terrific. Well, thank you very much for welcoming me and then having me today and then, Yeah, delighted to share my experience. Um, sort of business standpoint. Um, I'll start back back, actually, my early career. So I did my undergrad at U C. Berkeley. Um, very quickly. After graduating, I decided I want to go to business school. Not because I wanted to. You Thio go into finance, which was a rarity at the time, but because I wanted Thio know all of the skills and, you know, achieve my MBA and then kind of know who I was gonna be sitting across the table for him. So that's not a traditional MBA trajectory. But, you know, something that ended up working out well for me, I did my I did, actually. Ah, year business school at the CIA, Anderson Graduate School of Business. And then the other year I did in Cape Town, South Africa, just because I knew I wanted in international slant on everything I was doing from a business standpoint. So finished that in 2000 to 2000, maybe early 2003. Andi was quickly recruited by the Nielsen company. So by the measurement company Nielsen. They asked if I run a Web business. I said no. And I said, Perfect. Here are 18 B two B Web properties that we would like you to run. Um, their revenue models ranged from it was traditionally print, so they were making the switch from analog to digital. So it was an interesting time. Thio, um you know, jump into the digital space. So I took that on. I moved to New York. To do that was in Manhattan. I spent about 2.5 years with Nielsen. Um, you know, we grew everything, you know across the portfolio had about six people working for me, eh? So we would go basically site by site, property by property, identify the revenue streams, build them out. We've invested one property. But, you know, at the end of my 2.5 years there, we had successfully turned on monetization and successfully transition from print publications and or conventions Thio, you know. Ah, strong digital presence. There was revenue driving. So everything from subscription revenue to e commerce advertising. Um, which led me to actually be recruited by InterActiveCorp by a very dealer to move back to Los Angeles, which is where I'm from. Eso was was offered the position of running the national Strategy team for advertising sales. S I moved back to L. A way had a about. So I guess we're doing about $70 million a year in revenue across the icy portfolio, which at that time included sites like Expedia, CitySearch, Levi match dot com and a few smaller sites. But those were the large revenue generators. And you know what we did was go in and we work with the CEOs across the various companies and we identify advertising opportunities permanently high impact. So at that point, I had about 15 people working for me. Um, you know, 2.5 years out of business school on, do you know, really, um, explained to sites like Ticketmaster match dot com who had traditionally established revenue streams, be they ticketing or subscription revenue through the dating service on drily worked with them to figure out how advertising could complement the revenue on an overall basis, which was for them. You know, if Ticketmaster saw point 001% slide in ticket sales, it was materially relevant to their business. So, you know, working with the CEOs to determine what what you know, the right metrics were and how we wanted to work with them, and how the national sales team could actually complement their core businesses was kind of my focus there. From there, I was rehired by the then private Nielsen company to run Hollywood reporter dot com, which I did for 5.5 years. When I inherited the site, it was about 1.2 million unique. No social hooks. Um, there was a print publication on a daily basis that went to the studio executives and then network executives in television networks in Hollywood. But it's a very inside baseball for the entertainment industry type of publication. Eso I worked with my team. They're running digital, holding the P and L. Over the course of five years, Thio relaunched. The site relaunched the print publication in conjunction with the stakeholders on the print side on drily Grow it. I think when I left it was about 21 million unique. So significantly, you know, grew audience. We actually managed to flip the revenue mix from primarily prints of primarily digital, Um, you know worked very, very closely with Facebook and YouTube early days to make sure that, you know, our video offerings and social hooks were, as you know, materially relevant and optimizes they could be. But again, that was, you know, something that you know, it was directly I wouldn't have had that experience had it not been, you know, given the opportunity to kind of build from the ground up, which is fantastic. So I've always had great mentors along the way, you know, given me great, you know, chances toe build on and learn by experience. From there, I founded a company with a couple of colleagues from the Hollywood Reporter's From World in Digital. Um, there was truly a startup. I think there were four of us when I joined on, but the notion was that we could go out. We could take the millennial male space. A zit relates to Internet audience. Ondas really kind of roll it up from a representation model. My specific purview was to acquire some of the sites that you know we deemed relevant on. Basically, they were publishers. I'm sure you've heard of a lot of themselves, like barstool sports, you know, World star hip hop on the music side the chive. Um, you know, and it really ran the gamut from music toe lifestyle s over the course of 2.5, 33 years. There, we acquired nine sites, the largest of which was approx cycle approx dot com, which was heavily music focused, started by the founder of Rockets Records. Um, we then, you know, after we raised to $18 million rounds, about 42 million in total with our seed as well as our institutional rounds, the first round was led by I V p at the Silicon Valley. So, you know, cut my chops on. You know, the Silicon Valley road show dealing with private equity as well as VCs S O. You know, that was kind of my first entree into into dealing, you know, the startup level with institutional capital and then, you know, really building on the, you know, the board that we had and figuring out how we could grow the company and then scale it rapidly. Our second round was led by WPP, a handful of other strategic so again, more experience dealing with, you know, the finances of the company. The growth trajectory, the strategy. So I was the chief strategy officer there until we sold the company Thio Warner Music in 2016. Um, from there I started consulting. Um, I had a number of clients that I kind of took with me. They wanted to work with me on various projects, so I actually ended up moving to Mexico. Um, started a medical business in Mexico and about two years ago, Um, a gentleman whom I've known for about a decade ago named BJ Ski. He's one of the largest hip hop DJs in the world who spent 10 years of serious 10 years, eight years of I heart 10 years of serious. Um, you know, asked me if I wanted to join Dash Radio, which is a streaming audio company, that he founded this commercial free. So it's a commercial free, free app. The best way to think of it is, you know, serious sex. Um, without the monthly payments without the advertising. So you know the reason he founded it was primarily because he was so frustrated with, you know, 20 minutes per hour of advertising on his distressed real radio programs and and thought there was a better way that, you know, the radio and then audio specifically could be consumed in a curated fashion. Eso We've been working together for the past two years. Um, initially, as we enter 2020 you know, we we took over a massive 25,000 square foot space on the Walk of Fame in Los Angeles. We're holding events regularly beginning January of last year. Um, you know, we booked about $5 million in revenue in six weeks, which for the business was unheard of just because they've never really explored revenue opportunities. Andi. Then you know, we opened. We opened officially in February, and as of March 15th, we were forced to shut down the physical space, which is interesting. So you know that, you know, consider that part of my journey just because it forced us to take a look at the core business and say, you know, we had Thio let some people go. We have to make tough decisions around where we wanted to focus our attention. Resource is etcetera. We ended up keeping the space despite the fact that, you know, we were just streaming our audio from there and And we partnered with Twitch very early on to do live stream. So I think to date, we've done over 600 live streams with Twitch established a wonderful relationship with them on through the course of the pandemic. You know, we have, you know, despite everyone kind of working from home with the exception of a few sound engineers that we had in the office on a daily basis, Um, you know, we you know, we really spent most of the year at least half of the year, half of your planning for where we wanted the business to go on the rest of the year, executing against a lot on. But it really has transitioned into a business that is kind of virtual experience first. And you know what I mean by that is we work with all under the large third party platforms, everyone from YouTube to twitch, Thio, roadblocks, Thio, animal crossing, Thio work with three epic guys on fortnight we work with, you know, a number of being publishers. We did a huge event in December of 2020 with discord where we powered their first ever music festival and in five days of programming with everyone from cascade to dead mouse to snoop Dog to really bringing together talent and, you know, helping them, helping them explore how they could release music and then create audio experiences across the metaverse. Um, in a way that's meaningful and impactful has been the focus of my work for the past six months. Um, we're currently working with, you know, many of those same partners on developing what, the 2021 Um, sweet looks like from a development standpoint, our next event is gonna be a roadblocks events, you know, within that platform, Um and I think, you know, fundamentally, that's that's been the most. You know, it's something that we would have gotten to as a business. Anyway, I think it's only been accelerated by, you know, having Thio not work from an office with physical events being limited, you know, we were limited with what we could do. And I think you know, we we typically bring in artists that this quarter that I mentioned, we brought in, you know, 15 artists, three of whom were like Coachella mainstage headliners, and we actually had them perform at our space, and we live streamed it to switch to YouTube, etcetera. So that's our view on how we can monetize and how we can take musical experiences and audio experiences to the next level immediately while we wait for, you know, large scale, you know, real life experiences toe.

the elevator pitches. You know, as I mentioned, we're serious Exam for free without the ads. Um, you know, it's a curated experience. We have over 84 stations on the platform, over 15 million monthly active users, over two million daily active users, about 156 DJs and 432 shows. So that that just gives you a sense of kind of the breath of what we bring to bear on. You know, not only our platform, but we have distribution deals with 56 partners. Everyone from LG Smart TV side. You know, smart speakers were the number one app in GM automobiles, Believe it or not, even over navigation, just because we kind of very favorable deal with their connected device team. So they've been great for us, just in terms of visibility or in mostly Ford vehicles. You Cadi motorcycle just launched a new motorcycle based music experience, So we're basically distributing our content far and wide. Um, each of those deals look different. So, you know, part of my responsibility is thio find partners and work with our business development team to find partners. That makes sense. And you know, Allow us Thio garner more users as well as kind of put the put the content we're creating out there on a daily basis, I guess the, you know, the customers were And, you know, we're we we try and work agnostic lee across the audio space, so And if you go to the dash radio app, you'll see that we have a soundcloud, um, station on dash. We license our podcast to Spotify. We don't view virtually, you know, the closest we come again is probably serious, But we don't do any of those as direct competitors just because what we're offering it's completely free. It's completely odd free. And, you know, we're focused more on the experience, the authenticity, and, you know, our relationships in the space. And a lot of that came from, you know, D j skis relationships over his career, you know, in terrestrial radio. Some of it came from my experience in the music space, but yeah, we've we've created, I think, a nice little company that has grand aspirations to power audio across the metaverse, which it sounds massive, and it is massive. But I would say over the past 12 months, we've made great strides in making sure that, you know, we're able to execute that vision. So we tie in, we do tie in brands. So this space, um, that I mentioned is fully branded. So we have, you know, our basketball court is sponsored by Stock X. Currently, we've got, you know, with virtually every vertical category you can imagine from beverage Thio. You know, Thio fashion Thio sports is kind of covered in the way we associate our product with with, you know, experiences. It truly is experiential eso. So you're not gonna hear, you know, standard I be advertising. But you might see, you know, a branded placement on one of our stations. You might see a custom station. So, you know, we worked last year. We worked with the UFC to create a custom station around one of their fights s so they'll pay us for that. And, um, it's not traditional advertising. It's much more farm or organic on DNA. Now, we've moved into a space where we're actually being paid by the platforms to create content, um, paid by platforms to create content or paid by brands to be to participate in that content so it could be a a mountain dew lounge in a fortnight. Um, that's paid for by Mountain Dew that our developers work, you know, an unreal engines pipe pipe experience into fortnight and that that example doesn't exist. But that's just, you know, theoretically how we work with game publishers and trying to think of, uh, with the discord side. You know, that was a charity event where discord actually paid us. Um, Thio go out and sourced talent and actually produce the event for them. So yeah, there. And I guess the last one I mentioned are, you know, this production. We currently have seven shows in production with various distribution partners from Netflix to snap thio. You know, YouTube, thio, some smaller upstarts and then kind of metaverse companies that wanna create content in a meaningful way and associate music with it. So, yeah, they're multiple revenue streams. Standard advertising is not one of them. At this point, I don't think it will be in the future either. If you look at, you know, um, you know, they just wrote down another billion dollars against Pandora, so I think the, you know, I be audio ad model is fundamentally flawed. Eso That's something that we don't you know intentionally don't want to touch. But that's not to say that way won't get creative and and plugging and brands in a meaningful way.

so my responsibilities on the chief business officer. It's after radio. My responsibilities are pretty wide. I've always held the P and L. So finance and financial planning and strategy is a core fundamental piece of it. So revenue generation, expense control cost controls around, you know, some of things I mentioned where we would identify departments that you know don't necessarily fit with the company's media vision, you know, were forced to make corrections. Um, business developments indication. So, you know, and I have a lot of help across various departments. Eso I work closely with the content team. They work closely with the execution team. On the events side, I work closely with all of those, but at the end of the day, I'm the one that plans the, you know, the incoming revenue and outgoing expense associated with each events and or production that we do. E think you know, top three priorities are definitely revenue generation, um, strategic positioning for the company as we go forward. And we're, you know, probably going to raise, um, our series A within the next 12 months. So, you know, planning and making sure that the company is in a space and materials have been prepared so that we could go out and have meaningful conversations with the seas. And, you know, we were fortunate enough to have, um, some very, very patient and very astute investors that invested in our seed round who've been helping, um, you know, Passport Capital, specifically nimble bunch of capital and a number of high net worth individuals who just saw the vision and, you know, agreed with it on Ben, I guess weekly work hours that that really varies depending on the week. I mean, some weeks, it will be extremely heavy. And you know, we'll work through the weekends. Um, you know, if you ask, my girlfriend should say, I'm always working, so you know, it's it's definitely not a 9 to 5 job, but I, you know, find that I thrive and, you know, more dynamic, kind of always on situation where I can add value. And, you know, I think we have hired a number of people within the company that kind of think the same way. So when we when we need to lean into it, everyone is on the same page