Hello, my name is Ishak Jabril Yusuf. i am a founder, systems architect, creative builder, and entrepreneur working across media, real estate, technology, telecommunications, insurance, travel, and culture.
My work is connected by one belief:
Access changes outcomes.
Access to communication.
Access to protection.
Access to documentation.
Access to capital.
Access to creative tools.
Access to markets, audiences, systems, and opportunity.
Access to protection.
Access to documentation.
Access to capital.
Access to creative tools.
Access to markets, audiences, systems, and opportunity.
Across companies and projects, I build infrastructure that helps people create, communicate, protect, document, fund, and scale what they are carrying.
A lot of my work begins where art begins: with a feeling. Then I build the structure that lets that feeling become real.
Before the companies, platforms, and systems, there was always a creative impulse.
Songs. Ideas. Voice notes. Business models. Names. Stories. Worlds.
That is the foundation.
Where I come from
I was born on December 19, 1994, in Decatur, Georgia, to Somali immigrants.
I am the oldest of five. I have two brothers and two sisters.
I grew up in East Atlanta before moving to Bethlehem, Georgia, where I graduated from Apalachee High School. I played football from seventh grade through my senior year, was named prom king, and did the school announcements live on camera every morning.
I also gave a graduation speech in front of Over 5,000 people.
At the time, I did not fully understand what those experiences were teaching me.
Football taught me discipline, teamwork, and repetition.
The announcements taught me voice, timing, presence, and performance.
Being prom king taught me that people respond to energy, character, and connection.
Being the oldest child of immigrants taught me responsibility early.
The announcements taught me voice, timing, presence, and performance.
Being prom king taught me that people respond to energy, character, and connection.
Being the oldest child of immigrants taught me responsibility early.
Some of my most important lessons came from learning how to show up without waiting for applause.
That shaped me
I learned to observe.
I learned to adapt.
I learned to lead.
I learned to build.
I learned to adapt.
I learned to lead.
I learned to build.
My first lessons in business
My first job was as a cart handler at The Providence Club golf course, where I worked for three years.
That job became one of my first business schools.
I spent years around golfers, business owners, professionals, and people who had already moved through parts of life I was still trying to understand. I listened closely. I paid attention to how they spoke, how they carried themselves, how they made decisions, and how they talked about money, work, family, risk, opportunity, and time.
That experience gave me early insight into business, class, communication, service, ambition, and access.
It also taught me something that has stayed with me:
Access changes what you can see.
What you can see changes what you believe is possible.
What you can see changes what you believe is possible.
That idea sits underneath almost everything I build.
education
After graduating from Apalachee High School, I attended Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta.
Georgia State inspired me in immeasurable ways. Being in the heart of Atlanta, surrounded by business, culture, media, entrepreneurship, and constant movement, kept me fully engaged. I joined clubs, became the programming chair in my dorm, and involved myself in a number of student organizations and campus communities.
At first, I entered college with the intention of becoming a doctor. I pursued a bachelor’s degree in Nutrition with the hope of using it as a path toward medicine. Once I better understood the pre-med requirements I decided to go into a different direction.
I moved from Nutrition to Computer Information Systems, then to Economics, and finally to Media Entrepreneurship, a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program that gave language to what I had already been doing: building at the intersection of creativity, business, technology, media, and culture.
In 2016, during my junior year, I stepped away from school. But I never fully disconnected from Georgia State. Over the next decade, I remained connected to the university by enrolling part-time, returning in different seasons, and taking a mixture of full-time and part-time classes while continuing to build companies, serve clients, travel, and learn through real work.
Insurance changed how I understood work
In 2015, I obtained my insurance license.
At the time, I realized that no matter how many hours I put into certain jobs, I would still be limited by my base rate. I wanted to sell something intangible. I wanted to understand trust, value, risk, and performance.
Insurance attracted me because it rewarded initiative.
It also taught me how people think about protection.
Most people do not think about risk until they have to. Insurance forced me to understand the structures behind homes, businesses, projects, vehicles, productions, and livelihoods.
That experience became one of the foundations of how I think.
Behind every dream, there is risk.
Behind every risk, there should be structure.
Behind every risk, there should be structure.
Insurance became more than a product to me.
It became architecture for risk.
The car that opened a creative door
While working at the golf course, I saved enough money to buy a burgundy 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue in 2011.
When I entered college, I became friends with an aspiring actor who encouraged me to submit photos of the car for consideration as a picture car.
That one car opened a new world.
I started working as a picture car guy. Then I began doing extras work. Over time, I became a regular background actor and spent more time around film sets, productions, creatives, and people trying to build careers in entertainment.
I loved being close to that world.
Being on sets they had me at times serve as a background actor. There i met aspiring actors and actresses, creatives, and artists who now in hindsight after years of dedication dominate across genres. They are my tribe.
But I also saw the friction.
Creatives needed flexibility. Productions needed people. People needed work. Availability was messy. Communication was scattered. Opportunity often came down to timing, relationships, and whether someone knew you were available.
That is when I started thinking about building an app that would let creatives organize and share their availability for gigs.
That idea became one of the first times I saw technology, media, labor, and opportunity connect in my own life.
Los Angeles and the first website sale
The project gained momentum and support. In 2016, a friend of mine was moving to Los Angeles and encouraged me to come with him. He believed the project could grow there.
So I went.
In Los Angeles, I began working as a production assistant. But the jobs were limited, and I did not want to spend all my energy competing for PA work while trying to build something bigger.
I needed additional income.
When I showed people my website, they were inspired. Eventually, I sold my first website in Los Angeles and used that money to pay rent.
That changed everything.
I realized I could build value from my skills, my taste, my ability to listen, and my understanding of what people were trying to present to the world. From there, I was hooked.
Building websites before the DIY website builder market
After establishing roots in Los Angeles, over the past decade I split time between Atl/LA, the cities I feel most at home.
When I returned to Atlanta, I increased my web development work. There was a real need. Creatives needed websites. Restaurants needed websites. Small businesses needed websites. People with ideas needed a digital presence.
At its core, a website is made of media: photos, videos, text, identity, structure, and story.
That created a natural overlap between my interests in media, business, and technology.
This was before the wave of tools that made it easy for everyone to build their own site. Business owners needed help translating what they did into something people could understand online.
I became useful because I could sit with a person, understand what they were trying to do, and turn it into a digital structure.
That freedom allowed me to work remotely, travel, promote my own projects, and find clients along the way.
BIG and the mechanics of Marketplace building
One of my most important operating lessons came through my work with BIG, a construction marketplace connecting real estate developers, builders, and crew.
The relationship started through the kind of work that does not always fit neatly into one job title: websites, communications, research, systems, problem solving, business development, and the behind-the-scenes work that keeps a company moving.
Over time, I became more than a helper.
I became a bridge between ideas, operations, people, and execution.
I saw how a service business really works. I saw the pressure owners carry, the follow-up gaps, the missed opportunities, the need for better systems, and the difference the right infrastructure can make.
I also saw the possibility.
BIG showed me that operations can become infrastructure.
A local service business can become a platform.
A working relationship can become a launchpad for larger ideas around skilled trades, financing, insurance, workforce visibility, marketing, and community.
A local service business can become a platform.
A working relationship can become a launchpad for larger ideas around skilled trades, financing, insurance, workforce visibility, marketing, and community.
From websites to business formation
As I learned business, I also taught others.
Many clients needed more than a website. They needed a way to accept payments online. To accept payments, they often needed a business, an EIN, and a basic structure.
So I began helping people form organizations.
That work taught me that entrepreneurship is not only about ideas.
It is paperwork.
It is payment processing.
It is identity.
It is trust.
It is presentation.
It is compliance.
It is the ability to look real enough for the world to take you seriously.
It is payment processing.
It is identity.
It is trust.
It is presentation.
It is compliance.
It is the ability to look real enough for the world to take you seriously.
That lesson became central to everything I build now.
The office
As the work grew, meeting clients in coffee shops became unsustainable.
In 2017, I began working out of a room inside my mother’s grocery store. It was not a formal office at first. It was a space where I could meet people, build websites, talk through ideas, and help clients turn their plans into something more structured.
That space changed the business.
Having a physical place to meet created trust. It gave people somewhere to come, sit, talk, pay, plan, and believe that their ideas were being taken seriously.
Eventually, I opened a standalone office at the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia, a cultural space created to preserve Tupac Shakur’s legacy through youth arts education, creative programming, leadership, and community development. the building was under new ownership when i arrived.
At one point for about a year, I slept in the office for two weeks out of the month to save on rent costs, then flew out for the other two weeks to continue building relationships and opportunities.
To keep that office, I sacrificed the burgundy 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue that had first opened the door to film and production work.
That season taught me the cost of building.
It also proved something important:
Space changes how people see you.
Structure changes how people trust you.
Belief becomes more powerful when it has somewhere to live.
Structure changes how people trust you.
Belief becomes more powerful when it has somewhere to live.
A wider world
In late 2018, my uncle in London recognized my entrepreneurial spirit and invited me to help open a company overseas.
I had not had a passport since I was young, so he bought me one and flew me out.
We worked in the Middle East for a few months before he returned to London. I then flew to London for the first time and met many members of my family.
That trip expanded my world.
It connected me to a broader sense of identity, family, movement, culture, and international possibility.
I returned to the United States freshly inspired and continued picking up music video gigs including work around notable artists in Los angeles, atlanta, and new york. along the way i met the lifeblood of the entertainment business. the people behind the scenes whose names, creative instincts, and influence decorate the credits on films, music, television, games, art, and technology worldwide.
That period strengthened the bridge between my business life and my creative life.
Merging insurance and production
In 2020, I opened my own independent insurance agency.
A few years later, I began merging two worlds that had shaped me: insurance and production.
I started offering production insurance for the very kinds of shoots I had once been part of.
That was a full-circle moment. From Picture cAr to production insurance
I had been around sets. I understood the pressure, the moving parts, the rentals, the equipment, the people, the locations, and the risk.
Insurance was no longer just something sold from outside the creative world.
It became a structure inside the work itself.
That is how I think about business.
The best businesses do not sit outside the world they serve.
They understand the world from the inside.
The creative soul
There is a part of me that has always wanted to be an artist.
Not as branding.
As truth.
I have songs in my heart and songs on my hard drive. I understand the private life of a creator before the world sees the work. I know what it feels like to carry ideas that are unfinished, unshared, imperfect, but still alive.
That is one reason I care so deeply about building systems for creators.
To me, creative work is evidence that someone is alive. Processing. Imagining. Remembering. Healing. Reaching. Trying to become more fully expressed.
The artist in me is not separate from the founder in me.
The founder builds the systems the artist wishes existed.
What I build now
Today, I build infrastructure for creators, communities, and cultural commerce.
My work spans creative infrastructure, telecommunications, insurance, media, travel, civic information, and community platforms.
The projects may look different, but the pattern is consistent:
Find the missing access point.
Build the system around it.
Turn it into infrastructure people can actually use.
Build the system around it.
Turn it into infrastructure people can actually use.
Mission
My work is connected by one belief:
Access changes outcomes.
A creator who can record more easily has more chances to be heard.
A business with a better phone system can serve more people.
A production with the right insurance can take creative risks with more confidence.
A local community with better media can become more visible, informed, and connected.
A cultural space with better infrastructure can create opportunity far beyond the room itself.
A business with a better phone system can serve more people.
A production with the right insurance can take creative risks with more confidence.
A local community with better media can become more visible, informed, and connected.
A cultural space with better infrastructure can create opportunity far beyond the room itself.
The industries change.
The question stays the same:
How can this become easier to use, easier to trust, and easier to benefit from?
Where I work
I work across Atlanta, London, New York, and Los Angeles, with a focus on projects that connect local communities to global systems.
Atlanta gives me community, entrepreneurship, culture, and scale.
London gives me history, family, infrastructure, design, media, and global connection.
New York gives me faith, inspiration, and creative freedom.
Los Angeles gives me friends, entertainment, storytelling, production, and credibility.