Technology is a tool, and how we use it matters. That’s one of the ideas driving Co-Founders (through July 6 at ACT’s Strand Theater), says Anthony Veneziale, the play’s creative producer. He’s convinced that tech can create a more equitable future—but that for it to do so, things will have to change.
“You’re seeing a lot of these villains and—how should I put it—nefarious agents hoarding wealth, and that goes against pretty much everything that I think we’re trying to say with this show,” the co-creator of Freestyle Love Supreme told 48hills on a video call with Beau Lewis, who penned the script along with Adesha Adefela and Ryan Nicole Austin.
“We need to find new stories that inspire us towards a version of the future where it’s not .001% of the world that has 98% of the money,” Veneziale continues. “That can’t be the future of humanity. It cannot. So, let’s create music and songs that allow us to see new versions of the future where we’re living in a world that we want to exist in.”
Co-Founders acknowledges the Bay Area’s innovation and creation, from Silicon Valley happenings to the music and activism of Oakland. Its story follows a young Black woman in West Oakland trying to save her home, teaming up with a White prep school dropout.
Lewis originally hit on the idea for its story thanks to regular gatherings he organized in the Bay that combined cypher with catharsis. He grew up in Seattle, and describes himself as a recovering tech founder. Lewis says that meet-ups served as a kind of therapy for him and others in similar professional roles who didn’t otherwise feel comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities and fears about getting destroyed by the competition, or no one using their products, or running out of money.
“We found kind of a safe place in improvising and sharing comedic personal stories at a weekly cadence where music, hip hop instrumentals, pulled the stories out of us,” Lewis says.
The writer says he’s been obsessed with freestyle rap ever since he met a hip hop producer through his sister when he was 12 years old.
“I went over to his basement and saw an SM 58 microphone hanging from a cord from the ceiling, a four-track underneath it, and him and three of his friends making shit up whatever came to their minds, roasting each other about what they were wearing, about what they were going to eat for lunch,” he says.
“It was so fun, and it was infectious, and they were channeling some source of creativity and connection that I needed to be a part of,” he remembers.
Lewis worked on Co-Founders for years, inspired by those cathartic weekly sessions he wound up having as an adult. Meeting Oakland native and singer Adefela in 2018 at a First Friday event changed the project’s trajectory. The script’s structure stayed basically the same, Lewis says: two unlikely founders coming together in a competitive startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. But the integration of Adefela’s life experiences made Co-Founders far more interesting.
“What if this became the story of two co-founders who weren’t both historical insiders to tech, but one was a historic outsider who had grown up in Oakland, introverted coder, Black woman (some similarities to Adesha’s life) who is interested in technology but hadn’t had the access? What if she chased her dream, and it took her into this accelerator and we followed that story?” Lewis remembers asking. “That’s what created this writing partnership, initially between me and Adesha, and then me and Adesha and Ryan Nicole, all with Anthony as our benevolent connector.”
Lewis says back as a kid, he loved the “independent thought and wild creativity” of music out of the Bay Area, such as Too Short, Hieroglyphics, and Blackalicious. An exhibit about hip hop he saw several years ago at the Oakland Museum had a marked impact on him.
“It defined ‘hustle’ on the wall in a framed quote, and [defined it as] creating opportunities where none existed. I saw that, and I was thinking about the parallels of hustle in the tech entrepreneurial world and in Oakland independent hip hop music world,” he said. “Around the same time, in very similar geographic regions, Too Short and JT the Bigga Figga were selling tapes out of their trunks, and [Steve] Wozniak and [Steve] Jobs were selling computers out of their garages. Does it take the same hustle to sell a tape out of a truck as it does to sell your computer out of a garage?”
The play asks that very question in song “Silicon Valley to Vallejo,” a song featuring E-40 himself, a man with a key to that city and a street there named after him.
“It turns out there’s a lot of things that are similar, and there’s a lot of things that are different, and we’re not trying to wash over the differences in terms of the stakes, and the opportunities,” Lewis said. “But it’s really an opportunity to see what things are possible if worlds connect, and the power that we can create together.”
CO-FOUNDERS runs through July 6. Strand Theater, SF. More info here.
