Last October, I was diagnosed, by my Sloan Fellow cohort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as an “entrepreneurial creative.” How, as a Togolese-French-American magazine publisher and editor I got to become a Fellow at MIT is another story, which I will save for the conclusion of this article. In any event, I was told a few months ago that “entrepreneurial creative” was my career anchor. That attribute explained much of my journey as a media entrepreneur in London, New York and Paris.
Most people tend to identify me with the Trace brand, particularly Trace Magazine, a publication I launched out of my damp Clerkenwell Road basement bedroom in November 1996, when I was a hard-partying 25 year-old.
In crafting the new vision I had for Trace Magazine, I sensed that it could be imagined as a direct translation of my previous creative passions. I had a pretty strong feeling that music, particularly hip hop, R&B and Metalheadz-inspired drum n bass, should drive my new editorial mission. It had to do with the way that I’d learnt to fuse the energy of the beats with observations on the London fashion, film and art scenes. I also knew that I needed to be a lot more like Jefferson Hack, my mentor at Dazed & Confused who took me under his wing one day in 1994 after I walked into his office and told him I wanted to work with him. For free.
At Dazed & Confused I learned everything I could about magazine editing and publishing from him and his business partner, the fast-talking photographer Rankin. At 112 Old Street, I became a sponge who’d quickly acquired the basic tools and skills and human resource tips needed to launch my own magazine. So with some unsecured funds from Barclays Department of Trade and Industry I did it. A short-lived hip hop-themed monthly called True Magazine.
So after I moved with my 19 year-old wife and those three staffers down the road to 65 Clerkenwell, I realised I could do it again. Under a new name, Trace, and a brand new True-looking Trace logo from my art director Graham Rounthwaite. Trace became the identity of my media ventures for next 15 years.
From Jefferson and Rankin I learnt the power of personal connections and informal networks. I learnt it was possible, as a young journalist with a deep expertise in a specific field of the arts, namely hip hop, to become an entrepreneur. In those days of easy desktop publishing, where I’d already met many of the underground musicians who were then abusing the Cubase software, all one needed were a few talented writers – whom we’d glorified with “editor” titles -, a few good photographers, and a really good graphic designer – we called them “art directors” because as young, untested publishers we couldn’t afford to pay them what they were really worth on the job market.
In the Spring of 1998, after publishing Trace out of Clerkenwell for 18 months, I packed up once again, and moved to New York City, 476 Broome Street, right in the heart of SoHo. That was a risky business decision, because I never knew where the following month’s rent would come from, but I knew, from the Clerkenwell/Old Street days, just how important it was to be physically close to the creative community.
In Manhattan’s first dot-com environment, it was extremely difficult, at first, getting started as a young entrepreneur running a small magazine business without financial backers. But once again I learnt on the job by surrounding myself with a devoted team – a couple of editors who had followed me from London. We learnt from each other and supported each other in this high-risk journalistic endeavor. We learnt the importance of deadlines the hard way, because we were publishing a monthly magazine and, unlike in London, New Yorkers don’t suffer latecomers gladly. We learnt the importance of constant communication. As my small team was not fully compensated in those Spring and Summer 1998 months after we moved to Broome Street, I had to learn to keep them focused on the end goal, which was survival in the cutthroat Manhattan media market.
Our efforts and sacrifices paid off handsomely, because just six years after I’d launched Trace Magazine I was able to meet new business partners and secure $15 million in fresh funding from Goldman Sachs to expand Trace Magazine and launch a new spin off company called Trace TV. This all happened thanks to Richard Wayner, who is the one person who would end up having the biggest impact on my professional life after he resigned from his high-paying Goldman Sachs job and became my business partner in February 2002.
Richard and I complemented each other well. I was the Togolese-French culture-fiend but who’d learnt the trade in London; he was the Boston-born, Bronx-bred, Harvard and Stanford-trained Caribbean investment banker who’d risen to a Vice President’s position at Goldman’s legendary global headquarters on Broad Street. In addition to the highly successful Trace TV spin-off, Richard and I ended up launching another profitable New York and Los Angeles-based advertising and marketing business – ironically named True Agency – which rapidly drummed up blue chip clients like Nissan and Hilton Hotels in its first few years of operations.
The economy was booming until 2008, and we kept expanding our operations, opening outposts in far-flung places like Nashville, Tennessee. Then, on September 15th, 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the business environment would never be the same. Clients retreated en masse, and we ended up shutting down Trace Magazine, which had stopped growing in the face of competition from web magazines between 2008 and 2009, publishing the final issue (a special “Brasil 2010” edition) on November 16th, 2010. The previous summer, we’d sold the fast-growing Trace TV business to a consortium comprised of the TV channel’s French managers and two French private equity firms. True Agency was also downsized from a full-service, multi-office advertising agency to a six-person New York and Paris-based consultancy centered on my own network. (Richard returned to Wall Street, where he is currently working as a principal alongside a top Goldman Sachs partner who launched his own firm.)
So, what have I learnt from all these experiences? I learnt that it is important to attach clear values to a brand, and expand a creative business while always staying true to what that brand stands for. Trace was an urban magazine that became a global, multiplatform media company devoted to transcultural styles and ideas. I learnt that, when one works hard off a great instinct, it is always possible to ultimately receive the proper funding and support needed to turn a vision into a reality. The most important thing is to get started, and I must say it ended up working fantastically well for the Trace family, because the institutional funding allowed us to expand the footprint of a niche magazine into a transnational media corporation that, within a few years, was able to claim millions of subscribers worldwide.
I learnt that it is important to focus on quality in content creation because although the lowest common denominator might be tempting at times, quality content always prevails in the media business. Most importantly, I learnt that it is important not to spread oneself too thin, which is precisely what I did between 2005 and 2008, when I was running my businesses all over the world, unable to follow up on important meetings and basic human resource issues. As I traveled constantly between LA, NY, Paris, London and the other cities in which we were operating, I became the absent captain, the one who could only be reached through – and who would often be late for – conference calls.
Most importantly, I learnt that I loved nothing more than to create beautiful magazines with fantastic writers like Eddie Brannan (whom I have collaborated with since my 1995 True Magazine days) and Anicée Gaddis, my favorite French-sounding Georgia Southern Belle. I met and got to work with amazing photographers like Terry Richardson, Ellen von Unwerth and Marc Baptiste (a friend for life). I was invited to the funeral of the mother of Wu-Tang head RZA, and was privileged enough to have an unknown singer named Alicia Keys wait for me with her demo in our Broome Street office, and a few years later I chatted with a budding teenage singer called Rihanna who told me she’d recently moved to New Jersey from her home in Barbados. In 2007, after an improvised Trace photo short, I showed my office bathroom to an aspiring singer named Katy Perry. I feel that we made history with Trace Magazine.
Now having studied political science at Sciences Po in Paris and financial economics at London University, I guess I was never meant to become a music or style magazine journalist, let alone a serial media entrepreneur, but somehow I managed to find a way to operate independently in the creative industries of the biggest metropolises for more than 15 years.
So what am I doing at MIT, then? I came to MIT in June of 2011, because I wanted to step away from New York’s media and entertainment world of glitter and glam. I wanted, over the course of the one-year Sloan Fellowship, to craft a new vision for my career, focusing on a bigger social mission that has everything to do with Africa Rising. I now want to leverage my experience as a successful media entrepreneur to contribute to economic development in several African nations, starting with a new venture in Togo, the country where I was born 40 years ago. I came to MIT to understand technology, and how my team and I can effectively leverage the latest innovations in technology to provide a global viewpoint on evolving transcultural societies in Africa and elsewhere. I came to MIT to recapture that Clerkenwell spirit of hope, ambition, humility and open-mindedness.
Claude Grunitzky will be appearing at Cr8net on 24th April 2012.
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