Danny discusses the lessons learned from working at Google and YouTube, the origins of building Tailwind in a coffee shop, and how he and his cofounder balance having an office in Oklahoma City and an office in New York. He also shares his experience as coming into Oklahoma City as an initial outsider, as well as how he sees the startup community in OKC.
Startup Grind Local features incredible talks with entrepreneurs from Startup Grind’s worldwide network. Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs.
I was commissioned to film the premiere chat of the Oklahoma City chapter of Startup Grind.
Providing a workspace for aspiring commercial brewers, Brewers Union helps to turn Oklahoma brewers into breweries by helping them scale up. While for the consumer, it’s one taproom to come and taste multiple breweries under one roof. In this interview, Brad Stumph, John Elkins of Elk Valley Brewing, and Ross Harper of Angry Scotsman discuss how the union has helped them grow and what visitors can expect.
I’m sad to report that we’ve failed our Kickstarter campaign for Colorful Escapes. With funding being all or nothing, we got nothing and so we won’t be filming any more episodes this summer. I’m turning this failure into a positive. We’re going to back to the drawing board as we may try again in the fall or next year. Heide and I talked a few days ago about how unlikely it was looking that we would get funding for this first season. We discussed some ideas why we weren’t doing so well and what could we do to improve things.
For staters, Heide and I are going to work together more on Uncovering Oklahoma as practice and to build our brands and identities.
I also feel like perhaps the pilot wasn’t exciting and/or good enough. I think this is something that with practice working together, we’ll get better. On the subject of excitement, next time we’ll have more excitement behind the project because people will know us better. I recently learned some great crowdfunding tips in general.
I want to thank those that did back the project: Amy Young, Rick, Downtown OKC, Yenni Vance, and Kris Adair. Thank you for your support! It means a great deal to me.
As for my plans now, I’m going to focus more of my energy on the studio project. Also, do some freelance work to get a few more pieces of equipment to make better videos.
TL;DR; Failed Kickstarter, plan to try again later with a better everything.
While Norman Music Festival is over, the music doesn’t have to stop. In this week’s video, I’ve edited together a montage video of eight musicians interviewing other musicians at the festival on Saturday. Featuring Jarvix, Elecktra, Don Data, Sephra, Local Man Ruins Everything, Special Thumbs, GWIZ, and Limp Wizurdz.
I came up with the video idea on Saturday morning, so this was all done on the spot. This video was edited down from 30 minutes of raw interviews to a 10-minute highlight version. The completed collection is available here on Patreon. Since this concept worked out rather well, next year I’ll schedule interviews in advance and work to represent more genres.
Two of the area’s biggest festival, the Festival of the Arts and the Norman Music Festival, have passed. Actually, last week was jammed packed with stuff. For the festivals, this year, the weather was amazing. The Festival of the Arts only got rained out on one day, while last year the weather was just awful. I even got a little sunburnt at the music festival.
I had a great time at both festivals. For the arts festival, I filmed several local artist shout-outs. I even volunteered for a few hours there on Sunday. Then for the Norman Music Festival, I filmed b-roll on Thursday and Saturday. Thursday was interesting because it was the first time they did an outdoor stage that day, so it was busier than past years. On Friday, we had a date night at the arts festival, but on Saturday I was back at the music festival from Noon to 11 pm doing my press thing. I filmed the entirety of Jarvix’s main stage set for him, which you can watch below.
Before I went to the festival on Saturday, I was taking a shower when I was like, “I should I film interviews where bands interview bands. I got the technology to do that now.” When I did my Deep Deuce Pub Crawl video, I had this sound setup that worked well in the noisy environments and it worked great at the festival, even with a stage playing in the background. Because it was a last minute idea and I was doing a man-on-the-street on the spot thing, there wasn’t as much diversity as I would’ve liked to showcase, but the interviews were still great. Watch that video on Uncovering Oklahoma. I’ve also released the uncut interviews here on Patreon.
I want to wrap this story up by talking about My Brightest Diamond, who was one of the headliners at the Norman Music Festival. She was a major source of inspiration to my first fictional book I published a few years ago, The Crashing of Heaven and Hell. She was such an inspiration, I even dedicated the book to her. So of course, I wanted to give her a copy and personally thank her. I was lucky enough to meet her and talk to her for a bit. She was so nice and I’m so thankful she took the time to hang out with me. She said she would read it while on tour, so I hope she does like it.
On the subject of meeting your heroes, my friend, Jarvix, also got to meet Tune-Yards, who was was a major inspiration for him. You can read this article in the Oklahoma Gazette about his journey.
