Every year, I teach a class at Columbia University’s Film School. I bring in leaders from across the media landscape to inspire students and help them imagine their own careers.
Last year, I pivoted.
Instead of traditional studio executives, I started inviting people working at the convergence of legacy media and the creator economy—the collision point where the next version of this business is being built.
I want students to see where the future is heading. The fundamentals they learn in film school—story, character, structure—still matter. But the systems that support storytelling are changing fast, and education has to evolve with them. This class is part of that experiment.
Over the next six weeks, I’ll be sharing highlights from those conversations here on Open Gardens.
First up is my friend Neil Waller, co-founder of Whalar Group—a company quietly rebuilding the studio system for the creator age.
From Shopify to Hollywood
When Neil joined my class, I introduced him as one of those rare founders who could have thrived in any era—equal parts creative and operational, with a touch of producer energy.
He didn’t come from Hollywood. He came from Shopify.
Before Whalar, Neil and his partner had started seven other companies. Their eight—a watch brand called Shore Projects—became the top-selling fashion brand on Shopify worldwide.
“The skill set that we’d learned,” he told the class, “was not necessarily the business building… it was the reaching consumers and making stuff that had kind of cultural awareness and appeal.”
That insight became the seed for Whalar: a company built on the belief that creative connection—not capital—is the real infrastructure of entertainment.
The Studio System, Reversed
For a century, studios consolidated power. They controlled distribution, dictated taste, and owned the means of production.
The creator economy inverts that logic. The power now sits with individual storytellers who own their audiences and control their distribution. What they lack isn’t creativity—it’s structure.
Neil explained that a core group of their creators now run like full production entities.
“They’re essentially TV,” he said — “production and media companies led by a creator and entrepreneur, operating with the same discipline as television.”
Whalar provides the scaffolding for that evolution. It doesn’t own creators; it enables them. It’s the connective tissue that allows independent talent to operate at the scale of legacy media—without losing control.
This is what the new studio system looks like: decentralized, collaborative, and designed for abundance rather than scarcity.
Principles Remain, Practices Change
Neil quoted his chairman, Sir John Hegarty, during our conversation:
“Principles remain, practices change.”
It’s a simple line, but it could be the motto of the entire creator economy. The principles—story, craft, audience—haven’t changed. What’s changing, radically, are the practices: how you finance, distribute, and collaborate.
That’s the shift Whalar is built around. In old Hollywood, structure meant hierarchy. In the creator world, structure means alignment—shared incentives, shared data, shared creative direction.
Whalar’s job isn’t to manage creators; it’s to calibrate that balance.
As Neil explained, it’s about “reframing what is the level that is required, and then doing that with absolute precision.”
He used the metaphor of craftsmanship—figuring out exactly how precise each project needs to be and working to that level, no more, no less. It’s a different kind of professionalism: disciplined, flexible, and deeply aware of audience.
The Lighthouse Lot
If Whalar represents the new studio system, The Lighthouse is its first backlot.
Neil described it as “basically, like, literally a creative playground… the incubator, the campus, the playground for the creator economy to go further and do more.”
A century ago, moguls built studio lots to centralize power. The Lighthouse distributes it—giving creators access to space, tools, and one another.
Whalar opened the first Lighthouse in Los Angeles (which I wrote about), and another in Brooklyn inside a 19th-century pencil factory. They’re physical spaces for collaboration in a digital world—proof that even in an algorithmic age, creativity still needs proximity.
When traditional execs walk through, they see something that feels both foreign and familiar: a creative campus buzzing with energy, cross-pollination, and ambition.
And with the Lighthouse they have just launched Lighthouse Studios, which can not only leverage the studio spaces they have in LA and Brooklyn to scale content, but they are funding content.
The Next MTV
One of the most vivid examples of this new infrastructure is Lighthouse Studios’ partnership with Cole Bennett, the founder of Lyrical Lemonade.
Neil has talked for as long as I’ve known him about relaunching MTV for the digital era. But with that brand now sitting under the Skydance portfolio, that window’s closed—for now.
So instead, he built his own.
Lighthouse Studios partnered with Cole Bennett, the 28-year-old founder of Lyrical Lemonade, whose world already looks like what MTV once was: music, youth, and cultural velocity.
“Create the modern-day MTV,” Neil said—and this time, he means it literally.
Bennett started as a teenage music blogger in Chicago, built a YouTube channel directing videos for Juice WRLD, Lil Yachty, and Eminem, and turned it into a multimedia brand with its own festival. Last summer, 150,000 people turned out for Summer Smash.
Lyrical Lemonade TV will produce a multitude of shows on YouTube—an attempt to build a human-driven algorithm, as Neil put it, “rather than a computer-driven algorithm.”
Bennett acts as the tastemaker, tapping creators who reflect his sensibility and extend the cultural conversation he’s been shaping since he was a kid.
It’s the next iteration of cultural programming—curated by taste, not tech.
In Neil’s words, “Creators are the modern-day entertainment and media companies.”
The distinction between digital and traditional is vanishing; what matters is command of audience and consistency of voice.
(I’ll write more in depth about Lyrical Lemonade TV as this evolves.)
Failure as Process
Later in class, we talked about failure—something every creative wrestles with.
“Failure is only failure if it ends what you’re doing completely; otherwise it’s just learning,” Neil said.
He spoke about running multiple companies before finding the one that worked, and about persistence as the real differentiator.
“Going beyond what most people will do and carrying on when most people would quit is probably a pretty good formula for success.”
He paused, then added:
“You can’t sprint a marathon.”
That line landed hard with the students. In a world obsessed with virality, it was a reminder that sustainable creativity is an endurance game.
The Rebuild
As the conversation wound down, I looked around the room. My students—future filmmakers, producers, showrunners—were leaning forward, not because they wanted to be influencers, but because they recognized something familiar in Neil’s story.
It’s the same thing that built Hollywood a hundred years ago: people with ideas who refused to wait for permission.
The next studio era won’t be headquartered in Burbank. It’s already taking shape in creator campuses, shared spaces, Discord servers, and co-ops. It’s being built by people who understand both sides of the equation—art and infrastructure.
Whalar and The Lighthouse are proof that the studio system isn’t dead. It’s being reborn—creator-first, audience-driven, and community-powered.
And that’s what I want my students to see. Because the future of storytelling doesn’t belong to the biggest players—it belongs to the most adaptive ones.
As Neil told them:
“Collaboration amongst the community is the number one most valuable way to have a chance to break through.”
That might be the most old-school Hollywood thing of all.
Brilliant Ben! Thank you for spotlighting Neil.
Great read. I'm actually really excited for the future of the creative economy; its democratizing entertainment and I think for the better!