128: Ken Davenport Produces Broadway Hits. Here's the Startup Playbook Behind Them

The number one thing people tell me when I am giving them business advice is they say, oh, you don't understand, my business is different. And I'm here to tell you every business is the same and operates from the same principles. That's what I try to do for Broadway.

Welcome back. This is From Start-Up to Grown-Up. My name is Alisa Cohn, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Ken Davenport to the podcast. Ken is a Tony Award and Olivier Award-winning theater producer, and he's produced numerous hits including Kinky Boots, Godspell, O'Mary, and my very favorite, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise. If loving Neil Diamond is wrong, I don't wanna be right. Ken is also an entrepreneur, an author, and an advisor to other founders. And in this conversation, Ken talks about why producing a Broadway show is a lot like founding a startup. You have to develop your product, raise the money, build the team, and get customers in the door. We talked about how Ken sees the potential in an idea before other people do. How he changes his pitch when investors don't buy in, and how crowdfunding Godspell helped him build an army of marketers. We also talked about balancing creative instincts with audience feedback, how he's using AI, and his own growth as a leader, including learning to surround himself with people smarter than he is and managing the self-doubt that still shows up every single day. There are a lot of practical lessons here for founders and leaders, Along with a fascinating peek behind the scenes of Broadway. So please enjoy my amazing conversation with the great Ken Davenport. Ken, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm thrilled that you're here. You are a Tony Award-winning and Olivier Award-winning theater producer. You're the author of, I think, 5 books. You're an entrepreneur, you're a builder. But before all of that, you were a high school kid who saw Les Mis. Tell us about that moment that you saw Les Mis and what clicked for you.

Well, my origin theater story actually started when I was 5, and my parents dragged me to an audition for the local community theater production of The Steadfast Tin Soldier in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Go Gateway Players, big shout out for them. And my parents were divorced when I was 5, and I always say that the theater was the one place where they could get along. So they brought me there, and that really changed my life, that moment. I remember feeling like I found my people even at that age. So I did theater from the age of 5 to 12, and then I got too cool for it. I thought I was gonna play for the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Celtics simultaneously. So I sort of gave it up. I got too cool for it. And then the moment you're talking about is when I was 15 or 16 years old and I saw Les Mis in Boston, near Fenway Park. And I remember just being so moved by the experience because before that, I only knew musicals to be Annie or Cats or No, No, Nanette or Anything Goes. And these are all great shows. I love them all, but none of them really got me. And Les Mis, like, you know, that show punches you in the stomach, makes you cry, makes you laugh, does everything in 3 hours. And I remember being riveted. And I just remember exactly where I was, just sort of leaning forward thinking, I want to move people in the same way that this show is moving me. I went home, I bought the CD, and I just drowned myself in musicals from then on out. And then I quit the basketball team in like a scene right out of High School Musical. Like, I walked off the court. I was like, I quit. My coach was making fun of me. And, you know, I'm gonna do the musical, I said. And that's when I found my tribe again. And I'd been accepted to Johns Hopkins University, but transferred very quickly to the Tisch School of the Arts to pursue my life as an actor. And then that quickly changed over to a producer.

For you, was it like, okay, I mean, 'cause let's be honest, it's hard to make it as a producer, but it's really hard to make it as an actor. Was it like, listen, I'm not gonna make it as an actor? Or were you kind of drawn to producing? And then tell us what producing is, people who don't know.

Yes, it was a little bit of both, to be honest. So, I have always had a business mind, a creative mind, a builder mind, right? Like, I started the candy store in my father's cardiologist's office. So, he was, like, diagnosing them with heart problems, and I was selling them chocolate bars, like, right after they came out. So, I'd always been like that kid, sort of building things and writing things. And then I started performing, and I was doing fine, right? Like, and I went to NYU. I was like, oh, I'm gonna be fine. Except I don't want to be just fine. And this is something that I think is very important for people for people, like the objectivity that you must have when you are getting into any industry, I think is so essential to be able to say— it's 2 things. Like, my natural talents may not be enough to achieve the level I want to achieve, so I'm gonna have to work 100 times as hard. Like, it doesn't mean you can't do it, but it means you have to work 100 times as hard and love it that much. And I didn't. I just remember like one day I didn't want to go to an audition and I was like, that's a sign. You don't love it as much as you're gonna have to work. That ratio is off.

Mm-hmm.

So start to gravitate towards something that you love more, that you want to work hard at, and that your natural instincts and talent is taking you towards. On my podcast that I did, I interviewed Jason Alexander from Seinfeld. And what Jason revealed on that podcast is, you know, when he was growing up, he was supposed to be a jazz pianist and was very good. And then he tells the story that one day he looked down at his hands and he noticed he had tiny hands. And he realized, I'm not going to be as good as I want to be because I got tiny hands. So he said he switched to improv instead.

Wow.

That's it.

Yeah.

That objectivity. And he was very young. So I think that's very important for anyone pursuing anything. Again, you can do anything you want. You just may have to work harder.

Yeah.

So that was it. And then the other thing that I wanted to be in a business or a, a role in my industry that I could control, and actors are just not in control.

Yeah.

Doesn't matter how good you are. You could not get the job because of 100 reasons, or you could get a job, but not the lead job, or you could get a job, but it might be in a show that is terrible and closes 2 weeks later. So You made your Broadway debut, but then it's gone.

Yeah.

I wanted to be able to hire myself. And I think that's true for a lot of founders.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. So give us a little understanding of what producing is.

So being a producer is, I'm a founder of a startup. My product that I'm selling is just tickets to a play or a musical, but it's the same thing. I have to find the product, play or musical. I've gotta raise the capital. I gotta find a place to sell that product. It's just the theater. I have to develop the marketing plan. I'm the CEO, I'm the founder. It is exactly the same thing. And a lot of people think it's some like wizard of Oz type thing. Nope. I try to treat it very much like a business. This is why I love doing podcasts like this and listening to podcasts like this. I'm a part of like 3 entrepreneurial masterminds because I love to learn what works in other businesses so I can take it back to mine.

Yeah.

It was, you know, an old like information marketing guru who drilled this into me like 15 years ago where I read a product is a product, it's a product. And the number one thing people tell me when I am giving them business advice is they say, oh, you don't understand, my business is And I'm here to tell you, every business is the same and operates from the same principle. That's what I try to do for Broadway.

Yeah, that's very powerful. How do you decide— and I want to get into sort of like how a Broadway show or like a little show somehow incubates, but first you have to find a concept. Because to your point about startups, it's like there has to be the idea, you have to get the idea to product-market fit, all that kind of stuff. And even if you think about a VC investor, you have to start with like this sort of notion of the market and like, is this going to be something people are going to like? How do you find and source concepts? Or early-stage, you know, sort of products?

So it's a great question because, look, we are also an art form. And often what are our biggest hits are the shows that would never have passed any test like you just described. Hamilton, on paper, looks like the craziest show to ever put money in. It's the biggest hit, right? Oh, Mary. I'm a producer on Oh, Mary right now. There are things said by that lead character in Oh, Mary that you go, I never imagined anyone saying those things on a Broadway stage. Or Book of Mormon, or Avenue Q, or like, the list goes on and on. Rent. These are surprises. So there was no market that it would fit. In fact, many of those, you would say the market would reject them on paper. But I tend to think of that famous Henry Ford quote of, if I asked my audiences what they wanted, it would have been faster horses. You know, the best shows are the ones that come up with something that the audience is dying for, but they don't know how to explain it.

Right. So how do you discern that?

So for me, it's a lot of what I like, right? Like, I have to work on these shows. for years and years and years, I'm not gonna work on something that I don't love, right? Or to put it in a founder or builder description, a product that I wouldn't wanna use every day.

Hmm.

Right? I develop musicals and produce musicals that I would wanna see every day or over and over and over. That's the thing. And often, you know, I develop some original musicals, but talk about the fit to market, you know, over 65% of the shows that we do here are adaptations of some sort. So there is source material for them— books, movies, song catalogs, etc. And that's because of the economic challenges and the risk involved. Costs are so high, we need to start selling a few tickets right away just to be able to cover those early weeks of losses. Every business out there, every new business, every startup usually loses money for a long time. How many years was Amazon not profitable before it turned a profit, right?

Yeah.

So we're okay with that for a little while, but because costs are so high, We can't last too long, so we often produce adaptations in the hope that there's some IP value that's going to get people to come versus something else. And there's a very famous book called Breakthrough Advertising, and I stumbled upon it after producing a musical that audiences loved. It was called Getting the Band Back Together. Audiences loved this show. Exit surveys, 97% love, exceed expectations, all the things. We closed in about a month. No stars, no brand recognition, no source material, nothing. Meanwhile, Pretty Woman was down the block. Didn't get very good reviews. Word of mouth was okay, but it was doing like $1.3 million a week. I closed my show. I'm very depressed. I stumble upon this book. I open the book and the book says, in any cluttered market, audiences will always choose the devil they know versus the devil they don't. And Broadway has that as a little harder degree of difficulty there because, one, we're a very expensive proposition. So there's high risk in making a choice with something that they don't know anything about. And 2, we can't show them the product before they come in.

Yeah.

So they can't sample it, right? If Coca-Cola is doing a new soft drink, they'll put people in Times Square and they'll hand it out. You'll sample it, you like it or you don't. We can't really do that. You're going in blind and you're spending $150 to do it.

Yeah.

So we tend to use source material as a way to attract an early audience. It's never a guarantee the show's gonna work, but hopefully it reduces the risk for the early customer and allows them to get in the door.

Yep, that makes sense. You know, there's a lot that we're talking about these days, 'cause what you just said, I mean, you said a lot of things, but one thing is around source material. And also basically I have to like it because I gotta work with it for years and years and years. So I have to kind of come in every day and really enjoy it. And then that's also the notion of, you know, taste and the notion of like what other people are going to like. And there's a lot of talk, we'll talk about AI in a little bit, but like there's a lot of talk about now in the age of AI, the importance to develop taste. How do you personally think about taste as it relates to shows, to theater?

It's another really good question because, again, I'm going based on my own taste. I do shows that I would love to see. I often say that, like, I'm the worst businessperson on the planet because I couldn't work on a business that I didn't like it. Like, I was playing golf, and I was at a very, very fancy golf club, and I was the guest of somebody, and these obviously very successful members sitting down, and goes around the table, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? I said, what do you do? I work for a wire hanger company. I'm an executive. I was like, okay. I, I didn't know what to say. And as you can already tell, it's very rarely speechless. But I was— remember thinking like, how do you get up for work every day? I don't know. And obviously he gets up for work every day because it pays unbelievably well. And there are very few wire hanger companies because no one wants to do that.

Right.

But that's not something that I could ever do. I have to love it. Now, again, I'm making a sweeping, rude generalization because this person may have just actually been fascinated with coming up with new wire hanger technology. I have no idea. So I apologize for that. But the idea is there. I can't do this if I can't work on anything that I don't love. And it goes by my own taste.

But Ken, have you developed your taste over time consciously? Or, you know, like, how do you think about taste? Or what advice do you have for other people who develop their taste?

So here's the thing, is like, we all have predispositions and biases towards all sorts of things, and including entertainment. There's a thing that we're going to like. Now, I tend to, which I think makes me a stronger Broadway producer— now, very specifically, I said Broadway producer, not theater producer, because I produce for a 10-block radius. 65% of my audience is tourists, 18% international, 44 years old and female, $250,000 a year. That's a specific market. Theater producer may be something totally different.

Yeah, right.

I'm not running the Public Theater. I could never do that. That's not me. I produce for a bigger, wider, more mass audience. That's the only way I put food on my table. Yeah, I have that kind of taste. I loved Les Mis, right? I loved Phantom of the opera. I got to work for Andrew Lloyd Webber for 5 years as his executive producer. It was heaven for me, right? And I'm not the— I mean, I'll say it publicly, you want controversial or provocative? I'm not the biggest Stephen Sondheim fan.

Oh!

He's a genius. He's the Shakespeare of musical theater. I can study him like I study Shakespeare, but I don't want to sit through The Tempest again either, right? Like, you know, so that's a little bit more of my taste. So that said, it's very important for me to challenge that, so I do. The last production of Merrily We Roll Along, Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez. Outstanding.

Mm-hmm. That was a Stephen Sondheim production, every—

Yes. I have to challenge myself. Or I produced a couple shows that I wouldn't normally produce. Alan Cumming's one-man Macbeth, I produced. That's not normally my thing. So I'm finding, especially as I actually get older, that I don't get too settled in my own taste because the world is changing around me. And I have to keep pace with current tastes if I'm going to have a long career.

Yeah. And to push yourself to have that learning agility, I think that's really so powerful.

Yeah. Hire young people. Like, that's what, you know, that's what I do outside my door right now to make sure that I'm hearing what their tastes are.

That's powerful. I love how you just said that. You know, I want to talk a little bit more about actually the making of Broadway shows, specifically the time horizon. And I think what famously happens with shows is they start off, if I may say so, not too good. Like, actually, Hadestown was kind of well known to be not so good when it started. and then it kept growing, and it was, like, not so good. And they finally built it into something that ultimately won the Tony Award. I know because I was an investor in Tootsie that year, and so we lost the Tony Award. Boo on us. But honestly, I loved Hadestown, too. So, talk a little bit about how the sort of germ of a production, or, like, a new idea, is actually quite fragile, actually quite bad, and that then you can kind of shape it into something which is fantastic.

Well, look, Ernest Hemingway said that first drafts of anything are always shit. Like, that's it. And the first draft of a musical, which is the first draft first reading or the first time it's up, it's gonna be messy. They all are. Where producers, investors, direct— like, all of us have to— where we earn our stripes is that we have to use our imagination to see what it can become. You know, I've been on both sides of that. I saw one of the very first readings of Dear Evan Hansen, and I passed on it.

Oh.

Because I remember thinking, yeah, this music is good, but this guy's a terrible person. I don't get that. He's lying. It was a different show though, very different. Had more of an ensemble. He felt like a real liar in that. They softened it. They learned. They— that creative team did amazing work on that show to turn it into what it is. I couldn't see it. I just missed it, right? That said, I produced the revival of Once on This Island, directed by Michael Arden, genius director, nominated again for a Tony Award this year. We won the Best Revival of a Musical. And when Michael and I talked about the show, I could see exactly what his vision was. And I was like, this is gonna be great. No problem. We did a workshop of it. I thought I was gonna have all the money pouring out of this workshop, people writing checks. They didn't. They couldn't see it. And I remember getting mad. I mean, I know all the founders out there can like, what the F do you mean you don't understand this? Of course this is gonna work. And people, most people don't have imagination, me included at times. So that's what you have to really hone, that ability to see what things can become.

Yeah. And then how do you handle it when you kind of go in and you're like so sure, like, oh, this is going to be a lock, and then actually people are sitting on their hands not writing checks, but meanwhile you're still committed to it and you still want to build this How do you think about that? How do you kind of come back from that rejection, and how do you then stick with it?

Well, look, that's what being a founder is all about. Like, I believe in this, and I'm gonna make it happen no matter what, right? And I believed in it 100%. Also, I'm, you know, frustratingly to some, stubborn. And you tell me no, oh, I'm gonna figure it out if I believe in it. And when that didn't happen, but I was committed, we were gonna open in 3 months. I was already in. I wasn't gonna let that not happen. And I'm having PTSD because I remember I was right here at this desk, like, the next morning. What am I gonna do? Thought about it, brainstormed, strategized. I unlocked something, made a phone call, pitched a new strategy. The person said yes. And I remember thinking, I'm gonna be okay. I just need to drive and work and double down. And I was up every morning at like 4:30 in the morning, getting to my desk at 5 o'clock. calling, calling, calling, and pitching like crazy.

What was the insight that you had at your desk?

I changed the strategy and the deal that I was offering to people. I changed the terms.

Yeah, like what?

I just made it more attractive for people to get involved. Here's what I saw. I looked at the list of shows coming in that year, and there were very few revivals of musicals coming in. Carousel, My Fair Lady, Us. There may have been one other, but I remember thinking we were like a lock for a Tony nomination, like a lock. And I put us then at the favorite to win because I knew ours was gonna be a real revisionist thinking of the musical. My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center was gonna be stunning. They put up those beautiful, stunning revivals, but it was gonna be My Fair Lady. Carousel was gonna be very good, but we had the seminal production of Carousel in the '90s at Lincoln Center. I was like, they can't beat that. So, I made it possible for people to be a producer on the show for less than they normally would, saying to them, if you 99%, you're getting a Tony Award. And the odds, just based on the 3, 1 out of 3, we're winning. And I'm gonna put it more than that. I'm gonna put it somewhere between 1 out of 3 and 1 out of 2.

Yeah.

And that made people lean in. Ooh, when do I get these kind of numbers?

Yeah. And just to clarify for— that's really powerful, Kim. To clarify for everybody, you can be an investor in Broadway shows, or you can be somebody who sort of bundles a bunch of investors, and then you get a sort of a producer credit. And so if you get a producer credit and then your show wins, you know, any awards, you get to win that award. So that is kind of what you positioned it in a different way.

And I literally remember my desk is over here, and the Tony Award for that show is sitting right behind me. It wasn't. And I wrote on a piece of paper, this space reserved until June 10th, 2018. And I put that Post-it note on my bookshelf, and I pitched and pitched and pitched. And sure enough, I raised all the money, show opened, glorious reviews. We won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. And I put Tony Awards in the hands of, like, I think 10 or 12 people that had produced a musical before.

Boom! Love that. That's amazing, Ken. That's a beautiful story. You know, one thing we've been talking about so far is like the craft and like understanding how you turn into something great. And then you've talked a lot about the business because obviously you love the business. And one thing you're known for, a lot of sort of pioneering techniques, and one thing that you've really kind of made a name for yourself is your ability to do market research and market testing. Talk about that and talk about why that's like so like, oh, people don't like that, but that you think it's really important.

Well, look, Broadway for a while was one of the few industries where people would would spend $10 to $20 million developing a product and never ask people their opinion before finishing that product. And then like open it on Broadway and first audience, 2,000 people, and they're like, I don't get it. And they're surprised. What? How can you not get it? You got to talk to people. Yes, you need your gut, you need your instincts, you need all those people around you, but you also need an audience, especially in a high-risk industry like this where we have to get 1,000 people to 2,000 people to show up 8 times a week for years. This is not producing for opening weekend like film. It doesn't work that So, we need palpable word of mouth, and that only comes if people have an extraordinary experience. So, I just started testing, like everything I do, 3 times, based on an idea, when we developed the advertising materials, and then once the show was running, we test, and we've talked to the people who aren't coming but should be coming to find out why they're not. So, I do this. I've done all kinds, including I was the first person to ever use dial testing on a Broadway show, same technology they used for movies or—

Tell us about that. Tell us about dial testing and about how that landed you in the New York Times.

That was in 2013, a long time ago now. We did a musical called Somewhere in Time in Portland, and this is the technology where at the time, you know, people would hold the dial, and when they liked something, they would turn it to the right. When they didn't, they would turn it to the left.

This is pre-AI, boys and girls.

Yes, exactly. You'd get this graph of when they liked, when they didn't, and more importantly, what I saw were plateaus. And wherever there was a plateau, that was a plate. It's going on too long. It needs to read not up all the time like an EKG, and it wasn't. So, we made some adjustments based on that. And, yes, we were the first people to do it, so we got on the very, very front page of the New York Times as a result.

You gotta love that. And so, what else— when you say you test kind of beginning, middle, and end a little bit, like, what specifically do you do in the early stage to test? And then also, like, how do you talk to your customers? I mean, that's such a— I don't know, I can't figure out how you would actually go to individual customers to find out, hey, you should be at this show, what's going on?

So, there are companies, of course, that do this, and they just hadn't worked a lot on Broadway when I started But I have an early sort of proof of concept, to your point earlier. Okay, we're gonna ask a bunch of ticket buyers, musical buyers, multiple— like the people that come 3, 4 times a year that fit the average theatergoing demographic. We're gonna do some research. We're gonna talk to a data company and get these people.

Mm-hmm.

And then we're gonna do a quantitative analysis. Like, if I said to you, like, there was a musical called The Griswolds' Broadway Vacation, how inclined would you be to buy a ticket to that show knowing nothing else But that, and they pick a thing and then we get a result. And if the result is 99%, great. That means there is a natural propensity to want to buy. We saw this with Neil Diamond. I produced the Neil Diamond musical A Beautiful Noise.

I loved that show so much. Okay, keep going. Yeah.

The number was like 85% of audiences 50 or over didn't need to know anything else except there was a Neil Diamond musical to want to buy a ticket to a Neil Diamond music.

Guilty as charged! Guilty as charged!

Makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

So that's great, but then we looked at 40 or 30 or 20, like all the different ages, right? So then it changes. Okay, we don't need to do much to the audience that's over 50. 30, we need to do something, or wait, or, you know, like all sorts of that analysis. Then we start to test some titles and taglines and all sorts of things about the show. What are their favorite Neil Diamond songs so we can include that in the copy? So we include America, Sweet Caroline, and Cracklin' Rosie because those were the 3 songs that they checked as being the ones they remembered most. So when you put that in marketing, then it's more likely to, oh my gosh, right, that song, that song, that song, which gets them a little further along to buying a ticket.

Love that. That is so great. Let's talk about crowdfunding because you also pioneered crowdfunding for Godspell. Tell us about that. Like, what gave you that idea? Why was that important? And how did it go?

So this was a long time ago as well, and it was just when social networking was starting Was beginning to boom, and I remember thinking, "Wow! There's all these people on this site," and we had a niche social network called Broadway Space, named for MySpace, which by the way, tip out there: never name a product with the name of another product because you think you're like backpacking on that product because that one could just blow up, and then you're like, "What is Broadway Space?" Anyway, niche social networks were all the rage at the time, so I formed one, and we had like twenty thousand members like overnight. And I remember thinking, "Wow! I could raise a lot of money if every single one of these people threw in a hundred bucks, thousand bucks." whatever it is. And at the same time, Barack Obama was elected president using a very similar tactic. So I said, I want to do this for a Broadway show. It was a very— like, this is pre-Kickstarter, pre-all that stuff, and I wanted to do it for profit. It was a very, very arduous process that the SEC did not make easy, but we actually did it. And again, for those of you financiers out there, this is pre-Jobs Act, right? Pre-Obama. So we did it. We raised $5 million from 737 And what I loved about this was that I didn't do it to raise the money. I did it to raise a marketing army. When you have investors in a show, they will get behind it and at the time tweet about it and email their friends and buy tickets themselves and support it and wear the t-shirt and all that. And we built an incredible community. The other thing I should say about where I came up with that idea and all of my big marketing ideas, because I've done a lot of things that have gotten a lot of attention, before I pulled the trigger on it, I talked to Stephen Schwartz, who's the creator of Godspell, and I asked him, what's it about? What's the show about? And he said, Godspell is about a community of people coming together. And that's when I said, oh, what if I brought together the largest community of investors? So the marketing message and the artistic message were combined. Because I always say that, look, I can get attention for my show if I put someone in a penguin costume and have them do cartwheels down the street. But if my show isn't about penguins, it makes no sense, right?

Yeah.

The return on your marketing investment is like 10x when the marketing message matches the artistic one.

Yeah, I think that's very well said. And I would just add, like so many Kickstarter campaigns have discovered, it's not just about the money. As you just said, it's about building the army of marketers. And, you know, as an investor in Broadway shows myself, the reason you invest in part is to have ownership. You're like, I like this thing. I want to be an owner of this thing. And then once you're an owner of the thing, you start acting like an owner. So you start talking to people about it, and you want it to do well because you have this affiliation and ownership with it. So I think it's a very interesting thing sort of psychological process to bring people along in that way.

That's exactly right. The number one reason people invest in Broadway shows is to be a part of the process of a Broadway show.

Right.

So we try to deliver that.

Right. Have you done that? So since Godspell, have you done other, like, crowdfunding things, or what other innovative marketing things have you done, especially in the recent years?

I have not done that, but one may be coming. So keep your eye—

Watch this space.

Watch this space or watch my Instagram.

Yeah.

So, listen, I was the first person to livestream a Broadway or Off-Broadway musical in 2015. pre-Zoom, all of this.

Yeah.

I tend to try to adapt technology a little bit earlier than others because I grew up on computers and with a TRS-80 computer in like 1981 or something. So a lot of the technological or marketing initiatives that I've done have been around that. But we've done a lot of stunts. We've had towns, whole towns produce a Broadway show. My most famous marketing initiative was for my show My First Time, which is about exactly what you think it's about.

Haha.

It was my answer to The Vagina Monologues, and it was true stories about people's first sexual experiences, all derived from a website. There was a website where people anonymously submitted their stories, and they were sad and funny and tragic and all these things. So we put them into a play, and I wrote this play and we put it up. And I— as I was writing it, some startling statistics came up. Some were good and some were not so good. And I remember thinking, you know who should see this show first? Virgins should see this show first. first, people who have not had sex. So to demystify it, and maybe they'll learn, and maybe they'll make some better choices, right?

I love it.

So I remember thinking that was the mission of the piece. And when I got closer to the show starting, I said, I know what I'll do. That's the mission, that's the artistic message. Now the marketing message will be, I will let virgins get in free for the first performance. And then the question is, how are you gonna So I hired a PhD in nonverbal communication, a human lie detector, to stand at the front of the line analyzing handwriting, asking questions, looking in their eyes, being able to tell and deciding a yes or no.

Oh my God.

Well, we did a press release about that. I got a little blurb in the Daily News, and then one little radio mention. And then on the 3rd day, the Associated Press called me from the Rome desk. Of course, leave it to the Italians. And they were like, we love this story. They asked me me like 3 questions and then they said, it's going worldwide. I had no idea what that meant except the world blew up in like the next hour. Every major television station, the homepage of CNN, and then Jay Leno did a joke about it in his monologue on The Tonight Show. Oh my God.

And then of course you had virgins showing up everywhere. Virgins everywhere.

Well, I used to say they were like, are you worried? I was like, this is New York City, right? Not a lot of people here that fit that qualifications. And if they do, they're not going to admit it. So that was a different time. I don't even know if I would do that today. But yeah, again, artistic message and marketing message combined. I brought a goat on the red carpet of the Tony Awards for my production of Once on This Island. That's because we featured a goat and everyone was talking about the goat nonstop. So I knew if I could get some attention for the goat, people— maybe that's that show I want to see. That also went crazy viral. So, you know, that's sort of like old-school press marketing strategies as well as the new-school crowdfunding and live Yeah, very innovative.

I love it. Very creative, actually. So you talked about technology and you being an early adopter, and I know that you've been talking about on Instagram and on social, you know, about AI. Give us sort of the AI story, how you see it. AI is fantastic. AI is terrible. Tell us what we should know about AI in theater.

Look, AI is an extremely powerful tool for all businesses, and all of them and all industries should figure out how to make best use of it to harness it for good instead of evil. Like any other tool, it can go both ways. Okay, so this is the most powerful one we've had, but look, I've seen a lot of technological advances now, right? And for those people who are saying, I don't want to use AI, that is the equivalent of saying, I don't want to use Google, when Google came out. Like, oh, it's got too much access and too much information to everything. It's a powerful tool, but we need to know how to use it because it's not going away and it's only going to be bigger, right? So the theater is interesting because, like, number one, my axiom about AI is that AI can never be used to replace the art or the artist. That is it. Now, we have an easier time of this than our friends in film and television because AI can't replace a human actor, right? And it's so funny, Broadway feels like it is such an easy target for technology. Oh, you guys are gonna be like, streaming is just gonna put you out. Like, there's no way anyone will ever want to get off the couch. And I literally— someone said that to me and I was like, you know, they said the same thing about the invention of the radio. And the same thing about the invention of the And the internet and all of it. And what has happened to the theater since the invention of the radio? It's only gotten bigger. The more technology there is in the world providing entertainment, the more rare the live form becomes. In fact, the CEO of Netflix just said in today's— I'd be doubling down on the humanities right now because of how much technology is taking off. People are going to miss and crave that human connection, the live entertainment. So I'm very excited about how the theater will thrive in this market and also excited about how I figure how to use it to make it more efficient, more cost-effective, so we can lower our ticket prices, allow more people to see it.

Yeah. How— what ideas do you have already? How have you been using it so far, either behind the scenes in your business or front of the house? And what other ideas do you have?

Well, we'll talk about research. So I'm using it— I'm using it to do research for me. So I'm developing a musical based on the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and I'm having it do a lot of research on India history, like all just basic— that stuff that I would have used Google for. And before that, I would have used a library or an encyclopedia. It's the same thing. So for people that are like not using it for research because they're concerned about the technology, it's just a different form of the thing you were using before, and it's more powerful and faster. It's going to make your research better. It should make whatever product you're developing better because it gets you more stuff. The other thing I'm using it for is crunching data, of course, right? So like we did a musical off-Broadway, another new musical I'm developing called Joy. Founders should know about this. Based on the movie Joy, she invented the Miracle Mop. She was a startup. So I hired a research company to come in, but I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, there's a lot more research available to me than just the research company. I've got reviews. Okay, I took every single review and the qualitative research from the focus group, and then get this, I went on to all the websites where there are customer reviews. And I scraped every single one and I put them into chat and I said, these are critical reviews, these are quantitative research from focus groups and audience reviews. Find me the top 3 things that all groups have in common across and tell me what those takeaways are. Because that, like, you can't just rely on reviews, you can't just rely on the focus group. But if there's one thing in common across them all, I better pay attention. Now again, this is where your gut goes. You don't let the research or the AI or any of it tell you what to do. You just take it as an opinion, and then you decide as the artist what you want to do. And you never ask it, oh really, they think that's the problem? How would you fix that?

Right?

No, because frankly, it'll be terrible. It won't be good.

Yeah.

And that's because it's operating based on the past, not on the future. Like, if we could go back in time and put in— like, I have a musical about a group of dancers. There's no plot involved, but they stand on a line, they're competing for a thing, and each one comes out. There had never been a chorus line before that. Claude would have been like, I don't really see it or get it because it has no comparables, right? So like, that's the artist thinking forward. That's what we have to do is take it new places.

What did you do with that, with this example Joy?

I got this list and it becomes like a to-do list or to-talk-about list with my creative team. We sit down and this isn't what— again, I use it to crunch a lot of data and fast. This isn't what AI said was wrong.

This This is—

or write— this is what reviews customers have in common and the threads. So the things that maybe we should pay attention to.

Got it. And so then you guys talk about it together, and that's the creative spark and the creative process together. I love that. Anything else to say? If you speculate in the next year, 2, 3 about AI, what else is AI going to be doing that relates to you and your projects?

Look, we are theater people, so I imagine it will be helping us with a lot of the business logistics. From budgeting to forecasting to all the stuff that we do 25% of probably what we should be doing from a pure, like, numbers perspective. Already I'm having it analyzing budgets, right? Like, if you were a publicly traded company, what's wrong with this? Or like accounting questions, all these sort of things that are just like raw data questions. Again, not the art. Serving up different forecasting, analyzing grosses over a Broadway season or our Hey, like, we do this very manually. Here are my grosses over the last 10 weeks. Here's our advance. Here's our average ticket. Like, where do you predict we're gonna be? Like, you run the numbers. Show it to me. Here's our customer data, right? Like, here's the average age. Like, what can we do? You know, like, that kind of thing, just to crunch the numbers for us to help guide—

Yeah.

To hopefully help us sell some more tickets, get more butts in the seats. Like, I believe the world is a better place if there's more theater in it. There's only more theater in the world if there are people going to see it. See it so that we buy tickets so we can make more of it. And hopefully it will help us do some of those things.

Yeah, I love that. Now, Ken, in addition to being an entrepreneur and a builder and a writer, you're also a leader. You're a manager of your team over there. Tell us about the journey that you went on to be a leader, because, you know, on the one hand, an actor obviously collaborates with people, a producer obviously collaborates with people, but then when you have to kind of lead your own team to certain directions, it's kind of a different skill So what was that like for you, that journey to become a leader?

You know, it's still a journey. I mean, because often, especially founders, we don't want to lead teams. That's not why we got into it. In fact, I'm like probably many of them who listen to you. I'm an introverted extrovert. You know, shut me in a room and give me a computer and a pad of paper and like, I want to think my way out of a solution. I don't want to talk to people about it. I don't want to delegate even. I just want to do it myself. I'll be faster in the way I like it. So that's not why we get into it. But from when I was a kid, and maybe because I was an only child and just looking for some friends, like, I just put things together. So I started the Dungeons and Dragons club when I was a kid because I wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons and I didn't have any brothers or sisters. So I stood up and I remember the moment at every single class in my— I don't know why they let me. I stood up at like in 5th grade and was like, hi everybody, I'm just gonna read this. I'm starting a club. Raise your hand if you wanna be a part of it. So I just did that a lot. And And that's sort of de facto leader, right? Because, oh, that sounds fun. Leaders and founders have to be action takers, and I take a lot of action. The rest of it, you just figure it out as you go. And I was not a great one 10 years ago at times, and I was not a great one yesterday at times. Like, you just got to figure it out and listen, right?

Yeah.

Just listening to the feedback of the people around you. And I, in my employee reviews every year, one of the things I say is like, is there anything I can do better? For you? Like, how can I be a better boss for you?

Yeah. What input have you gotten to help you be a better boss from them?

Communication, like every relationship. Sometimes a little more grace. Remember that I can't read your mind. A lot of stuff that people talk about in marriages, actually. It's like very similar. It's, it's relationship stuff.

Can you talk about maybe a mistake that you made as you were growing into a leader, whether it was 10 years ago or yesterday, that kind of really taught you something meaningful and that you sort of still take away with you? Yeah.

Like, you know, there is a certain amount of ego that comes with all founders. We have to have it. We have to believe our idea is going to work. We have to go raise $20 million for it. We have to convince. So we have to develop this ego of like, I know what I'm doing. I'm smart. I've got it. I get it. And this is especially true for young males. We just have this like, I'm the smartest person in the room type of attitude at times. And that is, of course, the opposite of what young males are like. It's just like biologically everything. And I made that mistake of putting myself in rooms sometimes where I knew I was the smartest person in the room.

Mm-hmm.

Instead of putting myself in rooms where I was absolutely not the smartest person in the room, and how that is a stronger, smarter thing to do. And I'm a big golfer, and I picked up golf late in life, actually. And it was about 10 years ago, in a very early golf lesson of mine, and they were talking about playing, and my coach said, here's what you should do when you play. And I was like, I'm so nervous to play, like, I need He said, I know it's hard, like all the things. I want you only to play with people who are much better than you. And I was like, what? Only play with better golfers. I know it's easier to play with someone who's never hit a ball before because you feel better about yourself. That's not going to make you better. Play with something who is 10 times the golfer than you are. You're going to find yourself like a flower growing towards the sun.

That's so well said. That's good life advice, right? Is that why you've also been part of these entrepreneur groups? And what do you get out of those kinds of Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it.

So I did it for a few reasons. One, to surround myself with people like me, because founders, they're a very lonely group. And your staff, as much as you love them, may not get it. They don't understand. Your partners in life may not get it. It's a different type of stress, right? I wanted to be with other people that were going through what I was going through. And I'm a big believer, again, that where we started, all businesses are the same. And if I could swipe and deploy what was working for a duck farmer or a porta-potty renter or somebody else, and that hadn't been used in the Broadway industry, then I would stand out in the Broadway industry.

Mm-hmm. So you got to get fresh perspective, like support and fresh perspective.

Yeah.

The smart people. Ken, just a few more questions. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt?

Oh, yeah. Every day, if not multiple times a day.

Yeah. Tell us about that and how do you handle it?

Look, everyone goes through it. And, you know, that's part of being human and it's part of being a founder. If you don't have imposter syndrome, you're probably a sociopath. Like, you know, we all have to doubt. Elon Musk, maybe he doesn't have imposter syndrome. Maybe he should have a little imposter syndrome. Um, certain other political figures. But like, you know, it's very human and it's natural. And I take a deep breath through it. I try to really look at where I've come because, you know, someone once said this as well, like, for humans, you can't ever— especially for entrepreneurs and high achievers— like, you're never going to reach the horizon. You just keep drawing a goal that's further off into the distance, right? And then we get imposter syndrome. Oh my gosh, I'm never Going to, I don't know. Let's say I wanted to dream about winning an Academy Award. I'm never gonna win an Academy Award. I don't know what I'm doing, but I won a Tony. Like, why don't I think about that? Look at how far I've come. Oh, maybe I could do that because there was a time where I was like, "I'll never win a Tony Award. I'll never ever ever." I'm terrible. Like, it's the same thing. It's really trying to stop. Wow, I've come a long way from when I was sixteen and saw Les Mis. If I've done it before, I can do it again. It's just not gonna be. easy. I'm gonna sweat. It's always gonna be hard. That's the other thing, it's just like, it's always gonna be hard. But founders, golfers, we like to do hard things. That was the biggest realization for me. I could have done a lot of things. All of us could have done a lot of things, being lawyers or investment bankers, whatever it is. We chose this crazy thing because we like it. Even on the worst days, deep down, we like it.

Yeah, it's so true. I can totally relate to that, and all the founders I work with can relate to that totally.

Kim, what do you wish you had known earlier on your I wish I had listened to my father more, who was an Indian doctor, immigrated here in the '60s, not a very good businessperson, to be honest. But he used to call me in college, and he's like the only Indian doctor, by the way, who didn't want his son to be a doctor. So he encouraged me to pursue the theater. And then he used to call me and say things like, where are you going tonight? What are you doing? And I was like, I'm gonna sit at home, I'm studying, or I'm writing something. He was like, you're not writing something. You've got to go out and show face. That's what he used to say. I'm like, what? Go up to Lincoln Center. They have a young like theater group there, or go somewhere where there are other people. In other words, he was saying go network. Network relationships with other people are going to do so much more for you than sometimes even the work will. We all know people who are have achieved great like levels of success, and we're like, how the f did they do? that. They network their way to the top, right? And I wish I had listened to him more and shown some more face.

That's great. Do you show face now?

I do, but it's still hard because I'm this introverted extrovert. So I'm like, oh, maybe I won't go to that thing. I'll just skip it.

I'll go home.

I'll do some work at home. I'll work at home. That'll be like— the crazy thing is with networking and all of it, if you like, it just takes one person, one person to change your life, your business trajectory, all of it. But it's again like meeting a partner. Like, you got to get out there and meet a lot of people to find the one. And that's the thing.

That's true. Ken, last question. What advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

I think the advice is something similar to what I just said, is remember you chose this. There's a very famous quote from Godfather II, right? Lee Strasberg, the actor, played the character, and Michael Corleone says something, and the character says, this is the business we've Chose it. Like, it's like, oh right, I did this. No one was forcing me to become a founder. I chose this. All right, so I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and get through it. So that's it, is remember you chose this. You could do a lot of things. You wanted to do this, so just buckle up and do it.

Buckle up and do it. I love it. Ken, thank you so much. What a great discussion. I know it's gonna help a lot of people, and I think people are gonna be really interested in the behind-the-scenes Broadway peek. So thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Thanks for doing it.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.