Having Trouble Raising Investment in Your Startup? Sofia Coppola Probably Understands How You Feel

What do startup founders scrounging for venture funding have in common with the difficulties of filmmaker Sofia Coppola? As revealed in a profile in the New Yorker, Coppola, daughter of Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker in her own right, has struggled to secure funding for her most ambitious cinematic projects over the last few years. 

In conversation with writer Rachel Syme, Coppola explained that Apple TV+ pulled funding for a mini-series adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel The Custom of the Country in 2021. Vital funds for her 2023 film Priscilla, adapted from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me, also fell through at the last minute. 

In a savvy bit of improvisation that might resonate with founders operating in today’s dry climate, Priscilla was filmed on a relatively shoestring budget. Unable to afford production in the summer, certain scenes were shot in Memphis during the winter, meaning Coppola had to “coach her cast, shivering through outdoor scenes in their bathing suits, to ‘act warm,'” Syme writes. Coppola also sacrificed shooting in Los Angeles due to budgetary constraints, swapping in footage from a Cartier commercial she had shot in 2018 that was convincing enough to get the job done. 

Coppola learned that filmmakers often have to broker financing deals for their ambitions to be realized. She had seen her father quarrel with studio executives over money for years, the article maintains. Francis gave up on bartering with studios over creative direction and money in recent years, and is deploying a massive sum of his own cash–$120 million–to fund his forthcoming film Megalopolis. It had previously been reported that Megalopolis, which Francis originally wrote in the 1980s, is so ambitious that studios wouldn’t commit to bankrolling it. 

Startup founders might bristle, because after all, they probably don’t have parents with the starpower of Francis Ford Coppola. But the younger Coppola’s strategies might prove instructive as the venture industry grapples with a titanic drop off in funding levels. 

For one, your startup isn’t a movie, and taking less investment than you may have hoped for could be a blessing. As Mei Lin Ng, co-founder and CEO of New York City-based Hearth Display, a manufacturer of a digital touchscreen organizer that helps families plan household tasks, told Inc. last year, that only taking a $3 million investment while the froth was high in 2021 was a blessing for her company. 

“We’ve actually been using customer capital, from the very early stages of our business, to fund production of [our] hardware company. … [In] this kind of market, quite frankly, we’re not that scared,” she explained. 

Bootstrapping and crowdfunding can also open the door to venture funding in the future, Jessie Randall, founder and CEO of Sweater, a venture fund and fintech firm based in Boulder, Colorado added: “If founders go out and try to build first, and you get a first product out there, you have some customers and revenue,” he says. “You’ve really shown that you’ve been able to achieve something.”