Welcome to In Formation, the founder newsletter from Flamingo Media. I’m Dana Harris-Bridson and until Flamingo launches in January 2027, I’ll be sharing weekly dispatches from behind the build.

Flamingo is being built for the Story Economy: the growing ecosystem where creators, entertainment, brands, platforms, and capital use story to create value — and increasingly depend on one another to do it.

Please forward this newsletter to a fellow member of the Story Economy! And if someone sent it to you, subscribe here.

I’d never been to a summit like Uncharted’s Fame to Fortune. And by that I mean, it was held at a private home in Southampton that could easily accommodate 350-400 guests (said home belonged to Uncharted’s founder, Michael Loeb), served tomahawk steaks and lobster for dinner, and concluded with a bonfire on the private beach. 

And in other ways, it was like every summit. No matter how compelling the panels or how luxe the setting, all that surf-and-turf infrastructure is a Trojan horse for providing time and space for a whole bunch of ambitious people to talk and talk. 

Some backstory: Uncharted is a private community of founders and investors. Membership is free and by application only. Loeb hosts a flagship Uncharted summit every June, but August 28 was the inaugural Fame to Fortune summit (not crazy about that name, but bear with me) that launched the Uncharted entertainment vertical and its focus on talent, brands, capital, and media. 

I wrote a bit about this on LinkedIn but as someone who arrived knowing almost no one, FTF was also unique in its ability to gather lot of very powerful people who were also easy to talk to. (In Hollywood, that’s not really a thing.)

Some of that was by design as a heavily curated event, but there was also a sense that looking over people’s shoulders for the bigger, better deal was genuinely viewed as uncool. 

People at FTF seemed to understand their attendance was also tacit admission that they understood the assignment: Whether you were a first-time founder or an investment manager, everyone was were there to listen and to be heard. People were easy to approach, with minimal small talk. They quickly asked what brought you there and often engaged with the answer. No connection? No harm, no foul. On to the next conversation.

Uncharted is a fairly unique organization, but I think it also represents a core sample of where IRL events are going, and why. Sure, there’s the whole well-I-know-this-isn’t-AI thing and the humans-are-social thing — but the real value came from building a specific community with a culture that demanded no one try to prove they’re the smartest person in the room. 

That’s part of what I want for Flamingo. I haven’t laid out the specifics of Flamingo Media (maybe that should be next week’s newsletter?), but there will be an IRL element in Rooms — private gatherings under Chatham House rule with 10-20 Flamingo members from across the Story Economy. Some Rooms will be anchored by a special guest, or by a particular topic, but attendance is built around the idea that you want to know more about other people who value story and come at it from a completely different direction than your own. 

I think that’s essential to both Flamingo and to the Story Economy, which is comprised of industries that are used to setting their own terms. Creators, brands, film, TV, platforms, and capital each possess plenty of power and agency, and they all value story. However, successful executing story increasingly means engaging outside your industry, where you don’t run the table. Each industry has its own KPIs, ROIs, reasons, and outcomes — and they aren’t going to adopt anyone else’s because they remain different businesses. 

No one cedes power willingly, which means there’s an inherent tension across the Story Economy that impacts everything from initial outreach to the contracts and deal terms. Alignments will come over time (money and the desire to get shit done are marvelous motivators), but Rooms will be a space for putting some of that into action.  

Belief in the value of being there also followed me into a very different kind of Southampton room.

I was probably the only person who attended both FTF and the Southampton Playhouse’s sold-out screening of “Taxi Driver” (followed by a Paul Schrader Q&A moderated by Playhouse artistic director Eric Kohn). I’ve watched it many times, but this was the first one in a theater — and on a 1976 release print, no less.

The film was brilliant as always, but my favorite part may have been seeing the well-loved print’s occasional freckles and hiccups — the ones that couldn’t be erased by the Playhouse’s exacting process of checking the reel by hand. 

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week, but you can also follow me on LinkedIn for more.