A life shaped by ambition, unexpected turns, and extraordinary people. Discover where Aspen has been—and what he’s building next.
Now It All Makes Sense.
From two newspaper routes to Wall Street. From building businesses to developing a television series. The through line has always been a willingness to open the next door.
Meet Aspen ↗Travel, human connection, and the possibility on the other side of the familiar. Step inside the work.
Explore all four reels ↗SELECTED WORK / ASPEN POWERS
Founded by Aspen Powers.
Shaping what’s next.
TVPG is designed to arrive with independently financed premium content and evidence of audience interest. For distributors, that means a clearer programming opportunity, without funding production upfront—and a foundation for marketing and reaching viewers.
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Become part of the story, not just an ad slot. TVPG connects brand participation with story integration, producer credit, and opportunities for structured upside—building cultural relevance and value that can extend beyond a campaign.
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Participate in a platform designed to turn disciplined capital into owned content, audience evidence, and stronger distribution opportunities. TVPG’s ambition extends beyond one production: a repeatable business built for scale and long-term enterprise value.
The financing blueprint brings together three proposed sources: brand participation through the Enhanced Convertible Preferred Solution, or ECPS; EB-5 capital for qualifying infrastructure and employment; and strategic investment for growth. Each would have its own requirements. Together, they are intended to support content development, production, and a business that could carry the resulting assets forward.
Start a conversation ↗Across entertainment, business, and the conversations that bring new possibilities into focus.
Through TV Project Greenlight, Aspen is deploying Smart Capital to independently finance production—removing 100% of the Production Financing Risks from distributors so they can focus on bringing the work to audiences.
Explore the opportunity ↗Now It All Makes Sense.
Entrepreneur, storyteller, travel curator, and Chairman & CEO of TVPG. FOX Studios · Los Angeles, CA
Start with a short introduction, listen chapter by chapter, or settle in for the full story.
Before the internet made it possible to learn almost anything without leaving a chair, Aspen Powers learned the old-fashioned way: by working, watching, reading, and trying things before he had any real business trying them. Growing up in Branford, Connecticut, he had two newspaper routes and a job at a supermarket, and there were periods when he worked all three at once. The money mattered, but so did the fact that earning it gave him a first look at how the world worked. Somebody owned the supermarket. Somebody owned the newspaper. Somebody decided what things cost, who got hired, who got paid, and who made more money than everybody else. Aspen was interested in that part.
When he wasn't working, he had a strong thirst for knowledge, and he would often read how-to books about businesses he had never seen from the inside. He wasn't studying entrepreneurship because anyone had assigned it to him, and there was no obvious path waiting for him at the end of it. He was trying to reverse-engineer a world he wanted to enter. The books explained how businesses were started, how they were operated, how money moved through them, and, at least in theory, how an ordinary person might build something valuable. Aspen kept reading because the larger idea fascinated him: ownership changed the equation.
As he got older, reading about businesses gave way to trying them. He experimented with different ideas, some more successful than others, and began accumulating the kind of education that rarely comes with a transcript. He learned that having an idea and having a business were not the same thing, that revenue could disappear faster than it arrived, and that ambition was considerably easier to possess than to monetize. None of that seemed to discourage him very much. If anything, each attempt made the subject more interesting.
The people closest to him already knew where all of this was headed, or at least where Aspen intended it to head. He talked about building companies, becoming wealthy, and creating a financial future that did not depend on somebody else's opinion of what he was qualified to do. To some people, this probably sounded overly ambitious. Others told him they believed he would eventually pull it off. Aspen appeared to take the possibility seriously enough for everyone.
Then he came across an advertisement for a stockbroker position at a Wall Street investment banking firm. On paper, it was not an especially promising opportunity for him because the firm required applicants to have a bachelor's degree, and Aspen did not have one. A reasonable person might have treated that requirement as the end of the matter. Aspen treated it more like information.
He applied and went to the interview anyway. This would be his first professional career interview, an opportunity to enter a world no one in his family had entered before. He was excited. He also felt a responsibility to make something of it. Getting hired would give him a chance to put those ambitions to work.
The interview went well. The recruiter and a vice president wanted to hire him. Then came a practical question: how would he pay for the education, materials, examinations, and licensing? Aspen told them he would call people he knew. People who would support him.
The recruiter led Aspen to an empty desk on the brokerage floor. There was a phone. Use it, he told him. Reach out and raise the money you said you could raise. “Yes, okay,” Aspen said.
He could take as long as he needed and call whomever he needed to call. If he needed a phone book, they had those, too—directories for Connecticut’s cities and towns. Aspen began with the numbers he knew by heart. For others, he called 411.
After he started dialing, he saw the recruiter walk into the vice president’s office carrying a cordless phone. The VP and a few other brokers were inside. The recruiter said something. They all started laughing. Aspen felt they were laughing at him. He didn’t know what had been said, but he knew why he was sitting there. This was his shot. He kept dialing.
In about twenty minutes, he secured approximately a thousand dollars. When he went back to tell them, he learned they had been listening to his calls. They hired him.
He had arrived hoping to persuade them to give him a chance. They had given him a phone.
Aspen began studying alongside a class of aspiring brokers to pass the Series 7 and Series 63 exams. Within the first thirty days of training, many had dropped out. Aspen stayed, earned his licenses, and built a book of business selling stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
After he left the brokerage, insurance recruiters kept calling. About six months later, he pursued insurance licensing and entered the business. The industry changed. His ability to connect with people traveled with him.
The first business he built sold picture business cards. A face, a name, a way to be remembered.
Aspen assembled a sales team and photographers. Selling was familiar. Having people to coordinate and a payroll to meet was new. He recalls that the venture did well and continued for a time.
Real estate came through volunteering on the board of a nonprofit community development corporation. He recalls helping bring homes to first-time buyers from low- and moderate-income families, with support involving Yale, the City of New Haven, and private institutions.
Then he pursued development independently. Finding the money himself stretched him in ways that the earlier work had not. He stayed with it for a while, learning difficult lessons before deciding to move on.
Across ventures, he learned to recruit, lead, organize, sell, and keep working through reversals. His Christian faith became a source of steadiness: people, capital, and opportunities were resources entrusted to him to steward.
By the time modeling entered the picture, Aspen was burned out. He tried something new: posting a photograph on a modeling and talent platform. A message about a modeling job followed, and that unexpected response changed the direction of his life.
Work with art schools and photographers brought him into creative environments he enjoyed. He began discovering how an idea became an image, watching the people behind the camera while experiencing the process from in front of it.
During a meeting with an attorney in New York City, Aspen met with a team that had helped establish Connecticut’s film tax credit. They encouraged him to consider the state’s film incentives before relocating to New York. Afterward, Aspen sat down with his own team to work through the potential economics. He chose to stay in Connecticut and pursue its film tax credit, which offered an incentive of up to 30%.
Staying in Connecticut settled the question of where to build. What to make was the next question. Modeling had introduced Aspen to creative work, but he wanted a hand in developing the ideas and bringing people together behind the camera.
He conceived Club Culture 360, a traveling TV dance-show concept inspired by Soul Train and American Bandstand. He wanted to bring people together around an experience that could move from city to city. Producing his own show, he thought, might mean hearing fewer noes. He heard more than ever.
At the Billboard Touring and Music Awards, Aspen met Rob Light, a leading CAA agent. Rob told him he had helped put Toad’s Place on the map when Aspen was probably still in diapers. They shared a few laughs. Rob also joked that, with a name like Aspen Powers, he should stay focused on television if he couldn’t sing.
In the weeks that followed, Aspen completed his research into the live-music market. That research, together with his admiration for Anthony Bourdain’s work, opened another direction and took him to Scandinavia.
Aspen spent a few weeks visiting Iceland and Sweden. In Sweden, he was free to explore on his own. He knew people there, but visiting them wasn’t the purpose of the trip. He had learned a little Swedish before leaving. There was food to try, a city to explore, and introductions that brought him into conversations with locals.
There were also trains to figure out. He took the wrong one twice. When he finally found the right train, he remembers it being the last one that would get him where he needed to go. He still laughs about it.
During that stay, watching Bourdain sparked an idea for a show. A group tour the following day gave him a way to imagine it: bring first-time international travelers into an unfamiliar country and see what they discovered about themselves.
Travelpolitans grew out of Aspen’s own experiences in Iceland and Sweden. The unfamiliar places, conversations, and discoveries gave the idea its foundation: travel could reveal as much about the person making the journey as the destination itself.
Upon returning to America, Aspen contacted a Los Angeles distributor who had helped bring a wrestling documentary to Netflix. After a pitch meeting, the distributor expressed interest in representing and selling Travelpolitans and gave Aspen a letter of intent.
That interest gave Aspen a reason to keep building. The idea that had taken shape during his travels now had a prospective path to market. The next task was to develop it into a show.
Beginning in January 2017, Aspen traveled regularly to Miami to develop the project with David Rousseau, the famed Miami-based Music Video and TV director. Later, a cold call to TrueNorth led to a production meeting and a team visit to Iceland, returning the development process to one of the places where the idea had begun.
Alongside that work, Aspen hosted through Airbnb and worked in hospitality. Those earnings helped him pay his bills, and he kept traveling while he developed Travelpolitans.
At the Fontainebleau during NATPE, Aspen met a doctor, an attorney, and an accountant when they asked about his conference badge. After hearing Aspen talk about Travelpolitans, the doctor asked how he could become involved. Aspen recognized the interest, but it took nearly nine months of building the relationship before it led to funding for the first sizzle reel.
The reel gave him something to show networks. He recalls that in 2019 Pop TV responded with a letter of intent, followed by brand conversations and growing momentum. With momentum and excitement running high, COVID brought the project to a halt. Aspen later restarted development and created a second reel with additional backing.
In 2022, Aspen brought Travelpolitans to the Produced By Conference’s Pitch Perfect stage at Fox Studios in Los Angeles, California. An idea that began during his travels had become a project he could present to experienced producers.
While in Los Angeles, he met Charles King, who is an American talent agent, producer, and media executive. He is the founder and CEO of MACRO, a multi-platform media company focused on stories by and about people of color; and he also met Jesse Collins, the Executive Producer of the Super Bowl Halftime Shows for the NFL, the Emmy Awards, American Music Awards, and more. After years of developing the show largely on his own, he was meeting people from the industry he had been working to enter.
On Wall Street, he raised money in twenty minutes. After the NATPE Conference in Miami, it took almost nine months to raise the capital he needed.A different question 03 ↗
A distributor could want Travelpolitans without financing its production. A brand could see a place for itself while the show still needed money to proceed. Aspen had spent years bringing people to the project. Now he was examining how their separate interests could become a workable plan to get it made.
His financial background gave him a way to look at the problem. An idea needed financing. Financing needed a structure. Someone had to remain responsible for getting the work done. He had encountered those demands before, in businesses far removed from a television set.
He began asking what would remain after Travelpolitans was made. If every project required him to assemble everything again, finishing one series would leave him facing much the same task with the next. He wanted the years of work to give the next production a stronger place to begin.
That thinking became central to TV Project Greenlight: a company that develops production capability, retains intellectual property it owns or controls, and builds relationships that could carry from one project to another. When Aspen returned to the Produced By Conference in 2025, financing and industry relationships were on his mind.
In the approach he is developing, distributors are now joining the conversation early. Their knowledge of audiences, programming, and delivery requirements could help shape what TVPG prepared to make. Independent capital would support production to reduce distributors’ upfront production-financing exposure and allow them to concentrate on distribution and marketing. Each agreement would still have to be negotiated. Aspen wanted to bring more of the production problem to the table already worked through.
Aspen examines production economics through the same lens he applies to capital: where the money comes from, where it is spent, and how much more it can be made to do. The thinking begins years earlier, after modeling, when a meeting in New York causes him to reconsider leaving Connecticut. He and his team study the state's film incentive and what it can mean for a production based there.
With Travelpolitans, the logic becomes even more concrete. Connecticut offers a film tax credit of up to 30 percent, while Iceland offers a production reimbursement that can reach 35 percent. Location is no longer simply a question of scenery, access, or where a story happens to unfold. It becomes part of the financial architecture of the production itself, allowing the same pool of capital to support considerably more on screen.
Aspen also studies the other side of the equation: not simply how production money is spent, but how capital is formed, structured, and moved through the capital markets. The JOBS Act changes an important part of that landscape. Under Regulation D, Rule 506(c), a qualifying private securities offering can be publicly solicited while limiting purchasers to verified accredited investors. For Aspen, the significance is not the legal provision by itself. It is what becomes possible when private capital markets can be used to bring sophisticated investors into an entertainment venture from the beginning rather than after the most important financial and production decisions have already been made.
That thinking sits at the center of TV Project Greenlight (TVPG) and its Enhanced Convertible Preferred Solution (ECPS). ECPS is the capital structure Aspen developed to connect private investment with the economics of premium television and film production, incorporating preferred participation and defined conversion and priority mechanics into the investment model. The attraction is not limited to one side of the table.
Accredited investors gain a structured way to participate in an asset class that has traditionally been difficult to access directly. Brands gain a path to participate earlier and more strategically in content rather than appearing only as advertisers after the creative and financial architecture is already in place. Some brands are receiving a Producer's Credit as well as participating in the upside with narrative equity as part of the deal.
Distributors gain access to projects designed to arrive with significant portions of their production capital already assembled, allowing them to concentrate more heavily on distribution, audience acquisition, marketing, and scale.
That is what makes the model compelling to Aspen. Capital is not sitting passively on a spreadsheet waiting to be spent. It is being raised through the private capital markets, structured through ECPS, and then deployed into jurisdictions where incentives can improve its effective purchasing power. The same capital can support productions that create intellectual property, give brands a strategic position inside the ecosystem, provide accredited investors with structured participation, and present distributors with projects that have already solved part of the financing equation.
For Aspen, there is something almost circular about it. Long before television production, tax incentives, private offerings, or capital markets entered the picture, he was the kid in Branford reading business books and trying to understand why some people owned the businesses while others simply worked inside them. He wanted to understand where money came from, how it moved, how it was multiplied, and how ownership changed the outcome. His later interest in Wall Street, private capital, and entertainment finance is not a departure from that curiosity. It is the expansion of it.
It also brings his financial story full circle. Aspen is no longer trying to understand how capital moves through someone else’s system. He has designed one that works. Through TV Project Greenlight, he has built a capital-first model that aligns accredited investors, brands, production incentives, intellectual property, and distribution around the same commercial objective.
Through the Enhanced Convertible Preferred Solution, or ECPS, he has created and owns the framework that helps define how capital participates in that model. The progression is no longer from curiosity to understanding. It is from understanding to execution: from learning how capital markets work to building a structure of his own that can move premium content from idea to financing, production, distribution, and scale.
Through TV Project Greenlight, Aspen is deploying Smart Capital to independently finance production—removing 100% of the Production Financing Risks from distributors so they can focus on bringing the work to audiences.
Explore the opportunity ↗Different stories. A shared curiosity about people, places, and possibility.
A reel showcasing Aspen’s work as an executive producer.
Executive Producer
Through TV Project Greenlight, Aspen is deploying Smart Capital to independently finance production—removing 100% of the Production Financing Risks from distributors so they can focus on bringing the work to audiences.
Explore the opportunity ↗Every collaboration starts with a conversation.
Creative development
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Speaking & introductions
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