Nebula the business is “Standard Broadcast LLC,” and is directly owned at the LLC level by me and 43 other creators (and growing).
Nebula the streaming video service (which controls the streaming revenue) is Watch Nebula LLC, which is about 83% owned by Standard Broadcast LLC, with the rest held by Curiosity Stream. All control and all board seats belong to Standard Broadcast LLC.
We use shadow equity for platform creators because assigning LLC-level equity would make signing new creators logistically impractical, and would have complex tax implications for every creator we bring in. US securities laws also are skewed in favor of the wealthy: it would be very expensive or potentially impossible for us to comply with them if we were issuing securities to small creators who aren’t accredited investors.
If substantial control of the streaming service ever changes hands, we are contractually required to split the proceeds 50/50 with the creators on the platform. 50% of streaming profits are distributed to creators based on watch time. Additionally, 1/3 of the revenue from any subscriber is allocated to the creator responsible for bringing in that subscriber.
It looks like this was shared to Reddit as well, https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1ffnaza/who_actually_owns_nebula/
Dave Wiskus (CEO) responded over there: