Damian Pelliccione, co-founder of Revry, shares insights on building investor relationships before needing capital and securing funding from top-tier.
Damian Pelliccione, co-founder of Revry, shares insights on building investor relationships before needing capital and securing funding from top-tier investors for their LGBTQ+-first streaming service.
I would try to really enforce the importance of mental and physical well-being and how that really relates to your performance. I'm in my 40s now, so it's a lot different than when I was in my 30s starting this business. It's almost like a non-starter for me. Like my mental health, my physical health take precedent over, you know, my leadership because I know how much better of a leader I can be and that I am when I prioritize those things. So that's my biggest advice to make sure that you have a really good mental and health regime. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today I'm really excited about the founder that we have joining us today. You know we're going to be having a really inspiring conversation. We're going to be talking about his experience in Mumbai, the experience too with pitching investors at an early stage, what raising capital during the co
days look like and then also you know being involved and related you know and in communication with Goldman Sachs and some of those initiatives that they have around their accelerator program. But again you know the building the scaling the financing all of the good stuff that we like to hear. So without further ado let's welcome our guest today Damian Pelichion. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for excuse me. Thanks so much for having me. This is such a treat. So born and raised in Toronto, Damian. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Yes, I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Um lived there my entire uh childhood. Uh was raised by an immigrant family. My father was actually an immigrant from Italy during World War II when he was a lot younger, youngest of six. And my mother was second generation Canadian uh Italian. Uh her grandparents
had immigrated um to Canada. I have one sister. My dad is since deceased. Um he was a serial entrepreneur. Uh created a family business with my uncle and my cousins to be the second largest Italian cheese distributor to Canada. I did not want to sell cheese. That was not my calling in life. Um, what I did instead was work on or star in their commercials uh for some of the products that they had locally there in Toronto and throughout Canada. Um, but I went to Performing Arts High School in Toronto growing up, Unionville High School for Performing Arts. It was an amazing experience. Made a lot of great friends. Um, have always been in the arts, specifically in acting and drama for such a long time, my entire life practically. Um, and that thrust me to New York City first, uh, which I moved to January tw 2000, right before 911. Lived there until 911. And then afterwards, October 2001,
decided with everything, all the chaos in New York after, you know, that tragedy, I moved to Los Angeles where I had a few friends who were already working in the industry. So, I've lived now in lo I'm 44 years old. Um, and I've lived now in Los Angeles since I was 21 years old. I'm actually sorry 20 years old. It was right before I turned 21. Um October 2001. Um so LA is definitely home for me now. Uh and it's been a really exciting journey from you know uh being in the arts uh in front of the camera so to speak or on stage to really transitioning kind of my professional career from my early to mid late 20s into my 30s into technology and startup and specifically you know being an entrepreneur and creating and starting um you know this business of revery. So, you're obviously um a really important figure in the LGBT community, you know, and obviously, you know, everything that you're
doing is is really incredible to to really, you know, support it, you know, bring more awareness. I guess, you know, like for for the people that are listening too and for the community, I guess at at what point did you know that, you know, that was the the path for you in life, you know, and and Yeah. Yeah. I think look one of um one of the greatest things I love about being an entrepreneur and one of the greatest things I love about technology and you know obviously um I I had one cousin actually I should say out of all my 12 Italian cousins I had one cousin who was an entrepreneur um Anthony Dustafro who is um much more my senior he was the oldest grandchild I was the youngest and um he started something called um uh um MGI software back in the day invested in Microsoft in the 80s like he was the one that I kind of aspired to always kind of look towards um as you know a mentor, but
seeing how creative technology could be and I think combining my expertise in entertainment specifically with film and television with where technology was taking film and TV. Um, and one of the first jobs that I had, um, you know, was a small business, um, that myself and my roommate at the time, we were creating, um, opportunities for filmmakers to create content specifically for the web. Um, Diana Nicole Baxter, um, who's still one of my really good friends, she had won the first Emmy award for best broadband drama back in 2007, only a year after YouTube had launched. And so with that expertise, you know, that parlayed into producing content um, and I became a producer. I was very much inspired by her and produced a lot of shorts and videos and you know web content and from there really focusing in on kind of the entrepreneurial side of technology which I loved because tech is
creative, tech is disruptive. You can break and mold and you know create kind of new pathways um for any sector of of of work really any sector of business not even just entertainment. And so I love that creativity. I think, you know, I'm a neuro I'm neurode divergent. I have ADHD. Um, and so I think like my mind really loves to solve problems and really be a deep thinker and, you know, hyperfocus and fixate on things. Um, but it's really exciting to me. And so one of the biggest issues and problems that I saw was for our community specifically, there was no one-stop platform that essentially was the hub for all things film and television. um that was targeting a you know an LGBTQ audience which for context we do have new statistics you know revery is now 10 years old but it shows that you know in the United States the LGBTQ community is actually the third largest consumer group um the
first is white second is Hispanic third is LGBTQ we spend $1.7 trillion $1.7 trillion in disposable income and we're obviously more affluent in a much smaller group than African-American, black, AAPI or even, you know, white. And so you can target a very rich demographic that has a lot of influence in terms of capital or what I call the pink dollar essentially with any type of product and service. And I think one of the biggest problems was there were very few and far between places for brands, agencies and marketers to tap this audience. media is the best way to get any in front of anyone who is in our community, movies and television specifically, right? And so by building Revery and having this idea to create truly free queer TV, we say free queer TV, a platform with over a thousand hours of amazing content from Warner Brothers and BBC and Lionsgate, um, and original content that we
create. But for big advertisers like McDonald's and L'Oreal and Proctor and Gamble to be able to hit that demographic at scale with a really positive return on advertising spend. That's essentially what we have built at as a core a marketing machine to tap our audience at scale. the third largest consumer group and I think solving that problem and using entertainment to solve that problem for brands has been extremely fruitful and brought us to where we are today which is a profitable startup um that is no longer raising capital at least not right at this moment um you know and uh with 50 employees between here and New York City. So one question that comes to mind here is and and I'm sure that the people listening are wondering how do you guys make money? What is the business model over? Yeah. And so just going back to kind of that advertising free queer TV model, we make our money by
selling advertising. So unlike Netflix or Hulu or any other subscription service, we're not a subscription service. You watch for free, hence free queer TV, but you will have to watch advertising. We have two minutes of ads every eight minutes of content. Um, one, there's a social component to this where we're democratizing whether or not you have the ability to pay for a subscription for our entire community to be able to watch themselves and their stories reflected regardless of if you can afford or you have a credit card, a subscription model. Um, the other side of this again is to have a scalable audience of now 5 million monthly active viewers in the United States specifically that brands like McDonald's and L'Oreal and Lexus can target with their advertising dollars in a way that they've never been able to do before. And so that essentially is how we make money off of our
advertising. and then the…