If you can catch Troy Carter’s attention, there’s a good chance that you’re about to hit it big. After all, he was an early investor in a long list of companies—Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, and Warby Parker, to name a few—that did just that.
How does he know an idea is a winner?
“You know it’s a winner once it’s won,” says Carter, laughing. “Up until that point, somebody might have a winning idea or great product, but that’s not enough. As a VC, I invest in a lot of companies, and unfortunately a lot of them don’t do well. I haven’t met somebody with a 100 percent batting record.”
But Carter admits his own record is “pretty high.” True, he’s not the only investor who can spot soon-to-explode startups like Spotify. But he might be the only one who can also predict which pop stars will do the same thing.
Carter is the one who discovered Eve when she was a 19-year-old rapper back in his hometown of Philadelphia. And perhaps you’ve heard of his biggest success, a then-unknown performance artist named Lady Gaga? He was her manager for almost seven years, back when she was a nobody playing four shows a night.
Now with an estimated net worth of $30 million, he’s known for being a high-profile investor (he was recently a guest judge on Shark Tank), a serial entrepreneur, and a manager of big-name music artists. He is no longer with Lady Gaga (they had a headline-making parting of the ways in 2013), but does represent singers like Meghan Trainor and John Legend.
The way Carter sees it, the founder of a startup and the singer with a hit song aren’t that different. Musicians also have to be entrepreneurs.
“You become a leader,” he says. “You answer the same kind of questions: What type of leader do you want to be? How do you manage a team? How do you build morale? A lot of the time, an artist sits in the CEO seat the same way a manger sits in the COO seat.”
Right now, Carter says he’s all about “giving back.” That’s one of the reasons he agreed to be a judge for the Hennessy V.S.O.P Privilège Lab, a competition that provides one lucky winner with a year of free office space in New York City. WeWork is providing the space for a team of up to six people.
“Free office space?” he says. “As an entrepreneur, I understand how important something like that can be.”
Carter isn’t just a judge. He and other industry executives will serve as mentors for the program. It’s a rare opportunity, but Carter says that giving people an opportunity to test out their ideas in a collaborative workspace is also important.
“I’m a big believer in shared knowledge,” Carter says. “Those serendipitous moments where you bump into somebody in an elevator, or you overhear a conversation with somebody who’s trying to solve the same problem you’re trying to solve. You definitely have an unfair advantage when you’re all together under one roof.”
Carter says you can’t replicate that experience.
“You could choose to work remotely, or work from home, but there’s a lot of value in having incredibly smart, creative people in your environment,” he says.
He believes in the idea so much that he ripped out the gym from the headquarters of his L.A.-based company the Atom Factory (it was the “most underutilized room in our facility,” he admits) to make room for an accelerator called SMASHD Labs. He brought together a cluster of startups, all with some connection to the entertainment business.
“We’re six months into it,” he says. “For us, it was all about the founders. We chose six companies, and wanted to make sure that from an idea standpoint, and a personality standpoint, we were putting together a group that would work well together, complement each other. We were putting together a mosaic.”
Carter clearly relishes being a mentor. He’s been involved with every kind of startup imaginable, so he makes sure to remind newcomers that minor setbacks are to be expected.
“I remember about three weeks ago, when Facebook was down for a couple of hours,” he says. “This was Facebook, which has some of the best engineers in the world. Even Facebook still deals with crisis situations. It’s all part of the growing pains as an entrepreneur.”
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