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by Shanique Yates
September 16, 2024
Breakr’s Founders Anthony And Ameer Brown Discuss Innovation And Their Full-Circle Moment With Nas
As a tech company, Breakr has quickly become a powerhouse within the industry, shifting the ways in which music, talent, brands, and influencers are discovered and shared.
The relationship between Breakr’s founders, Anthony and Ameer Brown, is what happens when one merges innovation, entrepreneurship, and resilience. As siblings, their love for one another runs deep, and they bring that same admiration into their work as the co-founders of the dynamic platform connecting artists, brands, and creators as they work to reshape the landscape of the music industry.
As a tech company, Breakr has quickly become a powerhouse within the industry, shifting how music, talent, brands, and influencers are discovered and shared. Since its inception in 2020, Breakr has been connecting artists with labels and brands looking to take advantage of the creator economy. Beyond that, Anthony says ensuring that creatives are paid their value keeps him up at night (in the best way) when it comes to the business.
“We’ve been doing this for like three and a half years now, and you can get fatigued if you don’t have a why,” Anthony told BLACK ENTERPRISE. “I think our why has been so crystalized in the last few weeks, which is really more like months. It’s like, Hey, we want to be able to make it easier for brands and labels to be able to find creators, but we also want to make it easier for labels and brands to be able to interact and provide value to creators.”
“The big thing there is streamlining these payments. Payments have been a very important innovation we’ve pushed through Breakr,” he continued. “We have made it our interest, and like, modus operand, to pay these kids in real-time. To us, that stops evictions. That stops people from having to have a job and be a creator on the side. It allows people to go out there and price themselves appropriately because they know they’re going to get their money instantly.”
A double entendre on the front end, with the company’s name stemming from the beat breaker work of a DJ, and the other half of the company’s name comes from the idea that they want to operate like a switchboard or circuit breaker for the entities that use their platform, whether it’s from the lens of a creator or a brand or music label.
“We want to be central infrastructure,” Ameer explained. “Think about a house. All the different appliances in your house are powered by electricity, but they have to be told where to go, how much voltage needs to go, all the information that needs to get there is sent through the electrical current that gets to that appliance so we think about Breakr in that way for the creator economy, we want all the different inputs and all the different appliances to get the right information. They need the right payment. They need the right resources. They need the right efficiency. They need the right data that they need at the right times, and that’s essentially why we’re called Breakr. We’re just a routing mechanism connecting people and solving problems at an efficient scale.”
As Breakr’s founders and graduates of the esteemed HBCU, Florida A&M University (FAMU), the Brown brothers’ vision for the business came as an aha moment at the same time that the world was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Brown brothers were able to bring their friends along with them for the journey. For Anthony, working alongside his sibling has been “the greatest, most stressful, amazing experience” in his life.
“We started Breakr with two other co-founders that are friends of Ameer,” he recalled. “They threw a bunch of parties together in college. They went to FAMU, Daniel Ware and Rotimi Omosheyin, and that was the initial thing. There was a whole culture that they had established from the beginning in terms of how they operated together, and I think that Breakr works because, from my perspective, as technically the outsider of how they operate together, I had to kind of learn them and what they’ve mastered collectively is culture. This deep appreciation of culture. My background was more like finance, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, but they spent so much time in culture and curating culture and creating culture that what happened is that it ultimately became a part of our DNA as the business. We really do stand on the shoulders of that culture.”
The very culture of Breakr attracted early investors like rapper-turned-entrepreneur and cultural connoisseur Nasir “Nas” Jones. Thanks to a program called General Assembly that both Ameer, through his PR and communications background, and Anthony, thanks to his work in the tech space, were able to benefit from earlier in their respective careers, they were not only able to dive deeper into the world of digital marketing and coding, but it also brought them to the attention of Nas and Queensbridge Venture Partners, the first funders of the program.
The pair had no idea that not only would they get to meet Nas during a Hip Hop 50th Anniversary event several years later, but it would also be when they were fully immersed in their work as entrepreneurs, building the Breakr company from the ground up.
“The story is full circle for Tony, me, and in general,” said Ameer. “We’re both from Queens. Our family’s from Southside Jamaica Queens. Our whole history is from Queens, and Nas is essentially a Queen’s kid, you know what I mean. So the fact that he is who he is, and we even know him, is the coolest thing ever.”
Anthony added, “We got to meet him in person, tell him the whole story, take pics, etcetera. It was just a dope, full-circle moment to actually meet him as entrepreneurs, who literally learned technology and how to code through an investment that he made years ago. Then also to have him reinvest in our company, which was significant for us in those early days, in terms of just giving us the battery in our back to keep going.”
“The ability to actually fund our business is just crazy. It’s a story that nobody would believe unless it was true,” Ameer continued. “I actually wrote it. My essay to get into the General Assembly was called Silicon State of Mind: Techmatic and they were like, ‘Why did you name your essay this?’ I was like Nas said in 2009: Illmatic meant ‘the illest of ill, the dopest stuff of all time.’ And I was like; I want to be the techests of tech. I want to be able to make tech with the best of them, right? That’s why I named the article Techmatic. And that was the thing that the person at the General Assembly reading the essay said got me in. She was like, ‘This is a unique take, and I think that this is a dope story, and I want to accept you into the program.’ So it’s a wild story.”
In addition to being an investor, Nas is included in Breakr’s ever-evolving roster of artists benefiting from the platform. Other notable acts include Megan Thee Stallion, Gunna, Rick Ross, Future, and many others. Alongside the musicians, companies like Meta, Live Nation, and P&G are among the brands currently utilizing the startup for various campaigns with the aforementioned performers.
With exponential growth in a short period of time, Breakr has built a global database of 55 million creators, and the company is growing by the minute having onboarded more than 70,000 creators. As they look ahead to the future, the Brown brothers are hoping to reach north of $25 million in transaction volume by the end of next year.
“I think by 2026, it’s not unrealistic to see a world where we’re doing north of $160 million in transactions,” said Anthony. “Then basically by 2027, we think we’ll be doing anywhere around like $330 to $350 million in transactions. For me, the North Star is like, what does it take? How long does it take for us to get to a billion dollars in processed payments annually? So every strategy, and everything that we do is tied towards hitting that within the next five years.
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