STEVE “CAPTAIN HOFF” HOFFMAN | From Hollywood to Silicon Valley to China
Millions of people in the tech & startup world know Steve Hoffman as “Captain Hoff” from Foundersspace, a leading incubator from Silicon Valley that is now omnipresent throughout China. But very few people know that his FIRST career was as a development executive in Hollywood, and this is the first time Steve’s talked about all this in-depth since beginning his China adventures.
The lessons he's learned from his success shaping startups & stories are invaluable, & applicable regardless of your vocation or location.
I especially love his closing thoughts: “Are you putting your time into the most important things? Given who you are and where you are in your life, what's the most value you can be creating for the people around you and the world around you, and can you focus your energies on that instead of getting distracted by all these other things?”
This was a very fun and special conversation, so I hope you check it out.
STEVE HOFFMAN links -
Foundersspace:
WEB: http://www.foundersspace.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/foundersspace/
“Make Elephants Fly” Book: https://www.foundersspace.com/make-elephants-fly/
Steve Hoffman on “How China Works”: http://bigfishmiddlekingdom.libsyn.com/005-silicon-valley-with-chinese-characteristics-steven-captain-hoff-hoffman
Steve Hoffman on “Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom”: http://howchinaworks.libsyn.com/043-steve-hoffman-aka-captain-hoff-yingying-li-brendan-davis
SEARCH “If I Knew You Better” in all podcatchers OR listen / learn more at APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-i-knew-you-better/id1457785319 / WEB PLAYER: http://ifiknewyoubetter.libsyn.com/website/ LINKS https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/knew-resources
MARINA BARAYEVA | Marketing for Creatives
#059 - Marketing for Creatives | Marina Barayeva
Marina Barayeva is a portrait photographer based in Beijing. She’s also the host of her own podcast, “Marketing for Creatives”, on which she interviews a wide variety of experts to help entrepreneurs grow and expand their own creative business. Her own story of how she came from a relatively small city in Russia to building a successful career here in China is a lesson in taking chances and letting your instincts guide you. Marina has a true passion for learning and helping people by sharing her knowledge, and it really shows in our chat. We had a great talk, and I hope you enjoy the show!
Please SUBSCRIBE to “Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom” and leave a REVIEW at Apple Podcasts / iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/big-fish-in-the-middle-kingdom/id1237037187?mt=2 or search and subscribe wherever YOU get your podcasts!
GUEST LINKS:
Marina Barayeva Website: intnetworkplus.com
Instagram: instagram.com/MarinaBarayeva
Twitter: twitter.com/MarinaBarayeva
Pinterest: pinterest.com/MarinaBarayeva
Facebook: facebook.com/MarinaBarayeva
“BFMK" HOST / SHOW:
“Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom” on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigFishMiddleKingdom/
Brendan Davis on WeChat: BrendanDavis
Brendan Davis on Twitter: @VeritasInLux
Other links to LISTEN: https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/podcast-links/
JESSE WEINER: Entertainment Law in China
#019 - Entertainment Law in China | Jesse Weiner
This week’s episode features Jesse Weiner. Jesse is an entertainment lawyer with 10 years experience living and working in China. And although he is based back in Los Angeles now, Jesse expects to spend much more time coming back to China now that the entertainment business here is reaching a new stage of maturation.
First, a few housekeeping notes:
As long time listeners are aware, the release day of the show each week has shifted around a bit since I first launched. This has been due to a variety of reasons, but the last two weeks have drifted to Thursday and I think that will become the new home for now. A practical benefit of this has to do with the time difference between the US and China, and how that affects information flow back and forth, which is often a factor.
For instance, in the unedited raw interview for this episode, Jesse spent about five minutes discussing a particular business deal he had been in the middle of, now closed, that is unprecedented and very interesting. If I released this episode with that chunk of information, it would've been a Big Fish exclusive! But of course, the clients have their own timetable for when they are going to put out their press release, which is “not yet”...and the back-and-forth between the US and China to nail that down pushed us an extra day this week. So I pulled that little chunk out of the final interview. Once the news is announceable, though, I will release it as a very short bonus feature for this episode.
There is a great deal of information in this one, with something for everyone, but lots that is especially of interest to my friends working in the film and TV business internationally or those who follow it. We talk about the current state of evolution of the industry, and do a deep dive into the mechanics of what works and what doesn't work between these two business cultures.
Also, it turns out that Jesse actually had a pretty cool story before ever deciding to enter law school. He has a graduate education in music, and initially came to China as a composer and conductor as well as being a professor at the Central Conservatory, which is the most preeminent music school in China. In the episode he draws a parallel between conducting music and the practice of law that I think probably only he could make, so check it out.
My last note is that while many of the recent few shows lately have had a heavy entertainment business focus, the next few episodes will shift things up a bit. If you’d like to give me feedback about the show in any way, please contact me at the links below. Thanks!
Jesse Weiner:
http://www.yingkeinternational.com/office/united-states
jesseweiner@yingkelawyer.com
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
BFMK website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
BFMK Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/BigFishMiddleKingdom/
Other links to LISTEN:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/podcast-links/
SUPPORT BFMK via PayPal or WeChat:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/donate/
BFMK PayPal direct DONATION link:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=K5W6EANCYSQHU
DOMINIC JOHNSON-HILL: Building a Brand in Beijing
"And then suddenly, like 10 million people knew my telephone number, and it was a turning point for the brand, because when that show started to air China-wide, my phone didn’t stop ringing for two years.” - Dominic Johnson-Hill, Plastered 8
#007 - Building a Brand in Beijing | Dominic Johnson-Hill
Dominic Johnson-Hill is a British punk-rock Renaissance man. He’s famous in China for many things but he is probably best known as being the man who single-handedly began the transformation of an almost 800 year old (!) hutong called Nan Luo Gu Xiang - dating back to the days of Kubla Khan - into becoming one of the busiest and most popular tourist and shopping / nightlife destinations in Beijing around the world. If you have ever visited Beijing or looked into it on travel websites, you’ve seen the area featured as a must-see. Dominic was the very first person to open a store there, and the rest is history.
He did this as the founder of iconic street wear brand Plastered 8, a truly “only in China” success story that you have to hear for yourself. I am an unofficial brand ambassador for Plastered myself, being a huge fan of their crazy and cool t-shirts (owning about 20 as of now), so I was excited to hear the tale of how he built the brand straight from the horse’s mouth. The story quoted above starts at about the 10-minute mark of the interview, but the whole thing is a wild ride that you have to hear for yourself. Among Dominic's other innovations and “media moments”, he has gotten worldwide press as being the creator of canned “Beijing Air”, but that only scratches the surface of his innovation and creativity. He has created a 30 square meter mural in the high-end Beijing art hotel The Opposite House, has been a TV host and presenter as well as frequent guest on talk and game shows here, he's a filmmaker who directs his own commercials, and much more.
This one is full of inspired and occasionally raunchy, hilarious content; if you’re highly sensitive you might wince a few times, but I grew up on Monty Python, Benny Hill, and other English humor, so I laughed throughout the talk. One note is that we did have a few Skype issues. I edited around them as well as possible, and as always I strive to make those edits seamless, but this week there are a small handful that you will probably hear. There are also a couple of places where the audio quality gets weird in general for maybe 5-10 seconds, but I don’t think it detracts from the comprehension of the stories being told, so I hope you can bear with those brief moments when they pop up.
Lastly, I’m excited to announce that starting this week, we are a featured show on the Castbox.fm website and the Castbox podcast app! Castbox works in your web browser and they also have an iOS app, but they have an especially nice app for Android devices. Please check us out on Castbox, and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to us. Enjoy!
"BFMK" Website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
Plastered 8:
https://plasteredtshirts.com
about Dominic Johnson-Hill:
http://plasteredtshirts.com/category/dominic/
Castbox:
https://castbox.fm
"Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom" direct links -
on Apple Podcasts:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/big-fish-in-the-middle-kingdom/id1237037187?mt=2
on Castbox:
https://castbox.fm/channel/Big-Fish-in-the-Middle-Kingdom-id571573
Carl King (composer):
http://carlkingdom.com
FOUNDATIONS
How does where we are from and where we live and have traveled influence who we are?
The above photo of me was taken in early December, 2007 at sunrise in Carthage, Tunisia. The story behind it isn't as epic as the history of the place itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage), but it was a pretty profound experience for me all the same...
I was accompanying my great friend and then producing partner Blue Nelson on one leg of a particular long-term, record-setting-attempt road trip he's been on and off of in one way or another since 1998. This kicked off the North African leg. We'd previously been through Central and Southern Italy as well as the Southern European island nation of Malta together. This was the morning we woke up in Tunisia, having ferried over from Reggio, Italy 22 hours before, and it began a journey around the entirety of pre-Arab Spring Tunisia that took us down into the entrance of the Sahara Desert and back, with stops across the borders into both Algeria and Libya (past the old Star Wars sets, a movie his uncle helped produce...but that's HIS story to tell).
Blue, Brendan and Bigfoot. On location in the Angeles National Forest, CA, 200...3(?)
Scouting in Rome, Italy. 2007
Delivery "van" somewhere in Southern Italy, 2007
On the road outside Bizerte, Tunisia. 2007
Inside Blue's car at the Libyan border. Note Big Brother Leader (deceased) in the background. They wouldn't let us in but at least they let us leave. 2007
I say all this because I've had a lot of opportunity to reflect on the impact of travels and relocations in the slightly over 9 years since this trip. I woke up on January 1, 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand. The next day I travelled to Wellington, where I woke up January 3rd. On that day I meditated for an hour on the nature of my year just past, and was struck by the realization that in just the roughly 6 months previous I'd been in: Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Los Angeles, California, Seattle, Washington and Birmingham, Alabama in the US; various tiny towns in Inner Mongolia that I can't type properly in Roman characters; and in Gannan, Xi'An, Anyang, Erenhot, and Beijing, China.
Which of these things is not like the others? Getting to take part in a traditional celebration in Gansu, Gannan, China. July 17, 2016
Newspaper boardroom giving a talk, Xi'An, China. August 25, 2016
At the airport. Erenhot, China. August 30, 2016
Yakking about something at Sundance: Hong Kong. September 24, 2016
With a 2008 Olympic Torch at the SiMuWu company, which made it, in Anyang, China. November 28, 2016
With Steve Barr in Wellington (I think). Jan 2, 2017.
How did I get here - all of those "here"s - from whence I came? That'll take more than one blog post to explore, but the short version is that it was a combination of accident and effort. I'm going to brain-dump the outline below, without a lot of editing, and then will flesh out details in subsequent posts as I get around to it. :)
I was born in Augusta, Georgia in the Southern US. Mostly raised in and around the Atlanta area, and in Anniston, Alabama, where my maternal grandparents lived. They were the closest thing I had to a stabilizing influence in my young life so I adopted Anniston as my hometown of choice. I lived a few "interesting" years in Southwest Georgia, which will also merit it's own post. I spent one year of college in Birmingham, Alabama back before my mom lived there, which she does now, and I commuted an hour back "home" to Anniston most weekends to visit with my Grandmother, which was (in retrospect) probably why I am not dead or in jail as I type this. I had a sweet fake ID so I would go out and see my friend / guitar teacher Will (then "Bill") Owsley's bands playing in area clubs when I could - he gets a blog post too someday - but mostly I'd sit at home with "Ma" and do laundry, read or chat about things with her, and eat her amazing food. But after that one year in Birmingham, then a regrouping year back in Albany, Georgia at the then-junior college resurrecting my grades (I HATED my college in Birmingham, and avoided studying as much as possible in some creative ways, which is also it's own story), I finally moved to Athens, Georgia to attend the University of and get my life back on track. I lived in Athens for 8 years and have loads of stories and experiences involving the art and music scenes there that I will also dig into another time. For now, the key part of this narrative is that Athens and then Atlanta (where I moved next, the last stop before Los Angeles, and where I earned Bachelor's Degree in Film) are the two cities that most shaped me immediately prior to my move West.
As a Southern expat of 15 years now, I'm unqualified to talk about their values and virtues today. But when I was there, in addition to all the good and bad that are topics for still other discussions, there was a sense of fundamental community that I later had in Los Angeles, believe it or not, in the tight-knit concentric circles of the entertainment business, but which seems so far away from my 2017 perspective as an expat yet again, this time halfway around the world in Beijing.
First stop on the Beijing move: Tuanjiehu. June, 2016
Building a brand at Adamas Film HQ, Beijing, China. 2016
The plan is to be mostly here for ~5 years, give or take, with stops back home and at points elsewhere and in between as needed. The things that I'm building with friends and partners here are worth the tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs are real, and they are significant, starting with the ability to communicate fluently with close friends who share a somewhat similar frame of reference to me. It's why I spend any time at all on Facebook these days, even though the sorry state of affairs in our political system back home is hugely depressing. Still, it's the closest thing to a virtual town square I have, so for better or worse there I will be, for now.
Where have your travels taken you, and what are the lessons learned along the way that you think are universal? I'll have more thoughts on mine later. For now, I'd like to know yours. Please comment below, via the Contact form or any social sites I link this too if you want.
PROCESS
Now that the Chinese New Year / Spring Festival holidays are over and people are getting back to work, I have been reflecting on what they meant to me - an American - the way I spent them here myself in Beijing: alone, and far removed physically from the uncertainty and insanity consuming my own beloved country.
During the break, it’s been interesting to consider how exactly the various rituals of the celebration and the national homecoming here affected me personally, without my even taking direct part in them much this year.
It got me to thinking about Process, and how important it is for everyone to figure out for themselves what they need in order to do their best, in what context they ARE their best, and how to reconcile those personal needs with the needs of the collective, whose demands on our time don’t always sync up smoothly with our own agendas.
Speaking of that, re Chinese New Year 2017:
For me personally, on a practical level, it was great. I’m a pretty social and outward-facing guy when I need to be; maybe in another post I'll talk about how I overcame debilitating childhood shyness to become - twenty years later - very comfortable leading conversations in a professional environment or speaking to groups of people in public and private. But the flip side is that whenever I get the chance, I like to put the world on Airplane Mode and be as much of a hermit as humanly possible. At work I can play Type A with the best of them, but at home I’m all about soft lights on dimmers, reading, Chinese tea rituals, meditating with candles and incense burning in the background, etc. I basically tend towards being very very quiet unless there’s a great reason to get loud and rock out, which - as a recovering rock and roll guitar player - is always a possibility with me, too. But it’s not my default energy these days.
So the funny thing is that although I at times have a fairly big personality, naturally I'm more of an introvert than most people would probably imagine. I'm at home running a movie set or managing a high-stakes project with multiple stakeholders, but in terms of my personal, creative work, I don’t thrive in chaos. So enjoying a big, State-mandated break from all of the day-to-day craziness of Beijing and just being able to breathe - admittedly, with the help of a good air cleaner most days - and to move and live at my own pace for a hot minute was a real gift.
On a generative level it was pretty sweet also. Besides tending to the Western-facing aspects of our business here during the Eastern holidays, I got to spend a healthy chunk of brainpower working on some personal projects that needed time paid to them* (a concept I got from Carl Bressler, who I believe was likewise inspired by a friend of his) and also to catch up on some housekeeping issues like paying bills and sorting through tax records and such.
Creatively, in addition to starting this blog, I can now say that I’m in the home stretch of writing a TV pilot. I’ve had the basic premise for years and have been working on the story in one form or another for equally as long. It started as an idea for a short film, then quickly expanded to a feature once I got my head around the story better, and finally, after I’d lived with that version of it long enough I realized that it made the most sense to structure it as a series.
It’s far from done, but I think the shape of it is solid, I know my characters really well, and I have all of the scenes drafted; most of them are written to a state where I don’t want to punch the computer now, so in those aspects it's all good. Over the holidays I’ve mostly been playing with tone a lot, as I've struggled to say what I want to say in a form that I think people might enjoy and find compelling on a week to week basis. And I’m not done refining it yet but I’m also not hating where I’ve landed for now, so it's exciting to at least have the end of this iteration in sight.
Back to process:
Part of how I stay connected to my home culture while I am so far away from it is listening to podcasts. Recently the writer-producer-actor-comedian Whitney Cummings was a return guest on one of my favorites, the excellent Tim Ferriss Show, and the format of this episode was that she answered listener questions. The one she saved for last asked what was the best advice she’d ever received for achieving success. She credited actor-director-producer Peter Berg with a one-word challenge he gave her at a time when she was struggling with something profound:
“FINISH."
Just finish. His point (as relayed by her) was that there aren’t awards given out for the best screenplay someone merely STARTED, or funding being thrown at all those great IDEAS that someone came up with but never bothered to put into a tangible, shareable, salable, FINISHED form. You have to FINISH what you start for it - and all the effort you expended creating it - to actually MEAN anything.
It reminded me of another piece of advice I got once, that for anything to even have the HOPE of becoming real, you have to fIrst WRITE IT DOWN.
It works for Berg, it's apparently worked for Whitney, and it's worked - so far anyway - for me.
So before the more cynical of you are tempted to dismiss these as trite aphorisms, please know that as simple and obvious as these ideas may seem, there is also - for some of us at least - deep truth and real power to be found in understanding them, and lasting results are only attainable by applying them. So maybe meditate on them and see for yourself, if that’s your thing. Or don’t. Either way, good luck!
On that note, off I go to do it again. More later here. :)
Cheers, and thanks for reading. Comment below if you like.