A New Asset Class Called Attention: An interview with Josh Stein, Founder @ Attention Capital

If you can model it, you can finance it. – Josh Stein

In this conversation, we sat down with Josh Stein, Founder of Attention Capital. Josh takes us behind the scenes of why capital markets continually misprice attention, what makes an audience actually durable, and how underwriting creator-driven businesses is providing a massive new runway for the creator economy. We discuss how to evaluate attention beyond traditional ratings, why TKO shifted WWE away from running its own direct-to-consumer streaming service, how YouTube creators are crossing over into theatrical box office hits, and why high-margin creator businesses need access to private credit rather than venture capital.

The Speeding Ticket Origin Story

Tim Rowe: By your own account, this all started with a speeding ticket. Can you take us from the side of the road in New York to pricing attention in the creator economy like its own asset class?

Josh Stein: It was an April day in 2001, my senior year, outside Schenectady on I-88. I'm doing about three miles over the speed limit. Another car comes zooming by me, gets pulled over, and I get pulled over with the other car. I get a ticket, look at my court date—it's during finals. So I pled guilty, paid the $60, and forgot about it.

Years later, I went to law school, passed the bar, and was in New York City going through my character and fitness exam with a lovely woman in her 80s interviewing me. We had a lovely conversation, and then all of a sudden she gets super serious: “Mr. Stein, I went through your record and I noticed your violation in April of 2001. How can you be a pillar of community if you have a blatant disregard of the laws of the land?” For six miles an hour. I had two choices: die on a moral hill, or say, “Not a day goes by that I don't wake up in a cold sweat thinking about what could have happened with my reckless driving.” A week later, I was admitted to practice.

From Wall Street to Creator Deals

Tim Rowe: Your career started in legal?

Josh Stein: About six weeks after the ticket, I started on Wall Street in investment banking at Bear Stearns, then went to law school and worked in leveraged finance at Cahill Gordon during the LBO boom. Growing up, I was a creative. For years, what I did and what I loved were two hermetically sealed parallel universes.

Then during law firm orientation, they mentioned that pro bono hours count the same as billable hours. All of my friends hustling in the basement of entertainment and music now had a high-priced New York lawyer. I took my dark arts of finance, banking, and legal, helped them raise money, and they started winning. That day I split the atom for me personally: my dark arts can help creators create and build sustainable businesses.

From Wall Street, I spent the last 15 years as a senior executive in the media ecosystem at Vice Media, Univision, and Murata Studios. Early on, before the creator economy had a name, I worked with Dr. Phil to take two syndicated TV shows and build businesses off them, engineering two New York Times number-one bestsellers. I realized the power of a durable audience.

It's attention and audience that drive revenue, margin, and enterprise value. But capital markets are really bad at pricing it. You have creatives, operators, and financial stakeholders, and they don't speak the same language. With Attention Capital, we believe attention is an investable asset. We've built a private credit operator paired with AQS scoring and monitoring to price durable attention, similar to how capital markets have traditionally priced any cash-flowing asset.

What Makes an Audience Durable

Tim Rowe: What does durable audience mean to you?

Josh Stein: Most audience and most viewership is noise, but durable audience is audience that behaves predictably, even if something adverse happens. It's the audience that comes back, preferably unpaid, unprompted, and predictably. Predictability is the key because if you can model it, you can finance it. If it's noise, it's not financeable.

If you and I started a YouTube channel today and paid a couple of bucks to get algorithmic traffic, people show up, but when we stop paying, they don't really know who we are. It blows with the wind. Versus the State of Streaming podcast: whenever you drop, I'm coming back. It's appointment viewing. You don't have to pay me; it feeds my brain. Whether you get deprioritized by the algorithm or switch to another platform, I'm coming to see Tim. That is the paradigm of durability.

Measuring Attention Beyond Nielsen

Tim Rowe: The thousand-pound gorilla in television has traditionally been Nielsen. How does your industry approach measurement?

Josh Stein: AQS does for attention sort of what Nielsen attempts to do for making viewership legible to advertisers. But AQS is underwriting, not analytics. It's really a framework for working with what might happen.

We're looking at three pillars: durability—does the audience return unpaid and unprompted; cohesion—is your audience a community or Brownian motion, and is the land you're building on owned or rented; and conversion—does that ball of people convert reliably to cash?

These creator businesses are companies with multiple revenue streams and multiple years of operating history. We look at AdSense, metrics from Google and YouTube, and financials. In underwriting, we look at deterministic and stochastic variables qualitatively and quantitatively to decide whether this is a credit we want to fund.

WWE Quits Streaming and Wins

Tim Rowe: What's the WWE doing that's so interesting?

Josh Stein: I love what TKO is doing because they quit trying to be a streaming service. They quit trying to be Netflix, owned what they're best at, and monetized it four ways. Building and maintaining a streaming platform is very expensive and capex-heavy. You win the pie-eating contest and your prize is more pie—more capex and opex.

They got out of the churn game and customer service game and just produce awesome events and split it across four different services. In the last 12 months, they've made about $2 billion doing it. They solve problems for Netflix by providing appointment viewing, give NBCU cord-cutter repellent, give ESPN anchor events, and give Paramount live differentiation with UFC. As a business, it's a really smart move.

Creator Businesses Need Real Credit

Tim Rowe: You've described all of this as being very similar to small and medium-sized businesses.

Josh Stein: Once you have a durable audience and you've been going three to five years, they're really boring businesses. There's predictable, repeatable revenue. They are cash-flow-generating, high-margin SMEs. But they don't have access to credit; they can't walk into Chase and get a loan.

You have businesses making $5, $10, or $20 million a year looking for $2 million to start a hoodie company. Going into personal savings is a no-fly zone, merchant cash advances and factoring are really expensive, and venture capital is built for finding product-market fit, not for profitable SMEs.

It reminds me of the rise of private credit during the first part of my career, when middle-market businesses outgrew local banks but were too small for bulge-bracket investment banks, and Blackstone and GSO stepped in. Attention Capital provides senior-secured private credit giving these businesses the lifeblood they need to grow.

Want to watch or listen to the entire conversation?

Listen to the full podcast HERE