In the world today, pools of latent talent with untapped creative potential are sidelined by market dynamics – due to factors like proximity and accessibility, there are more talented storytellers than there are opportunities available. Adim’s focus is to empower a broader segment of these creators. Just like the 2002 Oakland Athletics did with the sport of baseball, to innovate and find alternative paths to success, we need to reevaluate the frameworks which the foundation of the entertainment industry are built upon.

The Story of Moneyball

Michael Lewis, in his book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”, tells the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball season led by General Manager Billy Beane. That year, Oakland was working on a budget of $39 million, while wealthier teams, like The New York Yankees, had budgets in excess of $130 million. When the A’s stunned the baseball world with a deep playoff run in 2002, they changed the way the game is played forever.

The Athletics front office took a contrarian approach to team-building, leveraging statistical analysis to construct a competitive baseball team while operating within the confines of a limited budget. Oakland focused on emergent statistical categories to optimize for qualities like plate discipline and statistical run creation rather than physical tools and vanity stats. Deemphasizing reliance on the home run and the 99 MPH fastball, Oakland’s new strategy led to winning baseball overcoming a cheaper budget and caused every team to examine their own methods.

The A’s strategy was rooted in the belief that traditional systems were inefficient and flawed due to an unwillingness to adapt to changing beliefs and the influence of modern technology in baseball. Decision-makers for decades saw the game through the lens of what they’d always relied on in the past, evaluating talent based on the eye-test and elementary data.

Technology has come a long way in the past two decades compared to what information was available prior to the Moneyball era. Modern focus on data-driven decision-making is exponentially greater than ever before driven by a rise in computing power, sports science, and motion capture. Now, every major sports team employs full teams dedicated to advanced analytics.

The same way the sports world took advantage of new technology to optimize their processes, it’s imperative that we assess the metrics that matter in entertainment and rethink how the game is played.

The Current Creative Landscape

Storytelling – the process of ideating, developing and sharing narratives – sits firmly at the heart of humans’ need to feel connection and belonging. For many years, mainstream storytelling projects and narratives have been largely funded and owned by centralized corporations. The decisions, ownership and IP are generally optimized for shareholder value rather than the people most bought in (i.e. creators, fans) to the stories themselves.

On top of existing power structures, lack of access and proximity to these centralized corporations has historically excluded creators and stories from being fairly represented. Generally, a writer’s room consists of a group of people with varying levels of experience and backgrounds coming together to generate stories, with each person in a room playing a different role. Some people are relied on for certain types of jokes, some people are relied on to break a script, and others are simply there to take notes and get coffee, earning the respect of their superiors. To even get into that position today is extremely difficult and often requires previous successes or a strong network.

While this model has produced great stories over decades, it doesn’t mean this is the only way to run things – just as the A’s proved to the MLB. Especially considering that in entertainment, we’re not hitting lightning-speed curveballs – we’re telling stories, which is what we intuitively and fundamentally do as human beings. Every single person has and can tell, if given the opportunity, stories that resonate with our common threads of humanity.

What would it look like if we approached this problem with a more open, equitable and inclusive system?

Our Moneyball Moment

For generations, power structures in entertainment have been in place to determine what is made and who is compensated for it, but in a new era of storytelling, this is being challenged. There is a demand for greater representation, access and ownership in the stories that shape our culture. Adim is built on the belief that removing the barriers impeding diverse, collaborative and nuanced creative expression will generate more intriguing and dynamic IP.

By democratizing access, the playing field of who can create, own and control their work is leveled. The criteria by which individuals are judged as creators is shifting – a variety of skillsets can be leveraged to make an impact. Creators bringing their own life experiences and desire to contribute to storytelling results in more paths to add value to the depth of a story in unconventional ways. Adim's structure helps us tell the stories people want to hear, OUR stories, not just the stories industry executives think we will pay to watch.

In the pursuit of seeking what really matters, our inaugural application asked a single question: Who is your favorite character of all time and why? We intentionally didn’t ask for anybody’s IMDb or portfolio to avoid any bias for previous industry experience. Thousands of people applied with thoughtful and introspective responses which opened a window into who a person is, what they value and how they think about character development from their answer.

Our team went through responses and curated 100 Adim Members to participate in our first Creator Room, bringing people together from around the world to participate in scaled-up writer’s rooms to create characters and stories. Creators were split up into 4 rooms of 25, each led by members of the Adim Creative team, working together to develop visually and narratively realized characters. They each approached the process in unique ways, and at the conclusion of Creator Room 1, the texture of our creative community emerged and genesis characters and stories were born. Each round of Creator Rooms offers the opportunity to improve the creative process and the platform that supports it.

In October, we kicked off Round 2 with 11 Rooms led by a mixture of the Adim Creative Team and nominated community members participating in our first Creator Room. These rooms, ranging in size, genre, structure, and vibe, are made up of hundreds of Adim Members embarking on the next phase of creative collaboration. Moving forward into our next wave of Creator Rooms, there will be opportunities for more creators and fans to continue to build new stories.

Like the A’s embraced inefficiencies to build a new model, Adim is doing the same by redistributing access and control to talent across the globe to catalyze new forms of collaboration.

The Adim Ecosystem

Adim aims to create a flourishing ecosystem of IP powered by creators and fans who are able to capture upside from their contributions.

Building with web3 rails presents a unique opportunity to create models for creators to retain ownership of their work, unlocking value systems that enable stronger incentive alignment to their creative output. This paradigm shift will replace extractive, centralized platforms and organizations with protocols which allow creators to create and capture real value.

Tokenizing characters and creative contributions as NFTs results in a verifiable record of provenance and ownership. When tracking provenance of both IP and relationships to IP on-chain, we create supercharged assets that are open, composable and interoperable across traditional and emerging mediums. Strong IP creates engaged microcosms that have been relegated to passivity by the existing system. By enabling this more open ecosystem of active participation, people are empowered to add value in more ways than writing scripts. Fans are able to partake in multi-directional processes with their favorite stories, allowing all stakeholders to create and capture value by engaging with stories they’re drawn to.

Another key way NFTs benefit the Adimverse is through composability.

A16z’s Chris Dixon defines composability as “the ability to mix and match software components like lego bricks.” Essentially, building software on top of other software creates a compounding effect which rapidly accelerates progress. One of the powerful unlocks of Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) has been the concept of composable money legos – new protocols are built on top of existing ones, creating entirely new combinations exponentially more powerful than each standalone lego piece.

Adim is looking at composability through the lens of character and story creation – characters don’t have to live in just one medium. The end of the room is the beginning of the life of a character.

By incentivizing active participation and collaboration, ideas can expand to the space of the passion there is for it without artificial constraints – broadening beyond the scope of a realized character. Creators can collaborate with other Adim community members to rewrite scripts, create new story objects, or spin off new rooms around their characters entirely. While that original group might've started with a simple logline, as they grow their community and foster interest in their project, they could end up with comics, animations, novels, and artwork around their characters that they can choose to add as canon additions to the universes they're creating while building a community that actually owns a piece of the pie.

Information about characters created are stored on blockchains, unlocking new use cases where creators can leverage the connective tissue of NFTs to build intertwined narrative worlds tracked on-chain. In the Adimverse, characters and worlds have potential to come into dialogue with each other akin to your favorite childhood crossover episodes (like the epic 1987 Jetsons x Flintstones crossover below).

Remixing and connecting creative assets opens up avenues for deeper interactions with characters and stories. This composability creates immersive narrative systems expanded by forking characters, extending lore and creating rich stories at scale.

What’s next?

In baseball, the Athletics unorthodox strategy was scrutinized for challenging conventional wisdom before eventually becoming the way that baseball is played. Just like how Moneyball changed baseball as the sport adapted to the new wave of innovation around analytics, Adim aims to impact the entertainment industry by taking a different approach to telling stories and creating more accessible creative environments.

As Adim scales, the aggregate of thousands of storytellers contributing ideas through iterative development has the potential to produce a stable of high-quality, diverse ideas. By incentivizing creators and fans to engage with these new ideas, built-in focus groups exist with feedback loops tailored to creating the most interesting IP. Participants in the network have a real say in the creative process, creating a built-in army of people wanting to see their ideas gain traction and make it to the market. By casting a wider net and providing more opportunity, Adim can impact all facets of creation, fandom and curation for years to come.

We’re on the precipice of franchises of IP built from the ground up by the next generation of creators – and you can find Adim at the forefront.

If you’re passionate about building a more inclusive, accessible and ownable future for entertainment, we’re hiring for numerous roles.