Hi there!
I’m Dana Harris-Bridson, founder of Flamingo. Welcome to the inaugural edition of In Formation, my letter from inside the process of building Flamingo: what I’m seeing, what I’m learning, and what I still don’t know.
I started Flamingo because the entertainment business has outgrown the entertainment industry.
The studio system is no longer the system. It’s part of a much larger ecosystem that includes creators, producers, brands, investors, platforms, distributors, and audiences.
I call this the Story Economy, and I think it’s the most exciting market taking shape today. (Granted, I may be prejudiced.) Many of you already operate within it — building companies, structuring deals, and developing new business models. Others are trying to figure out where they fit and how to participate.
It’s also a place where it’s remarkably easy for good ideas to get lost in translation.
Players bring their own assumptions about ownership, control, risk, and success. New models can make it hard to establish basic facts: Who financed what? Who kept ownership? Which approaches are repeatable?
A market can’t learn from experiments it can’t see. Promising ideas remain isolated, mistakes are repeated, and a polished press release can be mistaken for proof.
Enter Flamingo.
This is where you can see the scope of the Story Economy and discover the people worth knowing, ideas worth borrowing, and models worth adapting.
The work begins with journalism. I spent my career inside established media institutions, but reporting on entertainment’s future kept pulling me beyond traditional beats. The most interesting coverage happened at the seams —between film and brands, creators and capital, technology and IP, storytelling and social impact.
I don’t see these stories as curiosities. They reveal a connected market that’s developing faster than our ability to describe it.
Flamingo will look for ideas that travel. A model developed in gaming, independent film, or the creator economy may be useful somewhere else entirely.
That reporting will also feed the Flamingo Index: a structured record of the participants, capital, rights, distribution, and outcomes behind emerging models. Over time, the Index will reveal patterns that no single story can.
Flamingo launches in January 2027 with a free edition and a professional membership offering deeper reporting, quarterly analysis, and conversations where people working across the market can compare notes.
The Story Economy is forming in real time, and the knowledge that matters lives with the people doing the work — often in different fields and using different language but solving surprisingly similar problems. I want to hear what you experience, connect it to what others see, and return a clearer view of the market.
So, welcome. Tell me what you’re working on, what you’re noticing, and where you think I have it wrong. (Just hit reply.)
And if you see a company, deal, partnership, or business model that doesn’t fit the usual categories, send it my way.
It probably belongs in Flamingo.
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