Emily Best

Founder and CEO of Seed&Spark

Travels From Travels From:
Los Angeles, CA, USA
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Emily Best Biography

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a unique organization that accelerates the cultural impact of storytelling. Seed&Spark’s crowdfunding platform and national education program have helped thousands of bold storytellers raise tens of millions of dollars to bring to life entirely new stories, and they've built an engaged community of a half-million creators from around the world. Seed&Spark build curriculum around a curated selection of those stories and delivers them for maximum impact through Film Forward, an enterprise training platform that helps some of the world's largest brands build more innovative and accountable cultures.

An advocate for equity inclusion in the entertainment industry (and the entire working world), Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. She also runs workshops to help independent content creators successfully crowdfund, build an audience and pitch their projects. Best’s talks on crowdfunding, pitching, and building equitable startups have been viewed millions of times. She writes regularly about the entertainment and startup ecosystems and serves as an advisor and mentor to dozens of early-stage companies.

In addition to her work at Seed&Spark, Best produces film, series, and VR that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals. Best produced projects including “Like the Water,” a feature film starring Caitlin FitzGerald (“Masters of Sex,” “UnREAL”); “Fck Yes!,” a digital series about sexual consent which she also co-wrote and co-directed; Janicza Bravo’s virtual reality film “Hard World for Small Things” which premiered at Sundance; and James Kaelan’s “The Visitor,” which premiered at Slamdance and was featured at Tribeca. Best was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Business Journal “Woman of Influence”, a 2015 Upstart 100 entrepreneur (Business Journals), received the Ivy Film Innovator Award in 2015 and in 2016, graduated from Techstars Boston, an elite accelerator program for the country’s top entrepreneurs. Best has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding, and rewards-based crowdfunding and has personally participated in more than 300 crowdfunding campaigns.

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Speaker profile last updated by AAE Talent Team on 07/15/2024.

Emily Best Speaking Topics

  • The Demand for Innovation [Keynote & Workshop]

    In the last three years, every single workplace on the planet has been through a re-org 1-7 times. The move to all or partially remote workforce? Suddenly finding you have five generations of people with extremely different working styles and expectations side by side in the same company? Being able to metabolize and respond to major social uprisings? To tackle any of these is to re-organize the operating agreements, values, and behaviors of your organization. What about if you have to tackle all three by Friday, like most people leaders are asked to do?

    This Keynote and workshop is about how to recognize the demand for innovation, and how perspective-taking and storytelling can crack open pathways to new ways of working inside organizations at any stage of growth. Emily shares her own experience of how she learned to recognize the demand for innovation, what she discovered interviewing hundreds of people leaders on their biggest challenges, and what she has uncovered about workplace innovation in the last two years of growing her new venture, Film Forward. Film Forward is an experiential learning platform driving workplace performance, engagement, and inclusion with learning journeys built around the world’s best short cinema.

    To put the keynote into action, Best will share an award-winning short film and lead the group in a reflection exercise – demonstrating the possibilities of bringing creative solutions if you’re willing to invite in new perspectives.

  • Innovation is Not Magic

    Innovation is not magic. It's driven by a set of conditions that any organization has the power to create. From years of working across a wide range of corporate clients, Emily and her team have clear examples of how shifting and clarifying simple organizational agreements in small ways and large can create brand new conditions for innovating with inclusion.

  • Storytelling for Good: Building Real Community

    After over a decade of supporting community driven creators to tell stories that support and uplift their communities, Seed&Spark has become a central repository of how storytelling can gather and galvanize groups to move the culture forward. We'll watch a short film and clips and build excitement around story-powered community building.

  • Building Community That Wants You To Grow

    "Community building" has been a trendy way to rename many conventional marketing tactics and leave the communities feeling talked at, ignored or worse, exploited. Sharing the story of the unconventional tactics Best and her team use in building and growing Seed&Spark's vibrant creator community, this talk explores what it means to really be in community in a rapidly changing world.

  • Deprogramming Implicit Bias: The Untapped Potential of Film

    In this talk, Emily Best paints a portrait of media’s role in programming our society’s bias, not just through the films Hollywood has been churning out over the years but the very business model built to produce them. Through the arc of her experience building Seed&Spark, she demonstrates film’s untapped potential to undo some of the damage that has been done with equitable storytelling.

Emily Best Videos

  • Crowdfunding & Film Distribution Masterclass - Full Interview with ...
  • The #1 Reason Why Someone Invests In A Movie by Emily Best ...

FAQs on booking Emily Best

  • How do I book Emily Best to speak at my event?

    Our experienced booking agents have successfully helped clients around the world secure speakers like Emily Best for speaking engagements, personal appearances, product endorsements, or corporate entertainment since 2002. Click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page to check availability for Emily Best, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to discuss your upcoming event. One of our experienced agents will be happy to help you get speaking fee information and check availability for Emily Best or any other speaker of your choice.
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    Speaking fees for Emily Best, or any other speakers and celebrities, are determined based on a number of factors and may change without notice. The estimated fees to book Emily Best are for live events and for virtual events. For the most current speaking fee to hire Emily Best, click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to speak directly with an experienced booking agent.
  • What topics does Emily Best speak about?

    Emily Best is a keynote speaker and industry expert whose speaking topics include Celebrity, Culture, DEI, Diversity & Inclusion, Empowerment, Entertainment, Finance, Personal Growth, Television & Film.
  • Where does Emily Best travel from?

    Emily Best generally travels from Los Angeles, CA, USA, but can be booked for private corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. For more details, please contact an AAE Booking agent.
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    AAE Speakers Bureau has successfully booked keynote speakers like Emily Best for clients worldwide since 2002. As a full-service speaker booking agency, we have access to virtually any speaker or celebrity in the world. Our agents are happy and able to submit an offer to the speaker or celebrity of your choice, letting you benefit from our reputation and long-standing relationships in the industry. Please click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page including the details of your event, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536, and one of our agents will assist you to book Emily Best for your next private or corporate function.
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Emily Best is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics such as The Demand for Innovation [Keynote & Workshop], Innovation is Not Magic, Storytelling for Good: Building Real Community, Building Community That Wants You To Grow and Deprogramming Implicit Bias: The Untapped Potential of Film. The estimated speaking fee range to book Emily Best for your event is $10,000 - $20,000. Emily Best generally travels from Los Angeles, CA, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Jenni Gold, Rosie Perez, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, Diane Guerrero and Lena Dunham. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Emily Best for an upcoming live or virtual event.

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