The gamma. founder and CEO breaks down what drives him and his company to new heights, as told to Boardroom’s Damien Scott.
This story originally appeared in Boardroom’s Spring Issue print magazine and has been adapted for online publication.
I look at the artists and the executives as almost one and the same. We’re all rowing in the same direction to make the company a success. I would probably describe [this period] as one of the most arduous and rigÂorous times in my career, but also one of the most proud and joyful, because at the end of the day, for me, this is my company and I’m no longer working for someone else. I’m working for myself. And that brings a huge amount of gratÂification to my heart in a way that I can’t describe with prior experiences in my career.
I would even venture to say that [gamma.] is bigger than what I even thought it would be by this time.
In the last 30 days, we’ve announced the signing of, to me, one of the greatest artists of our generation, Ye. Inarguably one of the top two rappers in the world, if you look at the data. For someone of that caliber to be with us in that parÂticular way is incredible to me. And for us to be at the OlymÂpics with Mariah — I got a little misty while I was there, beÂcause it was an idea that I had last summer when she played me her album. When I heard the album, I said to her, ‘That song, “Nothing Is Impossible,” is a song for the Olympics, Mariah.’ Something she hadn’t thought of, but she found it to be affirming and heartwarming. And that was huge for me, because I felt like: I have to deliver on this now. I can’t disappoint Mariah Carey.
I DMed Marco Balich — he produces the opening ceremony of the Olympics, has produced many of them, legend — the day after Halloween. We’d not been introduced by anybody formally.
I just sent a cold DM from my own personal account, and he answered. Our Grammy party stole Grammy weekend. [We had] Ms. Lauryn Hill performing with Bieber, [with] Jamie Foxx and Gayle King, [and] the chairman and CEO of Republic Records in the room. It was the new kid in class, the insurgent amongst the incumbents.
It comes through just sheer hustle and hard work. When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s very tough to turn that part of your brain off. I was up at 5:30 in the morning on the phone with NBC on Saturday. There are so many things that I handle myself in a very unglamorous way, giving notes on the edit on Friday and SaturÂday for the Olympics closing promo with Mariah, negotiating the deal with the IOC for her performance. I called the guy who hanÂdles the social accounts for the Olympics at 8:00 a.m. and said, ‘Hey, it would mean a lot for you and Mariah for you to accept this collaboration.’ He couldn’t believe I was calling. But that kind of personal touch is the difference between a yes and a no.
It’s the details, man. It’s the details. When you look at a post and you see NBC Olympics, Team USA, Mariah Carey, Snoop Dogg, and gamma. — it puts us in a different echelon as a company. You cannot miss dotting one “i” or crossing one “t.” That level of being present for every detail, every decision, is what makes a company a success. That’s what I’ve learned working at Apple. That’s what I’ve learned from Jimmy lovine. The devil’s in the details.
Our participation with Ye is not that of a traditional label. All of the decisions he’s been making as of late, I’ve been in the passenger seat, I’ve been a copilot, I’ve been an active advisor or consigliere. That’s one of the things I thought was really conspicuously missing from a lot of these companies — that level of strategic value and detail-oriented thought leadership with artists. It felt very one-dimensional, two-dimensional, but certainly not 3D.
I sign artists that I really have an innate understanding of. EveryÂthing we get involved with is intentional. I realized very early on in my creative career that when I started working with artists, I started channeling those artists and becoming a conduit — in the studio producing Whitney Houston‘s vocals on I Look to You, Leona Lewis‘s vocals on Spirit, the best-selling debut album by a female artist in the U.K. this century. Lana Del Rey, same thing. Chief Keef, same thing. My job is to channel the most maximum version of these people and give that back to them.
I like art that evokes conversation. I like art that is provocaÂtive, whether it’s fine artists or musicians or comedians; I like art that comes from provocateurs. But it doesn’t get more mainstream than Mariah Carey at Christmastime. There are very few things left in a monoculture. Tell me the things that everybody can agree on at the same time in the entire world. The Olympics. The World Cup. Mariah Carey and Christmas. We’ve counted them on one hand and I’m struggling to get to the second hand. We like things that are provocative. We also like things that are mainstream. But more importantly, we like things that are big.
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Elon Musk said one of my favorite quotes: Being an entrepreneur is “staring into the abyss and eating glass.” It’s a very lonely gig, probably the most lonely job I’ve had in my entire life. Really, what people are underwriting when they invest is hope. When you have something pre-revenue, there’s nothing tangible there. You’re just underwriting hope at the end of the day.
Do you know the level of confidence and unshakable belief you’ve got to have in yourself when people who are “experts” and really much smarter than you tell you no? It’s really the artists that kept me going [in the early days of gamma.] more than anything. There were so many trips I took in the middle of the pandemic to go to Ohio just to go on five-mile walks every month with Dave Chappelle. His approach to storytelling is secÂond to none. He’s rivalless, in my opinion. Without people like Dave or Ye or Travis-those are the people that really meant more to me in the process of raising capital than the investors I was talking to, because those people let me know I was on the right track. [After] every single no, they reminded me that I was on the right track.
The biggest piece of advice Jimmy lovine always gave me — I think about it every day — is: Just stay at the table. That’s all you have to do. If you stay at the table, you won’t lose. It’s when you don’t have enough cards to stay at the table that you’ll lose. Stay at the table. Watch every dollar. Be judicious about your spend. Stay at the table.
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