Emily Best
Emily Best
Founder & CEO @ Seed&Spark
“We need to be taking big swings at new systems. How do all of the systems that I build and participate in reduce harm as they build towards whatever’s next? You don’t get the comfort of not considering the impact of a certain decision anymore. It matters.”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
Emily Best reminds us, “We’ve made up a lot of ideas about people that are just stories, and we can change the stories that we tell about each other.”
There’s a reinforcing loop between the stories we create about people, what we pay attention to, and the actions we take.
From seeing Emily’s photograph and reading her story answer these Qs:
1. What assumptions are you making based on what you are seeing and reading?
2. What conclusions are you drawing about her based on the assumptions you made?
3. What beliefs are you forming about Emily and others like her based on your conclusions?
Reflect on how these beliefs create a biased filter that would impact your conversation with her as an executive colleague, boss, parent, or potential investment.
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// TEAM EXPLORATION
Host a mini film festival!
The purpose is to cultivate empathy through shared stories, and explore beliefs together.
Gather a few of your culture champions to choose some films to watch and discuss. It can be held over 1 hour at lunch, with the follow-up Qs set up for asynchronous chat afterwards.
Resources
Use the Ladder of Inference model to help identify how easily you jump to conclusions. Leverage this framework and make better decisions together with your team.
Subscribe to Seed&Spark (Starts @ $3/mo) to watch their fantastic collection of movies, community events and crowdfunding opps.
Check out Emily Best’s writing collection on Medium to explore her take on topics like mentorship, DE&I, investment funding, and the entertainment industry.
Seed&Spark is a groundbreaking media company. With a business model that delivers the highest success rate for crowdfunding in the industry, it’s also a streaming platform of independent content by those who the industry excludes.
Emily’s article “How raising a $2+M Seed Round really, actually went” details her experience through the TechStars startup accelerator when she was pregnant with her first child. It raises awareness of the bias in the venture capital ecosystem. Read more about the Seed&Spark story in Jyoti’s upcoming book, “Evolutionary Rescue”, which elaborates on how Emily and her team challenge the “growth at any cost” mentality.
Emily Best (she/her) is proud to position Seed&Spark as the only streaming platform which is designed to disrupt the “echo chamber” effect, and challenge beliefs rather than reinforce them.
Seed&Spark boldy highlights, “We're the only streaming service with gender parity in directors in our library. Did you know Hollywood's six major studios have women directing only 3% of their films this whole year? Yikes!”
We love her story, and think you will too.
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New Stories, New Systems
I've dedicated the lion's share of my time to equity, equality, belonging and justice. We’ve made up a lot of ideas about people that are just stories, attached to the color of their skin or something else that we've decided has other intrinsic qualities that go with it. Those are just stories, and we can change the stories that we tell about each other.
I used to treat these issues as discrete buckets. As if equity issues in the workplace could be treated separately from equity issues in the justice system, separate from equity issues in reproductive rights. As if any of that could be separated from the economic system we live in, and our sense of ourselves inside that economic system.
The interconnectedness of these issues, and the need for imagining a new universe of totally new interconnected pathways makes my brain go WOMP! I have to move into that discomfort, because I don't see another way. I used to be firmly on the side of incrementalism, and I learned what a privileged position that is. Incrementalism is white lady BS. Like, I can deal with incrementalism, because my suffering has already been largely mitigated.
We need to be taking big swings at new systems. From a more day-to-day practical standpoint, how do all of the systems that I am building and participate in, at the very least, reduce harm as they build towards whatever's next? You don't get the comfort of not considering the impact of a certain decision anymore. It matters.
Nourishing Our Most Depleted People
Because our work centers around activism, we need the things that all activists need, which is more resources and more rest. I'm in the process of fundraising to get some more resources, which I hope will also mean that I get some more rest, and then we can divide the work up a little bit.
The thing that you can't solve is how ambitious activists are. It's very hard to slow them down, because they want the change now. I'm learning that building a team of activist minded people, the work to make sure that they’re valued and cared for is different than in your average company. They’re giving some of their personal identity to the work inside the company. That's priceless! Valuing that appropriately inside of a capitalist organization is very challenging, so we have to focus a lot on the work environment.
We have a lot of team activism. Holidays like Indigenous Peoples Day are service and learning days for us. Election Days both nationally and locally are days off for you to do what you want with them. A lot of our team members volunteer, they organize and are out in the streets, and we do events together.
What is “Professional”, Anyway?
I think the first tenet of professionalism is this idea that there's a work self and personal self. That division is the most damaging for women and people of color, because the work self is built around the white male prototype. Any ticks away from that, in terms of dress, style, or language, affect your “professionalism.”
All of that’s a way to oppress people's feelings and extract their labor in the most painful way possible. The other thing that means is workplaces are designed for a particular kind of person's comfort. Those guys walk in feeling great because they get to show up as their whole selves. It's fine to talk about football at work, it's not fine to talk about periods. The standard is built for white male comfort.
Tenet number two is the power structures. Concentrating power at the top is actually a really dumb way to do things because the top is not who gets the best information. The best information is out at the edges of the business. Alexis Gonzalez Black who is on our DEI Advisory Board, has influenced my thinking tremendously on this. She's the org designer behind the Zappos holacracy and talks a lot about moving power as close to where decisions are made as possible.
I'm in the universe of power structures, because I'm eight years into building this business. I have access to incredible mentors and leadership, and I can be better about sharing that with the team. For the team to get the benefit that, I should just get the fuck out of the way.
For instance, now the leadership of our equity and inclusion programs meet with our advisory board bi-monthly. That brain trust has become a safe space for those leaders to talk to each other and deepen their understanding of why they’re invested in developing our products.
Middle Management is a Problem Zone
Diversity, equity, and inclusion work inside organizations hits a ceiling, which is the power structures. Middle management is where DEI goes to die. The middle manager's entire purpose is to deliver on numbers, so they’re in charge of extracting labor. Feelings, conflict and challenging conversations get in the way of hitting their numbers, and makes it harder for them to do their job. So they’d just rather people not make their job harder, right?
I don’t envy the middle managers. They're being asked to do an impossible task. Part of the problem is the way middle managers are expected to advance. Do you think their review process has questions like: “How psychologically safe does your team feel?” No, that's not going in there. It's only, “Did you hit your numbers this month or not?”
I heard a CEO from a company that had a public sexism case saying, “I understand how we need to address this from a hiring perspective, and I understand what we need to do from a culture perspective, but I just don't really know what to do with the middle managers.”
Just go look at what you review them for!
A Team Driving Change Through Creativity
My team is full of people who are engaged and purposeful in the world, and I know they bring that sense of purpose to the work that we do at Seed&Spark, which is about driving change through creativity. That has a lot to do with equity and sustainability for creative people. We’re building systems that actually work for creators, anywhere, to develop sustainable lives for themselves, and then importantly, make sure that their creative work is delivered in such a way that it can have the impact that was intended.
Audiences are desperate for connection right now. The idea that the alternative to the end of movie theaters is just a bunch of people sitting alone in their houses staring at a screen by themselves is just absurd. There's lots of opportunity for purposeful solutions in that space.
We have a film-based equity and inclusion program that we built and now deploy for organizations. We're actually going to do it ourselves as a team in the new year. We’ve also done training internally, and we're coming up on attending the diversity and inclusion research conference together. We like to watch movies together every Friday and unpack their perspectives and their approaches. Some of it is cinematic and some of it is from an equity and storytelling standpoint.
A Place For Dream Builders & Culture Creators
I'd like Seed&Spark to be the last stop people make on the way to their dream. We’re becoming a place to fortify and develop yourself personally, professionally, and creatively. You can stay as long as it takes until you really feel like you can step out and do your purpose.
That’s the most successful environment. That’s a culture that supports the side hustle, a culture that supports professional development, and a culture that supports collaboration and creativity.
Manifesting New Models for Investment & Wealth
I really want stakeholders to understand who I am, who we are as a company, and the direction we want to go. What that means is, there's a lot of people I really admire who are not the right fit for us. There are people I desire to do business with because I like their minds and ethics, but ultimately, their alignment is still venture capital or wealth generation, and not wealth distribution.
As we grow and expand, what’s on my mind is a business in the future that really enriches our community in lots of dynamic ways, that’s regenerative as opposed to extractive. Raising money in a room with a regenerative business model is a challenge. At the end of the day, investors are like, “Why don't you keep more of this?” I say, “Let's talk about values.”
Longer term, it’s about how all of our systems are constantly giving back. We’ve done fairly well at Seed&Spark aligning our business model to make money with our creators, not off of them. My goal is to build the most diverse cap table I possibly can, so that when it comes time for us to pay dividends (also a thing they don't really like you to say in investment conversations), we're distributing that widely and not just into the hands of the people who don't need any more of it.
The point is to help investors understand how they’re a part of building a better future.
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Join The Tour & Get Your Free Guide Book!
Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.