I Accidentally Found Out I’m in the Entertainment Business, or at least that’s what our insurance company thinks.
There are certain moments in life where someone says something to you so confidently that you don’t even argue. You simply stare into the distance wondering if you’ve accidentally joined the wrong meeting. That was exactly how I felt a few months ago while shopping for insurance for Held & Rooted. Mind you, I wasn’t doing anything exciting. I wasn’t negotiating a deal or buying beachfront property. I was trying to purchase the least glamorous thing imaginable: nonprofit insurance. Directors and Officers insurance, cyber insurance, general liability…all of the adult things no one includes in those motivational quotes that tell you to “follow your dreams.” Apparently when you start a nonprofit, no one sends flowers. They send invoices. I had accepted that reality. I had budgeted for insurance. What I had not budgeted for was learning that I had apparently wandered into the entertainment industry without realizing it.
The insurance broker was explaining how Held & Rooted would be classified. I assumed he was about to say nonprofit, technology company, educational organization, or perhaps community organization. Instead, with complete confidence, he explained that they were considering us a multimedia company. I laughed immediately because surely this was one of those awkward misunderstandings where someone had opened the wrong file. Respectfully, sir, I organize moms’ events. We host playdates. We answer parenting questions. We encourage people to RSVP on time. There is not a single celebrity walking around our events, yet. He, however, did not laugh. He continued talking as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. Then he shared the annual premium. It was nearly eight thousand dollars. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced your soul quietly leaving your body while you continue responding politely on the phone, but I have. I distinctly remember staring at my computer wondering whether he had accidentally confused Held & Rooted with Warner Bros.
The funny thing about curiosity is that it rarely leaves me alone. Most people would have hung up the phone, found another insurance broker, and moved on with their lives. I, on the other hand, spent the next several weeks thinking about one phrase: multimedia company. The more I repeated it, the stranger it sounded. I didn’t own a movie studio. I wasn’t producing documentaries. The most dramatic production taking place around here was convincing people to upload profile photos instead of blurry pictures from 2008. Yet somehow the professionals whose entire careers revolve around assessing business risk looked at what we were building and immediately categorized it alongside multimedia companies? Somewhere along the way I realized that perhaps the more interesting question wasn’t whether they were wrong. Perhaps the more interesting question was why they thought they were right.
Around that same time, headlines about Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, streaming rights, billion-dollar acquisitions, and media mergers seemed to be everywhere. Now, I should probably confess something about myself, if you do know yet. Whenever I don’t understand a topic, I have an unfortunate habit of making it my entire personality for about two weeks. Some people casually read one article and feel informed. I accidentally enroll myself in an unpaid graduate program. Suddenly I was reading about companies I had never thought twice about. I wasn’t particularly interested in the celebrity gossip surrounding Hollywood. I wanted to know something much simpler. What exactly do these companies own? Because if their value wasn’t simply cameras and movie sets, then what was everyone paying billions of dollars to acquire?
The answer turned out to be surprisingly beautiful. They own ideas. Better yet, they own the legal rights to ideas. Batman isn’t valuable because someone drew him once. Harry Potter isn’t valuable because seven books were printed. SpongeBob isn’t worth billions because children happen to enjoy sea creatures wearing square pants. Those characters became intellectual property. Every movie, toy, theme park ride, lunchbox, T-shirt, translation, streaming deal, Halloween costume, or sequel exists because someone owns the original idea. I realized that my entire life I had looked at Disney and assumed they made movies. Movies are simply one expression of what Disney owns. Their real business is collecting stories that continue creating value for generations.
I’ll admit something slightly embarrassing. Before all of this, the phrase intellectual property sounded painfully boring. It felt like something discussed in a conference room full of attorneys wearing navy suits and expensive watches while billing clients by the hour. It certainly didn’t feel like something I needed to understand. But suddenly it became one of the most fascinating concepts I’d ever encountered because it completely changed the way I looked at business. I had spent most of my career believing businesses made products. Hospitals provided healthcare. Restaurants served food. Clothing companies made dresses. Media companies made movies. It turns out that many of the world’s most valuable organizations aren’t selling products nearly as much as they’re building libraries of intellectual property. They own stories. They own characters. They own brands. They own trust. They own ideas that can continue producing value long after the original creator has gone home for the evening.
Somewhere in the middle of this rabbit hole, I looked back at Held & Rooted differently. No, we are not building Marvel. Frankly, the pressure of producing superheroes on top of planning family events sounds exhausting. But every feature inside our app began as an original idea born from years of moderating this community. Every community care guideline came from real experiences that forced us to think deeply about how mothers deserve to be protected online. The technology is intellectual property. The educational resources are intellectual property. The research we’re collecting is intellectual property. The brand we’ve spent years carefully building is intellectual property. Even our philosophy about how digital communities should operate is intellectual property. None of those things existed until someone imagined them, refined them, tested them, and finally owned them.
That realization quietly changed something much bigger than the way I viewed Held & Rooted. It changed the way I look at creators. Suddenly I understood why so many writers eventually build websites instead of relying entirely on social media. Why podcasters create newsletters. Why YouTubers launch memberships. Why authors collect email addresses. Why businesses become strangely protective over logos, names, frameworks, and original research. Social media is an extraordinary gift. I genuinely mean that. Without it, many of us, including this very community, would never have found one another. But social media is rented land. Your ideas may live there for a season, but they don’t truly belong there. That’s a very different thing.
Lately we’ve watched creators lose entire accounts overnight because of accidental suspensions, changing algorithms, or platform decisions that no individual can control. Years of videos disappear. Communities scatter. Businesses panic. The creators who recover most quickly almost always have something else waiting for their audience. A newsletter. A website. An app. A membership. Somewhere people can still find them because they built something they actually owned. The more I thought about it, the more I realized those things aren’t simply marketing strategies. They’re insurance policies. They’re ways of protecting years of creative work from circumstances completely outside your control.
Perhaps that’s the funniest part of this entire story. I thought I was shopping for insurance. Instead, I accidentally received one of the best business lessons I’ve learned in years. The broker was trying to explain risk. I was busy arguing that I certainly wasn’t in the entertainment business. Looking back, I think we were both partially right. I’m not making blockbuster films or negotiating streaming deals. But I am spending my days helping build ideas that didn’t exist before. And maybe that’s the real business we’re all in, whether we’re writers, artists, founders, photographers, teachers, or community builders. We create something from nothing and hope it serves people long after we’re gone.
So no, I never expected an insurance quote to send me down a weeks-long rabbit hole about Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., and intellectual property. I certainly didn’t expect it to change the way I think about my own work. But every once in a while, life hands you a sentence you can’t quite shake. Mine was, “We’re classifying you as a multimedia company.” I laughed when I first heard it. These days, I smile for an entirely different reason.
Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie
