Marc Eckō Built A Creative Empire, Almost Lost It All, + Came Out On Top

you know I got the Henry chiffon Martha Cooper at Subway art book people have got nicknames the name is a part of the lore I just started signing things as Echo that's who I was [Music] in 1987 a 15 year old high schooler with an airbrush in Lakewood New Jersey had an idea Marc Echo combined his love for graffiti culture with a talent for illustration and laid the foundation for a multi-faceted decade spanning creative Empire despite many patches of turbulence when it all could have come crashing down and a couple times it even did over the course of his 30-year career Echo built a half billion dollar clothing line a million unit selling video game and a generation defining Media Company all while pursuing a quiet but consistent commitment to philanthropy that he's turned into his third Act and it all started with one idea [Music] thank you foreign how did your parents professional life inform your career Ambitions my mother uh studied to be a nurse and then she didn't practice for that long because she started having the the family and then my dad practiced Pharmacy he graduated from Rutgers College of Pharmacy where I ended up going to school I've remembered vividly my parents being very entrepreneurial even even my mom being the the sort of Homemaker she always had an entrepreneurial flourish and then my dad uh watched my mom go out and get her real estate license in the 80s and I guess he got some fomo or or that created validation for him to try his hand at it being in a house where both the parents were had a side hustle and like that was very much a part of the conversation in the house the relationship with their work uh our reverence for that the impact it had on our extracurriculars I definitely think that that had a profound impact how did Growing Up in Lakewood New Jersey frame your sort of uh understanding of culture I was very lucky to grow up there there was this sort of Tale of Two Cities thing that happened in Lakewood everything uh west of Route 9 was uh largely uh middle class the East lower part poor but then there was also this big contingency of like labovitch or Jewish folks surrounded by Suburbia right and Hip-Hop culture was really emerging and I felt it in my town of Lakewood because it was so diverse and as seventh grader sixth grade or fifth grade or whatever you're just kids you know you're just starting to create your identity I stood out because of my Affinity for art and illustration so I very much attached to that I would say my biggest earliest supporter of my parents they made a fuss of my love of Art and illustration hung stuff on the wall did that uh validating that is so important to adolescents you are getting interested in illustration and graffiti and airbrushing and emulating guys like shirt Kings and fate and these guys how are you even getting exposed to the work that they're doing I think it's a universal story your adolescent you're trying to fit in to your tribe you're finding the boundaries of your tribe you're defining who they are and you are sharing your interests being at a friend's house and there's like black Beat magazine and you're scrolling through the pages and you see LL wearing an airbrush thing you know when you go to the mall and you'd end up at the bookstore with my dad and like that Henry chiffon Martha Cooper book and finding that that book and being like you know this music played you know all the colors Spilled Out in my face and you connect it you go visit family in Queens or I go to Trenton then you see the elevated trains and you'd see it and you're like oh it starts start to realize your place in the space speaking of finding your identity around the same time is when you arrive upon your name and yeah there's nothing I think more Central or core to a person's identity than their name how did you land upon Echo and and what did that mean to you in that moment it was actually given to me as a nickname by my mother I have a twin sister Marcy m-a-r-c-i-m-a-r-c she's five minutes older than me my mother did not know she was carrying twins until she bared us back in 72 when I was born they didn't have all the same tests or whatever and they missed that one but you look back at the photos you're like how could you missed it my mother was like huge you know so who missed that my mother would go to the doctor and say why do I feel kicking in my breast and in the lower portion of my belly how is the baby able to do that oh it's just an echo in the fluids it's just an echo in the fluids don't worry and then the Echo and the fluids was me and so that was like a nickname and then um it served useful you know I got the Henry chiffon Martin the Cooper Subway art book people have got nicknames like the name is a part of the lore it's like the foundation story right for the you know the superhero so I started using it I just started signing things as Echo like I didn't realize how meaningful it was going to be until icon started the business I've marketed this Echo airbrushing you know and I would that's who I was foreign how old were you when you launched the airbrushing business I started formally airbrushing in eighth grade I got my air compressor and airbrush and also another kind of crazy thing about Lakewood the ultimate and singular magazine of the industry is airbrush action magazine published in Lakewood New Jersey so what are the odds of that come the end of freshman year I was selling T-shirts for fundraisers like for the school like in the school I would say by the time I was a senior like going into that summer the word of mouth had grown so much I had such a sort of avid clientele I probably was I don't know making you know at least a couple Grand like on a good week you know so some droughts because I was going to when I went to Rutgers and I started school I would just be like I can't work right now I can't take I can't say yes to any work but it was always like this like you know oh man is that calling and like the business was there [Music] foreign first business card probably ninth grade stuff you know this is like super fade influences yeah very short Kings this is was when I was all happening you know this was like 88. you know we were all a part of this sort of energy right and you're in your little domain and you're just making stuff I look back at this and I think it was the most important part of my career like in terms of informing the path that I was gonna carve out for myself and pretty much has been my life's path you're making thousands of dollars in the late 80s as a high school senior but you still end up going to a pharmaceutical school yes what was holding you back from just jumping in there's a lot of things different today I think what's maybe universally not different is that sort of sense however real or imagined um following in a parent's footstep or doing kind of quote the right thing from an academic point of view so my dad who ironically was right in front of me wasn't even practicing Pharmacy by the time I graduated high school but he went to Rutgers College of Pharmacy so I just thought like oh this is kind of check a box like I'll make my parents proud you go and then you continue to work on the airbrushing on the side yeah and I know you you know you have a moment with red alert that's very affirming to you and I think like a real point of inflection oh yeah sort of ambition I go to Rutgers my identity it starts to kind of cure like glue or paint drying you know like okay you're different than these other kids that was a interesting period because I found myself sort of like not fitting in I couldn't find a tribe and I had my little friend of Misfit nerds and we and it was a reflection of us like we were all a very mixed group we were kind of the the kids that were like well we're into all these things you know like you could be into the Cure and Into A Tribe Called Quest right like it's okay right it's not that deep right so long story short Thursday you know Friday nights what do you do what's the ritual you put on the radio get the cassette ready that'd be the kid in the room drawing by himself listen to Red Alert and red alert would be shouting people out and I just was curious like how do I get a shout out it was really that simple it was really that simple it was like I want a shout out I would bomb Red Alert with faxes I'd go to the to you know the Kinkos and I would just draw stuff I'd look at the liner notes of the records to find like where the street address was for packages how much is mail [ __ ] and I would just like just you know hit them with stuff until you know one day I'm sitting there on a Friday night I'm taping he's like yo shout out to my man Echo I just got this like ill flyer or whatever and he's got his event going on and thanks for the you know the custom airbrush and the next day all my friends heard it what was the battery that that put in your bag and how did that change oh my gosh it was like such a it went from like role-playing right like you're you're faking it till you make it like and then suddenly there was this sort of moment of validation it was like oh [ __ ] like who else on this campus is getting Shout Out by Red Alert that's uh I started getting like that kind of level of confidence I would say my role model is a composite of all the people that have helped me overcome my fear in whatever little ways or big ways that they have I think role modeling putting that on One Singular person it's like an energy it's like a force right so I extract it from a lot of folks that have been in my life I know that as the idea of echo as a clothing company starts to come into Focus you pitch both Michael Bivens and Spike Lee yeah on this and for whatever reason it doesn't seem to work out and then you end up finding a partner in a very unlikely place yes in an Orthodox Jewish gentleman named Seth gersberg yeah so I guess tell me a little bit about that a the process of pitching and being rejected and then how you found Seth first of all the pitches it wasn't like Spike was in the room on that pitch and what's interesting is when you go in cold even to Michael Bivens you know and I remember his aunt ran his Philly office and I had a good rapport with her and my good friend who's also from Lakewood named calibrock um who was a singer and when I did the swag bomb for Michael for Biv we put a cassette of Kali into that jacket right that was another moment of sort of affirmation and you start to get this sort of level of uh Swagger uh confidence delusion okay where I show up in Philadelphia to bid's office he doesn't know I'm about to pitch him he just thinks I'm there with Khali and I just bum rush him with a pitch so it I look back at that and I I thought I talk about in my book as if it was like this oh I pitched and I got I don't even know that they knew I was pitching but in my mind okay in my mind it was real okay and in my mind it was a no so I'm shooting blanks right swing and Miss swing and Miss swinging a miss one of my good high school friends who was a year younger than me is a guy named Perry landisberg he says oh I got this guy man he's kind of crazy I don't know man he's just like you he's entrepreneurial and he's at school I think he's about to leave school just like you are and his name is Seth and you should meet him but here was the beginning of my career and it was kind of felt like well College the implications leaving College these are Big like what he was willing to do and he knew investors that had you know hundreds of thousands of dollars I remember him coming to me with like a bag of cash like the first bag of cash to fund uh our second t-shirt or the first t-shirt I'd printed on my own at a local screen printer had like the the red tag of echo unlimited and the character on the back with his foot up and that's what I was like pushing is like my logo and but I wanted to print the multi-color thing I couldn't afford to do it from all my artwork and Seth was like uh I'll be your partner I had questions he had an answer and when he didn't have an answer he had the sort of brash belief in himself and in me just like we'll figure it out let's just do it these were like early t-shirts this was the one yeah this was called powerful potion this one I didn't really understand like the physics of like Fabric and like you know how your shoulder is like this fabric is falling right here so what I would do to compensate I would just draw faces in where the folds were and it became like a thing but it was actually you know my my weakness was my differentiator you start with these t-shirts that are essentially mining your sketchbooks yeah with graphics I'm curious because this is like 9192 what were the brands that you were looking at as a blueprint Carl can I was coming up cross colors was popping you know I would read The Source magazine you know I remember reading about Russell is going to launch a clothing company and there was an emergent thing happening at what point do you start contemplating what the brand of echo unlimited means and and what that sort of relationship with the consumer is about I think I I understood the convergence thing early on I couldn't articulate it and I was very intimidated I was often ridiculed by my peers for the point of view that I had on the brand because there was a certain Orthodoxy happening within emerging streetwear right I remember being at a trade show and all of my near peers and not so near peers there were bigger commercial Brands started encroaching a little bit on the aesthetic of what I was doing and what some of my near peers were doing I'm walking that trade show and I'm looking at all the brands that I admire there's a Ralph Lauren booth there and there's a giant Polo horse there's a Lacoste alligator there's the Timberland tree and I realize I go back into our little section or little area of this trade show floor and everybody's kind of shooting from the same angle right where everyone's just doing word marks I'm like that seems like a missed opportunity like what would my logo be [Music] you know I need a logo I need a mascot well Ralph could do it I could do it I didn't want to just be like a streetwear brand it never like occurred to me like that was the ceiling it was always like I want to be like Timberland big I want to be like Tommy Hilfiger big or Polo big in the coming years Echo unlimited would achieve its Founders wildest Ambitions of competing with Brands like Hilfiger and Polo ultimately setting the stage for Mark to leverage this success into forays and gaming and Publishing but misaligned visions and organizational overreach would collide with the Great Recession and in Peril everything he had spent the last two decades building hmm we've talked a lot about the importance of identity and a of brand fairly early on but after you've really done a lot of the legwork to establish the brand you get hit with a cease and desist around the name Echo yeah and you're forced to change it how do you feel about what that forced you and the brand to do funny enough in retrospect like the things that are your struggles can be your strengths and in this case that struggle which at the time felt like persecution or something that was unjustly put on me was actually an exercise in good hygiene exercise and better differentiating the brand it allowed me to um bolster the strength of the Ecko Mark okay because the unique spelling make getting the URLs easier there is a level of art and craft in doing business how people actually orchestrate the complexities of a business to do things and create new models and expand in ways that you you didn't contemplate I think the most important idea I've ever had wasn't exactly an idea but it was a philosophy of learning to love the problem and not love the idea [Music] the hard Goods business can be incredibly brutal in so much as you get these orders and then you have to put up capital in order to create the goods and then fulfill them and I know that in that period Echo went through a lot of really challenging Financial moments yeah get two million dollars worth of orders which is a moment you talk about in your book literally crying on the phone with your mom yeah yeah and you very very quickly realize that the difference between getting two million dollars worth of orders and then fulfilling two million dollars worth of orders and maintaining even a hair of margin are completely different things tell me a little bit about what was that realization like and then how did that inform how you guys move forward in that moment of like hanging up the phone I can't believe we got two million dollars in paper that was so real and it's I tell young people today like whether let's say fundraising or they're starting a business and like they think like okay they closed that round of funding they think they like they've achieved it's like yeah you haven't even started it's getting into relationship with the problems like the idea of echo unlimited the idea of the Rhino that was sort of an intention Center but then there's the problem of having to actually make it real and you have to love the problem as much as you love the idea I know that you guys had do some fairly extraordinary and somewhat ethically dubious things in order to you know make payments be delayed or you know borrow credit cards from employees and stuff like that oh it's brutal yeah I mean it makes for a funny anecdote you know in a in a sort of midlife crisis book about you know putting your spit on your thumbnail rubbing over the barcode of the check which conveniently obscures the number so that when the check gets run and processed at the at the bank it's gonna it's gonna slow the the the the payments down by a few days because it had to be manually done now today I don't think that's the case anymore with the direct to digital uh depositing but yeah we would do things like that and we were upside down this was a voyage of tremendous um self sacrifice uh mental health physical well-being Financial uh sacrifice relational sacrifice ethical sacrifice a lot of things you do that like you look back on now I look back on with age and I'm like I don't know that I would operate that way how did you manage that emotionally as someone who I know is sensitive and who is an artist and cares deeply both about the brand and also about the team that you're managing you asked a question before about when did you get to know that you had a brand is like when you start to be able to lend the IP you should take a loan against your own IP I remember oftentimes in boldly like taking massive lines of credit to fund so what were the assets that I had I had inventory that maybe had a long shelf life like basic core items like a pledge of that so if I went upside down the bank takes that I could pledge the IP the trademarks and then they were getting high every season more and more High valued right but it was crazy because we were more and more overextending ourselves right to go from that sort of role-playing make believe to the real that space takes a tremendous amount of um cash and I was just naive and stupid like in retrospect I should have been more patient you know having the sales volume the explosive sort of perception that the brand is in this great state but then in reality that you're upside down I've learned that you tend to make your same mistakes twice I learned that mistakes are a stubborn thing and that learning is a stubborn process and you got to have a growth mindset and give yourself Grace because you're probably going to do the first or second cousin of that mistake but as long as you're learning you're good foreign starts to reach some ubiquity in the marketplace in around the turn of the century yeah you become very interested in two Pursuits outside of just apparel video games yeah and Publishing I'd say like in 1999 to 2000 I start to more conscientiously be ready to Market myself we renamed the company Mark Echo Enterprises and so the gaming became a part of that and you guys had the the all Echo team yeah like an all-eco team in Madden I forget even the year it was but it was [ __ ] awesome it had like be real and Noriega and all the dala yep rest in peace Dave and I remember I was with Fat Joe I remember him saying to me yo Echo you win Platinum with the Madden [ __ ] you know that right you know I was just young and ambitious and you don't say well I'm pioneering but like you you're you're effectively a part of a a cohort that is in fact doing things for the first time and that was a very special place to be and I'm proud of I'm proud that the echo brand did a lot of Firsts from there you then go to making your own game yes and getting up where you play a graffiti writer yeah and you gamified the competitive sport of graffiti two nearly a million yeah unit sales which is pretty remarkable yeah it's crazy you know what was that process like and what was it like ultimately to have this game in stores with your name I didn't want to be boxed in and I felt like if Ralph was building a Lifestyle brand and World building if he could do Furniture I could do video games that was like my logic if Ralph could do tufted leather couches I could do video games and I was the beneficiary of being there early that was a luck he talked about wanting to do things that Ralph had not been able to do and one of those is to create a magazine successfully it came out of okay the role playing it was just RPG I want to build a fashion house so when I would show up at details magazine or GQ and they'd bring the the publisher they rarely brought the editor right they rarely and when they did the editor was kind of like okay I'm here for like the the meeting for like the ads like hopefully get the ads and I'll be like well are you gonna place my product in the editorial and it was always kind of a struggle right and it wasn't alone it wasn't unique to me my peers you know fat Farm triple five um eventually Sean John Rocawear all these guys like with the kind of like the the traditional fashion media kind of rolled their eyes at us they thought we were corny they thought it was just a trend they thought it was actually ugly Urban apparel was like code for that's like stuff that like black people or poor people wear right or like white trash or something you know so there was this sort of classism thing that I was encountered with when I would go place my media buying that informed my sort of Revenge fantasy to say well [ __ ] them I'm gonna create my own magazine we're gonna build the template how this cohort this sort of cat this band of Misfits sees themselves because we see ourselves as beautiful and we see ourselves as creative and we see ourselves as luxurious what are the qualities about yourself that you hold on to the most tightly I think you try to hold on to your sense of authorship sense of being fruitful I think it's really really important that you feel like you're being generative so you launched the magazine with its original team yes and fairly shortly thereafter you end up pivoting and adding Rich Antonello and myself both of us came into with a bit of a pedigree but Rich was coming from the Nat Geo Adventure World and I was coming from the hip-hop world but I was a child at the time 25. what gave you guys the confidence to put this part of your business in the hands of us we were moving all the business into New York right that was an exciting sort of re-energizing moment for complex You Know Rich came from Nat Geo but he was a New York Kid From Brooklyn that like grew up with hip-hop you know I wanted I was making a video game you guys were building complex um it was super exciting he also at that point are really diversifying the portfolio oh yeah Echo Red you have G Unit you have averettes Zoo York yeah I'm curious for you you know you go from essentially you know being in the driver's seat driving stick to now you are sort of in the way back of a limo yeah what was that like emotionally it's hard was it gratifying still probably the least professionally gratifying period because you realize that like you don't have all the controls which is a necessary reality like because even when you do have the controls you don't have all the controls I was being tasked to sort of put myself out there at once but the level of depth of my touch was becoming increasingly lighter all right so there was a dissonance there right as a crater there was a dullness during that period there were a couple years of a dullness what exactly happened in that 2007 to 2009 period that the business jumped off the rails oh there were so many things that happened I think the most catalytic thing was the financial markets crashing if you remember that was when we I was spinning complex off and starting to bring in investors because complex at the time was wholly owned but just you know uh me and and Seth you signed leases in 2005 2006 in a 2007-8 financial crisis where the banks are going upside down so you know having confrontational meetings just feeling the you know the weight of what personal guarantee means when you're effectively upside down right just it's basic math right you had more inventory both of people of product and leases than you do market demand market demand is being affected by macro conditions most of them I think were macro but some self-inflicted there were philosophical differences that started to show up some of those things have sort of adult sort of professional divorce you know people go through that especially me and Seth we came up as teenagers effectively into this they were babies so there was a very emotionally heavy business and also Feeling Just frankly tired you said burnout's a real [ __ ] thing well you guys were 18 years into the business or so with that non-stop tired from the travel tired from the expectations tired from you know explaining to the bankers why complex made sense and why getting up made sense and you know I I felt people trying to encroach on my creative ambition and it was my creative ambition that got us to the place of success as this dust started to settle on your core business how did you and Seth extricate yourself and sort of settle Affairs it was a very slow and sloppy and messy with lots of yelling and crying and mean things said and lawyers and uh it was a mess the mechanics of it were Seth would partner with a company called iconics that was a publicly held company they were buying me out of my position trading my interest into a Perpetual royalty and I would take complex and we'd buy Seth out and we would land the plane like that so I was betting on the complex but you know the brand went on still to this day we're on our 30th Anniversary you know I'm working on a little like capsule for it I'm not ashamed of it I travel the world I still see it I still love the brand it's an important part of my history foreign no longer an active participant in the company that he named it founded mark would find redemption in the explosive growth of complex and especially the passion project he championed at the brand complexcon after subsequently helping Shepard a several hundred million dollar exit from complex mark would turn his attention to philanthropy non-profit initiatives xq and the Emerson Collective you in that divorce end up taking complex yeah which at the time was profitable but doing fairly modest revenue and I would say I think we both agree largely on the strength of Rich's Innovation around the complex Network yes as a vertical ad Network we were able to scale the business out of the recession quite Against All Odds yeah in those moments of Separation when you were looking at complex did you have any idea that it could be what it would eventually become yeah I did and I still even even being away from the business in any sort of operational way I still look at my babies and my businesses my my um the problems that these platforms are trying to solve as relevant and pertinent and I understood the power of uh the audience and that there was an unmet need from a demographic point of view from a just overall content perspective to the point of your belief in that audience I think one of the most important and consequential things that you brought to the table a complex yeah you know was while we were building this digital audience that was real but it was numbers on a screen this inspired you to have the idea to birth complexcon yeah and this was a controversial idea within the office this was scrutinized it seemed very scary yeah it was scary people were scared for good reason because not like I hadn't taken some swings and misses in my career and I think that always sort of lingered for me is that uh as much as Mark is uh could hit it out of the park he could also put a lot at risk in his sort of blind crusader-like pursuit of uh an entrepreneurial Endeavor you know it's scary when someone gets into that kind of that you know that mode that they're seeing something you know but I also remember me and you sitting around brainstorming thinking about getting all the right stakeholders on board this is a much well lived and learned lesson from the echo days of not Distributing the the the the the risk and getting the right stakeholders I was convinced to engage with Takashi because I had a good rapport with him over a year of back and forth let's do some let's do something let's do something and then you were like let's go visit Pharrell and we went on the back law of the voice and we pitched complex con Market making scary that's what I've been my whole career is like I helped validate markets I try to make marketplaces organized where they don't necessarily exist I see the pattern and I try to try to help organize the pattern and and so you see that flock and you just see you see oh it's a flock after we meet Pharrell he says he's into it you and I are headed to dinner to celebrate and I look at you [ __ ] with your phone and I ask you if you're day trading because I can just sort of like peek over your and you're like no I'm buying crypto and this is the spring of 2016. right right and I'm like I'm sorry what's that and you explain to me web three but I am curious how did web3 come onto your radar what was your fascination then and what do you think about web3 as we move forward during that financial crisis when I'm on the balls of my ass with a lot of public shame right feeling really bad about myself selling my namesake my friend and partner at the at the time introduces me to this crazy article about a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto and it was all reaction to the banking crisis so I got turned on to Bitcoin and you know cryptographically designed stores of value because of the predicament I was in because I was getting so royally screwed by my Banks and that made me go down a rabbit hole like a Revenge fantasy of wanting to understand it I'm just Restless about systems redesign rather than sort of bring my hands and complain about the way things are I believe there's a path to towards solving a lot of our biggest issues just by like making new solutions that are better I believe that there's no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea because nothing's that definitive I don't think ideas live on a spectrum so binary between good and bad almost at exactly the same time that we are flying to LA to meet with Pharrell to figure out complexcon one rich is concurrently negotiating the sale of complex to Verizon and Hearst yeah and I have to ask the deal gets done we all exit for 300 plus million dollars reportedly according to the Wall Street Journal and you've talked about the shame that you experienced at the end of Echo and having to deal with that going bust in a certain way what was the sort of emotional payoff for you to then six years later put this tremendous W on the board oh it felt it felt great I don't I don't feel like Echo was the echo business how it landed the plane landed was something to feel shame for the shame-inducing feelings have less to do about my ego as much as it was the disappointment with my friends and the people I loved and my colleagues and feeling like I could have done better by the people that worked so hard for me I was gonna say on the flip side I mean with complex yeah you did quite the opposite and yeah so yeah that was gratifying we could all win together and it was a better distribution of risk and a better distribution of upside there is something really powerful in the incredible feat of of of getting humans to organize to do something together and to do it against a plan and it's like one of the most gratifying things foreign sales both of us stick around for about a year and a half until the fall of 2017 and end up going our separate ways yeah I mean I went to an adjacent space at Def Jam you went in a completely different direction going to work yeah an NGO xq right and the Emerson Collective Marine Powell jobs Institution what inspired you to go in that direction and tell what do you what do you do for them one of the many sort of domains of interest and pursuit for me has been philanthropy and specifically the educational space the high school space I have actually a history being the space amongst ad reformers the uh the corporal punishment right initiative I funded lawsuits against States that were allowing corporal punishment physical restraint in schools and I had some success so the corporal punishment initiative is how I ended up getting to meet the woman who was the the under Secretary of Education in the office of civil rights Russell and Ali ruslin went on to become the CEO of xq so I found myself in DC nerding out on this and like really leaning into it and became really friendly with Rosslyn and so I felt very lucky when she was launching xq she asked me to join the board at The xq Institute which is um effectively a high school redesign initiative we launched with 20 or so schools that are all informed by a certain set of design principles and we're really trying to make redesign open source and practical and available to districts and states and you know and contrary to popular opinion like if you you you know if you want to see something new you know just because the system you feel the weight of the system and you convince yourself that you can't you actually can just believing that you can makes the difference being able to bring folks from outside of philanthropy to philanthropy has been one of the most professionally challenging and gratifying things I've ever done and to realize I spent most of the my career about like myself my own sense of authorship my own like me me and like seeing the power of we it's why I went to to to join wrestling and and very generously like Laureen offered me to join I was so eager because their their Vision was clear and you know I'm proud to say that through the years that we've been there um we're now in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation themselves with them saying what we've been waving the flag on so this is a very exciting time uh professionally it's maybe not as um there you know it's it's not a sort of a much public Fanfare but I think it's as meaningful as anything I've done you've built two businesses that have reached ubiquity you've raised children to adulthood you're now in the middle of your third Act giving back yeah if you were to sit with a 21 year old creative entrepreneur what you had 45 seconds as we do in this moment to impart some wisdom on them what would that be curious you know don't let you you know School get in the way of your education you know you have to be a lifelong learner know that you're not alone in every way right uh collaborating is powerful right working with the team Distributing the decision-making power being part of that orchestra that that that that thinking Orchestra of problem solving man that's when the shit's at its best [Music] [Music]

Channel: IDEA GENERATION

Views: 99,969

Keywords: complex, complex magazine, complex media, complex networks, complexcon, current affairs, ecko, ecko unlimited, entertainment, fashion, getting up, hype news, idea generation, interview, madden, marc ecko, media, new jersey, sneakers, video games, marc ecko's getting up, magazine

Id: NBAifGR9Jzs

Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023