Get Your Story Out There with Emily Best

Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Atlanta based Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding platform that makes entertainment more diverse, inclusive, connected and essential. It is a place where creators, audiences, and organizations work together to tell stories that celebrate diverse voices and foster vibrant conversation. Seed&Spark is the most successful crowdfunding platform for independent filmmaking in the world. Since its inception in 2012, it has helped filmmakers raise more than $45 million to make thousands of movies and shows. They ensure that all kinds of stories are told and that all kinds of storytellers have avenues to spark vibrant conversations among people everywhere with their work.

Emily started in the film business taking a circuitous route through restaurants, vision and values strategy, and the theater. After graduating Haverford College with a degree in Anthropology, Emily studied to be a jazz singer in Barcelona before being tapped to run restaurants in California. As the GM of Bistro 33 in Davis, CA, Emily increased the profit margin 2x in the $5M business, managed nearly 80 employees and implemented what would become a company-wide training program. She worked as a contractor for a fiscal responsibility policy non-profit in Sacramento before moving to NYC to co-found Best Partners, a boutique vision and values scenarios-to-strategy company. With Best Partners, Emily participated in strategy efforts for some of the world's leading financial institutions including Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank, as well as organizations such as PREA and the Tallberg Forum. All the while she continued to produce and act in theater. In 2011, Emily produced her first feature film Like the Water (co-written by and starring Caitlin FitzGerald). The challenges and triumphs of that experience led her to found Seed&Spark.

An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. 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, and is now a mentor for Techstars, PlugIn South LA, Start with 8 Hollywood, Square One Startup School. She serves on the Advisory Board for Aleria Tech and Endcrawl. 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.