Mobile and full-screen renderings for soprano Alexandra Smither’s Stagetime domain. Photo: Jennie Moser
(Santa Fe, NM) - In August, I came across an opera-singing friend on Instagram who was lauding a new platform called Stagetime, which she was proudly beta-testing prior to its public launch. Directed at opera singers, companies, agents and management firms, my initial assessment was a beautifully designed business ecosphere for opera industry individuals and entities (it’s actually more, but hold that thought). I also knew of Stagetime’s founder Jennie Moser and her graphic and website design achievements across opera. It took us a little while to connect, but when we did so last month, our chat was a delight. As hoped, Jennie was open to sharing her experience as the female founder of a VC-funded startup in the opera space. If contemplating your own startup or already on the entrepreneurial path, read on for insights and takeaways from an opera innovator forging her own path. JM
By Jennie Moser
My year at the intersection of tech startups and classical music has been exciting and strange. When I looked around for other female founders in the art, technology, and venture capital space, my pool of peers was pretty much nonexistent, which meant that the frame of reference when I walked into a room to pitch lent me no support. No investor looks at me and thinks, “ah yes, we saw an excellent financial return last time we invested in a young woman with a background and market of classical music. This pitch is going to be great.” Don’t get me wrong — they don’t want me to fail either, but imagine giving someone your grocery list and then realizing that they don’t even know what a grocery store is. I have about 30 seconds to make sure that instead of an ill-informed tech wannabe with music degrees and subpar Excel skills, I come across as an articulate, multi-disciplinary professional whose diverse background makes my case stronger, not weaker.
My case - the case for Stagetime - was not born on a white-board in an MBA classroom. It came through the repetition of helping artists and arts organizations become digital by building their websites (which I’ve now done 126 times), a process that takes me and my team around 100 hours and costs our clients thousands of dollars, while the rest of the world has long been connected via LinkedIn at a nominal cost.
When we place the burden of large-scale digital problem solving on individual artists and regional arts organizations, we set the financial barrier to entry damningly high. When we cut artists and the arts out of the conversation about technology and data, a disservice is done to everyone.
Innovation is creative at its core, and I know that my tech and entrepreneurial colleagues would only benefit from having creative minds contributing to the future of the technology that is shaping reality before our eyes. Similarly, I see firsthand how my artist colleagues have more time to hone and distribute their craft when technology has the ability to make administrative tasks quicker and easier. Automation and digitization are not the enemy here — they free up invaluable resources, time, and labor, so that the arts can focus on, well, the arts.
When the arts are reliant upon manual, in-person processes to build bridges from the arts to the rest of the world, and vice versa, we create an insular vacuum. Our primary task is to find a digital home that shows us at our professional best as individuals, so that we can spend more of our time leveraging that technology to establish professional relationships that become symbiotically beneficial — first within our own industry, but ultimately, with the rest of the digital, professional world, which determines the technology and consumer-driven products that increasingly shape our global future.
So, how do creatives join the conversation?
“Siri, what is ‘venture capital?’”
“Alexa, what is 0.67% of 1.5 million?”
“Google, can you teach me how to sing?”
One of these questions is not like the other. In a world where data is queen, I felt alienated walking into meetings heavy on tech lexicon and MBA slang. I’ve watched the Khan Academy videos on venture capital a truly embarrassing number of times, I’ve had to text advisors at 11pm to ask how a pitch deck is different from a super fancy powerpoint presentation (spoiler alert: it’s not), and my social media confidence plummets when I realize I should share a recent pitch competition win on LinkedIn because, well, I don’t really know how to use LinkedIn.
If we’ve been on a Zoom call in the past year, you can pretty much guarantee my right hand was out of frame writing down words I’d need to look up later. “They didn’t teach us this in music school,” I say, followed by a smile. This happens more than I’d like, but it tends to remind people that I’m not ill-prepared or naive — I’m just hyper-trained in something totally different.
More importantly, all of those things I just mentioned are attainable via Google, textbook, calculator, or Khan Academy video. Numbers and jargon are automatable, replicable, search engine optimize-able. The way that I learned to sing isn’t. The creative side of my brain can’t be replaced by Google.
Securing venture capital is tricky enough and my particular profile as a female classical musician made my job even harder. After our first meeting, one investor texted a mutual colleague “I think the opera girl might be onto something.” I had to find ways to go from “opera girl” to “potential colleague,” so I spent a lot of time figuring out how to equate our experiences (we can talk about the 'girl' part of this in another article).
The first few months of my path to investment were spent endlessly explaining the music industry and gig economy to people who were “familiar” with something called “the arts.” In this context, I’ll define “the arts” as the subconscious action of reducing creative-driven careers that don’t fit a typical corporate structure into a lump sum commodity containing vague job titles, zany creatives, big personalities, and bohemians waiting to be “discovered”. I maintain that if you go to music school to become mainstream famous, you should perhaps try another line of work.
“I remind the venture capitalists in the room that although I have degrees from the same institutions as they do, my career has never appeared in their LinkedIn feed. ”
Photo: FAYMOUS Studios / Fay Fox
My job was to become really good at painting a different picture for investors. My business pitch was mostly centered around my ability to provide context and draw parallels to the professional experiences of the investors in the room. “The arts” started to take the shape of opera and ballet companies with administrative and production staff. They had roles, titles, and pedigree just as structured as that of the investors in the room. It shifted from nameless singer/songwriters and piano lessons for their kids to a realization that, yes, there are indeed buildings where Chief Financial Officers and principal violinists do their work under the same roof, for the same organization. They were surprised to learn that a set designer was not a high school woodshop fanatic who jumped into the professional trade at 18, but someone with an MFA in Set Design from Yale.
That’s when the fun part starts. I remind the venture capitalists in the room that although I have degrees from the same institutions as they do, my career has never appeared in their LinkedIn feed. I remind them that although we’ve been discussing my pedigree and career for the better part of the hour, they still don’t know what I sound like - and how would they be able to glean that from my LinkedIn? Sure, I have a website, but how would they ever come across me in a professional context? They aren’t going home and stumbling across my website after some late night just-for-fun pre-professional opera singer Googling, I can promise you that. Pain points become apparent, and I go from “opera girl” to “colleague” with education and experience in an industry that is different than theirs, but that still has value.
Our investments thus far have come from Elevate Ventures and the IU Angel Network who, once they had relatable insight into the arts industry, saw the value in investing in the arts via Stagetime. I win pitch competitions because Stagetime meets the requirements for technology, business model, market size, and financial projections, sure, but it’s also just...fun, and it looks good. The arts excite people. Whether it’s through their home city opera house or their favorite Netflix show, every one of my investors has a relationship to the product. Once they realize that, they start to feel an attachment to Stagetime, an emotional investment — and they like that. More than the capital, I’m excited that Stagetime has the resource of these investors’ experience in building viable, successful technology products. These are insights that are invaluable to the performing arts ecosystem, as the digital world is one where we have some undeniable catching up to do.
The best part about my job is that I don’t have to choose between the structure that makes a business successful and the subjective elements like attractive design and beautiful media — Stagetime is viable because both of those seemingly dichotomous things strengthen the product from opposite ends of the spectrum. I wouldn’t give up my music degrees or my financial models for anything. In fact, I’m really proud to have both sitting on my desk right now.
Learn more about Stagetime on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Visit stagetimearts.com