A-List Angels - SETTING COPY by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

Wallach wasn’t able to link Facebook and Interscope, but he’d soon find a way to help foster another intersection of technology and creativity, something he’d almost been designed to do. He grew up in Wisconsin loving computers and music, uniting the two in high school as an audio engineer (“which is, essentially, basically, primarily computer programming,” he argues).5 Wallach didn’t think much about business until college, when he started to contemplate how he might begin to monetize his music with Chester French (Zuckerberg was an early fan).6

“We were part of the first generation of artists that built its audience mainly through social media, not mainly by driving around in a van,” says Wallach. “I didn’t choose for these technological things to happen in my early career, but they did. And my early trajectory was driven by my choice to embrace those things, and really think from the beginning about, ‘What does it look like to build a band in a social media world? What does it look like to make recordings in a digital recording world?’”7

In 2007, Wallach moved to Los Angeles, where his music career took a promising turn. Pharrell Williams heard Chester French and signed the band to his Interscope label, releasing its first album, Love the Future, which peaked at No. 77 on the Billboard charts in 2009. Through a mutual friend, Wallach met fellow midwesterner Kutcher, who’d snagged a piece of Popchips—the snacking love child of rice cakes and potato chips—shortly thereafter. The next thing Wallach knew, he was negotiating with the company’s executives as they rolled out an influencer marketing campaign.8

“They were raising money and they go, ‘Do you want to invest in us?’” Wallach recalls. “So I put five thousand dollars into Popchips…I’d never done this before. Five thousand dollars was a pretty big purchase for me. And it wasn’t tech; it was a potato chip company.”9

For Wallach, the investment represented a way to establish a foothold in the venture capital world, even if it wasn’t the ideal company for him. (Today, is his outlay worth $1 or $20,000? “No idea,” he says).10 If he’d waited a little longer, Wallach could have made a much better first investment. The year after tucking into Popchips, he was still living in his mother’s house in Milwaukee when he received a call from Shervin Pishevar, then working at Menlo Ventures in Silicon Valley.

“I remember him calling me about Uber: ‘Hey, do you want to put a little fifty grand in?’” says Wallach. “I’m sitting there in my boxers at my computer with Shervin on the phone, and I’m like, Fuck, I don’t want to sound like I don’t have any money, but I can’t make a $50,000 investment. I barely have $50,000. So…I may have overweighted my skeptical theories of the company.”11

Wallach’s self-imposed pessimism faded as Uber’s valuation climbed from $300 million into the billions while he toured the world with Chester French—sometimes drawing decent crowds, but playing audiences as small as just a few people in one unfortunate tour stop in Bristol, England.

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