FinBuzz writes that there many similarities between working in finance and creative industries, but one key difference: level of emotional investment.
Ex-Goldman Sachs associate and founder of cult movie streaming service MUBI says distinction between business and creative worlds needs to be broken down.
In an exclusive interview with Creative Entrepreneurs, founder of film-streaming platform MUBI, has stated that budding entrepreneurs in the creative industries need to stop seeing the worlds of creativity and business as separate.
When asked his top tip for fellow entrepreneurs in the creative industries, Cakarel stated: “Break down that distinction between business and creative. I think we’ve proven over the last 9 years that they can work together in quite wonderful ways.”
With experience in both finance and the creative industries, Cakarel has found many, often overlooked, similarities across the two fields, but also a key difference, namely, the level of emotional investment: “Both deal in risk and are heavily reliant on relationships, but with cinema, while there is always something financially at stake, there is often also a lot at stake emotionally.
Invariably, films, and particularly the films we play, take years to make – blood, sweat and tears are in the celluloid itself – and you are responsible for taking that film out to the world, so you have to be sensitive to and mindful of that.”
Originally starting up in the Silicon Valley, Cakarel relocated MUBI’s headquarters to London, attracted by its creative talent pool and the desire to grow the platform globally.
He says: “The vision of MUBI was to take great cinema to every corner of the world and London is a global city at the heart of Europe – so it was an easy choice. The people are the most exciting thing – London has a huge amount of creative talent.”
With The Cannes Film Festival 2016 about to open, Cakarel has described his desire to increase access to independent and international films, which can be difficult to see outside of the big festivals and big cities: “I knew that there were millions of other people like me, that were passionate about cinema but unless they lived in a big city or were lucky enough to go to one of the big festivals, they wouldn’t get to experience the huge wealth of work that’s out there.”
Cakarel founded MUBI, the online film-streaming service which aims to provide a platform for cult, classic, independent and international films, in 2005, after a frustrating moment trying to find the Wong Kar Wai film In the Mood for Love while stranded in a Tokyo café.
This story originally appeared in FinBuzz.
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