TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Speaker 1 (00:00.172)
Hey, I'm Sanjay Sharma. I'm the founder and CEO of Marginal Media Works. This is Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

My name is Abhay Dhandekar and I share conversations with talented and interesting individuals linked to the global Indian and South Asian community. It's informal and informative, adding insights to our evolving cultural expressions, where each person can proudly say, trust me, I know what I'm doing.

Hi everyone, on this episode of Trust Me I Know What I'm Doing, we share a conversation with the founder and CEO of Marginal Media Works, Sanjay Sharma. Stay tuned.

Speaker 2 (00:47.534)
Okay, I'll hit you first with some breaking news in that I'm honored and grateful for you right now. You made a choice in an effort to engage here with Trust Me I Know What I'm Doing and make it a part of your day and even a small part of your life. I appreciate you watching and subscribing on YouTube, listening on all the podcast platforms, rating and writing reviews, following on those good old social media places, and sharing this with all your family and friends. And if you've really got something to get off your chest, celebrate, or are just feeling friendly,

send a message over to info@abhaydandekar.com as I'd love to hear from you. Now, as we all know, it's tough to actually lead from the margins, especially in a sustained way when the more prominent and compelling your work gets, the harder it becomes to keep close ears and eyes on those voices and stories that come from the outside in. But one leader who's making a compelling case for the sustained work for what's current and what's next in contemporary Hollywood and American media,

is the founder and CEO of Marginal Media Works, Sanjay Sharma. Sanjay was born in India and emigrated with his family to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He studied film and history at Columbia, got a law degree from Stanford, and went on to clerk for the US Court of Appeals on the Ninth Circuit. Sanjay's journey in media started at Warner Brothers, working on franchise films, video games, and indie projects. He then helped fuel tech startups and video game content before becoming the founder and CEO of All Def.

a leading media brand in hip hop and urban culture, creating content for HBO Cinemax, MTV, and Spotify, with a keen lens on American youth culture, particularly. And with a deep joy in the learning that happens when immersing in subcultures and a commitment to amplifying marginalized voices, Sanjay now serves as the co-founder and CEO of Marginal Media Works, focused on popular storytelling genres from outsider voices across all formats.

And you know, the best part is that those outsider voices and stories are changing all the time. So having a champion like Sanjay who can dissect things academically, execute them soundly in today's tech media environment, and maintain a future vision for mainstream application from those margins is really his gift for everyone to appreciate. Sanjay's commitment to this work stretches way beyond his company though, as he's a founding member of Gold House, an Asian American collective of leaders in the arts, finance, and technology.

Speaker 2 (03:08.46)
and chairs the board of CAPE, the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment. So we caught up for a meandering chat about it all, trying to speak our minds and of course not get deported. But I wanted to first know which margins he was focusing on these days, both personally and professionally.

So I love, I have always loved subcultures. And so our thesis from the beginning was pretty simple, was that the coolest shit happens in the margins. And that was something I grew up feeling and feeling a part of skateboarding, heavy metal, hip hop, just, you know, kind of outsider culture, not necessarily identifying it as anything to do one-to-one with race, ethnicity.

gender or sexual orientation. Although as you get older, you start to that, you know, you go to college and you start to learn that like, there's a reason all these things generally emanate through some overlap of those. Yeah. And so I just love being in subcultures and underground cultures and think that those communities drive just outsized import on cultural value, commercial value.

And often that value is extracted and appropriated once it breaks through. Right. So these days, let's see these days. mean, I love the intersection between kind of black Asian culture. I've always loved that. And there's a tradition of that, you know, from the Wu Tang Clan to today. Yeah. I love the kind of black and brown intersection. I love queer, trans race intersections.

And I really love them as they hit kind of call it cultural industries like streetwear, know, film, TV, obviously music, young, M.A., amazing, queer, rapper, you know, these are kind of the worlds I love these days. And I'm lucky in that the personal and the professional map pretty similarly. Those are the things I do in my free time.

Speaker 2 (05:18.03)
So no, that's nice when they intersect and they weave in pretty naturally like that. You know, as someone who's like you said, you've lived in that space, you love that space, you work in that space. And to a degree, that space becomes a commercial endeavor too. Is there a fine line between, again, sort of like the academics of how that borders upon showcasing and presenting?

versus exploited and over commercialized. is, and usually when it gets to that layer, it starts becoming less of a margin in that matter, less of a display of that margin. So as, the attention spans and the life cycles of these things shorten, especially in the current zeitgeist, how do you help define what those margins are? Do you have to constantly revisit that on an ongoing basis for yourself for that matter too?

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah, because some of the margins that you just discussed, I mean, they definitely wax with some nostalgia about what it was like to live in those margins. you know, as that changes, you know, in some cases, minute to minute, do you have to re-examine, maybe even redefine what the idea of a margin is?

I think the, you know, kind of more recent attention to largely from like academic circles that's now come into more popular conversation around topics like intersectionality are fairly new. Obviously it's always existed, but thinking about the world and culture and identity through multiple lenses and not just a single defining lens, right? You are South Asian. It's like, well, you might be many things that happens to be one of them and layering in gender identity, socioeconomic

Speaker 1 (07:00.568)
class, all of these kind of elements of someone's complex elements that make up someone's identity have become way more fluid and porous. And that ultimately is a good thing because identity I think has in some ways grown to be a limiting function and not a liberating function. so that constant re-examination I think is probably good if you're

self-aware and want other people to be self-aware that that re-examination is always a good thing. For the business, these are, I think, exciting times precisely for this reason that more and more people, I think, are feeling like I am fluid on many dimensions and there is a spectrum across all of these things. I am not just one thing.

Right. And so for recording artists or artists, but, we deal mostly with like visual storyteller filmmakers, right. Our hope in starting the company was that that could be a liberating function, right. You in Hollywood, you may be seen as, know, if you were an Indian immigrant, you would be told, write something about that. And the assumption would be write something about how hard it is to be an Indian immigrant. Right. Whereas you may have grown up watching Steven Spielberg movies, James Bond movies.

and got attracted to the idea of becoming a writer to write big canvas action movies.

Not so much that immigrant experience.

Speaker 1 (08:30.326)
You know, and so this idea that you don't have to eat this industry that we all grew up loving, watching, or many of us, but never reflected us. And yet we somehow followed all the stories, didn't miss anything, didn't feel like I can't relate to that. That's right. Like my parents. Yeah. Yeah. We all.

American pie. It's like that. Well, those parents aren't like my parents. Yeah, yeah, so this kind of idea, the idea of reimagining or we call it reappropriating Western cinema through these very commercial genres, prototypes, kind of archetype films, right? a bank heist, road trip movie, a stoner comedy, right with

people who look like the people we grew up with, right? And so I think of that classic kind of Spielbergian scene where like kids are riding bikes through the neighborhood or a Stephen King movie for that matter, right? And you and I were in that group riding bikes. And if you kept going and turned left around the corner, that was our house. But if you look through kind of 70s, 80s, even 90s American cinema, you wouldn't, you would think that none of us were here.

Yeah. and so re-examining all that stuff, I think is important. And as things break and become more popular, there is this question of like authenticity and how real is it still? But if you pick any of those, call it creator classes or art forms, for lack of better terms, think of hip hop, which is still seen by many people as a niche form of music, right?

Whereas it really is pop music now. It is the most streamed category of music in nearly every territory of the world around the world. it's by definition, not niche, right? But there's still real ones. Hendrick and Drake beef illustrates the difference between pop and real ones in hip hop. So there's still an authentic original art form that comes from the tradition of the origins, which were very much in the margins.

Speaker 2 (10:28.622)
You know the

Speaker 1 (10:44.384)
and still remain there and really true. And so if you love the form, if you love the craft, then you know how to get to what's real and other people recognize what's real. And so for us, it's deciphering in streetwear, in any of these kind of call it cultural industries, who are the real authentic people making this art.

I have one thought on that one. And that is, that as an executive, as someone who has a more than just a front row seat and a street side view of that, but you know, you live at that 35,000 foot level as well. When it comes to the realism of an art form and also taking the temperature of how rapidly things change and how they, you know, this dance between what pop is and say what hip hop is. Do you also, does that take practice as an executive where you have to understand

what the definitions of that are related back to a specific artist or a specific movie genre or a specific Spielbergian theme where you're thinking, look, this has some texture to it. It's actually a lot more fluid than the definition of what a specific artist is doing or what a specific filmmaker is doing. Is that something that you've had to iterate on a little bit so that you can get to a point where you see that fluidity a little bit more than the

specificity of a specific creator or an art piece.

Yeah, I think so. mean, think this is you're up in the valley. think what's what what kind of venture people call pattern recognition, right? And so some of that may be an overly used term, but I think some of that comes from lived experience. Some of it comes from genuine interest and passion around, whatever the subject matter is like, this is the music I've grown up listening to and continue to listen to in my free time. I love

Speaker 1 (12:40.322)
finding new artists, I love when my kids put me onto somebody new, you know, so you just have to, if you love staying current, then you kind of see what's really happening.

almost like you keep listing, you keep looking for it, you have to sort of keep that top of mind.

I have a bunch of friends, probably like our peer group of people who grew up in like the heyday of Wu Tang, Tribe Called Quest, Tupac, kind of that era, who are really like, man, hip hop fell off. don't know what these kids listen to. This is crazy. None of this is any good. It doesn't even sound like music. you know, I'm not, it sounds very different, but you kind of, you know, you kind of got to just, you've got to be open.

to how the medium is evolving. And I think a similar thing happens with indie film. If you've grown up watching American cinema or any country's cinema, that's just the one that I know the most. Even Indian movies, I grew up watching nothing but Bollywood movies every weekend for most of my young years. And that medium has changed. And I think you just develop through your lived experience.

your personal passions. I wouldn't take away from the luxury of a pretty sound academic training in film, studied film in college. so like seeing like French New Wave and seeing kind of international cinema. And then you start to see patterns, right? You start to see filmmakers who have similarities. And it's when you study them, then you realize, he was influenced by her and she was influenced by him. And then this person was influenced, you know, so you just see that lineage.

Speaker 1 (14:22.476)
And then you can kind of spot what the visual medium you can spot the references down to a frame that was framed this way. That's an homage to Hitchcock.

It's kind of like the lineage and the trees that get developed from a particular, know, I'm sure somebody out there is making music that you can link directly back to Q-tip. And and Honomonkai's music is going to be somewhat of a connect the dot experience to something else. So, exactly. you, when you think about film and media and all that intersectionality that you just mentioned, there's a definite

change that's happened in the last few months in at least the socio-political zeitgeist of the country where the temperature and appetite have very palpably shifted away from those margins and shifted to the centers. for at least the time being, whether that's temporary or not, has really created the opportunity for new margins to be identified.

especially new margins to be identified that the ecosystems may not even be aware of at this point. So I guess the thought that I had is, you I wonder if you can reflect a little bit on this evolution over these last several months, if not years, because I think this has been sort of in the making for some time, but reflecting on that evolution and for the most part, then what's the strategy to in fact, to navigate through that? Especially as someone who's had

some great experience in thinking about not only those margins, but how to be ladders of opportunity for people who live on those margins.

Speaker 1 (16:06.292)
Yeah, yeah. So this is the part where I get denaturalized.

Yeah, no, right. The risk, we're just gonna like put the disclaimer out there, right? Like we're both gonna stay in the country.

I mean, as you know from our prior conversations, I love politics and history just as a pastime. look, this climate is like nothing I've ever seen. And I didn't think I was particularly naive. The shock and awe campaign is working. what Steve Bannon calls muzzle velocity around the rapid fire.

executive orders and kind of taking universities down, extracting students from classes is literally insane. The association with anything that has to do with the dreaded three letter DEI is real and palpable. And in our industry, which has a tradition of being seen as progressive and liberal has fled.

from it. Major institutions have fled from it. Major corporations have fled from it. And so the, I think a couple of things have happened. It's obviously a ton to unpack it. could spend the whole session talking about this. I'd love to. I think a few things have happened. One is many marginalized communities, historically marginalized communities, over time, the left or the progressives or the Democrats have kind of lost them. And I think part of that is this

Speaker 1 (17:37.396)
is this sort of single identity focused aperture around you're Latino, you're Asian, right? You're good. You're part of our team, right? And the lack of understanding that people have a lot of different interests that make up their identity. Unfortunately, I think we've seen a lot of people in the, you know, our personal communities gravitate, right? Many of them always were right.

Like, let's be honest, lot of Asian immigrants don't come here as radical progressives. Like, you know, luckily, parents happen to be, but many of them are super conservative, right? Don't believe in LGBTQ rights. Don't believe that, you know, people should be given so-called handouts, right? They think we came here, we worked hard, right? And forget that they may have come here with PhDs, even though they had $3 in their pocket, right? And so that...

sort of interweaving from the margins into call it the center, right? Although I question if it's really the center. think the center over the last, since Reagan has just gone increasingly to the right. And on the left, we've continued to say, let's compromise, let's compromise, let's moderate, let's moderate. And we've been dragged to the right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:53.134)
Right in the world of like storytelling, I think these are real opportunities because the I think institutional understanding of or the institutional reaction to this is let's be safe and revert back to what we used to do. And there's this notion of returning to the center and that the safe default is go back to making the kinds of movies we used to make.

with the people we always made them with, with the stars who have always worked for us in the past, right? And that I think is a existential crisis for Hollywood, right? Because those are the kinds of movies that for the last 22, 23 years have declining ticket sales in US theaters since 2000.

yielded.

Speaker 1 (19:50.094)
So this sort of like return to the past is like, how's that been doing for you? It has not been doing well for you for 20 plus years. So what past are you returning to? if not that Hollywood is a great proxy for the rest of the country, but I do think in this case, it is the same question, right? What great past are we talking about? Whose great past are we talking about?

I actually think that question is even more fascinating of whose great past are we talking about, right? Because I think what great past are we talking about, people can actually define that on their own. But whose great past are we talking about really depends on who's asking the question in first place and then who's presenting it. You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. After a quick break, let's come back to our conversation with the CEO and founder of Marginal Media Works, Sanjay Sharma. Stay tuned.

Speaker 2 (20:48.354)
Conversation. It's the antidote to apathy and the catalyst for relationships. I'm Abhay Dhandekar and I share conversations with global Indians and South Asians so everyone can say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. New episodes weekly wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (21:08.003)
you

Hi, I'm Vivek Murthy. I'm the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. And you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Speaker 2 (21:27.416)
Hi everyone, this is Shevikas Khanna. Hi, I'm Karan Soni. Hello everyone, my name is Tim Franz. Hi, I'm Lilly Singh. Hi, I'm Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and you are listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Speaker 2 (21:46.85)
Welcome back to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's rejoin our conversation now with the CEO and founder of Marginal Media Works, Sanjay Sharma. You know, this notion then of gravitating towards some sort of ideologic center, especially in New Year's space, does that mean that the center of where those levers of power and capital exist depend on

in a way recalibrating back to this notion of we need to make content that reminds us of some, however ill-defined past we're talking about here. mean, like, are we really seeing a shift not just in the ideology of what storytelling is or what storytelling needs to be, but also where the capital and the power levers lie in 2025?

Yeah, absolutely. Although I wouldn't, I mean, I guess I wouldn't say we're seeing a shift. would, my personal view is that never really shifted. Right. And so, and that's kind of the great like irony of this backlash against DEI, certainly in Hollywood, but broadly across like the corporate kind of fortune 500 public company spectrum is

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:04.642)
There was never really that much of a movement to begin with. The perception really is far beyond the reality on this one. So in our industry, short of a number of big announcements by the major studios and streamers, which mind you were generally made during COVID lockdown in the wake of George Floyd's murder, Announcements like.

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 (23:32.13)
We're doubling down and doing a hundred million dollar minority creator fund and stuff like that. Right. That was during a time where there was no production going on anyway. So that money couldn't really be deployed. Right. And then fast forward a year or two years, there was a double strike that took the industry out for another year. So this last

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:54.572)
We call it the 2020s have been arguably the most challenged environment in the film TV industry in its lifespan. And really a kind of shut down in production, right? So easy times to promise gifts. Right. Right. And not have to deliver on them. Right. So not that much, not that much happened. Some, you know, some deals, some overall deals, some first look deals, more.

.

Speaker 1 (24:22.24)
expansion of the pie for large talent who have already already made it right it's easy to say i'm gonna do another big movie with eva duvernay another show with shonda they're established hit makers right and and god bless them and absolutely deserve everything they get and more that's not the same as we're bringing in

They're not on the margin.

Speaker 1 (24:47.86)
emerging new talent, right? And those are people you're already in business with and you're going to continue to remain in business with, right? So it's not really a redistributive kind of approach to changing the narrative system. It's doubling down on the existing narrative system, right? And that it the the I say the irony of that never having really changed, because if you ask filmmakers of color,

what changed in the last few years, I think most of them would say not much. Right. There was there was definitely a feeling that things were going to change. a few examples of some things that, you know, probably a project or two that went that might not have otherwise or a filmmaker that might have gotten a first shot, you know. Sure. But yeah, nothing seismic. Right. And clearly nothing of any permanence.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:39.726)
Nothing seismic.

Speaker 1 (25:45.644)
Right. Yeah. Because it was that easy to say we're doing away with all the shit. Yeah. Yeah. And we've heard a lot of executives say things like, and this is by the way, even before Trump took office, this, this pendulum had already started swinging back. Executives were saying things like, we can't really, we don't have the luxury of diversity anymore. We can't afford diversity anymore, which, you know, for us is like, it's not a

luxury, it's a demographic reality, that you're sort of an existential crisis. If you don't understand the demographics of the country, if you don't understand the growing cultural centers around the world and their influence and their importance for international streaming markets, Latin, South Asia, Southeast Asia, then you won't live in the next hundred years of media. But that perception in Hollywood has just never really stuck.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:44.628)
And I think it's because most of the incumbent power don't really know those worlds. So their value suddenly is like, well, I don't know any hot Singaporean filmmakers, right? Where's my value, right?

Do you have to therefore be a fulcrum in order to evangelize some of that? Is it your job to do that or do you have to create your own lane and live outside of that conversation or both for that matter?

I I thought it would be the former when I started the company, but it turns out to be the latter. The internal kind of the insularity and hegemony of the call it incumbent system is even more dogged than I bargained for. I've. By the way, you were. Yeah. Virtually impenetrable. Right. And so when I, you know, I've worked in the traditional media business early in my career at Warner Brothers and have been.

Impenetrable.

Speaker 1 (27:44.116)
in and out of the call it traditional media business left and went into tech startups. And then one of my, one of the companies I helped start and lead became a pretty big digital video company built entirely on top of YouTube was eventually acquired by a major movie studio, Warner Brothers. Or Machinima. Yeah, Machinima. And so, you know, starting inside of the studio system, working on,

Is it it machinima? Machinima. Thank you. close. You're close.

Speaker 1 (28:13.57)
The Matrix movies, the Chris Nolan Batman movies, the Ocean's movies, some of the, the time, biggest movies in the history of filmed entertainment. even at that time, feeling like this is mid 2000s in the outside world, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, the iPhone, the pace of change is just frenetic. And inside the studio, it may as well have been the 80s. Leaving.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:35.918)
staggering.

Speaker 2 (28:40.974)
Thanks.

And then 10 years later, selling a company to Warner Brothers and re-engaging in the studio system and feeling like it still feels pretty much the same. It's the same people. don't mean similar people. mean, the same person is in the same seat. Same office, same desk. And then starting this company, another five years now, almost 10 years later.

Yeah, nothing's changed.

Speaker 2 (29:04.501)
Yeah

Speaker 1 (29:12.366)
There was a funny quote by Jerry Bruckheimer, kind of storied mega franchise producer when they were making the Top Gun sequel, Maverick, that he had asked every agency head, he calls Brian Lord, Ari Emanuel, give me your top 10 actors right now. And Jerry Bruckheimer, who is an old legend, says he was shocked to see that the same 10 names were on that list, right?

mostly from every agency from when they made the first Top Gun.

Well, it's, it goes back to the longevity of Val Kilmer, guess, to speak to that. But the, the notion that, you know, those seats, those people, the vernacular and the language, and even just the actual thought process is not very much change, which maybe speaks to the impenetrance of, of what that, that circle is. If you have to be someone who then creates your own lane, who is part of a different structure.

where you build the mechanism and the architecture and for that matter, the capital around you so that you can make your own sort of ecosystem in that way. Is it the kind of thing where as you iterate that you're hoping parallels the other system, hoping collaborates with the other system, hoping lives together in some sort of like, you know, coexistent jungle? How does this all play out?

Yeah, great question. So we have built largely outside the system, but they have to work together, right? Because in this industry, unlike music in some ways, the distribution, ultimately distribution is still in the hands of a select group of players, right? So you could, you know, almost anyone can make a movie, you can put it up on YouTube and no one will see it, right? With some exceptions.

Speaker 2 (31:14.552)
Yeah.

And so ultimately, you know, we, our view on this thing is we are symbiotic to the traditional industry. have projects with some of the big studios. Who knows if they will ever get made. I'm not planning or betting on them ever getting made because that traditional theatrical studio development process through production, through distribution, and there are fewer studios now.

And they're making fewer movies. Right. And so our view was you can't, if you're building a traditional production company where that is, those are your kind of dependent partners, then you're building a company for the studios of the last hundred years. And our view was let's start a company, rightly or wrongly, win or lose, that is a studio for the next hundred years. And so that means you're.

independent from the studio system. You may sell into the studio system. You may go make projects and have distributors buy those projects, but they're not gating function. You can get through those gates on your own. Right. And I think over time, and there, by the way, it's not unique. There are companies that have done this and done it masterfully. That could be

A24 that could be Blumhouse, that could be Tyler Perry and Tyler Perry Studios, who truly did it on his own outside of system. So there are players who have, who are lighting this path. So it wasn't like no one's ever done it and we think we can. Not that it's easy. It's obviously incredibly hard, but A24 is now a three and a half billion dollar company. Blumhouse is not, its valuation is not privately known. don't, I don't believe they've taken outside capital, but they're

Speaker 2 (32:44.91)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:04.622)
close corporate relationship with Universal Studios. My guess is on the, it were a private company and raised outside capital, it'd be a two, $3 billion company as well, right? Sure. Maybe more than a, I wouldn't be surprised if it's worth more than A24. Right. Right. And so we do think there is an opportunity now, maybe for the first time in the, it hundred year history of filmed entertainment for the new studios of the next hundred years to be born.

this is the time they will be born, right? Whether we make it or not, and even if we don't, our goal, look, if we turn into the next Warner Brothers or the next A24, that's amazing. But if we die along the way and we got 10 movies, 20 movies, 30 movies made by first-time filmmakers of color, then we played our part in expanding the ecosystem and in changing the narrative system.

You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. After a quick break, let's come back to our conversation with the founder and CEO of Marginal Media Works, Sanjay Sharma. Stay tuned.

Speaker 2 (34:14.048)
Every story told is a lesson learned and every lesson learned is a story waiting to be told. I'm Abhay Dhandekar and I share conversations with global Indians and South Asians so everyone can say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. New episodes weekly wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (34:35.906)
Hi everyone, this is Sitz Re-Ram and you're now listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

Speaker 2 (34:49.495)
Hi, this is Farhan Akhtar. Hi, guys. I'm Ananya Pandey. Hi, this is Madhuri Dixit. And you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing with Abhay Dandekar. Hi there. I'm Abhay Dandekar. And this is Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's rejoin our conversation now with Sanjay Sharma.

I want to go on that same thread because if the end game is either or, or if not, hopefully both, where you do change that narrative and you exist for another hundred years, or at least the mission exists for another hundred years, in your mind and in your own sort of heart and soul, are you an Indian American media executive? Are you a South Asian American media executive? Do you think of yourself in that way? Or, and for that matter, does that label even matter? Yeah.

That is a good question. mean, I am... Yeah, I think of myself as kind of a... I think of myself as an Asian American, South Asian American media executive. I generally default to American. And part of why I do that is partly patriotism, but partly an assertion that we are American. Right? You were born here.

Yep.

I was naturalized in the middle school. I actually, unlike a lot of Americans, had to work hard to become American.

Speaker 2 (36:19.799)
Yeah, yeah. No, there was some effort involved.

was take tests. Yeah. And so I love the idea of just framing it as like, you know, I don't think I have a Wikipedia entry, but if it just said American media executive, right, American entrepreneur. And, and I say that, and I think about this often, it's a great question, because it's not to hide from being a, an Asian.

I'm not right.

Speaker 1 (36:47.616)
executive, Asian American or South Asian, not hiding from that at all, embrace that and lean into that as well. Right. But it's this, the hyphenate is, is double edged in some ways, right. Because the hyphenization of it, the thing I would hate for it to do is to take away from the singularity of owning being American. Right.

That part of your identity speaks very loudly to your work. And aside from your name, is there a thread that lives in your work that is distinctly Indian? Are there elements of your leadership that are components of your Indian-ness or your South Asian-American-ness or your Asian-American-ness? And for that matter, does that actually matter to you or the people you work

Yeah, it there I think there are it absolutely matters to me. I don't know if it matters to the people I work with. And I don't know if they can tell or not, honestly. But there are definitely elements to it that are kind of our, I think, cultural heritage and lineage without generalizing, obviously, because it's a big country with a lot of people. But I do think humility and humbleness is something, you know, we are raised with.

We're generally not super brash, arrogant, know-it-alls. There are obviously exceptions. Certain FBI directors.

Okay, deportation clue number two coming up. But I mean that notion that you mentioned, right? You live in, you have an experience as an immigrant that I don't. And there's unto itself, someone could look at the both of us on this screen right now and they say, hey, there's two South Asian Americans or Indian Americans, but our lived experiences might be completely different.

Speaker 1 (38:42.262)
Right, right. Exactly. Right. And so as you know, I was young when we moved here, but you know, technically first I was not born here. Yeah. And my parents were older when they immigrated here. They were they didn't come here as as college students or grad students. Right. Like a lot of Asian immigrants who you came here in the late 70s, my came in the early 70s. Right. And they were already my dad was already a professor. Right. And so we were raised with some of these

it traditional values. My parents are not super religious. They're atheists and Marxists. So I was raised kind of with an ethical and cultural compass, but not really a religious one. We'd go to puja every Sunday, but my parents are like, it's like social hanging out.

Sure.

Speaker 2 (39:33.334)
And some of those anchors maybe are a little bit different growing up in Baton Rouge versus growing up in Los Angeles and a different metropolis.

Yeah. So I do think there are, you know, at my leadership style or the way I look at building teams is a little, it's definitely not what Elon would call hardcore. It's probably the opposite. Right. It is much more empathetic and compassionate in some, you know, we try to build an ethical framework for running the business and growing the business. Don't believe it has to be hard edge all the time.

that doesn't mean you don't have to grind. And that's another probably cultural value, which is maybe not a good one, but I work just insanely hard every day of the week, morning till night. And startups are kind of full contact sports. If you want a nine to five job, then being in a startup environment is probably not the right fit for you, right? You do this as a side job.

So just that work ethic and not to play into, you know, model minority tropes, but the work ethic I was definitely raised with, you got to grind. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so, but, that was not antithetical to treat people kindly, treat people with respect.

Sure, not at the expense of.

Speaker 1 (41:01.748)
Yeah, not at the expense of other people's dignity or their health, right? And there is a way to balance that. They're not mutually exclusive, right? So yeah, I do think there's definitely a clear Indian, South Asian cultural values that I walk with every day. They may not be obvious to the people around me. Right.

And, and I mean, I think they, inform you, you, you are aware of it. and on top of that, how, how they manifest themselves in your own day to day, even sort of like your worldview as a person of color and as, as someone who's, you know, leading as professional, it speaks to sort of like the growth and how you navigate through that growth. And I want to touch on one thing, you know, as far as like the startup culture that you just mentioned here, when you go from a startup.

to a bigger orbit and now find yourself within an establishment or at least again, having to be symbiotic with an establishment. What do you think leaders like you need to unlearn about themselves to sort of successfully make that growth transition, if you will, without losing or even risking the kind of basics of their mission vision value?

There's definitely, I don't know that I've been great at this, but I think it, you know, once you hit kind of this step function up into another tier of whatever it is, entrepreneurship or management, senior management or something like that. Yeah. When you're going from, Hey, I'm managing a team of three to I'm managing a team of 30 to I'm running a company of 300 to what, you know, I haven't built.

companies that much bigger than that, but you kind of have to unlearn a lot of things at each step. And you realize, I think that the very skills that got you to step one may not be the skills that are helpful for step two. In fact, they may be detrimental. Right. And, but it's a, it's a, it's a good question. It's a tough question because I think, you know, you, you have to, in some ways, harden up a little bit once you're

Speaker 1 (43:18.284)
running bigger organizations and managing lots of people. It is harder to have individual personal relationships and you know, hey, my door is always open and come in any time, you know, that's easy when it's a small company. Once you've got 200 people, 300 people, you just can't have your door open all the time or you don't get anything done. Hierarchy, I think starts to fall into place and you kind of have to unlearn.

having a personal relationship with everyone can be counterproductive when there's two layers of managers between you and line employee. And people can't feel like they can go around their boss and come straight to you. It undercuts the manager in between. Right. Right. Right. And so I, you know, you, kind of have to learn how to, and it's why I like zero to one.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:04.278)
You made layers for a reason.

Speaker 1 (44:14.476)
very early stage startups, which are probably the hardest stage, but just the most fun, the most fluid, the most kind of like five person team, basketball squad, everyone's carrying something, right? And you kind of move up and down the court together. Once the organizations get bigger, you have to surrender a little bit to system and process and implement system and process. And that is a tough, that level of scaling.

some of the other guests on your show have way more experience than I do. And I gotta learn that, know, hopefully this company gets bigger and I'll have to relearn and unlearn.

Yeah. Well, but you you mentioned a word that that's often a common theme there, right? Just like, what do you actually, what do you actually let go of? What do you surrender to? What do you actually unimplement, if you will? And how do you sort of like recalibrate and redefine the confines of what you do? We could talk about all this forever, but I want to get you out of here on this one, which is those intersections that you live in. you know, again, this, this notion of intersectionality is

been around for a long time, but the ones that you particularly live in, whether it's entrepreneurial venture or media or tech, particularly in an era where we're kind of at these different inflection points, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in any industry for that matter, but particularly in the media space, this inflection point of tech

formerly being an important collaborator, growing to being a very key stakeholder, to in many ways being viewed as, like it or not, potentially a threatening driver of the work. What makes you, in seeing that evolution, what makes you optimistic about that intersection of media and tech, particularly from a

Speaker 2 (46:15.874)
very relationship and sort of human lens. Hopefully that makes sense by.

Yeah, I think so. You know, I think it makes sense. I'm just pausing because it's a good question, especially at this moment in time for the media industry, which, you know, stock prices off historic, you know, probably 30 year lows over the last few years, partly pandemic, partly strikes, but generally secular trends. you know, like I said, I think people forget that percentage of household income spent on movies is

You know, it was lower than it's ever been. And US ticket sales have been declining since 2000, 2002. Not a healthy, robust, industry. So technology, I think this is one of the few industries out there that are a multi hundred billion dollar global industries that have not been totally dislocated by technology. That has started to happen with Netflix, obviously.

But even that is really distribution, right? Distributing movies through the internet into your personal device or home, right? Right, right. It has not really changed the way the industry, the DNA of the industry is still the same as it's been, right? The executives, most of the executives who work at Netflix, Amazon two years ago worked at Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount, Sony or Fox, right? So it's still the same people with the same

Ways of thinking the same relationships and networks, the same ways of valuing talent and source material and content, right? And that thinking has, you know, remains very centered and has defaulted even more so to big IP and big talent. And so that we think is an opportunity for technology to really create operating leverage in new studios.

Speaker 2 (48:05.527)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:15.508)
And to really create a democratizing effect on studios in the way technology created a democratizing effect on music. Right. So cost of production came down, distribution became essentially ubiquitous direct to consumer and artists like Chance the rapper could get discovered on SoundCloud. Right. And so, SoundCloud may not be the best example, but Spotify for sure.

Now you have more people creating music, producing music and releasing music than ever. Discovery obviously is still a huge problem. That's why I think you will continue to need curatorial brands that stand for something. And that's what Def Jam Records was. That's what Interscope was. That's what Capital and Motown were and still are. That's what A24 has become. That's what Blumhouse is. That's what Tyler Perry Studio is. You kind of have a sense of what you're getting. Right. And so.

We see technology as a tool and enabler, and especially with AI, a very democratizing tool, but nothing replaces human creativity, human storytelling, human connections, human performance, right? There are proxies for those things. We see these tool sets and we're quietly working away on some of these things and matching them with data, which is widely available around.

what audiences are responding to and like and want to see more of which talent is emerging as just a new way of finding material, finding talent in the margins that Hollywood isn't looking for, doesn't know how to look for, even if they found would say, I don't think that kid's a star. And we would say, well, we disagree. And so we're quietly chipping away at what are the different ways we can apply

technology to this industry that has been and remains fairly analog still to build a new kind of, I describe it as like an operating system right underneath the studio. And if we saw the studio of the next hundred years, whether we do it or not, it has to have a technology foundation behind it that will enable it to.

Speaker 1 (50:33.044)
look at the world's talent, the world's stories, the world's content creators in a totally different way versus the insular purely relationship industry as it's historically been.

Well, on that note, you know, as someone who is making the world look at these questions and look at that infrastructure in a totally democratized and accessible way with a lot of harmony between those human relationships and the tech out there, I think more and more people are becoming really aware of your work and appreciative of it. And I know that there are a lot of teams and people out there who are looking to you for both.

you know, thought leadership, but then also, you know, all the work you're doing is as really beacons of light in many corners. So Sanjay, thank you so much. Honestly, we could have talked forever about all this stuff and I really appreciate you being here with us. I hope we can visit with you again down the road.

Dude, really my pleasure. Long time listener, first time guest. up the work. Pleasure, Long overdue.

Really.

Speaker 2 (51:41.644)
Long overdue. We'll do it again. Thanks again, Sanjay. And you can learn more about him on LinkedIn and at Marginal.Media. If you're enjoying this all, please subscribe, write a review, follow and share. Trust me, I know what I'm doing with whoever you know. Until next time, I'm Abhay Dhandekar.