65. Reggie Williams, Entertainment Entrepreneur

Show Notes: Reggie Williams, a Harvard graduate, had a great experience in his four-year period at Harvard College. After graduating, he went to Harvard Law School, which was a much more difficult and a lesser social experience. He was disillusioned with the law, finding that it was influenced by politics and was more subjective than objective. He decided law was not a profession he wanted to pursue. Moving into the Entertainment Industry While in law school, Reggie was inspired by the notion that he could pursue entertainment and started asking people around campus for advice. His goal was to eventually become a senior executive at a multimedia entertainment company or run his own company. He did not achieve his best grades in law school, but he did pass and he wrote a thesis about Tupac Shakur and the music industry needing to regulate itself with a voluntary rating system. Reggie took a negotiation class with Bruce Patton and Roger Friedman, which was the greatest course he took in any stage of academics.  He applied to 27 law firms in New York and LA, and only one firm accepted him. He had a great interview with a man who became his mentor. He was invited to New York City to work for Paul Hastings, an entertainment litigation practice, which represented stars like Madonna and CBS Records. However, when he got there, they didn't have a place for him in the entertainment litigation department. Reggie learned that sometimes life doesn't give you what you expect, but it's what you need. He found himself doing business law, which was more aligned with his interests in entertainment, learning contracts and IP. As a business law associate interested in entertainment, he was the first person to give deals in the entertainment industry, which helped him navigate the challenges and opportunities in the entertainment industry. Starting a Digital Lifestyle Entertainment Company He realized he didn't want to stay in corporate law for too long, and Reggie shares how he gained experience and made connections that helped him move forward in his career and land his dream job. He talks about having three dream jobs on the table but how negotiations fell apart and he lost all three. However, he finally landed one of them and found he was moving full speed ahead negotiating and closing deals with artists he loved. After two years, the partner came to him and asked him to write business plans for a couple of clients, which he did, and then decided that  the next one he wanted to write was for his own business. So, in 1999 he launched his first business and built a digital lifestyle entertainment experience, based around hip hop which was to become the next 25 years of his career.  Founding Ambrosia for Heads  After a rollercoaster ride of financial and relationship difficulties, Reggie was navigating the economic downturn in 2008, and his second wife was pregnant. In 2009, Williams realized that hip hop was growing and needed a platform that targeted people 25 and older. He created Ambrosia, a curated service for hip hop fans, and branded it Ambrosia for Heads (AFH), which would eventually become a streaming platform. He aimed to be a concierge through hip hop culture for people, starting as an editorial platform and building an audience around it. When Reggie founded AFH and was initially unsure of the role technology would play in the entertainment industry. However, he realized that technology is sovereign and that content is king. He had a dream of creating a hip hop lifestyle that encompassed TV, film, music, and other forms of entertainment. He set out to build a sustainable platform, similar to Netflix or Rolling Stone, but with a focus on adults. As social media exploded, Reggie used Facebook to build a community focused around hip hop culture. He aimed to make it like a Rolling Stone, with roughly 75% of the content being about music, 60% entertainment lifestyle, 15% politics, and 10% dark corners of the world.  Merging Technology and Entertainment  In 2017, Williams launched a subscription video service like Netflix on several different platforms, with over 300 hours of programming. Despite a successful launch, AFH was unable to raise capital, although having built an audience of 15 million a month. He listens to 20,000 hours of music last year and has a son and three sons who all have the same favorite artist, Kendrick Lamar. Reggie shares stories of meeting and working with artists, revealing that they are often very different from their appearance on stage or in public interviews. Most artists are incredibly smart, but this is not always welcomed in certain genres. They can be both introverted and magnetic on stage, but when they work with them, they start to get to know them as real humans. Influential Professors and Courses at Harvard Reggie mentioned being impressed with Derek Parfit, a philosopher who taught at Oxford but later came to Harvard. Parfit's book, Reasons in Persons, explores personal identity and the concept of the Star Trek transfer transformer analogy, which suggests that everything is created in the next place.  He took a course called Moral Reasoning in his freshman year taught by Harvey Mansfield. He also took feminism courses, which he found fascinating, and he also mentions film courses, which he had taken in his freshman year.  Timestamps: 03:12 Going to law school as an entertainment lawyer 09:07 A job offer from an entertainment law firm 15:51 The turning point in his life 18:31 The opportunity to work for Bbt 24:22 What has surprised Reggie about the industry 30:54 Taking a stand on social media 39:10 The unwritten rules of meeting celebrities 42:44 Reggie reflects on fatherhood Links:  Website: AmbrosiaforHeads.com CONTACT: Email: [email protected]