Story

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.

Across companies and projects, I build infrastructure that helps people create, communicate, protect, document, fund, and scale what they are carrying.

Much of my work begins where art begins: with a feeling. I then build the structure that allows that feeling to 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.

I was born on December 19, 1994, in Decatur, Georgia, to Somali immigrants. I am the oldest of five children, with 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, delivered the school announcements live on camera every morning, and gave a graduation speech before an audience of more than 5,000 people.

At the time, I did not fully understand what those experiences were teaching me.

Football taught me discipline, teamwork, preparation, and repetition.

The morning announcements taught me voice, timing, presence, and performance.

Being elected prom king taught me that people respond to energy, character, and connection.

Being the oldest child of immigrants taught me responsibility early. It taught me to notice what needed to be done and to step forward before I felt completely ready.

Some of my most important lessons came from learning how to show up without waiting for applause.

I learned to observe.

I learned to adapt.

I learned to lead.

I learned to build.

Those lessons shaped how I move through the world and how I approach everything I create.

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 discussed money, work, family, risk, opportunity, and time.

I began to see how trust was communicated, how relationships were formed, and how opportunities moved. That experience gave me early insight into business, class, communication, service, ambition, and access.

It also taught me something that has remained with me:

Access changes what you can see.

What you can see changes what you believe is possible.

That idea sits underneath almost everything I build.

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 engaged. I joined clubs, became programming chair in my residence hall, and involved myself in student organizations and campus communities.

I entered college intending to become a doctor. I initially pursued a bachelor’s degree in Nutrition, hoping to use it as a path toward medicine. Once I better understood the pre-medical requirements and considered where my interests were leading me, I decided to move in another direction.

I changed my major from Nutrition to Computer Information Systems, then to Economics, and ultimately to Media Entrepreneurship. The Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program finally gave language to what I had already been doing instinctively: building at the intersection of creativity, business, technology, media, and culture.

Those changes were part of my effort to find a structure broad enough to hold the questions I was asking. I wanted to understand systems and people, but I also wanted to make things. I was interested in the logic of technology and the feeling of a story, the structure of a business and the culture surrounding it.

In 2016, during my junior year, I stepped away from school. I never fully disconnected from Georgia State. Over the following decade, I continued returning in different seasons, enrolling both part-time and full-time while building companies, serving clients, traveling, and learning through real work.

My education has taken place in classrooms, offices, film sets, airports, client meetings, community spaces, and the uncertainty that comes with building something before other people can see it.

In 2015, I began thinking seriously about the relationship between time, work, and income. I realized that no matter how many hours I gave to certain jobs, my earning potential would remain limited by an hourly rate.

A friend working at an insurance agency introduced me to a different model. He earned a salary and commissions by selling something intangible: protection against events that might never happen but could alter a person’s life or business if they did.

The idea interested me. Insurance required trust, communication, judgment, and the ability to make an invisible form of value understandable.

I spent that summer studying for the licensing examination and passed on my first attempt in the fall of 2015. I worked at the agency for only a few months before leaving because its schedule conflicted with my university workload, but the industry stayed with me.

I maintained my insurance licensure for more than a decade and now serve clients across time zones. In 2020, I opened my own independent insurance agency.

Insurance taught me that some of the most important systems in a person’s life remain almost invisible until they are needed. It also showed me how documentation, credibility, risk, and protection determine whether people and organizations can move forward with confidence.

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 photographs of the car for consideration as a picture car in film and television productions.

That one car opened an entirely new world.

I began working with the car on productions, then started accepting background roles myself. Over time, I became a regular background actor and spent more time around film sets, production crews, performers, and people working to establish careers in entertainment.

I loved being close to that world. On those sets, I met aspiring actors, artists, filmmakers, and other creatives who, after years of dedication, would go on to make meaningful work across genres. They felt like my tribe. I recognized their ambition, imagination, and willingness to keep working before the world knew their names.

I also saw the friction surrounding creative labor.

Creatives needed flexibility. Productions needed people. People needed work. Availability was difficult to track, communication was scattered, and access to an opportunity often depended on timing, relationships, and whether the right person knew you were available.

That experience led me to imagine an application through which creatives could organize and share their availability for gigs.

It was one of the first times I saw technology, media, labor, and opportunity connect in my own life. I had experienced the problem from inside the environment and wanted to build the tool I wished had existed.

That instinct became a recurring pattern in my work: enter a world, understand its friction, and build the missing layer.

The project gained momentum and support. In 2016, a friend who was moving to Los Angeles encouraged me to go with him. He believed the idea could grow there, closer to the entertainment industry it was intended to serve.

So I went.

In Los Angeles, I began working as a production assistant. The jobs were limited, however, and I did not want to spend all my energy competing for production-assistant work while trying to build something larger.

I needed another source of income.

When I showed people the website I had built, they responded to it. Eventually, I sold my first website in Los Angeles and used the money to pay my rent.

That changed everything.

I realized I could create value from my skills, taste, ability to listen, and understanding of how people wanted to present themselves to the world. A website was not simply code or a collection of pages. It was identity, structure, communication, and possibility assembled in one place.

From that moment, I was hooked.

After establishing roots in Los Angeles, I spent much of the following decade moving between Atlanta and Los Angeles, the two American cities in which I have felt most at home.

When I returned to Atlanta, I expanded my web-development work. There was a real need. Creatives needed websites. Restaurants needed websites. Small businesses needed websites. People carrying ideas needed a credible digital presence through which others could understand and engage with them.

At its core, a website is made from media: photographs, video, language, identity, structure, and story. That made web development a natural meeting point for my interests in business, technology, culture, and communication.

This was before do-it-yourself website platforms became as widespread and accessible as they are today. Many business owners needed help translating what they did into something the public could understand online.

I became useful because I could sit with someone, listen beyond the first explanation, understand what they were trying to accomplish, and turn it into a digital structure. I was not only building websites. I was helping people make their work legible to the world.

The freedom of that work allowed me to work remotely, travel, promote my own projects, and find clients along the way. It also revealed that many people who approached me for a website needed far more than a website.

They needed the underlying structure of a business.

One of my most important operating lessons came through my work with BIG, a construction marketplace connecting real estate developers, builders, and crews.

The relationship began through work that did not fit neatly into one job title: websites, communications, research, systems, problem-solving, business development, and the behind-the-scenes effort required to keep a growing 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 actually works. I saw the pressure owners carry, the follow-up gaps that cause opportunities to disappear, the administrative work hidden beneath every visible result, and the difference the right infrastructure can make.

I also saw the larger 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 involving skilled trades, financing, insurance, workforce visibility, marketing, and community.

It deepened my understanding of marketplaces. A marketplace is not simply a website that places supply beside demand. It is a system of trust, coordination, communication, incentives, accountability, and access.

That lesson continues to shape the systems I build today.

As I learned more about business, I also began teaching and supporting others.

Many clients came to me asking for a website, but the website was often only the visible edge of what they needed. They wanted to accept payments online. To do that properly, they often needed a legal business, an Employer Identification Number, a bank account, and a basic operating structure.

So I began helping people form organizations.

That work taught me that entrepreneurship is not sustained by ideas alone.

It is paperwork.

It is payment processing.

It is identity.

It is trust.

It is presentation.

It is compliance.

It is the ability to become legible, organized, and credible enough for the world to take you seriously.

I began to understand documentation not as an administrative afterthought, but as infrastructure. The right form, agreement, account, policy, or process can determine whether a person moves an idea forward or remains trapped outside the system.

That realization became central to almost everything I would build afterward.

As the work grew, meeting clients in coffee shops became unsustainable.

In 2017, I began working from a room inside my mother’s grocery store. It was not a formal office at first. It was simply a place where I could meet people, build websites, discuss ideas, and help clients turn their plans into something more structured.

That room changed the business.

Having a physical place to meet created trust. It gave people somewhere to arrive, sit down, explain what they were carrying, make payments, develop plans, and believe 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. The center had been created to preserve Tupac Shakur’s legacy through youth arts education, creative programming, leadership, and community development, although the building was under new ownership by the time I arrived.

For about a year, I spent two weeks of each month sleeping in the office to reduce my living expenses. I would then fly out for the other two weeks to continue developing relationships and opportunities.

To keep the office, I gave up 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 showed me that belief often becomes visible through sacrifice long before it becomes visible through success.

Space changes how people see you.

Structure changes how people trust you.

Belief becomes more powerful when it has somewhere to live.

The office was not only a room. It was evidence. It gave physical form to work that had previously existed in conversations, ideas, files, and ambition.

In late 2018, an uncle in London recognized my entrepreneurial spirit and invited me to help open a company overseas.

I had not held a passport since I was young, so he paid for me to obtain one and flew me out.

We worked in the Middle East for several months before he returned to London. I then traveled to London for the first time and met many members of my extended family.

That journey expanded my world.

It connected me to a broader understanding of identity, family, movement, culture, and international possibility. It reminded me that the systems shaping a person’s life are not confined to one city or country. Families, industries, ideas, money, and opportunity move across borders, although access to that movement is not distributed equally.

I returned to the United States newly inspired and continued accepting music-video work around notable artists in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York. Along the way, I met people who form the lifeblood of the entertainment industry: the professionals behind the scenes whose names, instincts, abilities, and influence appear across the credits of films, music, television, games, art, and technology worldwide.

I saw how much creative work depends upon people the public may never recognize. Every finished production rests on an often-invisible network of labor, trust, skill, logistics, and coordination.

That period strengthened the bridge between my business life and my creative life. It made me more interested in the systems surrounding culture, not only the finished work audiences see.

In 2020, I opened my independent insurance agency.

A few years later, I began bringing together two worlds that had shaped me: insurance and production. I started offering production insurance for the kinds of shoots I had once worked on myself.

It was a full-circle moment, from picture car to production insurance.

I had spent time on sets. I understood the pressure, moving parts, equipment, rentals, locations, schedules, people, and risks. I understood that a creative idea can only become a production when the structure around it is strong enough to support it.

Insurance was no longer something sold from outside the creative world. It became part of the infrastructure inside the work itself.

That is how I think about business.

The strongest businesses do not remain outside the worlds they serve. They understand those worlds from within. They recognize the emotional and practical reality of the people using the system, then build in response to it.

My production experience helped me understand the risks. My insurance experience helped me structure protection. Together, they created a more complete way of seeing the work.

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 public encounters the work. I know what it feels like to carry ideas that remain unfinished, unshared, or imperfect, but are still alive.

I know the distance between imagining something and allowing it to be seen. I know how much courage can be hidden inside the simple act of finishing. I also know that the right environment, tool, relationship, or piece of infrastructure can shorten that distance.

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 artist feels what is missing.

The founder gives it structure.

The founder builds the systems the artist wishes existed.

Today, I build infrastructure for creators, communities, and cultural commerce.

My work spans creative infrastructure, telecommunications, insurance, media, travel, civic information, and community. The individual projects may appear different, but the underlying pattern is consistent.

One expression of that work is Crown Booth, a venture reimagining Britain’s red telephone boxes as public micro-studios for voice, music, and storytelling. The project brings together heritage, design, telecommunications, creative technology, and access. It asks what can happen when a familiar piece of public infrastructure is given a new cultural purpose.

Another is Entertainment Services Capital, a London-based creative finance and venture platform built around the conviction that creativity can be treated as an asset class and supported with the seriousness, structure, and capital applied to other industries.

My insurance work, communications concepts, community media interests, and other ventures extend the same inquiry into different environments. Each begins with a practical obstacle, but each also asks who is able to participate and what becomes possible when the right structure exists.

Find the missing access point.

Understand the people affected by it.

Build the system around it.

Turn it into infrastructure people can actually use.

I am interested in the connective tissue between an idea and its execution. That can mean helping a creator access tools, helping a production protect itself, helping a business communicate more effectively, helping a community become more visible, or designing a place through which culture can be created and shared.

I build companies, but I am ultimately interested in systems that allow more people to participate. The work is commercial because sustainable infrastructure requires a working economic model. It is also human because every system changes what someone is able to do, protect, express, or become.

My work continues to return to one belief:

Access changes outcomes.

A creator who can record more easily has more opportunities to be heard.

A business with a better communication system can serve more people.

A production with the right insurance can take creative risks with greater confidence.

A person with the right documentation can move through systems that might otherwise exclude them.

A local community with stronger media can become more visible, informed, connected, and capable of telling its own story.

A cultural space with better infrastructure can create opportunity far beyond the room itself.

The industries change. The form of the work changes. The central question remains:

How can this become easier to use, easier to trust, and easier to benefit from?

I am drawn to overlooked points of friction because they often reveal larger possibilities. A missing phone system can become a communications platform. A room can become a place of trust. A telephone box can become a creative studio. An insurance policy can make an ambitious production possible. A document can turn an informal idea into an organization capable of entering the world.

This is the work I continue to pursue: identifying where access breaks down, understanding what people are trying to accomplish, and building the infrastructure that helps possibility travel further.

I work across Atlanta, London, New York, and Los Angeles, focusing on projects that connect local communities to global systems.

Each city has shaped a different part of my thinking.

Atlanta gives me community, entrepreneurship, culture, and scale. It is where I learned to build, where many of my earliest relationships were formed, and where I began turning ideas into businesses.

London gives me history, family, infrastructure, design, media, and global connection. It makes visible the relationship between old systems and new possibilities and continues to expand the international dimensions of my work.

New York gives me faith, inspiration, urgency, and creative freedom. It reminds me how many lives, industries, and ambitions can occupy the same space and continue moving.

Los Angeles gives me friendship, entertainment, storytelling, production, and credibility earned through experience. It was where I first learned that a skill I possessed could become the rent, the opportunity, and the beginning of a business.

I do not experience these cities as disconnected chapters. They are part of one expanding map. Each has shown me something different about culture, access, ambition, and the systems through which ideas move.

My path has not been linear. It has moved through classrooms, golf courses, film sets, insurance agencies, grocery stores, offices, airports, websites, client conversations, community institutions, and ventures still taking form.

What connects those experiences is the instinct to notice what is missing, making introductions, and the belief that something can be built from taking action.

That is the thread through my life.

That is the infrastructure beneath my work.