The Clubhouse and the Graph

What we call Hollywood is a 1917 industrial template inherited from Europe and the creator economy is a return to what came before.

Seth Hallen is Managing Partner of Hallstone Ventures, an early-stage fund backing the infrastructure layer behind the future of media, entertainment, and advertising. Hallstone closed its first fund in May 2026, exceeding its $10 million target. Before launching the fund, Seth spent two and a half decades as an operator inside Hollywood at companies including Sony, Panavision’s Light Iron, and Pixelogic. He still thinks like an operator, which is how he picks the founders he backs. He sits on the AI Task Force at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

For two and a half decades, Seth worked inside Hollywood. He built businesses there, raised money there, sat in dark rooms with auteurs finishing their movies. From inside, he says, the room feels like the whole world.

It is a small room with a finite number of seats.

The pitches now arriving at Hallstone Ventures sort cleanly into two buckets. The first bucket is founders building products and services for Hollywood. They want to sell…