Upfront ventures, a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles, has named rapper Chamillionaire as entrepreneur in residence, as announced on Sunday by Upfront Ventures partner Mark Shuster. In an article on bothsidesofthetable.com, Shuster said:
“A while back Chamillionaire started telling me he wanted to immerse himself even more in the tech world – learning to build products, studying different business models and committing himself to being a true tech entrepreneur,” Shuster says in the article. “He attends many of the high-profile tech conferences and has been hanging out with a few partners at Y Combinator and such. This past year he even decided to attend burning man to get a sense of what that was all about. I saw him on stage at the event talking about how he used social media to engage audiences,” Shuster writes. “This was 2009 and his understanding of audience engagement was far beyond anything I was hearing from most people at that time. I reached out after the event to learn more. We started hanging out a bit and discussing technology and entrepreneurship. What Cham rarely tells people – he’s both private and humble – is that he started making some small co-investments with me in tech firms starting with Maker Studios where he was one of the earliest investors.”
Below is a video of Shuster speaking with Chamillionaire in 2010 about tech, and his ambitions beyond rap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x0FPhjl1Kw
[mc4wp_form]
