Contest: Tuck School of Business Competition, Dartmouth College
Winner: Movieshares.com
Team: Rick Balakier, Reza Habib-Olahi, Ada Peter Ojile, Kamran Pasha, Matthew Pope, Greg St. Pierre
Contact: kamran.pasha@dartmouth.edu; www.movieshares.com
Prize: $5,000
Funding: Raised $620,000 in seed funding from angel investors and more than 40 individuals; in negotiations for additional financing
Think you can spot the next Blair Witch? Wanna put some money on it? Later this summer, you may be able to. The founders of Movieshares.com, who will be announced in early June as the winners of this year's Dartmouth Tuck School of Business business-plan competition, have created a company that lets people invest as little as $100 in individual movie projects via the Internet.
The company's founders, five of whom are Dartmouth MBA students, ditched classes for two weeks in May to attend the Cannes Film Festival, where they cosponsored an interactive lounge in the festival's Internet exhibit. As a result of the trip, Movieshares says it is talking with Hart Sharp Entertainment, producer of Boys Don't Cry, about funding one or more upcoming productions. The startup has also signed on an undisclosed "A-list actor" as an adviser and company spokesman.
Movieshares plans to register individual movie productions as corporations in compliance with the Securities and Exchange Commission and state regulations. If all goes as planned, the company will register its first project in early summer, and should be ready for investors by August.
Cofounders Kamran Pasha and Ada Peter Ojile were in law school two years ago when they first heard how Andrew Klein's Spring Street Brewery raised $4.9 million in two offerings over the Net. "We thought, why couldn't we do that for the movies?" Pasha says. They launched Movieshares in November as a placeholder site that, for now, lets people play movie trivia games and helps directors, actors and screenwriters find agents and look for work. Since then, producer Elliot Shick, TV commercial producer Lawrence Bridges and Hollywood agent Michael Wise have joined the board.
Previous Net-based stock offerings and limited partnership investment opportunities have failed to take off, mainly due to the expense of reaching enough people to form an adequate pool of investors. Pasha believes the magic of the movies will change that.
After graduation, Pasha and a handful of other cofounders will move into Hart Sharp's offices in New York. The company also plans to open a Los Angeles office. "The reception we've gotten is stunning," says Pasha of the meetings he's had at Cannes. "People tell us at first they thought we were a joke, but when they hear the people we're [working with] and talking to, they want to talk to us, too."
