This is a story about storytellers, creators, filmmakers, and fable finders. Those intrepid souls who launched a business only to wake up one day and discover they had built an empire.

Strategic creatives like Joe and Mikon.

MIKON VAN GASTEL (CLIP): When you are an entrepreneur and you're in this business, the forces around you are fucking with everything you are trying to build.

JOEL PILGER (VO): Real and raw founders like Marcel

MARCEL ZIUL (CLIP): To just like show your pitches to your competitor and say, bro, you kicked my ass. Teach me here, please. I need to learn.

JOEL PILGER (CLIP): And how did they respond?

MARCEL ZIUL (CLIP): They showed me their pitches.

JOEL PILGER (CLIP): Whoa.

JOEL PILGER (VO): And makers like Erin, who I asked, what does it take to run a great creative business?

ERIN SAROFSKY (CLIP): Everything’s a hustle. It's not being built on the back of a, you know, a mountain that was already there.

JOEL PILGER (VO): One thing is clear, these creatives dismissed the safer path and ignored convention.

JOE WRIGHT (CLIP): What the company is today is completely different from what it was when we started it.

JOEL PILGER (VO): I'm Joel Pilger and this is my new podcast, the Fabulist. Brought to you by Coupe Studios and Arbo Radiko.

I've made a list and I'm traveling the world to capture the stories of these fabulous people behind the world's most interesting studios and production companies. Listen for a deep dive with names like Sibling Rivalry, State Design, Sarofsky, and many more to come.

To hear these stories, and their legacies - I’ll see you there.

Photo by Erica Schultz