Wins, Wrecks, and What's Next

The season finale. The stories that prove the model: Moderna out of Flagship Pioneering, Hims out of Atomic ('Silicon Valley's Pixar'), Snowflake incubated inside Sutter Hill for a ~$12B stake, and Dollar Shave Club's $1B cash exit from Science. Then the graveyard: the four predictable ways studios fail — economics that eat the studio, refusing to let go, zombie portfolios, and innovation theater. And finally the thesis for what's next: why AI collapses the cost of the build and makes the partnership studio model one of the biggest structural winners of the era.