As far back as I can remember, @NeMcCartney has been sharing his music recommendations with me. One time, over eleven years ago, he sent me Youtube videos by an unknown kid in Canada named The Weeknd. I recently interviewed Nate about his journey that took him from Pennsylvania to Silicon Valley to Paris and back.
J.E.: How did you get your start?
N.M.: In 2001, while the mixtape scene was taking off in NYC, I was going to college in Virginia. I couldn’t wait for the new tapes from DJ Clue, Kayslay, Envy, Big Mike, Cutmaster C, Whoo Kid etcetera - but the new music was not reaching us fast enough. I started looking online at sites like Boxden - for news and drops and Jay-Z World - for Roc-A-Fella freestyles. The admin of Jay-Z World became a huge fan of Joe Budden and started posting all of his freestyles. I had never heard Joe before and his lyricism blew me away. I started looking for ways to get the latest Joe Budden freestyles when they would drop in real time. Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa were good to find popular titles but not exclusive stuff. Through my research, I found BitTorrents, mIRC, Bottler, and then later private FTP’s. I would get all of the latest music and then post my AIM screen name on Boxden and different message boards so people could hit me all day and I would send them music without ever knowing who they were. All the while, Joe Budden started to really take off on the mixtape circuit. He had his own message board where he would read all of the threads and comment. One day, Joe told members of his message board that they should come meet him at a bowling alley in Jersey City. That was an amazing experience that would help shape my thinking around artist-fan experiences.
N.M.: I started corresponding online with Stephen Hacker, a college radio DJ down in Florida. Like me, he was captivated by Hip-Hop; but he had a much deeper understanding of how things worked. Being a college radio DJ, he was on the promotions lists for the major labels where they would send him all of the latest vinyl so that he would play it on the school radio. This put him in direct contact with the labels. Stephen and I started building a rapport through our love of rap. Stephen ended up hustling his way into an internship with Duke Da God and Dipset which was part of the Roc-A-Fella family. When I got my hands on some Beanie Sigel music that was unreleased from a studio engineer, Stephen played the music for some A&R’s at the Roc-A-Fella office. They asked where he got the music and it led back to me. I got called up to New York City to meet with Dan Kruchkow who was the VP of Digital Media at Def Jam and John Bartleson who was the Director of New Media Marketing at Roc-A-Fella Records. I showed them everything that I was doing and they took a liking to me. They said ‘let’s keep in touch and let us know if you ever need anything.’ I told them I wanted a job, an internship, anything.
Some time passed, but John reached out - with Stephen’s prodding - and said he had an opportunity for me. Roc-A-Fella was disbanding and he was going with Jay-Z. He shared with me that the two other partners, Damon Dash + Kareem “Biggs” Burke would need someone to do their new media marketing and he thought that I would be a good fit for the job. So I dropped out of college and my career officially started with Damon Dash Music Group.
J.E.: Dropping out of college to work for Dame was a wise decision. Continue on..
N.M.: Definitely. DDMG and then DDE - Damon Dash Enterprises - was an incredible experience. I would wake up at the crack of dawn, take the bus two hours from Pennsylvania to the Port Authority and then walk to Time Square where our office was and do that in reverse each night at 10pm. This was the dream - I wasn’t focused on how much I was being paid or how much time I was spending on the job. This opportunity put me in a world that I was previously on the outside looking in. One of the biggest perks working for Damon and Biggs was that they had so many things going on between Fashion - Prokeds, Rachel Roy, Alcohol - Armadale Vodka, Technology - BlockSavvy, Music - DDMG and Film + TV - The Ultimate Hustler, Mr. Untouchable, Shadowboxer. I was exposed to a lot of information that you wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere. Additionally, I got to work with some really good and smart people who would take the time to teach me how these different verticals and businesses operated.
N.M.: I knew I was fortunate then but as the years have passed, I realize that the experiences I had were priceless. Especially for a kid from Pennsylvania with no ties to the music industry. Having legendary Producer DJ Clark Kent describe recording sessions with Jay-Z for Reasonable Doubt and what it was like producing “Sky’s The Limit” for the Notorious B.IG. Former GM Roc-A-Fella Records Darrin Chandler explained to me how to manage an artist’s budget. Damon was rigorous about the margins at Roc-A-Wear. Biggs was ahead of his time with BlockSavvy. Marianne Tesler - Former President & CEO of Nike France, Givenchy, Rachel Roy taught us about high fashion. Geoff Gillis - Former VP Marketing at DDE, taught us how to build brands. I could go on and on, but my point being that these experiences aren’t things that you can find in a classroom and they definitely have helped me immensely. A lot of people look at the history of Roc-A-Fella Records and talk about the great artists and producers that came from the label. What’s equally as interesting to me, are the number of successful executives that came from that lineage. The founders of Roc-A-Fella and the leadership team there gave a lot of unqualified but hungry people opportunities and let them learn and grow into roles. These individuals are now running companies in many different industries.
J.E.: Yourself being one of them. What happened next?
N.M.: After a few years, Damon was gravitating more towards fashion and less towards music. John Bartleson, who shepherded my opportunity with DDMG, went to Nokia to handle their music business and called me about an opportunity at Verizon. The music business had shifted and telecommunication companies were in a position to capitalize. Consumers were looking for new media formats with music to show their identity and ringtones and ringback tones were a means to do so. I landed at Verizon working out of their headquarters in New Jersey as part of a small team of six people. Verizon was another amazing experience for me. I got a crash course in music economics and got to be on the front lines of negotiations with the major labels as they were looking for new partners to take the place of historical retailers like Best Buy, FYE, and Virgin. Verizon’s music business quickly ballooned to $350 million annually and became the number one mobile carrier for music and the number two digital distributor for music behind Apple. I was getting to do some really fun work. When I started at Verizon, one of my chief responsibilities was programming the deck which means that I would help decide which songs and tones would get featured. This allowed me to put on my A&R hat and help expose artists that were already performing at a high level or artists that I thought would blow up. Through the years, I would reach out to any artist or their management that I was a fan of and thought that Verizon could and should help. This led me to building strong relationships with artists like Mike Posner, Ryan Leslie, Nipsey Hussle and music executives like J Erving, Jonny Shipes and Benny Pough. It also allowed me to take shots on artists that I loved before they signed to a label. I’m a historian who loves to keep records of everything so it’s always a fun trip down memory lane to see proposals for Drake when he was being managed by T Slack before his YMCMB deal or correspondence with The Weeknd and his former manager Jake when House of Balloons dropped.
N.M.: As the business shifted again from ownership to an access model so did my responsibilities. Once again, Verizon was in a prime position to play an integral role in the new shift. DSP’s like Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, and Mog were emerging but they needed distribution and adoption. There was no better real estate than being pre-loaded on the home screen of a Verizon enabled device. I was tasked with getting the deals done with the DSP’s, getting their apps tested and then working with our device team on which services would be preloaded on specific devices. This was another opportunity to learn the economics of the music business but from a different perspective.
I spent seven years at Verizon and got to work with and learn from really smart people like John Harrobin, Jennifer Byrne, Anthony Aguila, Ed Ruth, Bill Fish, Keith Wright, Dana Moscato, Suzy Deering, Joseph Kearney, Kathryn Schurtz, Yannis Tsampalis, TJ Vitolo and Matt Schwartz.
Throughout this period, I also was spending time helping a couple of artists who were thinking about the music business from a similar mindset as my own. There were two artists in particular that I was really connecting with as our visions were aligned. One was Ryan Leslie and the other was Nipsey Hussle. Both were artists that were signed to labels; Ryan to Motown and Nipsey to Epic, but ended up independent and were looking for ways to continue their movements but with a D2C mentality. I helped Nipsey and his team get set up with a content aggregator and would support his mixtape releases with programming features on Verizon.
J.E.: You ended up starting a company with Ryan Leslie.
N.M.: Ryan would bounce app ideas off of me and have me come by the studio after he was finishing sessions with Madonna. We came up with a plan for him to capture data as to who was consuming his music. Through those conversations, Ryan and I conceptualized what would eventually become SuperPhone. As luck would have it, Ryan traded some tweets with Tristan Walker, who at the time was Entrepreneur in Residence at Andreessen Horowitz. Tristan invited us out to Menlo Park to meet in person. Ryan and I knew nothing about fundraising or building a venture backed company but we were passionate about helping artists own their data. When we got to a16z’s HQ, we ended up meeting with the boss himself Ben Horowitz, Tristan and Ben’s Chief of Staff, Chris Lyons. We talked about music, the music business and our passion to help artists take control of their careers. Ben told us that he loved what Ryan was doing as it was an artist solving their own problem but that problem also applied to every artist. He would write us a check to start our company and we’d be able to go raise a seed round off of his name. It was such an adrenaline rush and an amazing feeling. One thing about me is, I always love an underdog. That was part of the reason I love Nipsey and Ryan so much. It brought me great joy to feel like Ryan’s vision was validated by Ben, when a lot of the music industry counted Ryan out. I left Verizon and we got started on this journey to build a tech company.
N.M.: Like most things, raising money is all about momentum. With Ben’s blessing, we were introduced to and able to attract a lot of blue chip investors. While Ben has been recognized for his incredible acumen to fund the world’s best companies from their infancy to IPO and to share the hard truths of building companies with his pen, what’s probably lesser known is the force that is his significant other. Felicia Horowitz is a one of one. She’s a whirlwind of compassion, generosity, candidness and fun. She is the straw that stirs the drink in any room that enters and she’s been nothing short of a blessing to myself.
The reason I bring Felicia up so prominently is because she encapsulates so many desirable qualities and I’m hopeful that at least a few have rubbed off on me. Felicia has expanded my world and I’m sure many others. She’s taken Ryan and myself to Yuri Milner’s $100 million house. She’s included us in dinner parties with Oprah, Susan Wojcicki, Brian Chesky, Jeff Weiner, etcetera to talk about how we can utilize our combined resources to improve the world. She’s made sure that everyone that she encountered knew what SuperPhone is, but that’s not what I meant by a one of one. Felicia is the person who will do all of the above and more but then make sure you are up at the crack of dawn so that you can serve meals to the homeless at Glide before church service. She’s the person that when your store has a fire and burns down, sets up and hosts the fundraiser to get you back up and running. She’s the person that when Hurricane Harvey strikes down in Houston and causes catastrophic flooding, is loading up the U-Haul to drive supplies down herself! Felicia Horiwitz expanded my world by showing how one person can make such a big difference in so many lives. While I’m thankful to have expanded my network and learned new things as a result of her, I’m more thankful for her reaffirming the importance of helping others on a daily basis.
J.E.: Sounds like you and the company were growing up.
N.M.: Ryan and I were able to raise a seed round and the team started to expand. We worked on some great activations. Helping to execute Nipsey and his manager Steve Carless’s vision, we powered the Proud to Pay Campaign for Mailbox Money where Nipsey sold his project for $1,000. Nipsey was so smart because he understood that fans were spending the $1,000 to buy it directly from him so that he knew exactly who was buying the product and could acknowledge them. After a couple years, I decided that I wanted to do some other stuff, so I amicably parted ways with SuperPhone.
N.M.: A former colleague from Verizon named Yvonne Sheehan was working with iHeartMedia and she provided me with the chance to produce and be the showrunner for their first original podcast. In partnership with WeWork, the podcast was entitled “Art Of The Hustle” and featured great entrepreneurs sharing their stories. Guests included Tommy Hilfiger, Neil Blumenthal, Erika Nardini, Iqram Magdon-Ismail and Elliott Bisnow amongst others. At the same time, you presented me with an opportunity to produce some activations with artists. Most notably was the activation we did in collaboration with Biggs to celebrate Reasonable Doubt’s 20th Anniversary. That activation was really special.
J.E.: You have to be the only person who got to work for Dame, then worked with Biggs and then next thing I know you were working for Roc Nation. Is that correct?
N.M.: In parallel to this freelance work, I was building new products with two of my former colleagues from SuperPhone, Danny Quick and Brandon Brisbon. We would tinker on various things to empower creators that we thought needed to exist in the world. And while we were doing this, new opportunities popped up for all three of us.
My friend Benny Pough brought me into the fold with a new opportunity that he was hand-picked for. Benny was being hired as President of Roc Nation on the label side and wanted me to join him at Roc Nation as SVP of Commerce. I agreed to do so and we got started. The founders wanted to spin up a new company under the Roc Nation umbrella named Equity Distribution, that would serve as an alternative for artists who preferred to sign a licensing deal as opposed to a traditional label deal. I was tasked with heading up Equity Distribution and building out the infrastructure. This meant working with legal on the agreements, working with the the founders on the branding, building out the onboarding flows, managing the metadata and backend, getting the content live and then working with finance to get artists paid.
N.M.: About 18 months into my tenure at Roc Nation, Danny shared with some folks at Snapchat one of the products that we had built. They loved it and said they would invest in us if we went all in on it. So we did. We are now 3 years into a venture backed company whose core product is known as Galaxy. Galaxy is a resale fashion marketplace powered by video. We provide a new generation of resellers with the tools needed to run their business and on the consumer end, we combine shopping and discovery in a fun and interactive way.
J.E.: What new trends in the music business are you interested in? And what new music in particular do you keep an ear on?
N.M.: I’m always fascinated with helping empower creators. How we help people share their art and make sure that they are compensated appropriately for it. I’m also interested in demystifying the economics of different industries. I think there are a lot of creators that would benefit from having more knowledge about this.
N.M.: A lot of my closest friends are top executives in the music business so I’m always hearing about new artists to check out or older ones that I should know. Steve (Carless) has put me on to countless artists including Polo G. David Melhado who heads up marketing at United Masters always has someone dope to share. Lylette Pizarro and Rene McLean are always two steps ahead. I’m waiting on R Les to start producing again and making more music. Whatever Rance from 1500 or Nothin is working on is always going to be dope. Two artists that haven’t gotten their just due yet that the world should know are JMSN and Tanerelle. And two of my guys who are super dope are Ransom and Dibiasi from Jersey City. Just incredible talents.
J.E.: On a personal note, what’s your life like now? Earlier you mentioned learning the importance of helping others. How do you give back?
N.M.: Like most people, Covid has served as a reminder that life is short and that your time is valuable. I try to spend as much time as possible with my family, who’ve been incredibly supportive of all of my endeavors + dog. I also love trying to help my friends accomplish their goals. I’m really fortunate to have encountered a plethora of great people on my journey so I just try to pay it forward. I also watch a lot of Celtics basketball, talk about the music business with my friends and get some runs in.
N.M.: When I was working at Verizon, I would work long hours with a traffic filled commute and my health took a backseat. I made a list of things that I would prioritize when I left Verizon. One of those things was getting in shape. I figured the easiest way to force myself to get into shape was to put myself into an uncomfortable situation where I have no choice but to workout. For me, that was signing up for the New York Marathon via a charity. To receive your bib, you would have to hit a fundraising minimum, which I did. Come race day, I had an incredible marathon Sunday. What a truly uplifting day. Millions of people cheering you on as you run through New York City! It’s truly an emotional experience as you fight your physical and mental fatigue and try to power through. While I was running my first marathon and trying to stay strong, I saw an individual pushing another person in a wheelchair as they ran. At that moment, it blew my mind and I knew I could do more than just raise money. I’m now 8 marathons deep with many more to come. For the New York City marathon, I run on behalf of Achilles International whose mission is to support disabled athletes. Through Achilles, I’ve served as a guide to visually impaired runners where we are tethered together for the marathon. These are some of the strongest and bravest people I know. Imagine running for 26.2 miles being tethered to someone you just met whose job is to guide you through terrain you can’t see while people are yelling and screaming. Wow, just wow…
N.M.: In addition to New York, I’ve also added the Boston Marathon to my annual repertoire. This allows me to do 2 marathons a year with Boston in the Spring and New York in the Fall. For Boston, I run on behalf of the Boston Celtic’s Shamrock Foundation whose mission is to support children in need. I’m a die hard Celtics fan and it’s a tremendous honor for me to wear their Jersey every Patriot’s Day as I run from Hopkinton to Boston and make an impact in youngsters' lives. It’s also not lost upon me that I have an extremely generous network of people who help me hit these fundraising goals to support these important organizations.
While I hate actually running, I do appreciate the discipline of it. My buddies Lucas Bullerjahn and Perry Landesberg are always sending me their maps to keep me inspired to train. There are just so many similarities between life and marathons. On race days, plenty of Nipsey Hussle is being played!
J.E.: Lastly, for motivational purposes.. I know you are in France now doing big things, went from P.A. to Paris.. where are you at and how is it out there? What’s the best way for people to build with you?
N.M.: I’m currently at the Costes Hotel in Paris. It’s great, it’s spring time, I’m just out here for a few days enjoying some great Bordeaux’s and eating some great food. I’ll be back soon and then it’s back to the grind.
N.M.: I value relationships over transactions. I try to add value and if you add enough, people will want to compensate you for it. DM me - I’m always down to talk to ambitious, hardworking individuals.