All the success that Dylan Telano has seen so far with his digital entertainment startup has come from countless hours working in his Skidmore College dorm room.
That determination, along with the product vision, were among the reasons that Red Sea Ventures led the seed round this year for Telano’s startup, VoyceMe.
Scott Birnbaum founded the New York City-based venture capital fund in 2011. He said the fund has invested in 140 founders, including multiple digital media companies.
VoyceMe is an online platform and app where authors can share manga – Japanese-style comics – and webtoons, digital comics that originated in South Korea. Unlike similar platforms based in Asia, VoyceMe primarily publishes stories in English. The platform has now published more than 8,000 chapters and has more than 800,000 users each month.
Telano is entering his senior year this fall.
The Business Review spoke with Birnbaum about VoyceMe and why he invested in the startup.
After you met Telano through an angel investor, what was behind your choice to invest in VoyceMe? We work very closely with angel investors because we’re always investing at the very earliest stages of companies. Angel investors, who through their personal networks get to know interesting entrepreneurs, are always a great source of good introductions to us.
Initially, I was a little bit skeptical. It had been a while since I'd really looked at the manga and anime space, and digital media is a very hard space to build into in general. I met Dylan and I was just really impressed with him. He's a remarkably thoughtful, mature, hardworking, insightful visionary of an entrepreneur. Particularly remarkable given his age, given his experience.
We started really digging into the space and looking at the demographic trends that may be influencing a growth opportunity here. We think there's been a really interesting moment of pop culture crossover between Asia-based pop culture into the U.S. market. And then you look at some of the larger platforms in the manga and anime space, like Webtoon and others – some really, really big businesses that have not made a meaningful dent into the U.S. market. The combo of Dylan's passion, his experience in the space, and what he was able to build with pretty much no resources was just really exciting and interesting.
What have you been doing since then? We've been working super closely together. Our mission is to really work very closely with these founders between the start of the business and when they raise their series A financing. We're trying to accelerate his growth, which is super fast to begin with. This is a company that is growing quite quickly and looking to build out a team. He’s a very fast learner, and he is somebody who is remarkably open to constructive feedback and to coaching, and I think that's really a testament to his strength as a leader because he's always looking to learn and to grow. By the way, he doesn't he doesn't take everything you tell him as the gospel; he'll take feedback from a bunch of different people and triangulate what is the truth for him.
It sounds like you’re pretty optimistic about the startup? At the pre-seed and seed stage when we're investing, there's very little to go on other than the product vision, our assessment of the potential size of the market they're going after, and the quality of the entrepreneur. We spend a lot of time figuring out how much we can believe in a particular entrepreneur, and with Dylan, there's a lot to believe in. It's not very often that a founder who's as young as Dylan gets to build something like this that develops in any part of the country or any part of the world; it's a pretty unique set of circumstances.
Interview has been edited and condensed.
