057: This Angel Investor Specializes in Music + Startups = Ken Umezaki of Digital Daruma

Entrepreneur Stories 4⃣ Inspiration

Millionaire Interviews Podcast & Sir Austin Peek

Careers, Business:careers, Business

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ken Umezaki, Founder and President of Digital Daruma, has been involved in the music business full time since 2009, when he retired from a successful 25 year career in financial services. He has substantial experience in starting new business lines for major investment banks, seeding and advising start ups, capital markets trading, managing large organizations, and asset management. He is a musician and currently plays bass in the band Fifth of Bourbon. He is also involved in a number of music foundations and academic organizations, including serving on the national board of Little Kids Rock, Future of Music Coalition and advisory board positions at New York University and Berklee College of Music. *** For Show Notes, Key Points, Contact Info, & Resources Mentioned on this episode visit here: Ken Umezaki Interview. ***

Transcript

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0:00.0	Beyonce's lemonade album, for example, had 140 songwriters.
0:04.0	How do you track that when you've got 500 different digital consumption services globally,
0:08.4	and there's two trillion spins a year.
0:15.2	There's a lot of people who actually think, I'll just pick the money, we'll figure it out later,
0:18.9	that's actually not true.
0:21.6	So the fundamental thing we're doing is we're building a technology architecture
0:25.3	to allow the entire music industry to be...
0:35.1	In the notch for a year a little bit different than some of the other people we talk to,
0:38.1	so would you mind telling us what you do?
0:40.4	Sure, maybe a big background as well.
0:42.1	I have a previous career, if you will, in finance, as a trader and manager of trading desks.
0:46.7	I did that for 25 years or so, and basically for the last nine or ten years,
0:51.2	I switched gears pretty completely and I've played entrepreneur in the digital music space.
0:56.7	Most of my work centers around a company I form called Digital Daruma, I do a number of things,
1:02.1	all under the broad mission of trying to make the world of digital music
1:07.2	friendlier for the creator community.
1:09.0	It's a great time to be a creator, it's a great time, I think, as a consumer of media,
1:14.2	lots of choices, instantaneous, etc.
1:16.9	Very, very tough to make a living off of it.
1:19.2	I decided for a career number two to focus on that I call it the little,
1:24.0	which is how do you make the digital jungle friendly for the creator community?
1:28.8	So with that in mind, I actually do some investing in startups in the music technology space.
	...

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