Houston rap legend Chamillionaire (real name Hakeem Seriki) has recently been named the newest entrepreneur-in-residence at the prestigious investment firm, Upfront Ventures.
Mark Suster announced the rapper’s residency on his blog a few days ago, saying, “Chamillionaire has a way more refined sense of what customer behavior is like than most Ivy League graduates with nice PowerPoint slides that I meet.” For those outside of the hip-hop culture, Chamillionaire has been involved in the world of entrepreneurship and tech for more than a decade.
The “Ridin’ (Dirty)” lyricist invested in a Houston-based car dealership called FlyRydes in 2003. After that, he followed up his business motif with his own recording label, a modeling firm, a tour bus company, and even led a Global Innovation Tournament at Stanford as part of the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series.
Seriki met Suster while attending tech conferences across the country as an audience member and as a speaker in 2009. Suster invested with Chamillionaire in Maker Studios, which is an online video talent agency now owned by Disney. “After seeing Chamillionaire interact with several entrepreneurs both at events and as an investor, I started introducing him to startups in an advisory capacity,” Suster wrote on his blog.
With Chamillionaire wanting to immerse himself even more in the tech world, the 35-year-old moved to Los Angeles, and committed himself to learning more about the tech environment. From building his own products to studying different business models, Chamillionaire’s entrepreneur-in-residence titles mark the first time in hip-hop history that a lyricist has been given such a distinguished distinction at a venture capital firm.
As far as music goes, the Houston-to-Los Angeles transplant hasn’t released a studio album in eight years, but did manage to drop two EPs in 2013 entitled Elevate and Reignfall. Plus, his seminal hit, “Ridin’ (Dirty)," was parodied by Weird Al Yankovic for a song entitled “White & Nerdy.”
Photo: Kevin Krejci | Flickr
