INBOUND Bold Talks: Lisa Pierpont "Boston's Boldfacers"

I'm really honored to be here. I want to introduce you to some people. This is Lino. He grew up in the streets of the inner city of Boston, Mattapan and Dorchester. At the age of 14 he was homeless and by the age of 18 he was in jail for attempted homicide. Really going places, you know. But a funny thing happened. His cellmate was a guy who read and he threw Lino a book one day and said, you know, you should try this. Lino had never read a book in his life and the name of it was the Native Son. And he read his first book and he read it again and he read more. And to make a long story short, he graduated from high school in jail and by the time he was released he had been admitted to UMass. Now he's a father of two and he started a non profit organization called Urban Achievers. And the whole mission is to sort of swoop in to kids around the age of 13 or 14 when he was homeless and help them take a right turn instead of a left turn. So he's one of our Bold Facers. This is Rachel, she's kind of a badass. She's a roller derby skater. She wins a lot and she's a big fighter in the rink, off the rink. Her biggest battle has been surviving breast cancer. This is Marcus, he's a bongo drummer. I met him at a party on a roof and was blown away by him. He's from Brazil and decided to focus his life on hand drums. And so he went to Berkeley and he majored in it and now he's been on MTV and has albums and he's just killing it. This is Jeremy Allaire. If anyone's in the high tech world, you may be familiar with him. He started a company called Brightcove which has completely exploded. Here are some more. There's Ginny, a breakdancer. Steven, an architect. That's Deva, she's literally a rocket scientist helping us travel to Mars at mit. That's Nete, he's a voodoo priest. That's Dalen, the little six year old who captured the hearts of Celtics fans by dancing at Celtics games when he got excited and ended up on the Jumbotron. That's Clancy, he's an actor. He's in the Dog Actors Guild. So you may ask, what in the world do these people have in common? It seems like such a random sampling, but there are 400 others like them and they are what we call Bold Facers. I started it seven years ago and it's an Online magazine. The core of it is to showcase the area's coolest talent and personalities. You don't have to have a million degrees. You don't have to come from the right family or the right neighborhood. You don't have to have a lot of money. We choose people who are excellent at what they do. Prince or pauper, plumber or PhD. We choose people who have a spark and a story. And then we showcase them once a week. Every Tuesday there's a new story, there's a print feature, there's video. I'll show you some of that a little bit later. There's an insider's guide. So it's all been quite exciting. My background is, as Laura mentioned, I was a TV producer for the ABC news magazine show called chronicle for about 15 years. And it was my dream job. I mean, one week it was bargain burritos, and the next week it was the death penalty. So it was the light, the heavy, and everything in between. But after 15 years, I was sort of seeing a few things happen. And one of them was that traditional media was changing at warp speed and it was clear that things were never going to be the same. After the emergence of the digital world. I had happened to do a lot of freelance work on the side, even though I was a TV producer. And one of the things I got involved with was a site called Daily Candy. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it was on fire from the beginning. And I thought, this is it. This is where everything is going. It is clear professionally. I sort of had, you know, questions about what the trajectory would be as a TV producer. I didn't want to be a manager. I don't like managing people. I love being out in the field. I love meeting people and learning from people. And this, you know, the migration to the digital world seemed like an obvious choice for me. So when I sort of started, started thinking about how to make this change, I started thinking about the body of work that I had produced for the show. And there's nothing in common with a burrito chef and somebody who lost a child to homicide. But the one common theme was that everybody has a story. And even in a half hour show, a lot of times you don't have time to tell it. So, for example, if we were doing a story on a new restaurant, we would interview predictable characters. We'd interview the chef, we'd interview the owner, we'd interview a happy customer, show some shooting flames coming out of a pan. But the people we would remember somebody like the dishwasher in the kitchen who was training to be in the Olympics as a rower, and there would never be time for him. You know, that was just a complete sidebar where there'd never be time to tell that story. And I thought, that's the story. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to create this platform on which you can showcase talent and the next big thing that you wouldn't hear so about here about. And that coupled with the fact that every time I looked in the paper, I was reading about the same cast of characters, pro athletes and politicians and anchor people, and I didn't feel as though they were a real, true reflection of the richness of a community. Not just Boston, really, any community. I mean, this could happen anywhere. So that's why I started. I am now going to sort of toss this to some of our interviews so you can hear a little bit more from some of our people and see a little bit of a sample of the video work that we do. So if you can cue that up, that would be great.

Hi, my name is Shea Rose, and I'm a soulful rocker and rapper and music for social change activist rock. And Rose is kind of like, this is who I am. And rocking who you are in the world and being like, okay with who you are, like, whatever it is, if you have a bald head, if you have an afro, if you have dreadlocks.

So yay da ba ba ba ba.

Ba.

My serious rising got you starstruck As I struck Bette Davis on this bass line Kick it with me Rock funky with a soulful metal stop and taste.

You know, I'm applying for fellowship to hopefully go to Africa, Spain, and kind of pursue my music for social change activism, because it's something that I can do beyond my age. You know, certain parts of the music industry, it's very like, you have to be this age. You have to look this way, and that's it. And so that initiative really helps me to expand what I can do with my music outside of making a number one hit, writing a number one hit or a Grammy or whatever. So applying for a fellowship, Hopefully I'll get it. For a long time, I was perfecting my craft, and I kind of felt like at one point this is not enough. So I go in and I get other students to like, hey, you're a dj? Do you want to go in and do a DJ clinic for the kids at the Boys and Girls Club? Or if you're a professor, like, do you want to bring your class to this club and perform. So a lot of my work at Berkeley, in addition to being a student there, is really getting students, faculty, and staff at Berkeley just fired up about going into the Boston community and just sharing their creativity and their talent with kids who might not necessarily have it. And so writing and performing really keeps me connected to humanity and just like human conditions, like, everybody wants to go out and party sometimes and go to the club and just let go. And then everyone has a broken heart, so you can write about that and identify with people. So the message that ultimately I want to get out is we're here for hopefully, a common cause, which is to live and just express and do what our time is, you know, do our time here on this earth and leave a legacy behind that's positive.

Now you got the introduction to the rose. New rose. Everybody knows a rose is a rose.

No matter what you call it but. But you can call me shade rose.

For the nah nah nah nah nah I got you in my clutches and you're digging on this funk gon stomp your feeding bob your head now get your soul clapped down this music is a remedy Brings joy in the morning and the people that want it oh, everybody knows no matter what you call a rose, it's still a rose I say rock and rolls is a feeling you can flip it how you want can't put it in the box Say rocking roses and feeling let your mind run free be who you want to be Say rocking roses and feeling in the park on the block you can drop it like it's hot Say rock and rose is up is up.

She'S a star. She's since won a Boston music award. She wrote actually an original piece for us for we usually come out with something a little bit different for the holidays. And she wrote an original song for us. You can see the that on the site, Travis, is a second video. Totally different. Totally different ball of wax here. You'll see.

My name is Travis hartan. I'm from Boston. Boston, Massachusetts. Anywhere else and you know, you know, it's one of more corporate shops, but at the same time, like owner of ski market underground comes, comes, comes with me. You know, cracks things out. So, so, so it's great, great, you know, like, it's the best, best job. And I still love it. I, you know, I love having an influence on little kids. Come in, getting them psyched. Part of the whole thing. More than anything. More than anything. I just got a feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling something I do by myself. There's no rules.

That's.

And something that I move by myself with all my friends. So, you know, an individual thing, time off everyone else. As opposed to like team sports where, you know, you know, you lose, like no one ever loses. Skateboard. Whoever has the most fun wins. I remember, I remember I got my first real board for Christmas, you know, like 12. But before that I had like.

Down.

The hill and stuff like that.

You know.

It'S really, really endless. There's no. No end rights right now.

You know.

Kid, I'm just like, I just skate, you know, you know, look for me out here.

So, you know, these people have passion. They have passion for what they do. The question always with the business. So, you know, we have the content and we know what we're doing. For content. The biggest challenge has been the money. You know, everybody sort of says, how do you make money? And that's a really good question that, you know, I was very confident in my content making abilities. But the entrepreneur thing has definitely been baptism by fire. And especially in this space where everything is from free, you know, online media is sort of like opening up a store and paying the money to hire staff and then saying, take what you want, it's all free. Take the clothes, take the toys, everything. So we really had to sort of go back to the drawing board and figure out how to keep the lights on in a lot of ways, advertising, you know, I'm a little local person, so advertising at a local level won't do everything. So we had to be creative and come up with different things. So we started doing events and one of the things we did, we have a really cool space in Fort Point, Channel a studio. So we started monetizing the studio that we had and we started producing something called pop up stores, which I'd read about on the west coast that were really taking off. And so we started producing those once a month and sort of taking an editorial theme and applying it to that. We ran one every month. One month chocolate, the next month yoga, the next month month. At Gar Allan Poe, I mean, we came up with all kinds of things. The good thing about being little is that you don't need to go through a lot of management. You know, we come up with an idea and we can do it like next week. So we got a lot of traction from that. That really worked. It's nothing I particularly saw myself doing, you know, swiping credit cards a couple years after I started a magazine. But you know what, it worked and it paid the bills and that's what counts, you know, in coordination with that, we also produce panel discussions out of our studio as well. That was on manners. You know, how do you be polite in a modern world? Is an email. Thank you, okay. That kind of thing. We produce those once a month for about two years. And then something that we've done that really caught on as well is something called red frame coverage. We cover parties. And, you know, I was sort of noticing that as traditional media was having trouble, that they were not dispatching photographers the way they used to to to cover events. And even if they did, it's only a couple of pictures on a newspaper, whereas online you can go down to China. So we started charging for that. And so people hire our crews to come and cover them. So it's been seven years. As far as the future. We are excited about the day that we can roll out nationally into different cities. We'll be excited when that happens, but in the meantime, it's been great. No matter what happens and what I would say to anybody thinking about starting a business or starting a hobby, it doesn't matter. You just do it. The key word definitely is bold. The people that we've met have changed our lives, and it's not necessarily because of the successes they've had, but a lot of times it's because of the failures that they've had. And they've driven us to keep trying and keep switching, swinging the bat. And I would say the same thing to you. Don't be reckless about it. Do your due diligence, but find a way to do it. Don't let fear get in the way. Our bold facers haven't. Because even if you fail, it's okay. You're going to be just fine. So, you know, I always tell people that even though we're sort of an editorial magazine and we choose our people in an editorial way, you should be your own bowl face. Because as far as we know, there's only one life, and for us, there's only one way to do it, and it's to be bold. Thank you.