For Tim Luckow, the Grass is Green on Moving Day in Allston. At the head of GHouse, the creative community and record label he started in 2008 while studying music business and management at Berklee (he graduated last year), Luckow has built a network of motivated bands and smart minds.

Stem is delivering for Sheryl Crow, Childish Gambino and others who have signed with the music-and-royalties-distribution startup. The company, which Rabkin Lewis describes as “an end-to-end solution for rights owners,” paid royalties for 3.6 billion-plus streams during the first half of this year alone. Luckow says Stem now has partnerships with streaming services on five continents. “We can report triple-digit growth in the past 12 months,” he says. Cronin-Wilesmith sees Stem moving beyond music to other such creative fields as graphic arts. “We can help the people who are normally cut out of the process entirely,” he says. “Our business has been shining a light on all these creative businesses that also need a back-office suite of solutions.”

This App Wants to Help Indie Artists Focus on Music--Instead of Chasing Paychecks. A former talent agent and a former musician teamed up to build a better way for independent artists to publish their work online--and get paid for it.

Tim Luckow is the founder & CEO of Farm, a platform for investing in farmland to be used in various environmental projects such as regenerative agriculture and wind energy. In this episode we’ll talk about the challenges of quantifying natural capital, how Farm is building technology to identify investment opportunities, and how it’s championing collective land ownership to better align incentives between land owners, farmers, and ranchers.