Entertainment
As Hollywood continues to assess its new normal amid ongoing M&A and the general upheaval of the entertainment industry, support staff is particularly susceptible to layoffs, changing priorities and ever-shifting org charts. This has left assistants, coordinators and other entry-level staffers with more work and limited options for upward mobility, as the education and mentorship, usually are hallmarks of these early career positions, get moved to the back burner.
Now, a new company, whose co-founders include the creator of the popular Assistants vs Agents (AvA) Instagram-turned-media brand Warner Bailey, is looking to streamline duties that are often tasked to entry-level employees to alleviate some of this workload. In success, it will allow more time for these workers to focus on career growth, while enabling their companies to move through necessary backend operations with ease and offer insight into untapped or overlooked internal data.
Loyd, founded by Ryan McCaffrey, Vince Morales and Bailey, is described as an “intelligent workspace for the global entertainment industry and creator economy.“ According to the co-founders, the entertainment industry is propped up by a variety of fragmented, antiquated systems that no longer keep up with the pace of Hollywood dealmaking and workflow. Loyd (stylized as loyd) was built to simplify the day-to-day work of entertainment, from scheduling to deal tracking to cross-team coordination, allowing for everything in a single location.
“I built AvA because I believed the people powering the entertainment industry behind the scenes deserved greater access and opportunity. Loyd is the next chapter of that mission: giving them the tools to turn their relationships, knowledge, and ambition into career growth,“ says Bailey, who serves as Loyd’s President, in a statement to THR. To help build the suite of tools, Bailey, who began his career in the WME mailroom, drew on his decade of listening to and interacting with large swaths of Hollywood’s assistant class. “Hollywood isn’t dead; it just needed Loyd.”
“With the invention of email, the mailroom went from moving physical mail to moving information across databases and casting grids. Because systems don’t talk to each other, the individual is responsible for being the manual link between them,“ explains McCaffrey, whose background is in tech startups including Robinhood and AI finance outfit Hebbia. He will act as Loyd‘s CTO, having most recently worked at Warner Music Group, where he says he got a firsthand view of the technical problems in the music industry.
McCaffrey adds: “We’re building Loyd to help with the parts of the job that scale with volume rather than judgment, so entertainment professionals no longer need to be the switchboard stuck between the disparate systems, but can instead focus on the work that actually builds their careers.”
Morales, who will serve as CEO, started his Hollywood career in the UTA mailroom, later working across motion picture talent and music departments before landing at the agency’s venture fund and studio. He says, “Today, Loyd works with some of the most respected agencies, labels, and media companies in the global entertainment industry. They trust us because we know how this industry operates, we’ve experienced the same problems, and we have a deep understanding of the technology to build them the tools they should’ve had years ago. Loyd is built by the industry, for the industry, and backed by it.”
As support staff recently told THR, a single assistant is now oftentimes responsible for multiple bosses, with increased workloads, stagnant wages and opportunities for promotion becoming increasingly rare. According to 2025 and 2026 surveys of thousands of entertainment industry assistants, headed up by AvA, 62 percent of those surveyed say starting as an assistant is not as valuable as it was 10 years ago, while 35 percent report being in their current role for 4 or more years.
In addition to being employed by larger entertainment companies to streamline operations, Loyd could give an assist to an inundated assistant class. Says Bailey, “We’re optimistic about the future of entertainment, but it’s clear that the technology supporting its workforce needs to evolve.”
Read More
Mia Galuppo