Appointing Koto's chairperson in a post PE world
Challenge
Koto took private equity investment and immediately faced the most familiar risk in the creative industries - growth that costs you the very thing that made you valuable.With five studios across Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney, 19 shareholders, and a mandate to scale, the danger wasn’t speed. It was dilution.They needed governance without bureaucracy. Oversight without interference. And someone senior enough to stand between founders, investors and culture without turning the business into something unrecognisable.
Solution
UNKNOWN treated this not as a leadership hire, but as a structural intervention.
Rather than defaulting to the usual agency chairs or PE-friendly operators, The Search looked for a rare profile - a chairperson who understood creative businesses from the inside, capital from the outside, and growth as something to be protected, not forced.
We identified Charles Fallon - a former Saatchi & Saatchi leader with over 15 years of international agency experience, and two decades advising on M&A through his firm SI Global. A chair who had seen creative businesses scale well, scale badly, and fail quietly after doing everything “right”.
UNKNOWN’s role was to align founder intent, investor expectation and long-term cultural integrity - and to introduce a chair who could hold all three without blinking.
Result
Koto appointed Charles Fallon as its first-ever Chairperson.
Not to accelerate growth at any cost, but to safeguard what made the business worth investing in.
The appointment formalised governance across a complex, multi-studio structure while reinforcing Koto’s people-first philosophy. It gave the CEO strategic cover to say no when needed, clarity at board level, and a framework for scaling without hollowing out culture.
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