MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes recently bought popcorn at the Angelika Film Center before a screening of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale.”
“I think it’s incredible,” Spikes said of the movie he’s already seen. “You don’t see overweight people, addictions and broken hearts like you used to.” He filled a cup with his Diet Coke before heading to Theater 1, center row four. . (He always consults a map before choosing a seat.)
Spikes is a movie geek who has dedicated much of his career to helping theaters survive the age of smartphones and streaming. In 2011, he co-founded his MoviePass. This is a service that allows a user to pay a flat monthly fee to watch one movie per day in a theater. He pitched it as “Netflix for cinemas.” The launch was difficult as several major chains announced they would not be participating. (AMC Theaters called his MoviePass a “little fringe player” and threatened to sue.) The company eventually reached about 3 million subscribers, but Spikes wanted to keep it. struggled to raise funds and was taken over by the now-defunct Data in 2017. Analytics firm Helios and Matheson. Soon after Spikes criticized some of the company’s business decisions, including adopting an unsustainably low $9.95 monthly subscription fee, he was kicked out and MoviePass went bankrupt.2021 In 2011, Spikes bought the company back from bankruptcy. He relaunched it last fall.
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He has probably spent hundreds of hours in movie theaters around New York City and believes that researchers should use movies to train artificial intelligence algorithms to understand humans. “If aliens come down from another planet and want to know about us, they should go see a movie, right?” he said. “Then they’ll understand us.” A scary-looking Willem Dafoe trailer started playing. Spikes muttered.
Spikes wore a Manhattan Tech Bro uniform: jeans, a black Patagonia turtleneck and nanopuff jacket, and chunky black glasses. I wrote In it, he details his business success in entertainment and his struggle to raise money as a black entrepreneur in the tech industry. Every year, 2% of his capital is invested in non-white or female founders.
Spikes grew up in Houston. Her father was a principal and her mother was her entrepreneurial spirit and hosted her own public television show. After high school, he drove a pickup truck to Los Angeles, where he stayed at his uncle’s house and accidentally lost all his belongings to an overzealous garbage collector. (“Don’t put things in garbage bags,” his uncle told him.) He loaded his UPS truck, temporarily detoxed, and then started climbing. He first worked for a video distribution company where he was treated like family. , then he was mentored by a series of black executives at Motown Records. (He read a few newspapers each day, sent monogrammed notes, and learned to treat secretaries and janitors with respect.) In 1995, Spikes served as vice president of marketing for Mira in her pre-scandal heyday. Joined Max Films. (In his first hour at the company, Bob Weinstein, after asking Spikes for his opinion on the trailer for the movie, said, “We hired idiots? Harvey, we hired idiots.” I think so,” he exclaimed.)
While watching “The Whale,” Spikes made occasional low laughs and gasps. He then spoke about why he admired Brendan Fraser’s performance as Charlie, an obese writing instructor who is struggling to mend his relationship with his teenage daughter. I empathize, but he’s an enlightened man,” Spikes said.
He said he struggled to stay positive while experiencing MoviePass. That’s when he ran out of $2.5 billion before his two white executives who took over went bankrupt. In his book, he explains that he took his MoviePass white colleagues to meetings with his VC firms, where they had analysts assume that his colleagues, not Spikes, were the founders. doing. “It’s become clear that pattern recognition is a problem. It’s not that these are racist,” he said. “Women and minorities, we must not give up the fight and keep running to the gate.” “Imagine tennis without Venus and Serena. Imagine golf without Tiger.” When you don’t allow a wider view of the universe, you’re doing the same thing to the world of finance.
He sees signs that things are changing. He said students who read his book would do what he did: start and raise money for their own companies, even if they don’t look like your average tech founder. I hope to “Like Charlie,” he said. “I’m a bit of an optimist.” ♦
