Of Mascots and Men: Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickston Cole Tews on Hundreds of Beavers | Filmmaker Magazine

Our tagline is Founders are artists, not assets. If I had to summarize my core belief, it’s that the best founders, especially in the early days, look more like artists creating a fundamentally new, creative project. They don’t resemble business executives chasing an arbitrage opportunity.

Los Angeles, for example, has already been fully modeled by others. I didn't need to recreate it. Ditto for the desert or the puma. You go to this 3-D images supermarket and choose a palm tree pack, a piece of desert to download. This perfectly matches the mix between reality and artificiality in my projects. It's thanks to these virtual supermarke... See more

We had customers back then, but not much of a following. We printed T-shirts, but didn’t exactly have a clothing line. We did, however, have each other. And we had a mission: to design a brand themed around California culture, complemented by an online magazine that painted the backdrop for our lifestyle. Ben and I wanted to put Los Angeles back on... See more