Tuesday, April 28th, 2015

3:50 - 5:00 PM, Poolside Tent I

Investing and Funding in Music & Music Technology – Looking at Venture Capital, Private Equity and Crowdfunding

Fred Goldring, Co-Founder and Chairman, Aficionado Media

T. Hale Boggs, Partner, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips

Harry DeMott, General Partner, Raptor Ventures

Reza Rassool, CTO, Kwaai Oak

Dick Wingate. Principal/DEV Advisors, President/BHi Music Group, Moderator

McDonald’s and National Geographic, and an investor/strategic advisor to MP3.com (IPO), Napster (acquired by BMG), Tapulous (acquired by Disney) and Digital-On-Demand/Red Dot Net (acquired by Alliance). Fred was appointed as a Member of The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama (and he was sworn-in as a Member by Justice Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2010).  Fred also currently serves as a Member of the Board of Advisors of The Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics (COLE) at the Fuqua Business School at Duke University. Fred is the former Chairman of the Board of Directors of Rock The Vote, and he was the Executive Producer with will.i.am of the groundbreaking Yes We Can music video, for which Fred received an Emmy Award, a Clio Award, a Global Media Award, and an NAACP Image Award. In 2012, he was a Songwriter and Executive Producer of the Forward recording and music video produced in support of President Obama’s re-election and which has been nominated for a 2013 NAACP Image Award.  Fred was also a Co-Executive Producer of the documentary film/music project The People Speak (based on Howard Zinn’s seminal work, The People’s History of the United States), and he was a Producer of the Soundtrack Album from the hit television series Thirtysomething. Fred has authored numerous articles for The Huffington Post, is a frequent speaker and commentator on the subjects of entertainment, marketing, media, technology, and politics in numerous publications including The New York Times, and has been an instructor at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. He is a longtime member of the TED community (having attended the prestigious conference since 1995, delivered a Ted Talk on the Safe Shake at the 2010 TED Conference, and playing guitar and mandolin as a member of the TED House Band at the TED Conference in 2012).  In 2002, Fred was a recipient of the Bill of Rights Award from the ACLU for his extraordinary commitment to social justice. Fred was previously the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Bogart Pediatric Cancer Research Programs in Los Angeles. Fred is a member of the California and New York bars, and is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Miami School of Law where he founded The Entertainment and Sports Law Society, was the First Prize Winner of the ASCAP Nathan Burkan Memorial Writing Competition and recently receiving the Alumni Achievement Award. Fred is a co-founder of DEMAN, the Duke Entertainment Media and the Arts Network. He is a 22-year voting member of The Recording Academy.

MT. Hale Boggs, Partner, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips: Hale Boggs is a partner in Manatt's Corporate/Finance, Capital Markets and Venture Capital practice areas.  He splits his time between the firm's Los Angeles and northern California offices.  He founded Manatt's Palo Alto office in 1998, and helped to establish the firm's San Francisco office in 2007.  Mr. Boggs chairs the firm's nationwide Business Development Committee and serves on the Compensation Committee and Executive Committee.  He also is the chairman of Manatt Digital Media. Mr. Boggs' practice focuses primarily on corporate and securities matters, including venture capital transactions, mergers and acquisitions, corporate reorganizations, public and private securities offerings and joint ventures.  He works with companies across the spectrum of their business cycles, from start-up through late-stage, with a particular emphasis on companies in the digital media industry.  Mr. Boggs' expertise includes venture capital and other equity and debt financings, equity compensation matters, SEC reporting and disclosure, intellectual property licensing, complex corporate partnering transactions and corporate governance.  He also represents venture capital firms in fund formation and counseling matters.  He frequently assists clients in structuring creative arrangements to acquire, develop, protect and distribute technologies and products both domestically and internationally. Mr. Boggs also represents a wide variety of financial institutions and financial services companies, including commercial banks and bank holding companies, and consumer and commercial finance companies.

Reza Rassool, CTO of Kwaai Oak, is a serial start-up professional with a history of successful development and value creation with focus on digital media and entertainment. Kwaai Oak powers the tech departments of many startups through CTO-as-a-service™. • Gathr Films CTO, where he developed a crowd-sourced theatrical distribution - 'first $1M+ box office thru crowd-sourcing' • Music Mastermind CTO where he developed Zya, a music creation cloud which raised $48M in funding. • Director of Software at Second Sight, developing a bionic eye. Its IPO in 2014 achieved a market cap of $0.6B.• Chief Engineer at Widevine Technologies (sold to Google in 2010 for $150M) • Chief Engineer at Micropolis / Streamlogic, developed the world's first commercial VOD server and a family of VDRs. • Technical Manager of Lightworks – developed an OSCAR/EMMY winning editing system, sold to Tektronix. Reza gained a B.Sc. in Physics from King's College, has 21 patents granted, and has numerous papers published.