Originally Answered: How are record labels, film studios, and startup VCs similar and dissimilar?
The obvious answer is that record labels and film studios focus on content plays while VC firms avoid content plays (because as an industry they have such a bad record at predicting the success of content plays) but the real answer is quite different.
Record labels specialize in picking talent (A&R is king in recording), Film studios specialize in risk management (the failure of a film with $200 million in production costs and an expected worldwide return of well over $1 billion can bring down a Fortune 500 company as nearly happened to Sony in the '80s), and VCs specialize in the allocati...