Podcasts about maker studios

Alessandra Catanese serves as CEO of Smosh, the internet's largest sketch comedy brand and a pioneer in creator-first entertainment, redefining comedy for the digital generation. Catanese's career has spanned the evolution of the digital creator space, from helping establish the talent department at Maker Studios during the early days of YouTube, to launching the Los Angeles division of Patreon in 2016. She went on to become a leading talent manager at Anonymous Content, where she signed creators including BennyDrama, Anthony Padilla, and Kelsey Darragh. In 2020, Catanese co-founded Pressalike alongside Padilla, producing digital-first creator content that has earned multiple Streamy nominations and a Webby Award. In 2023, she helped lead Pressalike's acquisition of Smosh, where she now oversees operations for the pioneering comedy collective, helping it double in size, both in fanbase as well as employees. Under her leadership, Smosh continues to build on its legacy, having grown into an independent media and production company pushing the boundaries of digital-first comedy.

With a front-row seat to the future, meet Taryn Southern, a creative technologist, pioneering artist, strategist, and speaker whose work explores the intersection of emerging technology and human potential.  As an early content creator, she uploaded her first video to YouTube in 2007 — and it went viral. Ten years and 750 million views later, Taryn has produced more than 1,500 pieces of digital content for networks like Conde Naste, The Today Show, MTV, Snapchat, and Maker Studios. She's written for Business Insider and TechCrunch, and served as a host for Discovery Channel's #1 late night show. A three-time Streamy Awards nominee, her work has been featured in Billboard, Fast Company, Wired, Vanity Fair, Harvard Business Review, and more. Fast-forward to 2017, Taryn released the world's first A.I.-composed pop album, then in 2019, directed and produced a Tribeca award-winning documentary on the future of A.I. and the human brain, followed by creating an award-winning Google VR series. In 2020, she became one of the earliest content creators to create an A.I.-avatar of herself.  Since 2021, Taryn has served as Chief Storyteller at a leading implantable neurotechnology company, where she launched the world's first Brain Computer Interface museum and oversaw a communications strategy for two successful funding rounds totaling over $230M+. She is passionate about helping people use A.I. and emerging tech to amplify creativity and wellbeing.  Today's conversation explores the evolution of A.I.-assisted creativity, from Taryn's groundbreaking A.I.-composed album to her current meditative album in development that celebrates the human experience. We dive into her work deconstructing storytelling taxonomy and building custom A.I. tools, while examining how world-building, immersive experiences, and storytelling are transforming through emerging technologies.  Taryn also shares her fascinating work with brain-computer interfaces and her vision for how technology might reshape our physical and digital worlds. From questioning our relationship with productivity to contemplating a future with more "spaciousness," this episode offers fresh perspectives that challenge conventional thinking. What are Taryn's predictions about the future and why will she be one of the first in line for a humanoid robot? Listen in to find out — enjoy! EPISODE SHOW NOTES: https://creativitysquared.com/podcast/ep74-taryn-southern-a-i-creators-of-the-future/ JOIN CREATIVITY SQUARED Sign up for our free weekly newsletter: https://creativitysquared.com/newsletter  Become a premium member: https://creativitysquared.com/supporters  SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform: https://creativitysquared.com Subscribe for more videos: https://youtube.com/@creativity_squared/?sub_confirmation=1 CONNECT with C^2 https://instagram.com/creativitysquaredpodcast https://facebook.com/CreativitySquaredPodcast https://giphy.com/channel/CreativitySquared https://tumblr.com/blog/creativitysquared https://tiktok.com/@creativitysquaredpodcast #CreativitySquared CONNECT with Helen Todd, the human behind C^2 https://instagram.com/helenstravels https://twitter.com/helenstravels https://linkedin.com/in/helentodd https://pinterest.com/helentodd Creativity Squared explores how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform.  Because it's important to support artists, 10% of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized non-profit that supports over 100 arts organizations. This show is produced and made possible by the team at PLAY Audio Agency: https://playaudioagency.com. Creativity Squared is brought to you by Sociality Squared, a social media agency who understands the magic of bringing people together around what they value and love: http://socialitysquared.com.

Shield your mind from EMF's with the Ronin 10foil Baseball Hat— https://roninbasics.com/product/10foil-faraday-baseball-hat/ ----more---- In The Adams Archive, we go beyond the surface to uncover the real stories shaping our world. Each episode dissects current events, political maneuvers, and hidden agendas, forcing you to see the world from a new perspective. Here's what we dive into: Key Themes: Media Manipulation & MrBeast's Silence: What's really happening behind the scenes of YouTube's biggest star, MrBeast? We discuss his 30-day silence following the revelation that his trans co-host was allegedly involved in child grooming, and we investigate the mysterious sources of his immense wealth. Are powerful backers influencing the content and messages pushed on his platform? Political Power Plays: RFK Jr. Endorses Trump & the JFK Files: Explore the unexpected alliance between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, including Trump's promise to release the remaining JFK assassination files. We dive into the implications of this endorsement and why RFK Jr. suspended his campaign in key states to avoid splitting the vote. Censorship & the Arrest of Telegram's Founder: Why was Telegram's founder, Pavel Durov, arrested in France, and what does it mean for freedom of speech? We break down the charges against him, including the alleged complicity in criminal activities due to Telegram's refusal to censor its platform. The Propaganda of Kamala's Amazon Hat Trick: How did Kamala Harris's campaign manage to dominate Amazon's “Top New Release” list with barely any sales or reviews? We reveal the manipulation behind these numbers and discuss what it says about the state of political marketing and propaganda in the digital age. Dystopian Realities: North Korea's Utopia Conspiracy & the Defection of a U.S. Soldier: Could North Korea be hiding a secret utopia? We examine theories suggesting that the isolated nation is sitting on untapped trillions and advanced technologies, contrasting them with the bizarre defection of a U.S. soldier who fled there claiming racial discrimination in the U.S. Army.   Join the conversation that challenges everything you think you know. Subscribe to The Adams Archive on your favorite podcast platform, and follow us on YouTube, Substack, and social media for more in-depth content. Your support makes a difference—thank you for being part of our journey. All the Links: For direct access to all our content and platforms, visit linktr.ee/theaustinjadams. ----more---- Full Transcription  The Adams Archive.  Hello, beautiful people, and welcome to The Adams Archive. My name is Austin Adams, and thank you so much for listening today. On today's episode, we're going to be doing not one, but two deep dives, starting off the episode by looking at the most recent news about Mr. Beast. Now, it has officially been one month, and  For since Mr. Beast has come out and stated publicly that he knew that the transsexual  person that was working for him was allegedly grooming children.  Now it's been 30 days. So we want to see what he's up to. And I will tell you what he's been up to. And that will lead us into a further discussion about where this man even gets his money from.  So that's how we're going to start the show off. Once we move through that topic, we're going to discuss about how the CEO of Telegram, the founder of Pavel, has been arrested in France. And now the official charges are out. So we will take a look at that. Some of the things that people have said surrounding that situation and more. We'll also take a look at the RFK Jr. endorsement, some of the situations that have come of that, including him losing his secret service detail as a result.  Then we will transition into some of the propaganda. And, uh, we've seen around the Kamala Harris, Tim walls campaign that has now found its way to Amazon hats.  You might be curious and I was too. So we'll talk about that too. Then we will finalize our discussion here today with a U S soldier who fled to North Korea, defected to North Korea, who is a part of the U S army because he said, quote unquote, the way that they treated minorities. And that  will lead us into a very, very untouchable topic, which is the idea of North Korea being a utopia. We've seen all this propaganda, we've seen all of the conversations that the government has told us to believe about North Korea, all of the silly videos that have come out as a result from their leader, Kim Jong Un. But I have some questions. So we will talk about the Somewhat compelling, somewhat,  I don't know what to call it. I wouldn't say it's satirical, but I would say it's an interesting thought experiment. Uh, so we will talk about the possibility that North Korea is a utopia because apparently  according to many resources, or according to many, uh, online resources, they are sitting on trillions of dollars,  trillions of dollars of resources themselves.  So all of that and more, but first, I need you to do one thing for me, which is I need you to subscribe, leave a five star review wherever you're at, you can actually watch this podcast on YouTube, if you would like, and you can subscribe there too. Once you do that, I want you to head over to Ronan basics. com. Ronan is my company. That is a Faraday goods company. And we offer things like phone sleeves that protect your digital footprint, eliminate your digital footprint hats that block EMF radiation from being able to reach your brain  in more. So head over to Ronan basics. com. Go check it out. Protect yourselves from the harmful. Technology that is surrounding us all of the time that the government is trying to hide from you. And I don't say that like,  I'm not trying to be a alarmist in that. It's very, very real. I've been doing a lot of research on this. I did a 5g episode. Um, I've done a lot of research on EMFs more recently since I launched the company and even before it's the reason I launched my company was because there was so many, article so many people talking about it and so many scientific studies with have proven that there are serious harmful side effects to the technology that you have that you're listening to this on that you could be even driving at this moment, your Wi Fi router, the 5g nodes that you see literally in toxifying  your visual Space all the time when you're driving, I see all of these 5g towers, and it's the ugliest thing in the world. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that it can cause terrible things like cancer, insomnia, heart palpitations, heart issues, so many, so many things, a literal laundry list,  laundry list of health effects, and the ways that it can harm you and your loved ones. So head over to Ronan basics. com. Check it out, get yourself our 10 foil Faraday hat looks beautiful, and And you'll protect yourself from EMF radiation. It has silver lined fabric, which does that for you. Uh, so go check it out. Ronanbasics. com sign up for our newsletter there. You'll get 10 percent off. And if you leave your phone number, you'll get 15 percent off. And I promise I won't text you personally, at least late at night. And you will actually get a 15 percent off coupon just for adding your number. So all of that more stick around in without further ado, let's get started. Jump into it.  It has officially been 30 days since Mr. Beast came out and said that he had become aware of serious allegations surrounding his co host, Chris, the transsexual who was grooming children.  Now, if you're curious what Mr. Beast has been up to in those 30 days, Let's take a look and see what he has been doing. Now, here is the tweet from MrBeast, which says, 29 days ago,  well, the 24th, so coming up on, uh, 31 days. He said, Over the last few days, I've become aware of serious allegations of Ava Tysons, not Chris Ava. That's the name.  I think it was Chris before, now it's Ava. Um,  Ava Tyson's behavior online, and I'm disgusted and opposed to such unacceptable acts. I would hope so. You're talking about children here. During that time, I have been focused on hiring an independent third party to conduct a thorough investigation to ensure I have all the facts. That said, I've seen enough online and taken immediate action to remove Ava from the company, my channel, and any association with Mr. Beast. I do not condone or support any of the inappropriate actions. I will allow the independent investigators the necessary time to conduct a  comprehensive investigation and will take further actions based on their findings. This was seen by a hundred and six million people.  Now I have one question as a result of that.  Where's the thorough investigation? Where's the thorough investigation, Mr. Beast? We should be able to know that you weren't hiding this from the general public while also  getting hundreds of millions of views and money. From all of these online sources, including the time that our children, the time that adults have been spending watching your videos while you have been at least passively aware. Of what this man was doing to these children.  So where's the investigation, Mr. Beast? We want to know.  Also, let's take a look at what you've been up to for these 30 days since this post, because you haven't posted a thing on Twitter. You haven't updated us at all  in regards to the information surrounding this allegation for the person that you hired and kept around and, and brought a focus around. Right. And so when you think that there's these huge, literally  the most publicly known.  Transsexual,  besides Caitlyn Jenner,  is Mr. B's co host, Ava, or Chris, whatever his name is, right? The most well known, the most in the public eye, the most seen,  was Mr. B's co host. And so when you have something that's so in the public sphere, when you have something that's being pushed by the government, and by the, the, the social, uh, Being that is the grossness of our society's, you know, who, who controls our society.  We're not going to get into that today. Sorry, guys, but you might know what I'm talking about when you get into the idea of where these social constructs come from and how they're being publicly pushed with funneled with hundreds of billions of dollars to push these ideologies to crumble our society from inside.  Once you realize that, and then you look at the people who.  Who are engaged in this at the most visual level. This is the one. This is the one. This is the one your kids know about. This is the one who hundreds of millions of children watched Mr. Beast condone this transsexual being pushed in front of them, wearing makeup, putting on women's clothes, and then passing himself off as a woman when really all he was was a pedophile, weirdo.  That's the reality, right? So when you realize that, and then you look at him, not updating us, not making a single statement, not saying a thing about this for 30 full days.  Well, he had to been up to something, right? He had to have some, some serious investigations going on on his side, at least I would hope so. So let's take a look at his YouTube channel and see in the last 30 days that Mr. Beast has been silent about the transsexual that was a part of his team for years. Years, years and years and years.  What has he been up to? Well,  let's go ahead and take a look  in the last 30 days.  Here are Mr. Beast's post.  Well,  he had 50 YouTubers fight for 100 million.  I've gathered 50 of the biggest YouTubers on the planet. And whichever one lasts the longest in this cube wins that million dollars for their subscribers.  Never before seen in YouTube history. One billion subscribers worth of YouTubers are competing for one million dollars. And the rules are simple. All right, put the camera down. Close the line.  Okay.  So, if you step on the red line, you lose your subscribers a million dollars. So be careful. Last to leave Okay, so there's one thing he was doing, which was challenging a bunch of YouTubers for a million dollars to stay in a box.  That's what was more interesting than him investigating his team. Let's see number two. I just built this bunker and these two people who have never met each other are going to attempt to live down here for the next 100 days. Take your blindfolds off. Hugo, this is Rayne. Rayne, this is Hugo. This is our first time ever meeting, and this is the nuclear bunker. They will call home. Everything you would need to live for the next 100 days is in this bunker. Dang. You can even grow your own vegetables. Oh, cool. And if you come over here, you'll find your bedroom all 40 feet underground. Wait, what? Oh my God. Above you is a bed. Nice. And here's another bed and moose. Okay. There's another thing. He's been up to blocking two people in a pseudo bunker, 40 feet under the ground for another. 500, 000. So there's 1. 5 million this man is giving away. He has to be rich from what?  We'll look in a minute.  And what else has he been up to? Well,  during the time that he should have been investigating  this pedophile on his team, he also  I don't normally do intros like this, but I'm currently descending hundreds of feet into a cave that runs over five kilometers deep into the earth.  And whether we like it or not, as soon as my friends and I touched the ground,  we are officially stranded here for the next seven days.  That might've been the scariest thing I've ever done. First things.  All right. So  There you have it. That's what he's been up to. Instead of truly investigating, maybe, I don't know, contemplating, soul searching as to why he held this pedophile so close to him for so long and had no idea. No idea at all.  Or did he? Because many people allege that he was aware of these actions.  And now, I'm not somebody who's trying to hate on Mr. Beast. I think he's trying to His videos are phenomenal. I think that the work that he's been able to do and build his, his following is amazing,  but I have some questions.  What else are you been up to? Well, these things don't seem to be as important as gaining back the loyalty from the parents who let their children watch you or the parents themselves who watch this guy's seen by everybody. He's not just seen by children, right? This is that, but a big, vast. large percentage of his audience happens to be children who he enabled this trans person to be around constantly gave them the platform that gave them the power over these children  made this person a celebrity all while this pedophile was pretending to be a woman validated that to his audience  and then acts so surprised when that person actually ends up being a pedophile  Hmm.  That's weird.  Very weird.  So where does this man get his money? He gave away 1. 5 million. 1. 5 million in just two weeks there, according to those two videos.  Interesting.  So let's look here.  Now, somebody alleges this was one year ago. YouTuber MrBeast is funded by people with deep pockets.  Who could those people be?  Because he's definitely not making all of his money from YouTube. You don't spend that much money producing a video and then give away that much money and with 30 million views on YouTube, 40 million, 50 million, 90 million.  Make it all back every single time. Like he's definitely losing money on a lot of this. So here we go. So did you know that Osman Gold and Mr. Beast along belong to the same talent agency and that they are both directly connected to Disney and Amazon?  Today, I learned that a company named Knight Media literally manages basically every single Zoomer E celebrity, including Hasan Piker, Nikolulu, Dream, and these guys. If you ever look at the YouTube trending tab, at least one of Knight's talents will be up there. Knight Media is a subsidiary of Knight Inc. Itself is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists and angel investors.  Who owns Knight? Well, the CEO of Knight Media is Reid Dusher. who formerly worked for the NFL and then went to be the Dude Perfect's manager. The president of the night is Ezra Cooperstein, who is previously the president of Fullscreen and Rooster Teeth, as well as Maker Studios, which is now part of Disney Digital Network.  Ironically, neither of these guys are the real talent managers, as that position is for their 90 employees, including Andrew Pelosi, a former higher up at Influential. What is Influential? Influential is an AI, social data, and conversion technology. As well as a developer partner of IBM Watson and a Facebook marketing partner. Utilizing a network of over 1 million social media influencers as a tactic for distribution, Influential runs both native and paid campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube for Fortune 500 brands. Influential is owned by Jeremy Steinberg.  Night Inc. is directly financed by the Sherman Group, aka TCG, one of its executive members being Alexandra Moore, a former executive from Amazon who focused on mergers and acquisitions. However, TCG itself is financed by Providence Equity, an ECG compliance private equity investment firm valued over 300  billion.  All this information is freely available. I literally just ran names off of LinkedIn and read business articles.  Hmm.  So.  One of them, Felipe Neto, is now the most powerful man in Brazil. He profited off of every single political trend over the bizarre last decade. He's the architect of YouTube content system. His business has gone so deep into Portugal that some kids are speaking Brazilian Portuguese.  Hmm.  Somebody else said, dead internet. Right? Have you ever heard of the dead internet theory? Basically, that everybody and anybody that you interact with on the internet is fake. And that the internet essentially turned into a strip mall from the world itself, where you only have several small choices as to where to go at any given time, essentially. Very interesting theory.  Uh, let's see. What else we got in here. So, the people who fund this are essentially worth over 300, 000.  It's not this like boots from the ground, you know, bootstrapping YouTube channel. This guy is backed by huge money. He's not just taking all of his money and funneling it back into there from ad campaigns being ran on his YouTube channel. There is very, very powerful people behind Mr. Beast. It's not this, you know,  from the ground up type of thing.   So all of that to say, that you should at least be  considering the idea that maybe this man isn't as organic as he seems. Maybe you should be considering the idea that some of the themes that he's going to promote in his videos aren't themes that he wants to promote personally. Even some of the people that he puts on his team,  a la Ava, may not be there because it's what's in the best interest for your children, for you, for society to have involved. And, at the end of the day, this man has done nothing to come out and say, here's what the investigators have found. Nothing.  And that's what,  I guess we'll have to wait and see. Is he hoping, is he, what it looks like to me is that he's playing the PR game where they just tell you, shut up and it'll go away.  Well, shut up and it will go away may work for many things. I don't think it exactly works for you promoting a pedophile to hundreds of millions of people during a, as a Trojan horse  through the trans movement. And by movement, I mean the trans mind virus.  That is permeating our culture right now.  And isn't it funny that almost every single time you see these people in the public eye, they eventually are on Fox news for being arrested for something.  Interesting.  Interesting.  All right. Now that leads us to another topic, kind of in the public sphere as of late, although this one seems to be a little bit more about censorship, which is that the official charges have been released  against the telegram founder, Pavel Durov. during his arrest in France. And here they,  Durov is facing up to 20 years in prison.  Now here are the charges. And almost every single one of these has the word complicity.  What they're trying to essentially state is that by not censoring people,  that he is in, that he is in violation of their country's laws. By not censoring them. Okay. Complicity Web Mastering an online platform enable to enable an illegal transaction, an organized group refusal to communicate at the request of competent authorities.  Okay. Competent is an interesting word there for them. Complicity, possessing pornographic images of minors, complicity, distributing, offering, or making available pornographic images of miners.  Complicity. Acquiring, transporting, or possessing, offering, or selling narcotic substances. So they're basically saying anything and everything that's been done illegal on our platform, on your platform, unless you comply with us, we're going to come after you for everything anybody's ever done on the platform because you didn't listen to us and you didn't censor these people.  That's what they're saying. Complicity, organized fraud. Complicity, making selling or making available without legitimate reason, tools, programs, or data designed for or adapted to get access to or damage the operation of automated data processing systems. Wow. That's a stretch. Criminal association with a view. To committing a crime or an offense punishable by five more years of imprisonment, laundering of the proceeds  derived from organized groups, offenses, or crimes, providing cryptology services amid to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration, providing a cryptology tool, not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration, importing a cryptology tool, ensuring authenticity or integrating monitoring without prior  declaration.  Wow.  So,  Now somebody warned, I believe it was somebody that was, uh, had spoken out against  Trump before. I don't know, that was just the headline that I read. But essentially they were warning that, oh well, Elon Musk, you might be next. And that's like, if this holds up in court, on the court of law, in this country, yeah.  If they're just gonna come after you for anything and everything anybody's ever done on your platform unless you comply with their censorship,  Then yes, absolutely. They're going to go after Elon. They should go after Mark Zuckerberg. They're going to go after literally everybody and anybody who hosts any large website or platform.  That's the reality of this. But guess what? It's only going to be applied specifically to people who they don't like or who don't do exactly what they want. And the second that you step out of line, we're going to jail you for it. Not for something that you did, but for something that you Allowed to happen within your platform,  right? Like you're supposed to be able to watch hundreds of millions of people's actions and  do something about every single one of them all of the time.  Crazy.  Somebody said, Same can be said about any messaging platform ever, including the postal service. That's a great point, right? So if this guy has to go to jail, so does everybody involved in the USPS  offices. Great point.  All of it could be true. Some of it could be true. None of it could be true. None of that matters when you have the machine against you.  Now this guy's going to jail before literally anybody is going to jail for Epstein's List.  Isn't that interesting?  Now, transitioning over to Trump and RFK Jr. Now, Trump, uh, RFK Jr. suspended his campaign in the states that he said, um, would affect the potentially affect the outcome in a negative way towards Trump.  So he essentially said, I'm going to suspend my, my campaign in these states. Now, the reason that he did that  was actually quite interesting because he said, there's still a chance  that he could potentially, if Kamala, And Donald Trump essentially tie in electoral votes that it could come down to a potential, uh,  a runoff race, right? Where he could actually, if he remains on the ballot, could still have a chance to become president. So he said, I'm going to pull out of every state that  would potentially negatively affect Trump. As a result, he's hoping  that he could find himself in a position in office under Trump.  Now, during this time,  Trump accepted RFK Jr. 's endorsement and he vowed, Trump vowed to release the JFK assassination files.  Now, it says,  Hours after being endorsed by third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump said he would release all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy if he were elected president in November, as part of a proposed new commission on presidential assassination attempts, including The one that targeted him. Now, if you recall, it may have been my last podcast or potentially the one before it,  but I said this, he would be crazy not to release these documents. They literally, the same people that killed Bobby Kennedy, that killed John F. Kennedy, all of them are likely involved. At least the agencies, because some of those people are going to be dead at this point,  are very likely involved in Donald Trump's assassination.  It says, speaking at a rally in Glendale. Arizona, Trump also pledged that if elected, he would establish a panel of top experts that would work with Kennedy, a prominent anti vaccine advocate, this says, to investigate childhood health problems,  as they should.  Now, when you go back and you listen to RFK's speech that he did, pulling out of it, I think Robert F. Kennedy's speech was one of the greatest speeches in history. Ever in politics by any politician ever. And honestly, if you've been listening to me for quite some time, you know, that I have considered for a very long time voting for Robert F. Kennedy jr. And this speech solidified why I felt that way.  Everything that is wrong with politics is embodied in one way or another in each of the candidates that are left. And one being completely corrupt, terribly unequipped  to take office, absolutely a puppet for the establishment, and the other being pretty divisive. Now again, I voted for Donald Trump. I'll vote for Donald Trump again. I voted for him the last two elections. Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is out of the way.  But I just want you to go listen to To RFK jr speech and not understand like there's no way you don't understand why he's a compelling candidate that man is the only man not wearing a mask in some way shape or form and maybe  trump isn't wearing a mask maybe it's just has a mask on all the time and that's what he was just he's born a character and i think that's probably more the case than anything but i do think that rfk jr has the perfect  the only person that had the ability to potentially unite our nation. He had a ton of popularity among Republicans. He had a ton of popularity among Democrats, like true Democrats, not the far left that we see in today's politics.  His speech was amazing. It was unbelievable. 80 percent of it was about corruption in the health, that we need to the health issues we need to address in our country today. And he had tears running from his eyes by the end of it, because he's truly a good person. And he truly understands the weight of what this election will bring. And  it would be terribly sad to see another eight years go by without RFK. holding some very, very prominent position in office because he is one of the only real politicians that we've come across in the last 30 years.  So this goes on to say that Kennedy, the scion of one of the most country's famous democratic political dynasties, got a roar of approval from Republicans when he joined Trump on stage at the Republican campaign rally in Glendale. Bobby, Bobby, the crowd chanted. Kennedy had announced earlier that he's suspending his campaign. Da, la, la, la, la. Now, the hope would be that Kennedy would be put in charge of, here's my hope, I hope Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets put in charge of the CIA, because that would be the ultimate hope. Fuck you, from his family, back to the people that planned his assassination.  That would be absolute justice, and I hope he would clean it up, or obliterate it, shatter it into the wind into a thousand pieces, like his uncle said that they should.  Now, more realistically, he could find himself a part of the,  um, the health administrations, including the, overseeing the WHO, the NIH, well not the WHO, but the NIH, um, and all of the, uh, Uh, the FCC,  uh, overseeing children's food in school systems, uh, being able to ban the dyes that are permeating all of our food, see the oils that he talks about constantly, like this man is the epitome, he's 70 years old, and he's jacked, super healthy guy, is outside all the time,  he would be amazing in that position, and he truly, truly cares. Which is all you can ask for in today's modern political environment.  Just don't be fake. Don't be fake. Don't be corrupt. Don't be  evil. Like I think these are pretty basic things, but it's very, very hard to come by  in today's modern political environment.  Name three people that you can think of that are like true.  Now, one of those other people that come to mind  would be Tulsi Gabbard. Another Democrat that I would have considered a great pick for VP. Um, I think a lot of Republicans tend to agree with that statement.  But Tulsi Gabbard would be a phenomenal pick for VP. I really wish he would have picked her over Vance. I don't have any affinity for Vance, I don't have any malice either, but I just, I don't see him as a very excitable character to the general public. I think Tulsi would have been a huge, huge win for Trump's campaign.  Uh, but anyways, Tulsi Gabbard has now come out and endorsed Donald Trump. So the two most likeable, most Politicians in the Democratic Party are now backing Donald Trump. And I think those are the two biggest people that he could have got to back him. Like what's next, Bernie Sanders? Like that's about all that's left to endorse Trump for him to completely, uh, obliterate the Democratic Party.  Now, one thing that came out of this is that the Biden Harris administration had revoked the secret service protection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So immediately following RFK endorsing Trump,  Biden and Harris pulled RFK's  Secret Service.  Detail that was protecting him from the multiple assassination attempts that have happened on his life over the last  few months, you know, like weeks after actually giving it to him. Um, now to be fair, even though Biden pulled his security detail,  I think at this point, if I had the money, I would probably buy my own security detail. If I was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Because after the horrible comedy that was watching Donald Trump almost get assassinated under the protection of the secret service. Maybe that's not the bodyguard that you truly want if people are actually trying to kill you.  So there's that. Now here's Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Donald Trump. Go ahead and pull that up for you.  Uh, this comes from the post millennial. Uh, it says on Monday, speaking at the National Guard Association alongside 2024 GOP presidential candidate, Donald Trump, former democratic house Republican or house representative Tulsi Gabbard announced her endorsement of Trump. Now this makes it even better. The fact that Tulsi Gabbard. Endorsed. Donald Trump is so much sweeter when you understand that she was the one who completely obliterated, just destroyed Kamala Harris on stage to where you never saw her again after Tulsi Gabbard went after her in the debates,  and here it is. Let's watch it.  So, I mean, what I say when I share with you that I know that President Trump understands the grave responsibility that a president and commander in Chief Bears for every single one of our lives. Whether you're a soldier, you're an airman, a marine, sailor, or a coastie, he keeps us in his heart in the decisions that he makes.  We saw this through his first term in the presidency,  when he not only didn't start any new wars, he took action to de escalate and prevent wars. He exercised the courage that we expect from our Commander in Chief. In exhausting all measures of diplomacy,  having the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies, and partners alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort.  The truth is, as we head towards our decision as a country in November, the same cannot be said about Kamala Harris.  In fact, the opposite is true. And we're living through this reality today as.  This administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and regions around the world, and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.  This is one of the main reasons why I'm committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House where he can once again serve us as our commander in chief.  And there you go. Tulsi Gabbard has endorsed Donald,  uh, said, uh, go ahead and just read a purse short part of this here. Um,  this is personal for me. She said recounting her experiences in Iraq in 2005 with the Hawaii army national guard and how there was a sadness as we boarded the plane when we left. That we were leaving some of our brothers and sisters behind only to lose others. When we got home to suicide,  uh, she said, I am proud to stand here before you today, whether you're a Democrat, Republican, or an independent, if you love your country, as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing all that we can to save our country and elect. Donald Trump.  There you go.  So  two people that I actually think hold weight with their audience.  Tulsi Gabbard.  Uh,  And I think to me, she's probably one of the only, like, it's funny that the two Democrats that I would actually consider voting for that I actually think has any real personality to them that is actually speaking from their heart and is actually being a, a real true American  just so happen to be the people that endorse Trump.  Now, I don't think that's any coincidence because everybody else is just paid off or disingenuous or there for a power grab or whatever it is.  So let's move on.  Now,  you,  I don't even know how to start this because it's so ridiculous to me.  Do you know what's listed as the number like 43 top sold hat on Amazon?  You want to talk about propaganda when it comes to Kamala Harris, like they've made her this absolute star. Now this just shows exactly how ridiculous the propaganda is and how fake.  This shows exactly how fake Kamala Harris's entire popularity is. Go to Amazon right now.  Look at the top 100 hats  that have been sold in the last month.  And it doesn't have to be what's been sold, obviously, as you'll see here in just a second. But when you look at the top 100 hats sold on Amazon right now, one of them that comes up is this hat right here.  Here you go.  Now, if you can't see my screen right now, it's a Harris Walls 2024 hat.  Now this is listed as the number one new release hat on Amazon,  which is funny because there's only one rating on this hat, one five star review on this hat, and it's the number one new released men's baseball hat.  One star, huh?  That's weird. Almost as fake as the people that were on the tarmac when Kamala Harris got out of her airplane.  Now you want to know why this is interesting is because somebody else I know so happens to have a newly released  hat on Amazon.  If you go to number one released  on men's baseball hats, you will see. That the number one hat is Harris. Well, this is the entire  number one released. Amazon hot new releases of baseball hats. Number one, Kamala Harris walls. Number two, Kamala. Number four, Kamala. Number five, Kamala. Number six, Kamala. Number seven, eight, nine,  ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,  sixteen,  nineteen, twenty,  twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.  You're telling me,  on Amazon,  out of the top 22 hats released in the last month, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 18  of the top 22 hats on Amazon in the new releases are all about Kamala Harris?  Especially when you see that of those 18 hats that are in the top releases of hats, there's a total combined  eight stars that have been,  that have been given to these hats. Eight total purchases verified on Amazon for the top 18 of 22 hats on Amazon. 18 out of the top 22 hats on Amazon right now of the new releases are Kamala Harris, and they have a total combined purchased of. Eight total purchases.  Now you want to know why I know that's bullshit? Because guess what? I own a hat company called Ronin that just released on the same timeframe as these and my hats have more reviews and more purchases than every single one of these hats. Every single one of them. My hats aren't listed on this top 100 list, but guess what? 35  different variations of Kamala Harris on the hat. Are the top new releases for men's baseball hats.  That's interesting to me.  Hilarious actually. And what's even funnier is that the number three,  you know, of the top 10 on here,  nine of them are for Kamala Harris, but the one that's make America great again for Donald Trump has 28 reviews while the Kamala Harris ones have a combined.  Like 11, 10 reviews. So the number three has 28 times more reviews than any of the other ones.  But it's number three compared to number one is Harris Walls.  Especially when you see that the Harris Walls hats are like camouflage. Like, I'm sorry, nobody's buying a camo Harris Walls hat.  Nobody.  Hilarious.  So.  If you want to buy a real hat and support a real company with real values,  you can actually go to Amazon right now and you can look at it on your screen. If you're here on, uh, on YouTube with us, and here is my hat. You can look up Ronan Faraday hat. It will be the number one thing that comes up. It's a black hat that is a silver lined fabric, EMF blocking  Now it's also just so happens to be the best looking hat on Amazon right now as well. But my hat has more stars than the number 1, number 2, number 4, number 5, number 6, number 7, number 8. More purchases, guaranteed,  than all of those Harris Kamala hats.  Uh, Kamala Harris hats that are on Amazon right now. But for some reason, we don't show up on that list. Now that's interesting,  very interesting.  So if you want to protect yourself from EMFs, you want to give the middle finger to Kamala Harris and the propaganda arm that is Amazon trying to push this type of merchandise onto the general public. Like they're not only doing it with Amazon. AI generated photos. They're not only propping up Kamala Harris by putting Beyonce songs and Taylor Swift behind her and all of these fake propaganda videos where you see her in in what looks like packed arenas that are there for her with all these signs. No, they're there for the entertainment that they paid tens.  millions of dollars to even show up there because they know that's the only way anybody's going to show up to their campaign.  So if you're sick of the tomfoolery and you want to support a real brand go to amazon right now  and buy one of my hats. Ronin, Faraday hats on amazon. And while you're there leave a review so you can let them know too That we have way more people buying our stuff than Kamala Harris does.  Alright, anyways, let's move on.  But, let me tell you how infuriating that is.  It is infuriating if you know how much time, how much energy, how much effort has gone into me launching my hat company and then realizing  all I needed to do was make a Kamala hat. And everybody would flock to buy it, but nobody would review it. And it would also be in the number one new released hats. All I had to do is put, maybe I should, should I put Kamala's name on my Ronin hats, just so that Amazon would put it to the top of the new releases.  Do you think it would work? Maybe, maybe I will  just kidding. I would definitely not do that. I promise. I would never do that.  All right.  Last topic of the day,  uh, is the fact that there was a U S soldier,  uh,  Here it is. U. S. soldier, a United States soldier fled to North Korea,  fled to North Korea, and will plead guilty to desertion and other criminal charges.  Now, the reason that he fled to North Korea will shock you.  If you know anything about North Korea,  it will rattle you.  Now, here we go. Here's the first article. I believe this one came out. Well, let's, let's, let's start from the beginning. Let's start from the beginning, August 17th,  uh, August 15th, sorry, Pentagon disputes Pyongyang's acclaim. So, so North Korea claims that this U. S. soldier fled to them  because he sought refuge in North Korea from the United States. Now, that's really interesting when you understand that all the people, all of the people, Who are defectors of North Korea, say that it's the worst place possible.  Now, number one, how did this guy get into North Korea? Because the border is supposed to be like, shoot on sight, essentially. Number two, why would he think that that's a safer place than, I don't know, the United States of America?  Interesting.  Let's go ahead and read this article. Says the Pentagon cannot verify claims by North Korea  that U. S. soldier Travis T. King willingly sought refuge in the North to escape racial discrimination in the U. S. Army.  So this kid fled the army, this soldier fled the army to North Korea because of discrimination. That's how soft our military members are today. That's how soft they are. They think that they're being discriminated against in the military, which, by the way, really doesn't happen. When you're in the military,  I'm a veteran, when you're in the military, literally nobody acknowledges color. Like, nobody.  That you're all in it together when you're in boot camp, when you're in tech school, when you're deployed, when you're on base together, when you're all hanging out, it is a big, huge, like melting pot of people is the least discriminatory culture that you'll ever find in your entire life. Like everybody's just. It's a brotherhood. Nobody cares what color you are. Nobody cares where you came from, what ethnicity you are, what your, your history is, is, growing up, where, like, nobody cares about any of that stuff. You're there for a mission, and you do that mission. That's all you care about.  So, the Pentagon says it cannot verify claims by North Korea that the U. S. soldier Travis T. King willingly sought refuge in North Korea to escape North Korea. Racial discrimination in the U. S. Army, a senior defensive, by the way, there's probably a big list of places that if you were actually trying to flee the U. S. Army from discrimination, Yeah, probably not going to North Korea. Like, there's a lot of places that I would go first before I fled to North Korea. Unless, this man knows something that we don't know, which brings us to our next topic of North Korea as a utopia. Which we will get to in a minute. Um, King dashed into the North while on a civilian tour of the Joint Security Area on the heavily fortified border between North Koreas. Or to the Koreas, US officials have said they believe King crossed the border intentionally in the first public acknowledgement of the incident. North Korea State media reported Wednesday that Kings confessed to crossing in the North Korea because of inhumane maltreatment and racial discrimination within the US Army. Now there's a lot of dumb guys in the army.  . I was in the Air Force, so I can say that  there's a lot of dumb guys in the army. That's the running joke, at least. But you have to be the dumbest guy in the army if you flee to North Korea because of racial discrimination. Like,  I'm sorry, you're literally the only black person in this entire country.  You're probably going to get way more discriminated against than the military, which is like 40%, 30 percent black.  It says, North Korea investigators have also now concluded that King crossed deliberately and illegally with the intent to stay in North Korea or in a third country state news agency. K C N A set. During the investigation, Travis King confessed that he had decided to come over as he harbored ill feelings against his inhumane maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U. S. Army. And by the way, if you feel that way in the Army, like,  you're going to the legal council. Like, there's so many ways that you can bring that to your, you can go talk to your first shirt. You can, there's, there's so many channels for you to, like, I understand if you're at a, uh, you  Small company and you don't like the HR isn't existent and it's a mom and pop shop and you're like, fuck you guys I'm leaving and you run across the street to a you know, a different company to file an application But like you're in the military that the the  HR in the military is like the worst to deal with ever like you're gonna You're gonna get fired Get places every single person will get written up so quick, especially in today's modern social media.  Uh, he also expressed his willingness to seek refuge in DPRK or a third country saying that he was disillusioned as at the unequal American society.  The senior defense official who spoke with Fox News said North Korea has not communicated anything about Private King to U. N. command and anyone in the U. S. military. The official said there is no reason to trust what North Korea's state media is reporting. The reclusive communist regime, which frequently issues, uh, bellicose threats against the United States, South Korea, and Japan exerts total control over its media. Okay. So there's the first article. The second article.  This one came, uh, Just two days ago says that the mother of Travis King says he has so many reasons to come home from North Korea  The mother of the American soldier Travis King who spent more than a month inside North Korea says he has so many reasons to come home  Claudine Gates made the comments  to the Associated Press, uh, that they're continuing to work to bring the 23 year old son back to American soil after he ran into North Korea on Julythis is the craziest story ever  that he ran into North Korea, uh, and stayed there for a month. Because of racial discrimination in the military. I just can't see him ever wanting to stay in Korea when he has family in America. He has so many reasons to come home. I'm not mad at you, Travis. I just want you to come home, she added. He has a whole life ahead of him. He's still a young man. I just want my baby home. Come back from North Korea, King.  The Pentagon said last week that it could not verify claims by North Korea that King, a U. S. Army private, willingly sought refuge in the North to escape racial discrimination within the service branch's rank. A senior defense official told Fox News on August 15th that the Pentagon had no contact with King and does not know his current condition.  In the first public acknowledgment of the incident, North Korea's state media reported that King confessed to crossing in the North because of inhumane maltreatment and racial discrimination in the U. S. Army.  Wow.  That. Is. Huh. Larious.  He just bolted. He just ran. He's like, fuck you guys. I'm out.  Uh, all right. That's gotta be one of the funniest stories in  American military history. During the investigation, King confessed that he had decided to come over to the DPRK as he harbored ill feeling. Okay. We walked through all this kind of similar as the last one. Um, Gates in an interview with the AP said he, she has never heard her son express the sentiments attributed to him.  Uh, that's why my son was proud to be an American. He's not even a racist type of. person. That's why I can't see him saying that, she said. But she added, I was kind of told that he said a little something like that to his uncles  and that their approach with him was a little different than me. I'm mom. Wow. Uh,  that's hilarious.  Uh,  yeah, that's hilarious. Um, all right. And the last article here,  This one coming from just today says that the US soldier who fled to North Korea will plead guilty to desertion. Other criminal charges, lawyers saying, uh, Travis King, the U S army private who last year, last year,  how has he been detained this whole time? But those articles were from like,  was that  2023?  This guy has been gone for a year.  No way. Yeah, those articles were August 24. I thought this was like three days ago, seven days ago, a week and a half ago. Why has nobody talked about this army soldier fleeing to North Korea because of racial discrimination, North Korea for a whole year. Nobody's talked about this. This is I've never heard of this. And I was running my podcast. Then for the past three, four years, nobody's talked about this at all. That's hilarious. A whole year. How long was he in Korea for? Let's read this article and find out.  I'm so sorry for this. I should have read further. I so sorry. I should have looked at that. I just said August 15th, August 24th, August 26th. I just thought this was this like breaking story that nobody was talking about. This has been happening for a year.  Oh my gosh. All right.  August 26th,  this is, this is the actual new breaking update for you guys. So Travis King, the U S army private who last year ran into North Korea from South Korea is expected to plead guilty to multiple criminal charges, including desertion.  The U S army has charged him with 14 offenses under the uniform code of military justice. King will plead guilty to five of those charges and not guilty to the remaining offenses.  which the army intends to dismiss.  King's guilty plea will be entered at a general court martial where he will explain his actions to military judge. Uh, the guilty plea and sentencing will be held on September 20th. Mark your calendar.  Travis is grateful to his friends and family who have supported him and to all who outside the circle who did not prejudge his case based on the initial allegations.  North Korean government released King last September 18th. So he served like two months. When he reportedly sprinted away from a tour group in a demilitarized zone, there was no contact with King during his capture and North Korean officials were initially obtuse in responding to U. S. inquiries. The incident happened after King finished two months in a South Korean detention facility following  a physical altercation with locals. A senior defense official previously told Fox News. Wow. So he got like a fist fight with some South Korean dudes and then ran to North Korea because they were being unfair to him. Cause he's black.  Allegedly throughout the time he was in the facility, he made comments that he did not want to come back to America. King was eventually released on July 10th and sent home Monday to Fort Bliss.  Um,  so let's read that again. Uh, he finished two months in a South Korean detention facility for getting in a fight with a local. Uh, throughout the time he was at the facility, he made comments that he did not want to come back to America. King was eventually released on July 10th and sent home Monday to Fort Bliss.  So, he was in that detention facility. That timeline doesn't match up. But anyways, uh, North Korea state media reported that King confessed to crossing into the country because of inhumane. Okay, we talked about that. King's mother disputed the claims. And there we are.  September 20th, people. That's what we're going to find out.  Uh, Somebody says, I wonder if this entire problem can be attributed to the lower standards for enlistment that all military branches but the Marines have resorted to in order to reach their recruiting goals. It just seems unlikely that this is the first time this individual has been involved in trouble. Yeah, possibly.  Uh, somebody said, I would have no problem if he's sent back to North Korea. This is where he wanted to go. Yeah, have fun, bud.  Uh, it says in  1983, Private First Class White defects guard duty to the demilitarized zone in North Korea. And North Korea used him to As propaganda. Three months later, his body was found floating in a river south of North Korea.  King IL Sung said he was overwhelmed,  uh, and loved the support to the North Korean people couldn't meet standards. Wow,  you misunderstand. Even North Korea didn't want him. They gave him back freely. Uh, yeah. Shouldn't he be invited to the White House and given a beer with Harris  ? Uh.  Yeah,  very interesting. That's crazy. So here's a fun thought experiment.  What if he's right? What if North Korea is not this like, desolate, dystopian place where everybody's being like, totalitarianism to the core?  What if North Korea is hiding a secret utopia?  Where the elite live in luxury,  fueled by trillions in untapped resources. What  And that's what some people tend to believe.  I don't know if I agree with them. But that is what some people believe is that what if North Korea was really this huge propaganda campaign by the West.  And what if really what's happening there is actually utopia,  where Kim Jong Un actually doesn't  defecate,  where they have far advanced technology than us.  Where they have unlimited resources, none of them really have to work in this communist, socialist, totalitarian regime, and everybody's happy about it.  What if all the defectors there  It's hard to say this seriously, but like, think about it. Let's, like, let's, okay, let me, let me put on my serious hat here.  Here, here's the argument that can be made around this, alright?  There's actually a legitimate argument to be made that North Korea has an unbelievable amount of resources. North Korea is believed to be sitting on untapped natural resources potentially worth trillions of dollars, including vast resources of rare earth materials, including coal, gold, and many other minerals. These resources, resources could theoretically provide the economic foundation for a prosperous society, particularly if the government has been discreet, discreetly. Uh, exploiting these assets. Now, there's supporting evidence surrounding this, which is the fact that North Korea is estimated to be one of the largest reserves of rare earth elements in the world, which are critical for modern technology, from smartphones to military equipment.  Uh, reports suggest that these resources could be worth six to ten trillion dollars.  Given North Korea's isolation and the secrecy surrounding its economic activities, it's plausible that the regime has been strategically using these resources to maintain a hidden wealth based economy. fueling a more prosperous society than outsiders are aware of, right? Like what if North Korea is just like the real life Wakanda, where everybody thinks it's like this third world country. And it's actually this utopia with flying cars, and unlimited resources, and people are all super happy. And they have, you know, all of these things that we don't know about all this technology, all of these minerals, all these resources, all of this advanced modern societies, like, What if Wakanda is real?  And it's actually North Korea. That's the question I'm posing to you.  Uh,  now another side of this is that there's actually legitimate,  uh, legitimate evidence that shows that North Korea is known for its extensive network of underground facilities. Like huge, massive, underground military cities. Not just military bunkers, but cities. Designed to protect and sustain its elite. The underground cities might be equipped with advanced technology  Luxurious living conditions, but like nobody knows this right you go into North Korea Like you're getting a tour guide who's gonna walk you through these like fake cities. Have you ever seen those videos?  Like nobody knows what's going on there legitimately The only thing that we know is the propaganda that's being propagated by Kim Jong un which looks more satirical than anything at all  That you've ever seen like any video that is of Kim Jong un. It looks like a comedy like a legitimate comedy Um, so like what's actually going on there? Is it really just this like comical? satirical country where this  totalitarian brutal regime of or is it like  Or are they hiding something? Like, I think both of those are just as plausible as each other. Uh,  it says there's multiple reports and defector testimonies that describe vast underground networks in North Korea, initially built for military purposes. Satellite imagery has also revealed suspicious land formations and construction activities that hint at larger underground facilities. Now, if you recall, I've done a deep dive into the DUMS. The deep underground military bases that are under, uh, the United States of America, like huge, unbelievably huge, vast, like cities, infrastructures, military bases underground that nobody, unless you're in there and have the secret security clearances know about. And we found out about them because there was, uh, Strava data. Strava is like the, the, or was it like my fitness, um,  like the whoop app, whatever that is, the my fitness pal type of a thing that you put on your, your,  I think of Strava, Strava data got leaked and it's this running technology where runners put this like on their shoes or it's on your phone app and it tracks where you run and people, the data got leaked from Strava. And when it got leaked, they saw these. Uh, there was like hundreds of people running this track in the middle of nowhere, and I think it was like Antarctica or something. And what they found was a deep underground military base where these military members were tracking their runs in the deep underground military base. So these things exist. The data's been leaked. The US has these. They're huge, like massive cities under the ground.  So who's to say that North Korea doesn't have that too? I mean, there's a lot of evidence that suggests the same. Um,  right, designed, and so it talks about the land formations and construction activities that hint at large underground military bases. Uh, secrecy and controlled information. The secret, the extreme secrecy and control over information in North Korea allow the regime to maintain a dual reality. While the global community  sees a nation plagued by poverty and repression, There could be a totally different reality that's going on there. Um, North Korea's tight control over media and information, both domestically and internationally, is well documented. The regime's ability to obscure much of its military and economic activities from even the most advanced civilization, or intelligence services, suggests that it could be just concealing the truth. Aspects of its social infrastructure This is supported by the fact that there is very little known about the true extent of north korea's internal developments And the country's isolation means that much of what is known comes from the controlled sources either being the news The defectors right which could very easily be  Uh, people who are paid actors, just like we've had, you know, crisis actors here in the U. S. Um, and then it goes on to talk about how there's plenty of suggestselective Western propaganda. So proponents argue that Western mediaand this is all like a pro  article designed to at least give some evidence of this, so it's like, just Being transparent with you. This is not like some legitimate government resource or some scientific article,  but it is giving legitimate points about this. So, but it is in support of this idea of the North Korea utopia. Um,  but it says by depicting the country as a failed state, Western powers can justify sanctions, military posturing, and political pressure. This narrative could be deliberately exaggerated or even fabricated, masking the true nature of North Korean society.  And then it also talks about how there is inconsistent defector testimony. So while many defectors report dire conditions in North Korea, there have been cases where their testimonies have been questioned or even debunked. Some defectors have returned to North Korea, which, which proponents argue wouldn't happen if the country was in terrible as terrible as depicted, right? Why would you go back there if like, and there's some horrible videos like, and I'm not meaning like to having this conversation to like downplay those defectors testimonies? Because, um, who is the, there was the woman that was on.  She goes on and talks about some like horrific, horrific things that are going on there and like all these terrible, the terrible famines that are happening. Like I'm not trying to delegitimize that and like,  but it's an interesting concept, right? When, when everything has been shown to be false and propaganda, like you start to question some weird stuff, guys. This may be one of those cases. Um, but I'm sure that my, my bullshit radar is like pretty well up here. I, I'm not  totally buying this theory, but it's a fun thought experiment that North Korea's Wakanda. That's all I'm saying. And that is a good fair point that like, why would a defector go back there? Right. Unless their family's being threatened. Maybe like that. That'd be a good reason. Um, this suggests that life in North Korea might be in more nuanced with certain segments of the population living in better conditions than the Western media portrays. Yeah.  Interesting. Not sure what I make of that, guys, but that's at least, that's at least the theory for you. Now you know. The theory surrounding North Korea being an actual utopia, Wakanda, and us just being propagandized by the Western culture to think that maybe you don't want to be like those guys. Like, you want to, you want to stay with your democracy and your freedom of speech. Don't come over here to the dark side where, where, you know, we have the worst haircuts ever and satirical movies that we push out as propaganda to outside countries so they don't know that we have access to trillions of dollars of resources and advanced technology.  I don't know.  I mean, I kind of know,  but I don't know.  And with that. I'll leave you guys. So I hope you have a wonderful day.  Head over to Ronan basics. com. Um, head over to Amazon. You can buy our hats there as well. I have the Ronan basics RFID blocking wallets. Um,  have the Ronan  basics, uh, 10 foil hat, protecting yourself from EMFs. And the beanies coming very, very soon is our Faraday bags. So the phone, phone bags that you'll actually be able to put your phone into. I have many, many samples. I have, they're in production right now. We've gone back and forth and back and forth to improve them. Very, very excited. I should have those in stock over the next coming weeks. So look out for that Ronan basics. com subscribe, leave a five star review here. Uh, and. I love you. I appreciate you. I hope you're having a good day and I'll see you next time. The Adams archive.  Adams archive. 

Today's guest is a filmmaker and Filmtrepreneur Michael Gallagher. Michael is one of the co-founders of Makers Studio. Makers Studios was the largest independent YouTube network in history. YouTube channels under Maker Studios have also collectively earned over 90 million subscribers and accumulated over 1.1 billion views monthly. On March 24, 2014, Maker Studios, Inc. agreed to sell itself to The Walt Disney Company for $500 million, rising to $950 million if financial milestones were met.Michael has leveraged his success as a YouTube filmmaker to become a full-blown feature film director. His latest film is Funny Story, a dramedy about a well-intentioned father who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the life of his estranged daughter when she invites him to her woodland wedding. Michael went on to direct smash hit films on Youtube like The Thinning Series and InstaFamous. He talks about the big mistakes he made distributing his first feature film Smiley, self-marketing his films, and lessons learned from building an audience on YouTube.Enjoy my conversation with Michael Gallagher.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/2881148/advertisement

Michael Jones is the founder of studio and venture fund Science Inc., where he helps founders scale highly profitable and successful businesses. Mike's portfolio includes Liquid Death, Dollar Shave Club, Myspace, DogVacay, Goodreads, and Maker Studios, to name a few. Prior to Science, Mike served as the CEO of Myspace, and his company, Userplane, was acquired by AOL. His experience and expertise in both large and small companies focuses on strategy, growth, and operational efficiency, and has resulted in over $2B in exits.    You can learn more about:  How do we build the next big consumer brand?  How to create and manage a successful venture capital portfolio?  How to invest in the next Liquid Death and Dollar Shave Club?  ===================== YouTube: @GraceGongCEO Newsletter: @SmartVenture LinkedIn: @GraceGong TikTok: @GraceGongCEO IG: @GraceGongCEO Twitter: @GraceGongGG =====================   Join the SVP fam with your host Grace Gong. In each episode, we are going to have conversations with some of the top investors, superstar founders, as well as well-known tech executives in silicon valley. We will have a coffee chat with them to learn their ways of thinking and actionable tips on how to build or invest in a successful company.

Today's guest is a filmmaker and Filmtrepreneur Michael Gallagher. Michael is one of the co-founders of Makers Studio. Makers Studios was the largest independent YouTube network in history. YouTube channels under Maker Studios have also collectively earned over 90 million subscribers and accumulated over 1.1 billion views monthly. On March 24, 2014, Maker Studios, Inc. agreed to sell itself to The Walt Disney Company for $500 million, rising to $950 million if financial milestones were met.Michael has leveraged his success as a YouTube filmmaker to become a full-blown feature film director. His latest film is Funny Story, a dramedy about a well-intentioned father who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the life of his estranged daughter when she invites him to her woodland wedding. Michael went on to direct smash hit films on Youtube like The Thinning Series and InstaFamous. He talks about the big mistakes he made distributing his first feature film Smiley, self-marketing his films, and lessons learned from building an audience on YouTube.Enjoy my conversation with Michael Gallagher.

Beth Broday is an award-winning executive producer with over thirty-five years' experience in identifying, developing and selling content that results in millions of dollars in sales and revenue. Creative leadership and an innate ability to recognize advantageous opportunities ahead of the curve, Ms. Broday successfully married top entertainment brands and properties with digital media. Ms. Broday specializes in business development, production, original content development, executing brand strategy and spearheading long term, cross-platform initiatives. Ms. Broday is currently writing a memoir and continues as a career consultant to young women entering the entertainment business. Widely known as a pioneer of music television, Ms. Broday was the founder of two of the first, top tier international music video production companies providing a decade of content to MTV in its early years. Ms. Broday has produced and directed award-winning TV specials, and original web series for artists such as STING, Yanni, and Alanis Morissette. A-list client roster includes: Disney, CBS, FOX, IPG, Warner Horizon, PBS, MTV, FuseTV, A&E Networks, Televisa, Turner, Comcast, Nickelodeon, VH1, MSN, AOL, Maker Studios, Warner Records, and Interscope Records/Universal. Artist clients include (partial list) PRINCE, STING, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Cindy Lauper, Barry Gordy, Alanis Morissette, Ellen DeGeneres, and Jane Fonda. The Storytellers hosted by Grace Sammon, focuses on individuals who choose to leave their mark on the world through the art of story. Each episode engages guests and listeners in the story behind the story of authors, artists, reporters and others who leave a legacy of storytelling. Applying her years of experience as an educator, entrepreneur, author, and storyteller herself, Grace brings to listeners an intimate one-on-one experience with her guests. Visit Grace at her website www.gracesammon.net. Contact Grace about being a guest on the show, email her at grace@gracesammon.net Follow Grace: On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GraceSammonWrites/ On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/GraceSammonWrites/ On Twitter https://www.twitter.com/GSammonWrites On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grace-sammon-84389153/ #TheStorytellers #Storyteller #Storytellers # Storytelling #AuhtorInterview #LetsTalkBooks #LeaveYourMark #AuthorLife #StorytellerLife #ArtofStory #AuthorTalkNetwork #BookishRoadTrip #AuthorTalkNetwork #AuthorsOnTheAirGlobalRadioNetwork #memoir #MTV #pioneer #executiveproducer #awardwinning The Storytellers is a copyrighted work © of Grace Sammon and Authors on The Air Global Radio Network.

Beth Broday is an award-winning executive producer with over thirty-five years' experience in identifying, developing and selling content that results in millions of dollars in sales and revenue. Creative leadership and an innate ability to recognize advantageous opportunities ahead of the curve, Ms. Broday successfully married top entertainment brands and properties with digital media. Ms. Broday specializes in business development, production, original content development, executing brand strategy and spearheading long term, cross-platform initiatives. Ms. Broday is currently writing a memoir and continues as a career consultant to young women entering the entertainment business. Widely known as a pioneer of music television, Ms. Broday was the founder of two of the first, top tier international music video production companies providing a decade of content to MTV in its early years. Ms. Broday has produced and directed award-winning TV specials, and original web series for artists such as STING, Yanni, and Alanis Morissette. A-list client roster includes: Disney, CBS, FOX, IPG, Warner Horizon, PBS, MTV, FuseTV, A&E Networks, Televisa, Turner, Comcast, Nickelodeon, VH1, MSN, AOL, Maker Studios, Warner Records, and Interscope Records/Universal. Artist clients include (partial list) PRINCE, STING, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Cindy Lauper, Barry Gordy, Alanis Morissette, Ellen DeGeneres, and Jane Fonda. The Storytellers hosted by Grace Sammon, focuses on individuals who choose to leave their mark on the world through the art of story. Each episode engages guests and listeners in the story behind the story of authors, artists, reporters and others who leave a legacy of storytelling. Applying her years of experience as an educator, entrepreneur, author, and storyteller herself, Grace brings to listeners an intimate one-on-one experience with her guests. Visit Grace at her website www.gracesammon.net. Contact Grace about being a guest on the show, email her at grace@gracesammon.net Follow Grace: On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GraceSammonWrites/ On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/GraceSammonWrites/ On Twitter https://www.twitter.com/GSammonWrites On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grace-sammon-84389153/ #TheStorytellers #Storyteller #Storytellers # Storytelling #AuhtorInterview #LetsTalkBooks #LeaveYourMark #AuthorLife #StorytellerLife #ArtofStory #AuthorTalkNetwork #BookishRoadTrip #AuthorTalkNetwork #AuthorsOnTheAirGlobalRadioNetwork #memoir #MTV #pioneer #executiveproducer #awardwinning The Storytellers is a copyrighted work © of Grace Sammon and Authors on The Air Global Radio Network.

I adored today's guest and the chat we had and I am sure you will too. Court Vox worked in creative development and editorial direction for big corporations like Yahoo! Maker Studios, and Disney. He made the leap five years ago to begin transitioning out of corporate and three years ago he become a sex and intimacy coach full time.As his bio states.... 'Let's talk about sex. Court Vox provides personal guidance and expertise in the unique and often ignored areas of sex. Vox is a trained Sex and Intimacy Consultant, Surrogate Partner Intern and Sacred Intimate. His approach is personal and necessary. Founder of his practice The Body Vox, he brings professional opportunities for his clients to learn about and embrace their bodies and those of others. Sex, the thing the world is now acknowledging as so important for our general wellness, mental health and indeed our lives is on the agenda. While much progress has been made it is still too often a taboo subject. Court serves as the counselor of our times breaking down the walls of shame and anxiety around intimacy and sex.'Hope you enjoy Courts story and end up with a skip in your step as I did! www.thebodyvox.comwww.backtothebody.orgInstagram @courtvox Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.This week on the show we're joined by Dana Settle, Co-Founder of Greycroft. Founded in 2006, Greycroft began with a mission to invest in areas outside of Silicon Valley and specifically in NY and LA. The firm currently has over $2B in Assets Under Management, over 60 employees, and has invested in companies such as Bumble, Scopely, Plated, and Maker Studios among many others. This was a special episode where we unpacked all of the components of firm-building including team development, fundraising, investment decision-making, and evolving to market dynamics. We hope you enjoy my conversation with Dana.Program note: This was recorded prior to the issues arising in the banking sector.A word from our sponsor:Privately owned and headquartered in New York City, Grasshopper Bank is built to serve the business and innovation economy. As a client-first digital bank, Grasshopper combines the best of banking technology and years of industry expertise to deliver best-in-class experiences with trusted security and unparalleled support. Grasshopper's digital solutions are tailored for venture capital and private equity firms, startups and small businesses, fintech-focused Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and commercial API banking platforms, and more. Serving clients globally, Grasshopper provides flexible, firm-focused lending solutions, as well as a dedicated Relationship Manager committed to meeting the unique needs and strategic focus of your firm across all entities, including funds, general partner and management companies. Grasshopper is a member of the FDIC and an Equal Housing Lender.For more information, visit the bank's website at www.grasshopper.bank or follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.About Dana Settle:Dana Settle is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Greycroft. Dana's active investments include Acorns, Anine Bing, Avaline, Bird, Citizen, Cloud Paper, data.ai, Goop, HamsaPay, Happiest Baby, Merit Beauty, Mountain Digital, Pacaso, Seed Health, Tapcart, Thrive Market and Versed. Her notable exits include Bumble (IPO), Maker Studios (acquired by Disney), Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn), The RealReal (IPO), Trunk Club (acquired by Nordstrom), and WideOrbit (interest sold to company management).Prior to Greycroft, Dana spent several years as a venture capitalist and advisor to startups in the Bay Area, including six years at Mayfield, and investment banking at Lehman Brothers.Dana holds a BA in Finance and International Studies from the University of Washington and an MBA from Harvard Business School.In this episode we discuss:(02:03) What led to the creation of Greycroft(06:46) How they found believers in their hypothesis and got their first fundraise completed(08:19) Advice for managers and entrepreneurs raising in the current market(11:34) Building a distributed and remote-first culture outside of Silicon Valley(15:33) The role of diversity when building strong partnerships(19:00) Traits Dana values when she is hiring for the firm(21:09) Why curiosity is so important and how she uncovers that in candidates(23:55) The importance of creating a safe space for new voices to be heard in a firm(27:59) Why Dana hated the internal politics of old Silicon Valley and wanted to remove that from Greycroft(30:54) The decision to follow-on invest in their portfolio companies(33:11) How Greycroft manages conflicts within the partnership(35:01) The philosophy around team-building within the firm and how that benefits their portfolio companies(37:19) How Greycroft remains nimble with such a large organization(39:26) The bull case for Venture Capital moving forward(42:09) What Greycroft got the most correct and the most wrong in its historyI'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Dana. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

Ezra Cooperstein is the President of Night, a management company for the world best digital creators, including MrBeast, Moriah Elizabeth, Safiya Nygaard, Codie Sanchez, Graham Stephan, and more. He was previously CEO of Maker Studios and President of Fullscreen and Rooster Teeth and has over two decades of experience in digital content, media & the creator economy.

Flashback Episode of The Father Time Podcast with Jamie KalerThese genius dads are my favorite single panel cartoonists since The Far Side. And as it turns out, they are some of my fave guests ever. I met them the day of the show and they are truly some of my funniest guests ever. Here's a little backstory. Daniel and Jeremy Lehrer are identical twin cartoonists and comedy writers. They grew up in a large extended family in Los Angeles where the emphasis was on academic excellence, classical music, fine art, and other activities designed not to get them laid.After respectively graduating from Columbia University and Columbia Law School, Jeremy became a small cog at a big corporate law firm, while Daniel became a small cog at Ducati Motorcycles in Bologna, Italy. They engaged in a half-decade of the usual post-graduation soul- crushing work, before deciding to “Voltron” together to pursue their dreams of drawing and writing. They are represented at CAA.@lehrerboys, Daniel and Jeremy's Instagram account, is inspired by their horrible childhood fights over the Sunday Funnies and who got to read “The Far Side” first.Their satirical and biting single-panel cartoons comment on everything from Kim Kardashian and “selfie etiquette” to gender-neutral toilets and masturbation in high-tech times. The Lehrer Boys bring an outsider perspective to their work.They have created, sold, and developed numerous shows with studios including Fox, Adult Swim, Maker, and Amazon, and have been privileged to collaborate with talent like Paul Feig and Mila Kunis.They also recently created “Highly Gifted,” a series of animated shorts with Maker Studios, based on their socially-challenged high school years and starring comedian Ron Funches, Josh Brener of “Silicon Valley,” Oscar-winner Nat Faxon, and pop-icon Kesha.You Check them out at https://www.lehrerboysshop.comYou can catch The Parent's Lounge live every Tuesday night 10pm EST/7pm PST at:https://www.facebook.com/theparentslounge#theparentslounge #thelehrerboys #jamiekaler #jasongowin #katemulligan #farside #HighlyGifted #funnydads #parentingpodcast #parentinghumor #standupcomedy

Danny Zappin, Shay Carl and a few other YouTubers, started their own YouTube Channels and amassed millions of subscribers. They decided to pool together their talent, followers and subscribers into a kind of talent network. They called it Maker Studios. It kept growing and they finally sold it for more than $500 million. Let us check out their story.

Sometimes, life hits you all at once. It's challenging enough to go through ONE sucky human moment, find the courage to face it, and learn how to fly forward. But when it seems like all the suck is piling on at once, some heavy-duty healing has to happen. Going on that healing journey is no joke, but it's necessary. And wow, Brave Table fam, there's no one better to exemplify the strength needed to do it than my guest today, Taryn Southern.    Taryn is an award-winning artist, storyteller, and strategist whose work explores the intersection of emerging technology and human potential. Her stunning roster includes being an early YouTube creator, TV host, filmmaker, director, AI enthusiast, and angel investor in emerging technologies, often related to innovations in health care.    Taryn's first foray into entertainment began at 17 when she competed in the semi-finals of American Idol. In 2007, after obtaining degrees in journalism and anthropology, Taryn uploaded her first video onto YouTube. Ten years and 750 million views later, this early YouTuber produced more than 1500 internet videos, sold series to networks like MTV, DirecTV and Maker Studios, acted in sitcoms on FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and Comedy Central, hosted shows for Discovery Channel, Vh1, G4, and Facebook, and produced digital campaigns for companies like Marriott, Today Show, Snapchat, and ATTN. Her first directorial debut for her film, I AM HUMAN premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and won 4 “best feature” awards.    The first time I met Taryn, she bravely cracked herself open in front of a room full of strangers and told us about her recent (at the time) stage 3 cancer diagnosis.    In this conversation, she doesn't hold back, either. Taryn bares her soul as she shares with us her experiences with breast cancer and the healing journey she embarked on—all while going through a breakup, coping with a painful loss, and moving to a new home.    What you'll get out of this episode…    - Different modalities to try on your own healing journey - Why you can't put off confronting your pain - Rituals and routines to provide comfort during challenging times - How tough times and sucky human moments help build your resilience - The value in being vulnerable and honest with those around you - Experiencing duality and how conflicting emotions can be true at the same time - The different stages you might experience on a healing journey - And so much more   If you loved this episode, make sure you check out… - Taryn's website at https://tarynsouthern.com/ and on Instagram @tarynsouthern - Listen to this episode with Dr. Mariza Snyder: A Journey Back to Loving Yourself, Women's Wellness, Hormones, Fertility and More  - Check out this one with Emily Hirsh: Taking Ownership of Life Circumstances by Reframing Your Reality To Make It Work for You  - And this one with Joa Rivas: The Power of Plant Medicine, Healing from Painful Loss, and Transitions    Loves, before you go, check out this super fun quiz I created for you to determine your Bounce Factor! How do you bounce back from life's sucky moments? How strong is your audacious resiliency? Find your archetype and what you can do to strengthen your “bounciness” with my FREE Bounce Factor quiz! Get it at Get it at bouncefactorquiz.com. 

Today I'm chatting with Brydie Stewart, the curious creative behind Mary Maker Studio. A Visual Arts educator & creativity coach with a global following of over 500k worldwide, Brydie is transforming the face of Fibre Art with her innovative practices, exclusive range of bespoke fibres and sought after educational experiences.  In this episode we talk about: Walking your own path Tips for when others don't see your vision Standing out from the crowd  Scaling a business from the ground up  and more! Connect with Brydie: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marymakerstudio/Website: https://marymakerstudio.com.au/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQpoLbMNWgoB9P7PKU6bYIA   www.suzchadwick.com/pod225   To find out more head to: www.suzchadwick.com http://www.suzchadwick.com/bba  http://www.suzchadwick.com/amplify 

Grow House Media is an Austin-based production company that is clearing the smoke around the most misunderstood plant on the planet. We live at the intersection of education and entertainment, advocacy and amusement, telling the truth about cannabis and getting a little wild along the way. They are the producers of Big Texas Hemp which is a docuseries about Texas Hemp Farmers!Founded by husband-and-wife team Liz Grow and Patrick Pope, Grow House Media is Texas' only cannabis-focused production company.About Liz GrowIf you're looking for the stereotypical “lazy stoner,” then look elsewhere. (Also, that stereotype is completely unfounded — but we digress.) In her college days, Liz was a 5-time All American athlete and Notre Dame track star. She's still a fitness junkie, working out with the help of a little CBD to ease sore muscles.Liz's first introduction to cannabis was medicinal, prescribed by a San Francisco doctor. Since then, she's been fascinated by plant medicine and wants to share its hope and healing with anyone and everyone.About Patrick PopePatrick has been working in media and production for two decades, creating content for companies like Maker Studios, Chive Media Group, and Rooster Teeth. He's won several awards for his work, including the first Shorty Award for a LinkedIn campaign. Once the LA life lost its luster, Patrick returned to Texas where he and Liz reconnected. Sparks flew, magic happened, and within a year, they were married!Visit Grow House Media.

This interview features James Creech, SVP Influencer Strategy at Brandwatch and founder of Paladin. We discuss how former GE CEO Jack Welch inspired James to be a number one category leader, using his down payment on a house to start Paladin, his make or break pivot when the creator economy evolved in 2018, working till 3AM over Christmas to sell his company, why James and I are kindred spirits, and the power of recasting your success.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com---EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders.James Creech:Thomas and Ole and I all put considerable capital into the project. To put that in perspective, at the time, Thomas was getting married. His fiancé, she was amazing to say, "We believe in this dream, and we want to put that money that we would have saved for a big, nice wedding with our family and friends towards investing in this startup." I had been saving to buy a house, so I took essentially a down payment on what I would do to buy a house and said, "I'm all in on the business." Every penny to my name and probably even some I didn't have like went into Paladin. Then, Ole had recently gone out and bought a Tesla. He ended up driving back to the dealership and returning the Tesla, so he could take all of that money and put it into Paladin. So, every single one of us was all in from day one.Chris Erwin:This week's episode features James Creech, SVP influencer strategy at Brandwatch and founder of Paladin. So, James was born in Houston, Texas and grew up in Bakersfield, California with parents who worked in oil and gas. Early on, James was a creative. In high school, he made sketch comedy videos with his friends and thought film and TV was his future. So, he went to USC Film School and ended up running the college TV station, but soon realized that he really enjoyed and was good at the business side of entertainment. His career started at a video advertising startup, where he helped scale the team to over 40 employees, but then moved on to Bent Pixels, which started as an early YouTube MCN.Chris Erwin:While there, James took a big bet on launching a technology SaaS product for the early creator economy, which he ended up spinning out and leading as CEO, until its recent sale to Brandwatch just a few months ago. Today, James leads influencer strategy at Brandwatch and stays busy on the side, advising over 10 different companies and publishing content on his podcast and blog. Some highlights of our chat include how former GE CEO Jack Welch inspired James to be a number one category leader, when he used his down payment on a house to start Paladin, his make or break pivot when the creator economy evolved in 2018, working till 3:00 AM over Christmas to sell his company, why James and I are kindred spirits, and the power of recasting your success. All right, let's get to it. James, thanks for being on The Come Up podcast.James Creech:Hey, Chris. Thank you, excited to be here.Chris Erwin:This has been a bit of a long time coming. I think I was on your podcast a year or two ago, and I said, "James, I'm going to have to get you on mine someday." And, we're finally making it happen. When we were doing the prep, I just got even more excited, because I realized just how cool and exciting your story is. So, excited to share that with the listeners, and as always, let's rewind a bit. So, we're going to go back. Tell us about where you grew up, what your household and what your parents were like.James Creech:So, I was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up mostly in Bakersfield, California. So, I always tell people, "You could probably guess what my parents did for a living, right?" We worked in oil and gas. So, I spent most of my life, yeah, in Bakersfield, from ages four to 18, essentially. My childhood was great. I have a younger brother and sister. We're a close family. We had the chance to do a lot of traveling when we were younger, which was fun. I remember soccer practice and tennis and Cub Scouts, mock trial. We were involved in a lot of activities, and our parents were very much a part of those activities and the stuff that we enjoyed as kids.Chris Erwin:Quick interjection, how far did you get in Cub Scouts?James Creech:To the end of Cub Scouts. Never made it to boy Scouts.Chris Erwin:Did you achieve the Webelos badge?James Creech:Yeah, I was a Webelos. I think that's about as far as I made it.Chris Erwin:Nice. I did one up you a bit. I got to Eagle Scout with my twin brother.James Creech:Congrats. Wow, that's a huge achievement.Chris Erwin:It's a lot of work. Back to you, so grew up in Bakersfield, had some younger siblings. Early on, what were your passions? What were you into? Was there any glimpse into the career that you have today?James Creech:I think when I was a kid, I used to tell people what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be the governor of California. I don't know where that came from. I don't know that I have any sort of interest or passion in politics. I think as I got older, I would say I lacked the moral flexibility to pursue a career in that field, but was interested in politics and government early on. Somehow, that morphed into maybe being interested in law and going to law school at a certain point. I was pre-law at USC, so that was certainly a passion. I ended up doing the mock trial, as I mentioned, and then interned at a law firm and realized, hey, a lot of love for the legal profession, a lot of great friends who are lawyers, et cetera, but that probably wasn't the path for me.James Creech:In high school, the thing that really captured my intention was making videos with my friends, essentially comedy shorts. It's interesting, the timing, right? I was inspired by SNL and all these other amazing sketch comedy programs. Had I been a generation later, let alone maybe even five years later, the videos I made probably would've ended up on YouTube and now TikTok. But, because of the timing, I just made videos with my friends, and we made DVDs and shared them with our friends and family. But, it wasn't any sort of big distribution.Chris Erwin:It's never too late, James. It's never too late.James Creech:Yeah. There's an archive of a lot of old, embarrassing footage somewhere.Chris Erwin:Yeah, IP libraries are in high demand, high valuation. So, there could be something there.James Creech:So, that's what I was doing and figured, okay, well, I'm interested in media and entertainment. I applied and was accepted into the USC Film School and thought, okay, I'm going to go into film production, right? Fast forward a little bit, and I realized in college, well, I'm way more interested in the business side than I am in say the creative or the technical side. The stuff I liked doing in high school with my friends was making videos, which was really more about the experience of being together, less about the filmmaking process. But, yeah, that was kind of the early days.Chris Erwin:Yeah. So, I have to ask, what was your role in doing these sketch comedy or sketch segments? Were you a director? Were you a writer? Were you an actor? Was it all the above? And, I also want to hear, if you just have an example of one of the things that you guys did, I'd love to hear about it.James Creech:Oh, boy. So, I was an instigator. A ringleader is maybe the right word. We did all sorts of stuff. We were filming on these really small handheld cameras. I would certainly come up with sketch ideas and get my friends involved. We would shoot them. I would edit them. We would share them. There's plenty of stories that I can tell you, many of which are maybe too embarrassing for the podcast. So, we'll save that for a beer sometime, but one that definitely stands out is we kind of faked this kidnapping of our friend. He had a new girlfriend. He was really invested in that relationship, not spending as much time with our buddies. So, I said, "Okay, let's go to his house one afternoon, dressed all in black like ninjas," and his parents knew. We gave everyone a heads up, but we went in and kidnapped him for the day, which was a lot of fun. So, that's probably one that stands out.Chris Erwin:It's funny, hearing you tell these stories. So, I just started listening to This Is Important Podcast from the crew of Workaholics. They started just by making different sketch videos. They were filming wrestling matches in their backyard. Just hearing about some of their stories and how they started, and then they talk about, yeah, and then we sold the show to Viacom. How did this happen in Comedy Central?James Creech:Yeah, I wish that was the journey, was certainly inspired by Derrick Comedy and some of the other early, early YouTube sketch groups. We didn't get that far, right? It was fun to run around in our backyard and make videos, and that's where it ended for us.Chris Erwin:Yeah, cool. All right, so you get into USC Film School in 2012. I believe that you end up with a marketing and poli sci focus. But, tell us about you showed up at school. What was your initial focus? And, then it seems like it pivoted as you started to understand that you realized the appeal of the business side of entertainment, versus the creative side.James Creech:Yeah, so I went to USC, 2008. So, it was right around the housing crisis, financial crisis, which I don't know, as an 18 year old, you're fairly oblivious to. But, I was passionate about filmmaking. I was excited to be in the film program, also in the poli sci school. So, I was kind of running this dual track of, okay, well, I'm earning my political science degree, but I'm also taking these film courses and think that's what I want to do after I graduate. I got involved at the college TV station, called Trojan Vision, which is the largest TV station in the country. We broadcast to over a million homes, and I just kind of fell into it and fell in love with it. So, I was a producer on a show my freshman year, worked hard, got promoted to senior producer, second semester.James Creech:I was like, "Hey, I really like this TV thing. I like being involved at the station, meeting other students," applied for a staff position the next year and became an executive producer of a show. Okay, my first experience running a show, working in live television, it's exciting. It's the adrenaline rush of making something go on the air Monday through Friday. Through that experience, said, "Okay, I like the organization of the show, coming up with new ideas." We were experimenting with new technologies like HD broadcasts and live remotes and stuff at the time. So, I was like, "Okay, I'm excited about this," and people kept saying, "Maybe you should take some business classes." And, I thought to myself as a sophomore, well, hey, no. I'm doing the film path. I've got political science. I don't know what the business thing's about.James Creech:But, luckily USC has a very flexible structure and approach to curriculum. So, you could kind of dabble and take a couple classes. So, I said, "What's the worst that could happen? I'll take a business class or two," found out right away, hey, this is where I should be, and ended up transferring into the business school as a junior. So, I'm taking these intro 101 classes surrounded by freshmen. So, I had a very different mindset, let's say, going to the business school. I'm really excited to be here. There are certain things I want to learn. I'm finding ways to apply this over at the television station. I had been promoted to the general manager, so I was running the whole station at this point, which is a real budget.Chris Erwin:That's a lot of responsibility at a young age. What you said, it's one of the largest college broadcast stations in the US, and you're going ... Is there live programming Monday to Friday? That's a big deal.James Creech:Money through Friday, yeah, hours and hours of content. I was working essentially a full time load, basically 40 hours a week while going to school. But, I loved it. I loved every minute of it, creating television, working with students, and making something out of nothing, and putting it on the air every night, sometimes better, sometimes worse. But, I loved it.Chris Erwin:Okay, so you start taking these business classes, and right away, you're like, "This is a good fit." Then, what are you starting to think about what you want to do when you graduate?James Creech:Between my junior and senior year of college, I got an internship at Blizzard Entertainment. I grew up as a gamer. I wasn't necessarily a desktop gamer. I was more of a console gamer, but loved the opportunity to get exposure to another form of entertainment and work in a bigger company and try to decide what was right for me. So, as I was going through that process, had a great summer internship experience, came back, and had the opportunity to say, "Do I continue as the general manager of the TV station one more year as a senior?" But, kind of realized, maybe it was time to pass on the baton. So, it was hard to say goodbye, but I ended up getting another internship opportunity at this ad tech startup, this company in LA that was helping brands and media agencies promote video content on YouTube.James Creech:This was pre TruView, very early days, helping to make videos go viral. I was just, I guess, really interested in social media, but also, a USC alum was the COO. She was hiring. It was close to campus. It paid. I'm interested in this career path, but also it checks a lot of the boxes as a student that I want to make sure it's a good fit. So, I fell into that internship opportunity and just got hooked right away on the adrenaline rush of working in early stage companies. So, meanwhile, I had been recruiting, trying to figure out what do I want to do after I graduate. I had out law school or becoming a lawyer from my internship opportunity. I realized, okay, I'm more interested in the business side, so I'm gravitating towards that.James Creech:I like this startup company I'm working at, but I had always thought of myself as going into corporate America. So, I did recruitment on campus. I was offered a job to do business consulting and move to New York, which was kind of my dream. I was very excited as an almost 22 year old getting ready to graduate, moved to the Big Apple, and have this, what seemed like a really exciting, glamorous job at the time with travel and everything else. But, long story short, fell into working at Channel Factory, this ad tech startup, loved the team and the mission and the opportunity. They convinced me to stick around, so ended up declining the offer to do consulting and stay on the startup trajectory.Chris Erwin:I think what I'm starting to see here is you're on a unique path where you have both the creative know how and understanding, as well as the business savvy. That's very rare in Hollywood, right? I think of people like Bob Iger at Disney that has both of those sides of the brains, but it's a pretty rare profile, which probably explains a lot of the success that you've had in a very young career to date. Okay, so you go to Channel Factory, and what do you focus on there? Because, it seems like you start at the company when it's pretty early on, and they're on a really high growth trajectory. And, you facilitated some incredible wins there. Tell us about that.James Creech:Yeah, it was ground floor, right? It was in the founder's living room, essentially. We were building a business out of thin air, which was enticing to me and kind of felt similar to live TV production. Okay, there's this excitement. There's this adrenaline rush. You can have a big impact. So, I was basically the fifth employee, came in as an operator, doing a little bit of everything, strategic projects, built out ad operations group, hiring, training, commercial ops. I ended up working quite a bit coaching and supporting and at some points managing some of the sales team.Chris Erwin:This is all in like your young mid-20s, right? Because, you just listed off a lot of different things.James Creech:Yeah. We were all young, for the most part at that time. We were early 20s. It was a young company. It was an exciting opportunity in an early stage of the business. We ended up, of course, bringing in some more senior experienced folks, but there was this meritocracy to an extent, this excitement for youth and passion. So, we were all kind of figuring it out as we went along, and I was this person who didn't know anything going into it, but was just excited about where the company was going and the type of impact that I could have. So, we grew that business to whatever, 40 plus people, and close to or exceeding eight figure revenues. We opened offices in New York and Chicago. It was this wild ride for two and a half years, so learned a lot of lessons, both good and bad.Chris Erwin:Can you elaborate on some of those lessons?James Creech:I learned a lot about how to treat people, right? I didn't always agree with the founder and the leadership at Channel Factory. I had some great people that I learned from and supported me. Then, there were certainly some differences of opinion at times. I would say the other thing is it taught me a lot about the type of leader that I wanted to be and the type of business that I wanted to build one day. It's instructive to learn what not to do sometimes, as it is to learn what to do. But, I got great contacts and relationships. A lot of the people at Channel Factory have also gone on to do some amazing things, many of whom have become very talented entrepreneurs. So, it was this kind of amazing talent pool and this breeding ground for incredible individuals who were passionate about digital video and making an impact on the space, and that's been exciting to be a part of. There were certainly some things that we did really well, and being a young company, made a lot of mistakes, myself included. And, you learn from that and keep going.Chris Erwin:I love what you said. I always repeat this in interviews. It's very important to learn what not to do or what you don't like. In the beginning of my career where I was an investment banker, I worked with some incredible people and developed some incredible skills. But, there was also a lot of experiences and things that I was exposed to that I really did not enjoy, I thought were not good influences to the rest of my career. I consider that very valuable. When I talk to young people that are emerging from the undergrad and entering the workforce, it's this thought of, I have to nail my first few jobs, and that sets up everything for me. The answer, no, I don't recommend that.Chris Erwin:Try new things and experiment, and if it doesn't go well, that's totally okay. And, you're going to learn from that. That was some of the most valuable experiences for me. So, I like what you just said there, James. I think that's spot on. So, after a few years there, you then end up at Bent Pixels, where you also realized some great wins for the company. So, tell us about some of the work that you were doing there and how this set you up for your first big entrepreneurial venture, which is Paladin.James Creech:So, I entered Bent Pixels as an operator. That's what I had done at Channel Factory. The company at the time was a multichannel network in the heyday of MCNs, right? So, there was this time of excitement around Maker Studios and Fullscreen and Awesomeness TV, and Machinima, this early wave of digital disruptors helping YouTube talent grow their audience, monetize their content, figure out the early stages of influencer marketing, and what now we've grown to know as the creator economy. But, this was ground zero, right? You remember. You were there, too. So, this was the very, very early stages of what these future digital businesses were going to look like.Chris Erwin:And, tell us exactly, what did Bent Pixels do specifically? Were they a software platform for the early creator economy?James Creech:They did three things, right? They were a traditional YouTube multichannel network, so they provided services to YouTube channel owners and creators to help them monetize their content. They offered digital rights management services, so they would help IP rights holders monetize and enforce anti-piracy against their content on YouTube. So, they were using the content ID tools and additional manual services to help manage those content libraries. Then, they did audience development, so they were doing channel management and audience growth for brands that wanted help with their YouTube presence, so not unlike Fullscreen, Maker, many others at the time, right? So, when we came in, Bent Pixels was probably a top 30 global MCN. It was probably in the top five for rights management. I don't know, hard to say where it fell in the audience development or channel management services business, just because so many people were trying to get into that space.James Creech:We were doing all of this and facilitating it through technology, right? So, when I came into the business, I mentioned I started as an operator. And, I looked around, and I said, "This business doesn't need operators, right? We have a very capable COO, a general manager." I was looking for ways to do process improvement, cut costs, or optimize systems. There just wasn't much of that to do. The company was profitable and growing, and it had been fairly well managed, right? Well, what the business needs is growth. That's completely new to me.James Creech:I don't really know the space I was coming from, I say is the demand side. I was working with brands and media agencies, and all of a sudden, I kind of end up on the supply side, right? Now, I'm working with talent and content creators. This business doesn't really need all of the skills that I necessarily have historically had. So, we've got to figure this out, right? So, I just reached out to as many people as I could in my network and then through LinkedIn and said, "Hey, I'm curious to learn more about this space. Are you up for getting together for coffee or having a conversation?"Chris Erwin:This is very interesting. What was your primary networking tool? Were you using LinkedIn back in the day for this?James Creech:I was super early to LinkedIn, and I would just reach out to people. I would say, "Hey, I think what you're doing is really interesting. I think this space is early on. There's probably a lot we could learn from each other. Are you open to meeting for coffee or jumping on a call?" And, you'd be surprised, so many people said yes, especially all over the world, right? I was meeting people in Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific. It was this amazing opportunity to meet these other entrepreneurs who were like, "Yeah, everyone's early. We're all trying to figure this out. What are the things that are working for you? What are the challenges?" So, it was a lot of just connecting and sharing and learning from one another. But, obviously LinkedIn has changed a lot, A, over the years, B, post-Microsoft acquisition. But, in those early days, I was a young, snotty nosed kid, very earnestly trying to meet people and be helpful to the extent that I could. And, people were very kind to share their time and experience with me.Chris Erwin:I love that. You and I were actually just talking about this, I think, on LinkedIn. I just started a 30 day LinkedIn challenge. I think LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social networking platforms for professionals, hands down. I've been pretty active on it for the past few years, but our team is definitely ramping up our investment in it in terms of the type of content that we're creating. We've been doing a lot of experimenting, as well as the cadence of content as well.James Creech:Which is amazing. I can't wait to follow your content journey. I did something very similar in 2021, where I wrote every weekday, and it was such a stretch goal. I learned a ton from it, which we can talk about at some point, but I love LinkedIn, very supportive of the platform's evolution into becoming more of a content destination, and like you said, showcasing professional stories and helping people connect. It's getting back to some of those early roots of what it helped me pursue in my career.Chris Erwin:I love that. Well, maybe we'll have to do a mini series of a podcast about LinkedIn best practices. So, you start reaching out to all these different contacts across the world, focused on how do we share mutual learnings, and how do we grow? So, what did you learn? Then, what did you take from your learnings and apply to Bent Pixels?James Creech:So, what I kept hearing was everyone was facing similar challenges, especially as we tried to figure out how to scale. You have to remember at the time, people were focused on initially hundreds of creators. Then, it became thousands of creators. At the highest levels of Maker, Awesomeness, we were managing tens of thousands of creators. Bent Pixels had tens of thousands of YouTube channel partners that they were supporting. This was before YouTube had the infrastructure tools, resources, support to help those creators themselves. So, MCNs were the first line of defense. The demand, the excitement for the space was so dynamic that it was this gold rush mentality, this exciting time of help and enable as many channel creators as possible.James Creech:So, we had been building some software internally at Bent Pixels at the time out of necessity to figure out, okay, how do we find the right creators? How do we manage those relationships, pay them accurately and on time? Eventually, that would become, how do we manage branded content projects with them? Everyone else was doing the same thing. They were trying to build tools in house. They were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. How do we take Salesforce and DocuSign and all these other tools off the shelf, stitch them together into this Franken-suite, and hope for the best? And, it was expensive, and it wasn't working. So, I kept hearing this, and I thought to myself, well, hey, if everyone's facing the same problems, and we're building what to me feels like a pretty good software solution for this, that should be the business, right? I was a big acolyte of Jack Welch back in the days. I would read a lot of his books, this legendary CEO and leader of GE.James Creech:One of the things that stuck out to me is, if you're not one or two in a category, you should cut it, right? So, it just occurred to me at every leadership meeting, I was like, "We have an opportunity. There's this untapped market potential to build software for this new breed of creative companies, and no one's doing it right. So, we should be first to market. We could be a leader there. It's great that we have this profitable growing business, but we're never going to win, right? We're not going to be one or two in the category. We're going to be ... Maybe we move from 30 to 20 or five to three, right?" So, I was advocating for that. Now, the way it was perceived on the other side is, well, wait a minute. We've built this business, at that point I think over five or six years. It is growing. It is profitable.James Creech:All these other companies have raised massive VC investment. They have a lot more resources. We're happy with our business, and we want to keep developing it, but we're not going to bet the house on James's crazy idea, right? They were advocating, hey, let's get into paid media. It's what a lot of other people are doing at the time. There's a big opportunity. I had that background from Channel Factory. So, they kept saying, "No, forget about that. Focus on paid media." I don't know. I was persistent, probably very annoying, young naivete, saying, "I really believe in this idea. Just give me a shot." They shut me down a few times and just said, "No, let's focus on the paid media thing."James Creech:Until, finally one day in some leadership meeting, with the support of our CTO Ole at the time, they said, "You know what?" I think maybe just to shut me up, "Okay, fine, right? You can have two months, 60 days. Give it a shot. Let's see what happens, right? And, if it doesn't work," which they fully expected it wouldn't, "After the field experiment, we'll go back to focusing on paid media." And, I said, "Sounds like a fair deal to me, right? I'll take that bet." So, in those next two months, I signed Maker Studios, Defy Media, Me Too, Networks, and 2btube, which would later go on to become the largest Spanish language creator community in the world. So, all of a sudden, they said, "Wait a minute. This is really interesting. We didn't think you would sign a customer, let alone four of the top players in the space. This is absolutely what we're focusing on, and you should do this full time."Chris Erwin:Did you have to evolve the technology product to service these clients as well as reposition your services to actually close these prospects? So, you had to do both, because you didn't have a technology background before this. You hadn't built tech products. You weren't a project manager, but you had to become this for this new role, correct?James Creech:Yeah. I am passionate about technology, had never been in product, had been adjacent to it, but said, "Yeah, we've got to figure this out." We built a software application that's meant for internal use. We have to figure out access rights, provisioning, white labeling, to make this an externally consumable tool. We need to figure out how to price it. We have to figure out how to sell this to our essentially competitors, right? We were working with these companies that were also in many respects offering the same services or going after the same talent. So, in some conversations, that was a bit awkward, right?James Creech:It said, "Well, how do we know that you're not going to take this data or use this technology to better your business and not ours, right?" So, that was a tricky thing to dance around and navigate. Huge props due to our technical team, Ole our CTO, [inaudible 00:25:56], a lot of our early engineering design product resources who were making this thing happen behind the scenes. I was out there kind of selling the dream, but they were the ones executing on this. A lot of it was just need finding, listening to the market. What do you need? Does the current tool in some form serve that? How do we adapt it to fit what you need? And, what else should we be building in the future so that we can help you get there?Chris Erwin:Hey, listeners, this is Chris Erwin, your host of The Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we're putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guests, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work, and it also really supports what we do here. All right, that's it, everybody. Let's get back to the interview. It's interesting, because just listening to this story, one version would be ... And, James builds this incredible business at Bent Pixels, and he does that for the next 10 years of his career. But, the reality is that actually, you're there for a couple years, and then you found Paladin. So, after this initial two months of success, what actually caused you to say, "Hey, I want to break out and create a different suite of technology tools for the creator economy?"James Creech:So, I think in success, we got even more excited and probably a bit persistent on my idea that, okay, this is really working. We're now signing more and more customers. We're going to put more resources into this. Now, we are the market leader. We're first to market. We're building a name for ourselves in this category. People are rethinking the perception of Bent Pixels as a software company, as a technology vendor, whereas to creators, there's still this brand identity around being an MCN, being a services business, being a media company. But, I'm kind of casting Bent Pixels in this new light and trying to position or change the branding to be this enterprise software tool. Meanwhile, that business segment is growing. Engineers are expensive, so we're adding a lot of headcount to service the need and the customers.James Creech:It got to a certain point where I'm still advocating, hey, let's sell off or shut down the other business units, because look around. A number of other acquisitions had happened. Awesomeness was acquired by Dreamworks. Maker Studios sold to Disney. There was all this M&A activity happening. So, I'm like, "Okay, it's probably a good time to think about what does an exit look like for the media business?" Then, we can focus. We can really double down on this technology play. So, I was advocating for that. The rest of the leadership team said, "It's very clear that you're passionate about this. We don't necessarily all share the same vision or belief in that strategy, but obviously, the way you run a media company and a tech startup, a high growth tech company, require different fundamentals, principles, capital. So, maybe these businesses should live on their own, right?"James Creech:So, that's when the idea was floated that we should spin it out, right? So, it was at the time myself, Ole, our CTO, and I had convinced my good friend and partner in crime, Thomas Kramer, who worked with me back in the Channel Factory days. So, he and I kept in touch. We would catch up and talk about a lot of these challenges. I said, "Would you come over here and lead product for us?" He got excited about that vision and that opportunity, so it was really the three of us advocating for this opportunity. Initially, I was kind of resistant, to be honest. I said, "No, like, I think this is where the business is going. We should focus on this." Ultimately, saw the light that, yes, okay, we should separate these companies.James Creech:For a long time, I wanted the software business to continue to be called Bent Pixels, and that maybe the media company should rebrand as something, Millennial Studios. There were some other ideas that were floated, but after whatever, six months of back and forth and working it out cooperatively as a team, we decided, okay, Thomas and Ole and James will basically buy the software IP and spin out and form a new company, and then will rebrand it, come up with a new name. Bent Pixels will continue as a customer of Paladin, but there will not be any formal relationship between the two businesses. I wanted to be very clear that Paladin is its own company and eliminate that conflict of interest idea. I think Bent Pixels was very happy to say, "Okay, we can offload these expenses from developers and sales people and everything else off our books, focus on our knitting, and get back to the growth of the media business." We worked that all out to happen April of 2016. So, that was when we took the leap and said, "Okay, we're going to set out on our own."Chris Erwin:Did you raise outside capital to give you and your two other founders the ability to purchase the software, purchase the IP, and kickstart what you called Paladin in April, 2016?James Creech:We didn't. We thought about it, but the way we originally structured the deal was Thomas and Ole and I all put considerable capital into the project. Then, some of our partners from Bent Pixels also came in as angel investors. They said, "We like you guys. We believe in what you are doing. We want to support you." So, they were kind enough to give us a little bit of seed capital to help us get through the early days of burn and very kindly help us figure out how to set up our books and transfer the employee leases and all these things that as first time entrepreneurs, you have to figure out. So, they were very helpful and kind and patient with us. But, Thomas and Ole and I were pretty much all in.James Creech:So, to put that in perspective, at the time Thomas was getting married, and he had promised his fiance this amazing wedding. She was amazing to say, "We believe in this dream, and as part of starting our life together, we want to put that money that we would have saved for a big nice wedding with our family and friends towards investing in this startup, right?" So, that was Thomas's contribution. I had been saving to buy a house, so I took essentially a down payment on what I would do to buy a house and said, "I'm all in on the business."James Creech:Every penny to my name and probably even some I didn't have like went into Paladin. Then, Ole has the best story of all, was living in Norway. He's Norwegian and had recently gone out and bought a Tesla, right? Because, he loved the sustainability mission. He loved electric cars, this beautiful new vehicle, right when they had first come out, 2016. He ended up driving back to the dealership and returning the Tesla, so he could take all of that money and put it into Paladin. So, every single one of us was all in from day one.Chris Erwin:Dude, this is wild, because typically, VC backed founders, if the founders have a new business idea, they will mitigate the risk by saying, "Okay, I'm going to contribute a significant amount of my time, right?" It could be a few years in building out this venture, but they're not putting in their own capital. They're going to get capital from third parties, venture funds. Then, that capital is going to be at risk. You are essentially doubly invested with your time and your own savings. But, I think what that means is that you probably had so much belief in what you are building that you wouldn't have done it otherwise.Chris Erwin:I think that belief is clearly very powerful, and for all of you guys to have had that, where you have Thomas contributing his wedding funds, and you have Ole contributing his Tesla funds, and you're even getting from former Bent Pixel employees, angel investment. I think that shows there's really something there. It's almost like with those dynamics, it would've been easy to raise venture capital, because they would've looked at the founders and said, "Oh, my God, their gumption that this is going to happen is so powerful, we want to be in." But, probably better for you guys, because I know you will tell the story of how you sold the company. You guys owned the majority of the equity. I had never knew that story, James. I never knew those dynamics around your business. That's incredible.James Creech:Thinking back to the time, imagining how I felt, I remember being 25. Your goals and your priorities at 25 and whatever, early 30s, are very different. But, something inside me just said, "We have to do this, right? We have the right team. It's the right time. It's the right opportunity." You look at the data. Most successful entrepreneurs are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, right? They've had-Chris Erwin:The average entrepreneur is older than 40.James Creech:Right, and they've had time to build a network. They've had experiences, failures along the way. I had not thought of myself as an entrepreneur up until this point, but something just tugged at me where I was like, "I can't imagine doing anything else." Although I had historically been very risk averse, I was just like, "We can't miss this, right? We have to do it, and we have to do it now. And, if it means going all in, if that's what it takes, then yeah, let's do it. There's no better time to do it than when we're young." So, having that conviction, which I think again is a lot of ... We didn't know any better, right? We were just hoping for the best.Chris Erwin:Which, actually I think is a good thing, to be delusional. You have to be delusional as an entrepreneur. The odds are stacked against you.James Creech:Big time.Chris Erwin:And, you are delusional, but it worked in your favor.James Creech:Yeah, exactly.Chris Erwin:So, you start the company. All right, you all contribute your capital. Paladin is now a thing. So, what are the first steps? Do you rent an office together? Is it, okay, we've got five new hires that we've got to make? What did that first year look like for you?James Creech:Yeah, terrifying, right? You've just jumped off the cliff, and you have to figure out how to build the airplane. Everyone was excited. I don't know if other people were nervous, but we had engineers. We had sales people. We had product folks who were working with us.Chris Erwin:What was the total team size from the beginning?James Creech:It was small. I want to say it was eight to 10, right? We had three founders and then the engineering team and then some of the business folks in LA. We had an office. So, we continued to rent the office. Basically, everything that was in Los Angeles became Paladin, and Bent Pixels had historically been based out of Las Vegas, so they just kept their operations. But, yeah, we had the office lease. We had all these salaries and payroll we had to be responsible for. So, all of a sudden, it's a lot of responsibility overnight to take eight plus people's livelihoods into account. We were losing money every month, right? We're looking at the burn. We knew we had to sell like crazy to just get out of the hole. Our reserves were not very high. We're talking about, we started this business with a few hundred thousand dollars, not any sort of big investment and no VC capital. So, it was all our money and very quickly needed to figure out, okay, how do we make this thing work?Chris Erwin:What were some of the early proof points where it was, okay, this thing is going to exist for more than just six months? What were some of those early wins? And, did you ever think about raising venture capital?James Creech:So, we sold like crazy in order to get to the break even point, and that was 100% of my time and energy in those early days. I think one of the biggest turning points was closing Awesomeness TV. So, I was working with a lot of your former friends and colleagues, Matt Levin, Parker Jones, Kelly Day, also worked a lot with Jen Robinson, the CTO. This was the first six figure deal that we closed as Paladin. I'm trying to remember if that's true. Maker Studios, I think also ended up being a six figure deal, but I think the original commitment was smaller. So, when I closed the Awesomeness deal, it was the biggest customer we'd ever signed. It was like, wow, we're a real business all of a sudden, that this huge venture backed company is going to make a bet on this small startup and offload a lot of its cost. Awesomeness was spending significant sums of money and engineering headcount on these processes at the time.Chris Erwin:Awesomeness spent a lot of money back in the day.James Creech:And, look, they were managing probably the largest network in the world at a certain point, 90,000 creators. We said, "We want to come in and make that easier for you." I think in many respects, we could. Jen Robinson and others saw the opportunity and believed in us and worked really closely with us to make that happen. But, that was absolutely a turning point of, okay, we're signing, as customers, some of the biggest players in the world. They're making this bet on us, and these are real contracts with real budget behind them. That was certainly a turning point.Chris Erwin:This is great to hear, considering the current macro-economy that we're going into, right? So, we are recording this podcast in the middle of May. We have faced, over the last quarter, the 1.4% decline in GDP in the US. I think there's a lot of signals of the global macro-economy slowing. Out of China, there's supply chain issues, rising interest rates, inflation. You name it. I say all of this, because companies are going to need to start thinking about ... I think access to venture capital is going to become a lot more challenging.Chris Erwin:So, what's the best form of capital? It's revenue, and it's having a business that works. So, you guys, that was your approach in 2016, which is, if we're going to finance this business, we're going to create a product that meets the market need, and we're going to sell it successfully. Then, so you closed some big deals like Awesomeness. So, that early validation must have been very rallying the team, and we got something here, right? So, it seems like that success continues for a bit. But, then there's a point in your business where you were telling me a pivot had to happen, right? So, kind of tell that journey from that founding. You have some initial success like the deal you just mentioned, and then what is happening until you realize something's got to change here?James Creech:So, first of all, I love putting it in context, because at the time, people would ask us, "Oh, are you venture backed, right?" As if that were a sign of stability, right? We would do info-sec evaluations through Disney, through Viacom for Awesomeness. People wanted to make sure we weren't going to go out of business tomorrow. I remember thinking to myself, yeah, I would tell people kind of jokingly, "Yeah, we raise money from our customers, and we call it revenue. We have this different model. We're bootstrapped. It's very unusual," and people got a kick out of that. But, to me, it was, okay, we got over the hump. Now, we're break even, profitable. We're reinvesting everything back into the business. So, we closed the deal. We hire another engineer. We hire a new salesperson. But, you had asked, did you ever entertain the idea of raising capital?James Creech:We did. Probably the most serious thought we had around it was we looked at potentially acquiring Epoxy. I don't know if you remember those guys back in the day. They had raised a significant sum. They were great entrepreneurs with a good idea that was probably just a few years ahead of their time, backed by some of the biggest VCs here in LA. I think they raised something like $8 million and just were having a tough time figuring out the business model. This was before people thought, well, can we get creators to pay for anything? And, I really liked Juan and Jason, and they introduced us to Mark Suster at Upfront. We spent a lot of time together, saying, "Does it make sense for Paladin to get an additional capital infusion and then acquire the Epoxy asset and turn it into an enterprise product?"James Creech:We figured we have relationships. We know how to sell this. For a variety of reasons, we decided not to proceed, and it's a shame. They ended up selling the business to someone else, but that was the most serious discussion we had around it. The business certainly changed significantly over the years, right? So, in those early days, we were primarily focused on helping multichannel networks and other digital businesses, so talent management companies and agencies, figure out how to manage digital talent. First, it was YouTube. Very quickly, it became a multi-platform world. So, it was Vine for a little bit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. Then, you have things like Twitch come on the scene, and obviously later in our history, TikTok. So, the business was becoming much more multi-platform. The YouTube MCN business evolved significantly, right?James Creech:There were phases or stages to that business, but it became very clear that the 1.0 model of mass aggregation and monetizing off of the passive AdSense revenue was a bit of a dinosaur, and the new business model was focused on branded content and paid media and other incremental ways to build a business around the creative portfolios that these talent were were producing. So, we knew our business needed to change to keep up. The biggest signal was influencer marketing, right? If you looked at, well, how are creators making money, sure, they make millions of dollars a year in YouTube AdSense revenue, but there's this enormous opportunity from brands in branded content.James Creech:Then, of course later on, we'd see e-commerce, but at the time, we said, "Okay, we need to build tools to help our customers and ideal future customers support this activity. So, let's build better influencer identification and discovery tools. Let's build a much more robust CRM for not just agencies, but for brands. Let's think about creating sales materials, because people are spending so much time generating pitch decks, right?" I remember running influencer campaigns, and it was, okay, go ask the influencer for screenshots and put that into a PowerPoint presentation. Email it over to the client, and then they're going to ask for revisions.James Creech:You go back and forth, right? Why don't we just tap into the social APIs, pull all that data on demand, and create this robust real time reporting around the campaign, so that, A, you deliver better results, and B, you can actually monitor and optimize campaign performance in real time. So, that was really the direction that we started to go, was saying, "Okay, as much as we still want to support these customers and this opportunity, we're slightly modifying our strategy, and we're adjusting course to go pursue this influencer marketing opportunity, because it's brands and agencies figuring out how to work with creative talent in the digital economy."Chris Erwin:Got it. That was a big pivot that happened around what time, James?James Creech:Around 2018, 2019.Chris Erwin:And, so did that cause some real friction at your company? Did you have to rethink, hey, do we have the right team? Do we have the right sales strategy? Do we have the right relationships? Do we have to rethink how we're doing coverage? Do we need to build new products and services? And, do we have the right director of engineering to do that? So, what were some of those big key decisions that you had to work through as you pivoted the business?James Creech:Well, certainly, changing the identity and the branding of the business a bit, also the product offering, right? So, again, going back to need finding, what do the customers want? How do we build that out? It's easy to build something for one customer, but how do we build something for hundreds or thousands of customers? And, what is the right team composition that will help us to get there, right? It's classic innovator's dilemma of, well, we're still very dependent on these existing customers and their business needs. And, we want to continue to support that. But, at the same time, we need to be investing in this new direction. And, there were some hard conversations and hard decisions that came about from that, right? Some people on the team were very excited, made the transition easily. Other people said, "Maybe this is my stop on the train, and I'm going to get off and pursue other opportunities."James Creech:Other people were excited about the direction and couldn't make it work, or performance started to slip as we shifted strategy. So, you have to make some tough calls, but the team worked really hard through that time period to help us change course. It's not the most dramatic pivot in the world, but it certainly felt like a big shift at the time. It didn't happen overnight. We've got this North Star. We're going to move towards it over the course of 12, 24 months. And, I remember we got our entire team together in Poland. We've historically had a big operations center for engineering in Kraków. We brought the whole team in to Poland and said, "This is our vision. This is what we're going to build together." I think that was really energizing, to harness the energy of everyone and say, "We have this shared mission and objective. Here's why we believe it's going to drive business value, better opportunity." And, it wasn't easy, but certainly was the right choice to start to move in that direction.Chris Erwin:I like that a lot. We had a team reflection last week, and we're realizing that just having run an advisory business for five years that has gone through a rebranding and a transformation in the last couple years, as we're entering this new macro-economy and just also thinking about who are the clients we work with when we provide certain services? What feels great and is right in our wheelhouse, versus what feels like we're stretched or doing something different? And, there was a big kumbaya moment where we came together. To better service our clients in the industry, we need to really rethink things. It was some tough conversations, but when you just face it head on, and then you empower your team and be like, "You guys are all here for a reason. What are your ideas for how to fix this? And, how do we all rally behind that?"Chris Erwin:And, it was a very powerful moment. I'm saying that, because it feels like when you had this conversation with your engineering team in Poland, you have to face this stuff head on. There's certain people, like you said, this is their stop on the train, and they're going to get off. But, for those that it's the right fit, keep going forward. That's best for everybody. I particularly feel very reinvigorated after this conversation, and I see this incredible potential for success going forward. I have a much smaller business than what you have. Did you feel coming out of that, you're invigorated, you're excited? And, did you have that same feeling when you first founded Paladin of, we got this, we're going to crush this? There's no doubt in the world. Were you feeling that?James Creech:I wish I could say yes, but I don't think so. Founding a business and running a business is an emotional journey. I'm so privileged to have two amazing co-founders, because sometimes you have a bad day, or you lose sight of what you're building towards. They can help lift you up, and vice versa. But, there were some tough times around 2018, 2019, where we were making this change, because the environment, the business conditions around us had changed. We realized we needed to do something to continue to grow and to survive. Again, I started the business with youthful idealism and ambition. Sometimes, we set really high goals for ourselves, and we don't always live up to them. I'm still very proud of what we built and how we had done it, but it's easy to move the goal post on yourself.James Creech:So, looking at that time in our journey, I remember we were committed to figuring it out and moving forward. But, I have to tell you honestly, there were some very tough times in those years of ... Are we doing the right thing? Are we making the right choice? And, are we going to get through it? Because, it was really challenging. Once it started to work, absolutely, it felt amazing, right? Things really started to click in 2020, and I had more passion and enthusiasm for the business than I had back in 2016. It re-lit this fire in us of, okay, we got through the hard work, the two years of making this change. We see where it's going. We're rebuilding in this new direction, and it's fun. We're hitting our stride. Everything's growing really quickly. We're bringing on new customers, new team members. We're winning, and that's the exciting part. But, in the slog of making that transition, it wasn't always fun. That's for sure.Chris Erwin:I hear that, but I think you're right. There's just something as an entrepreneur and a founder and a CEO. You have to trust your gut. Are we having fun? Does this feel right? You can have all the KPI dashboards in the world and follow all the numbers, but there's just some intuition that's really important. As I reflect in my career, there's moments where I can specifically say I felt differently about a business decision, and I didn't listen to my gut, and it was a major miss. So, as a business owner, now I'm listening to my gut more. I want to be a database decision maker, but I think instincts are very, very valuable when you have to pivot and move quickly and also really energize your team. I hear that.James Creech:You need both.Chris Erwin:You end up selling the company to Brandwatch, which I think was just announced over the past month. So, I'm curious to hear the story to exit right after this success, the 2019 pivot to now. How did you end up selling to Brandwatch?James Creech:We were evaluating, what is the next step for us in 2021? As I mentioned, the business started to really hit its stride in 2020. We were looking around at the overall market landscape, and look, influencer marketing is a crowded, competitive space. It's great. It keeps us sharp, but we realized if we want to continue to grow and compete in this space, then we need to either raise money and start to double down on sales and marketing or execute on a broader roll up strategy. Or, we can find someone who shares our vision and our passion for this category, but has more resources and can help accelerate our growth, right? So, the calculus for us at the time was ... You look at our well known, well funded competitors. Do we go out and raise money? It's certainly a path. That's an option.James Creech:Paladin had customers in over 35 countries, across five or six continents. So, we were competing against different people in Germany, than we were in Singapore, than we were in Dubai. So, it was different by market, but we recognized that, okay, we need to raise capital to help accelerate, or we need to find an exit. So, thinking about the fundraising process, as I mentioned, we're bootstrapped. A lot of us had good, favorable positions on the cap table. If we raise money, you dilute the ownership, and you kick out the goal post, I don't know, two plus years, let's say. And, the other thing I was cognizant of is, well, it seems to be this interesting moment in time where things are happening at such a rate, people want to get into this space. It's probably the right time for us to find a partner. We had had a lot of inbound interest, so we said, "Let's test the waters and see what the reception is. If we don't find anyone we like, we can always fall back on our current plan of just keep growing, or we can look at the fundraising alternative."Chris Erwin:So, you were getting inbounds from companies that were interested in kicking the tires around you potentially in an acquisition?James Creech:Yeah. We have throughout the history of the business, but it became especially acute interest in, let's say Q1, Q2 of 2021. So, I reached out to my banker friend, Jason Rapp at Whisper and said, "It seems like there's some interest here. We should probably run a process. How should we handle these conversations?" So, he came on to help us with that, very quickly had some phenomenal conversations with great people that I think saw what we were building and wanted to help add fuel to the fire. But, I was fortunate to meet Giles Palmer, the original founder of Brandwatch, who now works at Cision, the parent company. We just hit it off. He said, "Can you spend some time with our product team?" We met the product and engineering team. It was like magic from the first call.James Creech:They loved the product. They saw what we were doing. It fit very neatly into their thesis and what Brandwatch has been building in and around consumer intelligence and being a leader in social listening. They have been merging with Falcon.io, which is an amazing social media management tool. Influencer marketing was very clearly just the third leg of the stool. So, we got excited about that. They said, "Hey, can we talk tomorrow? Can we talk Monday after that?" And, very quickly, it escalated where they made an offer, and it was the right offer and the right time. We said, "Yeah, let's go into diligence." So, we ran diligence over the holidays. So, I was at Christmas with my family, Christmas 2021, hanging out with family during the day, and then working until about 3:00 AM every night, because A, I had a lot of work to do.James Creech:And, B, I had these colleagues in Europe who were also burning the midnight oil on their holidays. So, going through all of DD, and then we kind of finished that in early to mid-February. At the same time, we were running a parallel path on the purchase agreement documents with legal, reached an agreement on that in end of February. Then, we had to do a 30 day hold for DOJ approvals, announced in March, and then finally closed the acquisition at end of March. So, long process, but a lot of learnings and an exhilarating outcome. So, it's been amazing to see it all the way through.Chris Erwin:Wow.James Creech:It is such a process, right? It's probably the hardest thing I've ever done. People tell at the end, "Oh, congratulations. We're so excited for you." And, that's amazing, right? You experience all the emotions of joy, excitement, elation, but at the same time, strangely, at least I also experienced this feeling of loss, which I think is natural. It's kind of closing of one chapter and beginning of another, where you're saying goodbye to this thing that you've built and you've poured so much of your energy and time and money and everything else into. It's like a kid maybe growing up and going to college.James Creech:It's exciting. It's the next evolution, but it's also saying goodbye to the thing that I knew in its past form. Then, honestly, there's this just overwhelming sense of relief, because a lot of it feels like deliverables and juggling so many plates and keeping everyone happy. Every different constituency has something else they want from this outcome. So, if you're able to get to a point where everyone's satisfied, or as much as you can, you just get it done. It's this amazing feeling of, whew, right? We did it, and that relief is also very comforting and satisfying, I suppose.Chris Erwin:One last quick question before we get into rapid fire is, what's next for James? You're going to stay on at Brandwatch for a while. Are you going to go start your next company? What are you thinking?James Creech:So, I have come on to Brandwatch as the SVP of influencer strategy. So, I get to work with the global leadership team to help think through how do we inject influencer and creator economy strategy into the entire business, which is so exciting, right? I've spent too much time and energy on this to walk away for now, so I'm very excited to be in this new phase of the business, doubling down on what we've built, adding more resources, combining that with the amazing product suite that Brandwatch has. So, I'm still all in, excited about what we're doing. As you mentioned earlier, I'm still involved in a lot of advisory engagements, and it's fun for me to get to give back and support other early stage entrepreneurs. So, still a big passion for me and something I make time for, but in terms of my day to day focus, yeah, it's 100% all in on Brandwatch.Chris Erwin:Before rapid fire, James, I just want to give you some kudos. I have known you for a while in the industry. I think our LinkedIn posts have crossed paths for at least over five to seven years. I think our relationship, we've gotten to know one another better, I think over the past couple. I was on your podcast. Now, you're on mine. I think there could be a fun future ahead where we collaborate on different things. That's a separate convo, but I just want to say, as I've gotten to know you, learning about just how thoughtful that you've been in building your business, how thoughtful, how you are in building for the creator economy, I think one of the things that got me excited when I entered the whole YouTube MCN space back in 2012 was this positive sum mindset.Chris Erwin:We can all grow together. There's incredible opportunity. I think that you embody that feeling incredibly well. You just put out a lot of positive, good juju into the world. You're very supportive of so many people. I think it has a really big impact, and I think it's a great inspiration for so many others. So, massive kudos, and I hear you on this notion of loss, loss and relief. You had this baby. You took a huge bet on it. It's worked out incredibly well for you and your team and your co-founders, but James, you're a young guy with a very bright future ahead. You have many, many more exciting wins that lie ahead in your future. Just have faith and the trust that we are lucky that you have the time to go and do that work.James Creech:Well, thank you. Thank you for all of that. It's very kind. I'm flattered, and I've felt for a long time that you and I are maybe kindred spirits in a sense, right? Oh, I've got to spend more time with this Chris guy, because you're very obviously very intelligent, well connected, thoughtful in the content that you share, the communities that you curate through your events and dinner series, and things like that. Also, I just think we have a lot of personal interests, like your real estate investing and everything else. So, any chance, any excuse I have to get more Chris Erwin in my life, I will take it. So, just putting that out there, because very much excited about that. And, one other note, maybe just to kind of close things out is, as I mentioned, started the business in my mid-20s. I'm now in my early 30s.James Creech:As you go through this process, I think the most impactful thing that I've learned is recasting what defines success. For a lot of peop

I was introduced to Jesse Cale on the Growing Up Christian Podcast and was infatuated by his story! Jesse is a wildly talented musician, artist, creator, and human! I could have talked to Jesse for hours, gleaning from his insight and experiences. I hope you enjoy this 2-part series!  Jesse Cale, also known as McSwagger, was born on May 19th, 1990, in Columbus, Ohio. He is a singer, musician, artist, composer, YouTuber, and former member of Maker Studios (now Disney Digital). He has worked with several other YouTube musicians, including Tessa Violet, Dodie Clark, and Emma Blackery. Instagram: @jessecale Twitter: @jessecale Growing Up Christian  YouTube --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/mygaychurchdays/support

The media veteran who took the reins of Mattel in 2018 outlines the toymaker's recent turnaround strategy and his focus on mining the IP value locked up in Mattel's “treasure trove” of toy and game brands. Kreiz is drawing on his deep background as a TV and digital entrepreneur (Fox Kids Network, Endemol, Maker Studios) to guide Mattel through new creative partnerships with Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Vin Diesel, among other notable stars. Kreiz has grand ambitions of building a Marvel-like universe out of Mattel's family friend assets. “We're not making movies to sell more toys,” Kreiz says. “We're making movies people want to watch.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

The media veteran who took the reins of Mattel in 2018 outlines the toymaker's recent turnaround strategy and his focus on mining the IP value locked up in Mattel's “treasure trove” of toy and game brands. Kreiz is drawing on his deep background as a TV and digital entrepreneur (Fox Kids Network, Endemol, Maker Studios) to guide Mattel through new creative partnerships with Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Vin Diesel, among other notable stars. Kreiz has grand ambitions of building a Marvel-like universe out of Mattel's family friend assets. “We're not making movies to sell more toys,” Kreiz says. “We're making movies people want to watch.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Mark Suster, General Partner at Upfront Ventures, talks about how he transitioned from being an entrepreneur to investing in startups. Mark elaborates his Lines and Dots technique for evaluating founders. He also points out some fundraising mistakes to avoid, especially when the capital market is undergoing correction.In this episode, you'll learn:6:27 Entrepreneurs need different kinds of help at different stages of their company.10:47 Cadence, ability to hire talent, and ability to ship code are tell-tale signs of a successful founder.15:03 Taking fundraising as part of your day job, and allocating time for it, is critical to building a strong company.23:03 Don't optimize for short-term valuation. Inevitably, everybody ends up raising capital downstream even if they thought they were not going to.Non-profit organization that Mark is passionate about: Defy VenturesAbout Guest SpeakerMark Suster is a General Partner at Upfront Ventures. Previously, Mark was the founder & CEO of Koral (Acquired by Salesforce.com in 2007) and BuildOnline (acquired by The Sword Group). Upfront Ventures backed both startups. Mark became VP, Products at Salesforce.com after the acquisition of his company. He had been working with Upfront partners for 8 years prior to joining as a General Partner, to help fund like-minded entrepreneurs. Mark writes a blog, Both Sides of the Table, in which he shares his views on tech trends and offers advice to start-up founders.Fun fact: Ask Mark about triathlonsAbout Upfront VenturesUpfront Ventures is an LA-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage technology companies. Founded in 1996 in Los Angeles with investing professionals based in LA, San Francisco, and Paris, Upfront has backed standout teams across all technology sectors, including Ring (acq. by Amazon), TrueCar (NASDAQ: TRUE), Bird, MakerStudios (acq by Disney), GOAT, Apeel Sciences, thredUP, Invoca and Kyriba (acq by Bridgepoint). Upfront invests about half of its capital in the fast-growing Southern California ecosystem, with the balance across the country as well as investments in Europe and Israel.Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode that will drop next Tuesday. Follow Us:  Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook

This interview features Sarah Penna, Senior Manager of Creator Launch at Patreon. We discuss how a trip to India inspired her media career, being one of the youngest YouTube MCN founders,  her $15 million exit to DreamWorks Animation, how she picks co-founders,  marrying a YouTuber-turned Hollywood filmmaker, founding a female-forward entertainment brand, and what's up next for Patreon. Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com---EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders. Sarah Penna:We had outgrown the office. We were in the National Lampoon office. It was so janky and eventually we moved the talent team to my dining room table. I would cook dinner for the talent team. We would take talent meetings in my living room, which was just so bizarre and unprofessional but worked. My house was kind of a YouTuber hotel. It was very wholesome and very duct tape and bubble gum feeling. We were just kind of figuring it out. Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Sarah Penna, senior manager of Creator Launch at Patreon. So, Sarah was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her father was a serial entrepreneur and her mother ran the family construction business. Sarah's first foray into media began while studying abroad in India, when she became the translator for a documentary film crew. So after college, she moved to California and immersed herself in LA's up-and-coming digital media scene, which included working with OG YouTuber Phil DeFranco. Sarah rapidly became a digital expert and started her own digital talent management company in 2010, which eventually became Big Frame and was sold to AwesomenessTV and its parent, DreamWorks Animation. Chris Erwin:Today, Sarah runs a team that helps Patreon develop and launch premium talent partnerships, and also advises Frolic Media, a female-forward entertainment brand she co-founded in 2018. Some highlights of our chat include how we first met during an awkward interview moment with a guitar, when having 10,000 subs made you a Top 100 YouTuber, how she picks co-founders, what it's like to marry a YouTuber turned Hollywood filmmaker, and what's up next for Patreon. Now, I've known Sarah for nearly 10 years. She was actually my gateway drug into all things digital entertainment and where it not for her founding Big Frame, I would not be where I am today, and I am forever grateful to her, which makes me super pumped to share her story. All right, let's get to it. Sarah, thank you for being on The Come Up podcast. Sarah Penna:Thanks for having me. Chris Erwin:We got a little bit of history here. So, we'll see how much of that we can get through in 90 minutes before your next thing. Sarah Penna:Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot to pack in. Chris Erwin:As always, let's rewind a bit and let's talk about where you grew up. So, my understanding is that you grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Your family had some land in Wyoming. I think your dad was a bit of an entrepreneur, but tell us about your upbringing. Sarah Penna:Yeah. I had a pretty cool childhood. I grew up in Utah. My parents were total hippies, just big personalities, did not grow up in the predominant faith of Utah. So, it was a little bit of an outlier, and my parents own a construction company together. So, a little bit of foreshadowing into how I worked with my husband at one point, but I grew up with an older sister and a younger brother. We had a menagerie of animals all the time, like goats, and my dad kept bees at one point. We always had two or three dogs and a bunch of cats and an iguana and chinchillas. We just had this kind of crazy Bohemian, bizarre, Jewish, hippie not Mormon family. Sarah Penna:So, my parents owned this construction company and became relatively successful with that but my dad has curse, as I do, which is, always coming up with new ideas and deciding to act upon them. He had a Japanese restaurant and he had a furniture company and he had an emergency preparedness kit company, and I- Chris Erwin:Would he do all of these at the same time as the construction business or would it be like stops and starts and all of that? Sarah Penna:No. My mom held it down. She really was the mastermind behind the construction company. She did all of the office work and made sure ... she really ran the company and then my dad was kind of the face of it. He was out at the job sites and in the early days, was actually doing the building. So, I got to see my mom be in this, talk about a male-dominated industry. She would come home so mad because she would get a piece of mail that ... her name's Paula and they would always address Paul, because they couldn't believe that a woman was running a construction company. So, I got to see this powerful woman running this super successful business in basically a hundred percent male-dominated industry. Chris Erwin:Sarah, I've known you for over 10 years and we worked together intimately for at least three or four of them. I had no idea about your background. I just learned more about you in two minutes. It took a podcast and a 10-year relationship to get here. Sarah Penna:That's totally my bad. Chris Erwin:All good. So, okay. As a kid, when your father dabbled in all these new business adventures, was that really exciting for you guys? Maybe frustrating for your mother, but as kids you're like, "Oh, dad's up to some cool stuff again." Sarah Penna:Yeah, it was fun. I was 15 when he did the Japanese restaurant and I got to work in the restaurant and just, it was cool, and I didn't realize the stress and the financial burden that it was putting on my mom and kind of how frustrating it was for her but I see that now, looking back, and she handled it amazingly. She's an incredible woman. But I'm a very early riser, and as a kid, I would ... my dad is, too. He would get up at four or five in the morning and I would, too. He would just load me up in his construction truck and we'd go get pancakes and go milk the goats and go check on his construction sites. So, I got to see the inner workings of that. Then, I love going to the office and rifling through my mom's office supplies. Chris Erwin:Well, I got some important Post-it notes here, got a yellow legal pad, all the things. Sarah Penna:It was so fun as a kid. You're like, pens and Post-it notes, and the office supply closet was just like this heaven. Chris Erwin:My dad, he ran a psychology business and still does for 40 years and had his own office, and then every year he hosted a conference. One of my favorite things is that he would hire his children, me and my twin brother, and we'd have to lick 500 envelopes and put stamps on them. But we got to use all of these office gear, we thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then, after a few years, we're like, "I think we're getting sick from all of this stamp-licking." Sarah Penna:Yeah, probably. Chris Erwin:But separate story. Sarah Penna:That's really funny. Chris Erwin:So, a question, watching your father's entrepreneurial endeavors and also your mother, too, running the business, did you feel like, "Hey, when I grew up, I'm going to have my own business too." Sarah Penna:Honestly, no. So, I was an incredibly shy child. I was very quiet. My family likes to joke that they thought I was just going to buy a cabin in the woods and just frolic in daisy fields and that would basically be all I could handle. So, to the shock of everybody, of what I wound up doing with my career, so no, I was very directionless. I went to a very intense high school that was a college prep school. There was a lot of pressure to kind of figure out what you wanted to do. Frankly, I just didn't have any passions. I wasn't thinking, "Oh, I want to take over the family business or I want to be an entrepreneur." I didn't even have that language. Sarah Penna:So, in a way, that was great because what I wound up doing didn't exist when I was little. If I had said, "Oh, I want to be a lawyer or an actress or what ... " something that did exist, I don't know that I would've found the path that I did find. My parents never called themselves entrepreneurs. They were just, this is what we do and this is how we do it. Chris Erwin:Very interesting, Sarah. So, I'm going to put the puzzle pieces together here. Let's talk about another formative event growing up. You had also mentioned that you studied abroad in India, where you actually learned to speak fluent Nepalese. So, tell us about this transformative moment for you. Sarah Penna:Like I said, I was a very shy child. In college, I kind of blossomed, but maybe in the wrong ways. I partied a lot and just, again, was quite directionless. I was a literature major, which is just like the lazy ... No, I love being a literature major, but it is a non-major. It doesn't really set you up for business success. Originally, actually, I was going to travel. I was going to study abroad in Italy and I had this moment where I just looked at myself and said, "You need to push yourself right now. This is a moment." My college had an incredible study abroad program in Nepal. Sarah Penna:Long story short, they couldn't do it in Nepal. There were some civil unrest, so they moved it to India. I went to India and I lived in a place that didn't have running water, and I did my laundry for six months in a river. I got perspective that I never would've had. During that time I met up with a documentary film, I will say, crew in quotes, because it was just two white dudes traveling around not knowing what they were doing. They were in this tiny little village that I was staying. I was living in a monastery and because I spoke the language I could just hang out with the locals. It was very funny to them that this tiny, little white girl spoke fluent Nepalese. Chris Erwin:Did you take Nepalese in advance of going to India at all? Sarah Penna:No. Chris Erwin:So, you just picked it up in country. Sarah Penna:Yeah. Chris Erwin:Wow. Sarah Penna:Writing is very hard, but the language itself is very intuitive once you fit the pieces together. So, I would help them. Tourists would come. I lived in this monastery for a couple of weeks. Tourists would come and I would help them translate and negotiate and all this stuff. So, these guys came, they were filming. I was like, "I'll join up with you guys and translate for you and help you get interviews and that kind of stuff." Because if you speak the language, it just opens more doors. So, I wound up traveling with them, and one of them I wound up dating, but that's for another story. He was going to UCLA. I was graduating. He was going to UCLA grad school. Sarah Penna:I was graduating college and I wound up learning about documentary film and originally thought I wanted to go into documentary filmmaking. So, 2006 is when I was in India. Chris Erwin:Got it. Did you have an interest in media and the arts before you met this documentary film crew/attractive young man that you wanted to date? Sarah Penna:No, and I didn't have any connections and I didn't have any ... but, again, I was kind of, not in a disparaging way, but I was kind of an empty vessel, right? I had no idea what I was going to do and this thing really sparked me. I loved holding the camera. I loved seeing the story come together. I moved to Venice with him, and this is way too long of a story, so I'll just make it really short through a series of very wonderful coincidences, which involved me randomly picking a documentary film at the LA Film Festival and contacting the filmmaker. I got an internship at World of Wonder and that kind of started my trajectory in media. Chris Erwin:This was the first time you dated a documentary filmmaker. I look at this as a warm up for Joe. We'll get into that later. Sarah Penna:I only dated creative people, [inaudible 00:11:39]. Chris Erwin:Another podcast for your wild party days at Pitzer College. All right, so that led to your first work experience at World of Wonder. So, tell us about what that company was doing and what your role was there. Sarah Penna:World of Wonder in 2008 was probably the most amazing place to work, I have to say. It was constantly drag queens coming in the office, and parties. It was just a wild time. They were filming the first season of Million Dollar Listing, which I was an intern on. They were filming the first season of Tori and Dean: Inn Love, the Tori Spelling Show, which I was an assistant on. They were filming Porno Valley. They were filming ... I mean, it was just like a wild, wild time, incredible company. I loved it. I also recognized that reality TV wasn't really for me. While I was working there, I also was making short films and uploading them to these two new websites. One of them was called YouTube and one of them was called Current TV. Sarah Penna:Current TV was Al Gore's network based in San Francisco, where you would upload short documentaries and then the ones that got the most votes, they would ultimately put them onto their TV network. So, I had a couple documentaries get bought and put onto the TV network and ... Chris Erwin:Were you doing this independently or as part of World of Wonder? Sarah Penna:No, no, totally separately. Chris Erwin:Got it. Again, I had no idea that you did this. Sarah Penna:Yeah. Now, we're in 2007, the first documentary that got picked up was about me getting my medical marijuana license. Chris Erwin:Okay. Sarah Penna:It was a very new thing at that time, and so I documented the whole journey of what it was like to get a medical marijuana license and I smoked a joint on-screen. When I got hired there, it would play in the rotation, and one time Al Gore came to visit the office and they had the TVs up in the office playing Current, and my documentary came on with me smoking a joint and meeting Al Gore at the same time. It was very embarrassing. Chris Erwin:I'm famous/I'm super embarrassed. What a mix of emotions. Sarah Penna:Yes. Chris Erwin:So, Sarah, I have to ask, you're working at World of Wonder, you're working on these incredible programs that are probably being sold to network TV, right? Not digital outlets and streamers. What was the catalyst that you're like, "I want to put my content on YouTube and Current TV." How'd that come to be? Sarah Penna:I just felt something more compelling about it. It felt more free. It felt like, somebody like me coming from Utah with literally zero connections could make something and have it be put on TV within a couple of weeks. Then, on YouTube, you couldn't monetize at the time. It was very rudimentary. I don't know, I just fell in love with it. Chris Erwin:YouTube was founded in 2004 and then, was it bought by Google in 2006, if I remember correctly? Sarah Penna:I think that's right. Then, 2007 Time magazine made you, the cover and the Person of the Year was you, and it was a mirror. I was like, that to me was a moment where I said, "Okay, this is really a thing and I want to be involved in it." Chris Erwin:I think you start meeting some pretty important early personalities and movers and shakers within digital video. I think you met one of the founders of what eventually became Maker Studios, I think. Was it Danny Diamond or Danny Zappin? Is that the same person? Sarah Penna:That's the same person. His YouTube name was Danny Diamond. Chris Erwin:Got it. So, how'd you meet Danny? Sarah Penna:So, I was working at this very small web series production company which, yes, that was a thing in 2008. So, I got laid off right from Current because the financial crisis hit. They laid everyone off. They sold the network to Al Jazeera. I moved back to LA. I had been up in San Francisco, moved back to LA, started working at this web series production company, got introduced to Danny through some mutual friends. He said, "Look, I just got some money from YouTube and I'm filming this thing for this new channel that we're starting called The Station. Why don't you just come up and see what it's like?" So, I go up there and unbeknownst to me, it was every big YouTuber at the time. It was ShayCarl, and KassemG, and Shane Dawson, and Danny, and Lisa Nova, and everybody- Chris Erwin:OG names. Sarah Penna:Funnily enough, my future husband was supposed to be there, but I don't remember exactly what happened, but he wasn't there. Chris Erwin:Okay. So, you're doing this. Are you thinking to yourself, "Oh my God, I'm having so much fun. This is a crazy world." You're embarking on a very exciting career adventure. You're seeing this change in the media industry. Did you feel that at the time or was it more of, "This is fun. I'm meeting some cool people. Let's see where it goes." Sarah Penna:It was more the former. I really thought to myself, I want to be involved in this in some way, shape or form. I really don't know what this is. Chris Erwin:Yeah. Sarah Penna:Not to say that I'm a genius, but I just had something in my gut that said, you've got to be involved in this somehow. You have to make this happen. Chris Erwin:That instinct proved to be pretty powerful for you in starting Big Frame, which we'll get to in a little bit. So, you meet Phil DeFranco, a prominent OG YouTuber, and I think you become a producer for him and his team, right? Sarah Penna:Yeah. So, he hires me in November of 2009 and I worked for him. We launched a new channel, which was like a gaming channel for him. I did PR for him. I handled brand deals for him. I edited because I still knew how to edit at the time. A skill I'm very sad that I lost. That was just an amazing experience. He had split from Maker TV at that time and so, we were kind of running our own thing. I think Phil, to this day, is one of the most brilliant, genius content creators that's come out of the YouTube space. He's just continually reinvented himself and not, just kept doing what he did and stayed successful. So, that was a masterclass in how to run a successful YouTube channel. Chris Erwin:Got it. Also, through Phil DeFranco, you actually end up meeting your future husband, Joe. So, he actually showed up on time for production or maybe a first day that you guys had. How'd you first connect with him? Sarah Penna:Before Phil hired me, I got invited to a Halloween party at his house and Joe was there, and I had actually very embarrassingly seen Joe's videos before meeting him. I was producing a short film with a prominent YouTuber at that time named Olga Kay and we were just doing some fun. We actually crowdfunded it. We raised a couple thousand dollars and made this thing called Olga Kay's Circus. We wanted Joe in it because he had a lot of subscribers at the time. He had 10,000 subscribers, so he was in the Top 100 YouTubers. Chris Erwin:Oh, my God. Sarah Penna:Can you believe that 10,000 subscribers would get you there at that time? So, we wanted Joe in it and we wound up meeting at this Halloween party and then Phil connected us and match made us a little bit, and we went on our first date in January of 2010. Chris Erwin:Then, how soon were you married or engaged after that? Sarah Penna:So, we went on our first date in January 2010 and then we got engaged in September of the same year, and then we were married the next year. Chris Erwin:First date with Joe, January 2010. Engaged, September 2010. Married, 2011. Interesting timing because you launched your first company, Cloud Media, I think in 2010, and you're sharing production space with Joe. So, you're tripling down on the digital media space. You're literally married to a creator. You're sharing space together and you're founding your own media company. But tell us about what was the origins of Cloud Media. Sarah Penna:Yeah, so I basically, again, I didn't say, "Oh, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm going to raise money." I didn't have a blueprint for that. I didn't know what I was doing, which I think you'll hear a lot of entrepreneurs say, that's kind of a blessing in a lot of ways. So, I did a very big brand deal for Joe. I was able to negotiate a high six-figure deal for him, and using the percentage that I took as his manager from that, I started what I called the Cloud Media. I bootstrapped that company for a year and a half and just operated it based off of the percentages that I was taking from brand deals that I was doing for influencers and YouTubers, whatever we called them at the time. Sarah Penna:My difference was I would start out by not doing contracts with them. We would just have a understanding, which is very common with management companies. Most managers don't have contracts, right? That's more for agents and Maker and Fullscreen at the time were insisting on contract, and Machinima. I was like, "Hey, you don't have to sign a contract with me. Let me just show you what I can do. This is my fee, and if you like it, then you can officially sign onboard and we can go from there." So, that worked really well for me. So, I started signing. I think by the time that we re-founded the company as Big Frame, I had about 30 clients. Chris Erwin:I remember, that was one of the things that attracted me to Big Frame. This is definitely the reputation in the space, is that you had built, Sarah, one of the most premium networks of YouTube creators that existed. Really high quality YouTubers that worked together, that worked with you, and there was really good camaraderie and trust and rapport amongst everybody, and it felt very special and different. So, it's clear that was based on these initial values of, I'm going to do good work and prove myself to you, and that's how we're going to develop a business relationship. Until I came in and then I was like, "Sarah, we need contracts." Sarah Penna:A big influence on those ... those are, me as a person, my core values. But DeStorm, who was my second client outside of Joe, who I just cold called and was living in New York, he really sort of guided me in how he wanted to be treated, how he felt business should be done. He really helped collaborate with me on some of those foundational core values that we carried throughout the duration of Big Frame really. Chris Erwin:So, speaking of that, you're literally learning from one of your clients. Were there any other mentors in the space as you're figuring ... this is the early days. We still say we're in the Wild West of the creator economy, that was the real Wild West of YouTube. So, probably, very few people to learn from. Did you have anyone that you would call on a regular basis and say, "Hey, let's just share notes." Sarah Penna:No, I didn't. Unfortunately, I think the space became quickly competitive. I would say at the beginning there was a little more collaboration between, let's say, like Danny and George Strompolos and myself. We would go up to YouTube and talk to them together as a group and what our needs were and share creator feedback. I think once money started pouring into the space we got a little more siloed, which is understandable, but no, I didn't. I was really out there in the woods like, "Okay, this is what we're doing now." Not really knowing what that was. Just saying, "Okay, this is how we're doing it. This is how our contracts are going to look." Chris Erwin:How old were you at this point? Sarah Penna:I was 26. Chris Erwin:So young. So, then, I think, well, as part of that dynamic, as the space got more competitive, George is launching Fullscreen, Danny is launching Maker, more venture capitals moving to the space. The Google Original Channels program launches, $200 million dedicated fund to help creators produce higher quality content for YouTube, which will then attract more advertisers and more revenue. So, I think at this point is when you eventually connect with Steve Raymond, the co-founder of Big Frame, which got its origins from Cloud Media, right? Sarah Penna:Exactly, through a mutual friend. I was on the hunt for a CEO. I recognized my limitations. I did want to raise money. I didn't know what that entailed. Frankly, I needed more of a grownup. I think my skillsets were really great on the creator side and the brand deal side but as the industry started growing up, I very quickly recognized I need someone who has a skillset that I just don't have. So, I met Steve and we hit it off, and we had a couple meetings, and he just jumped right on in. We decided to re-found the company. None of us liked the name because people thought it was like cloud computing and, which is fair, and it just made sense to start fresh. It also gave us an opportunity to have contracts with people and just structure it in a way that would allow us to raise money. So, yeah. Chris Erwin:Hey, listeners, this is Chris Erwin, your host of The Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we're putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guests, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work and it also really supports what we do here. All right, that's it, everybody. Let's get back to the interview. I have to ask, I started the advisory firm five years ago that I have now. I started that with a co-founder and then quickly realized, "Hey, I have a certain vision and I'm going to build this in my unique way." So, restarted the advisory firm with me as the solo owner. Chris Erwin:I've realized bringing someone else into the mix that really gets the vision that I feel comfortable sharing this with is difficult for me. I just know my personality, and founder issues are always like the hardest things in any startup. How did you feel in terms of bringing Steve on? Did you feel comfortable? When you met him, you're like, "Hey, this guy gets it. We have shared values and sensibility." Were you able to develop a sense of trust with him pretty quickly or did that take a decent amount of time? Sarah Penna:I trusted him very quickly. Although, I sometimes felt like that scene in The Little Mermaid where she's like, closes her eyes and signs her voice away, I was like, "Am I doing that?" I definitely had that moment where I was like, "Am I letting somebody in I don't ... ?" We had three meetings before. I was like, "Here's a third of my company." We had another co-founder, that's it. We don't need to [inaudible 00:25:56] but basically, here's half of my company. I definitely had people who were like, "Don't think you should have done that." But to me, the value of Steve and the ability ... I did trust him. The main thing for him was, he was very clear that he didn't want to disrupt what I was doing. He was very impressed with the business that I had built on my own and he didn't want me to feel like he was coming in to change that. Sarah Penna:He invested some of his own money and valued the contracts that ... I was like, I don't have that money to invest, but he was like, we should value the money that's in the bank for Cloud Media and the value of the contracts or the agreements that you have with the talent. So, I was like, "Okay, that's really fair." He made it easy. That, for me, was important. I don't like complicated things. I don't like long dragged out negotiations, and I was ready to just get to work. So, he was someone who was like, "I know how to do this. I have the connections. I don't want to disrupt your work." He's a good guy, I could just tell, and we made it work. Chris Erwin:I love that. I know Steve very well. He was my boss for three or four years and learned an incredible amount from him. But I think you're right, Sarah, the thing that stands out about Steve was just a good guy, good moral compass, and he doesn't let great get in the way of good enough. He'll just say, "This is good. This is thoughtful. We've talked this through. Let's move forward." But like you said, he's very fair in how he wanted to value the company. I didn't know that, but it's totally on brand for him. So, curious, I joined in the summer of 2012, I was ... Sarah Penna:Oh, boy, what a summer that was. Chris Erwin:So, I went to business school after being a Wall Street banker for a few years. Then, I was in school in Chicago and I worked while I was there for Pritzker Capital, which was an early investor in the YouTube MCN ecosystem. They had invested in Big Frame. They invested in Awesomeness. We eventually joined forces, and that is how I met Steve first. I was talking to Rishi, Rishi or Matt McCall and they're like, "Yeah, when you fly out to LA for these meetings, we invested in this company called Big Frame. You should check them out." I was like, "I don't even understand this company's business model, but digital video that feels like the future. I'll take a meeting." Chris Erwin:I remember meeting Steve and we had lunch on the Promenade, and then I came in for my first interview. I walked into the office, this is on Sunset Boulevard in the old National Lampoon building. I walked in and I walked into a ... it feels like we were just working out of someone's semi-living/work space. I was like, is this a company? Is this like what West Coast work is like? Because I had grown up working on the East Coast. I walked into the back room and in the back room there's this little circular table. Steve's there. Grant Gibson's there. Jason [Szymanski 00:28:39] is there. Then, you're at your back desk. Chris Erwin:So, you're supposed to be part of this interview, your head's down on your computer. They're like, "Oh, that's Sarah over there." I looked over and I'm like, "Oh, I guess this is what founders do in digital media. They're just heads down in their computers. Maybe I'll eventually talk to her over time." That was my first introduction to Big Frame. So, I just say all of this as I was like, this is like a precursor to just wildness that ensued thereafter. We had just gotten the Google Original Channels funding, raised some venture funding on top of that, and then it was like, build these five different content verticals. I'm curious to hear from you, there are so many memories from back in the day, but as you think about some of the war stories from the trenches, what are some things that stand out? Sarah Penna:Oh, my God. Well, your interview definitely. Also, you failed to mention that we had two absolutely crazy wiener dogs running around the office as well. Yeah. I think we had outgrown the office. We were in the National Lampoon office. It was so janky and we ... eventually, we're on three different floors. We moved sales to an office down Sunset. We were sandwiched between a strip club and a Trader Joe's. Then, Joe and I were renting a house off of Sunset, like walking distance, and eventually, we moved the talent team to my dining room table. Joe at that time was putting two YouTube videos a week out on his MysteryGuitarMan channel, and he would stay up all night and then he would sleep until 2:00 PM and he'd come downstairs. Sarah Penna:It was like, Lisa, Byron, Megan, Rachel were at our dining room table, and Joe was rolling out of bed as one of our talent but also my husband. I would cook dinner for the talent team at my house. We would take talent meetings in my living room, which was just so bizarre and unprofessional, but worked. We would also throw these wild game nights, board game nights, so Settlers of Catan was very popular at that time. We would have 40 YouTubers in our house playing Settlers of Catan with multiple games going on. My house was like a YouTuber hotel. We had a guest bedroom. Jenna Marbles came and stayed. Lena came and stayed with us. DeStorm. It was very wholesome and very duct tape and bubble gum feeling. We were just kind of figuring it out. Chris Erwin:I remember that. I remember Steve explaining, "Oh, we're having a reorg." The reorg was like, "Okay, we're moving the talent team to Sarah's house across the street." Then, production goes upstairs into a semi-new office that we got. For us, at that size, that was like a big deal. Sarah Penna:It was. Yeah. Oh, man, when we moved to our Lindblade offices, was that like heaven on earth to have an actual office, but that was later. Another funny memory I had was when Max first started. He had come from a place where he was doing really, really big deals. I handed him off a brand deal opportunity for $1,500 and he went in the bathroom, which by the way was right next to everybody's desk and splashed cold water on his face. We had moved him from New York to LA and he was just like, "What am I doing?" Ultimately, Max, obviously, was an absolute rockstar and built out that sales team to just be very profitable and doing really well. Sarah Penna:But that first deal was $1,500, and that was just par for the course at that time. It was shocking to people coming from the outside and then once it clicked, it really clicked and you're like, "Okay, I get what we're doing here." But there was just a lot of duct tape and bubble gum. Chris Erwin:I think Max is going to be an interview on this podcast coming up. I have interviewed Dan Levitt. When I think of Dan, we talk about when I first interviewed him and I think he showed up in some shiny suit and Jason Szymanski in the back office is pointing. He's like, "Chris, we're launching a music vertical and we have a new interview candidate coming in." I would just look out the window and I would be like, "These characters." I was like, "I've never worked with any characters like this before." I come from Wall Street, so it's was like everyone's in a suit and tie. I see people coming in shiny suits and I'm just like, "I think this is the new world I'm in. I'm just going to roll with it." Chris Erwin:So, it was such a rollercoaster of fun. So, then exciting things are happening and eventually, we move into this big new office, I think on Lindblade in Culver City. We're closer to Maker. We're closer to Fullscreen. Then, we run a process to sell the company. I'm just curious to hear from you, Sarah. Bringing Steve on was probably like, that was a big decision for you, but then hiring an investment bank that's going to run a sales process, we're going to have new ownership and potential leadership. What was it like for you to make that decision? Sarah Penna:That was really hard. I just wanted to keep the party going. Like many young entrepreneurs, I think I tied my identity completely to this company. And my husband was in the next office, he was a client. We went home, we would talk about brand deals over dinner. My entire identity was Big Frame. All of my friends were in some way, shape or form involved in this company. My family would tease me when I'd go home for Christmas. They're like, "Are all of your friends under contract?" I was like, "Yeah, kind of." Chris Erwin:Maybe a nice way to go through life. Sarah Penna:Yeah. I mean, we know where we stand with each other. No, but I just, I was so immersed that the idea of losing control was hard. I think I also felt my limitations as a founder and that's hard to come up against when you're kind of, I don't want to say that I was arrogant, but I was really confident and I felt really good about how I was running things and running the company. Then, we got to a point where my limitations and our limitations became evident and that's hard. It was hard and it was also exciting because it is, under most circumstances, it's a great thing. I also just had never been through anything like that, so I let a lot of anxiety get to me. Sarah Penna:I let it completely consume me. I'll be totally transparent. I would cry on the bathroom floor, like, what am I doing? There was a lot of doubt. I think that was probably the biggest strain on Steve and I's relationship, is how to go about this and how to present in the room. That was a big source of stress for us. Who's going to present? Is it me? I've been out there kind of the face of the company. I've been doing all the panels, and the VidCons, and the press, and the creator. Or is it Steve, who is the CEO who, frankly, should be doing it? Chris Erwin:That was unclear. We brought in an executive coach to help us figure that out. Sarah Penna:We did. Ultimately, like many of these things, it just came about through relationships and less about going and pitching, and the relationship that I had kind of built and cultivated, and changing landscape. There were a lot of factors, but that was very stressful. Then, in New Year's Eve of 2013, while we were in the middle of this process, I found out I was pregnant. Chris Erwin:Just to pile it on. Sarah Penna:Just for fun. Thought that would be a great thing to add on to the plate at the time. It's so funny because I think back a lot to the moment where I told Steve that I was pregnant, I was hysterical. I couldn't even tell him. I was crying so hard. He was like, in a very nice way, "I don't understand why you're so upset. This is a good thing." I was like, "What?" I thought he was going to be so mad and that this was going to ruin everything. I tell that story only to say, I think that our culture makes young women feel like ... and I had a lot of people tell me, then opened up to me over the years, that they felt like they can't have kids because of ... that moment of, "Oh, my gosh, I have to now disclose this thing." Sarah Penna:Even if it's illegal to not move forward with something because someone's pregnant, you can still find other ways. So, I thought I had completely ruined everything and that was ... I'm very sad about that looking back, but Steve really was like, "This is awesome. I'm so happy for you. Don't even think about it. Nobody's going to bat an eye." That was true. I wound up giving a keynote at VidCon eight months pregnant and we sold the company, but that was very stressful. Also, I couldn't drink. It was a lot. We were celebrating and I was like, "You know what? I'm having a glass of champagne because I'm ... You all have been drinking through this very stressful process and I haven't." Chris Erwin:More like being pregnant was also a launching pad for you to launch the mom's vertical at Awesomeness- Sarah Penna:Yes. Chris Erwin:... which came thereafter but, yeah, just to add some context on some of the notes here. I remember in the MCN days, there was the early Awesomeness launch in 2011 and then it was sold to DreamWorks, I think, in 2012, and everyone got really excited. But then, the YouTube MCN winter hit and there was a lack of capital flowing into the space. People were saying like, "Are these businesses real? Are they viable? Are they just going to get consolidated into traditional media?" It was harder to raise capital, and there was a lot of doubt in the ecosystem. Then, in 2013, I think in the second half of the year, Disney bought Maker for $500 million. Then, we made a decision, we're like, "There's a moment in time here, let's hire an investment banker." Shout out to Brian Stengel. Sarah Penna:Yay, Brian. Chris Erwin:We kicked off a process in the second half of 2013 and sold in April of 2014 to AwesomenessTV. Look, I was very intimately involved in that process with you and Steve. I saw how hard it was on you guys. You guys were just carrying an incredible burden. I think something, too, like a theme of your career, Sarah, where you have this passion for overlooked communities. I think you getting into the digital fears, there's a way to service these new creator voices in an exciting way with new business models and new distribution models. I bet there was some fear of ... A lot of this business was your friends and your friends actually had equity in the company. Chris Erwin:You had given equity out to a lot of creators when you launched Cloud Media and Big Frame. What if all that was going to change with this new ownership? I think that was probably a moment that you were concerned about. I don't know if we'll ever make all these details public, but the sales process, I just remember like one week it would be super exciting. We're flying to New York for this big meeting with a traditional publisher. Conversations are going really well and then they completely flat lined and go nowhere. Then, the next week, it's like really exciting, but eventually got to a great result. Sarah Penna:At three in the morning, while we were all still at the Big Frame offices collapsed on the floor. Yes. Chris Erwin:We end up selling to AwesomenessTV. I think that was a very exciting experience for all of us. I think Awesomeness was, in a way, they were the Goldman Sachs of the YouTuber economy back then. They built an incredible team and network, and I think we all really learned a lot from Brian Robbins and Joe Davola. Just amazing creative visionaries. You also launched a mom's vertical while you're there with Snooki and JWoww, you do the corporate thing for, I think, two to three years then it's okay, what are you going to do next? I think that you start seeing another underserved community, which is the romance community, and you think about launching a company there. So, what's that quick story? Sarah Penna:While I was running the mom's vertical, which as you said, I think my big passion in life is finding underserved communities and overlooked communities and creating content around them. I felt at that time that the content that was out there for moms was just not great and it was a huge market. So, Brian had brought on a woman named Lisa Berger who comes from E! and has had a very long traditional media career. He brought her on to do the Go90 programming and the YouTube programming for the Awestruck, which is the mom's vertical. We hit it off and we have a great time together running this crazy thing, and we wind up optioning a romance novel and turning it into a series for Go90. Sarah Penna:Very, very, very long story short, we crashed Go90 because of how popular it was, despite everyone telling us it wasn't going to work. I'm a huge reader and I love romance. I was looking out at the landscape and saying, "You know what? I think romance is going to have a moment, like what Marvel did for geek culture, where now it's cool to be a geek." I think we're at this point, this is 2017. Trump is in office. Women are pissed off. We're sick of all of the stuff that we're like being disparaged. We're sick of all of the female characters in popular shows being killed off or assaulted or whatever. We just want happily ever afters. Everyone's disparaging this romance community as just sad cat ladies, single cat ladies eating bonbons. Sarah Penna:I was like, "We're going to go prove them wrong. Fuck this." Similar to the early days of YouTube, where I saw these influencers have a chip on their shoulder where, "Oh, you just think I am a single dude making videos in my mom's basement." There was a similar misconception about the romance novel fandom. The romance novel fandom is actually incredibly educated, diverse, not just in who they are, but where they live and their socioeconomic status. They're incredibly feminist and they know that it's fun and cheesy. They know that there's a wink and a nod. We set out to create a space to celebrate that, not make fun of it, not disparage it. Sarah Penna:It's a fascinating culture, a fascinating community. I was not part of it in the sense of participating in the fandom, but I've been a long time romance novel reader and I was in the closet about it because I was embarrassed. So, we banished the term guilty pleasure because we don't want anyone to feel guilty about reading romance. So, we set out and we created a digital platform and a newsletter, and then started optioning novels to turn into movies and TV shows. We got a first look deal with CBS. We have a deal with Audible and we have a deal with iHeartRadio. Our daily podcast is going to launch in February. So, really set out to just create a space where people who actually know and love romance are creating the content. Chris Erwin:I love that, Sarah. It's also very interesting, when you came to me and I was like, "Sarah, what are you thinking about? What's up next?" You told me about the romance community. I did a double take and I paused because I'm like, "Wait, this is such a huge community." I think in traditional media, think of all the rom-com movies, but nothing in digital. I'm like, "Yeah, this is totally overlooked. Why is no one else talking about this? This is huge." I think it's very interesting how you characterize it as ... yeah, often when I say, even to this day, "I'm going to watch a rom-com." I'm embarrassed as just an older male saying that, but why? Why do we say it's a guilty pleasure? Chris Erwin:Why is there any guilt about a really fun love story? When love is one of the number one drivers of happiness and a common theme that all of us talk about around the dinner table and with our friends. Sarah Penna:Why is being a horror fan, seeing people get murdered, why is that not looked down upon, but seeing people be happy is? Very interesting. Chris Erwin:Very interesting points about the romance community. So, you are at Patreon now. Are you still co-running Frolic? What is happening with Frolic Media? Sarah Penna:Yeah. So, Lisa has taken over and is helming Frolic. I continue to be a strategic advisor and obviously, care very deeply about the future of where that company goes, and cheerleading and championing them from the position that I am in now. Chris Erwin:I think it's a very exciting space. We interviewed Naomi Shah, the founder of Meet Cute on this podcast as well, which does these, call it like rom-com microcast. I started listening to those over the past six months and I absolutely love them. Bite-sized nuggets of just rom-com joy in audio form. So, I believe in it. Pay attention to RockWater's 2021 predictions about underserved communities because I think this could be ... potentially, we will publish this likely in the end of January. It could be a good cover note that you're sending to any potential investors or partners for you. Sarah Penna:Absolutely. Thank you. Chris Erwin:Believe in the thesis. Okay. So, before talking about Patreon, I just want to talk about another concurrent journey within your family in the media space, which is your husband, Joe. He's been a creator for over a decade. I think in the past few years, he was digital native on YouTube doing incredible stop motion biography, but always wanted to cross over. I think he's realized some incredible success recently. Why don't you tell us about that? Sarah Penna:Joe is just, I obviously am biased, but he has an incredible creative mind. He's good at everything he does, which is so annoying, but I love him for it. He is good at languages, and art, and music, and math, and all of that really combined and you can see that reflected in the fun, playful nature of MysteryGuitarMan. But like you said, ultimately, he really wanted to direct movies. When he first started down the journey, there was a trend of these influencer-helmed, one to two million dollar movies that would be VOD and make back their money. You'd put the how many subscribers that YouTuber had and how much we were going to sell it for, and set download on iTunes, and that was where his agency and his management team was kind of pushing him to. Sarah Penna:He said, "You know what? That's not really the path that I'm going to take," and wrote a movie called Arctic, which is a mostly silent movie helmed by a 50-something-year old Danish actor named Mads Mikkelsen. So, quite the opposite of an influencer-helmed comedy. Joe willed that movie into existence. There was every hurdle against him. He had to start from the bottom. His YouTube channel didn't help him because he wasn't doing an extension of MysteryGuitarMan. He didn't want to be in front of the camera and he did it, and that movie got into Cannes. We went to Cannes, and it premiered and got a 10-minute standing ovation. Chris Erwin:Whoa, I did not know that. A 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes? Sarah Penna:Yeah. Chris Erwin:Good for you guys. Sarah Penna:So, that was just ... walking that famous red carpet, and for me, it was wonderful because I ... He had finally gotten traditional management. I was no longer managing him. So, I actually got to go to Cannes just as his wife, as his plus one. I was not worrying about logistics and getting him to his interviews on time. I still was but I wasn't [crosstalk 00:47:45]. Chris Erwin:It takes a village to get Joe to an interview on time. Sarah Penna:Truly, especially in a foreign country. That's a whole other story. So, that was just a really incredible moment to see and he, off the heels of that, they announced at Cannes his next movie, which was called Stowaway, which had Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette, and Daniel Dae Kim, and Shamier Anderson in it. It premiered on Netflix last year. Now, he is working on so many new projects and so, hopefully we'll be shooting another one this year. He's loving it. He's very good at it. He has the personality to be a director. Very in control of his set, he's very calm, creative, collaborative and it's just very, very cool to see. You know what? He went through the grieving process of letting go of that YouTube channel and he's out on the other side and making things happen. Chris Erwin:That's awesome. I remember when we heard that news, there was a lot of text threads amongst the Big Frame community. I remember texting with Byron and with Max, and with Steve about, "Look, how awesome is this about Joe? Have you heard?" We know that he'd been working so hard and he was just such an incredible creator from day one. So, we're pumped for him and it feels like this is just the beginning for what he's going to do. Right? Sarah Penna:It really feels like he's on the trajectory, for sure. Chris Erwin:Yeah. So, look, you and Joe, as this media power couple continue to evolve. Speaking of the most recent step in your evolution, as we work to the final segment of this interview, Sarah, you guys moved to Santa Barbara, I think during the COVID pandemic. Then, you recently, someone that we've known mutually for a while, Avi Gandhi, you started talking to him at Patreon and saw an opportunity to join the creator team over there, which is your latest creator adventure. So, tell us about what excited you about moving to Santa Barbara and your new role at Patreon, and what you're doing over there. Sarah Penna:Yeah. So, I wanted to move to Santa Barbara for 10 years and it never was feasible or realistic, and I, like many people during the pandemic, had a very hard year. Living in LA just became very challenging. Jonah, my son, our son is, when the pandemic started was five, and now he's seven. We just felt if we were going to do it, it was now or never because he started having his best friends and it just becomes harder as they get older. So, we just pulled the ripcord and we did it with no plan, no idea if it was going to work out and it has been just an absolute dream come true. We love it up here and was fortunate enough to be able to join this incredible company, Patreon. Sarah Penna:I joined in November and like many things in my career, it just felt so right that I couldn't pass it up. A big driving factor was, obviously, it's very hard to leave my start-up and to leave Frolic. I did it in the best way I could, but for me, going to a place that really shares my values in that creator space, I started seeing the creator economy and the interest in it heating up in a way that I haven't seen in a long time. Similar to when I met Danny all those years ago, and I was like, "I need to be a part of this." I felt that the train was leaving the station without me and I wanted to get back into the creator space. Sarah Penna:I took a lot of time looking at what is the right company for me, for my values, and for what I want to do. Patreon is kind of a unicorn, a unicorn in the sense that it's valued at a unicorn status, but also a unicorn, for me, because it hit this very narrow target of what I was looking for. Chris Erwin:Just remind me, how long has Patreon been around for? Because I remember Patreon, early days of when I started Big Frame in 2012. Is that right? Sarah Penna:Yeah, eight years. Chris Erwin:So, now at Patreon, what team are you running there and what are you focused on for 2022? Sarah Penna:I live on the creator partnerships team and I run a team called Launch. We are responsible for giving creators white glove experience for launching their Patreon pages. We have teams that are going out and sourcing those creators. Once they come to us, they are pretty excited about the platform and we help them figure out what tiers are best for them, what banner image is going to look good, and really help them drive towards their launch date. These are creators that range in all kinds of sizes and all kinds of ... I'm talking to someone who makes leather, like leather wallets and leather goods, and we're talking to big YouTube creators and celebrities, and we're talking to everybody in between. Sarah Penna:It's just a really exciting time to be at a company like Patreon that's been in the creator space for so long, is helmed by a creator, and is going to continue to be a real player in the creator economy as it goes forward. Chris Erwin:It seems that there's incredible traction for your business where I think there was a recent announcement. The team is currently 400, but you're doubling the company to 800 people this year. Is that right? Sarah Penna:Yes, that's what they say. Chris Erwin:Well, look, I think the market tailwinds are definitely behind them. I think, yeah, it's a really exciting evolution. We've written about this extensively at RockWater. YouTube created these new business models for creators, where they can publish content online and then participate in ad revenue through YouTube's AdSense program. Then, the chance to distribute content to other social platforms and participate in ad revenue there and then doing talent deals, brand integrations, and getting paid off platform. Then now, I think there's this incredible movement with all these creators, the audiences that they bring, the fandoms that they generate, the engagement that they generate on these platforms, they're the real moneymakers. Chris Erwin:So, how do you give them more tools though, to also not only build these platform businesses, but their own businesses? So, Patreon doing that, allowing them to have direct relationships with their fans, get access to contact information, monetize in different ways behind a paywall, different types of subscription content, whether it's video or audio, whatever else. I think what you guys are doing is a beautiful thing. We need more companies thinking like you. So, I think that you guys are really well set up for success, and I'm excited, Sarah, for the different communities of creators that you guys can represent, that have a need, that don't have the tools from other platforms that are overlooked right now yet, again, going back to what you do best. Sarah Penna:Thank you. I absolutely agree with all of that. I have said for years, as some people, not many, but a lot of people in the creator space, you need to own your audience. Renting your audience is not sustainable. You need to build community. You need to not just be on a conveyor belt of content, You really need, as a creator in this space, the tools are there for you to build a sustainable business and to not be tied to the whims of platforms and algorithms. There's a big conversation about creator burnout. Patreon is positioned to help creators solve some of these big issues, big and, by the way, nuanced issues. It's not just, oh, these platforms are bad and we are good at all. Sarah Penna:These platforms are great and you need to build up audiences on your podcast and on your social. If you are able to have ... I'm a really big a fan of Seth Godin's 1,000 true fans idea. If you can build out 1,000 true fans who are on your Patreon, you might be covering your rent. You might be covering your rent plus plus, and you might be making a really good living. That's what we want. We want to empower creators and we're really set up to do that. It's just an exciting time to join the company. Chris Erwin:Before we wrap this up with the closing rapid fire round, Sarah, I just got to give you some big kudos here. You legitimately changed my life. I'm trying not to become emotional here. I look back on my past career over the past 10 years and everything that I've done, being able to found RockWater is a function of you, starting Cloud Media and Big Frame, and then taking a chance on me. I had a very different background than someone that you had ever typically hired before. I'm sure that you needed some convincing from the rest of your leadership team. Chris Erwin:But what I have learned with you, the pedigree that I've gained and the experience has not only been so personally transformational, all these new relationships that I've built, women that I've dated and just incredible friendships and all of the above, it's really set up an exciting career for me. Something that I wake up to, excited to do every day. I see a lot of incredible potential going forward. It's a function of you taking a chance on me and getting early into the digital video MCN days. So, I am very, very thankful. I think there's many people that have very similar sentiments to what I just shared. Chris Erwin:So, I'm probably speaking on behalf of many. So, big kudos to you, and particularly to call out, I don't come from a creative background. When I came in and was very systematic and operational, I wanted to scale the business, it took me a while. But seeing how you ran the creative team, how you nurtured the culture, when you brought in Rachel and Megan Corbett, and Lisa Filipelli, and Byron, and people that I spent a lot of time with and really learned an incredible amount from, it really all stems from you. So, Sarah, you have been an incredible person in my life. You did incredible things for all the talent at Big Frame. Chris Erwin:You are now doing the game again, with Frolic and with Patreon, and I wish you the best. As you know, anytime that you need anything, sometimes we don't talk for six months or a year, but when we do, we pick up very, very quickly. I am a massive supporter of everything that you do. So, call me whenever you have a need. Sarah Penna:Thank you. Now I'm crying. Thank you so much, Chris. That means a lot to me. Chris Erwin:Very well-deserved. Okay. So, now, let's move into closing rapid fire. Six questions. The rules are, you can answer in one sentence or in one to two words. Do you understand the rules? Sarah Penna:Yes. Chris Erwin:Okay. Here we go. Proudest life moment? Sarah Penna:Having my son Jonah. Chris Erwin:What do you want to do less of in 2022? Sarah Penna:Less complicated. Chris Erwin:What do you want to do more of? Sarah Penna:More space in my schedule. Chris Erwin:I like that. Advice for media execs going into 2022? Sarah Penna:Don't believe all of the hype and just keep your eye on the ball. Chris Erwin:Any future start-up ambitions, Miss Entrepreneur? Sarah Penna:God, I hope not. No, not as of right now. I am very happy not running a company right now. Chris Erwin:Not necessarily off the table. That's basically what you're saying. Sarah Penna:It's never off the table with me. Chris Erwin:Last one. This is an easy one. How can people get in contact with you? Sarah Penna:Sarah@patreon.com. Chris Erwin:Very easy. All right, Sarah, this was a true delight. Thanks for being on the podcast. Sarah Penna:Thank you so much, Chris. This was so much fun for me, too. Chris Erwin:Wow. That interview with Sarah just flew by. I felt like there were so many more things that we could have discussed. We'll have to do another podcast together. Yeah, I admit I got a little teary-eyed at the end there just going down memory lane with her. She was really formative in my career and, yeah, that really hit me at the end. I was not expecting that. All right. So, a few quick things. Our Livestream Commerce executive dinner is coming up. The date is now March 10th. We are 98% close to confirming that with our sponsor. But if you're interested in attending, shoot us a note. You can reach us at hello@wearerockwater.com. Chris Erwin:Also, we are hiring. We're looking for interns, undergrad and MBA level, and also a full-time analyst. We are growing all things creator economy and we need help. If you're interested, you can apply at jobs@wearerockwater.com. Lastly, we love to hear from our listeners. If you have any feedback on the show, any ideas for guests, just reach out to us. We're at tcupod@wearerockwater.com. All right, that's it, everybody. Thanks for listening. The Come Up is written and hosted by me, Chris Erwin, and is a production of Rockwater Industries. Chris Erwin:Please rate and review this show on Apple podcast and remember to subscribe wherever you listen to our show. If you really dig us, feel free to forward The Come Up to a friend. You can sign up for our company newsletter at wearerockwater.com/newsletter and you could follow us on Twitter @TCUpod. The Come Up is engineered by Daniel Tureck. Music is by Devon Bryant. Logo and branding is by Kevin Zazzali. Special thanks to Alex Zirin and Eric Kenigsberg from the RockWater team. 

Jason is an expert in the e-commerce space, consistently providing value to companies including Rhino Entertainment, Maker Studios, Universal Music Group and 300 Entertainment. Listen in as we break down Jason's unique path exploring consumer products, marketing, fan engagement and more! This is an episode you won't want to miss!

Jason is an expert in the e-commerce space, consistently providing value to companies including Rhino Entertainment, Maker Studios, Universal Music Group and 300 Entertainment. Listen in as we break down Jason's unique path exploring consumer products, marketing, fan engagement and more! This is an episode you won't want to miss!

Notable Orange County Ska Bands The Aquabats.The Forces of Evil.Goldfinger.The Hippos.Jeffries Fan Club.Mealticket.My Superhero.No DoubtFollow Mike at @thelastmcneal on the IG and look him up at www.mikemcneal.com.Drop us a line payorrequest@gmail.com with comments or fan mail. Watch Young Sheldon on CBS on Thursday nights. 

Jason is an expert in the e-commerce space, consistently providing value to companies including Rhino Entertainment, Maker Studios, Universal Music Group and 300 Entertainment. Listen in as we break down Jason's unique path exploring consumer products, marketing, fan engagement and more! This is an episode you won't want to miss!

Episode 403 This week Ashley Scott Meyers talks with Writer/Content Creator Logan Burdick. They talk about the new Rom-Com he wrote, It Takes Three (2021).  That movie stars Mikey Madison and Jared Gilman. Logan Burdick also talks about how he became a digital content creator for Maker Studios which was bought by Disney.

This conversation explores the L.A. tech scene and venture investing featuring two of the industry's leading voices. Spencer Rascoff and Dana Settle discuss Pacaso and Greycroft while sharing their thoughts on L.A.'s evolving ecosystem. Dana Settle is a founding partner of Greycroft, where she heads the firm's West Coast office out of Los Angeles. Prior to joining Greycroft, Dana spent several years as a venture capitalist and advisor to startup companies in the Bay Area, including six years at Mayfield, where she focused on early stage companies in the mobile communications and consumer Internet markets. Dana currently manages Greycroft's investments in Anine Bing, AppAnnie, Avaline, Bird, Bumble, Citizen, Clique, Comparably, Goop, HamsaPay, Happiest Baby, Merit Beauty, Seed, Thrive Market, Versed, and WideOrbit. She also managed the firm's investments in The RealReal (IPO), Awesomeness TV (acquired by Dreamworks), Maker Studios (acquired by Disney), Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn), Trunk Club (acquired by Nordstrom), Sometrics (acquired by American Express), Viddy (acquired by Fullscreen), and Voicea (acquired by Cisco). Show notes and resources: Dana Settle bio on Greycroft Both sides of the table Diversity Ride for the Term Sheet  

#20: Lisa Donovan is the founder and CEO of The Pattern, an intuitive, astrology-based social networking app that was created to help people better understand themselves and connect with others in a deeper way. Celebrities like Channing Tatum have given the app public praise for its accuracy. Lisa has an extraordinary resume, starting out one of the first YouTube creators and later selling her business, Maker Studios, to Disney for $500 million.   Today, Lisa and I talk about:   The influence astrology had in her life during a challenging time, which eventually influenced her idea for The Pattern Her craving for deeper connection with others, learning about their charts and how the app was filling a void she felt New features coming down the pike for the app I get a personalized reading from Lisa!   Download The Pattern HERE! You will need to know the exact time you were born to have your charts show up accurately. #MAYFAIRWORLD   Get In Touch With Lisa: Follow The Pattern on Instagram HERE Follow Lisa on Instagram HERE Download The Pattern app for Apple products HERE Download The Pattern app for Android HERE   MERCH: We are offering 20% off with the code MAYFAIRWORLD. Shop our latest drop, “Mayfair Athletics” HERE.    Want More From Mayfair? Follow Sam on Instagram HERE Follow The Mayfair Group on Instagram HERE Shop The Mayfair Group HERE TEXT 81247 for exclusive updates! By signing up via text, you agree to receive recurring automated promotional and personalized marketing text messages (e.g. cart reminders) from Mayfair Merch at the cell number used when signing up. Consent is not a condition of any purchase. Reply HELP for help and STOP to cancel. Msg frequency varies. Msg & data rates may apply. View Terms {http://attn.tv/mayfairmerch/terms.html} & Privacy {https://attnl.tv/legal/p/Vii}   This podcast is produced by Nikki Butler Media

You might call Lisa Donovan—founder and CEO of the astrology app The Pattern—a genius entrepreneur, or you might call her a soul-reading wizard. In 2018, The Pattern went live in a public beta without any marketing or PR. Today, Donovan has grown the platform to over seven and a half million users, with notable fans like SZA and Channing Tatum. There's no doubt that Donovan's years of work developing The Pattern are shown in the app's burgeoning success and scarily accurate insights, but it may come as a surprise that astrology is indeed Donovan's second life. Previously, she had a career in many forms of entertainment as an actress, a popular YouTube creator (you may remember her channel LisaNova), a producer, and co-founder of Maker Studios. On this episode of Second Life, find out how Donovan found healing through astrology and uses it to connect with millions of people around the world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mattel went through three chief executives in four years before Ynon Kreiz took the job in 2018. He stood the test of time in part because of a big bet: taking Mattel's toys to Hollywood. The toy giant is partnering with Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie to bring Barbie to life on the big screen, and creating films based on everything from UNO to Magic 8 Ball. It's a strategy that draws on Kreiz's past experience at entertainment companies like Maker Studios and Endemol, and one that draws inspiration from franchises like Transformers and companies like Lego, which Kreiz says was able to make “great movies out of bricks.”In this conversation, Kara Swisher stress tests Kreiz's strategy, asking whether these potential movie franchises are any more than glorified marketing and what a movie based on the Magic 8 Ball may look like. (Reply hazy, try again.) They also discuss the future of play in an age of video games and smartphones, and when Mattel might introduce a transgender Barbie. Oh, and Kara pitches her own media franchise mash-up: a Teletubbies movie directed by Martin Scorsese.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Mattel went through three chief executives in four years before Ynon Kreiz took the job in 2018. He stood the test of time in part because of a big bet: taking Mattel's toys to Hollywood. The toy giant is partnering with Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie to bring Barbie to life on the big screen, and creating films based on everything from UNO to Magic 8 Ball. It's a strategy that draws on Kreiz's past experience at entertainment companies like Maker Studios and Endemol, and one that draws inspiration from franchises like Transformers and companies like Lego, which Kreiz says was able to make “great movies out of bricks.”In this conversation, Kara Swisher stress tests Kreiz's strategy, asking whether these potential movie franchises are any more than glorified marketing and what a movie based on the Magic 8 Ball may look like. (Reply hazy, try again.) They also discuss the future of play in an age of video games and smartphones, and when Mattel might introduce a transgender Barbie. Oh, and Kara pitches her own media franchise mash-up: a Teletubbies movie directed by Martin Scorsese.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Just a few weeks ago, a Blackstone-backed media vehicle acquired Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Before that, Amazon acquired MGM for $8.5 billion. The list of studio M&A deals and rumors is a long one, with buyers ranging from streaming platforms and traditional media to CPG and blue chip private equity firms. In this episode, Chris and Andrew discuss the recent high-priced M&A, media valuations on a standalone VS streamer-integrated basis, private equity's perceived market timing, where the next big talent deals may happen, and new content buyers like FAST platforms, Apple, and Nike. (and apologies, we had a technical snafu so the recording quality is a bit subpar) Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteEmail us: rounduppod@wearerockwater.com--EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Chris Erwin:So Andrew, I've been reading a lot of headlines lately about all of the capital investment and M&A of different production and media companies. It actually reminds me of when I first got into the digital space back in 2012, 2013. But we'll talk about that parallel a little bit later on. There's a few deals, I think, worth highlighting, but are you reading the same headlines that I am? Andrew Cohen:Yeah, it's crazy. We've seen a bunch of acquisitions, investments, and then even a lot of rumored ones and the numbers are eye-popping. So it's... Chris Erwin:Let's go through a few of these deals. As always, there's a laundry list. But most recently, Hello Sunshine was acquired for $900 million by a Blackstone-backed media venture. And of note, that venture, I think, has Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, they're helping to spearhead it. We saw Amazon acquire MGM for around $8.5 billion, and it's actually, I think 28 times EBITDA, wild. A24, supposedly rumored to be exploring a sale for around $3 billion. Also SpringHill, spearheaded by famed athlete LeBron James, seeking a sale for around three-quarters of a million. And the list goes on. You got Imagine with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, Legendary Entertainment, Lionsgate Spyglass, et cetera. Any other big deals I'm missing? Andrew Cohen:I'm sure there are. Especially if you span back over the past year or two, seeing things like Crunchyroll being acquired by Sony for almost $2 billion. STX sold for almost $1 billion last year, and there's a lot more. We're seeing these every week and it's definitely made me sit back and wonder why. Chris Erwin:Quick clarification. Was STX sold or they've just raised seven hundred million? Andrew Cohen:So it raised and then it merged. Chris Erwin:So then it begs the question, Andrew, why is there all this market activity? And particularly, I think just over the past two to three months, it feels like there's been a major uptick. And I think with all the rumors that we just walked through and more, that we can come back after the August vacation and Q3, Q4 is just a wild M&A sprint. So why is this happening? Andrew Cohen:Like a lot of other pods we've done, all roads lead back to the streaming wars. So content and IP, what we're seeing, is more valuable than ever before because of the exorbitant spends that we're seeing in the streaming wars as consumption is shifting from traditional TV and film onto the streaming platforms. And so the major players: Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and now Discovery, all of them are spending more and more in the billions every year on content and marketing to increase customer acquisition, to reduce churn, and to maximize lifetime value, and to ultimately win the future of entertainment when it's a streaming-first world. And in this world, content is more valuable than ever before. It's content-exclusive IP. It drives user acquisition. It minimizes churn. And what we've seen is it's new tentpole originals of things like Stranger Things that really boosts user acquisitions. Andrew Cohen:People come on to be part of the zeitgeist, watch these new shows. And then library content, so things like The Office, boost user retention. People stay there to watch these comfort food shows. And I think that that explains a lot of the acquisition and investment activity that we're seeing. So things like Hello Sunshine and A24, I see as more of a bet on future output of new tentpole originals for user acquisition. Both of those studios do have a great library of content, but I think it's more about taking a bet on best-in-class creators to continue to churn out the type of best-in-class content that's going to bring people to the platform. Andrew Cohen:Then things like the MGM acquisition by Amazon, I think that that was really a big bet on library. They have classic IP like James Bond. Chris Erwin:Don't forget Pink Panther. Andrew Cohen:Of course. The list goes on, I'm sure. Rocky. Roku, who recently did the same acquiring the Quibi library. So that's going to be the type of stuff that keeps people on the platform, reduces churn, and maximizes user retention. So really, a catchphrase I hear a lot from people in that world is that as the streaming wars are going on, it's these production companies that are the bullet makers, and that makes them more valuable than ever before in today's [inaudible 00:04:18] . Chris Erwin:So a few things to break down there. I think a point about investing in production companies/studios, where you're going to get a team that you believe is going to make a lot of high quality and differentiated content in the future that is going to help drive user acquisition through temporal content. And just even having a really great library, which drives retention, which is increasingly important as there's more and more competition, right? Someone churns off, the ability to get them back becomes even more expensive, as now there's HBO Max and there's Peacock and all the niche streamers, et cetera. And I think that is something that is reflected in Netflix's recent re-upping of their deal with Shondaland, right? So that was the first big talent landmark deal with the streamer. I think dating back to around 2016, 2017, that set off a big talent buying spree of Ryan Murphy with Netflix and a handful of others. But clearly it worked out for Netflix, right? The number one performing Netflix show is Bridgerton, which was done through the Shondaland partnership. And I think they're betting that that's going to happen again. Andrew Cohen:On a similar point, even the second-tier streamers like Paramount Plus. You just saw Viacom CBS just spent $900 million on a deal with the creators of South Park to turn out new seasons of the show and even new movies. So again, taking this bet on fresh content, beloved IP to drive acquisition and retention. Chris Erwin:The dynamics that we are talking about now is where we're seeing that there is a very viable business model for this content. I think it's worth noting that you look at a price tag that we're seeing for what's rumored for Spring Hill or 900 million for Hello Sunshine. And you're like, how does this make any sense? On a standalone basis, do these companies make enough revenue and EBITDA that drives that independent valuation. Chris Erwin:But the point is the independent valuation is not what matters. It's about the integrated value that is going to be created in the business model of a streamer. And I think back to my early days in the digital world where I started out in digital YouTube and MCN, so I was part of Big Frame, which is then sold to Awesomeness. But in that vintage of 2012, 2013, you saw incredible investment where I think it was Comcast and Time Warner Cable were investing in Maker Studios and Full Screen and Dreamworks Animation, but Awesomeness pretty early on in 2012, if I remember, 2013. And there was all this hope, which is like, okay, when you looked at the Comscore data of these MCNs, just the amount of digital traffic to them was incredible. Chris Erwin:And so the bet from these traditional cable or media businesses, is like, we don't have the business model now to extract revenues, but we're sure we'll figure it out. With traffic and audience, revenue will come. But the reality is, that never actually really happened, and there was also massive changes in the platform algorithms in YouTube or in Facebook, which caused viewership to just tank overnight. A lot of things that were outside of the control. But today these dynamics, the business model is much more solid and the environment is much more stable, because these companies are going, like a Netflix or a Peacock's, going direct to consumer. They're not relying on a third party platform. So it actually makes sense. So I just thought that's an interesting parallel, comparing my weirdo digital history. Andrew Cohen:Absolutely. I think the fact that you refer to 2013 as vintage, I think shows how fast this space is moving. And I think what you just said about the stable operating environment on the buy side for the platforms, I think is just as true on the sell side as well, comparing this premium OTT landscape to the wild wild west of early stage digital video. Because I think a lot of these bets on early stage YouTube traders, MCNs, where you catch lightning in a bottle, but then the algorithm shifts, trends shifts. I think right now, when you look at companies like an A24 or a Hello Sunshine ,who have been able to consistently produce the [inaudible 00:08:11] best-in-class movies, TV that people connect with. I think that that is a safer bet that someone like a Netflix or an Apple can bring them onto their platform and say, "Keep making that, but make it for us." And that there's consistency and reliability there that they're going to continue to turn out the type of premium fair that brings people onto the platform. Chris Erwin:There's also another trend that's happening here in the buyer-verse that's worth calling out. And that is the fact that really large private equity, blue-chip companies are getting involved in the content bidding wars. So specifically, right, we saw Apollo over the past few months, acquire Yahoo and AOL from Verizon for a few billion. And then Hello Sunshine, again, was acquired by a Blackstone-backed private equity vehicle. From my history in digital and entertainment, particularly over the past five to seven years, you wouldn't see these big PE firms making these size bets in media, typically. But I think the tides have turned. And the reason is, I think these are going to be, short-term holds. The private equity owners are sophisticated. They don't want a standalone basis that these companies are not going to drive meaningful revenue and cashflow. Chris Erwin:But like you said, the streamer war dynamics means that there's going to be an aggressive buying race over the next two to three years. It's not going away over the next six months. It's going to increase. And if these firms can buy up a bunch of media assets, consolidate them, get them to a certain scale, and even potentially, who knows? Is the next Shondaland deal with Netflix? Will we start seeing equivalents of that with Apollo and Blackstone packaged into their new media portfolios? Potentially. And then they're going to flip them for a good profit, I think, in the next 36 months. So I wasn't seeing this coming, but it seems to make sense. Andrew Cohen:How do you think that the increasing stack presence plays into all this? Chris Erwin:Obviously Buzzfeed is going public in a spec and is using spec proceeds and other investment to roll up complex, as well. As these digitally native companies, again, are realizing increased scale through consolidation, then getting more investment through spec, maybe they're upping their quality of programming. And they're looking at really premium franchises, like say Hot Ones under Complex or Buzzfeed Tasty, and say, "How can we go even bigger and make this attractive to a Netflix or a Peacock or a Discovery and align with their Food Network programming?" Yeah. Maybe that also feeds the wars in the future. I don't know. That's my two cents. Andrew Cohen:Totally makes sense. So as we look at what you just said, that PE, they're holding for this big buying spree to come as values are inflating for content and IP, I think makes you think of who these buyers are going to be. One thing that comes to mind is just the OTT platforms themselves. So, and we're already seeing platforms spending tons of money on output deals. You mentioned Shondaland, Viacom, CBS. Would it make sense for them to follow the Disney model? Like what Disney did acquiring Pixar or Marvel, and acquiring studios outright to own the process from end to end, from development to distribution. And then I think beyond that, there's a few other potential buyers in the market. Like consumer product brands. We saw Apple is one of the companies that are better being rumored to buy A24. Nike is one of the companies being rumored to buy SpringHill. So I think as we're seeing media and commerce merge and content become this universal truth, I could definitely see a world where these studios serve real value to companies even outside of the streaming wars, as we know it. Chris Erwin:Well, I think of note, Andrew, that there's just also not a lot of premium studio assets left, right? MGM was taken off the table, Legendary was taken off the table. I think Lionsgate is rumored. I think a question that I'm left with is like, what are these other assets that could be exciting for, say, new buyers for these CPG companies. Like a Nike, for example. So here's a crazy thought. Thinking about the next big source of digitally-native IP that caters to these new, young fandoms that are going to become older and want to have loyalty with platforms over the years, might some of these streamers start dipping their toes in acquiring large metaverse creators or worlds? Is that something we might see? I think that's top of mind because we're doing some work that's relevant in that space, but just a random thought that came to me. Andrew Cohen:Absolutely. I think eyeballs follow content and IP that they connect with. And right now, especially for younger audiences, a lot of that is being originated in the metaverse. So definitely wouldn't be surprised to see that adapted by the main streaming platforms, I think even just, again, expanding the [inaudible 00:12:50] power defining the streaming wars, there's also what we call the AVOD wars or the fast wars outside of subscription platforms like Netflix and HBO. You have the Roku's, the Tubi's of the world that amassing huge audiences at a really big footprint. But right now it's still a really commodified space. And we've been seeing some moves into original content programming by them to differentiate them and their offerings in the marketplace, like the Quibi library acquisition that we mentioned earlier. But I could definitely see them moving more and more upstream to more premium tentpole originals. And to do that, I think acquiring a studio or production company would make a lot of sense. Chris Erwin:Yeah. I think the core business model for those AVOD and fast platforms is selling ad inventory across their third party content. But we know that the negotiation rights for selling that inventory, that is a constant battle with their partners, and who knows how the terms are going to change. And so where they have more control, is there more owned content hubs that they're creating, which gives them not only more ad inventory, but also a differentiated user experience relative to their other fast peers, right? Andrew Cohen:With a bigger user base, bigger control of the market and audience size, you have more leverage with those ad partners. I think the most viable way to gain market share, and like I said, it's kind of a commodified space, is by having differentiated premium content offering that can make Roku the go-to AVOD platform. And then once you own that audience, you could now have a lot more leverage in the ad market. Chris Erwin:We all know a lot of marketers are really frustrated by the fact that they are not able to participate in the SVOD environment. So we know marketers have been clamoring, Netflix say, like, "Let us in." Also create an ad based model. Now we're seeing that HBO max and peacock have ad-based support. But I think a lot of these marketers still want more premium content environments to advertise to consumers in. And I think the fast platforms are going to offer that for them as that demand goes up. I think that's yet another reason why they're going to start investing in more premium content, to get those ad dollars. But Andrew, I think that we are backing up against our time limit here. So unless there's any final points, I think we've got to say, "Till next time." Andrew Cohen:Next time. See you then.

Nathan Ramos-Park (1/2 Korean 1/2 Filipino) is an award-winning Writer, Actor, and Musician. He sold a feature and pilot to streamers and is working on a yet-to-be-announced streaming show.  He's worked at or is working at these places: Disney, Netflix, Nickelodeon, Amazon, Google, Snap, Maker Studios, CAPE, EWP, 2020 CBS Showcase.  He wrote and EP'd a Disney Southeast Asia show. His video, Gay Asian Country Love Song went viral!  We discuss being aware of one's stimulus value, or way others perceive you based on your appearance and behaviors, especially when in negotiations in the Entertainment Industry.  He reflects on growing up in OH, coming out to his parents and being "emotionally dis-owned, and moving to NY and then LA, determined to give voice and representation to minorities in a historically "legacy-based" industry.   Check out more of Nathan's work at: https://www.koreapino.com/

We Talk About: What The Pattern is Understanding yourself and others better Reading our charts Relaxing into who you are   Resources: The Pattern App Website: thepattern.com Instagram:@motherofpatterns Follow Alli: @alliwebb Follow Lori: @loriharder Follow Brittany: @britdrisc   Show Notes: Lisa Donovan discovered astrology while on a personal path of self-discovery. What she found led her to form The Pattern, an app known for providing “accurate as shit” astrological readings to help people better understand themselves and others. She joins the roundtable this week to talk about what astrology has done for her life, why she started the company, and what's next for her.   Question Highlights:   What is The Pattern? What led you to starting your business? What is next for The Pattern?     Guest Bio: After the successful sale of her company, Maker Studios, to Disney in 2014, it appeared Lisa Donovan, Founder of The Pattern, was living the entrepreneurial dream. Behind the curtain, she was being confronted with everything she knew slipping away. In response, she started the long journey of self-discovery, which ultimately became the driving force behind creating The Pattern. Born from her personal experience - she focused all her efforts into building something that could help others feel seen, understood and supported during times of struggle as well as expansion. She returned home and passionately wrote every single passage for The Pattern from her childhood bedroom. A labor of love, Lisa has since spent the last six years developing a system that could make this type of information easily accessible to all.

If you've ever heard of The Pattern, the most common words you'll hear alongside it are "scarily accurate,” or you've seen the video of Channing Tatum freaking out after trying it saying, “Who runs this thing?! How do you know me so well?! Someone please contact me ASAP.” Well the person to reach out to is their founder,  Lisa Donovan. For those of you who are unfamiliar to the app, it's a social app that creates accurate and detailed insights into your personality, empowering you to better understand yourself and build deeper, more authentic relationships with those around you. Prior to The Pattern, Lisa co-founded and ran the first and most viewed YouTube content company of its time, Maker Studios. She built it over a thrilling five year period which culminated in a successful sale to Disney in 2014.  It was after that that Lisa began the journey of self-discovery, which became the driving force behind The Pattern. In this episode, Lisa tells us all about developing the app, how it goes beyond astrology, and Lisa gives Olivia a personalized reading from the app. We talk about a few personality traits, how to implement these concepts into real life, Saturn returns, and a whole lot more. If you want to see yours - go download The Pattern app! Follow The Pattern on Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/thepattern/   Download The Pattern here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-pattern/id1071085727   Love the show? Follow us and leave a review!  Produced by Dear Media

Miguel Armaza sits down with Alison Lange Engel, Venture Partner at Greycroft, a leading venture capital firm focused on investments in the Internet and mobile markets, with offices in New York City and LA. Greycroft manages over $2 billion and has made over 200 investments, including some leading fintech companies like Acorns, Venmo, Flutterwave, and Public. Alison works across the Greycroft portfolio, advising companies on go-to-market strategy, execution, and sourcing new investments. She’s also a proud MBA alum from our very own Wharton School. We discuss - Her operator background at companies like LinkedIn, Microsoft and Stripe - A deep dive into her experience as Head of Marketing at Stripe - Transitioning to the investing side - Greycroft’s story, investment thesis, and what defines their portfolio companies - Why Alison and Greycroft are bullish on the future of consumer fintech - Inside stories on fast-growing portfolio companies - And a lot more! Alison Lange Engel Alison Lange Engel is a Venture Partner at Greycroft. She works across the Greycroft portfolio, advising companies on go-to-market strategy and execution and sourcing new investments. Alison has 20+ years of experience leading, structuring, and scaling high growth businesses. She’s managed teams throughout North America, Europe, Brazil, and Asia. Prior to Greycroft, Alison was the first CMO at Stripe and worked to establish the marketing function, scaling the team 5x in one year and driving quantified growth. Prior to Stripe, Alison was a Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn. In her 6 years at LinkedIn, she had a broad impact on LinkedIn’s advertising business strategy and execution, with overall company revenue growing from $200MM at IPO in 2011 to $5Bn+ today. Alison’s early career in technology started with the sale of Massive Incorporated, a venture-backed video game advertising business, to Microsoft in 2006. She held marketing leadership roles at Microsoft Advertising for 3 years. Prior to her career in technology, Alison was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, focused on Media, Entertainment and Consumer sectors. Her media background includes HBO and the CBS Television Network, where she held sales and programming roles. Alison has a BA from UCLA and an MBA from The Wharton School. About Greycroft Greycroft is a seed-to-growth venture capital firm that partners with exceptional entrepreneurs to build transformative companies. The firm has deep experience in both consumer and enterprise technology, with a portfolio that spans the globe. Greycroft values building enduring relationships with founders and understands that they want more from investors than just capital. Greycroft has raised $2 billion in commitments and has over 200 active investments. The portfolio includes Acorns, Anine Bing, App Annie, Axios, Bird, BetterCloud, Braintree, Bright Health, Buddy Media, Bumble, Flutterwave, Goop, Happiest Baby, Huffington Post, Icertis, Lightricks, Maker Studios, Medly, Openpath, Scopely, SEMrush, Shipt, TheRealReal, Thrive Market, Trunk Club, Venmo, and Yeahka. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Miguel's Twitter: twitter.com/MiguelArmaza Miguel's Substack: https://bit.ly/3jWIpqp

Charles Gabriel is the Head of Global Advertising Sales for WildBrain Spark, a premium kids and family AVOD network. Charles started his career in finance before transitioning to media, initially at Broadband Enterprises and later at 5min Media, AOL, and Maker Studios. Prior to joining WildBrain Spark, Charles served as the President of Apester and CRO of First Media U.S. In this episode, Charles and I explore what advertising looks like in the children’s entertainment space. Charles shares best practices for ad targeting based on content rather than audience demographics, and we debate the future looks like in a world without cookies. Finally, we touch on Instagram’s latest child safety measures, Roblox going public, and the arms race for kids’ content among SVOD platforms. Host: James Creech LEAVE US A REVIEW! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review! https://ratethispodcast.com/allthingsvideo LISTENER SUPPORT If you’d like to make a small monthly donation to help support future episodes, please visit https://anchor.fm/allthingsvideopodcast/support ABOUT THE SHOW All Things Video is a podcast dedicated to uncovering the past and charting the future of the online video ecosystem. Listen to interviews with founders, executives, and thought leaders from the world’s leading media companies and engage in thought-provoking debates about the issues shaping the next generation of entertainment. From the short-form content revolution to the fragmentation of video viewership in an always-on world, All Things Video reveals the key trends and insights from the world of digital media. Follow All Things Video on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for new episodes and updates! ABOUT THE HOST James Creech is an entrepreneur focused on technology, online video, and digital media. He is the Co-Founder & CEO of Measure Studio (next-gen social media analytics) and Paladin (the essential influencer marketing platform).

Sam Wick, head of UTA Ventures, discusses the booming marketplace for talent and business partnerships, from startups to equity ventures. Brands are becoming savvy about making connections with celebrities, influencers and creative talent at a time when millennial consumers are increasingly focused on companies with “founder-led stories.” The alumnus of Maker Studios, MySpace and MP3.com also offers thoughts on the media M&A environment and sectors to watch in the coming year.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Sam Wick, head of UTA Ventures, discusses the booming marketplace for talent and business partnerships, from startups to equity ventures. Brands are becoming savvy about making connections with celebrities, influencers and creative talent at a time when millennial consumers are increasingly focused on companies with “founder-led stories.” The alumnus of Maker Studios, MySpace and MP3.com also offers thoughts on the media M&A environment and sectors to watch in the coming year.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Today I got to speak with Sienna Beckman from all the way across the pond. Sienna is the Co-founder & Creative Director of Emergence Films (based in London & LA). Living and working in Los Angeles for 10 years, Sienna has produced for NBC Universal, Scott Free Productions, Verizon go90, Fullscreen Media, Esquire TV, Refinery29, Prettybird Entertainment, and Disney's Maker Studios, among others. Emergence Films is a film and television development and production company dedicated to championing female filmmakers and committed to creating more opportunities for underrepresented voices in storytelling around the world. In addition to producing, Sienna is an active member of Women in Film & TV UK and Times Up UK, and she hosts a speed-networking event series with WFTV to promote the hiring of more female crew members, creatives, and technicians. We talked all about her finding her place in London and growing her company.

In part one of this two-part interview you get to meet David Sievers. David has had an interesting career path, from sorting mail in Lincoln to helping run over 70,000 YouTube channels at Maker Studios and even becoming the youngest VP in Disney history. Listen in as David tell all about each experience and how they have helped him make his new ventures more impactful than ever. ___ Connect with Spark To Fire | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok | YouTube ___ This show is produced by Grindstone. Interested in starting a podcast? Visit grindstoneagency.com/podcasting to learn more.  

In part one of this two-part interview you get to meet David Sievers. David has had an interesting career path, from sorting mail in Lincoln to helping run over 70,000 YouTube channels at Maker Studios and even becoming the youngest VP in Disney history. Listen in as David tell all about each experience and how they have helped him make his new ventures more impactful than ever.

Larry Chu is one of the most accomplished tech M&A lawyers in Silicon Valley, where he has advised on over 200 transactions with a total value of over $125B. Along the way, Larry has cultivated one of the best technology networks of anyone I know. In this episode, he reveals how painfully shy he was as a child, but decided early in his career to be a good listener, and used that skill to develop lasting and valuable business relationships.Listen to Larry's stories about panicking on a large conference call while at Davis Polk, getting grilled by a legendary Sequoia Capital investor, and working with entrepreneurs like Ryan Smith at Qualtrics, Greg Duffy at Dropcam, Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman at LastMinute.com, and Trevor Healy. We also discuss Larry's angel investing career during which he recommends Jason Calacanis' book Angel.Currently head of the West Coast Technology M&A practice at Goodwin Proctor, Larry has worked on some of the most notable deals, including (deep breath) Zoox’s $1.3B sale to Amazon, Qualtrics’ $8B sale to SAP, The Climate Corp's $1.1B sale to Monsanto, Nest's $3.2B sale to Google, Maker Studios' $500M sale to Disney, and Oculus'​ $2B sale to Facebook, Dropcam's $555M sale to Nest, and Lynda.com's $1.5B sale to LinkedIn. His list of clients includes such investment firms such as Silver Lake, Accel, a16z and Kleiner Perkins. More about Larry Chu at: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lawrencechuattorneyEmail: lawchu8@gmail.comTwitter: lawchu2More about the host, Dave Ingraham, at:Website: https://www.teleportgroup.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsingraham/

cc: growth journeys from emerging ecosystems to global markets. Mark Suster is the Managing Partner of Upfront Ventures, the LA-based VC fund with homerun success stories such as Bird, Ring (acquired by Amazon), and Maker Studios (acquired by Disney). Prior to Upfront, Mark co-founded BuildOnline (merged with Citadon) and Koral (acquired by Salesforce). What’s in this episode? 1) LA’s unique position and its surge as a tech hub over the past decade 2) Mark’s entrepreneurial experience and how it shaped him as an investor 3) Upfront’s conviction focused investment strategy and portfolio management 4) Success of immigrant entrepreneurs and what sets them apart 5) Opportunities to invest in European tech You can reach us through our website or @getcced on Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and Linkedin. Hosted by Enis Hulli and Rina Onur.

In this episode, Senior Analyst Lowry Howell and CEO and Head of Research Ross Glotzbach interview Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel. They discuss how Ynon went from a windsurfing instructor to media entrepreneur at Fox Kids Europe, Endemol and Maker Studios before becoming CEO at Mattel. [3:06-9:02] Next, Ynon discusses how Mattel has remained innovative through the current environment, how COVID-19 has impacted the toy industry, as well as Mattel's near-term strategy and how Mattel has given back during this unprecedented time. [15:12-29:56] Ynon discusses core brands Barbie, Fisher Price and Hot Wheels, as well as up and coming growth brands, including Masters of the Universe. [35:11-45:23] Next, he discusses Mattel's intellectual property (IP) monetization plans and Mattel's long-term intrinsic value and growth proposition. [45:23-53:52] Finally, Ynon shares some personal insights in a short lightning round of questions at the end. [56:42-59:32]

In this episode, Trish joins Shireen to discuss her move from Hollywood, FL to Hollywood, CA to pursue a career in entertainment, despite many people advising her not to. She further shares her experiences working with countless celebrities and building a successful career in LA, and then ultimately asking the big question: “What else is out there?” Tune in to learn how Trish went from working with Oprah to working with women fighting homelessness and listening to stories on Skid Row. About Trish Lindo:Trish Lindo has over 20 years of experience in the Los Angeles media and entertainment industry. She currently works at BuzzFeed/Tasty and previously had success working for companies such as Maker Studios, OWN, CNN, and Yahoo. Trish is also passionate about social impact and volunteering. She's a mentor for EmpowHer, which supports high school girls from marginalized communities. She's also a volunteer and Brand ambassador for the Downtown Women's Center social enterprise store Made by DWC.

Mark Suster is the Managing Partner @ Upfront Ventures, one of LA's leading and largest venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Bird, GOAT, Maker Studios and Ring.com to name a few. Prior to joining the world of venture, Mark was the founder & CEO of two successful enterprise software companies, the most recent of which was sold to Salesforce.com where Mark became VP, Products. Mark is also the author of one of my favourite industry blogs, Both Sides of The Table. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Mark made his way from founding enterprise companies to joining "the dark side" of venture with his move to Upfront? 2.) How does the current economic landscape change the world of B2B? How will renewals be impacted? How will customers approach discounting? Similarly, how will the world of B2C be impacted by COVID? How does this impact marketing and ad spend? 3.) How does Mark think about reserve allocation today with Upfront? How does that change in the face of COVID? Why does Mark believe this environment will redefine valuations? How should founders respond in the face of heavily changed valuations? 4.) Does Mark believe we will see a graveyard of new venture firms who have deployed too quickly and have too many hungry mouths to feed? How does Mark think about building temporal diversification into the portfolio? How can managers use reserves more intelligently moving forward? 5.) Does Mark agree with the Twittersphere that VCs remain "open for business"? How will we see deal volume impact? How will we see size of transaction impacted? What is the most important role a VC can play today? How will the M&A market also be impacte din the face of COVID? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Mark’s Fave Book: Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World Mark's Most Recent Investment: Solve As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mark and on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Adweek's annual list of the top media agencies is out, and our panel of editors and writers is here to walk you through this year's picks. We also look at John Oliver's plan to put ads right in front of Donald Trump, why Maker Studios is dropping YouTube megastar PewDiePie and how Under Armour responded to claims its CEO is siding too much with the new president. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Total Tutor Neil Haley will interview Celebrities  Donovan Leitch and Billy West. HOST Donovan Leitch - @donovan_leitch Donovan Leitch has spent his entire life in the entertainment industry. His father and namesake, the psychedelic rock pioneer Donovan, is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee. Growing up in the heart of Hollywood, Leitch started his acting career as a teenager. He then moved to New York to pursue a career as a musician, where he also worked for 10 years in the fashion industry. Setting his sights on becoming a producer, he has made six feature documentary films. Leitch has had development deals at MTV Networks, Electus, and Maker Studios, and has created and produced web content for Microsoft, YouTube, Vogue.com, and MySpace. He is also the co-founder of Hollywood's first co-work/incubator space, io/LA. In 2002, Donovan co-founded the All-Star rock ‘n' roll cover band Camp Freddy (now called Royal Machines), serving as the super-group's lead singer. Royal Machines has played over 200 shows over the last 12 years, and has featured many of today's leading rock stars including Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol, Scott Weiland, Dave Navarro, and Tommy Lee. He is currently producing a musical called Head Over Heels, with actress Gwyneth Paltrow, based on the music of The Go-Go's; and is a development executive at Insurgent Media, as well as host of AXS TV's BREAKING BAND.   You know Billy as Stimpy on the original Ren & Stimpy (and later Ren as well), ..a host of characters on Futurama (Fry, Dr. Zoidberg, Professor Farnsworth, and Zapp Brannigan - to name a few), the voice of Elmer Fudd on “The Looney Tunes Show”