In fifth grade, Johnathan Butler's computer teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Like most kids, Butler's answer involved working for someone else. His teacher, Mr. Philip Shade, responded with a question Butler still carries decades later: "Son, why play for the team when you can own it?"
At the time, it sounded like simple career advice. Looking back, Butler sees it as the first spark behind everything he's building today.
Today, he is the founder of October Ventures Studio, a Nashville-based venture studio built around a deceptively simple idea: instead of waiting for opportunities to appear, create them.
The studio develops businesses across marketing, media, commerce, and technology, validating concepts before committing significant capital and resources. Five ventures are currently being tested in market, while more than a dozen others sit in various stages of research and development.
The goal isn't to build a company, rather it's to build a system for building companies.
That distinction sits at the center of Butler's work.
Most startups are built around a single idea. October Ventures is built around a process: identifying problems, researching markets, validating demand, and determining which opportunities deserve to become businesses.
The flagship venture today is Scoreworthy, a sports loyalty platform connecting fans, teams, and local businesses through rewards, challenges, and gamified experiences. The company is currently building relationships and testing adoption across Nashville, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Tallahassee.
But on any given day, Butler may be studying a completely different market. One week might involve interviews with sports fans. The next could focus on senior living, hospitality, consumer products, or emerging opportunities in the creator economy.
His work unfolds in 90-day sprints built around customer discovery, research, strategy, and execution.
"There are a lot more spreadsheets, customer interviews, and note-taking sessions than people realize," Butler says. "The work is less about having ideas and more about figuring out which ideas deserve to exist."
That realization has become one of the defining lessons of entrepreneurship.
People often assume founders struggle to generate ideas. Butler believes the opposite is true.
Confidence isn't something you wait for. It's something you build through action.
For someone building multiple ventures simultaneously, the hardest challenge isn't finding opportunities. It's deciding which opportunities deserve attention and which need to wait. Learning to say "not yet" has become one of the most valuable skills he's developing.
The challenge is one Butler understands personally.
The hardest stretch of his entrepreneurial journey wasn't financial. It was psychological.
Building what he believes could become the first minority-owned venture studio sourcing and creating concepts internally required a level of conviction he wasn't always sure he possessed. Unlike many venture studios backed by institutional capital, large teams, or extensive networks, October Ventures began with a simple bet: that a market opportunity, disciplined research, customer discovery, and persistence could compete with resources.
"There were plenty of moments where I questioned whether I was qualified, experienced enough, or ambitious enough," Butler says.
The goal isn't simply to build companies or brands. It's to build things that create value, solve real problems, and positively impact people's lives.
That mindset was shaped by a lifetime of influences.
Growing up, Butler was fascinated by stories. Movies, magazines, advertising, business publications, and popular culture all captured his attention. Over time, his curiosity expanded beyond storytelling and into ownership.
He studied the careers of figures like Jay-Z, Clarence Avant, Kathy Hughes, Quincy Jones, Richard Branson, Kenneth Chenault, Chuck Feeney, and MacKenzie Scott, not simply because of their success, but because of what they built and owned.
At the same time, he became increasingly interested in sociology and the ways race, class, gender, wealth, and power influence opportunity. Thinkers like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Pierre Bourdieu, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Reich helped him better understand the systems operating beneath the headlines.
Being laid off multiple times also sharpened those questions further and eventually, all of those influences converged into a single realization: What would happen if he built businesses instead of helping other people build theirs?
That question ultimately became October Ventures Studio, which also inspired another platform.
Alongside the studio, Butler publishes The Culture Ledger, a thought leadership platform examining the intersection of business, marketing, media, technology, entrepreneurship, and culture.
The Culture Ledger explores how race, class, gender, wealth, power, and shifting consumer behaviors shape markets and opportunity. While much business coverage focuses on what happened, Butler is more interested in understanding why it happened, who benefits, who gets left behind, and what those changes mean for founders, brands, and communities.
Together, October Ventures and The Culture Ledger form two halves of the same system. The studio is where Butler builds companies while The Culture Ledger is where he examines the cultural, economic, and societal forces that reveal where opportunities exist in the first place.
But, it's his faith, he says, that serves as the connective tissue between both.
For Butler, faith isn't something separate from work. It's how he approaches the work itself. It influences how he treats people, how he navigates uncertainty, and how he makes decisions when there isn't a clear answer.
Today, October Ventures has five concepts actively being validated, with more than a dozen additional opportunities in the pipeline. Scoreworthy continues expanding its footprint across four markets while several new ventures move through research and validation.
The long-term vision extends far beyond any single startup.
Butler wants to build an institution capable of repeatedly identifying opportunities, launching businesses, and creating value across industries.
In a world obsessed with building the next company, he's focused on building the system that creates them.
And in many ways, it all traces back to a question asked by a teacher more than two decades ago: "Why play for the team when you can own it?"