S9E2: Devo Harris, Founder of Adventr, Is Producing Success From G.O.O.D. Music to Building AI Brands

It was interesting when Kanye got signed. The label, Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella, they were not like super behind it. We had to make it happen ourselves in terms of raising awareness. Same thing we do with startups, right? This is literally a startup as an artist and then as a label.

Welcome back to season 9 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, happy Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday, Madison. Thrilled to be back behind the mic with you. Since last season, you've had a few updates on your end. You're now at Harvard Business School. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Claudia. It's been a dream of mine for some time to attend, and I'm thrilled to be back on the East Coast this fall. You'll have to keep me updated on what's going on in the Bay Area news and all things Priv, where you're still co-CEO and co-founder.

I absolutely will. Well, if you're new here, we're two best friends building our careers around tech and entrepreneurship. Since August 2020, we've interviewed over 80 guests, including the likes of Michelle Zatlin of Cloudflare, Vlad Magdalen of Webflow, Ciara, the Grammy Award-winning R&B vocalist, Spencer Raskoff of Zillow, and many more. Through these conversations, we open the door to the room where it happens.

Our guest companies share a combined valuation of over $47 billion and have raised north of $6.5 billion in venture funding. And last year, Spotify named us a top 5% most shared global podcast. This season, we're back with 8 new stories touching on everything from open source, trust management, generative AI, and more.

If you're based in San Francisco or Boston, catch us IRL this fall. The best way to keep up is to subscribe to both the podcast and our newsletter, which you can find at theroompodcast.com. Before we dive into today's story, we have a short message from our sponsors. Silicon Valley Bank, now a division of First Citizens, remains fully committed to serving founders, executives, and investors across the innovation ecosystem. As the largest banking team focused on technology, life sciences, healthcare, private equity, and venture capital, SVB is uniquely positioned to deliver specialized lending and financial solutions clients need to reach their ambitious goals. Find out more at svb.com.

Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first institutional venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world. The firm has 60+ years working with VCs. Helping form managed funds, make investments, and to handle the myriad of issues that arise through a fund's lifetime. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups. On today's episode of The Room Podcast, we're embarking on a journey of innovation and creativity as we delve into the fascinating realm of Adventur and its visionary founder, Devon, or Devo Harris. Imagine videos that aren't just a passive experience, but rather interactive narratives that you can steer in any direction. This is the vision brought to life by Adventur, a platform that believes interactive connected media should be accessible to all. Crafting intelligent videos that allow viewers to actively engage with the content, a choose your own adventure, if you will, unlocks a new art form to consume media. Devo Harris has a unique and non-traditional path into becoming a technology founder. From his strategic beginnings at PwC to co-founding GOOD Music alongside Kanye West, Devo's journey highlights the power of building connections and community no matter where you go. It was his own relationships from his undergraduate experience at UPenn which helped to get Kanye initially signed. Winning a Grammy Award for Best Rap Song along the way, Devo has demonstrated his prowess in merging creativity, technology, and business strategy. Deevo's influence doesn't stop at music. He's reshaped the digital landscape by pioneering interactive web videos in 2010 and later driving product innovation in video players at Vimeo. Today with Adventure, Deevo continues to be a pioneer at the intersection of creativity and technology. In today's episode, we explore insights and themes such as mastering the art of fake it till you make it, how to challenge other people's perceptions of you, and the future of interactive content. Let's open the door. Deevo, thank you so much for joining us today here on The Room.

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited.

We're really excited to have you here. And before we tell your journey of what you're doing today, we always like to start at the beginning with our guests. And Claudia and I are curious where you grew up and how that's shaped your view of the world.

Yeah, so I grew up everywhere and I am an Army brat. So I literally grew up throughout the South, Southern United States, Germany, the Midwest. Like I went to high school in Kansas City. I lived in Oklahoma and Texas and Arizona. I was born in Georgia, but some of my formative years I spent in Germany. So Yeah, I think that's given me a worldly perspective and a global perspective. I think I get along with folks from everywhere, but as I started to get into more creative work in the music space, it would be hard for me to make like LA-sounding music or New York-sounding music, but it was pretty easy for me to make globally relevant music. And even when it comes to product, I think I'm pretty globally aware of how things operate.

So you had a global orientation from a young age and fun little Easter egg. I was actually also born in Georgia. So we share that. For us, like in that vein of early identity, sometimes the path that you feel like you're on as a kid is the path that you do end up as an adult, but sometimes it's total 180. So we're curious for you now that you have embraced being a founder yourself. Did you always think you were on this track to found something?

I always wanted to be a stockbroker when I was a kid. I didn't even know what that meant, or I still don't really know what that means, but I saw a vision of myself in a suit with a briefcase, and I don't know what a founder is. I just knew that I wanna do something where the reward is directly proportionate to my intelligence. Through the various fields that I've been in, that's borne itself out.

And the field that you did end up going in, a little bit different than stock picking, but I guess picking in a different way because you ultimately do pick artists and align with them on how to work and build and create. We're definitely gonna dive into the founding of GOOD Music specifically, but on this journey, how did you find your passion for writing and producing music?

My passion is really around building. And I like building brands. I like building entities. I like taking ideas and turning them into global phenomenons when possible. When I went to undergrad, I studied strategic management at Wharton. And I remember having lunch with a professor. He was saying, why are you doing strategic management? You're supposed to do finance, accounting, like more hard skills. And I was like, I'm trying to learn from other people's mistakes and learn how to build properly in whatever I choose to. So it just so happened that I found some opportunities in the music space when I graduated. That was always more of my passion. It's just, I just lucked up in that it was in a creative space.

Can you tell us about that first job in the music space post-graduation?

My proper first job was at PwC when I graduated. So I was actually a strategy consultant. And I worked at the firm with like 40,000 other people. I really hated it. If I didn't show up to work, who cares? Like nothing would really affect the product. I didn't like not counting. And so I left there and I ended up actually working in VC myself for a short period of time. I was a kid and then September 11th happened. At the same time, the internet bubble was bursting. This is over 20 years ago now. Like all my friends at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, everyone was getting laid off and the actual capital markets were drying up. The VC advisory firm I was working with, our customer base like shriveled up and everyone was in pain economically. But my cousin had moved to New Jersey from Chicago and he was the only person I knew whose just career was skyrocketing. Kanye West is his name. No one knew him. He didn't have a record deal at that time. But I was just thinking like, man, me and my friends, we all did the safe thing. We got these expensive loans for school. And my cousin, he dropped out of school. He just did whatever his heart told him. And why is he killing it? And we're all struggling and worried. So maybe there's a glitch in the matrix. Maybe we don't have all the answers. So at the same time, when I was an undergrad, I was a DJ. At Penn, and a lot of my friends were in music. They were rappers or singers or played in bands. And so whenever I moved to New York, I still made little beats in my apartment and I DJ'd for my roommate's band. So we would perform at weddings and like bars. I was doing covers and whatnot. So I'm performing with my roommate on the weekends. I'm making little beats. I didn't have a job. Trying to figure out what I'm going to do. And my cousin Kanye, he was doing his thing, trying to find a record deal. And I just started trying to be helpful to him. So I went to one of my Wharton connections and was saying, hey, my cousin's just produced all these Jay-Z songs and he's a rapper. So my friend was a writer. She wrote an article about Kanye, the first article ever about Kanye West. My Wharton colleague wrote. I'm just trying to be helpful. And another colleague worked in the mailroom at William Morris. And so I was like, I think the number one booking agent is at William Morris. Let's go see if we can get a meeting. I'm so too young to know better. Let's see if we can get a meeting. We ended up getting a meeting. Kanye jumps on the table performing. The agent signs him. So he gets his first booking agent with the number one agent through a warden connection. So after that, Kanye said, you need to be around every day. You work with me now. So for $200 a week, this was my first job in the music business, was assisting Kanye West and helping him get his stuff together as he wanted to become a solo artist.

That's quite the early story of your career. And just a few years later in 2004, you started an independent record label, Good Music, with Kanye. Tell us a little bit more about how the idea for starting a label came to be after he got signed and your sort of early days helping him out.

It was interesting when Kanye got signed, the label Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella, they were not like super behind it. So we had to make it happen ourselves in terms of raising awareness. Same thing we do with startups, right? This is literally a startup as an artist and then as a label. So if anyone ever got like a Kanye West mixtape, it came from my apartment in the East Village. We would go to the club and like me and my interns would go to the DJ to say, hey, here's— this is when they had the big vinyl records and people actually played those. Go there and say, hey, there's a new artist, Kanye West, play this, right? And so convince them to play this music. And it worked. And the music was good. And I learned about pricing and the powers that be at these different labels were saying, all right, They know what they're doing. They're marketing. They're making great records. Let's give them a budget to do more of that. Kanye was super hot at that time, and I'm just there to get stuff done, provide a little bit of business structure, and be a buffer for him. Yeah, we just had this opportunity, and at the time, 50 Cent was really hot, and there's a lot of like gangster music was popular. And so the idea for us was to be the antithesis, right? If you have this momentum swing to like gangster music, we're the opportunity for it to swing back to a more positive, more inclusive sound so that people in the suburbs could feel welcome. Kids doubting themselves could feel welcome. And so good music, G-O-O-D, is supposed to signify good, right? It's the other side of the Spectrum. And also it was getting out our dreams, right? G-O-O-D. And it's supposed to be a sort of dream fulfillment, reach your goals sort of vibe. So that was the idea for the label. And we needed to find artists. And so I had already connected my roommate to Kanye in terms of performing on some songs. But I was saying, we need to sign my roommate. He, we need to make him the first artist. He's dope. So we signed, I signed my roommate to the label and we changed his name from John Stevens to John Legend. And then I managed that for the company as well.

That's a legendary, no pun intended, story around the start of Good Music. Tell us a little bit more about the early days of signing John Legend and maybe some stories that a lot of listeners wouldn't know about these early days.

Yeah, it was an awesome time. I felt like we were on top of the world, on the music world. And I was working personally on the business side and marketing side, but I'm also like just making songs with my roommate at the same time. And so I ended up producing like half of Ja's first album. Then that, I start producing Kanye and all these other artists. I think what was super interesting was just At the end of the day, everyone has the same tools. Like when they're making music, everyone has the same like machines. Same thing with software largely. And what the difference is your perspective and your taste. That's all people are paying for when it comes to music and putting together these projects. It was really interesting that our taste was just the crème de la crème taste of that time. I think one interesting story I learned a lot from was like John's name. John Stevens was his original artist name. And so one of our friends, J.Ivy, started just calling him in the studio one day, John Legend. So everyone starts saying, oh, John Legend, John Legend. But that wasn't his name. And so Kanye eventually is like, you got to change your name to John Legend. But we're like, you, you're not a legend. You don't have any songs out. Like, what is legendary? How can you use a name that you haven't earned? So there's a lot of back and forth about that. And there was another guy at the time on American Idol who was like a finalist. His name was Jon Stevens. So there was— he had red hair. He was a crooner. I'm like, he's more famous than you. And so maybe you should change it. So he did end up changing his name, obviously, the stage name. And that's something that for weeks we debated that and didn't wanna do it. But I think that's one of the, one of the best choices he ever made and that we made. I don't know that he'd be an EGOT winner or be all these things if he was John Stevens.

I'm laughing at this definition of fake it till you make it. Like, I'm not a legend yet, but I know I will be someday. And so I'm manifesting this for myself.

Whether it's John Legend or you know, at the time Kanye, he started calling him, we put out a mixtape called Kanye the Louis Vuitton Don. Within 2 years he had a Louis Vuitton deal. He was designing Louis Vuitton suits. There's, I remember being on TV and saying, hey, I'm working on this Nas album. I wasn't, I was in my head, but he didn't know I was, right? And then so his management contacted us saying, hey, why'd you say that? I ended up on Nas's album. So I just learned a lot about speaking things into existence, speaking to the market. The market will take what you tell it if you back up what you're telling it. And so I learned a lot about the power of words, names, claiming your spot.

Which is an important lesson, not only just in music, but marketing, but startups more broadly. And so not only have you written and produced songs for artists like Jay-Z and Britney Spears, John Legend, but you also won a Grammy for best rap song, Diamonds from Sierra Leon, I'm sure there are many lessons learned from founding a music production startup in many ways, taking that to the Grammy Awards and how those lessons can be applied to the world of tech. Could you tell us a little bit more about what maybe some of those key lessons were around building, marketing, and scaling a business from your time in music that hold true today?

I feel like there's so much in common with well, with music, especially hip-hop music. And one of the interesting things I learned is about pricing and positioning. I think the common sort of, or popular ethos is you buy low, sell high. You spend as little as you have to and then charge as much as you can. There's a sort of generic perspective. What we used to do is, for example, mixtapes back when mixtapes were a physical thing. I know if you guys ever made like mix CDs and write the name of it, like Party Night Mix. And so that's how most mixtapes were distributed. So these sort of blank CDRs, low quality, et cetera. We would sell mixtapes that were professionally made. They had screen printing, multicolor, like fancy real record printing, but it's the same mixtape. And we would have better music generally. And so I would go to these mixtape distribution centers, for example, and they would pay 25 cents a CD wholesale. That's just a standard price. We pay 25 cents and then we sell it for a dollar or whatever it was at that time. And I would show up, remember Kanye West is brand new. And I would say, all right, these are 75 cents. And they say, no, we buy the 25 cents. Period. I said, for this, it's 75 cents. This is better quality music. It's better art packaging. It's better quality CDs. And so they say, all right, we'll buy a couple, but we're not going to buy many because this is a crazy price. And they would come back and come back for more and more. And I think one thing, just one thing that I learned just working with Kanye and just working in this space, we learned about clarity in your positioning, clarity in your pricing. So it's okay to be premium and to charge more. And we sort of changed our perspective. It shouldn't be make it as cheap as you can, sell it for as much as you can. It should be make it the best you can and sell it for as much as you can. So that sort of thinking around product and how do we supply and how do we charge for product. Definitely influences how we operate now, especially with the premium product.

Yeah. And in a world where free is free, how do you actually elevate the music and the product that you have to demand that premium?

Yeah. Yeah. Free. Have you guys read the book Free? Chris Anderson. It's an awesome book. It's a few years old. I think he wrote The Facebook Effect. The book is about the concept of free on the internet and how if you wanna be big, you have to have free, right? Google is free, Facebook is free. And so how do you create a premium sort of experience when free is a paradigm? I think free is just an entry point. It's totally up to you once someone enters your ecosystem where you take them and how you represent their value when they're in that system. And sometimes the free user is the product, right?

We're going to transition to talking about how you went from being a pioneer in the music industry into founding Adventur. But before I go down that path, I just have to acknowledge, is that a Grammy behind you in your video feed?

These are just gold awards and like platinum awards. But I think there's the Grammys right there. So they are over there.

I thought I had a wall of fame behind me situation. I love it. Could you just take our listeners into that moment where you get the gold medal of music and just how that felt and that accomplishment moment? Because sometimes, you know, when we're in the muddy middle of career journeys and trying to get to the top of the mountain, it's hard to know like what's waiting for us on the other side. What was that moment like for you?

Honestly, it's still like, I guess cool, but I look at my friends that have like dozens of Grammys and Oscars and all the Emmys. I'm like, all right, I got a couple of little Grammys here. What's the big deal? Just work pays off. And that particular song, Diamonds from Sierra Leone, that's really just like me. We always wanted to be new and interesting. And so I think in the music business, most people are trying to copy what's working. We never did that. We would try to stand out, right? And make something totally novel. I see the same thing in the technology space of we try to slightly twist something that is already existent. And this is very important for us to stay fresh and stay making new concepts.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and also just to have that pinnacle moment and also be like, we're not done yet. There's still more to come here, but also trying to celebrate the wins. I know that's something Claudia and I have struggled with in our careers too, to finding that balance between the wins and so much more left to come, and more certainly to come. You made this transition to working at Vimeo, of all places, which for those who don't know, is a video sharing and editing platform, which coming out of the mobile innovation era of the late 2000s, late 2000s, really everyone started being a content creator. It wasn't just that you could be someone in a recording studio. Frankly, we're recording this right now from the comforts of our home, and hopefully it'll sound not too shabby. And so Vimeo was one of the first agents of change in that mobile creation, individual creator movements. So tell us a little bit about that transition and joining as their product lead.

I've always had a fascination with formats. With video formats. Part of my job when I started working with Kanye was burning CDs. And so you guys probably are too young to remember this, but there used to be CD burners where you had to literally hit record and wait for the full song to play and then hit pause and finish. But there wasn't enough time for him to do that, right? So I would spend hours a day making the CDs for different artists. And then iTunes came out that you could just burn the CD. Through a computer and the LimeWire and Napster and MP3s. And there was this constant evolution of that format, of this audio format. I was like, what's next? What's next? I went to Columbia for grad school and ended up, I made a music video while I was at Columbia that was interactive and just made some noise at the time. This is over 10 years ago. And the next thing I know, these different media companies, big companies started approaching me saying, how do we get our content like this? Little bit interactive, it's like some buttons on it. And I realized this is gonna be a new format. So I started building little tools and started getting people to pay me. And then I started to raise money to grow these tools. And, uh, it was really hard. For years I couldn't raise money. And I know my background, the story we just shared, is so diff— my appearance is very different from the expectations in Sand Hill Road. And so it was, it was really tough. And part of me legitimizing myself, which a lot of my peers didn't seem to need to do, but part of me legitimizing myself as a tech space person was going to work at Vimeo. Keep in mind, I haven't had a job since September 11th, basically I got a corporate job. And so at Vimeo, I learned about corporate America. I learned how do you operate a video company at scale? How do you service? How do you build all these different squads? So that was an interesting time for me. It's my first job in 20 years. Definitely learning what to do and what not to do.

There is some good learnings that are baked in there, and I'm sure it did transfer to now what you're doing with ADVENTURE, which we're going to talk to next, but I just want to acknowledge your point around feedback that you maybe received from VCs around needing to add legitimacy in tech to your resume when other people maybe don't get that feedback when they're pitching up and down Sand Hill Road. And that's definitely a frustration that I know Claudia and I have experienced with where this industry still has a lot of room to grow in terms of both equity inclusion and frankly, just access. And yeah, just wanna acknowledge that experience for you and say like, ugh, that's frustrating. That's what you felt when you first started to try to break into the tech world.

I started working with this attorney years ago at the number one sort of tech law firm. So I started working with a partner there. I'm like, look, this is a, this idea I have. I already have people paying me good money and I have a pretty good track record. I make people a lot of money. I have all the Ivy League degrees, like, what's up? And he's like, this is cool and every investor will want to get a beer with you. No one's going to invest in it. I'm like, that's crazy. Everything I touch turns to gold. He's like, it doesn't matter. They won't invest in you. I'm like, okay, you don't know what you're talking about. It's Devo. Devo is here. And, um, he was right at that time. So things are improving, but I could appreciate what you guys have dealt with as well. But we're definitely moving in the right direction slowly. But yeah, it's pretty crazy out there.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely is. I encourage though that now after 2019, you were able to found Adventr and raise venture funding for it. And for our listeners who maybe don't know what, who and what Adventr is, it's the world's first smart media platform that's enabling creators to make interactive content, connected media, and then actually share that across any platform, not just in one walled garden. We love this as creators ourselves. Tell us a little bit more about the aha moment from this depth of experience you've had along this journey to break into tech that inspired Adventur3r.

When I started in the video space, I really was just making a small, subtle system to allow the sort of experiences that I made in this crappy music video I made a long time ago. A few years ago, around 2019, I got an Amazon Alexa Echo Show. The one that has a video screen on it. I'm like, oh man, this is amazing. I know you can talk to Alexa and ask all sorts of questions. Now they put a screen there, so now I can talk to the content and it'll do stuff. So I got this show, put it in my place, and I remember talking to the content, but it didn't work like that. It was just a screen that would show YouTube videos or show the weather. but it, the content wasn't really affected by you speaking to it. And I was like, oh, number one, I thought that's what I was buying. And number two, that's a lost opportunity. So at that point I started building what I was thinking about, a video system that you could speak to and that the content would change as a result of what you're saying to it. As we started building these video tools, when it comes to an aha moment, As I started to understand about streaming technology, it became very clear to me what was happening next. As I mentioned to you, I spent a lot of time paying attention to technology and media formats. And so what was really fascinating is, you know how if you watch YouTube or Netflix, they used to buffer sometimes. They don't buffer anymore. What'll happen is your video quality gets fuzzy for a bit. Right? And then it will go back to wherever it was. The reason why your video doesn't buffer anymore is because they no longer use video files really. They use HLS, HTTPS live streaming. I'm gonna be technical just for a few seconds for a bigger story. So HLS is really, instead of an MP4 file that we think of video as, it's really thousands of tiny little files. Each one might be 3 to 5 seconds long. And so what happens is on Netflix, when you hit play, there's a playlist that loads and it starts playing the first clip and then it'll play the second clip, but they're stitching them together as you watch. Now, there's thousands of these clips, but they come in several different bandwidths. Some are really clear, some are really crappy. So what's happening while you watch, your browser is telling the video player, okay, we have a good connection here. Now let's say in where Madison is, some other people start to get on the internet. The browser will say, hey, Madison's connection is getting a little bit weaker. That next little clip you add on, let's go down 4 levels of quality. And then that's why it gets fuzzy seamlessly without you doing anything. And then people will get off of your internet and then the browser says, okay, we're good again. It'll go back up. This is what I call smart media. Your video feed is responding to its environment. It's responding to messages from your browser about the bandwidth. And that is in real time affecting your stream and decisions that are being made. The next step to that, clearly to me, is what else can affect that stream in real time? I've watched media formats for 20 years now. That became clear to me in video. Okay, it's dynamic. What are the inputs that make it dynamic? One is bandwidth. What about the viewer data? What about their browsing history? What about where they are? What about what mood that they're in? All of that will start to affect that media stream. So that's became clear to me, but those rules and the logic of what should affect it and what inputs it'll take, that's really what Aventure is, the system that allows you to declare the inputs and outputs that define media in real time.

What that has enabled you guys to do and build is have this patented audio technology that is called SmartListen, which allows any viewer or receiver of content to choose kind of their own adventure and style in a commercial, in a movie, in a game. Definitely it feels like the future of marketing and the future of interactive experiences. Tell us a bit more who like your buyer of this product is and how that's impacted your go-to-market.

Everyone is a content maker now. Literally everyone and every company makes content. And the streaming wars are intensifying, social media, any social platform is generally a video platform or they're trying to be a video platform. How do you stand out when there is so much content coming from every direction? Our users that come to Adventur3r, they wanna have more impact. They don't want to get drowned out. And so by using these tools, whenever I put out that music video a long time ago. You know, we put out a regular music video. The comments were like, this song sucks. The next week we put out the exact same video for the exact same song, but just have some buttons on. And there people are saying, oh, I love this song. Oh, this is gonna be a hit. I love it. And they watched it longer and they shared it more because they're able to be part of it. That's why people come to us because they want better performance. They want more click-throughs. They want people to remember, even educationally, we want people to retain more information, higher purchase intent. So our buyers are typically the product producer or decision maker for digital agencies, brands, and educational institutions. They want a better way to connect with the audience.

You've built this product. You've gone to market with it, and as we alluded to earlier, you've been able to do so through venture funding. You raised over $6 million from venture capitalists, and we're curious who in this journey of finding the right people to believe in you and your mission was the first person to say yes to adventure?

My crazy friends. I don't know why my friends, again, from Penn and from Wharton, these are the first people to support. What's interesting, I remember working in consulting and stuff in my early career and then saying, you know, I think I might work in music with my cousin. And I remember being in a car and a buddy of mine saying, you can't go into music. You're this, you're a business person. I was like, I don't know, I think I can. He's like, man, that's crazy. You shouldn't do that. That'll never work. And so it worked. And then as I started to transition to technology, which to me is all the same. It's all building cool stuff and getting people excited. I don't know how to play any instrument. I don't know how to read any music. I don't know how to code either. But I can make better songs than 95% of the expert guitar players. And I can direct engineers to develop a product they could never have invented speaking to NVIDIA themselves. So my point is, the same guy that said, you can't do this, you must be this. He was one of the first people to put in money when I said, this is where we're going next.

It's incredible to just hear your career arc from being a business person to crushing it in the music industry to building a technology company that's really innovating on the forefront of how content is consumed. Congratulations, first of all. But I'm sure It hasn't always been up and to the right. And as an entrepreneur myself, I think it's very easy to get caught up in the high highs and low lows. I'm curious, with building Adventur, what is an example of a moment where things might not have gone according to plan?

The biggest thing is probably the fundraising that I spoke about. It's challenging to not have money. You're trying to do something and if only I had this, this would move faster and I could do this. But I think the bigger, the bigger challenge was an identity challenge at that time. And really, man, I thought that I was a winner. Why am I not winning? What's going on here? Are they right? Am I not qualified? Am I not good enough? Am I not smart enough? Should I be less of this? Maybe if I dress differently or I speak differently, they'll accept me. I think those were the bigger challenges for me, and I'm still working on that. But yeah, letting other folks' perception sort of start to define how I should show up, I think that was the hardest thing for me to—

I think it's something that every founder experiences. It's in many ways such a lonely journey where you're really the only one that truly knows what's going on and is faced with all of the daily challenges. And yet it's your sole job to be the visionary that's so convicted about what you're doing, that people will continue trying to knock you down. You can't have any unwavering doubt. And really, that is a tall task for any human. I really appreciate you shedding light to just the inevitable self-doubts that anyone has as they're building a business. I'd love to shift gears a little bit. We chatted a bit about your career journey to date, but looking to the future, especially with everything that's going on in AI and how everyone is a content creator, essentially, what's next for Adventure?

We've been in a garage for a few years now building, just building this product and getting things right. And now we're transitioning into more of a marketing brand forward phase. Whatever customers we have, some Twitter, AWS, Autodesk, a Chevy, Lexus, 23andMe, et cetera, we've got these customers with zero customer acquisition costs. No marketing, no social, no anything. And so that's cool, but we gotta start growing the awareness of this, like, what we think is gonna be a mainstream format. I make it very clear to our investors, very clear to our team, there's a singular vision for what adventure is. And in the movie Minority Report, you guys may have seen this, Tom Cruise goes into the gap, and he just stole someone's eyeballs, or he was like, give me some eyeballs. So they like scan his eyes and they're like, they think he's a Japanese person. But either way, he goes into the Gap, a hologram pops up and says, hey, welcome back. How'd those tank tops work out for you? And Tom Cruise just looks at it and he walks off. He could have touched that content. He could have said, oh, those tank tops were too small. This future state, that media would be able to understand him and say, oh man, that's terrible. I know you got medium, we have large in stock. You want 10% off? Knowing his purchase history, being able to access the Gap's inventory in real time and make him an offer in real time. He could just say, yeah, that's fine. It's on its way to you. Done. That's the future state of media. We see it personalized and connected. That's what we're creating. I thought that we have 8 to 10 years to get there. Right now you upload video clips to our platform. It's always been the goal to eventually move away from video clips and have a fully generated experience. That needs to be probably in the next 24 months as opposed to 8 years. So that's where we see AI fitting into what we're doing, both on the SmartListen aspect. So literally, and I'll share the link with the listeners, they can check it out, but you can literally speak to some content and say, show me that red shirt. Don't go in there. The answer is B. How will this genetic thing affect me? And get answers in real time. And speak to this content, which is also speaking to the Gast internal systems or whatever third-party system. That is the goal here. That's what we mean by smart media is content that's actually intelligent and it's connected. And we are, we do use AI in our voice technology and we're going to be using more of it as we collect more data around best practices to generate this immersive content, gamified content, whether it's video generated, hologram, whatever it is, we want to be the operating system. For media.

We're incredibly excited for that future. Being able to have customized shopping experiences is something that definitely resonates for myself. So we can't wait to continue to keep our eyes on everything that Adventur is doing, and hopefully all of our consumer experiences will be personalized in some way by Adventur. Switching things up a little bit, I read that you're also an advisory board member at Harvard University's Lehman Program. On creativity and entrepreneurship. Super important to encourage the next generation of leaders to really, like, rethink not only their careers, but the problems that exist in this world and how we can solve those problems. Tell us a little bit more about your work with the Lehman Program.

From my understanding, and I went to Harvard a couple times now, there's not a lot of infrastructure around entrepreneurship. Following, like having these crazy ideas and leaning into them. And so that's what this new center at Harvard is for. How can we give permission for people to dream big and then start to give them tools for how to structure that into an organization? I speak there and we have meetings where we learn about the students' different projects, but even more importantly, really How do we design this program to be more effective moving forward for people to have more skills to realize their dreams? Yeah, I'm actively helping design what does curriculum look like? What does externships look like? What's important? What's not important? What are the core things that we need to, in a short period of time, make sure undergrads have so they're best equipped for this, like, very ambiguous worlds.

And as you alluded to, the pace of innovation is only increasing, only getting faster to really meet the needs of all that's happening at the forefront of content creation or reaching audiences, scaling businesses. And so it's only ever more important that we're empowering the undergrads of today to enter into the workforce with those skills. And love that that is a core part of your mission and something you're doing outside of building Adventr and changing the way that we consume content. Do you both This has been like, we're around the world tour of your journey at the music industry meets tech meets the future of innovation and entrepreneurship. And we're so grateful that you spent this hour with us. Before we wrap, would love to ask you our final question, which is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career? We encourage you to think about it in the professional context.

I would say a very influential woman would be Sarah Kunst. I don't know if you guys know Sarah. She's from Clio Capital. As I started to get involved in the tech space, Sarah was one of the first people that I had encountered. And she's a woman, she's a Black woman, and she's very unapologetic about that. As I was trying to get my feet wet, and I'm at the time running into all these nos and you're not right, you're not the guy for this, you're not enough. She was saying, no, you are enough. You are awesome. This is awesome. You are gonna do it. I got a lot of confidence from her and she would take me to meet people. She really helped me get acclimated in the space. I still talk to her to this day. And I think she probably doesn't know how impactful she was and is on me, but I would say Sarah.

It's really unparalleled to have someone who has conviction in you in the times when you don't have conviction in yourself. And it sounds like Sarah was that for you. I know she's been that for other people as well, and grateful for innovators like her, innovators like you in the industry who are changing the face of what it means to be a champion of others and building and scaling really awesome things. So Divo, thank you for sharing your story with us today and opening the door to The Room Where It Happens.

Thank you for having me. This is fun.

Thank you so much, Divo.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See ya. See you in the room.

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