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Tayyib Smith hopes hip-hop can launch a new generation of entrepreneurs

His Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship seeks students from all walks of life

Philadelphian Tayyib Smith is launching the tuition-free Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship for people with nontraditional backgrounds.
Philadelphian Tayyib Smith is launching the tuition-free Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship for people with nontraditional backgrounds.Read moreMICHAEL ARES / Staff

Tayyib Smith didn't grow up in a house where Forbes magazine landed on the doorstep every month or where marketing plans and contract negotiations were topics of discussion at the dinner table. Instead, Smith - chief operating officer and founder of the Little Giant creative agency, founder and publisher of two.one.five magazine, and partner in the Center City coworking space Pipeline Philly - found inspiration for his business acumen in more unconventional figures: Sean "Puffy" Combs, Jay Z, Dr. Dre.

"I'm a serial entrepreneur from an undercapitalized community in a city with one-third poverty who has a GED," Smith said. "I don't think I would have accomplished what I have thus far if hip-hop hadn't opened doors for me."

For Smith, hip-hop provided a literal path into entrepreneurship. The Philadelphia native got his start as a promoter and music exec who has worked with the Roots, Jazzy Jeff, J Dilla, John Legend, and other artists, creating relationships and marketing opportunities with such clients as Heineken, Vitaminwater, and Scion. But Smith says the lessons he learned about creative problem-solving and reinvention from hip-hop groundbreakers have been far more important than his actual involvement in the music business.

"If it weren't for graffiti, which became street art, you wouldn't have whole aspects of graphic design or fonts or different color palettes," Smith said in a conference room at Pipeline Philly.

Hype Williams, he said, director of award-winning music videos and the feature film Belly, "affected music videos, but he also affected the aesthetics of how people shoot film. If [DJ and record producer] Marley Marl hadn't worked with an engineer to figure out how to sample breakbeats and make new songs, modern production wouldn't be the same.

"If people like Grandmaster Flash in the '70s hadn't taken the Technics 1200 turntable to heights never intended by its creators, the technology would have never evolved. What once took a crew lugging 20 crates of records to a gig can now be accomplished by unpacking your laptop and plugging it in. I could go on and on, and it all started by one person saying, 'Hey, what if we looked at this a different way?' "

Smith hopes to pass those lessons on to a new generation of enterprising young people from nontraditional backgrounds with the launch of the Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship (IHHE). The tuition-free program, one of the winners of this year's John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Knight Cities Challenge, is accepting applications from Philadelphia-area candidates ages 18 to 32 to participate in the nine-month course, designed and taught by creative professionals, businesspeople, technologists, and musicians to highlight the aspects and challenges of building a business.

Asked to describe his ideal applicant, Smith casts a wide net. "I have a belief that brilliance is not exclusive to socioeconomic class," he said. "I see brilliance at all levels of society, including a favela or the 'hood. I'm looking for people who have a passion for learning, curiosity, drive, and work ethic. They don't have to have any relationship to hip-hop; they can have an idea or they cannot, they could have gone to college or they could be reentering society from incarceration."

Smith cites some of the best-known success stories in hip-hop as guiding lights for potential students: Dr. Dre, who started out in Compton, Calif., with the band N.W.A. and who recently sold his headphone company Beats Electronics to Apple for $3 billion; Jay Z, whose Roc Nation empire includes a record label, talent agency, concert-production company, music, film, and television production companies, and a music publishing house; and Sean Combs, whose partnership with British beverage company Diageo made Cîroc vodka as synonymous with hip-hop as Courvoisier and Hennessy.

But Smith also cites non-musicians who embody the hip-hop spirit, including fellow Philadelphians like Troy Carter, Lady Gaga's former manager who now holds a key position at Spotfiy; and music mogul Shawn Gee, who parlayed success on Wall Street into a spot on Billboard's Power 100 list. The common factor, he says, could be summed up as "hustle" - a word whose negative connotations have been flipped in the context of hip-hop success.

Of course, success for IHHE students from less-than-privileged backgrounds can mean something different from the accepted standard, Smith says. The buzzword among venture capitalists is 10x - meaning success comes only once you've returned 10 times your initial investment. But "if you're coming from Mantua or West Philadelphia or Francisville," he said, "2x is a success story - 2x is keeping you out of mass incarceration. 2x means you're not being caught up in something that marginalizes you into the black market economy. 2x is life-and-death when you're thinking about it in those terms."

Smith ultimately hopes to see a few new businesses generated from the program and, possibly, some partnerships formed among students. But he'd also be happy to help students increase their fiscal literacy or get a foot in the door with other business owners. He wants to promote the idea of community, bringing people together to share ideas, resources, and support. Most important, he hopes to set an example for an alternative approach to modern financial education.

"Our education system is still based off of industrialism," Smith said. "It was basically meant to get you off the sundial and onto a clock. You weren't supposed to have creative thought. Now, we're in the age where intellectual property is how money is made, and because of machine learning and innovation, we don't need drones. Creative thought is what you really need, and hip-hop has that train of thinking."

The Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship is accepting applications through Sept. 1 at www.ihhe.org.