Black Founder by Stacy Spikes

Author:Stacy Spikes [Spikes, Stacy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

WE WERE ABLE to get Urbanworld Films off and running. We staffed up and started acquiring movie rights. We also received an investment from Black Enterprise magazine, and they did a photo shoot and featured me on the cover. That was a big honor. Every Black family I knew had four magazines on their coffee table: Ebony, Jet, Essence, and Black Enterprise. I knew I had arrived when my grandmother Ozelia called and said in her southern creole accent, “Ooh, baby, you made Grandma and your family so proud.”

Urbanworld Films was located in the new 550 Digital Media Ventures accelerator offices, directly across the street from the Sony building. We shared the space with other early-stage start-ups they had invested in. The offices were tricked out with an open-air floor plan, no walls, PlayStation consoles, and a fully stocked kitchen. The idea was to give a young start-up a place to focus on growing its business without needing to worry about office space and rent. It was a great setup. We had space to do our business in a very chill, relaxed atmosphere.

Things moved quickly. We started to purchase films and build out our technology. We were running the business on two parallel tracks: the theatrical and the dot-com. On urbanworld. com, we were doing deals with filmmakers with short films.

The short format worked better due to the low performance of the bandwidth. We had a large library of short-form urban and hip-hop content from Roc-A-Fella Records, Jay-Z, and more. The big streaming service that everyone was using at the time was Akamai.

Streaming business models had not formed yet. For the most part, you wanted to drive up traffic and then hope to monetize via advertising later. The experience was so bad and inconsistent. We were very early to the party, but we all still chased this streaming utopia that would come.

Within six months we had four feature films nearly ready for theatrical release: The Visit, starring Billy Dee Williams and Hill Harper; King of the Jungle, starring John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez; an urban comedy called For Da Love of Money, starring Pierre Edwards; and a film called Punks, which was about a Sister Sledge drag queen cover group. In addition to these titles, we had seventeen more in the pipeline. Everything was incredible!

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