Hi {{first_name}},

On February 13, 2020, I made the largest investment of my life.

There was no final contract for the James Bond IP.  Not even a signed term sheet to show anyone. Instead, we had a verbal agreement, a Danish entrepreneur named Casper Daugaard, and a Copenhagen video game studio called IO Interactive (the makers of Hit Man). 

I wired the money anyway.

Anyone looking at that moment from the outside would have seen a private equity bet with incomplete documentation on an asset class most allocators have no framework to evaluate. I saw something more. 

I've spent the last twenty-plus years acquiring companies, advising transactions, and building a private markets portfolio. That work gave me one kind of pattern recognition. But there's a second body of work most people in my world don't know about. From my early twenties through my early forties, I produced 11 films. My films premiered at festivals like Sundance and Tribeca. I won an Emmy. I sold one to Netflix that became their second Netflix original. I even starred in a western we sold to Lionsgate.

Me, as Tommy Cross in the 2002 film, Defiance.

I spent years learning how money moves through the entertainment industry, how IP licenses get structured, how franchise value compounds across formats and generations in ways that never show up on a balance sheet.

When Casper started describing his vision for Delphi Interactive, I had two decades of experience  to frame the opportunity.

That's a specific kind of information edge. You build it without knowing what you're building it for, until the moment it matters.

This issue is about learning to evaluate assets where the value is almost entirely intangible, where replacement cost is the wrong question, and where the investors who get it right are working from a framework the deal room doesn't hand you. I've been running that framework informally for two decades. This issue will help you do it too.

Here's what we're covering this week:

— Walker Deibel
WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Founder, Build Wealth

PS: If you've ever wanted to own a piece of building a billion-dollar company, James Bond, or FIFA, we have an open SPV investing in Delphi Interactive, the subject of this issue. The fund closes in four weeks. I'm doing a live webinar on Thursday, May 7th at 5pm EST — the BuildInteractive II Deal Drop (encore) covers the full Delphi journey, the four characteristics that separate franchise IP from everything else, and the specific terms of the investment. Register here.

Private equity carries more risk than real estate. It also produces higher returns over long time horizons. Those two facts are inextricably connected.

Real estate rarely goes to zero. You can walk a property, assess its condition, model its cash flows from existing leases, and understand the range of what it's worth before you write a check. 

The floor is visible. Every sophisticated portfolio needs a floor.

Private equity is different. There is no floor, but the upside is infinite. The world’s top companies are built on intangible assets: brands, intellectual property, software, loyalty, talent. These assets are hard to measure but when they compound, they create value in ways that physical assets cannot.

In 1975, roughly 83% of the S&P 500’s value was tied to tangible assets like factories, inventory, equipment, and land. The balance sheet explained most of what investors were buying. Today, most of the value comes from intangibles. 

The world's most valuable companies include Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon. They are almost entirely made of things you cannot see. They derive much of their worth from software, ecosystems, data, and brand strength rather than hard assets alone. 

Within intangible assets, there is a hierarchy. Intangibles can lose value quickly. Patents expire. Trade secrets don't scale. Software depreciates fast. Brand and trademarks hold value across cycles, only if they're built right. But at the top sits one category that operates by entirely different rules: franchise IP.

Franchise intellectual property is a cultural phenomenon with enduring and ubiquitous recognition.   

A seven-year-old and a seventy-year-old on any continent will know it without explanation. Emotional ownership: fans don't just consume it, they identify with it, argue about it, pass it to their children. You cannot engineer another James Bond. You cannot manufacture a replacement for FIFA or NFL, Barbie or Marvel. The assets are rare, nearly impossible to replicate, and can grow as audiences rediscover them. 

James Bond at 63 is worth more than James Bond at 20. There are almost no assets on earth that work this way.

For decades, the primary vehicle for franchise IP at global scale was American cinema. Hollywood has been the most economically dominant cultural export this country has ever produced. In 2024, international markets accounted for over 70% of Hollywood's total box office revenue. A hundred years of storytelling infrastructure, the talent, the distribution networks, the franchise development machine, built a cultural force with no real parallel.

But gaming has now surpassed it. 

In 2023, the global gaming industry generated $184 billion in revenue, far exceeding global box office revenue of $34 billion. Gaming combines the need for entertainment and ongoing interactive engagement that other platforms struggle to hold.  

In 2025, PE and VC investment saw a huge deal in the acquisition of Entertainment Arts which hit an unprecedented $55 billion. That is why investors continue to study gaming assets closely. The games that attract and hold the attention of a global audience do so over generations, and that power can have an enormous impact on enterprise value.

This week we dive into how video games have become a powerful player in the global market. Read the full report. 

IP continues to drive value in gaming. In the next six weeks, Delphi Interactive is releasing games for two of the most recognizable franchise IPs ever assembled under a single publisher: 007 First Light and FIFA just before the World Cup.

Delphi may not have written the original franchise characters, they licensed the IP. Understanding what the film producer Thomas Tull figured out in 2005 is the key to understanding what Casper Daugaard is building now.

In 2005, the film producer and investor, Thomas Tull, saw a weakness in the Hollywood model. The legacy studios held all the cards.  

They controlled distribution, infrastructure, industry relationships, and how the marketing worked. This gatekeeping didn’t allow for true partnership with creative talent and IP owners.  IP owners felt undervalued. Directors wanted independence. The studios preferred wholly owned franchises they could control indefinitely.

Tull recognized that the biggest value in film was increasingly coming from intellectual property. The identifiable characters, ongoing stories, and unique worlds audiences trusted and engaged with. Yet many IP owners were being paid fixed licensing fees while studios captured most of the upside. 

Tull saw a gap. He raised $500 million to build Legendary Entertainment with the goal of operating it with a different perspective.  He started co-financing and co-producing films built around licensed IP. 

Legendary licensed premium IP, partnered with top creative talent, and co-financed films with larger distributors. This reduced overhead while preserving access to global release platforms.

The model worked. Legendary’s hits include Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Jurassic World. Then in 2016, it was sold to Danian Wanda Group for $3.5 billion.  

Tull identified where value was being created and where it was being misallocated.  He licensed the IP, partnered with exceptional creative talent, and structured deals that gave IP owners a path to more than a transactional license fee. He understood that the legacy system was structurally misaligned with the assets that drove the most value, and he built the alternative.

Fifteen years later, Casper Daugaard looked at the video game industry, saw the same gap, and built Delphi Interactive.

He took the lessons of Tull, building an alternative to the traditional misaligned gaming model.  Top publishers in gaming have owned the value channels of famous franchises from development to distribution. EA and FIFA, breaking up after 31 years didn’t happen overnight. IP owners were seeking a different partnership to grow their brands.  Casper built a lean team with little to no overhead in order to work directly with IP owners using equity participation rather than transactional fees. 

The model allows for independent studios to work as development partners rather than in-house teams. Producing games that are faster to market at a fraction of the cost.

Then he went and signed James Bond.

The Broccoli family, the custodians of the 007 franchise under their company Eon Productions, had effectively banned gaming licenses for over a decade. Their experiences with studios EA and Activision had soured them on the gaming category. The last Bond game of any significance had shipped in 2012. Separately Amazon acquired the franchise and the first Amazon Bond film is expected in 2028.

Casper pitched taking things back to an origin story, a full AAA title built around the pre-007 James Bond. This angle would provide a standalone expansion of the world’s favorite spy,  elevating the brand in a new way.  The game would be developed by IO Interactive, the world class studio behind Hit Man, one of the most critically respected franchises in gaming history. 

The Broccoli family said yes.

The next move was to partner with FIFA on an equally creative venture. FIFA ended their 31-year relationship with EA Sports and chose Delphi as its new gaming partner.  They received  an equity stake in the company in the process. Netflix signed on to own distribution. 

An exclusive football simulation game, FIFA Mobile, will be released for Netflix Games on iOS and Android to coincide with the 2026 World Cup, offering a "mobile-first" experience.

Institutional validation followed. Goldman Sachs built an independent model projecting a $5 billion enterprise value by 2030, while CAA joined as an advisor, expanding access to global IP and talent networks.

The Delphi pipeline now built for franchises like Bond and FIFA includes the ability to expand across media platforms adding multi-directional value and an attractive source for IP owners.  

I was Delphi Interactive’s first investor back in February 2020. Seeing the progress over six years proves the value of breaking down the outdated models to elevate assets like an epic franchise. Watch for 007 First Light shipping on May 27th. FIFA shortly after on June 5th, six days before the FIFA World Cup kicks off across North America. Two simultaneous AAA releases into the single largest entertainment moment on earth.

The Legendary exit took eleven years. Delphi is five years in.

From Our Sponsor: 

If you've ever wanted to own a piece of building a billion-dollar company, James Bond, or FIFA, we have an open SPV investing in Delphi Interactive, the subject of this issue.

I've shared this story in detail because this is a live opportunity, only available to institutional investors and us. Last year, Build Wealth members had access to Delphi through BuildInteractive I at $275M. We are now raising for BuildInteractive II. This raise is the last opportunity to invest at the current $300 million valuation, ahead of the 007 and FIFA launches. Goldman Sachs projects a $5 billion enterprise value by 2030. 

I’m hosting a live webinar on Thursday, May 7th at 5 pm EST with the whole story. Register here.

Every deal you evaluate likely contains a mix of tangible and intangible assets. 

When most of the value is intangible, this three-step process helps turn instinct into informed judgment.

Step 1: Qualify the IP.

Ask whether the intangible at the center of the deal is franchise-grade. The distinction matters because franchise-grade IP compounds with cultural significance that other intangibles just can’t. Start with four questions:

A deal that clears all four questions is carrying franchise-grade IP. Without all four, you may still have something valuable, but it will have a steeper hill to climb. 

Step 2: Run the Compounding Decoder.

Once you've qualified the IP, sort every intangible into four categories.

The shape of this distribution tells you more about the deal than the revenue multiple does. The highest-quality deals concentrate value in the first two categories. Avoid paying for decaying assets.

Step 3: Ask the Durability Questions.

For every asset that lands in the appreciating or stable category, run three questions before you move to financial modeling.

The distribution of your Compounding Decoder sort, combined with the durability answers, will tell you whether you are looking at a floor asset or a ceiling one. And it will tell you whether the multiple being asked reflects what the asset actually is.

"The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing." — Philip Fisher

The allocator prices what cannot be touched. 

Like this issue? I'm doing a live webinar on Thursday, May 7th at 5pm EST. The BuildInteractive II Deal Drop (encore) covers the full Delphi journey and details of the current investment opportunity. Register here.

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This is not financial advice. Illustrative output of a reasoned thought experiment. Not a backtest, guarantee, or prospectus. Actual results vary based on market conditions, fund selection, timing, fees, taxes, and factors not modeled. Private credit, CRE, and leveraged strategies involve significant risk including loss of principal. Consult a qualified financial advisor.