Our Vision

A Letter from our Founder

My name is Joey Flores and I am the founder and Managing Director of Inversion Art. In addition to being a hobbyist painter since 2018, I have been in the tech space for over 20 years. During that time I have been the CMO of a cooking app startup, taken an advertising platform from $19M to $48M in two years, and even started my own startup, Earbits. Earbits was a marketing platform for musicians and, by the time we sold the company in 2015, we were working with over 15,000 artists and 600 record labels.

I owe a lot of our Earbits accomplishments to an investment firm named Y Combinator. In 2011, YC selected us to participate in their world-class “startup accelerator”. Among many great things they do, they give you a small amount of capital, put you through an intense 3-month mentorship program, and then hold a demonstration event to present your company to top investors. For this, they take 7% of your company.

Seven percent for a small amount of capital isn’t normally a great deal but the real value is in the program they deliver and the effect it has on companies. Before we went into the program, I couldn’t secure a single meeting with investors. After we presented at Y Combinator’s demo day, we raised $1.7M in funding from some of the best investors in the world, got tons of great press, and could arrange a call with nearly any partner we wanted to work with.

Going through YC was not only a game changer for our company, it changed my life. The mentors were people who had built and sold massive companies, teaching us the ropes in business. The alumni network is now made up of incredible entrepreneurs from companies like AirBNB and Dropbox, making it an unparalleled source of support and networking. There are internal communication tools where the graduates of the program can source help, advice and opportunities from one of the best alumni networks in the world. It’s like having gone to Harvard except that they pay you and it only takes three months.

Our ambitious goal at Inversion Art is to create a similarly groundbreaking investment program in the fine art space. We believe that if we give the right artists financial support, great mentoring, helpful resources, and exposure to industry leaders, we can put them on an accelerated path toward success.

The first task at hand is to understand deeply the differences between artists and startup companies. We want our artists to see us as patrons and partners, not someone who owns a part of them the way a venture capitalist owns a piece of a company. We will offer an investment model that aligns our success with the artist’s long term success, and we want to continue adding value long after artists have finished the in-person program.

In order to do this, my goal is to assemble a team of incredible, highly successful artists and industry leaders who believe that the art world needs a program like this and who want to mentor the next generation of fine artists. We want to bring in guest speakers from different areas of the art industry with diverse backgrounds to share. We’ll offer workshops on topics like art handling and shipping, tax write-offs, and how to maximize the benefit of your solo exhibition. We want to help our artists connect with the next level gallerist or curator that could further their career, and we believe our artists will be even more desirable to work with because they have the support of Inversion Art.

We will also be providing business services to alleviate the artists from them, such as social media management, keeping their website and online presences current, invoicing, accounting, and contract review. We want our artists to be focused on creating incredible art, not on creating certificates of authenticity.

When we succeed, the Inversion Art program will be a life changing experience for the artists who go through it. You will make lifelong friends, countless professional contacts, and the alumni network will continue to grow and become stronger. Every artist will be able to chat with other Inversion artists and lean on one another for introductions to helpful contacts and for advice about each other’s successes. It will be an incredible investment fund that can scale and deliver results for thousands of artists.

I know already that there will be naysayers and people who think that the only respectable way to help artists is with grants or charity. We ran into similar naysayers when we launched our music marketing platform Earbits. By the time we sold it, we had over 15,000 artists and 600 record labels using our platform.

It’s time to invest in artists differently. We look forward to connecting with anybody who has thoughts on our plans, and to sharing more about our vision as things progress.