Meet Fred Seibert | Serial entrepreneur who produces cartoons and creates media companies.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Fred Seibert and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Fred, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Hah! None. At least, not consciously. I wanted to make records and didn’t know how (or was scared) to contact “real” record companies. So my buddies and I started Oblivion Records ( http://bit.ly/3FlrFFm )

Working in the corporate gold mines of commercial radio and then as a co-founder of MTV wore me down. So my partner Alan Goodman and I started the world’s first media branding company figuring it might be more invigorating. https://fredalan.org/post/165050268321/the-fredalan-chronology-we-were-in-business-for

I went back in the grind to resurrect the famous Hanna-Barbera Cartoons studio when Ted Turner bought it. When he decided to sell his entire company (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network) to Time Warner, I figured that five years of working for a lunatic, brilliant entrepreneur was good enough, so I started Frederator, my own cartoon studio. I stupidly went back to the salt mines of MTV to run their online businesses, quit after a year (I was a really bad employee) and add an online video component to Frederator.

Channel Frederator did so well that venture capital approached us and with a few co-founders I put together Next New Networks, the company that, for better or worse, started the multi-channel networks (MCN) on YouTube. Who could resist free (sure!) money? YouTube bought our company.

20 years in Frederator went through a number of changes, a lot of hits, online and in traditional media, and ended up as a small public company.

Yuck. I quit and started FredFilms in Los Angeles.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I come from a family of scientists and decided at six that I’d be a chemist. After a school life as a math/science kid I went to college to study chemistry. A few weeks in I turned to my Zoology lab mate. “I like the Beatles more than this,” and marched into my college radio station and never left. No surprise, I never graduated.

After a lifetime of playing music I went to the other side of the glass in a recording studio to produce records (records and pop music were the lingua franca of my generation). After spending years figuring it out, a wise, famous recording engineer pointed out to me that staying focused on talent was a super power. That’s what I’ve done for 50 years.

Whether it’s in music, television, cartoons or technology, I’ve staying focused on identifying superior, ambitious and friendly talent.

I continue to be a fan, a professional fan, who tries to help that talent.

Website: https://www.fredfilms.com … https://fredseibert.com … https://oblivionrecords.co … https://fredalan.org

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fredseibert

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fseibert/

Image Credits
David Yellen