Jeff Annison, cofounder of Legion M and UCLA alumnus, joins Podcasts contributor Aidan Teeger to discuss his career and advice for students.

Aidan Teeger: Welcome to Bruin to Bruin, where we tap into the wisdom and insights of the UCLA community. Today’s feature is Jeff Addison, a distinguished entrepreneur and cofounder of Legion M, the world’s first fan owned entertainment company. Jeff Annison, thank you for being here.

Jeff Annison: Thank you for having me.

AT: You spearheaded a really interesting project, Legion M. I’m going to challenge you to run me through exactly what it is and why it’s a bit of an anomaly in the entertainment industry.

JA: Well, fantastic. So, Legion M is, we bill ourselves as the world’s first fan-owned entertainment company. And what that means is we are an entertainment company that makes movies and TV, just like hundreds or really thousands of other entertainment companies out there, but what makes us unique is the fact that we are the first one that has been designed from the ground up to be owned by fans. And we’re using these new laws that were enabled by the JOBS Act, the relatively recent, less than a decade ago, that for the first time allowed just regular people to invest in early-stage startup companies. Which was new. When these laws went into effect, which was like 2016, prior to that, the only people that were allowed to invest in pre-IPO startup companies were what’s called accredited investors. It’s effectively the wealthiest, probably 95% of the population, sorry, the wealthiest 5% of the population, were allowed to make risky bets in startup companies. And everyone else was not allowed to, you or I, or anybody, could invest in a company after the IPO. But companies at that point are usually pretty mature. They’re very valuable. So to give you one of my favorite examples, if you look at Facebook, the company, the earlier investor in that was Peter Thiel, who’s a noted venture capitalist. His return when he invested eight years prior to Facebook going public, his return was, I want to say it was like 2000 or 3000X return. He literally turned a 500,000 investment that netted him billions of dollars when he sold the stock during the IPO. But the people who invested at the IPO, so when the IPO happened, that’s when anybody can buy the stock, and a lot of people did. And Facebook, if you were smart enough or lucky enough to get in on the day Facebook went public and you had held on to it eight years after the IPO, Facebook outperformed just about any other company on the stock market and it did really good, but it was like, you would have got a four X return on your money. And so it just, it goes back to the kind of the relationship between risk and reward and the idea of investing in early-stage companies, that’s how people like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, like that’s where you can make these very high-risk investments because most startups fail. But if you win, the companies that succeed can go on and change the world and the returns can just be astronomical. So anyway, the point is, is that the idea behind Legion M is that entertainment film and television is one of the most lucrative industries in the world. It’s a multi-trillion dollar global industry that’s home to companies like Netflix and Disney and Sony, these titans. And it’s extremely competitive. It’s an extremely difficult place to build a business, but if you can do one, they can become quite valuable. And our idea was that if you’ve got a company that was literally designed from the ground up to be owned by fans, you can create competitive advantages. So the M in our logo in Legion M is the Roman numeral for one million. It’s because our long-term goal is to unite one million fans as shareholders of the company. We actually bake that into the logo. And so if you can imagine, a company that literally has a million people that are investors in the company. That gives you a million people that are more interested in coming out opening night to see your movie and bringing their family and friends and talking about it on social media and all of the things that can make the difference between success and failure in the industry. And so, that’s what we set out to do a little bit over eight years ago. We’ve just been steadily leveling up and leveling up. We haven’t won yet. We’ve gotten farther than I think anybody had any right to expect. And, like I said at the outset, startup companies are very risky. We know the odds are against us, but we keep leveling up and we keep fighting. And we think that if we continue, someday we’ll be unstoppable.

AT: Yeah, it’s a really dynamic concept, I mean, it sounds like the whole core idea is to leverage the power of crowdfunding in a sense of the word that’s not usually used to unite fans as investors and as a community that can influence the development of the projects as well. To what degree do the investors have a stake and to what degree does their opinion influence the decisions of the company?

JA: Well, it’s a great question. So first of all, I’ll answer the second one first. The community is literally the core of everything we do. At the end of the day, I’m the president of the company, but I work for the shareholder. So if you’re an investor, I literally work for you. And as a company that’s designed to be crowd-owned, that’s where the value of the company comes from as well. And so every single thing that we do, it all starts and ends with what is right for our community. How can we make our community happy? But the flip side of that is how can we use our community to create a competitive advantage? What is the one thing that separates us from every other entertainment company out there? And it’s the fact that we’re owned by fans. And when you look at the film and television industry, I think this applies to most industries. But film and television is probably where it’s maybe the most tangible or the most impactful. Fundamentally, when you can unite the consumers of a product to have a stake in that product, then you’ve got this wonderful, virtuous cycle, right? So you asked, how much of a stake do the fans have? It depends on what you’ve invested in. But Legion M is literally, we are owned by fans. When you invest in Legion M, you’re buying stock in the company. And if you, the value that you’re buying in at today, if you do a comparison, like it’s tough to even comprehend this stuff. But if you were investing in companies and the value of those companies were represented by skyscrapers. Netflix would be like a skyscraper that’s a mile and a half tall and would literally reach into the stratosphere. And Disney would be one that, depending on what the market valuations are at the time, would be higher or lower than Netflix, but these massive, 10 times the size of the Empire State Building, whereas Legion M would be the very ground floor. And so the idea is, I mean, obviously I just named two of the largest companies in history, let alone in entertainment. There’s no guarantee obviously that we will become that big. There’s no expectation that we would become that. I mean, there’s also no guarantee that we can’t become bigger than them. And we can talk about that later, but the point is, even if we have a fraction of the success of some of these companies, there’s ample upside for people. So the fans own the company. So the more we can get the fans excited about the project, and the more that they support the project and go see the project and talk about the project, the better the project does, but that actually ends up benefiting them because they’re the shareholders of the company. And in some cases, even the investors in the film, Legion M as a company is owned by fans, but we’ve had two movies so far, where people are buying directly into the film itself and have a return that’s directly tied to the performance of the film.

AT: Interesting. When we talk about competitive advantages, one thing that strikes me is that the whole concept itself and the feeling behind it can manifest as an advantage as well. You have just recently released a William Shatner documentary, “You Can Call Me Bill.” From what I understood about that, William Shatner had been approached by countless producers to get a documentary going and he had turned every single one of them down. But he heard about what you guys are doing, how innovative this whole model is. And he was happy to do it primarily to give back to the fans. And that didn’t really take any extra legwork on your part to make that happen. It was just as a consequence of the model itself. So I think this entire thing is something a lot of people can relate to. And fingers crossed people, more people hear about it and are willing to get on board.

JA: 100%. Now that’s a great observation. And you’re exactly right. When you look at the entertainment industry, I mean the idea of having a legion of a million people, right? So that you can bring a large group of people out on opening night. That one is pretty obvious, I think to most people and they get it right away. But you hit the nail right on the head, right? You know, people like William Shatner get approached all the time. Stan Lee was one of our earliest advisors, and we worked with Stan Lee before he passed away. It was the same thing. These are people who, honestly, they can do whatever they want to do, right? I mean, there’s plenty of people approaching them every day saying, “Hey, I’m a guy that has some money,” or “I want to pay you to do this,” or “I want to do that.” But both Stan and William Shatner agreed to work with Legion M because they liked the idea. And it, again, for people like that, for people who are in the industry, they generally understand the ones that are successful, that we power the industry, you and I, and all of the people like us. We’re the ones that buy the tickets. We pay the subscription fees. We decide what to watch. We are literally responsible for every dollar in valuation for Netflix and Disney and all of these companies. And this idea, at a theoretical level, the idea of if we unite, we have this enormous amount of power. That’s a very theoretical, abstract notion, but it manifests itself throughout the industry. There are so many points where the difference between success and failure is slight, and if you’ve got a large community of people standing behind you, it improves your odds. So, you think about it, one of the key things in the entertainment industry is finding people to finance your movie. Movies are really expensive and having money to finance them is one of the most important things. If you were a financier and I’m approaching you saying, “Hey, would you like to invest in our movie?” And let’s just say there are two movies and they’re identical. I mean, movies are art, right? Each one is unique. They’re all individual. But they’re also a commodity and you’ve got to decide, okay, which movie am I going to invest in? And if you assume everything else is equal and one of them has just this guy named Jeff and Paul, and they’re standing behind it, and yeah, this is their movie that they did, and the other one is with Legion M that has, right now, 50,000 investors and 150,000 members, for you, which one would you decide? All things being equal, going with the one that already has a community behind it makes more sense to you. And that sort of decision making manifests with, if you’re a distributor and you’re trying to decide, okay, which of these movies am I going to put up on my service? Which one of these movies am I going to buy and try and release in theaters? I think fundamentally what it boils down to is you say, okay, if we can do just as good as everyone else in the industry but have that little bit of an advantage because we’re owned by fans, that over time, if you can do 5% better, if you can do 10% better because of that, that is something that over time can build you into something that has enormous potential value.

AT: And what going forward is your strategic vision for Legion M? Super broad question. I’m just trying to think because, well, I’ll actually segue back very quickly when you mentioned Netflix and Disney. A lot of these entertainment giants are struck by issues regarding bureaucracy. It sounds like because of what Legion M is, you guys can kind of bypass that. But there may also be an issue, and you’ll have to tell me if this is correct, where you guys kind of have the opposite problem where because so many people have a stake, there is an issue getting things done and making decisions. Does that manifest in reality? Or have you kind of found a governing structure where you can take everyone’s influence into account and go with the best option in a democratized sense?

JA: Yeah, it’s a great question. The way that we say it is Legion M itself is not a democracy where everybody votes on everything. That’s largely because we believe there is no better resource on the planet for helping us evaluate films than our community. But there are so many decisions that get made in running a business and in the entertainment industry where our community is not particularly well suited for things like corporate governance or figuring out what deal terms should be and all that sort of stuff. So the way that we try to do it is, wherever we can, we like to harness the wisdom of the crowd, and we like to use our community to provide data that helps us make better decisions. We do all sorts of polling. We have an app called Film Scout that allows you to help us pick films at a film festival, or if we’re going to consider producing a movie before we do it, we’ll put it out with a poll. We do these things called impulse polls and we do them all the time and we send them out to everyone and we say, “Hey, here are 12 ideas that we’re thinking of.” Sometimes eight of those 12 ideas are just made up or they’re projects that we’ve heard of, but we’re not involved with. But buried within those 12 are two or three or four that we’re literally making a decision on. So we use the made-up ones as control groups to try and figure out and understand what everybody else is interested in, and then get the actual data for the ones we’re trying to make a decision on. So, bottom line is, I think bureaucracy is inherently challenging. That’s just a manifestation of size. I’ve been in the startup industry now for over 20 years. The first startup that I ran, or co-founded, grew from three co-founders to three or 400 employees around the world. There’s an inherent bureaucracy that organizations need once you get to a certain size. Legion M doesn’t have any of that right now, largely because we’re so small. But what we try to do is use our community. Like I said, it’s not a democracy where they vote on everything, but it’s more like a targeted missile. If we’re trying to make a decision, one of the things that makes bureaucracy so damaging and so challenging when it comes to decision making is, I like one movie, you like another movie, who’s right? How do we settle that dispute? It’s challenging because so much of that decision making comes down to who has more power in the relationship? Who’s louder? Who’s better at effectively arguing their position? We hope to be able to bypass that sort of organizational bureaucracy by putting these decisions out to our community, getting real data, because at the end of the day, you and I can argue till we’re blue in the face if this is a good movie or a bad movie or which one’s better. But when we’ve got data to back it up, well, that becomes the decision. And then you just move forward from that.

AT: And how big is the executive team? I know it’s made up of you, your business partner or cofounder, Paul Scanlon. Who else is involved?

JA: Well, we’re pretty small, honestly. We have three full-time employees at Legion M right now. So Paul and I are the principals of the company, so to speak. We have David Baxter. We have a team of people that work with Legion M that all have a voice in the process. Whether it’s Brandy, who’s our primary investor relations person. She’s the one that, if you send an email to [email protected], she’s the one that responds to it. So she’s constantly interacting with our investors and our shareholders on that front. Or we’ve got Eric who does a lot of our operation stuff or Harley, who runs our social media. All of these people have voices at the table, so to speak. But like I said, it’s really easy with Paul and me, because at the end of the day, we believe our community is smarter than any one of us at Legion M. And so, again, there are some things that we can’t run past the community just because it doesn’t make sense or it’s confidential information or it’s not the sort of thing that most people would understand. But wherever we can, we try and put things in a way that we can put them out to our community and let our community decide. Because like I said, they’re the ones that own the company. At the end of the day, we work for them.

AT: Super interesting. I just want to take a step back very quickly and go back to your time at UCLA. You got a bachelor’s degree, Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. What year was that?

JA: ’95.

AT: ’95. So we’re talking about a 21 odd year gap between then and founding Legion M. How do you think you went from someone who has a degree in mechanical engineering to coming up with this incredibly innovative concept in the entertainment industry? What were you doing during that period? You mentioned that you’ve been in startups for a while. How did those experiences contribute to where you are now?

JA: So I started off as a mechanical engineering grad, and my first job was in mechanical engineering. I was a mechanical engineer at Spectra FX, which was a show action equipment that did theme park ride design. For me as a mechanical engineer, that was a field I really wanted to work in. I tried really hard to get a job in mechanical engineering in the amusement park ride area because I loved that. I did that for a couple years and then my wife and I got married right out of college. She’s also a Bruin. We decided that we needed to move back to Northern California. We were both from Northern California. We had planned to move back there someday and her mom got sick with cancer. So we decided it was time to move back. There’s no theme park engineering jobs in Northern California. That’s a very specialized industry. It exists primarily in Southern California, Florida and Germany, or at least it did 30 years ago back when this was happening. So I got a job as a mechanical engineer working for a toy and consumer product company. I did that. So I started off as a mechanical engineer. But in around 1999, I got pulled into a startup company. It was a startup company with a marketing guy, an engineering guy, which was me, and the CEO and tech guy who was our friend who pulled us together. We did a startup and that pulled me into this world of being an entrepreneur. Bottom line is, I very quickly shifted from doing mechanical engineering to running that startup. The nice thing about a degree in mechanical engineering, as well as a degree at UCLA, is it prepares you for a lot of stuff. They talk about how it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in any one area. That’s about 10 years of a career. A lot of people think of having a career, but you can have multiple careers. I’ve worked in engineering for a number of years, in theme parks and toys. Then I got into app design and the internet with Moby TV, which was the startup we founded, which went on to become very successful and pulled me directly into that space. I worked in the music industry for a while. What precipitated Legion M was the new laws from the JOBS Act. We felt like this is a fundamental change. It was changing laws that had been on the books since the Great Depression. It was such a fundamental change. We thought this is like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something like this. I don’t know that we can even take credit as being the first people to ever think of having a fan-owned entertainment company. But what we can take credit for is that we were lucky enough to be around at the exact moment in space and time when that became possible, and we jumped on it and we’ve been holding onto it with everything that we’ve got.

AT: So I’m going to adapt the phrase “what came first, the chicken or the egg” to this situation. Before the JOBS Act came into fruition, had you even considered a fan-based entertainment company, or was that totally just, “Oh, you heard about the JOBS Act, this is interesting, this is new. What can we do with this?”

JA: I guess the egg came first or the chicken. I don’t know which one is in this analogy. But I had a company, the company just before Legion M, we had a product. It wasn’t a full company, but it was called the New York Rock Exchange. This was back in 2012. We said, what if you could buy stock in a rockstar? Like, what would that mean? Whether it’s like, “Oh my God, I’m the world’s biggest Taylor Swift fan and I want to own stock in Taylor Swift,” like, would that be cool? Or maybe it’s just, “Oh my God, I just heard this band. I think they are going to be huge. I want to buy stock in them because I think they are …” It was just kind of a fun idea. So we started with this idea. This was in 2012, which incidentally was when the JOBS Act was passed by Congress. It was supposed to go right into effect in 2012, but there were a bunch of delays and it took the Securities and Exchange Commission about four years until 2016 to actually implement it. That’s when we started it. It was all based on the New York Rock Exchange. We looked at all the different financial and legal ramifications, as well as the gamification of it and what it means to be a shareholder and all that sort of stuff. To answer your question, when the JOBS Act rolled around, I was very fluent in that. We were working with, at the time, my partner Paul was working with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, which produces Robot Chicken. Have you ever watched Robot Chicken?

AT: Tidbits. Yeah.

JA: If you haven’t, or if your listeners haven’t, go just Google “Robot Chicken” and then be prepared to be sucked down a rabbit hole because it’s really fun stuff. But we were working with them, and we were gonna develop this little studio for their content. That was the initial idea. It was all going to be related to Seth Green and the team at Robot Chicken. One thing led to another, and four or five months later, we had pivoted beyond that. They were still involved. They’re one of our founding advisors of the company. But we recognized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I think the JOBS Act is applicable to pretty much any industry on the planet, any consumer-based industry for sure. But I think entertainment is probably one of the best possible uses of it because if you think about it, content is king and that’s where there’s enormous value. But we also live in an age, especially today, where the entertainment industry has fundamentally changed over the last 10 years. Content is a commodity. It’s all around us. There’s too much content coming out every week for us to even keep track of what it is. So often the difference between success and failure is the ability to find an audience, the ability to rise above the noise. These are all things that having a community of people who are paying attention because they’re investors in it can make the difference. It can be make or break.

AT: And is there an upper limit for how big you intend for this community to grow? I know, I think you said at the start, something like a million investors. From what I’d seen on the Legion M website, it’s currently sitting at around 35,000.

JA: We’re about 50,000. I don’t know. I actually haven’t, I need to add up the investors because what happens is we get these reports, and we know how many people invested, but then we have to go back and see, were you a new investor or an old investor that’s just invested a second time. I think we’re about 50,000 investors now, but there’s not necessarily an upper limit. Right now, we’re still in such early days. The company is in early days. Frankly, our shareholder base is all early adopters. In order to invest in Legion M, you can’t buy it on Robinhood or something like that because it’s not publicly available. You have to go to a website like startengine.com, which is a platform, kind of like a Kickstarter for companies like this that are doing equity crowdfunding. That’s what this whole space is called. And you have to be willing to invest in something that’s a long shot. We tell people, like, look, the fact is most startups fail, period. I’m not saying that because I don’t believe in what we’re doing. I’m saying that because that’s the fact. We want everybody who’s considering investing in Legion M to know what they’re getting into. The most likely outcome of investing in any company like Legion M is that you’re going to lose your investment. Again, that’s just the fact. But like I said earlier, most startups fail, but the ones that succeed can go on and change the world. If you are lucky enough or smart enough or whatever to, if you had invested in Disney back when they were our stage, you would be very happy or your grandchildren today would be very happy for that. From a financial standpoint, it’s a swing for the fences. It’s also a way for people to be a part of something they believe in. Legion M really strives to open the gates of Hollywood and let people be a part of it. This idea that I’m not just a consumer anymore, I’m part of this industry. To get your name in the credits of a movie, that’s a cool bucket list sort of thing. We do everything from set visits when we’re filming. Obviously, we can’t bring very large groups of people, but via live streams and that sort of thing, we can. For smaller groups of people, we actually have them visit the set and see what it’s like to spend a day on set. We’ve had people show up for that, and they get pulled into the movie. It’s like, hey, we’ve got a walk-on role. We’re shooting the scene today and we need some extras. Do you want to put on a costume and appear in a movie? We try and set up live streams with the directors and the creators and the stars and all that sort of stuff. Just really find ways to allow people to be a part of this. At the end of the day, I think Legion M is as much a movement as it is a company.

AT: Going back to the current day, “You Can Call Me Bill.” How has that been received recently?

JA: That was the first film we released ourselves theatrically. It’s been received really well. It’s funny, one of the things you learn when you get into the movie industry, it’s really hard. Everybody starts out trying to make a great movie, but most movies do not end up great. Most movies end up mediocre. A lot of movies end up being poor. It’s a small slice of movies that would be considered good or great. It’s a bell curve, what you would expect. The hard part about a movie, whether you’re a writer, director, producer or investor, is that it’s such a large amount of time. We started on this William Shatner doc years ago, like probably two years ago, and people invested. It takes all this time and you put years worth of time and effort into something and then release it to the public. At that point, it’s out of your hands and it’s entirely up to the public and what they think. We’ve been very fortunate. We’ve produced three movies ourselves and they’ve all been very well received. The William Shatner doc is 86% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 94% with the audience on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s got very good scores. The other two films, both of them are 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. They don’t have as many reviews yet. Anyway, the point is we’ve been really fortunate. It’s really daunting. It’s just a matter of time. Everybody starts out trying to make a great movie, but it’s really hard to make a great movie. That’s why, by definition, most movies don’t end up being great.

AT: William Shatner is an absolute titan of the industry. This kind of represents a big litmus test for you guys. I say that lightly, you guys have been working on this for years. It’s probably got to be a little bit nerve-wracking to see how it’s going to go because it really could dictate the direction of the company. Where do you plan on taking Legion M from where you’re sitting now? What is your strategic vision?

JA: Everything we do at Legion M has really been about growth and what Paul and I talk about, leveling up in the industry. It’s like playing a video game, right? You level up, the levels get harder, the rewards get bigger. That’s kind of the way I view it. The entertainment industry is like professional basketball. A lot of industries have this linear growth pattern, where it’s like, let’s start a lemonade stand and we’re going to make so many dollars. We’re going to hope that next year we make twice as many dollars. We’re gonna hope the year after that, we make three times as many dollars. You’re going to have this growth that is either linear or exponential, and that’s how you’re going to become successful. But you think about the route to becoming a professional basketball player. It’s not like you can make any money at all as a high school basketball player. Of course, this is changing now with NIL, but generally speaking, if you are a collegiate player, it’s not like you make half as much money as a pro. It’s more of a step function. You make nothing until you make a lot. That is the trajectory of a professional basketball player, an actor, or a lot of industries. Legion M’s focus from day one has been about stepping up to bigger and bigger projects. Imagine if we had a million investors. Right now, the average investor puts in 400 dollars. If you do the math, that would be 400 million to make movies, which is an ample amount of money. Movies are expensive, but 400 million is a decent amount of money. Then you’ve got a million people to support them when they come out. Everybody gets that, or they don’t get it. The hard part of a startup is how do you get from nothing to that point? How do you get from zero to your first million dollars? How do you get from there to five million to 10 million to 50 million? When we started out, this was just an idea. It was literally just Paul and I jumping up and down saying, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could do this? We made some small investments in other people’s projects. Our first project was an Anne Hathaway project with Jason Sudeikis called “Colossal.” We were lucky enough to invest a little bit of money there. We knew when we made that investment that it didn’t matter if this movie made it or not. The amount of investment return we were going to get was not of consequence. But it was more important because it allowed us to demonstrate to the world, this is what Legion M is about. Back then, we had raised a million dollars and had 3,000 investors in our community. People would say, a million dollars, that’s nothing in Hollywood. All you’re ever going to be able to do is fan films or super micro-budget films. But we were able to show them that even with only 3,000 investors, the distribution company Neon, that was releasing “Colossal,” said, “Yeah, let’s bring you in on this.” I think that’s valuable. That allowed us to show the world, these are the sort of movies Legion M wants to be involved with. We’re not in this to make micro-budget horror movies, no offense to people that do. That’s wonderful, but that’s not our goal. It allowed us to level up. From there, you use that as a stepping stone to the next one. Today, we are fully financing, producing and releasing these films. The last film we just premiered at South by Southwest, which is a preeminent film festival, won the audience award. It stars Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman. We’ve gone from making tiny investments in other people’s projects to hiring Morgan Freeman to work on our project that we own. When I say we, I mean Legion M and all the investors in both the company and the film. As we flash forward and you ask what is our strategic vision, it’s to keep doing that. Right now, we’re making small movies, small by Hollywood standards, meaning in the less than 10 million dollar range. But we want to level up. We want to get to the point where someday we’re making Marvel budget movies. Someday we’re releasing to 4,000 theaters and that sort of thing. Everything is about, I think the key to being an entrepreneur and starting something new, is about what is the stepping stone that gets you to the next stepping stone that hopefully gets you to fulfilling your vision of what the company could be.

AT: Dude, it’s an incredibly inspiring timeline and it really resonates with me a lot, what you’re talking about where you kind of just have to level up. I heard the saying, create a mountain with layers of paint, one layer at a time, continue to level up, you have your vision, you know what you want, keep going in that general direction, there will be periods of uncertainty. I think that’s a spectacular viewpoint to hold.

JA: That’s good. I love that term, build a mountain out of layers of paint. I think it’s really smart and very appropriate. I think that’s what it’s all about.

AT: Well, here’s one for the cohort of aspiring entrepreneurs, startup enthusiasts and people who may just want to follow in your footsteps within the entertainment industry at UCLA. Million dollar question. What practical advice can you give that cohort of people?

JA: Oh, my gosh. Filmmaking and entertainment is a brutal industry. It’s very hard to succeed financially as a filmmaker. It’s a fun industry, a sexy industry, an alluring and glamorous industry. It also can be very lucrative when you’re successful. But because of all those things, it is fiercely competitive. It’s driven by passion. It’s one of those things where there’s always somebody willing to do it for free to get a foot in the door. So if you’re going to get into that industry, I wouldn’t discourage anyone, but I think you just need to be eyes wide open about that. You have to understand what you’re getting into. Practical advice, whether you’re trying to get into this industry or whatever you’re trying to do, particularly if it’s entrepreneurial, is to take the long view. A lot of people are very transactional. What can I get out of you right now? What can you get out of me right now? Is that a suitable transaction? But Paul and I tend to be more relationship-driven and take the long view. Understanding that a lot of times you have to sacrifice today to do something that’s going to pay returns in the future. Wherever you are, you start out at the bottom and you do all the crap work that nobody else wants to do. That’s where you start and recognize that this is an investment of my time into my future. I think when you treat people right and take the long view and look at building relationships as opposed to transactions, that’s a huge differentiator between success and failure, particularly in a highly competitive industry. One of the things you learn as you get older, I didn’t recognize it when I was in college, is how small the world is. The people you’re in class with today, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, some of those people will be running companies. Some of those people may be potential customers or partners, or they could end up holding your fate in their hands for whatever you’re trying to do 20 years from now. When you realize that, it benefits those who invest time and build relationships with people and take the long view on things.

AT: I’m glad you touched on that last part, leveraging the connections you can make in college. Not just sitting there, doing your assignments, getting your degree, but really embracing the whole holistic experience. I think there’s some real wisdom there.

JA: I think that’s one of the real values of college. For some people, it’s just the education. To be perfectly honest, I had a lot of good friends in college, but if I were to go back and do college again, I would probably invest a lot more in the networking part of it and getting to know people and building strong relationships. I was kind of a nerd, an academic. But in some sense, there’s wisdom in the people that spend all their time at fraternities and that sort of thing because of those social connections. It’s a funny thing, but the world is a small place.

AT: Well, fantastic. It sure is. Very quickly, what is on the table for Legion M going forward in the near future, and how can people get involved if they want to?

JA: Well, I’ll answer the second part first. If you want to get involved at Legion M, just go to legionm.com. You don’t have to invest. You can join for free on our website as a member. It doesn’t cost anything, but it gets you on the list for all of these amazing parties and experiences. And if you decide someday that you want to take a risk and invest with us, you’re welcome to if we’ve got a round open. You can get all the information there. You can also follow us on social media. It’s legionmofficial everywhere. As far as what’s next, we’ve got a film called “The Man in the White Van,” which is a true crime thriller starring Sean Astin, Ali Larter, Brec Bassinger, Madison Wolfe and Skai Jackson. It’s one of the ones I mentioned earlier that’s 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a true crime thriller, not like a horror movie, but a really tense, good thriller based on a true story from the seventies. We’ll probably be releasing that one later this year. “My Dead Friend Zoe,” which just premiered at South by Southwest and won the audience award. We don’t know when that one will be released or what the release plan will be. We’re hoping for a theatrical release, but in this day and age, it’s tough to know what the release path will be. We’ve got an amazing story about Captain Robert Smalls, another true story from the Civil War era about an enslaved man who was the pilot of ships in Charleston, South Carolina. He and the crew decided to steal a 140-foot Confederate gunship and make a run for freedom. They gathered their families, passed hundreds of Confederate cannons and made it to the Union blockade. The whole thing is an absolutely amazing story, and it’s entirely true. After this event, Robert Smalls went on to become a hero of the North. He met with Abraham Lincoln, helped convince him to allow black soldiers to fight in the Union Army, and recruited the first 5,000 black soldiers. He fought in 17 naval battles for the Union Navy, bought the plantation he grew up on, and became a congressperson. He helped create the first compulsory public school system in the United States, making him arguably one of the fathers of the American school system. The most common reaction to this story was, “Why has Hollywood never made a movie about this guy?” So many people in our community were saying, “Let’s do this.” Because of that, we took this on as a project. We’re working with the screenwriter for “The Princess and the Frog,” and we’ve created a graphic novel to develop the story and create IP for it. This is a $50-million to $100-million movie, way outside the range Legion M is operating in now, but we hope to be producing these movies regularly in five years. The graphic novel allows us to get the story out to the community, build buzz and present it to studios with more than just an idea. Anyway, there’s more movies coming. We’ve got an endless stream, and everything we’re doing is about leveling up to bigger and better things.

AT: It all sounds super interesting. This whole story is something that sounds very much up my alley. I’ll be keeping posted on that. Jeff, thank you for your time. It’s been a super interesting discussion. This entire concept is so innovative and incredible. You’re so passionate about it. I think it’s something that’s going to resonate with a lot of listeners. I can’t wait to see what you do next.

JA: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on. My wife and I are both proud UCLA alumni. Anytime, anything we can do to help, just let us know.

AT: Go Bruins!

JA: Go Bruins!

AT: If you enjoyed that conversation with Jeff and are curious to hear from a litany of other UCLA students and alumni, head over to Daily Bruin Podcasts on Spotify and follow Daily Bruin Podcasts on Instagram to be notified whenever a new episode is published.