I guess I’ve always had somewhat of an entrepreneurial spirit. (Laughter). Jay and I got into the business while we were students at the University of Georgia. I guess we were somewhat Mavericks in that we, the two of us and our other partner Alfred Ponder, we formed a production company, a promotion company. We started throwing parties in college, which I don’t think is necessarily all that revolutionary, but while we were students we started booking national concerts – started booking concerts with national acts. We booked Cyprus Hill for their first gig in Atlanta while we were still college students. And so we ended up doing shows with Cyprus Hill, 2Pac, Brand Nubian, Digable Planets, and we did all these things while we were in college and the year after college. So we were relatively young and it was also, I think it was an interesting time in hip hop because we were able to book these acts because nobody else would do it. Everybody else was scared, which gave us kind of a, the ability to get into the market place. And so I just, I did that, and Jay ended up going to law school, kinda cause one of us had to go to law school. (Laughter).

So Jay went to law school. I was doing street promotions and I was DJing. In fact, that was another thing too. I started DJing not because I wanted to be a DJ so much, but because we got tired of paying a DJ at our parties. So, we were like, “Somebody’s gotta – one of us has to learn how to DJ,” so that ended up being me, and so from there it just, it grew. And I didn’t actually have a job, like a real job, until five years after college. I was DJing, I was doing street promotion and independent marketing, and then my first job was doing A and R at Relativity. They hired me and I – the first records I A and R’rd were Three 6 Mafia, and so I did their first records with Relativity, and Project Pat, and Gangster Boo, and The Tear Da Club Up Thugs, and then went on to – and I also put the marketing plans together for them and was involved at that. And moved to New York and helped do marketing for Relativity and the other acts. Then I worked at Red Distribution and – for a short period of time, and was one of the first employees of a division of Red called Red Urban Music Marketing, which looked to bring in small urban labels that really needed a little bit more information and more guidance in how to navigate through a system like Red, which is a big distribution system, especially for a small company of maybe two people who don’t have that kind of experience, which also kind of led me to say, “You know what? There’s something here.” That was one of the areas where I – one of the times when I started thinking, “You know what? There’s a need for something like this, and a need for consultants to help these small companies.”

Then, an exciting thing, MC Search from 3rd Bass, he and I became partners and we did a deal at Warlock Records, and we put out a bunch of records through Warlock, which was really exciting. And we had records that sold, you know, 100 copies, and then records that sold 100,000 copies. And that was a really great hands on experience in everything from creating a record, you know, in the studio, you know, signing the contracts, you know, reading through the agreements, going through deal points, going into the studio, recording the records, developing the marketing plans, helping put the co-op plans together, you know, involved in how much are we gonna manufacture. I mean, you know, everything. You know, radio promotions and so forth, you know, all the way through the end. And so that experience, coupled with what I had at Relativity, and it read – along the way I was just like developing and putting together all the information that you need as a whole to run a record company.

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