Meet Reid Genauer, the chief marketing officer of video app Magisto, and the lead singer/ of the Assembly of Dust band.
LOS ANGELES – If you were to call Reid Genauer a real rock star of a chief marketing officer, you wouldn’t be exaggerating.
Genauer is a tech marketer by day for the video editing app Magisto–but he often spends weekends, with guitar in hand, in front of large crowds at clubs, performing with his band, Assembly of Dust.
“I do this because music is a part of my DNA,” says Genauer, Magisto’s chief marketing officer, our guest on the extended weekend edition of the #TalkingTech podcast. “I can’t imagine life without it. It’s all I ever wanted to do, and I chased it with all of my being.”
But once his first band Strangefolk became successful enough to tour 120 dates a year, his feelings about the working musician’s life turned south. Going from gig to gig, town to town, made him feel “unhinged,” like he was living a truck driver’s life, not that of an artist.
So on a lark he applied to Cornell for an MBA change of life, and a few years later was working as a product manager at Snapple.
Now he’s all about getting Magisto into the hands of more consumers and businesses.
« I don’t know how he does it, » says longtime friend Jim Louderback, editorial director for the VidCon online video convention. « Very few people could do both gigs well. Reid just has a tremendous amount of energy and is great at focusing. »
Magisto CEO Oren Boiman says having Genauer on the team gives him a different perspective of consumers than he’d get with a traditional marketing exec.
“He gets a feeling for what moves them,” he says. “Our business is about people and their emotional reactions and memories,” and having the creative type on staff is a good counter-balance to the hard-core science, he adds. “A lot of our innovations come from the marriage of the two.”
His bands were never household names, but Genauer sells enough tickets to get consistent bookings, and has become well known on the folk-rock and jam band scene. He’s opened for Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh and Bob Weir at solo shows. Singing the Dead’s « Friend of the Devil » to assembled Deadheads was a career high, he notes.
Mike Vorhaus, an analyst with Magid Associates, knows Genauer both as a music fan, and as from industry conferences.
« I have watched Reid play and sing and I have watched him wine and dine digital titans, » he says. « I doubt (the late Dead guitarist) Jerry Garcia could have done both. »
Magisto has over 80 million registered users, and looks to all those folks making videos on their smartphones that never get around to doing anything with their images.
The app, which is free, automatically creates mini-videos, which can be shared on Facebook and YouTube. (Subscription plans start at $4.99 monthly, and remove Magisto branding from the video.)
Genauer’s audience is the “99% of the world that never considers video editing,” he says. “Our greatest competitor is apathy. But as you see more video in your social feed, the expectation of what’s possible increases, people start to say, `How did Aaron do that?’”
Usage of the app is being driven by millennials, he says. “They are mobile first and social first. It’s hard to read a long article on your phone, but you can watch a video very easily.”
Genauer, who grew up in New York State, now lives in the Silicon Valley, where Magisto is based. But the audiences for the group–both Assembly of Dust and Strangefolk, which still plays occasionally, are primarily on the east coast. The alt-country folk group Dust recently did gigs in Washington, DC, Philadelphia and New York, and will appear in Portland, Maine and Vermont in November.
Dust will perform 25 dates in 2016.
A Google search of Genauer pops up with a band reference first, followed by his corporate LinkedIn persona.
How does he lead the dual life?
“I work like a snake eats,” he says. “I go through intense hyper productive periods, and then I crash.”
Once he switched to business, he couldn’t leave music behind, he says.
“I like wearing the same shoes I did when I was 14,” he says. “I like cursing, I like my hair a mess. The music part of my persona I carry with me wherever I go.”
Beyond that, music is “an outlet for thoughts and emotions,” he says, and performing is “like having a magic wand. You can change people’s state of minds….Having 200 people sing your songs back to you–there’s just nothing like it. » On the flip side, working for a video editing app, and « watching videos of people telling their life story in Japan, and India and Chicago all in the same day –that’s quite magical. »
Being in the business world is also creative, he says. “You’re building a new product out of thin air and problem-solving in ways that haven’t been addressed before.”
That, and, he adds, “compared to being a musician,” working for a tech-startup “is very stable. That’s ironic, but true.”
Reid Genauer performs his composition « Speculator » in the USA TODAY Los Angeles bureau, accompanied by Jefferson Graham on guitar
Stick with the podcast all the way through to hear Genauer perform his composition “Speculator,” accompanied by the host, and follow USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham. The extended weekend edition of #TalkingTech runs every Saturday; listen to the daily and weekend editions on Stitcher and iTunes.