Next Gen Entertainment Entrepreneurs
The entertainment business is evolving faster than ever, with new methods of funding, production, distribution, viewing and sharing content entering the market regularly. Learn how startups can disrupt the industry from the next generation of entertainment entrepreneurs. The managing partner of Plus Capital, Adam Lilling, will moderate as the founders of VHX, Slated, Tugg and The Black List share their stories as well as their insights on launching a successful startup in the entertainment world.
Check out other Startup Alley programming here: http://sxsw.com/film/startup-alley
Presenters
Adam Lilling is an entrepreneur and investor, creating pioneering media and e-commerce companies for almost two decades. Adam is the founder and managing partner of Plus Capital, an early stage venture capital fund based in Los Angeles. Adam is on the board of Chromatik, and is an investor in and board advisor to transformation companies including ZEFR/Movieclips, ShareThis, MoviePass, BigFrame, Iconic, Triptrotting and MediaNet. Adam is also proud to be a founding director of LaunchpadLA.
Adam has been building Internet companies since 1994. His first venture, Pentagon CDs & Tapes, was one of the Internet’s first online retailers of music and video. Adam sold Pentagon to the Virgin Entertainment Group in 1999. Subsequently, Virgin took Pentagon’s e-commerce technology and formed a new venture with Adam in 2000 called Pazanga, becoming a worldwide entertainment e-commerce services company. Most recently, Adam co-founded BiggerBoat, a vertical search and ad network for entertainment.
Adam holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.
Pablo Gonzalez was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and has over 12 years of experience leading development and marketing teams in an array of industries, ranging from enterprise software to retail products. Driven by his interest in disruptive technology and his longtime passion for film, he turned to the entertainment industry and co-founded Tugg, Inc., which specializes in theatrical-on-demand releasing, allowing audiences to bring the movies they want to their local theatres. He is currently the COO and oversees the company's development and operations. He is also an electrical engineer, holds an MBA, and resides in Austin, Texas.
Founder of the Black List, the yearly publication highlighting Hollywood’s most popular unproduced screenplays and the startup birthed to continue its mission. Franklin has worked in development at Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, Leonardo DiCaprio, and John Goldwyn. Before Los Angeles and all things film related, Franklin was - at different times - a business analyst at McKinsey & Co., a weekly columnist for the Trinidad Guardian in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and the communications director for John Cranley's 2000 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio's first district. Since 2010, he has been named one of Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Under 35, Black Enterprise magazine’s “40 Emerging Leaders for Our Future,” AOL Black Voices “30 Black Hollywood Game Changers” and Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business.”
STEPHAN PATERNOT is co-founder and Chairman of Slated, an exclusive online film finance marketplace. Stephan is also co-founder and Chairman of PalmStar Entertainment. Founded in 2004, the film production company specializes in literary adaptations and true stories. Stephan is also the founder and general partner of the Actarus Funds. Founded in 2002, these angel investor funds provide seed capital to Internet start-ups. Prior to this he cofounded one of the first Internet community sites, theglobe.com in 1994. The company set stock market history when it went public in 1998 with a record setting IPO pushing the company valuation to over $1 Billion. Over a six-year span the company grew to over 300 employees with the website becoming one of the top thirty most trafficked sites in the world with nearly 10% of all internet users visiting the site monthly. In 1999 Stephan won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and in 2001 published “A Very Public Offering”, a non-fiction business book detailing his experience at theglobe.com. Before founding the company Stephan attended Cornell University where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Stephan grew up in Switzerland and the United Kingdom before attending college in the United States.
Beyond his duties at the Actarus Funds, Stephan sits on the board of the Heineman Foundation, based in New York, and on the board of it’s sister organization the Heineman-Stiftung, based in Berlin. The aims of the foundations are to give financial support to educational, artistic, cause based and scientific non-for profit institutions. Stephan also sits on the board of the Independent Filmmaker Project IFP.org, the largest national non-for profit organization dedicated to supporting independent filmmakers. Stephan resides between New York City and Los Angeles.
Casey Pugh is an Emmy-winning technologist immersed in the online video industry. From 2007-2010, he helped create Vimeo.com. He then headed web development at Boxee in order to help push internet video to our TVs. In 2009, Casey created StarWarsUncut.com in his spare time; A crowdsourced remake of “Star Wars: A New Hope” and the first time a site for a broadband-only production to win a Primetime Emmy. Casey is co-founder of VHX, an indie film distribution platform that allows artists to sell their work from their own, website directly to their fans.
Sunday, March 10
