Winners Welcome Podcast, Episode 16 with Stacy Spikes, Co-Founder and CEO of Moviepass.

Stacy Spikes built MoviePass, lost it, and bought it back. Now he’s betting on what comes next.

In January 2018, Stacy Spikes was fired from the company he co-founded. He had opposed the $10-a-month pricing that made MoviePass a household name and pushed it toward collapse. The next day, he took an old family Bible down to the Hudson River and read the Book of Job. The message he walked away with has stayed with him ever since: they took what you made, but they didn’t take what you made it with.

That mindset carried Stacy through one of the most unusual founder journeys in recent memory. He invented MoviePass, scaled it to millions of users, watched it implode, and then bought it back out of bankruptcy to relaunch it as MoviePass 2.0. Before all of that, he spent decades in entertainment at Motown Records, Sony Music, and Miramax Films, and founded the Urbanworld Film Festival as a home for diverse storytellers.

In this episode of the Winners Welcome podcast, Stacy goes back to the 120 investor rejections that came before his first check from AOL and True Ventures. He explains why he doesn’t see those as nos at all, but as rehearsals for the pitch that finally lands. He opens up about the realities of fundraising as a Black founder, the reading habit that keeps him ahead of trend lines, and the 12-year daily running streak he’s kept through fevers, flights, and altitude sickness.

He also looks ahead. Stacy believes AI is about to give filmmaking the same jolt digital tools gave hip-hop, opening storytelling to far more people. And with Mogul, he’s building what he calls the fantasy sports of Hollywood, where fans can turn their knowledge of movies and the box office into real stakes. In his words, MoviePass 1.0 was about saving people money. MoviePass 2.0 is about helping them make it.

This episode is brought to you by Gunderson Dettmer, the number one law firm in venture capital globally, partnering with leading investors and groundbreaking companies from start to scale. #PoweredByGunderson

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About The Winners Welcome Podcast

The Winners Welcome Podcast brings elite founders and top investors into thoughtful conversations on pushing past possible, sharing the conviction, standards, and lessons behind building generational companies.

About Harlem Capital

Harlem Capital is a venture capital firm that backs the next generation of winners. The firm partners with exceptional founders with the irrational motivation to build generational companies. All Winners Welcome.

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