TROVE Mission, Inc.

About TROVE Mission, Inc.

We made a short film called Code Rouge. It premiered at the LA Festival of Movies, ran the circuit, and then had nowhere to go. That's how we found the problem, though the problem turned out to be a lot bigger than short film. Every other medium eventually built a premium tier. Music got Bandcamp. Writing got Substack. Podcasting got Patreon. All of them ended up with a place where the good work lives and gets paid for. Video on the internet never did. There's a free tier of essentially infinite scale and nothing above it. The most-watched medium on earth is the only one where quality has no home. Now the noise is infinite too. Generative tools made it free to produce unlimited video and the feeds are filling up with it. When supply costs nothing, the scarce thing is taste. Someone you trust saying this one is worth twelve minutes, and here's why. Curation stopped being a nice-to-have the moment the slop became unlimited. So we built TROVE, a curated marketplace for short-form video. Everything on it is handpicked, either by us or by curatorial partners: festivals, screening series, programmers whose taste people already follow. Audiences buy credits and spend them on individual works. Creators price their own work and keep 70%. There are no ads. The proof is in other mediums. Fans have paid musicians $1.7 billion through Bandcamp and Patreon creators earn over $2 billion a year. People pay creators directly all the time. They've just never had a place to do it for this kind of work. I spent three years at IMAX moving films across 75+ countries, and a decade before and alongside that making them. Nicolo and I have been building together for the past two years and this is our second company. We're the customer here. We also know exactly what distribution machinery exists for features and doesn't exist for anything shorter.