Tuesday, October 16, 2018

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

Track I: Haas Conference Center, Room 172 & 173: Live Webcast

VCs, Private Equity and Corporate Investments: The Funding and Accelerating the Content and Technology Marketplace

Pallavi Shah, Senior Vice President, HOULIHAN LOKEY

Schuyler M. Moore, Partner, Greenberg Glusker

Christopher G. Howland, Vice President | Entertainment Industries Division, PACIFIC MERCANTILE BANK

Gregory Bedrosian, Managing Partner & CEO, Drake Star Partners

Paul Hanson, founder and Chief Executive Officer, Covert Media

Megan Jones, Associate, Clark & Trevithick

Jason Anderson, founding partner, Pursuit Advisory

Larry Gerbrandt, principal, Media Valuation Partners, Moderator

Paul Hanson is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Covert Media, an independent feature production, financing, and distribution company. He serves as producer on all the company’s titles including the recently announced The Ice Cream Man, the star-studded Ophelia starring Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts and Clive Owen, and Resurface which is being produced alongside Broken Road Productions. Projects released during Paul’s tenure at Annapurna include American Hustle, Joy, Foxcatcher, Sausage Party and Spike Jonze’s Her. Paul also managed QED’s slate of notable projects including District 9, Fading Gigolo, and Oliver Stone’s W.

Pallavi Shah, Senior Vice President, Houlihan Lokey: Ms. Shah is a Senior Vice President in Houlihan Lokey’s Tech+IP Advisory practice. As an industry-recognized thought leader and spokesperson in technology, innovation, and intellectual property, Ms. Shah has focused on helping Fortune 100 companies and their partners monetize their innovations, bring many digital media and security technologies to market, and protect their innovations through the filing of well over 100 patents. Ms. Shah has served as a Board Observer of venture-funded Silicon Valley startups, and has chaired various standards committees, including MPEG4-Java. She is also the inventor of four U.S. patents and has authored and presented multiple technical and business papers. Previously, Ms. Shah was a Senior Vice President of IP Transactions at Black Stone IP, a boutique investment bank focused on valuing and trading Tech+IP assets, which was acquired by Houlihan Lokey in 2017. Earlier in her career, she served in various senior management roles at HP for over a decade, including where she monetized HP’s intellectual property through patent sales, technology transfer, channel/partner development, and new business incubations. Before HP, Ms. Shah managed alliances for Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corp.). Prior to Sun, she worked for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where she pioneered the world’s first interactive HDTV. Ms. Shah holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pune and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Utah State University. She is fluent in Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi.

Gregory Bedrosian is Managing Partner & CEO of Drake Star Partners. Gregory is an award-winning, seasoned investment banker and private equity investor whose experience spans both domestic and cross-border M&A and private equity transactions across the US, Europe and emerging markets.  Amongst his numerous honors, Gregory received the 2016 M&A Advisor Leadership Award and is an M&A Advisor Hall of Fame inductee. Prior to Drake Star Partners, Gregory was a co-founder of Renaissance Capital, a leading investment bank focused on the emerging markets of Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa and co-founder and General Partner of The Sputnik Funds, a $1 billion private equity investment firm. Gregory began his career in the merchant banking department of Credit Suisse First Boston in London and the leveraged buyout group of Salomon Brothers (now part of Citigroup) in New York. Gregory is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations and he is a regular speaker and panelist at leading industry and academic forums. He has served on numerous corporate and non-profit boards across the US and Europe. He is currently an Advisor at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-Lab) and sits on the Business Advisory Council of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He also chairs the Investment Committee of a $100 million New York-based foundation and sits on the Board of a $100 million emerging markets investment fund. He previously served on the Harvard Business School Alumni Board of Directors (Emeritus). Gregory holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Schuyler M. Moore is a partner in the corporate entertainment department of Greenberg Glusker, practicing entertainment, corporate, and tax law. Mr. Moore holds his undergraduate degree from UCLA (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude) and his law degree also from UCLA (first in class).  Moore has been practicing in the entertainment industry since 1981, and he represents a broad spectrum of clients throughout the entertainment industry, including producers, sales agents, foreign distributors, and financiers.  He has handled some of the largest financing transactions in Hollywood, including Reliance’s investment in DreamWorks, the Ratpac-Dune slate financing for Warner Brothers, the Hemisphere slate financing for Sony and Paramount, and the Hunan Group slate financing for Lions Gate.  He is the author of several books, including The Biz: The Basic Business, legal, and Financial Aspects of the Film Industry, a popular book in its 4th edition, Taxation of the Entertainment Industry, the leading treatise on that topic, and What They Don’t Teach You in Law School.  He was an adjunct professor at both the UCLA Law School and the UCLA Anderson School of Management, teaching Entertainment Law and Finance for many years, and he is a frequent speaker and writer on a wide variety of entertainment subjects. Mr. Moore has been named (a) one of the top 100 entertainment lawyers by the Hollywood Reporter, (b) one of the top 25 entertainment lawyers by Variety, (c) one of the top 100 lawyers in California by the Daily Journal and (d) one of top 3 "Most Influential Lawyers" in media by the National Law Journal.

Megan Lisa Jones is a tax attorney at Clark & Trevithick, A.P.C. who advises on business, estate planning and complex structuring issues. She has extensive transactional and fundraising experience.  Ms. Jones has both a J.D. and an LL.M. in tax from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. Undergraduate work was completed at Pepperdine University. Megan focuses on advising clients on a wide range of tax and other structuring and administrative legal issues.  Having worked as an investment banker for Lazard Freres and Needham & Company, her grasp of financial complexities provides a solid foundation for transactional, valuation or fundraising issues.  She has sold businesses from inside and outside trusts, handling complex partnership, S Corporation or public company issues.  Her expertise includes both domestic and international estate planning.   Megan’s clients include individuals, businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Ms. Jones is a member of the Beverly Hills, the San Fernando, the Los Angeles and the American Bar Associations. She is a continuing education instructor for Loyola Law School, CEB, Pincus Professional Education, PFAC and NBI, among other organizations, and speaks at numerous conferences. Ms. Jones is a STEP member, has written three books and has a California real estate broker’s license.  Megan is an education advocate and on the board of the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation.

Jason Anderson is a founding partner at Pursuit Advisory. He brings his experience in venture capital, leveraged finance, and mergers and acquisitions together with a deep passion for media convergence. Jason was a key architect of Pursuit’s integrated business model. Following the 2008 Financial Crisis, Jason witnessed as Wall Street firms struggled to provide clients with innovative strategic thinking on par with their transactional expertise. The sheer speed of market change coupled with Wall Street’s rigid intellectual culture made keeping up impossible. Moreover, client attitudes changed and they began demanding far more creative strategic ideas given the pressure to drive corporate value. Before Pursuit, Jason spent ten years on Wall Street. His most formative years were spend with UBS’s renowned LA office working in the Global Media Investment Banking Group during its rise to prominence.  Prior to banking, Jason worked for the venture capital affiliate of Gartner. Jason spent the summer of his MBA studies at UVa with Business Objects working in corporate development. When not at Pursuit’s LA office, which is rare, you can find Jason with his wife, Tiffany, and Boston Terrier, Henry Lee.

Larry Gerbrandt, principal, Media Valuation Partners: A leading media and entertainment executive, research analyst and consultant for more than 25 years, he focused on the economic and strategic implications of the intersection between traditional media and emerging content delivery technologies. Background includes experience in film and video production, commercial photography, cable TV system operations and magazine publishing. Joined Kagan World Media, a groundbreaking media research organization, in 1984. As senior analyst and senior vice president of Kagan's entertainment division, oversaw more than two dozen of its newsletters and databooks, led its valuation practice and was the creator of Kagan's definitive Economics of Basic Cable Networks database. In 2000, after Kagan's sale to Primedia, became COO and led its integration into Primedia's MediaCentral division. Upon Kagan's subsequent sale to MCG Capital joined AlixPartners to lead its entertainment consulting and litigation support practice. In 2005 was recruited by The Nielsen Company to become SVP/general manager of Nielsen Analytics, focusing on emerging media technology economics and conducting primary research on consumer adoption of new media platforms. Following Nielsen's sale to a group of private equity companies he formed his own research and valuation practice, Media Valuation Partners, in 2007. Widely quoted as an expert on trends and economics in the M&E industries and has served as moderator of more than 200 Kagan and industry panels and conferences. Have served as an expert witness and expert consultant on dozens of major litigations in the media, entertainment and intellectual property arena, including the landmark Katzenberg v. Disney case. An award-winning fine art photographer and a graduate of Regis University with a bachelor's degree in business administration. Author of two monthly columns in leading industry publications: “Letter From America” in Euromedia Magazine and the “Media Math” column in The Hollywood Reporter.