When you’re building a new company, fighting the urge to criticize your competitors, especially ones who don’t even know you exist yet, can be tough. I’m of the opinion that you should make the case based on what you’re going to do, not what others are doing wrong. If you occasionally need to compare and contrast to emphasize a point, do it honestly and stick to the point. But mostly focus on yourself and let others do what they’re going to do.

I think that’s what I’ve done here, highlighting the ways Kyndred is going to work to make things better for artists, crew, and fans. I’ve also laid out the case for what Kyndred is going to deliver on the content side, again focusing on what I enjoy and what I’d like to see more of rather than picking apart work that didn’t resonate with me.

Something I haven’t gone too deeply into is what Kyndred will be like for the people building it alongside me. That’s right, I’m not in this alone. Not anymore, at least. In the short time since I brought this idea to life, I’ve already met with so many incredible people. Honestly, I wish there were more roles to offer because everyone I’ve met so far has been someone I could see working alongside and someone who would make Kyndred a better place.

That’s really what this is all about for me. I want to make Kyndred the best place it can be for everyone involved. I know we’re in an era of chasing 100x value, maximizing efficiency, sacrificing everything for the company, replacing humans with AI, or making the people who remain accomplish even more in less time. We’re told to always do what the CEO says without question and win at all costs, regardless of the toll it takes on everyone involved.

Don’t get me wrong, I want this company to be incredibly successful because that allows us to keep doing what we want to do. But I also want people to enjoy the work they’re doing. I think fulfilling work is vital to our well-being and sense of purpose. What I don’t believe is that work should become someone’s entire identity. A fully realized person has many sides to who they are, and they need to be able to nurture those sides if they’re going to be at their best in their careers.

What does that mean, exactly? It means supporting people every chance you get, listening to their ideas, giving them autonomy, and seeking their counsel before making decisions that will affect them. This is not a dictatorship, no matter how many sycophantic think pieces on LinkedIn say that’s how companies should be run.

It also means respecting their time. Giving them space during the day to nurture other parts of their lives, and not making them feel guilty for using the time you said they could have. Not reaching out in the middle of the night expecting an immediate reply. Giving them the freedom to get their work done in the way that makes sense for them, as long as they're delivering quality and hitting timelines. And not leaving them alone on an island without support when they need it.

When I bring someone onto the team, it’s not because I want them to simply do what I say. I could just get a bunch of AI agents if that were what I wanted. It’s because I believe they bring tremendous value, a unique skill set and point of view, and the ability to make everyone around them better, including me. I like to surround myself with people I believe are smarter and more creative than I am because I can learn from them and because they inspire me.

There are many things I see Kyndred doing, and they’re all rooted in ethics. Creative ownership? Ethics. Backend participation for crew? Ethics. Fans having a say in what gets made? Ethics. Bringing jobs to Los Angeles without limiting creative freedom? Ethics. Creating a better work environment on set? Ethics. Utilizing a human workforce and not letting people go in favor of AI? Ethics. Being profitable without being greedy? Ethics. Telling original stories that everyone is excited about? Entertainment. (Thought I was going to say Ethics again?) Look, entertainment has to be at the heart of everything we do as a company, but we can be good people while we do it. I believe that will create the most successful version of Kyndred.

What does this mean for you, the reader, exactly? It means that however you become involved with Kyndred, whether as a creator, fan, crew member, team member, investor, or partner, you’ll know that what you’re contributing to and supporting is built on respect. It’s about working together every day to build an ethical company that creates some of the best entertainment the world has to offer. It’s about feeling good about what you’re investing your efforts into for a change.

Stay tuned because we’ll be making a team announcement very soon, and we’re going to start releasing videos on social media so you can get to know the people behind the scenes. I can’t wait for you to meet everyone.

Thanks for your support!

-Lauer

Shapiro framed three paths: traditional finance, crowdfunding and crowd-investing. Traditional finance is the familiar ecosystem of private capital, sales agents, distributors, studios, festivals and buyers. Crowdfunding, through platforms like Kickstarter, Seed & Spark, Patreon and Substack, lets audiences support creators directly, but those platforms are mostly infrastructure. The creator is still largely alone when it comes time to produce, market, distribute, and sustain the work. Crowd-investing, through platforms like Republic, lets fans buy into a financial position connected to a project or slate, but now you’ve introduced legal and emotional complexity to the creator/fan relationship.

Where I think the conversation gets more interesting is in the distinction between the different kinds of fan participation being discussed. Because not all fan-funded models are the same. They may look adjacent from the outside, but they create different companies, different incentives, different audiences and different outcomes.

I think there’s a fourth path and it begins with a simpler idea (I’m a simpler is better guy): a curated entertainment studio that uses fan pre-sales to fund the work the audience asks for, with the full production and distribution apparatus to actually make and deliver it. Fans are already buyers and artists need support behind the scenes so they can focus on being creative. Mind-blowing, right?

They buy pre-release opening weekend tickets. They pre-order books. They pre-order special edition Blu-rays of films they already have access to digitally. They pre-order exclusive vinyl pressings of albums they can stream for free. They buy merch, event passes, subscriptions, collector editions, deluxe editions, signed copies, behind-the-scenes access, festival tickets and limited releases...all these things! Most of the time before they even know what they’re in for. That behavior isn’t theoretical. It’s one of the oldest and most proven behaviors in entertainment. (Like I said, simple.)

Here's the scale of it, and most of it happens before the actual release. Tentpole films pull approximately 10-30% of opening weekend gross from Fandango pre-sales alone. Hyped game pre-orders can hit 40-70% of opening units. Top-tier pop albums see 50-80% of first-week numbers from pre-saves and physical pre-orders. Real money, already committed, by audiences who haven't even experienced the work yet.

I met with an investor last week, and their biggest question about Kyndred’s success revolved around the validity of crowdfunding at scale. In the moment, I answered the question the way I thought I was supposed to answer it. I cited examples, trying to validate crowdfunding at scale. That was the mistake, and one I knew better than to make, because Kyndred isn’t trying to prove crowdfunding at scale. (First investor pitch for Kyndred. You live and learn.)

Kyndred is a pre-sale model. More specifically, it’s a demand-validation model built around pre-sales. Fans aren’t donating to a dream, and they aren’t buying a speculative financial position. They’re pre-purchasing defined entertainment: tickets, subscriptions, books, albums, films, series, physical editions, merch, events, exclusive access and experiences.

The behavior is already proven. As I stated above, entertainment has always been built around audiences paying in advance for things they want. Kyndred’s innovation isn’t asking whether fans will pay early. The innovation is moving that proven behavior earlier in the production lifecycle, so audience demand is validated before production begins. Traditional entertainment often produces first and validates later. Kyndred validates first and produces after.

That means Kyndred only produces work after audiences signal that they want it. Not in the abstract. Not because an algorithm guessed at demand. And certainly not because an executive thinks a trend is emerging. Because real people commit real money to an idea before production begins. Then Kyndred follows through helping that idea become a reality.

That follow-through is why Kyndred is more than a funding platform. Open crowdfunding platforms have proven that audiences will support creative work. That’s valuable and shouldn’t be dismissed. But platforms like Kickstarter, Seed & Spark, etc. aren’t studios. They don’t package the work, supervise production, market the work, manage delivery, provide full distribution, build a shared audience across projects or preserve the finished work as part of a long-term catalog. A campaign can fund and still stall.

Across crowdfunding, research has consistently shown only about two-thirds of funded projects deliver on time and roughly 1 in 10 don't deliver at all. And that's just the funding stage. Marketing, distribution and sustaining the work afterward are entirely on the creator. A creator can be talented and sincere and still lack the operational support to finish the project.

That's the difference between a funding platform and a partner. Even the most successful independent creators on Substack or on YouTube usually have a team behind them. The ones doing it solo are the exception. Infrastructure is what gets the work over the finish line, and Kyndred is structurally built to be the infrastructure that helps those creators deliver. That’s the difference.

It’s a curated entertainment studio where projects are reviewed before they ever reach fans. Budgets are built. Timelines are considered. Rights are reviewed and production feasibility matters. Campaigns are designed around defined deliverables, so the fans aren’t funneling their money into uncertainty. They’re pre-purchasing entertainment they want to experience.

Outside capital funds the company and fan pre-sales fund the projects. That separation is critical. Investors aren’t being asked to finance a slate of speculative productions. They’re helping build the infrastructure that lets audience-validated projects get made and delivered.

That also separates Kyndred from the fan-investment category where companies are trying to solve a real problem. I respect that. They’re creating new ways for people to participate in entertainment financing, and there may be a real audience for that. But it’s a different audience than what Kyndred is going for. A company that promises financial returns on a film is a finance or investment company operating in the entertainment space. A company that promises movies, series, books, albums, podcasts, tickets, subscriptions, events, access and ownership is an entertainment company. Period. Those aren’t the same thing and they create different goals going in.

If the fan relationship is built around financial upside, the audience is trained to think like investors. They want return, they want liquidity and they want performance. They want to know whether the trade worked, and if the project doesn’t return what they hoped, the emotional relationship can curdle quickly.

We’ve already seen what happens when entertainment assets become market symbols. The AMC and GameStop moment was loud, fascinating and culturally revealing, but it wasn’t really about movies or games. It was about the trade. The product became a vehicle for speculation. That’s not the audience Kyndred is built for.

Kyndred is built for the audience that buys an opening weekend ticket to Obsession, Backrooms, Iron Lung or whatever original thing feels like it might become the next cultural signal. The audience that orders the boutique Blu-ray because the packaging, commentary, transfer quality, essay booklet and permanence matter. The audience that buys a special vinyl pressing because the object carries meaning when someone walks into their home and sees the album featured on their wall. Kyndred is for the audience that wants to be in the room, own the thing, follow the creator, attend the event, support the work and say they were there before everyone else caught up.

Our audience isn’t trying to exit a position. They’re trying to get closer to the work.

The danger of confusing these audiences is bigger than one project or one platform. If a fan-investment model disappoints, the industry may draw the wrong conclusion. Entertainment is very good at chasing trends and very bad at reading small sample sizes responsibly. One underperforming structure can quickly become a lazy narrative: “Fans won’t finance entertainment.”

But that’s the wrong lesson. Fans already finance entertainment every day through all the methods mentioned above and then some. The question isn’t whether fans will spend money on work they love. We know they already do. The question is whether we’re asking them to behave like fans or behave like investors.

Look at what’s happening with Letterboxd this week. The platform is for sale, and now and have launched a campaign to organize the community to buy a majority stake themselves. A community ownership structure designed to keep Letterboxd from getting stripped for parts by whoever buys it next. That’s an audience willing to put its own money up to protect something they love. Returns don’t enter the picture. They just want the platform to survive on its own terms, and they’re willing to pay for that outcome.

Now please don’t misunderstand my message. I want Republic to succeed. I want ROYALNIFTY to succeed. I want others like those to succeed. I don’t see less for Kyndred when others win. Along with being a “simpler is better” guy, I’m also very much a “rising tide lifts all boats” type of person. This is all good news. I really appreciate Shapiro using his platform to highlight alternative paths at a moment when creators badly need them. The traditional indie financing model is strained and as he notes, streamers have backed away from mid-budget films. Studios are increasingly built around franchise protection and risk avoidance. Creators need more options, and fans have already shown they’re willing to financially support work they care about. These are all the things, among many, that I’ve been shouting from the rooftops lately. (Or saying to anyone I meet in person - big fan of meeting in person btw).

Kyndred chooses fans and that choice shapes everything else. We’re not looking for people who are excited about the money. We’re looking for people who are excited about the work where the upside is experiential and cultural: better access, better editions, better events, better rewards, closer proximity and the satisfaction of helping something exist. We’re not bending creative decisions toward speculative investor return. We’re building toward work people want to watch, read, hear, own, attend, collect and share.

It also has to stand for something. Creative ownership. Crew participation. Meaningful fan rewards. Human-made work. Production in Los Angeles whenever possible. Transparent reporting. Physical permanence. Live experiences. Fair participation. A studio that’s trying to lift up artists, craftspeople and audiences instead of treating all of them like commodities to be extracted from.

That’s the ethical studio we’re trying to build. Not ethical as a marketing pose. Ethical as an operating system.

I’ve said all this before, but I’ll reiterate because I think it’s important. The entertainment industry is consolidating. Greenlights are shrinking. Creators are being asked to trade ownership for access. Fans fund culture constantly, but they rarely get meaningful participation in what gets made or what gets preserved. Crew members make the work possible and too often get left out of the upside entirely. Finished projects can be buried, deleted or treated like disposable inventory. Kyndred is being built as an answer to all of that.

A place where creators keep ownership. Where fans help decide what gets made. Where crew can participate in success. Where production is supported with real oversight that appreciates the people who come together to make it. Where the finished work isn’t treated as disposable but a fundamental piece of our culture. Where people who love films, series, books, music, podcasts, physical media, theatrical events, merch and live experiences aren’t afterthoughts, but part of the model.

I’m glad Republic is pushing the conversation forward. I’m glad ROYALNIFTY is interrogating the mechanics. I’m glad Shapiro is using his platform to name the problem loudly. The more serious people working on alternative paths, the better.

But Kyndred isn't trying to be a better version of a Republic-style fan-investment model, and isn't a competitor to the production infrastructure layer ROYALNIFTY is building either. Kyndred is an entertainment company where human relationships to each other and their stories are the point and the purpose.

We’d rather carry the pressure of telling great stories than the pressure of maximizing speculative returns. We believe the great stories are what create the durable returns anyway. Not because every project becomes a rocket ship, but because trust compounds across all of it. Audiences, creators, crew, investors, the whole culture around the work. That’s the audience we’re building for.

That’s the fourth path. An audience that came for the work, pre-sales that fund what gets made, and a studio structurally built to deliver.

-Lauer

Correction: An earlier version of this post grouped ROYALNIFTY with Republic as a fan-investment platform. ROYALNIFTY is production infrastructure that can support multiple financing models, not a competing path of its own. Thanks to Tristan Wirabangsa for the clarification.

I’ve produced a narrative podcast.

My wife wrote a serialized audio drama called The Strange Chronicles, and I produced and directed it. I ran the edit, the mix, the sound design, the music...you name it. We also brought in an occasional guest director to expand the creative influence and help approach the material from a different angle. The whole process felt like making a film with your eyes closed, and I mean that as a compliment. Every creative decision had to land through sound alone and rely solely on your ears. No establishing shot to orient the audience. No close-up to sell the emotion. Just voices, atmosphere and the listener’s imagination doing the rest.

It was one of the most creatively satisfying things I’ve worked on and it taught me something about the medium that I don’t think you can fully understand until you’ve sat in a room trying to figure out how to make a listener feel the tension when you only have access to a single sense.

A narrative podcast is not a talk show with writing. It’s authored, produced, performed work. It requires scripts, actors, engineers, composers, sound designers and editors. The production pipeline looks a lot more like a film than it does like two people sitting across from each other with microphones. And when the work is good, it reaches people in a way that other formats can’t touch, because the delivery mechanism is so intimate. It’s one voice, or a handful of voices, arriving directly inside your head. Just the story and the listener.

That intimacy is part of why the format is growing so fast.

Roughly 600 million people worldwide listen to podcasts today. The overall audience has grown nearly 30% in five years and shows no sign of flattening. In the US alone, 58% of Americans aged 12 and up are now monthly podcast listeners, up from single digits in 2008. But the number that matters more for narrative work specifically is this: some industry benchmarks cite narrative podcasts as carrying completion rates as high as 85%. That means listeners who start a serialized audio story overwhelmingly finish it. They don’t listen and ghost. They commit. That kind of engagement is rare across any medium, and it signals something important about the relationship between a narrative podcast and its audience.

The audio drama audience continues to grow at a steady compound rate year over year, and institutional recognition is catching up. The Tribeca Film Festival just announced its largest and most ambitious podcast lineup to date, including scripted fiction premieres alongside its film and television selections. The same festival that was first to establish an official podcast selection back in 2021 now treats narrative audio as a co-equal format for world premieres. The format is here to stay.

Stories that started in your ears and ended up on your screen

Some of the best examples of the podcast medium’s power have come from stories that proved their audience in audio first and then expanded outward.

Welcome to Night Vale launched as a twice-monthly podcast in 2012 with two people and a microphone. Today it has tens of thousands of Apple reviews, hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, spawned multiple novels, national and international live tours, and built an entire production company (Night Vale Presents) that incubates other narrative podcasts. No studio greenlit any of that. The fan base was the greenlight.

Limetown debuted in July 2015 and hit #1 on iTunes within two months. That audience proof led to a television adaptation and a novel. Podcast to TV to book. The flywheel in action.

Homecoming, the psychological thriller from Gimlet featuring Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac, proved its audience so convincingly that Amazon adapted it with Julia Roberts and Sam Esmail directing. The audio audience de-risked the entire adaptation for the buyer.

The Magnus Archives ran five seasons and 200 episodes of horror fiction starting in 2016, built one of the most passionate fan communities in audio, and has since expanded into a sidequel series (The Magnus Protocol, currently in its second season and funded by Kickstarter), a tabletop RPG, a board game, and a subscriber community. All from a podcast that started as one guy reading horror statements into a microphone.

And then there’s The Edge of Sleep. It launched as a hit QCODE podcast in 2019, became one the biggest genre narrative podcasts of its era, and starred Markiplier (yes, the same person who surprised traditional Hollywood with The Iron Lung this year). When they tried to sell the television adaptation, major media outlets passed. The show eventually landed on Prime Video through their self-upload service with zero marketing support from Amazon, and it still surged to the platform’s top ten within days, carried entirely by the built-in audience. The fans dragged it into existence because the traditional system couldn’t figure out how to value what was already proven.

Every one of those stories follows the same pattern. A creator makes something with minimal capital. The audience shows up. And the proven demand unlocks the next format, whether that’s a TV deal, a novel, a game, a live tour or a merchandise line. The podcast wasn’t the stepping stone. The podcast was the proof.

Stories that started on screens and followed fans home

But the flywheel spins both directions, and this is the part of the conversation that most of the industry is still sleeping on.

If you’re a fan of a Kyndred series and you watched the finale on a Friday night, what happens Saturday morning? You want more of that world. You want to stay inside it. A companion narrative podcast, set in the same universe, extending the story or exploring a corner of it the screen version didn’t have time for, lets you do exactly that. And it meets you where screens can’t.

About 40% of podcast listeners tune in during their commute. Almost another 50% listen while doing things around the house. There’s even an 8-to-10 PM listening surge where listeners are connecting with audio as a way to settle into the end of their day. Listeners spend an average of seven hours a week with podcasts, and much of that listening happens on mobile devices. Stories in their pockets.

Think about what that means for a story world. A fan watches the show at home. The next morning they pick up the companion podcast over coffee. Monday, they’re 20 minutes into the next episode on the train. Tuesday night, they’re in bed with headphones, settling into the story the way people used to fall asleep to a novel. The story doesn’t stop when the screen goes dark. It follows them through the parts of their lives where screens don’t belong.

That continuous engagement changes the math on everything else. A fan who lives inside a story across three formats is more invested than someone who watches a season and moves on. They’re more likely to back the next project. More likely to buy the physical edition. More likely to show up at the live event. The podcast is the connective tissue between all of it.

Gretta Cohn, the CEO of Pushkin Industries, recently made the point directly: many podcast companies were built on the promise of IP development to TV and film, but if you’re not considering books and audiobooks as part of the pipeline, you’re missing out.

Kyndred isn’t missing out. The cross-medium model we’ve been describing throughout this series, where a single story world can launch in the strongest first format and then expand deliberately across books, podcasts, film, television, music and eventually games, requires narrative podcasts as a core piece of the architecture. They’re the format that proves audience at the lowest production risk. They’re the format that keeps fans engaged between seasons and between releases. And they’re the format that meets people in the car, on the subway, on the walk, in bed at the end of the day, when what they want more than anything is to close their eyes and let a good story find them.

That’s what we’re making room for at Kyndred. Not podcasts as marketing. Not podcasts as a development pipeline for the “real” medium. Podcasts as a medium that stands on its own, connects to everything else and lives in the spaces between all of it.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

Your Turn

What's the narrative podcast that got you hooked? The one you stayed up too late listening to, or the one that made your commute disappear? What's the story you wish someone would turn into a podcast? And what's the show, film or book you love that would make an incredible audio drama?

Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.

Thanks for reading.

-Lauer

Music is one of our oldest art forms. By some estimates, it emerged around the same time our ancient caveman ancestors started drawing on their walls. Which means despite all the consternation over the business of music, the art form isn’t going anywhere. It’s ingrained in us as a species, and has been one of the major ways we’ve shared our stories throughout our history. It also acts as a sense memory. Like a certain smell, sound, or visual, there are songs tied to our core memories and the specific moments we heard them. A song will play, and instantly we’re taken back to those moments throughout our lives. It’s why it’s so important to include it in Kyndred’s mission of delivering an all-encompassing narrative studio.

I grew up with music. It’s one of the favorite parts of my childhood memories. Not in a, my-family-was-made-up-of-a-bunch-of-musicians way (might be a little jealous of you guys), but in a my-dad-grew-up-in-the-60s-and-often-played-his-record-collection-at-full-blast-as-I-was-growing-up-in-the-80s kinda way. So yeah, music filled the air. The Beatles, Otis Redding, Simon and Garfunkel, the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Platters, the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and even Richard Harris from time to time (you might think of him as the first Dumbledore). 33s and 45s (the B-sides! My kingdom for a good B-side…) on a turntable that had probably been around longer than I had. The whole physicality of it. The sound of the needle drop followed by the crackle of the run-in groove before the album started. The cover art big enough to qualify as wall art. The liner notes. It all added up and helped me understand that music was a thing you could hold physically and emotionally.

My kids are growing up the same way...sort of. No, the first album they bought on vinyl at Kmart with their own money in 1986 wasn’t Slippery When Wet (I don’t know who that was), BUT they have the Beatles in heavy rotation because that one is non-negotiable in our house.

They also have Weezer, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Tribe and Nirvana. Some of the music my wife and I listened to on repeat in high school, and somehow none of it feels dated to them. Of course, they’re getting a steady diet of more recent artists like Wet Leg, Car Seat Headrest, Noname, Deep Sea Diver, Jay Som, and Indigo De Souza that have worked their way into heavy rotation, but they’ve also got their own music, much of it based on video games they’re obsessed with. (Piano practice sometimes makes whatever is going on in the house at that moment feel like a high-stakes adventure!)

One of the first modern albums we all agreed on was the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack. That album bonded us and was on repeat so much in the car that it became the second most-played album in my entire library, right behind a Beatles anthology. (We’re not going to talk about what Sesame Street did to my algorithm). It’s one of the great cases where the music fit perfectly inside the film and was allowed to live as a real album, with its own commercial life, rather than feeling like a marketing afterthought. It showcased what cross-medium music can do when it’s used effectively.

Soundtracks were always a way in for me, too. Juice. Pulp Fiction. Trainspotting. Garden State. Almost Famous...anything Wes Anderson has ever touched. I spent a lot of my youth going deeper into artists’ catalogs that I first heard during a single needle drop in a movie. The right song in the right scene can rewire how an audience feels about a story, and it can also rewire how they feel about the artist who made the song.

That’s the kind of music Kyndred Music will exist to support.

We’re building this vertical for all kinds of artists. Composers, songwriters and recording artists who fit naturally inside the Kyndred film, television, podcast and book worlds creating original scores, soundtracks, companion albums, and collaborations across the slate. But also independent musicians and recording artists who want to make a record on their own terms with real production support, with an audience that will be living inside the platform, and a deal structure that doesn’t ask them to give up ownership of their work to access the industry.

The math has not been kind to artists for a long time. Three companies control more than eighty percent of recorded music. Most major label deals still ask artists to hand over their masters. Recoupment structures are punishing enough that a record can earn millions while the artist still owes money. Streaming pays fractions of a cent per play, and the accounting behind those fractions is opaque by design. Most artists also don’t get meaningful access to the listener data that would help them understand who their audience is or how to reach them directly.

The independent side has its own version of the problem. Bandcamp gives artists a real shot at direct sales and a model that respects ownership, and a lot of musicians have built meaningful careers there. SoundCloud was the launchpad for an entire generation. Patreon has kept ongoing income flowing for artists who otherwise could not sustain a working life from their music. Places like DistroKid and TuneCore have made it possible for anyone to put a record on streamers without a label. These tools matter and they’ve done a lot of good.

What none of them do on their own is fund production at scale or provide full infrastructure. They work best for artists who already have marketing savvy, strong email lists, and enough time to handle audience-building on top of actually making music. It gets even harder if the goal is to place that work inside a wider ecosystem of films, books, podcasts, live events, or touring. Most artists on self-distribution platforms are doing every job at once, and many of them are exhausted.

Kyndred Music is meant to sit alongside those tools, not replace them. An artist can have a Bandcamp page and a Patreon and still make a record with us, and the rights they hold elsewhere stay theirs. The participation model that applies to our films, books and podcasts applies here too. Same transparency, same quarterly reporting, same published methodology. One system, applied consistently across every format.

I’m not a recording artist, and I’m not going to pretend to be one. But I do know the specific feeling of finishing something you care deeply about and not having a place for it that feels right. Of putting work onto the internet and then grinding endlessly to help it find an audience among thousands of other things sitting on the same platforms asking for the same attention.

Kyndred Music is meant to be a place for the artists we work with and for the fans who want to support records that otherwise might not exist, or that deserve a larger audience than they have been able to find on their own.

If we get this right, artists keep making original music, and someone hears a song on a Kyndred record twenty years from now that takes them right back to where they were the first time they heard it...and maybe they share it with their kids too.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

Your Turn

What are the songs that take you back? What are the moments you keep revisiting? What artist or band is your guilty pleasure? What’s your favorite soundtrack? And maybe most importantly, what’s your go to karaoke song?

Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.

Next up: podcasts.

Thanks for reading.

-Lauer

My wife is an author. She indie published her novel The Girl in the Zoo and the first two volumes of her Strange Chronicles series under our production company, and she’s working on more. Meanwhile I’m about ten books behind on the nightstand but I just finished Project Hail Mary, which I enjoyed enormously and has me thinking about what this post should actually say.

Andy Weir writes prose that does what only prose can. The interior monologue, the rhythm of a solved problem laid out in a character’s voice, the cumulative weight that builds across pages. The recent movie adaptation handled the material beautifully with changes that worked for the screen and really leaned into the feel good elements without getting bogged down by some of the finer details in the book. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE those details in the book, but leaving some of that out gave the film the tone it needed and the pacing to keep audiences engaged. The book gives you something the film can’t and the film gives you something the books can’t. Both formats can be excellent on their own terms, delivering a unique experience best suited to the medium.

That’s where I want to start with books at Kyndred. Every story has a format that suits it best, and the best ones can travel between them without losing what made them work in the first place. The kinds of books we want to build a home for are the ones that earn their readers. Contained worlds, character-rich premises, prose that lives in your head longer than it spent in your hands.

The Humans by Matt Haig is one of those for me. So is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin too. Different writers, different genres, but they share something. They make a whole world out of a small one, they trust their readers, and they don’t waste a sentence. I want a hundred more of those. From writers we might already know and writers nobody knows yet.

I love big sprawling worlds too. The Stormlight Archive, the Lightbringer series, His Dark Materials, The King Killer Chronicles. Fantasy that takes years to read and lives with you for years after. Books are one of the few formats where scope is set by the writer’s ambition and the reader’s appetite. A novel that takes a thousand pages to land is welcome here just as much as a tight novella that finishes itself in a single sitting.

Then there’s the cross-medium piece, which is one of the things I’m most excited about.

A novel proves character depth, narrative voice, and the architecture of a story world in a way a pitch document or a sizzle reel never can. When that book finds its readers, the case for adaptation gets a lot easier to make. And when adaptation works well, it works because the source material has room to breathe in another format. Catch-22 had a strong film in 1970 and then got the room to expand when Hulu turned it into a six-episode series. No Country for Old Men is one of the cleanest novel-to-screen translations in modern cinema because the Coens trusted Cormac McCarthy’s structure. Station Eleven, Silo, Foundation, The Martian. All of them work because the people adapting them respected what the book was doing first.

The reverse works too. A series or a film with a story world worth deepening can grow companion novels, prequel books, character-driven side stories that live in print and audio. Same canon, expanded reach, more for the audience to live inside. That’s what cross-medium means at Kyndred. Story worlds that earn the next format because readers and viewers asked for them.

Books are also where the writer is the most exposed and the most in control. There’s no production crew between them and the page. The voice is the whole event. The taste of a publishing list, meaning the books a publisher chooses to back, tells you everything about what they actually believe in. That part is on us. We know what we love and we know what we want to champion. Original fiction with craft and ambition, literary or genre, standalone or serial. Books that complete themselves on the last page or earn the next one.

If that sounds like the kind of bookshelf you’d want to live with, you’re in the right place.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

Your Turn

What are the books you keep rereading? What is the one that stuck with you long after you closed the cover? What is the book you wish more people knew about? What are some books you wish had been adapted to either a film or series? And what film or series do you wish expanded its world through books?

Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.

Next up: music.

Thanks for reading.

-Lauer

Alongside movies, I grew up with television, but it had a different impact.

Movies were events but television was the constant presence. A lighthouse at the end of the day. It was stable and secure. A constant, like Thursday nights with my parents watching Seinfeld because nightly TV as a family was still a thing. It was lots of network programming, and mostly comedies like Perfect Strangers (our family cat was named Twinkie, a nod to Mr. Twinkacetti), Family Matters (I probably drove my family nuts trying to master a voice impression of Urkel), and The Fresh Prince (a sitcom that had some poignant moments and maybe helped your parents understand your world a little better). TV kind of fell into the background during college as life got busier, but then came the first season of The Sopranos, which I actually watched on DVD because I was a broke 20 year old and couldn’t afford HBO. With that show, cable opened up something on television that hadn’t been done at that scale before. Longer arcs. Darker characters. Adult storytelling that trusted the audience. The Wire pushed it further. Six Feet Under took it somewhere more interior. Mad Men made it elegant. A generation of writers and audiences realized that television was no longer the “smaller” format.

I loved the medium before I worked in it, and after twenty years inside the business, much of it spent in formats that never fully aligned with my instincts, I only wanted more to help produce the kinds of shows I would be drawn to as a viewer. As my taste evolved, I found myself connecting most with television that felt cinematic without losing what makes TV special. Episodes that carried the craft and intentionality of movies, but with the added gift of longer character arcs and the time to let characters show you more of who they were.

When I look at the shows I keep coming back to, a few patterns show up. Character first. Mulder and Scully. Don and Peggy. Omar. Vic, Shane and Curtis. Fleabag. The Roys. Everyone in The Leftovers. The shows that stick are the ones where the people feel real enough that you connect to something inside yourself, whether they’re heroes or monsters.

Those characters live in ambitious genre pieces, too. The Expanse. Severance. Silo. Watchmen. Shōgun. The Last of Us. Stories that use science fiction, fantasy, or horror as a lens into human behavior rather than a costume to mask it. They show up in comedies that make you laugh but can make you a little uncomfortable, too. Barry. Succession (which can be a comedy depending on the episode - a ‘tramady’?). Shrinking. Party Down. Reservation Dogs. I’m Sorry. The Studio. Shows that trust the audience to keep up. They can really shine in limited series. Chernobyl. Mare of Easttown. The Night Of. The Queen’s Gambit. Station Eleven. A complete story in a tight frame. No second season because the story is done. That can be a gift to the audience, and a discipline most of the industry has forgotten.

And then there is The Bear, which sits in its own category for me because it hits me in a way not many other shows do. Not because of the restaurant world, though I hear it gets that right too, but because of the tenderness of it. The portrayal of family, both biological and chosen. The way it deals with the grief of losing someone you love to suicide.

I’ve written before about how I lost my best friend from college to suicide last year, and the most recent season aired at almost exactly the same time I was trying to process that loss. Watching Carmy carry Mikey’s spirit through every episode, and recognizing so much of his pain, grief, and trauma response, left me sobbing by the end of the season. It also left me feeling compassion for that character on a level I wasn’t prepared for. The Bear articulated something I was living through in real time. It gave me something to point to when I didn’t have the words to communicate what it was that I was feeling. It understood that loss like that does not resolve cleanly. You compartmentalize it, and it can make you behave in ways that are unpredictable, even to yourself. You try to work through it and show up for the people who are still here, and if you’re lucky, you figure out ways to let them into what you’re going through because if you don’t, you might just explode.

A show that can do that while also being funny, visually alive, warm, and structurally inventive is exactly the kind of work I want to help make possible. I think a lot of great television is still being made right now. The talent pipeline hasn’t dried up. The writing isn’t worse. The ambition is still there. What’s broken is the structure around it.

When Christopher Storer won his Emmy for The Bear, he used part of his speech to talk about the financial reality of being a working writer right now. The creator of one of the most celebrated shows on television was calling out the struggle. If he’s having that conversation, imagine what it looks like for the writers and crew that haven’t achieved that level of success. The people making the work are too often undercompensated relative to the value they create.

The industry is facing other issues as well. Shows that deserve a run are getting cancelled before they hit their apex. The Perry Mason reboot is the one that stings for me as a viewer. Two seasons of gorgeous, atmospheric, character-rich noir, something we haven’t had enough of lately, cancelled right as it was finding its footing. That story of cancellation is not unusual anymore. It is routine.

Seasons have compressed to ten, and in some cases, just eight episodes, and that gets framed like a creative evolution when a lot of the time it is really an economic one. Smaller rooms. Less time for younger writers to develop. Fewer episodes for a show to find its voice, deepen its bench, and let supporting characters become essential. I am not arguing that everything should go back to twenty-two. In a lot of cases, that was too many and you could feel it. But I also do not think eight or ten should be the automatic default. Some shows want six. Some want ten. Some want fifteen. The shape should come from the story, not from a platform mandate pretending to be aesthetics.

The other thing that feels broken is the way television is released. Too much of it gets dropped all at once, consumed in a day or two, and pushed aside for the next thing before it has had the chance to really settle in. That is efficient, but it is not always healthy for the work. Some shows need time. Time for audiences to catch up. Time for conversations to build. Time for theories, arguments, group texts, and that feeling that a show is actually part of the culture while it is airing. Would a show like Lost have become what it was if season one had its episodes dropped all at once? Television should have the chance to live in the zeitgeist for a while, not just spike and vanish.

Which is also why I think there is real opportunity in treating television more like an event when the work calls for it. A premiere with an audience. A full-season theatrical event for the right limited series. A big finale on a big screen. Part of what I want is a release structure that lets television be communal when it wants to be communal, and intimate when it wants to be intimate. That’s part of the opening I see.

Kyndred’s television slate should be scripted, character-driven, and varied. Dramas. Comedies. Thrillers. Science fiction. Horror. Limited series. Returning series. Shows with real points of view. Not one flavor. Not one template. Not a house style designed to flatten everything into the same product.

Fans back projects directly. Creators keep their IP. Writers and showrunners participate in profits across every distribution window a series generates. Below-the-line crew participate too, because they should. Shows that are finding their audience get the runway to keep growing it, and they get released in ways that let audiences actually gather around them. Rooms get staffed properly. The people doing the work get paid fairly for it.

That matters to me because television is not just a format. It is a relationship. It lives with people as it comes into their homes week after week and becomes part of how they experience a stretch of their lives. The best shows do not just entertain you for an evening. They accompany you and become reference points. They shape your language and become the thing you want to talk to your friends about the second the episode ends.

That is why television deserves patience and a solid infrastructure. It deserves a business model that is not constantly cutting off the very thing it is trying to build. I want Kyndred to be a home for the show a writer has been carrying around for years and could never quite find a place for. The ambitious genre piece. The character drama that scares off a development executive. The comedy with an actual point of view. The limited series that deserves exactly the space it takes up. The returning series that needs time to become part of people’s lives. That’s the goal.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

Your Turn

What are the shows you keep rewatching? What is the one you still think about years after it ended? What got cancelled too soon? And what is the show you wish existed that nobody seems to be making?

Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.

Next up: books.

Thanks for reading.

-Lauer

We’ve talked about who Kyndred is for. Now let’s talk about what we’re actually going to make. Starting with movies, because that’s where it all started for me.

I grew up watching movies and loving every minute of them. Repeating movie quotes was how I learned to socialize with the kids at school. I couldn’t always afford to go to the theater, or have cable TV with movie channels, but we could rent a VHS from time to time at the local pizza shop (yes, pre-Blockbuster, our corner pizza shop had a little movie rental section), and when I could go to the theater I was blown away by the scope of it.

For a little while near the end of high school, I somehow convinced myself I wanted to be a physical therapist. So that is where my early college applications went. Then somewhere around the start of senior year, I had my Ralphie on Santa’s slide moment and snapped out of it. I had always loved my art classes, and I really loved animation (Making it home after school in time to catch Batman: The Animated Series & X-Men was a thing). I had always loved movies, too. So I started over, changed course and went to a small local college with a communications program, where I learned the trade of filmmaking. Loading 16mm camera mags in a black bag (we were timed on this for our final). Cutting on flatbeds (changing the bulb felt like changing your oil). Then moving onto the early non-linear systems (anyone remember jazz drives?), and learning Photoshop and After Effects back when even that felt like the future.

I was hooked.

My career has taken some twists and turns along the way, but creating narrative works has always been my passion.

I have never been precious about what qualifies as a good film…okay, maybe a little bit precious. But not in the way some people mean it. Mass appeal, at least the way I think about it, does not mean dumbed down or beneath anyone’s taste. It just means enough people got to see something and it connected. Those are two very different things. I think there are far more movies out there that could have real mass appeal if they were actually given the opportunity to find an audience. (Y’know…maybe if they had a distribution plan and some creative marketing, or any marketing, behind them?)

Steven Spielberg and John Hughes occupy the same shelf in my head as the Coen Brothers and the Daniels. I love Arrival and I love Space Jam and the fact that those two films have absolutely nothing in common doesn’t bother me at all.

Good films can come from anywhere and be about anything.

What connects the movies I love is not genre or scale or budget level. It’s point of view. A filmmaker with something specific they want to say, the craft to pull it off, and the ability to hold an audience and take them somewhere. That is the test.

The Conversation is one of the great American films and it’s basically a guy walking around San Francisco being paranoid for two hours. But every second of it is riveting because Coppola understood exactly what that paranoia felt like and built the entire film around making you feel it too. No Country for Old Men works as a thriller, but it’s really a film about the moment you realize the world has stopped operating by rules you understand, and the Coens never once explain that to you, but they get you to feel what it’s like to live it. Moonlight tells a story about identity and tenderness in a culture that punishes both, and Barry Jenkins shoots it like every frame is something fragile he’s trying to protect. Parasite…oh, my…Parasite. It’s a commentary on class inequality that starts as a satire but keeps peeling back the layers until the comedy is revealed to be a horror that ultimately ends in tragedy. And you can’t look away or forget what you saw.

These films trust you. They don’t over-explain. They don’t pull their punches. They have a perspective and they commit.

That’s what I want Kyndred to make.

When I tell people I’m starting Kyndred, one of the first questions they ask is what kind of films I want to make. Sometimes I say “character-driven narratives,” which is true, but does not quite cover it. Sometimes I jokingly say “yes,” which is probably more honest. I want to make all kinds of movies. I’m building a studio, not a niche label. It’s “The Studio for Everyone.” And I mean that in a lot of ways. Not just for creators, crew, and fans, but for creators, crew, and fans with all kinds of tastes. We don’t have to be one thing for a narrow audience, or make narrow things for a broad one. We can make a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and they’ll always feel well crafted. Their own version of prestige.

Kyndred is not going to be a company that only makes dramas, or only horror, or only family films. I want all of it. Dramas. Horror. Thrillers. Sports movies. Romance. Crime stories. Science fiction. Fantasy. Big emotional movies. Strange little movies. The kind that leave a mark. The kind that make people argue in the parking lot after. The kind that become part of someone’s life.

The point is not genre. The point is that a certain kind of professional film is disappearing right in front of us, and I think people feel that loss whether they can name it or not.

What’s vanishing is the low-to-mid-budget movie made at a serious level. Not the giant franchise machine that costs the same amount of money to make as the GDP of a small country. Not the micro-budget first feature that premieres at a festival and vanishes before most people ever get to hear about it. The movie in between. The one with enough support behind it for the filmmaker to really execute the vision, but not so much money riding on it that every decision gets watered down by committee.

That used to be a real lane. It still exists here and there, of course, but it is getting harder to find. Harder to finance. Harder to release. Harder to give oxygen to once it is finished. That matters because a lot of great films live in that space.

Rocky is a perfect example. Stallone wrote it himself and refused to sell the script unless he could star in it, which every studio told him was insane. What he made, was a character study about a lonely man trying to prove to himself that his life means something, disguised as a boxing movie. The whole thing is people talking in small rooms and walking through cold Philadelphia streets. The fight is the last fifteen minutes, and (spoiler) Rocky loses it in a split decision, but he accomplishes his goal of going the distance and showing the world that he’s not a “bum.” By the time the fight starts, you’ve almost forgotten you’re watching a boxing movie. It works because the whole thing is built around dignity, longing, and the need to matter.

That is not really the kind of movie the current system knows what to do with anymore. Or if it does make one, it often does not know how to support it, market it, or give it time to find its audience. And that is the larger issue.

A lot of the movies people say they miss are not gone because audiences stopped caring. They are gone because the business got narrower. More consolidated. More risk averse. More dependent on obvious pre-awareness, existing IP, and models that can be explained in one sentence on a spreadsheet.

Lost in Translation. Manchester by the Sea. Sing Sing. City of God. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There Will Be Blood. Do the Right Thing…and so many, many more…films that took real swings and connected. Different decades, different genres, different countries. What they share is a refusal to be conventional. Every one of them could have been softened or broadened or made more “marketable” by someone in a suit with an LLM, and every one of them would have been worse for it.

The pipeline that used to produce these films consistently has narrowed. The companies that championed them have been consolidated and infiltrated by people who never intended on making movies. They just wanted the business and the access. The theatrical infrastructure that gave them time to breathe has been compressed and is collapsing. But the filmmakers who make this work haven’t gone anywhere, and the audiences who love it haven’t either. The demand is there. The foundation has been destroyed by the people on the top floor of the building.

But audiences are still audiences. People still want to feel something. They still want surprise. They still want specificity. They still want work made by filmmakers who are actually trying to say something, not just fill a slot on a platform.

That is the opening I see.

Kyndred is not here to make one flavor of film. It is here to help rebuild a lane for professionally made, filmmaker-driven movies across genres. Movies that trust the audience. Movies that do not need to be giant to matter. Movies that can actually be made, released, and supported without being stripped of what made them interesting in the first place.

There are a couple categories that feel especially neglected right now, and I think their absence says something important.

One is comedy.

The theatrical comedy used to be a regular part of movie culture. Not once in a blue moon but regular. Raising Arizona. Best in Show. Office Space. The Big Lebowski. Super Troopers. Beverly Hills Cop. These are not all the same kind of funny, and that is exactly the point. They are specific. They come from distinct sensibilities. They are funny because the people making them had an actual comedic point of view.

Comedy also benefits from a room. From strangers laughing together. From timing that lands differently when the audience is part of it. A good comedy in a theater is not the same experience as a good comedy at home, and I think we have lost something by letting that whole category shrink.

The other is family films.

And I do not mean factory-built product designed by committee to move merchandise. I mean filmmaker-driven work that happens to be appropriate for younger audiences while still respecting adults. The Iron Giant. Paddington. Fantastic Mr. Fox. Kubo and the Two Strings. Movies with craft. Taste. Emotional intelligence. Movies that are not lesser because they are accessible.

Having kids changed how I think about this. Once I started watching more things with them, I became even more aware of how wide the gap is between the best family films and everything else. The great ones do not talk down to anyone. They’re full-craft, full-vision cinema that work on multiple levels simultaneously. They are just good movies. Made with care. Made with standards. Made by people who understand that younger audiences deserve real artistry too.

So yes, comedy and family films are part of what I think is missing. But they are not the whole point. The whole point is that the industry keeps abandoning entire categories of good professional filmmaking whenever those categories stop fitting whatever the current corporate logic happens to be. And every time it does that, culture gets smaller.

Kyndred pushes in the opposite direction. I want us making movies for adults. Movies for families. Movies for horror fans, thriller fans, romantics, weirdos, sports movie lovers, comedy people, and anyone else who still wants to walk into a theater or hit play at home and feel like somebody actually made this for a human being who’s actually watching rather than for an algorithm.

I also care deeply about how these films are treated once they exist. Not just what gets made, but what happens to it afterward. One of the things that has become normal in recent years is work being buried, pulled, deleted, or treated like disposable inventory the second it stops serving a short-term business objective. I hate that. I think a finished film deserves better than that. I think audiences deserve better than that. I think creators definitely deserve better than that.

So when I think about what Kyndred should make, I also think about stewardship. A real theatrical life. Physical media. A platform home. A chance for a movie to keep finding its audience over time instead of being tossed aside because it did not explode instantly. It’s about building something that lasts longer than a release cycle. Some films arrive like a thunderbolt. Others take time. Both matter.

And then there are the movies nobody sees coming. Every decade has a few. Movies that sound impossible on paper and then connect so deeply they become part of the culture. Films like Being John Malkovich and Everything Everywhere All at Once. The thing that made those films work was not that they were safely engineered. It was that they were bold, specific, and fully themselves.

I do not know what the next one of those is. Nobody does. But I know there is probably someone out there right now with a script that would blow people’s minds if it got made, and they can’t get traction because it does not fit a corporate template and there are fewer places to take it to. Kyndred should be for those filmmakers too. So when I say “yes” to the question of what Kyndred makes, this is what I mean.

Filmmaker-driven movies with a point of view. Movies across genres. Movies made at a professional level, especially in the low-to-mid-budget range that keeps getting hollowed out. Movies that trust the audience. And movies that get a real chance to live.

That’s the goal.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

Your Turn

I’ve told you what I love and what I think is missing. Now I want to hear from you.

What kinds of movies do you wish someone was making right now? What genres feel underserved? What was the last film that genuinely surprised you and what made it work? Is there a type of story you keep looking for and can never seem to find?

Tell me in the comments. If Kyndred is going to build a slate with its community, this is part of where that conversation begins.

Next up: television.

Thanks for reading.

-Lauer

It’s time to talk about the people who come together to make the work. It’s a conversation that’s long overdue.

The DP. The gaffer. The grip. The editor. The PAs (that’s where I started!). The people who build the sets, hang the lights, run the cables, drive the trucks and solve the problems nobody ever sees.

Film and television are collaborative art forms. No single person makes them. A story might start with a writer or a director’s vision, but the moment production begins it becomes something larger. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of craftspeople working together to bring an idea into the world. That collaboration is the reason the work endures.

And nowhere on earth has built that collaborative skill set better than Los Angeles.

For over a century, the crews here have developed a level of experience and craftsmanship that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. Generations of filmmakers train the next generation. Departments pass knowledge down. Techniques evolve. Standards rise. It’s one of the greatest creative workforces ever assembled.

But right now, that ecosystem is under real pressure. Production has been leaving Los Angeles for years. Incentive programs elsewhere have pulled projects away. Industry consolidation has reduced the number of greenlights. Fewer shows mean fewer days of work for the people whose livelihoods depend on it. And that doesn’t just affect individuals. It affects the entire creative infrastructure that made this city the center of filmed storytelling in the first place.

I care deeply about this city. I live here. My kids were born here. My friends live here. Most of the people I’ve worked with for nearly 25 years live here. From the moment I arrived as a know-nothing 20-something from Massachusetts, this city welcomed me and became Home with a capital H.

There’s a movement here to keep production in LA, and I’ve recently started attending city council meetings to show support for those efforts. Their hard work has started to pay off as new initiatives have passed to help make production in LA a little easier and a little more affordable. There’s still a long way to go, and Kyndred wants to support those efforts. It’s not that we don’t want to see this industry grow in other places, we absolutely do. But we also want to support an environment that allows the work here to continue and to flourish.

What Kyndred Believes

The traditional studio system tends to treat crew as labor attached to a project. Hired for the run, thanked in the credits if they’re lucky, and rarely thought about once the deliverables are in.

But that framing has never matched reality. Every person on a set shapes the final story in ways audiences will never fully see but would immediately feel if they were missing. A scene doesn’t work because of a single person. It lands because dozens of crafts come together at the same moment, each department solving problems, making adjustments and refining the work until the story finally clicks. That collaboration is what makes filmmaking different from almost every other art form.

I know from almost thirty years in production that people who are treated well do their best work. I know that when crews feel respected, supported and trusted with their craft, the work gets better. The environment gets better. The culture on set becomes something people actually want to be part of, and that energy shows up on screen whether you realize it or not. That’s not idealism. That’s just experience talking.

Kyndred is built around the understanding that all the people behind the work are the reason a story is successful and the reason audiences connect with it. They’re collaborators in the truest sense, and the model we’re building is designed to treat them that way.

How Kyndred Supports Crew

When Kyndred backs a project, we stay involved through the entire production process. That means experienced production support, realistic scheduling and professional working environments designed to respect the time and skill of the people doing the work. It means advocating for fair conditions on set, reasonable hours and clear communication between creators, producers and departments. Everyone who has spent time on a well-run set knows the difference it makes. Everyone who has spent time on a badly-run one knows the cost.

Kyndred also believes that when a project succeeds, the people who helped build it should share in that success. A portion of Kyndred’s participation is reserved for the crews who make the work possible, and creators working with Kyndred are encouraged to match that participation so the people behind the camera can benefit when the project they helped build finds its audience. Not as a bonus or a gesture of goodwill, but as recognition that the finished work exists because of the people who brought it to life.

And Kyndred’s commitment to Los Angeles is structural, not just philosophical. When a project aligns creatively with LA-based production and studio space is available, that’s where we make it. Local crews, rental houses, stages and post houses. Building a studio means building jobs in the community where the talent already lives.

Why This Matters

The entertainment industry is changing quickly. Fewer studios are making more of the decisions. Production is shifting geographically. And the people who actually make the work often have the least say in how those changes affect their careers and their families. It means traveling too far and too often. It means not sleeping in your own bed at night. It means having to choose between financially providing for your family and actually being there for your family. It means that too large of a burden is put on the people helping create the value.

It means you make all the sacrifices so C-Suites and Wall Street can get bigger payouts.

But storytelling has never belonged to corporations as much as they try to silo it. It belongs to the people who believe in it, the people who imagine it and the people who bring it to life. Kyndred exists to bring those forces together around work that’s made by people who care about the story and the craft behind it. Work that’s made together, with intention, and built to last.

Because the best stories aren’t built by studios. They’re built by people.

That’s Kyndred. The Studio for Everyone.

Let’s jump straight to the heart of this.

Kyndred doesn’t want to own your IP.

Which might make you ask... why? That’s pretty much a requirement of every other studio.

It’s a fair question. Ownership is how the traditional system works. Studios finance the work, distribute the work, and in return they control the work. That trade has been the standard. You want access to infrastructure and distribution? Hand over your intellectual property. Want a real budget and a real release? Give up creative control. Want to know how your project actually performed financially? Good luck.

But normalization doesn’t make it inevitable.

What Ownership Actually Creates

Here’s what people often overlook when they talk about IP ownership.

It’s not just about money.

It’s about continuity.

When a creator keeps ownership of their work, the story has a future the creator controls. They can return to it. Expand it. Adapt it into new formats. Build something larger over time. License it on their own terms. That’s how worlds get built. That’s how characters endure across decades, not because a corporate strategy kept them alive, but because the person who created them kept building.

The current system treats most stories like inventory. A project performs or it disappears. A new title replaces it. Another cycle begins. Finished work gets pulled from platforms when the financial math changes. Entire catalogs vanish not because they failed but because someone else’s business model shifted.

But culture doesn’t actually work that way.

Stories last because people carry them forward. Fans keep them alive. Creators expand them. Communities grow around them.

None of that can happen if the foundation keeps getting yanked out from underneath.

The Landscape Right Now

You already know what’s happening. You’re living it.

The industry is consolidating at a pace we haven’t seen in decades. Fewer studios making more of the decisions. Massive mergers promising billions in “synergies”... which is a polished way of saying fewer jobs, fewer greenlight decisions and fewer original voices getting through the door.

Every time the industry consolidates, the people who lose first are the ones who actually make the work.

At the same time, there’s a growing and genuine conversation happening among independent creators about what it actually looks like to build outside the corporate system. People are talking about transparency, artistic ownership, sustainable careers and community-driven support. That energy is real. And it matters.

Going direct is powerful. Creators reaching audiences without a middleman has been one of the most important shifts in modern entertainment. But it’s also exhausting. You become the creator, the marketer, the distributor, the accountant and the customer service department. You’re wearing every hat and each of those hats weigh a ton. Heavy is the head that wears the “hat”...Now imagine wearing every hat at the same time.

Not relying on traditional systems shouldn’t mean you have to do everything on your own. Yes, you should be thinking about marketing, distribution, longevity...even profitability so you can sustain yourself between projects and support the people who help you make them. Those things matter. But trying to do all of that by yourself takes you away from the thing you were meant to do.

Create new and exciting work.

The answer to that shouldn’t be dependence on a system designed to extract ownership from the people who create the work. But it also shouldn’t be total isolation where every creator has to exhaust all their time and energy just to get a project made.

The answer is infrastructure that supports creators without requiring them to give up the thing that matters most.

This is where Kyndred forges its own path.

Supporting you in forging yours.

That’s Kyndred’s differentiator. Taking the individual elements of independent creation and unifying them in one space to truly support your independence.

That’s what Kyndred is building.

What Kyndred Offers Creators

You keep your IP.

That’s the starting point. Not the negotiation. Not the exception for creators with enough leverage to demand it. The default. Every creator who works with Kyndred retains ownership of their intellectual property.

You grant Kyndred an exclusive license for an initial distribution term. That term is defined upfront and intentionally limited. When that term ends, you decide what happens next. Renew with us. Go non-exclusive. License it somewhere else entirely. It’s yours. It was always yours.

Creative control stays with you. Your vision, your final cut, your aesthetic decisions. But creative control doesn’t have to mean creative solitude. Kyndred is a partner in the process. Someone to develop ideas with, give honest feedback, help make it work within your budget, and work through all the challenges alongside you... not to override your vision, but to help you realize it. The final call is always yours. We’re just making sure you don’t have to make it in a vacuum if you don’t want to.

Financial transparency is built into the model. Kyndred uses a published profit participation methodology with verifiable reporting. No black box. No opaque accounting. No expensive audit just to find out if you’re being paid fairly. You get meaningful participation in your project’s success across every distribution window... theatrical, streaming, physical media, digital, licensing. And because production is funded by the fans who want to see the work made, creators aren’t trapped behind the traditional studio recoupment structures that often delay participation for years.

That’s not an accounting trick. That’s a structural difference.

How It Actually Works

You submit your project. Pitch deck, budget, timeline, creative vision. Kyndred’s team reviews it for narrative merit, production feasibility and rights clearance.

If it’s selected, it moves to our crowdfunding platform with full studio support behind the campaign. Your audience validates demand before production begins. The campaign closes with full funding and your project is greenlit.

Then we make it together.

You lead creative. Kyndred handles production operations, guild compliance, budget administration, vendor coordination, post-production, marketing and distribution. LA-based production whenever it aligns with the creative vision, with Kyndred negotiating rates with local stages, equipment houses and post facilities. The crew working on your project has an advocate in Kyndred too... fair working conditions, reasonable hours, and their own participation in the project’s success.

When it’s done, it goes out into the world through every distribution window that makes sense. Theatrical with a real runway to build momentum. Streaming. Physical media you can hold. Digital. Licensing. Live events where fans experience the work in person and you maintain your connection with them.

Your work stays available on our platform for the duration of the license. It doesn’t get pulled because someone else’s quarterly numbers changed.

Why This Matters

Fewer studios are saying yes. Fewer greenlight decisions are being made. The ones that do get through are increasingly optimized for algorithms, not audiences. And every wave of consolidation narrows the path further.

Creators shouldn’t have to choose between access and ownership. Between getting their work made and keeping it. Between professional-grade support and creative freedom.

There are people across this industry having the right conversations right now. Talking about what a better system looks like. Demanding transparency. Building communities. Supporting each other. That work matters and it’s long overdue.

Kyndred is here to be part of that future. Not by asking creators to go it alone. By building the infrastructure so they don’t have to.

Keep your IP. Maintain creative control. Participate in real profit with real transparency. Have your work preserved and distributed with intention. And do it all with studio-grade support so you can focus on the thing you do best.

Create.

That’s Kyndred. The Studio for Everyone.

Let’s start with what’s obvious but nobody says out loud: fans run culture.

They always have.

The books that survive decades? Fan communities kept them alive. The indie films that broke through the noise? Fans drove it. The music that defines a generation? Fans made it viral long before streaming platforms had algorithms.

Fans discover. Fans champion. Fans buy tickets and merch and subscriptions. Fans keep stories alive in conversation, fan art, fan fiction, conventions, online communities. When a creator needs help, fans show up.

They’re the actual engine.

So why does almost every platform treat them like an afterthought?

The Current Model (And Why It Isn’t Working For You)

Here’s how entertainment works today:

An executive at a studio, streamer or publisher decides what gets made.

Fans consume it (or they don’t).

If it succeeds, the distributors benefit.

Your role was to provide attention.

In recent years, platforms have removed finished projects when they no longer served business priorities.

Fan investment rarely factors into those decisions. They typically have no meaningful say in greenlight decisions and no participation in a project’s upside.

They funded it with their attention, their money, and their loyalty but remain outside the equation once it is made.

The Data Says It Should Be Otherwise.

Fans are already voting with their wallets at massive scale.

Kickstarter: Nearly 25 million backers have shown they will directly fund the creative work they believe in.

Patreon: Money flows from fans to creators. The platform essentially invented modern direct support.

Comic conventions, fan expos, merchandise markets: Fans buy physical, ownable media because they want permanence. They want to hold what they love.

Right here on Substack: Fans are subscribing to their favorite writers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, and other creators across every medium, because they want to support the actual people who make the work.

This isn’t niche behavior. This is the mainstream. Fans have been telling us for years: Let us participate. Let us have a say. Do not make us an afterthought.

How Fans Participate and Benefit With Kyndred

Fans help decide what gets made by choosing what to fund.

You see a project. You believe in it. You back it. Your money, along with thousands of other fans, helps make it real.

Production happens. The show gets made. The film premieres. The book gets published.

When that project succeeds, your participation is recognized.

You get platform credits to reinvest in the next project you love. You get exclusive access, in person events, behind the scenes content, collectible editions made exclusively for you.

It’s recognition. It’s participation.

You made this possible. You believed first. You supported it when it was just an idea. When it works, your participation is acknowledged through platform credits, special access, in person events and rewards tied to your support.

The Mechanics (What Kyndred Actual Does)

The infrastructure already exists. The desire is proven. What was missing was a studio willing to say let’s see this through from start to finish.

Fans back projects through a curated crowdfunding platform, and projects have to earn their way onto Kyndred. Not every idea gets a platform, only the ones that meet professional and creative standards. That’s the curation part. That’s how Kyndred protects you and ensures the projects we post can actually be made. You are backing something designed to become a reality.

Once a crowdfunding round closes, a project is greenlit and goes into production.

Then here’s the part that changes everything: You never have to wonder if the people you backed will deliver.

When a project is fully funded, the backers have an advocate responsible for seeing it through.

Kyndred.

Budgets, schedules, marketing and distribution have been reviewed and deemed feasible beforehand. Kyndred stays with the creators after funding, providing production support through the entire process. It receives marketing support, distribution execution, and studio level backing. Once it’s ready, it premieres in the format that makes sense based on the medium. Kyndred stays with it every step of the way.

Once it’s live, you can track the project’s performance. It remains available on our platform during its licensed term. When it succeeds, your participation is recognized through the rewards and benefits built into the platform structure.

Why This Matters Now

The entertainment industry is consolidating fast. Fewer studios. Fewer greenlight decisions. Less creative risk. More algorithm, less culture.

At the same time, fans have proven they want ownership and participation. They want shared culture. They will fund projects directly. They will support creators transparently. They will buy physical media that lasts. They want a say in what gets made.

Kyndred is built for this moment. Where the industry is shrinking creative opportunity and fans are saying: Let us participate.

You believe in a story? You can help make it real. Not by hoping an algorithm recommends it. By backing it directly. By being part of why it exists.

And when it works, you are not invisible. Your participation matters.

The Real Question

Fans already fund culture. Kickstarter proved it. Patreon proved it. Substack proves it. Every convention, every merch line, every book club, every fan driven community proves it.

The question isn’t whether fans will participate.

The question is why they should accept being treated like passive consumers.

Kyndred’s answer is simple.

They shouldn’t.

Back the projects you believe in. Help decide what gets made. Enjoy meaningful access and recognition when it succeeds. And know that the story you love will not quietly vanish during its licensed term because quarterly numbers shifted.

That’s the fan economy. That’s Kyndred.

I know how the system works. I also know it’s not working for the people who matter most. The creators making the work and the fans who love it.

Here’s what I see. Fewer projects are getting greenlit, production is running away so corporate profits can go higher, theatrical windows are shrinking, and more executives are asking creators to oversimplify their stories because they think audiences can’t pay attention anymore. The solution, apparently, is to race to the bottom and make everything even easier to ignore.

I think that’s backwards.

The problem isn’t that audiences are distracted. It’s that they’re being given fewer things worth paying attention to. Stories are being treated like disposable inventory. Finished work gets deleted when it stops serving a balance sheet. Creative risk shrinks because fewer people control more decisions, and honestly, they’re afraid.

One “wrong” decision could mean their job, and when someone’s livelihood is on the line, they’re likely going to play it safe. Lean on an algorithm, point to the data and avoid risk. I don’t have anything against data. It’s quite useful. The only problem with it is that it only tells you about the past. It can identify a trend already underway, but when everyone is rushing to similar conclusions, the market becomes oversaturated with the same type of ideas and originality pays the price.

So I’m building something different.

Kyndred Studios is a curated studio ecosystem that funds, produces, and distributes films, TV series, books, and eventually podcasts, music, and games all under one roof. Where creators keep their IP, fans back the projects they want to see made, and nothing gets deleted because Wall Street needed bigger returns.

We’re not a content platform. We’re a studio built around people and their stories. The platform exists to support the work, not the other way around.

Here’s how it works:

Kyndred bridges the gap between crowdfunding and professional studios. We pair studio-grade development and production with fan-powered crowdfunding, then give the work a proper release. We prove a story in one medium, expand it across others, and build lifetime value through a cross-medium flywheel.

For Creators:

• Retain IP ownership

• Get curated development, production, distribution, and marketing support

• Stay creatively involved across formats

• Receive transparent reporting so you can actually see how money moves

• Maintain full creative authority without studio mandates or being boxed into a homogenized house style

For Fans:

• Directly support the projects you want made

• Gain access to exclusive in-person events

• Receive tiered rewards and ongoing access

• Participate in a community built around the slate

• See the tangible impact of your support through transparent metrics

Who this is for:

If you’re a writer or showrunner developing original scripted series who doesn’t want to be boxed in by episodic requirements and batch releases, an independent filmmaker who wants a proper theatrical release, an author or screenwriter building worlds that can evolve across mediums, a creator who wants equitable financing and complete ownership, then this is for you.

And if you’re a story-centric viewer drawn to crafted, character-rich, emotionally resonant fiction, someone who values shared experiences like theatrical screenings, live readings, and fan events that feel like Events, then this is for you too.

What makes Kyndred different:

Only vetted projects that meet professional and creative standards are selected. Fans determine which projects get funded through our managed crowdfunding system. Once a project is funded and produced, it’s never buried, shelved, or removed for a tax write-off.

We release episodes weekly to allow anticipation to build. We give films a proper theatrical runway so they find their audience in the way they were meant to be seen. We support physical media by treating things like 4K releases, hardbound books, and vinyl albums as an essential delivery method, not just nostalgia. It’s how you make sure the work survives.

We release work with intention, preserve it with care, and build it to last.

We’re based in Los Angeles because this city built modern entertainment, and when location, story and conditions permit, we’ll ask creators to shoot their series and films here. It strengthens the creative community and keeps LA at the heart of global storytelling.

Why now:

The market is ready. Direct fan support has been proven at scale. People want to back the work they believe in. Creators want ownership and transparency. Fans want meaningful participation. The infrastructure exists to deliver both.

What’s missing is someone willing to put it all together. Curated development, transparent funding, professional production support, and permanent distribution without asking creators to give up what matters most.

Here’s where we are:

The website is live (www.kyndredstudios.com). The pitch decks are ready. I’ve been taking meetings, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “Where can I sign up?” positive.

Now comes the next phase. I’m building the core team. I’m looking for a Chief Technology Officer, Chief Creative Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. The kind of people who see what I see, who want to create an environment based on trust, kindness and respect, and who want to build something that hasn’t existed before.

This Substack is the first space where the audience and creators can build and make connections. If you’re a creator tired of the current deal, a fan who wants to support work you believe in, or someone who thinks entertainment can do better go ahead and subscribe. I’d love to have your support on this journey.

The future doesn’t belong to conglomerates extracting value. It belongs to the creators and fans building it together.

Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.

— Lauer

Not just a pitch-deck idea, but a gut-level, can’t-let-it-go idea.

I’m building Kyndred Studios — The Studio for Everyone — because I believe something is missing in entertainment right now: permanency. Too much work is treated like inventory. Too many creators are asked to trade ownership for access. And too many audiences are left with stories they love… that can disappear, get buried, or never get made because they don’t fit someone else’s formula.

Kyndred is going to build something different.

A fan-funded studio where creators keep ownership of what they make, and where projects are built to last. Not just in a library somewhere, but in the world: through real release strategies, community events, and physical editions that people can hold onto if they want to.

I’m preparing to raise capital in 2026. Right now I’m in the early, important part: assembling the first pieces: the founding leadership, the initial creator relationships, and the standards that will define what this studio becomes.

This Substack is where Kyndred will share important updates. Not the nitty-gritty of every internal detail, but the why, the choices, the principles, the lessons, and the people I’m looking for along the way.

If you’re someone who believes stories matter… and that creators deserve better than “take it or leave it” deals… I’d love to have you here.

More soon.
— Lauer

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