Fellowship Spotlight: Good Trouble Ventures
“We hear a lot about the top 5% of artists, but what about all the other creatives out there that have an opportunity but don’t quite have the access?,” says AJ Thomas, founder and co-GP of Good Trouble Ventures, a VC firm focused on what they believe to be the two most powerful levers for shaping culture and opportunities: technology and entertainment. “There are a lot of really amazing untapped, unlikely, underrepresented artists and creatives of all races and profiles and backgrounds,” she adds, “that we can capture by showing them the funding and other resources available to them.” To capture this opportunity, Good Trouble Ventures is investing at the intersection of tech-enabled creativity and entertainment as a sector ripe for impact.
Creating Good Trouble in the Media and Entertainment Lane
“What we’re trying to do is what John Lewis admonished us all to do: create good and necessary trouble in every lane,” says CEO and Co-GP of Good Trouble Ventures, Monica Pool Knox. “We’re not saying the struggles of creators, artists and athletes are equivalent to the struggles of Black and Brown people in the Civil Rights Era. We’re responding to Lewis’s invitation to create something other than the status quo and not be afraid of disrupting what needs to change.” Pool Knox, Thomas, and Founding Co-GP, Kat Steinmetz, are responding by raising a $75M early-stage fund with select Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A investments, writing checks on average ranging from $500k to $1M and reserving 40% for follow on funding.
The firm’s first fund is investing in three core areas: IP content and media; creator economy and technology infrastructure; and sports and gaming data insights and analytics, all within a strategy designed to net a 5X ROI. They believe that, with sufficient capital, creatives leveraging AI will build groundbreaking media and entertainment companies, shape new market categories, disrupt traditional monetization models, and deliver extraordinary returns.
“Many people are already investing in these three areas,” Thomas acknowledges, “but what distinguishes our work is the thread of media and entertainment throughout.” The companies they’re looking at are most often working in sports and gaming or in storytelling forms through film, music, and creators. “The creator economy is broad,” Pool Knox points out. “Creators are showing up and representing brands in so many different spaces and creating economic opportunities through their name, image, and likeness and their connections with brands that want to be affiliated with something that’s relevant and cool.”
Strong partnerships between creators and brands lead to sophisticated and cutting-edge tech-enabled solutions. “We’re in this to give dreams wings,” Pool Knox goes on. “Founders have put their heart, blood, sweat, and tears into these companies and they just need some funding to fly.” As Thomas says it, “Most creatives are wired to become great entrepreneurs because they’ve had to do it with their hands tied behind their back, not even knowing they have access to funding. We’re clear on what the pathway can look like. If we unleash it even just a little bit, creatives can blossom, and we’ve already seen that happening.”
Vast and Aligned Experiences
Thomas, Pool Knox, and Steinmetz have their own distinct and high-leverage relationships to the world of media and entertainment on top of 20+ years each working in tech, media and entertainment. They’ve worked at Microsoft, Twitter, Sony, Google X, Disney, Box, CBS Interactive, Burning Man, and more. Thomas has a background in the music industry. Pool Knox has a son who’s a D1 football player working toward an NFL career and in storytelling herself as a published author. Steinmetz has worked as a professional touring musician as well as in support of working artists. “We understand the technology and why it’s better when you keep the artist or athlete or creator in it,” Steinmetz says. “Better products, better returns, better world.”
They share professional experiences working in HR – talent, people, and culture – a space that Pool Knox says, “is critical to identifying winning founders and leadership teams. We’re the rare venture fund that has GPs and advisors with the professional backgrounds to be able to identify top talent and develop them individually as leaders or across their teams.”
Complementing all these skills and their understanding of how to assess deals and business strategy, all three are also mothers, with decades of experience keeping families healthy and happy. “In all of our different life experiences – from being immigrants and living in different countries to being born and raised on military bases and communities to being a professional musician who’s performed around the world and then going in to tech,” Pool Knox reflects, “quite frankly, we’ve all had an incredible variety of life experiences, and that’s actually a great background for venture – we can relate to and make authentic connections with so many people.”
The three GPs crossed paths over the years while working in tech across talent and culture roles. They’ve overlapped in the accelerator and conference ecosystems, sometimes even ending up on the same calls advising and coaching founders. “When AJ and I saw each other at the Transform conference in 2024,” Steinmetz shares, “we were both coming off of our last thing, and she invited me to be a partner in this fund she was going to start, Good Trouble Ventures.” Though she never thought of starting a fund herself, she was interested. Pool Knox similarly didn’t imagine herself starting a fund. “I had recently started investing and then advising venture funds, so I was already in the space,” she says, “but I never envisioned myself being at a venture fund full time or starting one.” She came on board when Thomas invited her to be a venture partner, before asking her soon after to be the CEO.
Providing Expansive Support
Steinmetz explains that Good Trouble Ventures takes the position of only investing if they believe themselves to truly be the right partner for the company in question. “We ask, ‘Why us?’,” she says. “Why would we be the right investors? What are you looking for in a partnership and investor?’ And we want to feel that we could fulfill that.” The team’s impressive depth and array of experiences help them relate to the position that founders are in. “We understand what it means to have a business strategy and grow a business,” Steinmetz adds, “and we also have this coalition to engage in pitch calls, diligence, and portfolio support.”
Good Trouble Ventures works with a potent coalition of artists, technologists, and executives supporting different areas of the firm’s work. Their networks, the product of decades of relationship-building and cultivation, are vast. Among their coalition are two creatives-in-residence, brought in to advise not only companies that are in the Good Trouble portfolio, but also companies that they’re considering.
“We give that strategic support that goes beyond capital,” Thomas adds. “Before even writing a check, we’re already putting founders in our ecosystem and network, building opportunities for them to make connections because we believe in what they’re trying to do.” She explains that, when they do get to the diligence process, creatives play a key role in evaluating deals. “We’re not just coming in from our tech or people and talent backgrounds. We also have a Grammy Award winning artist who’s worked with some of the greatest artists of the past 30 years, who knows what it’s like to hit a certain note to imbue a particular mood for the audience, and also understands the technology.”
Along with their coalition of seasoned, skilled, and celebrated producers, actors, screenwriters, expert social impact, technical, finance, and go-to-market executives, the team brings clear perspective that supports true and deep collaboration. Together, they strike the balance of being effective hands-on partners while still following a company’s lead.
Participating in the VC Include Fellowship
“It’s been a wonderful experience,” says Steinmetz of her time participating in the VC Include Fellowship. “We create programs like this, so I’m a pretty discerning eye and ear,” she adds, “and it is a really well run program.” She says that she feels supported and informed, lifting up the quality of the curriculum, speakers, and mentors, and the integrity of the community. “It feels like really all the things that we actually need,” Steinmetz shares, “which I think a lot of accelerators want to say they are, but they aren’t really all those things.”
At a time when entertainment has the potential to shift public opinion, the VCI team recognized that Steinmetz and her all-female GP team are uniquely qualified to make an indelible impact on this industry. We’re humbled to be able to provide practical tools and guidance that poises fellows for ongoing success, and we’re eager to see all of the groundbreaking innovations that Kat and her team at Good Trouble Ventures roll out.
