HipHopWired: Did your interest in technology develop out of a natural interest or was it something you felt you needed to survive as an artist?
Leslie: Being a Harvard undergrad in the late ’90s, that’s really when email had started, and everyone was so excited. It was like, “Man, I don’t have to write a letter home, I can just send an email.” So my interest in technology was a natural process. In fact, I started building my own websites all the way back then in school.
HipHopWired: Guess that explains how you got into coding. How beneficial has that skill been to you in your career and business?
Leslie: I get a lot of young people who say, “Yo, I want to rap, I want to produce, I want to be a dancer, I want to be famous…” but at the end of the day what they’re really saying is that they want to be able to make money entrepreneurially doing what they love. I tell people they need to fall in love with coding because one of the other observations that I’ve made from being out in Silicon Valley is that there is no shortage of demand for great engineers. So I did what I needed to do to learn what I needed to learn. I already had some proficiency from building websites in my Harvard days. That’s nearly 15 years of building sites, so it’s very easy to learn new computing and programing languages when you have that type of foundation, but I spent extensive time in the Coding Academy teaching myself how to code.
HipHopWired: But you’re in a position where you could have easily paid someone to do that for you. Why was it so important for you to actually learn how to do it yourself?
Leslie: So I can understand how to make these different services talk to one another. The way that programs and web services talk to one another is through an API. I wanted to understand how I could get a store API to talk to a mailing list API. And how a mailing list can talk to a voice and SMS API. So this is what I wanted to understand and to see for myself how I can connect all these services together.
HipHopWired: As you’ve delved deeper into the tech space, I’m sure it hasn’t been a smooth journey. What are some of the hurdles you’ve faced and what have you learned from those experiences?
Leslie: It’s the same way as with any start-up. When you’re doing it on your own, or setting out on your own, what I would really recommend is if you have the luxury of time to do your best to invest that time in building relationships with people who have gone down that path so you don’t have to make the same mistakes they did. If I had known someone who could have led me down the path and said, “If you’re just interested in making sure that when someone texts you it actually goes to email, then you could use this service or that service.” There’s a lot of time I invested in building solutions that already existed. For anyone interested in this path I would definitely say find some mentors, or some people who are in this space already so you’re not reinventing the wheel or making mistakes that have already been made.
HipHopWired: What have been some of your biggest successes in regards to using technology in your career?
Leslie: Probably the biggest to date was the success we enjoyed with Cassie. I believe it was a foreshadowing of what was to come because that was really the first time that an artist actually sold a number of albums commensurate with their social media following. We built Cassie’s MySpace friends to about 650,000 and she actually sold 650,000 albums. Us being early adopters of using social media to promote the record was revolutionary and I don’t believe at the time or even since then has an artist been able to sell a number of records that is equivalent to his or her social media following.
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