Creative entrepreneurs go BOLD-ly forth, getting to the heart of the matter

Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com and Yo Santosa of Ferroconcrete at Art Center’s BOLD Symposium.

This past weekend, Art Center College of Design presented BOLD: The Art Center Symposium for Creative Entrepreneurs, a daylong symposium of presentations, lectures and workshops at the College’s Hillside Campus in Pasadena, focused on the future of creative entrepreneurship, design-driven startups and artist-run businesses and nonprofits.

The main takeaway? You gotta have heart.

More than 350 alumni and other guests heard inspiring stories of both triumph and failure—because for entrepreneurs, the two are never mutually exclusive. Fostering community and maintaining faith in one’s ideas are essential to survival. California’s improving economy is helping too, according to Kimberly Ritter-Martinez of the L.A. County Economic Development Corporation whose optimistic data reports kicked off the proceedings.

Among the 35 artists, designers, movers and shakers who presented: Lynda Weinman, co-founder of pioneering online education company Lynda.com; Colette Brooks, founder of Big Imagination Group; and Yo Santosa, founder of Ferroconcrete.

President Lorne M. Buchman at Art Center’s BOLD Symposium.

In his introduction to the symposium, Art Center President Lorne M. Buchman said that today’s students, different from past generations, no longer see securing a job at a pre-existing company as their only possible career path.

“Something has shifted,” he said, “and it has everything to do with entrepreneurship.”

Buchman shared that he recently visited a prominent Menlo Park venture capital firm that told him it wouldn’t talk to a startup unless it includes a designer on the senior team. “That marks where the creative imagination is right now,” said Buchman. “That’s where designers and artists need to be in the development of business and innovation.”

When Weinman took the stage to deliver her keynote address, she told the audience in the packed Ahmanson Auditorium that a recent Forbes article on the $107 billion online learning industry referred to her company as “arguably the 800-pound gorilla in the e-learning space.”

“I’m not sure why you’re clapping,” said Weinman with a laugh to the audience’s applause. “That feels like an enormous amount of pressure.”

Weinman candidly covered a range of experiences instrumental to her professional career: as a struggling 13-year-old student, she read Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, a tome which argued children would naturally develop a sense of motivation and love of learning if not forced to study; at her progressive private high school in Los Angeles—which she paid for with her $80 monthly hot dog stand salary—she took a class in feminism and discovered she “could be anything that [she] wanted to be”; while teaching motion graphics at Art Center—a job she accepted after lecturing on campus about her pioneering use of a personal computer to do pre-visualization work for Star Trek V—she discovered “[she] just loved creating handouts” so that her students wouldn’t miss what was happening on the screen.

Weinman also shared how she and her husband and business partner Bruce Heavin—an Art Center alumnus and now a trustee at the college—borrowed many ideas that are in practice at Art Center when starting up Lynda.com, including learning how to foster critical thinking and collaboration skills, learning how to be critiqued, and learning how to present and communicate.

“We all engage with each other in person,” Weinman said. “We need people skills almost more than we need technical skills.”

Photographer Nicol Ragland and Colette Brooks of Big Imagination Group at the BOLD Symposium.

At the “Heart of the Maker: Aligning Your Creative and Business Practices” workshop later in the morning, Brooks, founder of the Big Imagination Group (BIG) advertising agency, began her presentation by playing Adler and Ross’ “You Gotta Have Heart” from Damn Yankees. She then went on to share how she spent seven years working for smaller advertising firms in an industry that suggests “consumption is the key to a more fulfilled life” before paving her own path and finding a way to “align her passions with profit” by creating BIG.

“The ingredients that I found to work are authenticity, fearlessness, creativity and generosity,” she told the audience assembled on a student film stage. “Oh, and one more thing: ignorance.”

Brooks provided several examples of successful conscious consumerism campaigns her firm created, including the “Red Carpet, Green Cars” collaboration with Toyota and Global Green USA in which celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts and Salma Hayek were chauffeured to the Academy Awards not in a limousine, but in a Prius, at a time when Toyota was actually having difficulty selling its hybrid car.

“This idea was born out of What’s the right thing to do,” said Brooks. “Not I want to make money on this.”

More than 350 alumni and other guests attended Art Center’s BOLD Symposium.

Later in the afternoon, at a workshop titled “The Overrated Business Plan: Here’s What Really Works,” alumna and Ferroconcrete founder Santosa told an audience that she’d “rather fail and try than wonder and regret.” Santosa made a name for herself by creating the brand identity for Pinkberry back when the frozen yogurt chain was a small mom-and-pop store in West Hollywood. Since then she has added companies like TBS, The Today Show and Skywatch to her client list, as well as started several new endeavors including online gourmet cookie company Früute, premium perfume and cologne company Commodity and the recently launched publication LA Downtowner.

Other speakers at BOLD included photographer/filmmaker Nicol Ragland, alumnus Agustin Garza of Garza Group Communications, guerilla street artist Robbie Conal, alumni and Moreless founders Joe Tan and Markus Diebel, and American Gonzo Food Corporation founder Paul Hibler.

The College’s ongoing entrepreneurial initiatives include The Design Accelerator, a collaboration between Art Center and Caltech that emphasizes design as the critical component for successful innovation.

BOLD was organized by alumna Yvette Roman, Humanities and Sciences faculty Robert Nashak and Terry Lee Stone, and Kristine Bowne and Robbie Nock of Art Center’s Alumni Relations Department. For more information, visit the symposium’s website.