Livecamp stories: Culture Genesis
It’s a dope live gameshow.
What happens when the audience is the game? Livecamp focused on companies building at the intersection of live streaming and audience participation and Culture Genesis is doing just that–and doing it for urban, multicultural audiences that are vastly underserved by current digital entertainment.
Culture Genesis is a digital studio that focuses on creating culturally-relevant digital apps and products, with their first project being Trivia Mob. Trivia Mob puts the audience at the centre of the trivia-based live game and uses influencers and elements of trending urban culture (music & fashion) to create a brand new form of digital entertainment harnessing live streaming. Read our interview with Culture Genesis co-founder, Cedric J Rogers, on the importance of this venture for him and his co-founder Shaun Newsum, as well as the challenges of trying to bring the technology of Silicon Valley to LA’s entertainment industry.
S- Who are you and what did you do before starting Culture Genesis?
I’m Cedric J Rogers, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Culture Genesis. I’m originally from Houston Texas and I have a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina A&T State University, I also have an MBA from Emory Goizueta School of Business. I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I spent the majority of my career working for Apple, where I started as an systems engineer before moving into the apps team. When the iPhone was launched I became passionate about mobile apps. Since Apple, I’ve built a couple of startups, one of which, Looklive.com (YC Summer 2016), is an app to browse influencer fashion and buy the look.
Shaun Newsum, is my co-founder and CTO, and we share responsibilities at Culture Genesis. I’m CEO, focusing on strategy, fundraising, business development and marketing. Shaun is originally from Brooklyn, NY, he exited his first business at 18 yrs old! He then went on to get a degree in software engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology. Shaun is a video stream expert. He was one of the first engineers for MLB Advanced Media where he focused on live streaming. He moved on to Vevo where he led the build out of Vevo on Google Chromecast.
S- What are you working on?
We’re building a digital studio in Santa Monica, focused on remixing digital technology for urban, multicultural audiences. Our first product is Trivia Mob — a live trivia game show for urban culture using popular influencers as hosts.
S- Explain your product in 3 words?
dope live gameshow
S- What has been your biggest challenge so far during the Betaworks Camp program?
As our Studio is based in LA, we’ve been traveling back and forth between both coasts while participating in Livecamp — that’s been a logistical challenge. But the largest challenge in general building our company and our first product has been to bring together the worlds of tech and entertainment. Creatives flow in their way and tech folks flow in their way and we’re trying to bridge that gap. It’s not insurmountable, but there’s definitely a sense of inertia. It’s something we have anticipated and we’re excited to be offering a new mix of entertainment and tech built from the ground up for urban culture. The audience we want to serve has not seen anything like this before — that’s why it’s an opportunity.
There’s not a lot of trust between Silicon Valley and LA — creatives sometimes feel that the tech entrepreneurs don’t value content and creativity. So there’s always a healthy scepticism from the entertainment industry towards technology. But consumers want an interactive media experience on their phone and that’s what we’re building.
“… there’s always a healthy scepticism from the entertainment industry towards technology. But consumers want an interactive media experience on their phone and that’s what we’re building.”
S- Why did you apply for Betaworks Camp?
Shaun is from NYC and he knew all about Betaworks, the companies they’ve built and the various projects they’ve run. We were particularly interested in the Giphy success story and Betaworks’ early stage investments in Rap Genius and Medium. So between these previous investments and what we’d seen John [Borthwick] write and speak about in the media, we felt like he’d understand our focus on developing products for the multicultural audiences. And when we started talking with Betaworks it was clear they understood and could bring value.
S- Why did you build this product?
Shaun and I knew we wanted to build Culture Genesis to develop technology for multicultural audiences. This year Nielsen has published a diverse intelligence series where they examine the impact of digital technology on different multicultural audiences. For example 90% of African Americans households own a smartphone and have a higher use of social networking, watching video and streaming music than others. And 73% of African Americans and 72% of US Hispanics 13 and older identify as gamers compared to 66% of the total population. From the Nielsen research we confirmed three key things: multicultural audiences have mobile devices and that they love gaming, messaging and video streaming services. And they are enthusiastic about interactive experiences that are reflective and representative of them.
One of our business advisors, Jason Geter (Co-founder of Grand Hustle Records with TI the rapper) wanted to start by building digital video platform, but we felt like Trivia Mob would be the best first entry for our company so that we could cultivate a relationship with our audience. That’s what made us do it — we looked at what was happening in the live trivia game space and wanted to make it highly relevant to urban culture and our core audience.
S- If you could get introduced to one person to help the development of your product, who would it be?
It would have to be Jay Z. Jay Z sat down for his first interview after dropping his ‘4:44’ album on the Rap Radar podcast and he said, “We are the culture, nothing moves without us”. And I agree with him. That’s why we need to focus on developing technology for the culture first. That’s the reason why we call ourselves Culture Genesis.
Trivia Mob epitomises the new merging of Silicon Valley and LA, showing a clear example of how the two can come together to create a new form of entertainment. Trivia Mob is also the manifestation of two tech industry veterans coming together to create something that’s built from the ground up for audiences previously overlooked or underserved–and that’s pretty dope.
You can download Trivia Mob now from the App Store and tune in to play live every Sunday at 9PM (EST). You can read the media coverage from their launch on TechCrunch, Black Enterprise and Yahoo Finance.
This is the fifth and final post in our series that dives into the Livecamp founders’ journeys into the tech industry, their biggest challenges and hanging out at Betaworks. Read the fourth post on Bunch, here.
Betaworks Camp is a thematic 3-month accelerator program at Betaworks, NYC. Stay up-to-date on Camp company announcements and future programs on Twitter: @thebetacamp
