Today in Boulder at the municipal building on Broadway and Arapahoe, I met Yancey Strickler (co-founder of Kickstarter) after hearing his talk on a new business designation that went into law in Colorado called an A Corp. This is similar to an LLC designation, but it’s geared toward supporting artists. The plan of action was conceived by Yancey just two years ago and is already law in Colorado, the first state in the U.S. to adopt it. As an interesting aside, it could have been possible to register a business in Colorado as an A Corp today, but it may take the state up to eight months before it can push out the one new column required in the official database…hopefully it will be ready in the spring of 2027. Generally, LLCs and other business entities that are founded now, or were already established, may switch to an A Corp when it becomes available.
What’s so cool is that it offers artists a simple template for starting up, especially when there is more than a single artist involved. If a group, like a music group, gallery owners, or people who share ownership in an artistic business, come together to share in the intellectual property, assets, investment, etc., the format offers an easy way to set it all up, designed to maximize value in the market while protecting the individual people and their artistic contributions. In a similar way that a B Corp offers a legal method to put one’s fiduciary responsibility to a social-good mission over a duty to enrich shareholders, an A Corp provides a way to define a business in terms of an artistic mission.
As Yancey and the others at the introduction were saying, the new A Corp doesn’t offer anything new that couldn’t be created with an LLC. You can have an artistic mission in an LLC and structure it all exactly the same as an A Corp without being an A Corp. This is basically a template for doing it, but there is somewhere to go next: Being recognized clearly in the market as a legitimate business. Specialized support services are destined to spring up now in Colorado. Lawyers will learn about the A Corp and begin providing expert services for artists to get setup for less of an expense. Insurance companies are likely to offer health plan rates for working artists with A Corps. Tax accountants will learn how to provide more value for artists based on the assets they are contributing to and building for the company. Shared resources will make marketplaces more efficient and cost effective. It’s a brilliant plan because it legitimizes artists in the workplace. The world will do more to see the value of the work artists do, and that the value is real, in terms of a legitimate economy for the state. Colorado is first.
You have likely heard about how cities and states can transform by supporting various industries. Austin, for example, transformed by offering tech companies and film companies tax incentives and lucrative contracts to move in. An interesting point that was made today along these lines: Colorado wants to be the place for the creative arts, and a recent investment into Sundance offers some evidence. In fact, the director of Sundance, Eugene Hernandez, played one of the many critical roles in the story that brings Yancy to Colorado first, the two having met to discuss exactly this important support that makes Colorado unique. Jared Polis, who don’t forget was a founder of Techstars which was inspired to platform startups, signed the bill into law last month. [The full story of how the A Corp came to be]
Check out, keep your eye on, and get in contact with the arts and business leaders pictured above (Meredith Badler became one of “A-Corp’s most influential champions in Colorado”) to plug in or help bring this plan to fruition wherever in the world you are. See Artist Corporations for the latest progress. To register, you can learn about the details, get your paperwork in order, and be ready by following the ten steps at https://www.artistcorporations.com/register.
Flashback to 15 years ago, here was Rocketboom’s Ella Morton on the pulse when Kickstarter was just coming out. You can see the trajectory from the thread in the works, years of dedication to platforming artists.