Running a company like an artist | René Pinnell (DWeb Camp)

Edit: Since the recording of this interview many things have happened to René and the Artizen platform / community. René has suffered two strokes which has put his health at risk and has moved towards closing down Artizen. At the same time, he stated that matching funds that were promised through the application would not be going out and only the donations minus the endowment fee will be paid out. So far it seems that no one has been paid out, including my own project Bread Cooperative which had received donations.

People are currently hurting over these events and legal action is being prepared by those who feel wronged. Meanwhile, my team at Bread Cooperative has been working on an alternative called Pastry. Using our stack, we hope to build something that is auditable, decentralized and learns the lessons of Artizen.

I’m leaving this interview published as it for posterity. I will provide much more context and commentary in a later video.

René Pinnell grew up in a family of artists who always needed a second job to pay for the work they cared about. He's spent his career trying to fix that, and his platform Artizen just closed a funding season with almost $7 million raised for projects in art, science and technology.We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. René talks about what he learned raising money in film and then in startups, and how Stripe shutting down his last company pushed him into crypto. He also explains Artizen's idea of making art the investable asset for any kind of project, and we get into whether that's the right way to fund culture when public money already pays for so much of it.René Pinnell is the founder of Artizen, a match funding platform for art, science and technology. He started out as a filmmaker and later ran Kaleidoscope, a company that funded and toured virtual reality projects.

0:00 Introduction1:36 Background & Origin of Artizen10:22 Running a Startup as Performance Art12:27 The ZIRP Era 25:44 Where Does the Funding Come From?32:19 Public Funding vs. the Investable Model49:23 A Pluralistic Approach to Funding

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