Conway is a wannabe techie from Pennsylvania, all sheen and no substance. Esata is an Oakland native, all hacker talent and no cultural capital. When they team up at a Bay Area accelerator to pitch a start-up to the venture capitalist Sandy Hill, odd-couple hijinks ensue. But perhaps Conway and Esata are not as different as they seem.
That conceit is at the heart of Co-Founders, a hip-hop musical co-written by Beau Lewis, ’04, that premiered this summer at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
Co-Founders has its roots in stress relief. In 2013, Lewis sold his viral media business, then immediately started working with his wife, Debbie Sterling, ’05, to launch GoldieBlox, which aimed to close the gender gap in the construction toy aisle. By 2015, Lewis says, “I basically needed some sort of therapy.” So he turned to one of his childhood comforts: freestyle rap. “Every Tuesday, me and three other guys, Jason Tan, Jodie Ellis [’03], and Brent Schulkin [’03], who were also founders, got together and put on a beat and let stories flow out of us: fears, admissions on our entrepreneurial journey.” Their first staged reading was a hit with friends and colleagues, and Anthony Veneziale, who co-founded the improv hip-hop group Freestyle Love Supreme, provided Lewis with mentorship for version 2.0.
‘Does it take the same hustle to sell a tape out of a trunk as it does to sell a computer out of a garage?’
On stage this summer was version 13 of the musical, co-written by Ryan Nicole Austin, Lewis, and Adesha Adefela. “We’re kind of the heart, which would be Adesha; the grit, which would be me; and the drive, which would be Beau,” says Austin, who also portrayed Esata’s cousin Kamaiyah. “That’s why I think the show works—the three of us.”
Version 13—which will get further upgrades in the coming months as its creators aim to take it to Broadway—pays homage to Bay Area innovation both technological and musical. “We asked this question as, does it take the same hustle to sell a tape out of a trunk as it does to sell a computer out of a garage?” Lewis says. Even the audience is invited to get into the act by pitching start-up ideas in the lobby; the winning concept is transformed into a battle rap and performed onstage. “We want those people in the audience to be reflected as entrepreneurs who might not have thought of themselves as such,” Lewis says. “And if we build in that we can accept user-generated content in real time, then the show can refresh itself as well.”
Kathy Zonana, ’93, JD ’96, is the editor of Stanford. Email her at kathyz@stanford.edu.
