Ashton Kutcher Talks With Charlie Rose At TechCrunch Disrupt

Ashton Kutcher Talks With Charlie Rose At TechCrunch Disrupt, a photo by zennie62 on Flickr.

Appearing in a beard and hat, and not wanting to talk about his new gig on Two And A Half Men, Actor Ashton Kutcher came on to talk with Charlie Rose at Tech Crunch Disrupt New York about his company Katalyst Media, that he started with Jason Goldberg, and a new investment company and initiative.

Ashton revealed that he was an early investor in Skype, and involved in promoting the brand as much as putting money into it.

Kutcher, who has over 6 million Twitter Followers, sees on Twitter the opportunity for mass syndication and "something that is very addictive," and, he says, satisfying in seeing your tweets retweeted.

The New Fund

Kutcher's got an investment fund called A-Grade that "puts money into tech investments," and is looking for apps that "solve a problem for a large subset of people."

On this, he says that it's best to invest in companies that are "just trying to keep their servers going," which means, if that's the case, he's going to have a lot of people knocking at his door.

Right now, A-Grade is looking at a variety of different companies, but he's not into hearing about someone's market cap, because there are so many people pitching companies who says that first. "What I look for is what is the trust level of people, and are you solving a signal-to-noise issue. The more people trust the application, the more time and money they will put into it."

A-Plus, is the name of "a really good grade, he says, and a new platform that builds an app to essentially catch real time information and sort it so that it can be seen at the time that works for the user. "I want to follow Charlie Rose's Stream, but I want to just read about tech."

He tweets every day or once or twice a day, sometimes six or seven times a day. He says he tweets everything himself, and tries to answer back to the community.

Hollywood Is Like Tech

For him, acting and movie - making is a lot like tech investing in that "you have to raise money for a movie" and then work to make sure it's made and does well, in this case, at the box office.

On The Future

Prediction" media will just become media, but on multiple consumption devices, but have one distribution device. What a lot of people are trying to capture is what consumption system we use to get media.

On Movie Canibalization

Ashton says that Hollywood's arguing about what to do about Digital Media is stopping it from coming up with an overall solution. (Hollywood) is already being caniballized," he says.

He points to his movie No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman as one example of how piracy is harming Hollywood. "The movie did fairly well at the box office, but on other platforms... So I looked it up online and found about 20 different copies (that the studio did not upload), and asked, "Are we doing anything about this," and never got an answer.

Maybe after today, Ashton will get one.

Stay tuned.