Students & Guest Lecturers at IHHE.
Philadelphia’s Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship, founded by Tayyib Smith and Meegan Denenberg of Little Giant Creative, “uses the ethos of Hip-Hop to connect nontraditional, ambitious young entrepreneurs with the resources, knowledge, and contacts needed to take their ideas from concept to reality.” The 9-month program funded by the Knight Cities grant and inspired by hip-hop’s creative economy leverages the capital of the cultural zeitgeist during weekend sessions that groom students to build and ultimately pitch their ventures to investors.
These entrepreneurs are the rising standard bearers working outside the spotlight, where they create solutions for social justice, civic engagement and product development with the potential to carry them beyond their respective cities and expectations. The byproduct of the founders’ combined experience in marketing and entertainment, the institute itself is similarly capable of impacting lives and changing how people view opportunities for mobility and business incubation within hip hop culture. So how did we get here and what’s the real story behind the IHHE? Tayyib and Meegan explain how they created the space to craft your hustle.
--
Okayplayer: Can you talk about your journey thus far and how that has led to your success or growth as an entrepreneur?
Tayyib Smith: I don’t consider myself to be successful. I think I’ve done a couple of things that have worked. I have a different scale in terms of success. I think I’ve been continually trying to redefine what that is. In terms of my path, I had always been passionate about music. I worked first as a street promoter and eventually became a club promoter. I moved to Colorado for a bit. I worked at the Fox Theatre and Red Rocks. Promoting parties and producing my own events. About 1996, I came back to Philly where I was waiting tables and still trying to do my own promotion thing. I got hooked up with King Britt, who had always encouraged me to follow whatever it is I was trying to do creatively. He introduced me to Vikter Duplaix and James Poyser. I ended up working for their production company, Axis Music Group, for about 4 or 5 years. Halfway through that period I started to do administrative work, A&R’ing and acting as the U.S. legal manager for BBE Music — for Peter Adarkwah out of London. That was a really interesting time in Philly because he was doing the Beat Generation stuff — the series of records from people like Pete Rock, Marley Marl, Jazzy Jeff...J Dilla’s Welcome 2 Detroit. Somewhere around 2004 or 2005, while I was still doing that, I started managing a band called The Nouveau Riche that had Khari Mateen, Dice Raw and Nikki Jean in it. Between that and how difficult the business was becoming, I was getting disillusioned with music. I had always, on the side even at Axis and BBE, acted as a marketer doing brand collaborations and partnerships. These were the early Scion years. I made some good relationships and got to book a lot of really cool people through that. We did events for Triple Five Soul and a couple of other brands. Then when I was done with music and trying to figure out what path I wanted to take, a former colleague had approached me with the idea of starting Two.One.Five Magazine. Little Giant Creative was always the parent company of the publication. The print publication was our focus for three years.
OKP: How did you become partners and what has the experience of building Little Giant been like for you?
Meegan Denenberg: I lived and worked in New York before returning to Philly, where I was Director of Marketing For Philly Car Share. I was planning their 5-year anniversary. We were doing this big b-boy activation and Tayyib was recommended when we were looking for someone who might be able to help pull this off. The event happened and was very successful, but I subsequently left PCS to do some consulting. When I started coming to him to talk about things that were happening, I think he and his then business partner had come to a point where they realized that the magazine wasn’t sustainable and they needed to have some kind of business model that would generate income. At that point they had been approached by VILLA for a lookbook and a fashion show. I don’t know that anyone had had prior experience in that realm and since that had been my whole career, I started putting together documents. When I came on board, it was pretty much at a point when the situation was do or die. The magazine really wasn’t sustaining itself and we needed to pay staff. We realized that marketing was the thing that would provide some income. I took a leadership role with the company and about a year later Heineken approached us. We developed an event series for Heineken Green Room. Our subsequent dealings with bigger clients like that has had a lot to do with having an agency background. After Heineken, we added Vitamin Water and a host of others. At the end we had to make the decision that a paper magazine just wasn’t financially viable. We talked to experts in the field that told us we were not going to have room to grow in that format. Especially if you want to be recognized as a national brand, a magazine isn’t the way to go. So I started focusing on the growth of the company itself. We parted ways with Tayyib’s old partner and for the next 3 years we worked on the Philly 360 initiative with Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation. We did the Vitamin Water Uncapped live series. We added Drexel to our roster of clients. We expanded Heineken Green Room to D.C. and then to New York.
OKP: How have you evolved as an entrepreneur since the beginning of your career?
TS: I looked at my time at Axis Music Group as kind of like college. And my time developing Two.One.Five and Little Giant at different phases of my career, was like graduate school. I would say the magazine was graduate school and the current phase is probably when I’ve learned the most and become a little more astute about partnerships, relationships, and personal brands. The things we invest in. How I devote my time. Now I’m a little more thoughtful and more selective about what I get involved in. Before I was a lot more accessible and just down for the cause. If I had a friend who wanted to be a rapper? Someone wanted to be a producer? I was kind of that person in the scene that would invest in you. Now, because we have an overhead and salaries and employees -- because I have business partners that I’m responsible to, I have to be much more prudent in the decisions I make.
OKP: Do you think that that’s a conclusion that you could only have gotten to as a result of lived experience?
TS: Absolutely. And to speak to the reasoning behind the need for the Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship, it’s amazing how many people come to me for advice. Over the course of the year. Whether they are in school, recently graduated from school, or somewhere in a career and suddenly realizing that isn’t what they want to do. I have a lot of empathy for people trying to figure out how to make in the 21st century economy. When I look back at my peer group from when I first started, most of those people were talent and I was in the unique position that I never desired to be talent. There’s so much that you learn in the process of trying to start a company or launch your first brand. Doing things that people don’t expect are in your wheelhouse or a part of your skill set. Recently I’ve been doing things that I could never have imagined myself doing years ago. And frankly, they are surprisingly easy. There are moments when I find myself now having conversations with my retrospective self and the things that I once thought were beyond my capabilities are funny to me now. I see so many people that might have talent or might have passion or might have a good idea or great skills, but figuring out how to combine those into some movements to get people on the path to fiscal responsibility or independence is something that has been a motivation because I don’t feel like I have enough peers.
OKP: How has Little Giant evolved and refined its mission?
MD: Throughout that period of time when we were building the brand I think we were ahead of the curve with respect to what’s going on now, which is kind of this cultural competency that a lot of brands are beginning to realize is necessary in order to talk to a world that is clearly changing very rapidly into a different majority. Everything that we did had such an inclusive platform and to us it wasn’t multicultural marketing, it was general marketing. When you really think about the demography of the city and the country, brands are still continuously trying to talk to a specifically African-American or specifically Asian or specifically Hispanic market. That’s an outdated paradigm. I think Tayyib and I have always had certain passions for that subject and in the course of our work, we naturally gravitated to the realm of cultural competency. That is where a lot of social justice issues are stemming from. As a result of that, I think we’ve somewhat inadvertently fallen into the social justice realm where we really care about social impact and focus more heavily on that. With Tayyib traveling and being exposed to various workshops and salons and conferences and discussions -- through my work and the things that I’ve been doing with our clients, I think we’ve naturally fallen into a space where the IHHE, our Creative Cities Lab, and some of the other concepts we are developing are concerned with ensuring that rapidly changing cities are not going to be rapidly shoving out the local communities at their foundations.
OKP: Does the IHHE curriculum pull from your experiences about things like best practices, pivoting to refine a business, or cut the fat in order to make room for growth?
MD: I think what’s great about what Tayyib and I are doing, is that IHHE is beautifully laid the foundation of what we have done with Little Giant Creative. I that think what’s worked best for us, however, is that we don’t posit ourselves as experts. One of the things that make Little Giant so great and dynamic is that since we’re such a small team our basic premise is solving problems. Not necessarily thinking that we know all of the answers, but solving problems however we can. Which means casting a wider net and talking to more people. Maybe getting information from people who know better than us, or just knowing that he and I can’t rest on our laurels or successes or failures, and that we always have to keep going. As much as our story is very much the story of IHHE, we’re working with specific curriculum developers and experts in and around the subject of entrepreneurialism. While we are 100% committed to working with them on what the curriculum is going to be — talking about proposition value, talking fiscal responsibility, talking about social impact — we also want to make sure that our story is only part of the narrative and that there ultimately are many more narratives to draw from.
OKP: How important is it to have avenues outside of academia or startup schools for entrepreneurship?
TS: Mostly everything I’ve ever done or learned was achieved through independent study, process, hands on experience or mentorship. One of the things that always blows my mind is how much the incubation and startup scene doesn’t see their own cultural bias and how much privilege they have. The tech scene is such an exclusionary, white, male space. I think it is really hard for people to get how much we’re not taking advantage of the collective social and intellectual capital of women, people of color -- people of color beyond just being black. Most of the tech scene that I see is white men who are 25. And on the venture capital side it is white men who are above 45. That level of arrogance and ignorance to believe that all of the good ideas that are going to make a transformative change for the future of the planet reside in those men, is an absurdity. Take into account how many avenues are blocked to women and people of color to have the same access to opportunity. For people of a certain socioeconomic class, your first round of starting a business is your friends and family. When you’re in the hood, friends and family is a different situation. Friends and family is debt. When you’re black and someone dies, you get bills. When you’re white and someone dies, you might get a house. You might have some inheritance or maybe a trust. I’m speaking in generalizations. Not everyone has that. But if you look at the perspective or the narrative of a lot of the people that are the faces of this new gig economy, they didn’t have to gig their way through college.
MD: I think that’s what is driving this program in a lot of ways. Someone from a university pointed out to me that academic institutions are the oldest institutions on earth. Regardless of what everyone talks about with the incredible prices of education, university and college endowments are the highest they’ve ever been. Enrollments are the highest they’ve ever been. So institutions and universities aren’t facing any types of problems and they aren’t going away anytime soon. However, I think that we have to take into account how quickly things are changing and how quickly that change has occurred within the last 50 years (as opposed to the last 250). With all of these things evolving around us, how do we not change the basic precepts of education? I think that if the basic precepts of education work for some people, they clearly are not working for everyone. As evidenced by the disconnect between the people who have access to education and the people that don’t. A lot of what we wanted to do with IHHE was at least move the needle to maybe create a bridge for that gap. There are so many reasons why people don’t succeed in academic institutions. Not the least of which, is the fact that many people can’t afford it or do not feel it is within their grasp. I think a lot of people within the academic institutions don’t necessarily feel like it speaks to them. Its not necessarily taught in a way that is contemporary. What we really want to do with IHHE is acknowledge that there are alternative ways of being successful in this world and there are alternative ways of learning. Putting things into the perspective of hip-hop or music or anecdotes or stories, it can make a really hard theory into something accessible. That’s the future and that’s the way that a lot of people from underserved and underrepresented communities are going to be able to go from here to there.
OKP: Do you think there’s a definite lack of mentorship in hip-hop?
TS: Without saying names, I think that there are a lot of entrepreneurs in the hip-hop space that are popular, but they give out misinformation. Someone will talk about themselves, but they don’t talk about their team. There are a lot of people that are known as these titans of the industry but they don’t show you that they have a guy behind them that is running their marketing company. That he does that job well. They don’t discuss all of the things, that have nothing to do with music production, that it takes to establish something and help it become an international brand. Subsequently, we spend too much time talking about personality of the one person out front and their individual experience. It is almost similar to something I read years ago about what they call the Uncle Tom’s Cabin narrative. In traditional African literature, the narrative is a collective story. It’s not about an individual, it is about a village -- a community. In America, the traditional African-American narrative is often one negro story. There’s one negro boy going down the river with a white boy. One instance of one individual success. I think that hip-hop, frankly, does do a poor job of reinvesting in community, reinvesting in mentorship and sharing knowledge. We learned the music industry from the previous music industry. Music never really had a template. People didn’t understand publishing. People didn’t know rights or royalty rates, but they knew how to ball out and drive nice cars. They knew how to make intellectual property but didn’t understand how to monetize intellectual property. There are generations of people who, both consciously and subconsciously, have exploited that ignorance. It is learned behavior.
MD: I don’t know that I could say that there is a lack of mentorship. I think that hip-hop culture and the entrepreneurialism within that stems from a place and from people that didn’t normally feel like they had mainstream access. People didn’t feel they had the bridges to get on the pathway to entrepreneurship or into certain careers, but the culture opened those doors for them and made space for those conversations. Very often, the new or alternative spaces that hip-hop inspired often came from a place of not having plenty. I think if you don’t have a lot, I think that helping others have more is a bit of a hard conversation to have. Given that, I don’t know if the conversation has been present all along. I do think that it has started to have a bigger footprint.
OKP: So are you interested in changing that dynamic across the industry? Similar to the each one teach one philosophy?
TS: I’m interested in doing whatever I can with my skill sets and my relationships to push the pendulum forward. Whether that’s creating a small ecosystem in Philadelphia and then scaling that to other communities or cities. Meegan and I have - whether its IHHE, our co-working space Pipeline or Little Giant - some overarching holistic mission. Though that could be hard to see from the outside. I’m not a rich man or a man of means, but I think I have a lot to offer and with that the goal is to figure out what we can do to elevate and change the conversation. That’s the biggest and most accessible goal that we can do here. Once we decided on this and did the research - looking at hip-hop programs at Penn and Duke and Harvard - I was surprised and almost insulted that none of them had ever looked at hip-hop from the business perspective. It was always from the artist’s perspective or looking at it from an archival standpoint. Its the same thing we’ve done with other genres of music. But not looking at the power, impact and influence of the culture from a business perspective is a mistake. You wouldn’t have SUV’s or certain model cars if people at street level hadn’t modified their vehicles and forced that industry to adapt. That’s directly related to hip-hop. Even film, television, and graphic arts or typeface. There’s so many people I see now that are considered high artists -- whether it’s KAWS or ESPO or Shepard Fairey. I’ve talked to those guys and if you ask who they look up to, its some black or Latino person in the hood who was doing work that inspired them to get into a creative field. I can’t think of one person that comes from that lineage that is held in high regard by museums, or high art institutions. I feel our success is in being able to crack the door and have Knight Foundation invest in the concept. That’s what got the concept to CNN and other business realms. Now if you look at recent history, things like Childish Gambino’s CD sales or the score of Luke Cage, everything Ava DuVernay is doing -- we’re in the midst of a cultural renaissance but I feel like no one can see it because of the amount of media bias that exists. So much of that would not exist without hip-hop. Its very black and white for me but I feel like I need to speak about it for a couple of years before people start to pay attention.
OKP: What are you most concerned with imparting to the students at IHHE?
TS: I think literacy, the power of collaboration, lifelong learning, the power of your personal brand, having a good work ethic, a good moral compass, and being civically and socially engaged in your community are important. There are so many different examples, even in recent history, where you have men of means that don’t really realize the negative behaviors that they are bestowing upon millions of people who see them publicly refuse to collaborate or honor one another. A lot of those negative learned behaviors can be undone by providing a better example.
OKP: What are you most excited about and what are you looking forward to?
TS: That we have an almost equal split between men and women. Also, that our class is made up of people who have recognized needs in their respective communities and have a desire to service them. We’re in the platform economy; Google is a platform, Airbnb is a platform, Lyft is a platform. As the program evolves, I would like to find strategic partners that would enable us to scale to other cities. Mainly Detroit and Miami. On a larger scale, figuring out how we can scale the program to become an international platform and license the curriculum to schools and institutions that have the desire to teach people alternative or experiential learning.
MD: Since we heard the announcement that we won the Knight Cities grant -- from then to now, I can’t believe how quickly time has passed. I hate to sound really trite about it, but it feels as if we’ve been planning this for a long time. To see the actualization of something that for so long was planning and conversation is sort of surreal. I also have to say that I’m so excited that we have this cohort of 24 young men and women. I was in on the interviews, I was reading all of their applications, and I feel like I’ve gotten to know them on paper and in person. I feel that they are a tremendous reflection of what we’re talking about. That there is brilliance and there’s smart thinking in the far corners of this country and these cities. Its really lovely to see that there might be this kind of way to have a lot of these men and women who have these hopes and these dreams and these ideas and brilliant concepts, who up until they heard about IHHE were maybe feeling a little stymied — maybe not knowing where to go or what to do or who to talk to — I think the fact that we can bridge that is the most exciting part. I think this cohort will work. If we can get it to happen again and again and maybe expand, I think it’ll be a really exciting way to help people who feel a bit marginalized begin to feel empowered.
OKP: Should entrepreneurship be another element of hip-hop culture?
TS: I think its always been there in the culture but we haven’t defined it. Too often I think we’re looking for props and not profits. Most people, whether they admit it to themselves or not, are looking for props. They will bring their crew, they will bring down their management company, they will bring down their label for more props -- but maybe will turn down a more fruitful opportunity or offer if it takes a little more due diligence. If we can get down to the brass tacks of what is really improving the community versus what benefits someone individually, that will be a huge step. Music, in general, is a young person’s game. Having things that you can transition to and still use all of your skills and what you’ve learned from the culture to affect other things -- business, economy, development -- is ideal. I think that should be the new paradigm of hip-hop. Get in, get all your creative juices out, mature, then take that into politics, or technology, or into healthcare.
OKP: Is the ability to provide this kind of forum empowering to you all at Little Giant?
MD: I think we feel empowered that people liked the idea enough at Knight to take a leap of faith and give us the grant. I think that makes us feel that this whole concept and message is starting to be a bit more on the cusp. I just like the fact that people are thinking this way and that Tayyib and I are not alone when we think about how important this is. When we know that cities are changing and we know that 60-70% of the population will be living in cities in the next several years, how do we get underrepresented members of the community to feel like they are a part of the professional ecosystem of their city or to feel like they are not going to be pushed out of someplace they have been living their entire life? It is really nice to know that other people are on the same page, we are creating around that, and we are moving together toward some very necessary and exciting conversation.
