The co-founder of MoviePass is moving on from the company’s spectacular crash and raising money for a new venture studio that will help develop and fund startups.
Hamet Watt, who confounded MoviePass in 2011 with the idea that moviegoers should be able to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to theaters, told Business Insider he has been hard at work at Share Ventures.
The new company has secured almost $20 million in funding with backers that include Alphabet and Amazon. Watt said the venture is focusing on startups in the future of work and longevity spaces.
He thinks the AI boom and high interest rates have made the venture capital ripe for a “model that’s differentiated,” which is why Share Ventures is creating its own software alongside complex language models to automate its internal work, Business Insider reported.
“You don’t need as large of funds, and you can get signal on an opportunity much earlier with much less capital,” he told the outlet. “For us, that’s a great thing because we’re building companies from scratch and using all of the most advanced tools to do that proactively.”
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Watt said that “a lot of venture firms are investing in these new technologies, but they’re not really embodying and using them.”
“Using novel data and automation in our process is something we think is uniquely special to us,” he added.
Watt said he became interested in health and longevity after losing his mother at 25 years old. She was just 49 when she died.
“When you lose your mom at a young age, it forces you to think about your own mortality, in a way that I don’t know that I was conscious of at the time,” he said.
Watt’s failure at MoviePass, which he recently discussed in the documentary “MoviePass, MovieCrash,” only motivated him to keep trying to innovate, he said.
“What have I learned, and what do I have the guts to go out now and try — and maybe fail, but maybe succeed?”