The cofounder of MoviePass is raising $50 million from Amazon and Alphabet for a longevity-focused venture studio

That's what he did with MoviePass, the moviegoing subscription service he cofounded in 2011. MoviePass, which let users pay a single monthly fee to watch an unlimited number of movies in theaters, saw a stunning rise in the late 2010s — and an even more stunning fall.

MoviePass ousted Watt, along with its other cofounder Stacy Spikes, from the company two years before filing for bankruptcy. Its executives were later charged with defrauding investors; an HBO documentary abou t MoviePass based on Business Insider's reporting was released this May (Spikes regained ownership of MoviePass and relaunched the company himself in 2022).

For Watt, the MoviePass story was bittersweet. Despite the company's collapse, Watt felt he'd made a real impact on the entertainment industry.

He decided to turn his focus to other sectors that needed radical innovation.

"What have I learned, and what do I have the guts to go out now and try — and maybe fail, but maybe succeed?" he said.

Since then, Watt has been building Share Ventures, a venture studio that's now closed on nearly $20 million of funding from backers including Amazon and Alphabet. The firm is creating new startups from scratch in hot areas like longevity and the future of work.

Share Ventures has quietly been spinning up those startups and plans to start announcing them in the coming months. It's also raising more capital; Watt says the firm aims to do a second close by the end of the year, with a target of $50 million in total for its first fund.

Watt said the firm is seeing success as more investors latch onto the idea of the venture studio model, with AI offering startups the ability to go further with less capital.

"Smart LPs who are reading the tea leaves, that's helped us," he said.

Zeroing in on longevity

Watt has spent decades in venture capital as both a founder and an investor, including as a current board partner at Upfront Ventures.

Before starting Share Ventures, however, he noticed the only companies sparking his curiosity were building in health and longevity — an interest he thinks was born from his mother's passing. He was 25 years old when she died; she was only 49.

"When you lose your mom at a young age, it forces you to think about your own mortality, in a way that I don't know that I was conscious of at the time," he said.

Watt said Share Ventures is finding new opportunities in the "human performance" category, including health, biohacking, and longevity, alongside broader issues like financial wellness and relationships.

While Watt didn't share specifics about the companies Share Ventures has built so far, he noted a few areas the firm has dug into, including oral health, culture and value systems in the workplace, and home ownership.

One of Share Ventures' portfolio companies is working on a smart toothbrush powered by AI. Share Ventures AI is supercharging the venture studio model

Threats to the venture capital industry, from high interest rates to the explosion of AI, aren't letting up. But Watt thinks that environment "is the perfect storm for a model that's differentiated."

"You don't need as large of funds, and you can get signal on an opportunity much earlier with much less capital," he said. "For us, that's a great thing because we're building companies from scratch and using all of the most advanced tools to do that proactively."

Share Ventures is building its own software on top of large language models, which the studio is using to identify which industries to build in and automate its own internal processes as it scales up companies, Watt said.

"A lot of venture firms are investing in these new technologies, but they're not really embodying and using them," he said. "Using novel data and automation in our process is something we think is uniquely special to us."

Watt suggested the venture studio model may also become more popular with venture firms because it gives those firms a stake in the company from the beginning — and it could get more expensive to buy ownership into successful startups as AI allows founders to grow with less cash.