Will.I.Am (left) and venture capitalist Tim Draper. Damien Miller/DFJ
Tim Draper, a big man in a rumpled suit, stood on stage reciting lyrics. “Three years ago, they stopped their tour,” rhymed Draper, a founding partner at DFJ, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms. “But for Will.I.Am it was the start of so much more.”
Then Will.I.Am entered in all black—fitted jacket, silk shirt, beanie, thick-rimmed nerd glasses. His group, The Black Eyed Peas, was one of the top musical acts of the aughts, and his viral “Yes We Can” video (25 million views on YouTube) defined Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign. Recently, he has remade himself again as a fixture at tech industry events, including this gathering of hundreds of CEOs from DFJ’s portfolio companies at a Silicon Valley mansion-turned-hotel last week.
After introducing his famous guest, Draper panted. “I’m just exhausted reading my little rap,” he said, wearing a tie that shows California divided into six states—a reminder that, despite millions of dollars spent, Draper’s effort to carve up the state didn’t qualify for the November ballot.
Will.I.Am talked about his childhood growing up in a housing project in Los Angeles and his rise in the music industry, which he described in the language of the startup entrepreneur. Kodak failed, he said, because it thought its rival was Fuji, when in fact it was Instagram. The Black Eyed Peas succeeded, he said, because they always tried to anticipate the next commercial trend. “You’re a dinosaur if you think you’re just competing with the same person you were competing with yesterday,” he said.
Celebrities dabbling in tech is nothing new, but these days it’s different. U2 plays Apple press events. Ed Norton sits down at Uber dinners. Silicon Valley is no longer surprised when a hot new startup gets funding not just from typical venture capitalists and angel investors but from Snoop Dogg and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto. When the venture capital money dries up in Silicon Valley, when interest rates rise and institutional investors seek safer returns elsewhere, famous people with money will be the ones left.
Opinions vary on Will.I.Am’s music, but his skill as a marketer is beyond dispute. In 2004, The Black Eyed Peas’ “Hey Mama” was used to advertise the iPod, cementing a valuable tie between Apple’s brand and the band’s own. And at one point during his appearance on Thursday night, he sent a tweet by talking into a self-produced smart watch on his wrist. He calls it i.amPuls, and he plans to release it around Christmas.
More drool-worthy to the assembled CEOs, however, was Will.i.Am’s instrumental role in launching Beats Electronics, not to mention his founding stake in the company after it was purchased by Apple for $3 billion. As Will.I.Am described it, Beats as a celebrity-led company didn’t need to seek out celebrity endorsers in the same way. It effectively became its own marketing engine. “Beats was like, hey, we have this ability to reach,” he said. “We actually make the noise.”
He also talked about kids who are in the same spot he was growing up, kids of color from poor families and the system stacked against them, kids who are “already set up for you to go to the prison down the street.” He tells these kids them not to chase the dream of becoming a musician or an athlete: “Pick up the STEM skill set and aim to be engineers.”
The CEOs burst into the biggest applause of the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment