Ken Sterling Podcast Transcript
Ken Sterling joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ken Sterling. Ken Sterling is a seasoned attorney, tech entrepreneur, and talent agent. He passionately advocates for artists, creators, and influencers, ensuring they have prominent platforms and rewarding engagements.
In addition to teaching at the USC Annenberg School, Ken worked as a technology and management consultant with KPMG and played an integral role in co-founding a cloud computing company and a socially conscious bank. As part of a boutique asset management firm, he was entrusted with overseeing the legal team and real estate portfolio exceeding 300 million.
In addition to his corporate roles, Sterling has a robust presence in academia and media. Sterling earned his LLM from the USC Gould School of Law, a BA in Communication and Applied Psychology from the University of California, an MBA in Marketing and Leadership from Babson College, and an MA. From the USC Annenberg school and a PhD in organizational leadership from the University of California.
Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Ken. Welcome to the show!
Ken Sterling:. Brian, Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I’m really excited that we have this opportunity to get together and chat. You’re hailing out of the great state of California. You’re in LA right now. Love that place. I spent some time in Orange County, but I really do appreciate you jumping on and making this time.
And Ken, we’re going to jump directly into the questions so we can get your story out there. Let’s talk about your career in technology. You’re a litigator, mediator, attorney. You’re a senior executive. You’ve been in marketing and now. You’re the Founder and CEO of Sterling Media Law and Partner and Head of Talent Management at BigSpeak.
Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
Ken Sterling: That’s a great question, Brian. It’s real, if you’re looking at the real truth and the real Origin story is I grew up very humble at times. We were homeless. So, my vow was, hey, I want to live better. I want to do better.
And I just have this built in hustle that I’ve never lost. You know, I’m a kid from New York. I came out to California and as you know, Southern California has got a different work ethic than other parts of the world. You’re, you’re in a great place in the Midwest where there’s a strong work ethic. So, I feel like one of the things that’s helped me Excel is to always remember my roots.
Every morning when I wake up, I feel grateful. I feel abundant and I know that I cannot be complacent or lazy.
Brian Thomas: Love that. And you’re right. Can we’re close probably to the same age and absolutely. We both had some tough times growing up. I get it. And I appreciate you waking up and remembering those things.
Cause that’s what really keeps us humble. So, thank you for sharing. And Ken, you certainly have quite a diverse career. And educational background. It’s amazing. I love it when I was doing these questions. What’s the secret behind you pursuing so many career interests?
Ken Sterling: That’s a great question. You know, again, going back to my humble beginnings of back in the day.
Of knowing education was the way out of poverty and knowing that learning and always being curious is going to lead to bigger and better things for myself and for my family and for my communities. It really. Is interesting to me to go to school and I pick programs that I find really fascinating and engaging.
So, I think that’s a big part of it. And a lot of times when people think of higher Ed and what they’re going to do this kind of old cliche of follow your passion or follow your heart. And I’ve always picked programs of things that I was really interested in. And I always took the classes and electives that to me.
We’re the most unique and different. I even remember taking a surfing class. If you could imagine I was getting college credit for surfing. So having fun education could be fun. It just doesn’t have to be a bunch of books and scantrons.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing your experience and you know, surfing, obviously.
Whenever you’re learning and having fun, you retain much more and your grades are obviously better. So, I appreciate you sharing your diverse skill set and educational background. That’s awesome. And Ken, switching gears to our third question, you work in venture capital space as well. Are there any promising tech projects you are working on that you’re able to share with us today?
Ken Sterling: Possibly. Great question. So, I’m an LP of a very progressive all tech fund. So, we only go into tech and I’ve been with them for about 5 years. The biggest projects that we’re looking at right now, of course, or AI. And I know that it’s almost. You know, 3 years ago, it was blockchain and crypto and things like that.
AI is huge. The potential for, for not just pure play AI or generative AI or these LLM large language models. It’s also putting AI on a platform or putting AI on a technology that’s even 20 or 30 years old. How does it make it better? How does it enhance it? One of the spaces I’m really interested in, and I do this in my media law practice.
We do a lot of privacy and cyber law. So, when you take cyber law and when you take privacy and when you take cyber security, and then you add AI to both sides of the fence. So, in other words, for the perps out there that are using AI. They’re able to do so much more and so much more damage and on the other side for the people that are, you know, the air quote, good guys, they can use AI to detect anomalies and trends and to shut things down.
So really, really excited in AI cybersecurity.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And as a technologist and technology executive, we’ve been using a lot of that stuff in the last probably four or five years in our environments, but it’s only gotten, it’s just accelerated the speed on how they’re releasing some of this stuff.
It’s pretty awesome. So I’m with you there and can last question of the day. Are you leveraging any new or emerging tech in your firm or business? And if not, maybe there’s a cool tool or app that you use that you might share with us.
Ken Sterling: Sure, we’re using so a big speak speakers Bureau were the on any given day.
We’re in the top 3 largest speakers bureaus out there and we’re definitely the speakers Bureau that focuses the most on the fortune 1000. We are very tech driven. And you know, part of this just comes from me being in a big tech background and understanding technology can be an amazing tool. So we’ve been using AI and iterations and variations of AI for several years before it was cool before it was scaring people before ChatGPT came out or Bard.
So, we’ve been using on the marketing side Jasper AI, which is great. And they’ve built all these templates If you want to do Amazon bestseller ads, if you want to do blog posts, if you want to do PPC ads. So, anything in the marketing world, and I come from MarTech in the marketing world. So really big on Jasper.
We do use generative AI for our content. We’re using Salesforce and we’re using the Einstein AI modules there. So those are good. And then another tech play that I’m involved in. With Opus intelligence labs is a conversion platform for influencer campaigns. It goes bigger and deeper than that. We’ve got a very interesting board.
Our cap table has a lot of celebrities and well-known people and everybody that’s on social media. If you’re on social media, if you’re on Wikipedia, if you’ve been in newsletters, if you’re in anything, that’s in the digital footprint, our technology is. Ranking all that content and giving people point scores.
So even you and where you’re located, it might be counterintuitive for people to think. Oh, Brian’s an influencer in men’s apparel. And how do we know that? Well, he’s got a picture on Instagram where he’s wearing a red and white striped tie and that has more engagement than. Any other image that he has so all of a sudden, your point score to a brand like men’s warehouse or banana Republic or Gucci ties would say, Hey, for this particular product for this particular campaign, Brian gets a point score of X, which would probably be higher than my point score because I don’t have photographs of me and ties.
So I won’t have that kind of engagement. The technology is mind blowing. Oops. One of one of the people on our cap table and who’s our de facto CTO, I can’t say his name. He’s majorly known out there for data science; publicly traded company owns a basketball team. I mean, major, major players. So I’m excited about this product that we’re building.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And thank you for sharing our audience gets jazzed about the things that people are using. And, you know, we focus on tech here on the podcast, but we do interview all kinds of executives and entrepreneurs that may not be technologists. So we just get excited about the things that people are sharing and doing.
So that’s awesome. And Ken. It was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Ken Sterling: Wonderful. Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ken Sterling Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
