film-producer
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Bobby Balachandran and the business of unfinished work
He built Exterro around the work that falls between departments. Then Bobby Balachandran entered Tamil cinema, carrying a familiar set of questions about who does what, what happens next, and whether everyone gets paid.
Kyle Kuhns and the value of one day off
Before XX Artists had 125 people and a place inside Media.Monks, Kyle Kuhns negotiated a day a week to build his own business. His path from artist management to social marketing still runs through the same question: how do you make room for someone else’s talent?
Joshua Wexler wants you inside the story
The creator of LEGO’s Clutch Powers became the Chief Executive of Fun at Pure Imagination Studios. His next chapter connects the make-believe worlds of entertainment with the very practical business of learning in Kansas.
Whitney Williams and the Art of Getting People in the Same Room
Before Whitney Williams advised philanthropists or ran for governor, she persuaded a university to offer a class. Her career has kept returning to that same question: who needs to be brought together to make something happen?
Branden Chambers and the second life of a good idea
From underwater fairy tales to Cheech & Chong, Branden Chambers learned to give familiar material another audience. At The Chambers Group, he brings that production background to the family marketing business he runs with his brother Eric.
David Ellison and the price of the next act
He began with an airplane and a part in a movie. Two decades later, David Ellison leads the company above Paramount and Warner Bros., with a much larger audience waiting to see what happens next.
Alaa Fadan and the audience hiding in plain sight
Before Telfaz11 made films for Netflix and Saudi cinemas, Alaa Fadan saw gifted people treating their best work as a hobby. He helped build a company where that work could become a living.
Angga Dwimas Sasongko and the story that stayed open
A coffee-shop set became a real café. For Angga Dwimas Sasongko, it was an early clue that a film could have a life beyond the cinema - and that Visinema could grow beyond its founder.
Justine LaViolette and the Night That Refused to End
A failed date introduced a filmmaker to her future business partner. Six years, several refusals and one astonishing opening-night queue later, Justine LaViolette had helped turn a familiar queer daydream into a permanent Brooklyn address.
Russell Hadaya Knows Where the Story Lives
From a Boston-set internship to the streets of Los Angeles, Russell Hadaya built a career finding the real places where fiction can happen - then used the same practical patience to help a young writer find his voice.
Oleg Shardin Put a Whiteboard on the Internet. Then He Went Looking for a Story.
Before remote work made the digital canvas feel inevitable, Shardin helped build one from a practical annoyance in Perm. His second act trades sticky notes for screenplays, while keeping the same fascination with how people understand one another.
Mandy Teefey Has Always Bet on the Story Everyone Else Left by the Curb
Before she became Wondermind’s co-founder and CEO, Mandy Teefey learned production from the floor up, turned an abandoned-couch family joke into a company name, and carried one young-adult novel through years of Hollywood limbo. Her career is a study in stubborn attention - and what it costs when conviction meets the operating realities of a startup.
Adrienne Becker
Adrienne Becker is the CEO and co-founder of Level Forward, the public-benefit entertainment studio she launched in 2018 with filmmaker Abigail Disney. From a Los Angeles base, she finances and produces films and stage work that pair compelling stories with real-world advocacy - a slate that has earned a combined 37 Tony nominations (Jagged Little Pill, Oklahoma!, Slave Play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Suffs) and Oscar-recognized films (The Assistant, Red White and Blue). A former CEO of DailyCandy and SVP at Nielsen and IAC who got her start on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Becker treats entertainment as a tool for economic and cultural change.
Sam Pressman
Sam Pressman is the CEO of Pressman Film, the storied independent studio his father Edward R. Pressman founded in 1969 and that backed American Psycho, Wall Street, Badlands and The Crow. A Stanford Film & Media Studies graduate who grew up on his father's sets, Sam took the helm after Ed's death in 2023 and is betting that independent cinema's next chapter runs on radical filmmakers, crowd-sourced financing, virtual reality and AI - while keeping his father's motto, 'every film is a miracle,' close.
William Fay
William Fay is the CEO of Steric, a Culver City beverage-technology company that uses electromagnetic fields to fine-tune the flavor, aroma and mouthfeel of wine and spirits at the molecular level without adding or removing anything. Before pouring himself into distilling, Fay spent three decades as a top Hollywood producer, co-founding Legendary Entertainment and executive-producing blockbusters including Independence Day, The Patriot, 300, Superman Returns, The Hangover and The Town. He brought that storyteller's instinct to a refrigerator-sized machine that can rescue a flawed batch of whiskey in a single pass, winning the 2023 DISCUS Innovation Showcase and closing a $3.5M seed round in October 2025.
Will Smith
Will Smith is a Philadelphia-born actor, rapper, and producer who built a $350 million empire spanning music, film, television, and digital media. With over $10 billion in worldwide box office receipts, four Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award for Best Actor (King Richard, 2021), he is one of the most commercially successful entertainers in history. Known as 'The Fresh Prince,' Smith transitioned from teenage rap star to global movie icon before a 2022 Oscars incident with Chris Rock triggered a career reckoning - one he has been navigating with characteristic resilience through his 2025 album comeback, a National Geographic travel series, and an upcoming I Am Legend sequel.
Ashlee Vance
Ashlee Vance is a South Africa-born, Texas-raised journalist, author, and documentary producer who spent 14 years at Bloomberg Businessweek before launching Core Memory in January 2025 - an independent sci-tech media company. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books including the definitive pre-Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, producer of HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die, and creator of Bloomberg's most-watched video series Hello World. In 2025 he is writing a forthcoming book on OpenAI and Sam Altman with exclusive access, and already sold the film rights.
Wayne Chang
Wayne Chang is a Taiwanese-American serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and technologist who co-founded Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter for ~$260M, then sold to Google as Fabric), co-founded Digits (AI-powered fintech for SMBs), and is currently building Reasoner, a neurosymbolic AI company claiming to outperform OpenAI's o1 models. Named one of Forbes' Top 50 Angel Investors with 80+ investments and 31+ exits generating over $150 billion in combined value, Chang also holds the coveted @wayne Twitter handle, holds 20+ patents, won an Emmy for producing Chasing Coral, and helped launch Dropbox by recruiting co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.