David Senra - Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

Starting point is 00:00:02 Dude, I've been a fan of you for over 20 years because I grew up listening to hip hop and everybody in hip hop knows who you are So I'm very excited to have a conversation with you. Yeah One of the fascinating things that Jimmy Iveen told me about you Was you made a very unusual decision coming out of a record label like you could have started your own record label and you said no, I'm not gonna start a record label I'm gonna go full on into advertising and marketing You tell me about that? It was 1999 and I get a lot of credit for seeing that whether it was Napster or MP3s were going to shift the music business from the CD,

Starting point is 00:00:37 we started to see signs of it, but it was very, it was in the fledgling stages of that. So I didn't quite see it. What I did see was an industry that didn't know the difference between good and great. What I mean by that is that when an industry is booming, sometimes when it's booming because of the business model itself, Medioka gets rewarded. And over time, it catches up. But in the beginning, mediocrity is applauded and financially awarded.

Starting point is 00:01:10 And I knew that because we were selling CDs for $16, and people were paying for it when there was only one song on the album, that that wasn't going to sustain itself. Like, there was something wrong with that. Like, why would you pay $1699 and you only liked the first single? And executives were getting paid tons of money on that. you know, idea, and they weren't even talented. And I'm like, this is going to have to cave in.

Starting point is 00:01:37 Outside of that, what I seen was an advertising business that felt like archaic. The advertising business at the time looked at the world through the lens of black, white, Hispanic. And I'm like, that's not the way people relate to products and marketing. It doesn't, no one looks at them and goes, well, oh, they're speaking to me because I'm white. Or like, that's how I prefer to get spoken to because I'm black. Like, these things weren't real.

Starting point is 00:02:09 And the music business did teach me that. The music business taught me that the idea that people listened to certain records had nothing to do with their ethnicity. DMX was selling in Iowa. The radio station in Iowa didn't play DMX. where Eminem was being played, was being purchased in Harlem. I did nothing to do with white and black. But why would products treat it that way?

Starting point is 00:02:40 Why would, like, we're going to, you know, and you want to sell a Cadillac to a black person, you put a deep voiceover like, the new Cadillac Escalade. Nobody wants that. And Spanish people don't want an ad that just says, Ola, like, these things don't work. My whole idea was like,

Starting point is 00:02:58 why don't you just find shared values? Like if you're an 18-year-old African-American from Compton and you're an 18-year-old white kid from Greenwich, Connecticut, and you like skateboarding, like, it doesn't make a difference if you just speak about skateboarding, you're both going to find the shared value in the culture of skateboarding. But this other thing that was happening just felt like it was dying. And I knew that if I got into that industry, I could make a difference.

Starting point is 00:03:26 But what Jimmy, I think, admired most is that, like, you didn't care what was expected. Like, you didn't make the decision that everybody else was making or a decision that was expected of you. It's like you forge your own path. So I'm giving you the rational, you know, how I seen it. The idea of seeing it that way and then jumping and to go into a business in which you didn't understand. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Yeah. Look, I can reference a lot in the Jimmy podcast, not that I want this podcast to, like, be the advertising for all your others, but you know, you've had a lot of interesting people. And there's a lot of six degrees of separation in the way we think. When the unknown is a better option than the known run in that direction, run towards darkness. And the unknown was what I didn't know, right, the advertising business. But the known was this industry that was going in the wrong direction in a direction where they were selling one song for a lot of money,

Starting point is 00:04:26 they had a monopoly on the distribution of CDs and they control radio and MTV. And those things didn't seem like they were going to last forever. So running towards the unknown became very easy, not because, and also because I was 29 years old, right? And I didn't have a family yet. I didn't have kids. I'd already made a lot of money.

Starting point is 00:04:49 I'd already done well. so I wasn't like needing money and I didn't have like a family that was reliant upon me to like earn instantly. If I didn't make that decision at that point in time I would have never made it at all to change industries.

Starting point is 00:05:03 Look it. We own in the advertising business and I had a big proof point. The proof point was when I was at Sony I made the soundtrack. I was fortunate to make the soundtrack for the film Men in Black. I had known Will Smith and his manager James Lasseter for many men.

Starting point is 00:05:20 years. And when they were making that film, they wanted to make the soundtrack. They were making it with Sony, who also distributed that film. I was a Sony executive and they, you know, said, look, you know, you know, you do this. I wanted to do it. I was excited to do it. And the song became a hit. Right. Here comes the men in black. But will. But what was bigger than the song was the glasses. And he said, I make these look good in the movie. It was all in the music video. God knows what the impressions were and you measured that if you measured it in today's sort of metrics. And the glasses became contagious because of the popular culture impact of that song in that video. And I'm like, if we're in the music business, why aren't we getting paid off those glasses?

Starting point is 00:06:15 Like, why do Ray Band has nothing to do with any of this other than they gave wool of glasses? Like, why aren't we make... So the guy in the company that did the product placement for those glasses, while I was thinking this, he was trying to find me because he wanted to find the next thing that did that. And I was like, if we can sell 14 million glasses or whatever the number was, I could do this shit all the time. The idea that Jimmy was putting the beats headphones and music videos was literally a derivative of that idea. I had seen that idea very early. And my peers and others in the industry would tell you that. I was infatuated with the idea and to the point that I left the industry to learn the advertising business to understand the language, the dialogue, the people, the movements to shake.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Because I wanted to understand that business. So I put my, I immersed myself in it, not by studying it, by quitting and doing it. Jimmy allowed me to do that. I had worked for him at that time. I had left Sony, had gone to Interscope. I'd done great work with Interscope. Jimmy and I was close. She's a mentor of mine.

Starting point is 00:07:32 And when I told him I wanted to do it, the deal was like, look, man, I got you back. But bring the deals to Interscope first. So a lot of the early things that I had done were based around Interscope artists. And I mean, I got great, great stories about me, Jimmy, and Steve. you know, trying to get bring, when I was working on McDonald's early around me, I'm loving it, launch. We wanted to do it was around the same time iTunes was launching. And the thing about Apple at that time, the stock was at 9 or 10, you know, very, you know, it was like there.

Starting point is 00:08:13 And, you know, it was, so in 2001, I don't let to go all over, and Ron had just. Take this wherever you want, man. In 2001, the Enron thing happened, right? Where the CEO and the CFO, they had, they, they, they, they no longer, the CFO couldn't say, oh, well, the CEO told me to do it. That's why I did it. That was Sarbanes Oxley came out of this whole thing. And everyone would say it about insider trading.

Starting point is 00:08:43 So I remember when we knew that the iPod was coming because of Jimmy's relationship with Steve, We all wanted to buy stock in Apple. And the stock was like nine. Not that we knew that nine was cheap. We just knew that something good was going to happen. And we were all scared to death to buy stock in Apple. And we were like, no, we're going to go to jail. And we're going to be Jeff Skilling.

Starting point is 00:09:10 I was like, no, no, no, no. But back during that time, I was transitioning out. And, you know, the iPod launched before the iTunes. People think they launched at the same time. So when iTunes launched, the one thing about Apple at that time is if they could put distribution, the expense of distribution to a third party, Steve was all about that. He was all about how can I find somebody else. Remember, HP was the partner for the iPod.

Starting point is 00:09:44 They're the ones who put it in all of the best buys and circuit cities or whatever the retailers were around the world. Apple didn't have the sales team to do that. And they didn't have their stores at, right? They relied on a third party to do that. They did HP. HP happened to be one of my clients, call a Fioreen at that time. And with iTunes, same type of thing. Who could we get to distribute it?

Starting point is 00:10:04 Jimmy was trying to get a deal done with Coca-Cola, an executive at Coca-Cola, Steve Hyatt turned it down twice. I was representing McDonald's, and we wanted to do, I had the idea we're going to do the music meal, you know, Big Mac and Large Fries or Hamburger Fries and a song. And McDonald's turned them down as well. The executive at McDonald's sort of was like posturing. And Steve went, nuclear.

Starting point is 00:10:38 I mean, nucleo on them. I mean, at the time he went, he said some shit to them. I was like, holy shit. He said, like, it's like, you're in a meeting. And, like, the meeting hasn't quite gone bad yet. but it's going directionally in a place where you kind of predict that it's going to not end correctly. And he's seen that coming. And he just said, man, don't you guys know you make food that kills kids?

Starting point is 00:11:04 It's like, oh, shit. Now, I'm a young executive trying to, I'm trying to do the right. I'm trying to come up. Jimmy knows Steve Jobs. I got McDonald's. Jimmy and I've worked together. We're doing the tango. We're going to go bring this McDonald's iTunes Apple thing together.

Starting point is 00:11:21 You know, and then he says that, and the guys that McDonald's are looking at me, like, you walk me into this shit. And I'm like, he's just playing, man. He don't mean that. I remember that feeling at that time. It was like, shit. What the fuck am I doing?

Starting point is 00:11:42 Did they try to kick Steve Jobs out of the meeting? How did the meeting out? Kick Steve Jobs out of the meeting? Yeah, I guess, yeah. First of all, the meeting was at Apple. They weren't kicking Steve Jobs out of any meeting. So we're actually going to do an episode with Ed Catmull, who's the founder of Pixar.

Starting point is 00:11:57 He worked with Steve Jobs for a long. I think he worked with Steve Jobs, uninterrupted for like 24 years. Yeah. And he tells a story about what a meeting in his autobiography, Creativity Inc. What a meeting with Steve Jobs is like. Remember the, I think it was like Magnavox?

Starting point is 00:12:10 Of course. Yeah. Magnovics. They made video games. They made television. Yeah. And they used to have this commercial probably in the, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:12:17 80s or 90s, where somebody's like sitting in a chair. and the music is so loud as like blowing the guy's hair back. Was it, it could have been Maxwell. Or Maxwell, sorry, yeah. The tape company. Yeah, that makes more sense.

Starting point is 00:12:31 And it's like, do you remember that commercial? It's like, that's what it's like being in a meeting with Steve Jobs. He's just so overpowering. He's like such a force of nature. It kind of blows you back in your chair. Look, I didn't have the exposure to Steve Jobs like that. That was, I was in maybe two meetings with him where, I mean, like real meetings where,

Starting point is 00:12:50 Like, there was feedback and that kind of thing. And that was that. I mean, I'm close with Eddie Q. And he tells amazing Steve Jobs stories along with Jimmy. That was just my version of getting a taste of it. And it was like, holy shit. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately.

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Starting point is 00:15:16 And you can do that by going to apploven.com. That's apploven.com. Going back to the Raybans, so you were at Sony. Yeah. When you're, is that the first time that you're like, oh, wait, wait, there's like a, you can translate cultural influence to sales, like business success. Is that the first time where it clicked or was there something that happened before that? I had known it intuitively, growing up in Queens,

Starting point is 00:15:43 And being around hip hop my whole life, much of my, you know, at 16, when I was 16, was 1986 when, you know, Run DMC performed that Madison Square Garden and like, it was fresh fest. It was like a sort of the coming out party of that hip hop could have actual rock stars. So that was my wheelhouse. And the only reason why I wore Adidas shell toes was because of them. Like, we knew that. So it wasn't like it was a new idea or, you know, grand pooh-ba advertising for Sprite, which is an amazing, amazing.

Starting point is 00:16:24 Wait, did you do that deal or so before you? That was way before me, but I remember when he said, you know, the line, like he said the line, you know, first thing first, obey your thirst. And like, he talked about Sprite. Like, you've seen these things or St. I's malt liquor. You should look at these ads with Ice Cube and see. St. I. These things were so powerful that hip hop would be working with these brands and like it would influence urban culture immediately. And when I talk about urban culture, I'm talking about dense cities, not even black kids. I'm talking about just dense inner city.

Starting point is 00:17:05 You know, I use it as a measurement of space, density of people. They would gravitate towards these products that these artists talked about either in their music or did blatant acts for. So by the time I had gotten to Will Smith and Men in Black, I mean, I had seen it for 25 years. But it still wasn't mainstream cultural impactful yet for reasons that I still don't understand. Like it was very clear and obvious. But, you know, like most things, when the alternative is working, when the incommative is working, And when the incumbent can still rely on the old business practice, they won't disrupt themselves.

Starting point is 00:17:46 They'll just keep doing that, right? Like, why would I invest any money in understanding hip-hop when Kenny G is still selling? I mean, no disrespect to Kenny G. Michael Bolt is still selling, whatever it may be. But if those things are still working, you're not going to pay attention to Wu-Tang. You're not going to pay attention to things of this.

Starting point is 00:18:06 Or if you're still selling in a world in which you can say, I'm going to target white consumers. I used to talk about this all the time. Like black consumers are the best consumers in the world because they buy products that aren't marketed to them. I grew up in a world where I'd see African-American women buying products, L'Oreal products, in which there was only white women with blonde hair on the box

Starting point is 00:18:31 or in the commercial. And African-American women would buy it. Or the same thing with African-American men. And like, people took advantage of that. But when brands leaned into being authentically connected to where culture was, which also spoke to those segments, they were taking market ship. They were taking that attention. So to me, it was just a matter of time before it tipped, and that became the new marketing paradigm. And that's why I called my company translation, because I wanted to translate that cultural insight for Fortune 500 companies.

Starting point is 00:19:07 And the first company that gave me a shot, that's still my client today, is McDonald's. Okay, so this is what I was curious about. So you're at Interscope. What are the assets that you have when you start translation? So you're young. You don't have a family. You can take more risks. You have an insane network.

Starting point is 00:19:23 You've already been, you were managing Nas at that time. Like, what were the asset, the non-financial assets you had going into this, like, jumping into a new industry? When I first left, remember I said I learned first, right? Before I started translation, my marketing services company. I learned and I worked at an interned a company before that. Which one was this? It's called Arnell Group.

Starting point is 00:19:44 Okay. So I worked at this company and I worked at, I became partners with. When I left the record business, you know, I was making a couple million dollars a year at 29 and I went to an agency in which I got paid $150,000 and $20,000 in 20% equity.

Starting point is 00:20:04 I didn't necessarily understand the value of equity at all. I certainly understood 150,000 was a lot less than two million, two and a half million. But I wasn't even betting on the equity, man. I was really betting on the education. I sincerely mean that. I did not know what was going to happen at all, but I knew I was going to learn. That was the period in which I had gotten exposure to certain clients like McDonald's and Reebok. So at Reebok, that was a client that when I was partners in this agency,

Starting point is 00:20:41 I'd met Adam Silver at that time, who was the deputy commission of the NBA, because we were doing all the marketing. Reebok had the license for the NBA, and I was doing all the marketing around the throwback jerseys. And then, like I was seating them, and all the artists back then were wearing throwback jerseys. So it became this really big deal that, like, wow, this guy knows what he's doing. He has, you know, I had gotten, that's what he's,

Starting point is 00:21:05 the market was going, but I had gotten a lot of credit because it was just selling like crazy. And Reebok was the beneficiary of it as the NBA licensee. They were the NFL and the NBA licensee at the time. A gentleman by the name of Paul Fireman was founder of Reebok who did an amazing job. He trusted me and put a lot of investing behind my ideas. And then the thing that was like the loudest was this idea that every artist wanted to be a basketball player and every basketball play wanted to be a rap artist. And I came up with this platform called the sound and rhythm of sport.

Starting point is 00:21:46 And we made this commercial for Reebok with Alan Iverson and Jadicus. And it was explosive. And I had Hype Williams, a music video director, shoot it. And no one thought, like, it was like, this sounds crazy today. I mean, to think. But it was like, how could Hype Williams, a music video director, shoot a TV commercial? I'm like, I didn't even know what you're saying. It's not a TV commercial.

Starting point is 00:22:13 It's entertaining content. Whether it's a music video, right, which was men in black, or a 60-second, same idea, but you call it a TV commercial only because you run it on television, not because the format is different, just because you're running it on television. So music videos ran on MTV, but if you took the music video for MTV and made it a 60-second spot, just running on television, it's a television commercial. I heard you, like, six years ago say, you're like, everything is advertising. That, like, you jumped to advertising earlier.

Starting point is 00:22:47 People thought you were bugging. That's the term we used. Like, everything is advertising. I just talked to Brian Armstrong about this, founder of Coinbase. And he said the same thing. It's like, everything is marketing. It's just like you have to entertain or get people's attention. And then you get a message across that serves some kind of thing you want to happen

Starting point is 00:23:03 in your business. In his case, you know, the new products that Coinbase is building or the financial performance of, you know, the stock or whatever the case is. But I love that. You know, everything is advertising. Again, at that time, it was just, you know, when you're trying to explain something that you fully don't understand, but you just know it's instinctively correct, it's hard to get people to buy into it because they're like, most people are risk-averse.

Starting point is 00:23:30 So it's like, why would I, what are you talking about? Like, why would this guy? I'd be able to shoot a TV commercial. He's never shot one. I'm like, because it's the same thing. I mean, what is the music video? It's an advertising for a song. It's a TV commercial for a song if you're running on television, right?

Starting point is 00:23:44 So anyhow, we shot this content as we've evolved. And it blew the fuck up because it was Jada Kiss rapping to the sound of a basketball bouncing. And Alan Iverson can dribble the basketball and make it sound like a beat. So it sounded just like any other hip hop beat, but it was literally a ball bouncing while this guy rapped over it and the commercial was beautiful.

Starting point is 00:24:12 And it was boom. And that changed the trajectory of Reebok. And when that happened, that was a big deal. And then I started doing artist deals around Sneak because I did the JZS. Carter's. But that's the first ever non-athleteat shoe deal. This is again why I want to talk to you. You just see stuff before anybody else.

Starting point is 00:24:32 else. Yeah, we did that. We did the G unit. 50 was just hot at that time. What was the marketing? Didn't, didn't, and you guys did something smart, if I remember correctly. Like, wasn't, didn't Jay put out a mixtape around? Yeah. It was like the S-Carter. We did the S-Carter mix tape, which was a mix-tap around the sneaker, marketing the sneaker, the S-Carter's. Then we did a commercial with 50 in Jay-Z. No one understood it at the time. Like, why would you be doing this? Like, why would you be doing this? Like, why we spending money on this? And I'm like, at the time, all I could say to them was like, it's like a commercial. Imagine trying to sell a product to housewives, to women overall, and you got Martha Stewart and Oprah. That's what this is. This is like the equivalent of that level of power between these two guys. And that's the only way I could explain it to somebody who didn't understand it, you know? And, you know, the S-Carter's were big, the G-units were big. Then I did the Farrell sneaker. And Farrell would tell you that was his foray into footwear

Starting point is 00:25:37 and gives me a lot of credit for, like, his path in the design because I gave him that opportunity very early. What's clear was Nike wasn't doing lifestyle at that time. They thought, like, Just Do It was all about athletes and performance. So what I was trying to do was tap into the truth, which was people were wearing sneakers not to perform at all. just so it could match their hat, their shirt, and that other thing.

Starting point is 00:26:06 It was fashion. So I just started choosing guys that didn't want to work out or run or jump at all, Jay-Z being the number one version of that. Like, he doesn't, right? He doesn't give you the athletic vibe. Right? He gives you the vibe of, like, I'm chilling.

Starting point is 00:26:22 And then it was 50. And then it was Farrell. And it was all just playing along the lines of fashion. Dude, how many people were wearing Jordans than I playing basketball on them? It was the only, light space left because there was no way I could market Reebok as the agency of record at the time. I told Paul, I'm like, Mr. Fireman, there is no way I can convince a 16-year-old they can jump higher

Starting point is 00:26:49 or run faster than Nike and Reeboks. Like, that's not happening. Okay. So, like, let's go into the other thing, which is the non-performance stuff. And it got so hot that, We got a chance to go into the performance business again, and we were trying to sign Kobe, and I have great stories of pitching Kobe. First of all, I signed Kobe to a record deal, recording contract when he was a rookie. And then we pitched LeBron.

Starting point is 00:27:16 That's how LeBron and I became good friends to this day when we pitched LeBron, and he has a famous story of LeBron. We're pitching him for Reebok. We, you know, they send a plane. Everybody wants to sign him. I tell Paul, while he's coming in from Akron, we're flying from New York to Boston to meet him there.

Starting point is 00:27:41 And I like Paul, we do this in the record business and it works. You give an artist in advance. And you bring the advance right there. But in cash and a duffel back? Well, that has been done in the music business. But this was going to be a check. And I seen Paul fucking, this was some ball and shit, call his wife because he couldn't get the company to get the check.

Starting point is 00:28:03 and his wife wrote a personal check for $10 million. And the driver, when we landed, had the check. We went to the meeting, and Paul says, LeBron, I know, you know, $100 million. You know, Adidas is going to offer that when you go see them next, and then Nike's going to offer that when you see them. I'll match that deal and give you a $10 million signing bonus right now to not take those meetings.

Starting point is 00:28:31 That's the number. We'll give you their number plus the $10 million. So Paul took my advice all the way. LeBron, he's going back. He has to be in home room the next morning, okay? He's in high school, right? He's in high school. He's going back to a home room the next morning.

Starting point is 00:28:49 He's in there with his mom and his team, his agent at the time. But he's clearly, LeBron James, he's making the decision. We leave the meeting. He asked for some room. We leave the board room. We're going to the other room. We're like, oh, you think he's going to do it? I'm like, man, I think so.

Starting point is 00:29:09 Like, it's $10 million, man. The guy, I'm paying him exactly what he's going to get paid. We're not, this is just a bonus. This is not coming from the money. This is a signing bonus to sign it now and not take the other meetings. We come back in the room, this 18-year-old kid says, no, I'm betting on myself. He didn't say that, but we knew that. He was going to take the other meetings.

Starting point is 00:29:35 he walked away from $10 million, a check signed to his name, to go back to the projects in Akron and back to Home Room. I applauded him. Because I knew at that moment in time that the world had changed. When a young African-American that was in poverty knew that his talent was bigger than that check, it taught me a lot. It taught me a lot of where the world was going

Starting point is 00:30:10 and that we were already there. And it's something that I'm proud of him for to this day. Not that Reebok was the bad choice or anything like that. It wasn't even about that. It was the fact that he believed in him more than the money at that moment in time. That was a big shift for a community of people. But I think that's one.

Starting point is 00:30:36 one of the main themes that runs through your entire career is like you're encouraging other people around you to like bet on themselves. Even the story you told about the Raybass. We sold the glasses. We didn't get anything for it. Like I read Andre Agassiz's phenomenal autobiography called Open. And he goes out one night, is hungover and, you know, he's a wild boy. And he winds up playing a tournament the next day. Wins the tournament. But he's wearing Oakleys, like the crazy multicolored ones. And just because his eyes are bloodshot, he's hung over. right you wins a tournament there's a crazy photograph that gets put on like the cover sports illustrated he winds up selling a ton of oakley's did he get equity in oakley no you know what you got i got a dodge viper sent to his house by the founder of oakley so it's like if that guy bought you a 60 000 or 80 000 car how much money did he make yeah and so your whole thing it's just like

Starting point is 00:31:22 why aren't why are you giving it away won't you this is very entrepreneurial it happens all the time again when the incumbent is already making money doing what they're doing when you're making all this money if you're in the record business at that time think about this the music business you sell singles, right? So you buy the single for $4.99 or $3.99. And then the single was a way to get you to buy, ultimately buy into the artist for a less expensive price. And then ultimately, when they dropped the album, you'd buy the album. When the CD came, they didn't even fuck around and sell singles no more. They removed the single. The single was on cassette? The single was a cassette. Okay. Or 45 or, you know, back before that. But it was a single. But it was a single. It was a cassette. But it was a

Starting point is 00:32:06 was a cassette. So when they stopped selling singles, they wanted the artist so badly that one song, one music video, you heard hot in here, and you've seen that video, you're 1699. Without even knowing what song number two, three, four, five, six was. You didn't give a fuck. And the industry took advantage of that.

Starting point is 00:32:29 What's the first single? Let me tell you what happens in that environment. You spend all your time making one single, The rest of the album, right? So the creativity suffers because they're buying it anyway. So let's just try to make the first single. What's the thing that's going to work on MTV? And what's the thing that's going to get on radio?

Starting point is 00:32:50 That thing. In fact, a lot of artists would make an album and then go to like all the top producers just to make the first single. So they'd make a whole album with one guy or two guys and then go to one specific person to make a song that was the radio record. And that song could sound like,

Starting point is 00:33:06 nothing else on the album. They didn't give a fuck. They just wanted to sell obviously the thing. And it worked. So when you're making that margin on that product, the last thing on your mind is who's making money off the glasses, all of the shit that's being sold in the music video. What are the other businesses that we should be building on the back of this because we're giving it away? And that's what Jimmy talked about. Why don't we own the end customer? Why do we build businesses with the artists. Why don't we build business with artists? When I first started United Masters, my music distribution company, the first thing I tried to do,

Starting point is 00:33:44 the only thing I wanted to do was build a universal, not a record company agnostic CRM system. My whole idea was like if, like anything else, you go on Amazon, it's like if you buy this, then you buy that, right? So if they're selling you toilet tissue or whatever, they're selling you, the next thing, There's a plunger. There's other things that have associated with that product that you just bought. My whole thing is that if you listen to Yeezy, the Kanye album, Life of Pablo, you know, 30 times, why the next thing I'm referring to you a pair of Yeezies or a hoodie that he made?

Starting point is 00:34:26 It's not that. And the record companies and the artists had no CRM tools. every other product that I've seen, digital product, you found a way to go, okay, the margins are going to be a lot lower, but the remarketing is going to be cheap because I know who the customer is. So even if I make this amount of margin on the first transaction, the fact that I now have your name and your taste, I can sell you the next product.

Starting point is 00:34:55 This is what you talk about, that you learned Jeff Bezos, you know about selling windshield wipers. Once you board on the platform and he had your intelligence, your information, he could find out what else you wanted, and he could speak to you directly. The record business doesn't own their customers at all. I mean, at all. I have a theory around this, at least as of late. If the artists knew who their fans were, they wouldn't need a record company at all. If you're an artist and you have 200,000 people who love you, you know how much money you can make with those 200,000 people?

Starting point is 00:35:33 selling them higher margin items, or selling them the music, and then the higher margin items like hoodies and t-shirts and merchandise and other things that go back to the essence of why they fell in love with you in the beginning. When the record companies cut the deal with Spotify and this whole 70-30 split,

Starting point is 00:35:52 they had all the leverage in the world. In fact, they took equity in Spotify. The record companies owned a piece of Spotify. It was a big thing that came out. It was like, was that a big thing that came out, Like, was that value passed along to the artist who was the leverage that they utilized in order to get that equity? But putting that to the side, rather than negotiating the equity, why wouldn't you renegotiate the access to the data? The real access to the data?

Starting point is 00:36:20 So that the artist would know, if you listen to that, if Taylor Swift has a fan that listened to her album 700 times, Why wouldn't Taylor Swift be able to communicate directly with that artist to sell them the ticket directly, sell it a fan, the gear directly? The record companies, I believe, never negotiated that when they had that leverage because they didn't even want to have to share that information with the artist. Time has passed and maybe there's privacy laws around it, but they could have still had the option to opt in. Like, do you want Taylor Swift to be able to contact you?

Starting point is 00:36:54 Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. Do you want Kendrick Lamar to be able to contact you? Fuck yeah. Beyonce, hell yeah. But they didn't negotiate that because they may would have to share that. And once the artists had direct connection to their fans,

Starting point is 00:37:13 record companies would then become obsolete. I was trying to build CRM tools for the artists. So like any other brand would have CRM tools. These CRM tools would allow you to navigate with your customer and that you could be able to manage that relationship. The route of waking was there is no data. to be gotten. There's no data to be gotten.

Starting point is 00:37:35 Meaning that the data source, Spotify or YouTube or whatever it was, were not going to ever give you the user IDs. Right? So like on Apple wouldn't either either. No, Apple, no. They're not going to give you the user IDs. So it's not like if that phone downloaded something,

Starting point is 00:37:59 you know, or streamed something X amount of times, I wouldn't be able to send an advertising directly to that phone. They wouldn't allow you to do that. Years later, there was a law around that GDPR that talked about this, so that definitely got in the middle of this, and it was around Facebook and voting and things of that nature that sort of brought this to light. But prior to that, if it would have been shared

Starting point is 00:38:25 and the artist had an opportunity to get that intelligence, and the fans had a chance to allow the artists to get an opportunity to that intelligence through those platforms. I think we'd be talking about a completely different industry today. When I was building United Masses and I started in 2017, the idea about building an independent distribution company was driven by the premise that the record business at one point, for many, yet for decades, since its inception was you have to find, a record company in order to find an audience. You get a record deal. We control radio. We're going to get you on the radio. We're going to get you on MTV. Oh, my God. Because trying to get on MTV and

Starting point is 00:39:15 radio, if you didn't have a record company at a point in time was almost impossible. Since this whole digital content revolution, artists would find audiences before they found the record company. So if they found the audience before they found a record company, why would they have to give over their rights? Why would they have to sell off their name, image, and likeness and perpetuity to somebody because they gave them a half a million dollars when they were 18, 19 years old in the beginning of their career? So we started United Masters with the premise to invert the economics so that the artists got the lion's share of the economics because they actually did the work. They kept the ownership.

Starting point is 00:39:58 That's why you called it United Masters. Yes, you got it. And Ben Horowitz was a big supporter of that in the beginning. Tim Cook strongly believes in that. Tim Cook is a big believer. It's the Apple ethos to support and give the creative tools. They believe in that. Whether it's an architect, a designer, or an artist themselves,

Starting point is 00:40:19 they believe in that at its core. So it's not like it's an idea that doesn't have massive support behind it. But it takes a generational shift because the artist for so long, it was a Stockholm syndrome. They're stuck in these deals. They believe that if I'm signing a record company, A, I'm going to get a lot of money. They're going to make me global. I'm going to get awards, you know, and recognition around it. So I'm going to keep doing that.

Starting point is 00:40:49 Then you have another generation of artists that are coming up right now that are like, are you fucking crazy? I own my shit. I market myself anyway. guys don't do anything for me. At least I don't believe they do. I rely on myself first and foremost. I'm the best marketer of myself. I'm the best marketer to my audience of myself that anybody else can do, a third party can do. So I'm betting on that. So you have artists, independent artists right now that are blown the fuck up that are done really well. You know, we have an artist on United Masters,

Starting point is 00:41:19 a big X the plug. It's made $20 million this year. I mean, more, more, more, more. And it's his. and he owns this, and it's something that he can give to his family, his kids, he owns it. This idea, when you've seen years ago, like,

Starting point is 00:41:34 people ask, like, when Prince wrote slave on his face, Prince changed his name from Prince to a symbol to get out of a contract. Because Warner owned his name, image,

Starting point is 00:41:47 and likeness. So he said, if I change my name to a symbol, doesn't that navigate me out of the contract? that I signed. He wrote slave on his face. One of the most successful artists of all time wrote slave on his face because he knew that I don't even own the shit that came out of my brain. That's crazy. When you explain this to technology companies, I explained this to Larry Page was the first guy that invested in United Rasses. I said, could you imagine if every time a seed investor

Starting point is 00:42:21 came in, they actually own the IP, an intellectual prop, they owned it. That's what it is in the music business. The guy comes in first and gives you a check for half a million dollars. He owns your name and image and likeness. People look at, you can't be fucking, that can't be real.

Starting point is 00:42:37 I'm like, I swear to God that's real. That's why these artists at the end of their career, they die broke, because they don't own anything. It's owned by the person who discovered them. It's not owned by them. Even though they have the unique gift to create something that others can't, they don't own it.

Starting point is 00:42:58 They actually have the thing that's rare and therefore valuable. Yes. And why I love where we are today and the democratization that digital is provided is that an artist can now, and not only musicians, artists, painters, but like, I'm a painter. substack. I'm a writer. I'm a journalist. Podcasters. Podcasters. I don't need the publisher to be a third party that owns this anymore.

Starting point is 00:43:36 I can find an audience on my own. And the power in that and the economics in that and the long-term value of that is something that we've never seen before in the hands of the actual creatives. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring,

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Starting point is 00:44:37 great description of the value deal can give your company. He said, we built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. There's a long history of the music industry, essentially fucking over the artists. I read Jay-Z's fantastic book Decoded, and he talks about reading this book called Hit Men. And I think it was all the about the crazy shit going on in the 70s and 80s.

Starting point is 00:45:20 And he's like, okay. Oh, 60s. 60s. Yeah, 50s, 60s, 70s, it's crazy. It's always like, you have to read that. It's almost like reading, it's the like the movie that they turned, the book they turned into Goodfellas.

Starting point is 00:45:31 Really? That's what it feels like when you read it. It wasn't even a book they called that turned into Goodfellas, the movie. I don't remember. But Jaycey's point was just like, all it is like, I just read the book. I'm like, I'm going to avoid that.

Starting point is 00:45:42 Wise guys. Okay. So I read, Jay's like, I read the book and I'll just avoid doing that. And then he came into the game independent, I think he, the founding of Rockefeller. So he got it, and he got it back in, what, 96? How the hell were you still telling the story in 2000?

Starting point is 00:45:57 Oh, wait, what time? I'm out. You know, Jay got it because he was turned down. Record companies wouldn't sign him. Okay. A guy that talented, they wouldn't sign him. He had no choice but to go independent. He figured it out.

Starting point is 00:46:13 And then when he got independent, he obviously figured it out. Master P figured it out cash money figured it out to a certain extent because there's different versions of this there's different versions of guys figuring it out like there's a figuring it out where you like

Starting point is 00:46:27 I own the whole fucking thing it's mine and you're my partner and I pay you a percentage right then there's a version of it like look I'm not going to allow one contract to hold everybody which was Wu Tang's thing the Riza had a record deal

Starting point is 00:46:43 and it didn't work Then he came back and invented this thing called Wu-Tang. And he made sure that he did not sign what he had signed prior when he was Prince Rakim and artists. What was the difference? All those artists could be allowed to sign. Wu-Tang was signed in one place, but the artist had the right to sign in different places.

Starting point is 00:47:06 They weren't stuck under one agreement. So what happened in the record deal, like if I signed the group, that if anybody in that group ever went solo, they also had to be with me. That's what record companies' deals look like at the time. So if I signed you in a group, if you decide to break off from the group, you're with me first.

Starting point is 00:47:25 When he did the deal immediately with Wu-Tang, none of them had to sign with the record company that originally, BMG, RCA, which originally gave them the deal. That was a breakthrough. That guys got hot off the album, the Wu-Tang album, and it was signing deals in other places. People had never seen that before.

Starting point is 00:47:42 And then when you've seen Mass the P-No Limit, This was independent and putting out number one top five records every week and talking about how much money they were making and selling records out the trunk. It was like, what are they doing down in New Orleans? These guys were finding ways in resourceful manners and were making a ton of fucking money. But how did they get on radio or MTV if they were independent? This idea, the power of emerging subculture,

Starting point is 00:48:12 they were building something on the way up. Remember, man, if you get 200,000 people who love you, the amount of money in that is tremendous, and they grow with you. They didn't need MTV and radio at the time. They may have had a local radio station. They were down in New Orleans. They had a community of people who bought into this idea, and they were building no-limit records. And that contagion and growth kept going throughout the South.

Starting point is 00:48:41 And, you know, at some point, MTV had to play it. You couldn't be left out. Right? So it wasn't about you, you needed it at some point because it was so popular versus it needing you to brick. Okay, so this is the difference between like top down record companies at the time. They're like, we have these relationships with national radio and MTV. We're going to make you a start. We're going to push it from the top down.

Starting point is 00:49:03 Master P and these other guys, they did bottom up. I remember hearing Sean Parker on an interview one time. He said this unnamed record company executive was just like, you know, give me anybody in the the world even if they're not talented. And with enough push behind them, I can make like them a popular musician. Basically saying they controlled the system. Yeah, they did control. They did control the system. They control radio. Is this related to what you were saying earlier, how mediocrity was like famous? Rewarded. Yeah. You know, and I'll use references like I, like I said, you know, Kenny G, who's a great musician or Michael Bolton. And sometimes I just

Starting point is 00:49:38 say these things because I know it brings like shock value, but just to make the point, I shouldn't know the Britney Spears song, Oops, I did it again. There's a lot of in-sync songs I shouldn't know. But they were pounded in your brain. You couldn't avoid it because MTV and radio, local radio, they had a monopoly on it. So all of a sudden, you started listening to this music. By the way, I grew up my whole life thinking the whole whole notes was black. Because you wouldn't even, you would listen to these songs.

Starting point is 00:50:10 And they were like, There were a time in the 70s where they weren't on music video, so you'd hear the voices, and like a lot of these artists were trying to sound African-American or like R&B artists, so you'd hear it, and you'd be like, I guess they are black, and then you find out, you know, obviously they were not.

Starting point is 00:50:28 But like, when they control the system, they could push something on you. And the power of reputation will force you to have some recall. whether you like it or not, that's a whole other story. But the awareness is more than there. And like, if I got 50, if I got a 50-50 shot because you already heard it,

Starting point is 00:50:57 I love those odds versus the shot that you never heard it at all. Repetition is persuasive. So, again, I think we both have a love of, like, I love to study the advertising industry. And I'll go back to like the early 1900s when it was just copyrighters for the best advertisers.

Starting point is 00:51:11 But even if you think about the 50s, 60s when they're building all the massive advertising firms, the global advertising firms on Madison Avenue. It's like they all talk about this for 100 years. You're not repeating your ads enough. Repetition is for space to do it over and over and over again. If you see all the deals we do with our partners, you can't buy an ad on any of my podcast, a single ad. You're doing at least a year, in many cases, many, many years. You have to repeat this. It's so important. So going back to you're realizing, hey, what is the purpose of a record label? You're essentially creating almost like a record label infrastructure

Starting point is 00:51:42 in United Masters or three United Masters but the artists maintain ownership so you're taking the parts of like you guys can market better than we can you have control like I've watched all your interviews I love Russ the rapper Russ Love him

Starting point is 00:51:58 You've done a book Yeah you've done I've taken so many ideas He's so fucking good The way he's so The way he explains it His passion around it Dope as fuck And I've taken ideas

Starting point is 00:52:10 From where he markets his music to the way I run my podcast. I don't see any barriers here. It's the same thing, whether you're a filmmaker, you mentioned a writer earlier, a rapper, a podcaster, a founder. It's all the same thing. Painter. Russ is a rapper, but he's really an entrepreneur. His product is. It is. First of all, A, he is an entrepreneur. Like, full stop. A good one. A really good one. We should tell people that don't know him. He's the first person in history to a single person that wrote, recorded, engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered an album that got a billion streams.

Starting point is 00:52:45 A single person. I don't know all of the stats around him as a artist. Him as a business person and the way he, how prolific he is at explaining his business and the amount of songs he puts out knowing that, you know, if you don't like this song, I may put out 12 songs and then you like the 13th song and then all of a sudden you like song number one

Starting point is 00:53:08 and then his whole catalog when he was explaining at the beginning of his of my sort of entering his journey I was just blown away about how prolific he was as a business guy to explain it and then you know chance the rapper like there were a lot of guys

Starting point is 00:53:27 that took independence in the whole digital era and like took it and turned it on its head and they were proud of I don't want a record deal. Are you fucking crazy? Pay, you can't give me $200 million. You can't buy me out of this shit.

Starting point is 00:53:45 That was the next step. Like, when I just talked about LeBron James saying I wouldn't take the $10 million, that's Russ saying I wouldn't sell my publishing for $200 million. Right? Like, you start to realize the power of ownership. This is a funny story I got to tell you about Russ.

Starting point is 00:53:58 He might have said it to you on the interview did with him, again, both of them were excellent. When his business manager said, hey, this company wants to buy your catalog, He goes, I just need to know the number. You obviously know the answer is no. I just want to know the number so I can put it in a song. I can rap about the fact that I turn down this much money.

Starting point is 00:54:14 La Russell, Russ, Toby Neway, Big X the Plug. But it's so Larry June, there's Brent Fires. There's so many artists that your audience may not even know the name. They're making so much money because they're independent. And now you're watching the artists that were, signed for many, many years. Usher's an independent artist now. Usher's independent.

Starting point is 00:54:42 Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl. Then Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny's an independent act. Are you serious? I don't know. Yes, he signed to Rima. Bad Bunny's an independent artist.

Starting point is 00:54:54 These guys are making a fortune. They own themselves. That's the future of the music business. That's the future of all of these media businesses. You own this podcast. What does it mean? The power of that. Fucking, look at Joe Button.

Starting point is 00:55:13 When I talk about Russ, I think about Joe Button, too. Joe Button walked away from a lot of money, man. And, you know, forget me and going into the advertising business. This guy left, you know, a rap career, whether he left the career or the career left him. He went into the podcast business very early. And he's done an amazing job. And then he turned down Spotify and went to Patreon. because he wanted to work directly with fans.

Starting point is 00:55:40 I don't want to any obfuscated version of money. I want to know exactly what, I want to get paid exactly what I deserve because I have the audience who pays me directly and he uses Patreon. These are great things that are breakthrough in business models. I look at all of these artists as solo entrepreneurs, as SMBs. The SMBs that used to be flower shops and bodegas and this, that, and a third are now streamers,

Starting point is 00:56:17 independent artists, influencers, podcasters, vloggers, and writers on substock, they're the new SMBs. And I don't think industries have caught up to that idea yet. I don't think the insurance companies understand it. a lot of the new fintech companies understand that. But there's so many incumbent industries that don't see that yet. So they're still looking at the old version of SMBs and they're so locked in with that.

Starting point is 00:56:57 You know who gets it? Like it's the founder-led companies. Because just like you had that observation when you were 29 years old, it's like, I'm in this industry that's like maybe dying or this can't be sustained. It's being attacked. by technology, right?

Starting point is 00:57:10 You're not gonna sell these high-margined CDs anymore when Napster exists. Same thing that Jamie Avine realized, you realize as well. And so even look at like some of our big partners, like I'm a huge partner with this company called Ramp. It's like, it's a founder-like company. They think like founders, and they place a huge, huge, I should have a multi-year bet on me because of all they asked,

Starting point is 00:57:30 there's no numbers. You talk about being intuitive. They didn't even know how big the audience was. All they said is like us and all of our founder friends, the most elite people, are listening to you. Let's figure out how to work together. 100%. And that's what the founders say.

Starting point is 00:57:41 He's like, I don't care if State Farm hasn't come into podcasting yet or they have now. But like all the money that's flowing from TV and radio is going into podcasts. I've seen this with a cash app was in very, very early. It was a marketing guy at Cash App. So fucking good. Seen it early. Placing bets on emerging subculture is on its path to mainstream culture. So placing the bets on the right guys who are driving.

Starting point is 00:58:10 this emerging subculture, whether it be podcast or whatever it may be as a medium, it's just a matter of time before those things become the next mainstream, go-to, mass consumed product. And the founder, I mean, dude, I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg about this. I've talked to Jeff Bezos about this, to Daniel. Like, they see what, they get it completely. They understand the power of this, especially when you have a very, you know, wealthy society. You do the work.

Starting point is 00:58:38 The one thing about you is that you actually do the work. work, you're well read, you understand the topic of each person that you are interviewing. This whole idea now that, and you and Jimmy sort of got into this, and I'm a big believer in this, that we're at odds with fame and talent. Fame and talent historically always had this relationship where they knew how to coexist. In fact, fame was an accelerator would blow the flames so that talent can get bigger. So they had a great partnership.

Starting point is 00:59:26 And I would say in the last 20 years, maybe longer, but like 20 years, it's become very profound, that those two things are at odds. In fact, fame believes it doesn't need talent at all. And I've come to the realization that talent believes that. And what I mean by this is this whole idea that you are famous without having any talent. Or if you're talented, you actually will put the talent to the side and do the thing that will get you most famous rather than actually utilizing your talent to get that attention and that fame. And that's a very dangerous aspect of where we are in society when talent is not being.

Starting point is 01:00:12 incentivized to be talented, where fame is being incentivized to be famous for things that are not necessarily driven by talent. Yeah, it's not a world I want to live in. It's the world that we do live in. And I don't know what the long-term unintended effects are of this, but I've seen this affect many different industries, including politics, where fame is more important than the talent. in corporations, in politics, in popular culture, whether it be films or podcasts, you name it, that fame is the driver, not the talent itself. Now, you find the rare cross-section of talent,

Starting point is 01:01:04 you do all the work, and you have a great foul. But that's rare. I think this also plays into what you're saying is why independence and retaining ownership is so important, because, like, Russ may not have, obviously, the audience that Taylor Swift does, but Russ makes a phenomenal living. You know, I think he's got, like, whatever,

Starting point is 01:01:21 10, 15 million listeners, so it's not a small audience, but it's not, you know, power, it's not 100 million monthly listeners. But if you own it and you retain control, his unborn grandkids are already rich. And if you really owned it, he would have the CRM intelligence around the people who love them.

Starting point is 01:01:40 And that's the next step of the music business. That's why these industries have to, to go next. Because the creators are going to demand that. They're one step removed from demanding that. I need to know exactly who listens to this podcast. I don't give a fuck. Or you're not going to get the podcast. Whoever the distributor

Starting point is 01:01:56 is, whoever the platform is, you know what? The next evolution of this in the next three years, I have to be able to go direct and I have to be able to collect that fan data. I want to send out the newsletter. I want to send out the fan

Starting point is 01:02:10 sort of correspondence. like it's the platform you own, I now want to be able to have my direct relationship with the fan. And somebody's going to build the next platform that's going to become the one that drives consumption is the one that allows that to happen fluidly. That's for certain. Book it. That's what Jimmy's talking about,

Starting point is 01:02:33 what he wants to do with his company. That's exactly what we're doing. That's why you're seeing these shifts right now in the marketplace. there's a company called 11, or even, rather. 11 labs is different, right? Even. We use 11 labs for our transcripts. Shout out 11 lives.

Starting point is 01:02:53 11 labs is an Andreessen Harwood's lead company. They're fucking awesome. They invest in, and they believe in founders. They believe in CEOs. They bet on good CEOs. They have great CEOs in their portfolio. What does the company even do? Even allows artists to sell directly to their fans.

Starting point is 01:03:09 And they're selling merch and, vinyl and vinyl is now considered merchandise. And a lot of the independent artists have used them for a while, and now artists on labels have used them, and they have found success using their platform to sell directly, and now UMG is moving in that direction. They just signed a deal with them. So I guess the good news out of all of this,

Starting point is 01:03:35 since we started United Masses, is that the independent music space, and there's a lot of us, have outgrown on the front line, the major labels. So if you talk about new releases, market share, the independents have, obviously the record companies make a lot more money. They have catalog and all these other things. But because of that trend line, what the major labels are doing now are borrowing tactics

Starting point is 01:04:01 from the independents, including buying the independence. UMG just completed the sale of the purchase of downtown, records, which has a lot of independent, all independent music assets. And Sony has an independent, the fastest growing part of their business is a company called The Orchard, which is all about independents, which is where Bad Bunny, for example, assigned to or through his company remorse. So the majors are now following the independent. Watch and see what happens.

Starting point is 01:04:35 Pay attention to what Ryan Cougler has just done with sinners. Now what's that. Oh. So Ryan Couglin, top three, if not the best director, Fruitville Station, and obviously Black Panther and now Sinners, which got nominated for the most, you know, Oscars and probably ever. I think 16 is the most ever. The rights of that movie reverts back to him. So what he did when he negotiated his deal with Warner to put out sinners, which he wrote and directed, was that he would only put it with a studio. that would allow him to get the rights back in a certain period of time. So they put up the money and he gets,

Starting point is 01:05:16 that is unprecedented in the film industry. What we just talked about is happening in the music business with Russ. It does not happen in the film industry. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars as the initial bet. He says, you're not getting the movie. You're not getting my intellectual property unless you allow me to this movie to revert back to me. I'm not giving this to you. They agreed to it.

Starting point is 01:05:38 The movie went on to make $400 million at the box office. It's the most awarded movie, definitely this year, probably ever, with 16 Oscar knobs. What do you think every other director and film producers is thinking right now? Because once you break that ice, right, the door is now open. I want Ryan Couglas deal. I want to get that. I want ownership. That's where this is going.

Starting point is 01:06:06 Ben Harwood said to me, you know, we were sitting there years ago. He said, you know, he took about the evolution of like the workforce. And it like, it went from the indentured servant to the slave, to the employee, to the owner. We're at the owner. People want ownership, whether it's stock in the company or ownership of a print or ownership, you know, in the art business. You know, one of the big thing with artists is like artists sells, gallery finds artists. artists work gallery markets artists and sells to you buy you buy it for you know a hundred thousand dollars artist is so happy you know david owns his work david sells that work for

Starting point is 01:06:52 a hundred thousand dollars for ten million dollars artist doesn't get any of the lift from the from the hundred thousand to the ten million artist feels like why don't i get a carry on all of this It's my name, it's my intellectual property. How come I don't get a piece of this? You're going to start to see that take place when artists sells work and they get a carry every time that work is sold. The galleries,

Starting point is 01:07:20 which are the, at this point, necessary middleman because the galleries are like, you wouldn't have an audience if it wasn't for me. As everything else is taking place, you're going to start to see the galleries start to lose relevance because the artists are going to, to start finding audiences directly without needing a gallery to authenticate the fact that they

Starting point is 01:07:41 are great artists. And this is where the world is going. Yeah, the common theme through everything we're talking about is just the constant elimination of middlemen. Brian Halligan founded HubSpot 20 years ago, and he has this line about AI that I keep thinking about. He said most companies are using AI to make their teams more productive, but the companies that will thrive make the company itself the intelligence. And that is exactly what HubSpot does. HubSpot gives you AI that works. AI that actually knows your customers and your business. Your AI needs to know what you know, your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't.

Starting point is 01:08:14 HubSpot connects AI to your real customer data. So when it writes an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that they already contacted support twice this month. And that's when you start seeing actual results. Visit HubSpot.com to learn more. That's HubSpot.com. So we've been talking a lot about, like, ownership, going your own path, making your own independent decisions.

Starting point is 01:08:38 We had dinner at our mutual friend Rick Gerson's house several months ago, and you told this amazing story. Gregson just got paid. He's coming on the show. We'll let him talk about that. Don't add a doubt out. No, no, no. That's staying in. He definitely did an incredible deal just now, which we're going to talk about on the podcast.

Starting point is 01:08:57 But something you told me that night, which was very fascinating, he's like, I really admired the fact that you, like, bet on yourself. just like you talked about LeBron betting on yourself, the people you respect the most. Because, like, people don't understand. You built a phenomenally successful, not only was translation influential, but it was making a ton of money. And you took the unusual,

Starting point is 01:09:18 another unusual decision to roll that in to United Masters. Yeah. You talk about that? Yeah. You know, I believe strongly that music and marketing, at least the segment

Starting point is 01:09:35 that I focused on with translation, it's the same customer. And if I'm going to make marketing ideas that focuses on, you know, Gen Z primarily and understands that culture is what drives decision-making, if I have a music company that distributes artists at scale, I'll be able to gleam intelligence from that in order to make that a marketplace offering that no one could fuck with.

Starting point is 01:10:06 That was really what I was the idea. Like, in my heart of hearts, building a company today, if you want to disrupt and do something that is groundbreaking, you have to live at the convergence of culture, technology, and storytelling. They have to be able to coexist. The culture people can't be too cool for the technologists. The technologists can't be too nerdy to give a fuck what culture is talking about. Like, these things must work as one. So when Jimmy was talking about his school at USC, and he talked about, like, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:43 software people don't make hardware because they don't respect design or these worlds must collaborate. So the emotion that brings these things together are, obviously it's curiosity, but the emotion that drives it is empathy. You have to have empathy for things that you actually don't understand and know that the power. of these things working together is going to create something phenomenal.

Starting point is 01:11:09 Bono said something to me one time, which is so profound that we should all take with us, which is you can get anything done in this world if you're willing to not take credit. So this idea that you're going to put the idea of doing that thing, and you're not going to let the politics of who gets the credit for it affect everyone's incentive of doing that thing, if you can actually remove that feeling of needing to be self-applauded for doing that, you can get anything done. And I believe in building a company that's disruptive to be able to get culture, technologists, and storytellers to work together, they have to be able to put themselves second

Starting point is 01:11:55 to the idea and being serviced to that idea. And that's the company I'm building. And that's the company I want to be a part of. That's the only thing I want to do is be a part of things like that, that bring worlds together. And I did that in the music business. I was always working on, like, you know, how do we tell stories that are going to bring that and that together?

Starting point is 01:12:17 So whether it be basketball and that or, you know, Eve and Gwen Stefani, you know, these things that I was working on was always about, like, if you could put two worlds together, you're going to find a synergy that's going to compound each one of those worlds as individual worlds. Yeah, you kind of, you're like a habitual, like, line stepper. You don't really respect boundaries between anything else because you don't think there should be boundaries. Like, even your decision to sign- I don't believe it.

Starting point is 01:12:47 Exactly. Well, it's obvious to be like me studying your career for so long. Yeah. But even your decision to sign Kobe. Yeah. To wrap. Well, let's talk about that for say. Let's talk about Kobe.

Starting point is 01:12:56 God bless. God bless that man and his family. When Kobe came out as a rookie, I had found out that he was part of a group, actually, when he was in high school. And they were recording. But the one thing I knew about him, which we all know about him, was his competitive nature with Shaq. Shaq was a successful musician. Shaq sold millions of records. Shaq really sold millions of records.

Starting point is 01:13:25 Shaq has a song with Wu Tang. Shack has songs with Notorious B-I-G on Shack's first album. I noticed it sounds crazy. So when I went to Kobe, I already knew he wanted to do better than Shack. So he wanted a record deal, and my bet was that he's going to, like, really do his thing because he wants... And the first thing is, Kobe Bryant would do I sign the group. Three months later, he gets rid of the group. And now...

Starting point is 01:13:56 He's the solo act. You know, I got a chance to know him really well. He spent a month at my house in New Jersey at the time working on recording the album, and I watched his routine, which was phenomenal. And I remember watching a 19-I had to book a local gym and watch him shoot a thousand shots. And then he had these tapes of Michael Jordan going right,

Starting point is 01:14:20 Michael Jordan going left, Michael Jordan guarding people going right, Michael Jordan guarding people going left. And, you know, you realize that he didn't come to America until he was 15, 14, 15 years old. He had all this footage that I guess the team had made for him of these cutdowns and shit. But watching him go through that taught me a lot about, like, discipline.

Starting point is 01:14:42 And he had that fucking early. I mean, obviously, I'm not saying anything that's not obvious to everybody at this point in time. But his recording career, we made the first song. It didn't go. over well, but he met his wife. He met Vanessa at the set. So it went over very well. He made his soulmate on the set. But the experience of working with him was amazing. He worked really fucking hard. Even on rapping. He immersed himself in it, man. He was around Nas all the time. And, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:16 obviously Nas and Foxy Brown and, you know, he came to New York. He lived with me. I mean, he was in it. He was in it, man. Yeah, I love the idea that's like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. By the way, that's the one thing I learned in life. That idea, whoever said that coined it perfectly. How you do anything is how you do everything. That guy was hardworking. You know, you ask athletes, whether it be Tom Brady, LeBron.

Starting point is 01:15:45 Like you go to these guys' lockers, it's perfect. It's how they play on the court is how they fucking make sure that their locker looks. It's like pristine, like all the great athletes. It's not sloppy. It's not sloppy because somebody comes and does it for them. They don't leave it sloppy. They are very pristine. If you just look at a player's locker,

Starting point is 01:16:07 it will tell you a lot about how that players play. And that's everything about that. And I was just saying about Kobe, everything he did, he went all the way. And then, like, he came to New York. And I have great stories where, you know, where he was training to play against Alan Iverson and he got like 10 New York City type point guards.

Starting point is 01:16:28 And he stood, I had a guy go get him for me and my man, shout out to my man Anton, who worked for me at the time in the music business, but always had a love for basketball. He's now a recruiter for the Cleveland Cavaliers. But back then, when I said, look, Kobe wants, he's going to go down on Iverson. He wants 10, like, New York City point guards with handles. Can you find them? This guy go finds him. You go to Chelsea Pairs.

Starting point is 01:16:52 Kobe, these guys are lined up at half court, ten of them, with basketballs. Kobe's at half court and they, at the foul line and they start coming through. Fools one by one. And with a head of steam, they have to get by him and go to the basket. He's stripping

Starting point is 01:17:08 the ball, blocking the ball, and as soon as he gets that one, the next one comes, he does not play offense. Like an assembly line. This is after a thousand shots and this, that, it's like who am I dealing with? And he's 18, 19. Is there any in the music industry that you thought had a Kobe-level work ethic? Beyonce.

Starting point is 01:17:29 She's at the top. I mean, the work, from everything I've seen, like, work ethic, I know Michael Jordan obviously has a strong work ethic, but I don't know that firsthand. Beyonce, Kobe, Ed Reed, Ray Lewis, and Ed Reed. Who's the rapper that has the best work ethic? I would say Jay has the, has the, all of them has the strongest work. Okay, I wanted to ask you about Jay-Z.

Starting point is 01:17:57 I didn't expect you to answer that with him. I heard you tell this hilarious story years ago on a podcast that Jay-Z, like, rolled up, I think this before you guys were close. He, like, rolled up on you with, like, his crew at the office. I think you were so Sony,

Starting point is 01:18:09 and you're like, this is the first thing. This is when we started getting close. Yeah. You told the story that you were barefoot. Yeah. I remember I was like, why are you barefoot at Sony at Sony and Edward to Sony?

Starting point is 01:18:20 Hold on. You know, I don't, I don't know if it's because I'm from the West Indies and from Trinidad and shit. I would be barefoot right now. Well, next to that. I don't know why I'm not barefoot. Next time we do the podcast together, we'll both be barefoot. I love being barefoot.

Starting point is 01:18:33 I feel comfortable being barefoot. My son and my daughter, they take off their shoes all the time. I have a lot of stories about being barefoot. This is the first time I heard about you. This is like 99. And I think this is like a remix of like a Maya song or something. And that was a result of it. He was like, tell us out to holl at me, man.

Starting point is 01:18:50 That was before that. That led to that. The story is like, obviously I had known of Jay, and in New York there was this thing, like after, it was like Biggie and Nas, and then Jay was the guy coming up behind them in the New York rap scene thing. Because Illmatic and Ready to Die came out before reasonable doubt.

Starting point is 01:19:13 Before, but people were judging it just rap skills. It's almost like a, it was A sales and notoriety and skills. And it was just like Biggie was the best, or Nas was the best. Jay was coming up to be in that conversation. He says that on a record, people on the streets is watching, who's the best rap of Biggie Jay Z or Nas? He talks about that because that was like a thing. He inserted himself in that conversation.

Starting point is 01:19:40 Which is smart. It was very smart because the conversation really was Biggie or Nas. But anyhow, there was something going on with an artist that they were supposed to sign and they had never signed them. They basically, as let's say you and I, you're doing a deal, and then you don't sign the deal for six months, but the paperwork is there, and you're basically holding an option

Starting point is 01:20:03 without even holding it because you don't sign the deal. So when after six months, there's time that goes by, I'm like, look, I was working with the artist, there was a lot of other interests for more money in the artist, and I'm like, he's going to do a deal over here. And then Jay and his team were like, No, we keep your word. He has to keep his word.

Starting point is 01:20:25 Bro, it's been fucking six months. Like, his word is like expired. I mean, it's been six months. And they did not like my response. So it's nine o'clock in the office, and they roll into the office, him and four or five other guys. This is Jay Z. Jay Z.

Starting point is 01:20:43 Tata. Had you met Jay before in person or no? I'd seen him before, but like we didn't know each other like that. And I didn't give a fuck. And neither did he. and he come to the office. I met Sony at the time, and they're like, so we speak on the phone,

Starting point is 01:20:59 and he's like, we're coming to see you right now. I'm like, great, I'm at $5.50, Madison. And they come upstairs, and I'm sure that I didn't even notice at the time, they thought, oh, we're going upstairs, and he's probably going to have some guys, and there's going to be like a, you know, some faceoff or some version of that, I guess. They came upstairs, let them upstairs, you know, front desk,

Starting point is 01:21:20 let them up. that are they comes theirs, and I'm by myself barefoot. And I'm like, and you've seen their face. And I'm like, listen, I don't want to have an argument about anything about anything that doesn't involve big houses. They just start laughing. I'm like, unless some big houses involved,

Starting point is 01:21:43 this is a stupid conversation. And then like literally out there. Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean? I don't want to be involved in anything big house. You say it's like a small deal? Yeah, like money. If we're not talking about a lot of motherfucking money, what are we talking about?

Starting point is 01:21:55 So my analogy to that was just big houses. I'm like, are we talking about big houses? Because it doesn't even matter unless we're talking about big houses. They love that shit. So I had laughed at it and then Jay and I became friends and started playing Madden all the time and then realized that our, that realized, but my cousin was his cousin. My father's brothers, my father's brother married a woman that happened to be connected to his side of the family.

Starting point is 01:22:29 They were cousins. So my cousin was his cousins. So he was second cousins. And that all came out because we started to hang out with each other. It was like, oh shit, right, that's true. I didn't even realize that. And we, you know, ensued a... And then how soon after did you start doing business together?

Starting point is 01:22:46 Because you did his... Immediately, immediately. Okay, so you did his shoe deal. the first deal we did was I got on the right still DRE for Dr. Drey. So Jimmy comes to me, this is Jimmy. Jimmy Iveen. Jimmy I love that. You're in podcast mode like Jimmy.

Starting point is 01:23:01 The audience doesn't know that, Jimmy Iveen. Jimmy Ivee, who was on the last episode in case you really go and listen to that again. Dr. Drake comes in with the album, the Chronic 2001, which is a fucking amazing album. Classic. Right? And he plays it for Jimmy. And Jimmy goes, are you? you sure?

Starting point is 01:23:20 That's the... That's it? Dre's like, yeah, this is the shit. Da-da-da-da-da. So Jimmy's like, what does Eminem think? Because Eminem's hot at the time. So Dre's like, what do you mean? What is the Eminem thing?

Starting point is 01:23:34 You know, and I'm sitting in the meeting. And Jimmy's... Jimmy's so good at reading the room. He bets on his nose more than his any other sense. Fuck his eyes and fuck his airs. his nose.

Starting point is 01:23:51 Does Drey know confidence tell me that this is the shit? Or is there any fucking crack in the door that he can go further? And whatever line of questioning he asked led to the, like, let's try to make one more. Jimmy's always one more. One more. One more. One more. So Drey plays a bunch of beats for the one more.

Starting point is 01:24:17 and like I picked five beats. They cut me a CD with five beats to make the one more and Steve's going to go help get the record made. Man, I'm honored. I'm fucking, it's Dr. Dre. Fuck all that.

Starting point is 01:24:35 Motherfucking Dr. Dre. Fucking, motherfucking Dr. Dre. Fuck all that. I can't believe I'm getting on a plane with Dr. Dre beats and I'm flying in New York with it. It is that, there's nothing. There's nothing I could be more responsible for

Starting point is 01:24:51 than having a fucking, what this guy cooks on me, and I go to New York. There's a beat I like, but I don't say anything. I played a beats for Timberlin. I remember playing it for Timbley. He's like, you got fucking Dre beats? I'm like, hell, fucking yeah. Played for Timblein's like, that shit right there is crazy.

Starting point is 01:25:12 Call. Jay. Yo, Jay, listen to this shit. You got fucking doc. Yes, motherfucker. Listen to this. He hears that shit. He picks the same exact beat.

Starting point is 01:25:24 The same beat I like, Timlin picked, and then Jay Z pick. I told Jimmy, see if I can get Jay to write it. I asked Jay to write the record, and Jay writes fucking Still DRE. And he doesn't actually write, right? Is this at the point in his career where he stopped writing? He still doing? Yeah, yeah. But he fucking rap like a West Coast artist.

Starting point is 01:25:45 Listen to Still DRE. Every line Snoop says in the hook is fucking J-Roe. I was like, this guy's different. He wrote Snoop's parts on that song. He knew West Coast lingo. He understood the nuance of being from the West Coast. If you listen to that song, talking about the four or five, talking about khakis with the cuff and the crease.

Starting point is 01:26:14 Like, he understood that thing. And they did it work. Word for word, it ended up becoming the first single. You just brought something to my mind, because I've been reading a lot about Bob Dylan. And, you know, it's like, I'm always interested in, like, who influences the influencers? So, like, the greatest living musicians are like, like, Bruce Mason saying. He's like, I just followed Bob Dylan. And when you studied Bob Dylan's early career, he was so good at mimicking.

Starting point is 01:26:39 He could sit in Club Wawa in Greenwich Village and listen to you play and then be able to recreate your sound exactly as if he was you. Kobe could mimic. We're talking about people, Bob Dylan, great, right? Can mimic people. Kobe could mimic, I mean, look at his, look, he can mimic Michael Jordan. Now you're saying the exact same thing. Jay-Z's not from the fucking West Coast, yet he could rap as if he grew up there.

Starting point is 01:27:01 It's not even a problem. Yeah. It wasn't even an issue. Jay-Z can write R&B songs. What people need to know is I am not taking anything away from the great writers, Maya, Angelo, Shakespeare. You name the writers, nothing. Naz and Jay-Z are in that conversation.

Starting point is 01:27:25 They're that good. The way they can paint pictures that you would never, with words, like you're watching a film, is a phenomenal gift that because of the art form being wrapped, gets overlooked because of the beats, the clothing, the media surrounding it. But the words that they paint

Starting point is 01:27:51 the feeling that they can give you. If you listen to those songs, it's why you love it. Because you could actually put yourself in an environment that you didn't grow up in and you could live through those lyrics. They painted the pictures more vividly than anybody else. And one of the greatest things that I've ever done,

Starting point is 01:28:14 people give me a lot of credit for doing many things, the greatest thing I've ever done was be able to manage Nas. One of the greatest writers of all time. You went into the hood, Queensboro Projects to find this young prodigy. Can you tell that story real quick about, like, how the hell did you even hear about Nas? And then what lengths did you go to manage him? Yeah. So let me back up, too.

Starting point is 01:28:35 This is why shout out to our mutual friend Jared Kushner for putting us together, the way I met you. I'll tell the story real quick, right? So listen, Queensbridge Projects, Nas, Jared Kushner. That's what you just did. Yes, exactly. But we're going to go back. But like this, because I was like a little like sad the first time I met you because obviously Jared's a close friend of both you and I. And he's like, we're having this private birthday party at this private restaurant in Miami.

Starting point is 01:29:02 And there's getting that room. There's not a lot of people. There's like eight to ten people. And there's just fucking killers. I heard Steve Stout. I was like, oh shit. And I'm sitting across from you. And you're like, who is this bigheaded fucking dude that like I was lighting you up with questions all night?

Starting point is 01:29:16 I couldn't believe that you knew. No, you know what it was? No, no, I'm glad you said that. We never talked about this. I was shocked by the nuance of what you knew. The specificity and the nuance of what you knew was alarming to me. It was alarming to me.

Starting point is 01:29:35 That's what it was. It was almost like, wow. But it was wow in a scary way. But I didn't know what you did. Because if you knew that level of information and you didn't do this, it'd be psychotic. Yeah. I didn't know what you did.

Starting point is 01:29:51 So I didn't know that I was speaking to a journalist or whatever. I'm not a fucking journalist. But that's why I told you. Okay, what the fuck? You're more than a podcaster. Yeah. But like that's why I was like, Jared, like, I need you to, because I felt that way. I was like, dude, I need another shot at stout because this was.

Starting point is 01:30:06 And so Jared, you know, said something to you, vouch for me. And then Rick. No. When they told me what you did, then I got it. But when you started coming at me with these hip hop fucking jeopardy fucking insights, I'm like, fuck off. Hey, and we're trying to eat at dinner. It's this guy's birthday. You fucking attacking me.

Starting point is 01:30:23 Anyhow. Let's come back to me. Let's go back. Jared Kushner definitely played a role in this, big time. I'm at home. I live with my parents. And, you know, I decided that I wanted to be in the music business. I didn't know what I was going to be.

Starting point is 01:30:43 I didn't know what was going to turn out. All I knew is that that was my calling at that time. I'm like, you know, whatever. And what nailed it for me was I was sitting in my, had my car, it was in my driveway, listening to Nause, it ain't hard to tell. Before Illamatics out or no? Yes.

Starting point is 01:31:03 There were two singles. Okay. Half time and then it ain't hard to tell. Is halftime the one he did with Lawrence Professor? Yes. Where it's like, uh, street disciple, my raptor trifle. I assume slugs from my brain just like a rifle. That's one of my favorite Nause lines ever.

Starting point is 01:31:17 That's live at the barbecue. Okay. And then he live at the barbecue was him part of a, there's four other rappers on that thing. Half-time came out and it ain't hard to tell. This is a Michael Jackson sample. And I heard it ain't hard to tell. I was in my driveway.

Starting point is 01:31:36 I was like, I need to know this guy. Prodigy. I can't. This is the thing that he was saying shit, I couldn't even believe what the, person was saying that he wrote it, but he was like 16. 17. I didn't even, I mean, I can't even believe it was like so fucking genius.

Starting point is 01:31:57 So anyhow, I was on my journey. I'm like, you know, like for me, my idea of trying to figure something out when there's no clear path, it's to start from ground zero. Ground zero was, where is he live at? Queensbridge Projects. Go to Queensbridge Projects. There was no other way to find this guy, not that I knew of at that time. So when I went to Queens Ridge Projects, you know, I make this joke.

Starting point is 01:32:25 The projects, it's not even a joke, but the projects doesn't have a front door. It's a bunch of buildings. There's no, like, clear front door. So you basically are walking to a building, and I'm trying to find somebody who I could ask, yo, where does Nas live or hang or whatever? and that person immediately goes to get a gun because I looked like

Starting point is 01:32:52 one of the guys that they had beef with and then somebody tell you, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, I think that guy works with these producers and shit and that the second guy who said that happened to give the first guy reasonable doubt to like go further in the question. It happened to be Nas' brother, Jungle, that I asked. So I did ask the right person immediately, randomly,

Starting point is 01:33:21 or the wrong person, depending on how that thing ended. And we have known about Jungle, like, he's going to have a gun. He's never leave home without it. And that led to me meeting him. And when I met him, I realized that as brilliant as he was and as successful as Illmatic was that the infrastructure around him did not give him the opportunity

Starting point is 01:33:49 to be able to be everything he can be. And as much as I credit for going there and having the guts to do that, I was one of 50 people who tried to seem that he was an undervalued asset. It wasn't a unique idea. He chose me. And he put his career in my hands

Starting point is 01:34:11 at 25 years old, and I had not done it before. Why he chose me, I'll never understand. I do know that 30 years later, 31 years later, that's my brother, we're really good friends. And I look at a lot of relationships in the music business. And whether the person's died or they're no longer friends or partners or whatever it may be, him and I started our careers together and not one thing has ever interfered

Starting point is 01:34:41 in our relationship and us being brothers. I love him. he's one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life, in my family's life. That's a beautiful place, Stan. Stout, thanks for taking the time, man. I really appreciate doing this. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Starting point is 01:34:54 Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show

Starting point is 01:35:10 first found me through founders.

David Senra - Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

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