A-Corps & The Two Kinds of Making

The A-Corp creates an off-the-shelf legal structure where creators and operators can each bring a real asset to the table and share in the upside of what they build together.

A little over a year ago, a writer in Salt Lake City named Elle Griffin wrote about a small project she’d been part of. Seven writers and a designer put together a collection of essays called CITY STATE and released it through a platform called Metalabel, which let them sell it in printed and digital form. The collection earned $732.33. After costs, and split eleven ways, it wasn’t much of a payday but the profitability wasn’t what interested me. A group of people made something together and owned the result together, utilizing a platform designed to make that kind of endeavor simple instead of expensive.

I’ve been following the person behind that platform ever since. Yancey Strickler co-founded Kickstarter and started Metalabel, and for the past year I’ve read/listened to most of what he publishes. His position: creative people have always worked at a structural disadvantage. The legal and financial scaffolding that protects an ordinary business wasn’t built with creatives in mind but building it yourself costs more than most creative work will ever return, so almost no one does. He decided that was a quandary worth solving at the level of the law.

How Artist Corporations became law

by Yancey Strickler

What Colorado just did

As of June 2nd, 2026 a new type of legal entity officially exists. Governor Jared Polis signed a bill creating a new kind of company in Colorado: the Artist Corporation, or A-Corp. It’s a variant of the limited liability company, so it keeps everything an LLC already has but adds a few protections built specifically for creative work. In this new structure, the artists hold at least 51 percent of the voting power, permanently, and no operating agreement can sign that away. The company names an artistic mission in its founding documents, and that mission carries legal weight. The creative work associated with the company can never be transferred to outside investors, and if the company closes, the work returns to the people who made it. Economic rights can be separated from control, so an investor can share in what a project earns without getting a vote in how it gets made.

The A-Corp breaks the linkage between capital contribution and control. The idea is:

• Investors can provide capital.

• Artists can retain governance and creative ownership.

• Financial ownership and control rights can be separated more deliberately than in a standard corporation.

So in an A-Corp, the distinction between money, capital, and ownership becomes especially important:

• Money = cash contributed.

• Capital = the resources invested into the venture.

• Ownership = the bundle of economic and governance rights defined by the A-Corp structure.

• Creative control can remain with artists even when outside capital is involved.

The first reaction most business people have is to shrug. “So what?” A competent lawyer can already write most of this into a custom LLC agreement. This is true. The catch is the price. Doing it properly could run ten to fifty thousand dollars in legal fees, which is an absurd thing to ask of a painter or a band or a group of writers whose project might clear a few hundred dollars. When close to 40 percent of working artists make under twenty thousand dollars a year from their craft, a five-figure legal bill is not a real option. The protections that an A-Corp established have technically always been available but they were priced out of reach of the exact people who needed them most.

What the A-Corp does is make those protections the default – you get them by filling out a form rather than retaining a firm. The same move worked once already. Everything a public benefit corporation does was possible before 2013 with the right articles of incorporation. What changed was that mission-first ownership became something you could choose off the shelf, and within a decade it spread to thirty-six states. Strickler says six other states are already drafting their own versions of Colorado’s new law.

Services firms are intellectual assets

Equity is only worth holding if there is something durable to own. A firm that holds nothing but contracts for billable work has nothing to share except a slice of the treadmill. The A-Corp forces a services firm to ask: what is our durable value, who actually built it and how can we maximize its earning potential?

For us the answer is the engine. The engine is our repeatable process for building revenue systems, the frameworks those processes are built on and the judgment that gets sharper with every engagement. The engine is the asset with lasting worth. It’s ownable, rentable and yes, contributable as capital.

Levver’s engine is a creative asset.

Levver contributes intellectual capital in exactly the same way a software founder contributes source code or a designer contributes a methodology.

There are two kinds of making inside any business and they are traditionally valued unequally. There’s creative work: building software, designing a chair, defining a framework, and then there’s operations work: getting the creations into the hands of people who will benefit from them.

We have maintained since the day we started that this division is unnecessary. Designing and running a revenue system is a creative act in itself. It takes the same course as any other kind of making. You begin with a formless idea, you find a medium to express that idea, and you build a structure that did not exist before. You build an asset.

The A-Corp provides a legal structure that can recognize that asset as a basis for ownership.

The A-Corp structure goes beyond valuing and protecting the work of artists.

Underneath the specifics, the A-Corp treats creative contribution as a first-class basis for ownership and protects the creator’s authority over the thing they create.

Traditional business structures tend to concentrate ownership and control around financial capital. Creative contributors can receive ownership, but their authority often becomes negotiable once outside capital enters the picture. The A-Corp says the people who create the value can hold the value, and it builds the infrastructure to make that real and enforceable.

Founders and operators can become co-owners of a venture without reducing either side to a contractor.

This is the leading edge of creativity in business formation. From my view, professional services firms are sitting right on that front line. Think about what a firm like Levver actually is. We own no factory, no inventory, no equipment that matters. What we have is a way of thinking and the people who can do the thinking. Our entire offering is intellectual. In that sense we have far more in common with a band or a film crew than with a manufacturer.

If I want to value the contribution of creative work equally with the contribution of capital, in regards to ownership and control of a cash engine how can I align the interests of both contributors?

In the model I’m imagining, the founder contributes the creative work and retains control of it. Levver contributes the operating engine: go-to-market strategy, pricing, pipeline development, and the systems that turn an idea into a sustainable company. We receive ownership for that contribution, and the founder receives ownership for theirs.

The premise is simple: both forms of work are assets. Building the thing and building the revenue system that allows it to survive are equally valuable contributions.

AI makes this increasingly important

As AI increases the leverage of individual creators, the bottleneck shifts from creation to commercialization. That’s exactly where firms like Levver operate.

The number of people it takes to build a real business keeps shrinking. In May, Stripe published an analysis of the companies formed through its incorporation product. Solo founders now account for 63 percent of the C corps formed through Atlas, an all-time high. The reason is not mysterious. As AI tools let one person design a product, launch it, handle support, and keep improving it, the headcount required to stand up a serious company has zealously declined. The best of these founders are not earning rounding-error money, either. Four years ago the top tenth of solo founders made about 34 times the median in their first six months. Last year that figure was 61 times. The ceiling on what a very small team can build has moved up sharply.

The same data shows where going solo tops out. Past the two-year mark, founding teams pull ahead of even the strongest soloists, and the soloists who keep pace are usually the ones who extend themselves through partners, advisors, and networks rather than carrying everything alone. Put those two findings next to each other and it’s pretty obvious: AI has made it possible for one creative person to handle the product side of a business almost entirely on their own. What they still lack, and what still separates the ones who break out, is the other half of the work: the engine that finds customers, sets prices, and turns a good product into a thriving company.

That empty co-founder seat is just waiting for professional services firms who know operations. The larger the business one person can now build, the more value rides on getting that second seat filled, and the more it matters to have a clean and fair way to share ownership of what the partnership creates. Right on cue, enter the A-Corp.

The structure I keep coming back to

The model I keep thinking about is a holding company that incubates a portfolio of independent ventures rather than operating as a single firm. Each venture is built around a strong idea and the person capable of bringing it to life, so could be a software product, a book, a branding methodology, a framework distilled from years of experience, or something else entirely. The category matters less than the existence of a creative idea with enough clout to warrant building a business around.

The A-Corp makes this structure repeatable. Instead of negotiating custom arrangements every time, ownership can be issued for contribution rather than cash. Economic participation can be separated from control, allowing collaborators and the holding company to share in a venture’s success without taking creative authority away from its founder. If a venture ends, the underlying creative work returns to its creator.

What makes the model so interesting is that it was designed to protect artists, but the same protections apply cleanly to software founders, strategists, designers, and other creators. It allows a firm like ours to participate as a genuine partner rather than a vendor selling services.

Geography is not a meaningful obstacle. Like Delaware corporations, A-Corps can be formed in Colorado regardless of where the founders live, making the structure compatible with distributed teams and partnerships.

What it costs to mean it

The most significant constraint is also the feature that makes the model work: the creator must retain majority control. A holding company can own economics, but not command. Most holding companies would see that as a limitation. I see it as the alignment mechanism. The venture succeeds or fails under the leadership of the person whose vision created it, and the law makes that relationship durable.

There are still some unanswered questions. How should ownership be allocated when multiple creators jointly found a venture? How does a portfolio of A-Corps behave from a tax and entity-structure perspective? And because the law is new, there’s little precedent for applying it to consulting, strategy, or other forms of knowledge work. I believe it fits, but that assumption hasn’t been tested yet.

Those uncertainties don’t dissuade me though. A legal structure created for painters and musicians just so happens to describe a firm I have wanted to build for years.

Imagine a company that looks like the people inside it, and grows in proportion to what they bring.

It could show up as a single venture or a portfolio of them. It could grow into an ecosystem of creators, operators, and investors whose interests are aligned from the beginning instead of negotiated after the fact.

Maybe I’m in the minority – and I’m always okay with that – but I think the A-Corp pushes the horizon line toward a future where ownership can more accurately reflect contribution, where creators and operators each bring a real asset to the table, and share in the upside of what they build together. It’s a whole new way to create.