Penny Arcade is a fascinating example of what I think of as a common pattern in creative industries... You get a creative who is amazingly talented and makes st

Penny Arcade is a fascinating example of what I think of as a common pattern in creative industries... You get a creative who is amazingly talented and makes stuff that people just want; this person has no or rudimentary business skills. The creative partners with somebody else who understands the business and deeply believes in the creative. The parter provides the structure to make that creative successful. The obvious example is Walt and Roy Disney. Walt would have been next to nothing if it wasn't for his brother. Roy was brilliant at figuring out how to pay for his brother's ideas. There are a few examples in the world of fashion, genius designers who are paired with a merchandising expert. With Penny Arcade, Jerry and Mike accidentally sold off the rights to their work for short money, and were generally stumbling along. Robert Khoo was just graduating from an MBA program. As I understand it, he walked in and said, "I love you guys. Now I'll handle the money." It's worked out amazingly, to everyone's enormous benefit. In my head, there's some sort of way to scale all this. I wrote a semi-coherent post back in January on my blog, trying to explain it to myself. http://www.njl.us/2010/01/new-old-business-model.html http://www.njl.us/2010/01/new-old-business-model.html Basically, I think there is room for a media conglomerate that's about playing the Robert Khoo/Roy Disney roll for all sorts of talented creatives. Scale up a support system that lets folks develop their own little independent brand on the Internet, but then provides them with pipelines for merchandising, advertising sales, and all the administrative crap involved in actually running a real business.