3 weeks ago
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Sharing something imaginary with real, live people makes it easier to believe in.
The digital tools that make creative work easier to produce and distribute also tend to strip away a lot of the physical environments where people connect and ideas gain momentum. That’s one of the gaps The Lighthouse wants to fill.
Inside the former Venice post office (the one that once housed Joel Silver’s production company) is a small campus of podcast studios, edit bays, production spaces, and communal tables. It’s a co-working space that aspires to be something closer to a creative operating system.
“Creators truly are creatives, but they’re also entrepreneurs,” said Lighthouse CEO Jon Goss. “They’re also technology-savvy and they understand audiences. And I don’t think there’s ever been a generation of creatives who’ve been able to do all four of those things.”
With its high ceilings, concrete floors, and visible cables, Lighthouse has the semi-industrial feel of a design school crossed with a maker space. Members move between meetings, shoots, and editing sessions.
Last month, Lighthouse opened a second location in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with twice the footprint. A third city is being scouted.
With a $6,000 annual membership, The Lighthouse also represents a kind of gatekeeping. There’s an application process. A review council. The Venice Lighthouse opened a year ago and has about 350 members; the max is 500.
Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, aka creator economy gurus Colin and Samir, serve as creators-in-residence and co-chairs of the Creator Council. A recent speaker was Modi Wiczyk, co-founder and co-CEO of MRC.
The fee includes membership to both sites and credits for studio space, with additional access available at below-market rates. But what Goss and his co-founders — Whalar Group co-CEOs James Street and Neil Waller — are really selling is proximity.
“We think about this as a modern-day version of art school meets film school meets a Harvard MBA,” Goss said. “How do we help people think about scale and growth and sustaining a creative career?”
Most co-working spaces measure success in occupied square footage. Lighthouse wants to measure it in networks.
“I see myself as the A&R function of The Lighthouse,” Goss said. “Trying to spot talent, trying to help talent, trying to connect talent.”
The goal is to increase productive collisions — early-stage conversations that turn into shows, companies, and partnerships.
“We would like for this to be a place of convening for the creative industries,” Goss said. “I’d like somebody to say they met their writing partner here and they won an Oscar, or developed a product here, or met somebody who became a lifelong business partner.”
Heavily involved in the space’s design, Goss was inspired by Andy Warhol’s The Factory and its function as production space and social engine. And like Warhol’s Factory, it carries some of the performative energy that comes with creative ambition.
However, Lighthouse isn’t designed for show. It includes private offices, production bays, a screening room, and a kitchen set, all pre-rigged and ready to go. (Serena Williams used the makeup room to shoot launch content for her skincare line.) The screens-free Physical Art Department offers analog production classes.
Goss knows a space like this can easily drift from creative purposes. Before joining The Lighthouse, he spent years inside membership-driven creative clubs including Soho House and NeueHouse and saw them evolve from working environments into hospitality businesses.
He’s determined to avoid that slide. Production infrastructure as design details are reminders that this is a place to make things. Early Soho House, he said, worked because it felt like “a genuinely safe space for creatives.” The challenge was maintaining that identity as the business scaled. Lighthouse, he hopes, can maintain the balance.
The development function extends into a steady cadence of programming meant to shape creative ambition. Lighthouse hosts talks with founders, creators, investors, and authors on topics like ownership, brand partnerships, and financing pathways, alongside screenings, DJ nights, and listening sessions.
Workshops and labs — including office hours, legal education, and production training — focus on the mechanics of building creative businesses. The vocabulary is more startup accelerator than art school, which reflects the reality that talent needs fluency in the systems that sustain it.
The broader goal is to lower friction and increase iteration. While that doesn’t necessarily require spending $6,000 a year, infrastructure does require resources. And resources tend to concentrate.
The modern creative economy is built on the premise that anyone can make something. Membership at The Lighthouse points to the paradox of gatekeeping in an open system, but it also aligns with the tension in ambition. From Bauhaus to Sundance, creative scenes have always formed this way — built through clusters of people who find each other and the opportunities that accumulate around them.
It’s early days, but Goss’ vision for The Lighthouse go far beyond the workspaces. There’s plans to develop its own productions with an in-house studio; he sees a future where The Lighthouse member database will create matchmaking opportunities for its members.
Ideally, Goss wants “to be sitting here in three years’ time talking to you about the latest independent film that was the progeny of people who met here, they went into the writer’s room, they tested a bunch of stuff in a studio. They did a screening here. They did a premiere here.
“I love people who are infinite learners,” Goss said. “There’s going to be this melting pot and if we can put tools around it — where we have 500 members here, 750 in New York — then there’s an IRL market that’s going to happen.”
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