Brian Fielding

Founder & President, Broken Symmetries

Brian Fielding

Founder & President, Broken Symmetries

Brian Fielding has over 30 years experience as an attorney, business executive, and consultant in digital media, broadcasting, technology and licensing. He was on the senior leadership team for 15 years at Audible.com, during its start-up and rapid growth phases and for five years after it was acquired by Amazon.com. Prior to Audible, Brian lived the dream by working in the Sports Division of CBS Television Network, after practicing entertainment law in NYC.

As a Senior Attorney with Outside GC, Brian provides business-focused commercial contract, digital and broadcast media legal counsel to technology, online, e-commerce, and digital media companies – both public and private.

Brian was Audible’s EVP for Corporate Development from 2005-2012, and played a key role in setting Audible’s strategic and operational direction, including managing the relationship with Audible’s mission-critical 3rd party distribution partner, Apple/iTunes. He managed international development and expansion opportunities, including all non-domestic content acquisition, and was responsible for Audible’s Japan operations. He oversaw content negotiations with US-based Big 6 publishers and the leading European publishers.

From 1997 – 2005, he served as Audible’s EVP – Content & Business & Legal Affairs, and functioned as de facto in-house counsel, responsible for managing content acquisition, content partner relationships, co-marketing and technology deals. Brian structured and negotiated strategic business development deals, including marketing and technology partnerships, and the first digital-only publishing imprint – Random House Audible. He developed the digital publishing concept of “direct-to-digital”(D2D), now a paradigm for co-publishing and catalog deals between publishers and digital distributors. Additionally, Brian managed Audible Original Production Studios. Brian’s deals included ground-breaking internet production/distribution deals with Robin Williams (in 1999) and Ricky Gervais (in 2005). He worked on Audible’s original co-marketing deal with Amazon in 2000, and negotiated seminal deals with Microsoft and Apple, the latter of which covered the integration of Audible’s firmware into the iPod and made Audible the exclusive global supplier of audiobooks to iTunes, which is still true today over a decade later.

Before Audible, Brian was Vice President, Business Affairs and Director of Programming at CBS Sports where he was responsible for sports rights and talent negotiations. He did all of the transactional negotiations with the IOC, the USOC and the respective local organizing committees for the1992, 1994 and 1998 Winter Olympics.

Prior to joining CBS, Brian was the associate attorney in the NYC boutique entertainment and sports-focused law firm Ryan & Fogerty where he worked on a wide variety of transactions, with a specialty in television broadcast rights (e.g. Augusta National Golf Club & The Masters golf tournament), home video rights, music, trademark licensing and broadcaster’s personal service agreements.

Brian graduated from the University of Michigan and received his JD from New York Law School. He grew up in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. After graduating from U of M he lived and played music in Detroit before moving to New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood where he lived for almost 20 years prior to moving to Montclair, NJ with his wife and now-grown kids. Brian is a jazz pianist and composer and will be releasing his first album of original music in summer 2015.

Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.