A creator generating millions of dollars a year walks into a bank and asks for $2 million in working capital. The answer is very often no. Josh Stein, founder and CEO of Attention Capital, has heard that conversation enough times to build a company around fixing it.

Attention Capital is a Los Angeles-based private credit platform that originates senior secured loans to Creator Economy and digital media companies. Its underwriting methodology, a proprietary framework called the Attention Quality Score (AQS), treats the audience creators have built not as an intangible reputational asset but as a structured, scoreable, and financeable one. The thesis: audience attention drives enterprise value, but capital has never had the tools to price it correctly.

Josh arrived at that thesis by inhabiting both sides of the problem. He spent the early part of his career in leveraged finance at Bear Stearns and as a leveraged finance attorney at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, then spent 15 years in senior operating roles at media companies including VICE Media, El Rey Network/Univision, and Mirada Studios. Navigating both worlds left him convinced that finance and media functioned as parallel universes with no shared language. Attention Capital, founded in 2025, is built on the frustration of having lived in both.

“Attention is an economic asset,” Josh says. “It’s the thing across every company that I worked for. It drives revenue, margin, and enterprise value, but capital still doesn’t know how to read it.”

The Credit Market That Keeps Saying No

The pattern Josh encountered across 15 years in media was consistent enough to feel structural. Creators with multi-year operating histories, high-margin revenue, and strong cash flow would seek growth capital and find their options reduced to two: surrender equity in a venture deal, or accept a merchant cash advance at rates Josh says could reach 30%. Neither suited the businesses involved.

“The conversation always starts the same way,” he says. “Everything’s going great until they see my social handles.”

The banks were not simply risk-averse. They lacked a methodology for underwriting businesses whose primary asset, a loyal audience relationship, had no established pricing framework. That, Josh argues, is an infrastructure problem rather than a credit risk problem. 

The historical parallel he reaches for is the private credit expansion of the early 2000s, when middle-market companies outgrew their local banking relationships but were too small to access Goldman Sachs or UBS. Firms like Blackstone stepped in to fill that vacuum. “It’s the same market failure,” Josh says. “Just with new borrowers.”

AQS: Scoring What Banks Can’t Read

The Attention Quality Score evaluates three variables: behavioral durability, audience cohesion, and conversion efficiency. None of them is a follower count.

Durability asks whether an audience returns unprompted and unpaid. Cohesion asks whether the relationship constitutes a community or a crowd of disconnected accounts. Conversion asks whether attention translates into cash across multiple revenue lines. 

“The big mistake I see the market making,” Josh says, “is mistaking reach for an owned audience.”

The practical translation Josh offers to traditional credit professionals is the analogy of a dental practice. A dentist’s patient list behaves predictably: every six months, the customer returns because the relationship is habitual and durable. “Instead of a cavity, I drop three videos on YouTube every week, and I’m showing up for two or three of them reliably,” he explains. “It starts to act like a coupon.”

AQS pairs with conventional underwriting rather than substituting for it. Josh describes the score as a translation layer, one that makes attention-driven businesses legible to capital allocators who understand how to price dental offices and manufacturing plants but have no framework for a YouTube channel. The methodology is proprietary. The outputs inform advance rates, covenant packages, and recovery assumptions that the lending market has not previously had.

When Strong Numbers Aren’t Enough

Early in Attention Capital’s development, Josh evaluated a creator business with a long operating history and impressive YouTube metrics. He expected it to perform well against the AQS.

It did not. The business was an unboxing channel. The content had almost no catalog value, no meaningful residuals on older videos, and a decay rate Josh compares to “last night’s local news.” If the creator stopped posting, the audience relationship deteriorated quickly. “I was looking at this business almost like a slam dunk,” he says, “and it wasn’t the case.”

That evaluation established something now central to Attention Capital’s process: platform dependence is the first risk the firm underwrites. A business that exists entirely within a single algorithm scores accordingly, regardless of viewership numbers. “The bankable ones,” Josh says, “have a more robust direct relationship that you can’t take away.”

His guidance for creators whose businesses fall short on that measure is consistent: build email lists, launch newsletters, distribute across multiple platforms. The problem, he acknowledges, is rarely awareness. Most creators understand the case for owning their audience relationships more directly. The issue is execution time. “The willingness and the knowledge are there,” Josh says. “It’s just I gotta get around to it.”

The Loan Structure Is Built to Surface Problems Early

Attention Capital’s credit products are senior secured and non-dilutive. Creators retain ownership of their companies. The terms include standard covenant packages alongside what Josh calls behavioral covenants: requirements tied to posting cadence, content consistency, and conduct. 

“Whatever your cadence, we have behavioral covenants we want to make sure you’re adhering to,” Josh says.

The monitoring structure differs from conventional lending in one significant respect. Because AQS tracks performance metrics continuously rather than quarterly, the system can flag deterioration well before it produces a payment problem. Josh describes a typical 50- to 60-day early warning window. “With traditional lending, you don’t know there’s a problem until the quarterly payment, and there is a problem,” he notes.

If a borrower’s business declines, collateral covers the full operating company, including any content catalog. Josh’s preference, drawn from his leveraged finance background, is to work problems out rather than foreclose. A creator with a catalog has options: monetization deals, partnerships, asset sales. Foreclosure, in his view, represents a failure of underwriting, not a solution to one.

The Infrastructure Already Exists Elsewhere

Josh’s argument that audience loyalty is financeable rests not only on theory but on transactions already completed in adjacent markets.

During the pandemic, major airlines raised substantial capital by pledging their loyalty programs

as collateral, separate from their physical assets. United Airlines raised approximately $6.87 billion against its rewards program. American Airlines raised roughly $10 billion through a similar structure. The underlying logic was that the behavioral relationship between airline and traveler constituted a durable, scoreable asset. 

Music catalog lending has followed similar reasoning since the late 1990s, with institutional firms including KKR and Goldman Sachs now deploying billions against royalty streams that are, as Josh puts it, “behavior wrapped in a rights wrapper.”

“Once you bring the standards in,” Josh says, “everything starts to open up.”

Creator Companies That Outlive Their Founders

Attention Capital currently operates with two principals, Josh and a partner, working a pipeline on a deal-by-deal basis. The AQS methodology is built and in active deployment; the lending platform is backed. Josh describes the approach to early deals as methodical. In credit, he argues, reputation is built as much by the deals a lender declines as the ones it funds.

His vision for what comes next extends past any single transaction. He wants AQS to function as a market standard available to other capital allocators, in the same way credit ratings gave institutional legitimacy to leveraged lending over the past three decades. For creators, the near-term objective is simply access to non-dilutive capital that does not currently exist.

The longer view is that creator companies, properly financed and structured, will institutionalize in the way media companies historically did, growing past the individuals who founded them. Josh points to early examples, including Dhar Mann and The Sidemen. 

“The companies that survive are going to grow bigger than their key man risk,” he says, “into companies doing not just what they started out doing, but branching out.”

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