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Conversation with Damien Ritter, Co-founder and President of Funk Volume

by | Nov 1, 2010 | Business, career path, consulting, Conversations, entrepreneurship, mba, music industry, notable organizations, Stanford GSB, strategy | 1 comment

In this entry, I present the second installment in my “Conversations” series of interviews with professionals in the business world. In the video below, I am interviewing Damien Ritter, who is the co-founder and President of an independent hip-hop label and production company called Funk Volume.

Damien has an educational and professional background that most people would kill to have. He is a Stanford MBA and University of California at Berkeley grad who has worked at Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Deloitte Consulting in his career. About 18 months ago, he decided to make the plunge into entrepreneurship and launched Funk Volume.

Dame and I have been friends for several years since he started his studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Business during the start of my second year there. Later, we reconnected when I moved to Chicago and lived in the same apartment building as he’d been in for over a year. It’s great to see the success that Dame has had in building up Funk Volume because I remember hearing about it from the idea stage during work-out sessions in our apartment complex’s gym.

He would tell me about his belief in his younger brother (SwizZz) and his brother’s best friend (Hopsin) as artists and how he felt that they could leverage their talent to create something great. He talked about the ups and downs of getting the venture off the ground and the amount of legwork required to make it happen. He invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into Funk Volume and it often wasn’t easy, but his desire to launch the organization kept him motivated to continue moving forward with it. Now that Funk Volume is a real entity and is rapidly gaining traction as an independent label and production company, I’m incredibly proud of what Dame has been able to accomplish.

For additional information about Funk Volume, its artists, and its activities, please note:

Before getting to the video, I would like to thank Dame once again for agreeing to be featured on my site. While some might think that our interaction may have been too informal, that’s exactly what I was going for…you guys definitely got the real Damien Ritter in this one 🙂

By the way, I’ve figured out the source of the earlier audio issues experienced during my first video interview with Graham Richmond and have resolved it in this interview.

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Interview video:

Conversation with Damien Ritter, Co-Founder and CEO of Funk Volume from Marquis Parker on Vimeo.