Ernesto Schmitt
Ernesto Gottfried Schmitt (born August 1971) is an American-born internet entrepreneur, businessman and investor of German-Uruguayan descent. He is co-founder of The Craftory, a venture capital fund supporting cause-driven challenger brands in the consumer goods space. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a German father and Uruguayan mother, Schmitt was raised in Brussels and Mexico. He attended Churchill College, Cambridge, where he received an MA in manufacturing engineering, later attaining an MBA from INSEAD. During the dot-com boom, Schmitt founded Peoplesound, the first platform for digital music streaming, which was sold to in 2001 . More recently, he founded Beamly, the second screen social discovery and engagement platform sold to S&P 500 component Coty, Inc., DriveTribe alongside Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson, and deep learning fake-news detector Fabula AI, acquired by Twitter in June 2019. Early life and education. Schmitt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio where his father, Gottfried E. Schmitt, worked for Procter and Gamble. His grandparents through his mother, Maria del Carmen Vieytes, are the Uruguayan actress Nelly Weissel and artist Juan Fernando Vieytes Pérez. Schmitt grew up in Brussels and Mexico. After attending high school in Brussels, Schmitt enrolled  at the University of Cambridge, studying engineering, where he graduated top of class with a (BA/MA). After a year consulting for Boston Consulting Group, Schmitt received a Master of Business Administration (MBA), with distinction from INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France. Business ventures. Peoplesound and dot-com bubble. In 1999, Schmitt founded Peoplesound, the first online music store and streaming service. He ran it until 2001, when the company was acquired by . As the first European platform for digital music, Peoplesound offered customers two free songs from every band as a taster and then invite customers to create their own compilations  in CD Realaudio or MP3 format. It famously offered artists £100 for each submitted song. Peoplesound's business model primarily focused on observing user behaviour around their engagement with music to help the music industry better understand and target consumers. A darling of the dot-com boom, Peoplesound raised money based on a valuation of around £70m, from Bernard Arnault's Europe@Web, investors including Finnish wireless communications operator Sonera Corporation and venture capital firm Zouk Ventures. Schmitt experienced significant media coverage at the time as an key example of the dot-com bubble, including in the BBC  documentary "Inside Dot Com". Vitaminic, the Italian-owned rival music website, bought Peoplesound post bubble crash in 2001 in a deal worth €34m (£20m). The deal was financed partly with cash and partly with the issuing of 1.3 million new shares to Peoplesound shareholders with Peoplesound retained its brand name and website. Silverscreen. Schmitt founded Silverscreen in 2003 alongside Sebastian James. Starting from an initial six stores in 2003, Silverscreen was the United Kingdom's first specialist DVD high street retailer offering an extensive selection of chart and non-chart products. Apax backed the original launch  of Silverscreen in 2003 with £3.5m of funding and followed it up with a secondary fundraising of £20m in 2004 to help finance the company's ambitious plans to open 160 stores. The company received ~£33M total in funding and turnover in excess of £85 million. Beamly & Zeebox. In April 2011 Schmitt founded Beamly alongside Anthony Rose. Originally called tBone, then Zeebox, Beamly was marketed as a social discovery and engagement platform with 2nd-screen TV, creating the concept of "social television". Beamly, then called Zeebox, aimed to provide the optimal platform for connected  television, making it a social and interactive viewing experience rather than the standard television viewing format. The platform allowed users to follow and interact with their favourite TV shows, as well as play games and take part in polls. It expanded to the US in September 2012 and into Australia in November. Beamly took on funding from BSkyb, Comcast, NBCUniversal, Viacom and HBO. Its first round valued it at above US$150M. It was sold to the New York Stock Exchange listed S&P 500 component Coty, Inc. in 2015 for an undisclosed sum. Drivetribe. DriveTribe is an automotive online community  platform founded by Schmitt, alongside "The Grand Tour" presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. The platform features different automotive-themed 'tribes' which people can join, post to, live chat with members of and share content on The website launched in November 2016 with a few selected tribe members. Financing for DriveTribe came from, among others 21st Century Fox and Breyer Capital, who have invested respectively $6.5 and $5.5 million in the platform. The Craftory. Schmitt co-founded The Craftory, a global investment house based in London with Elio Leoni Sceti as an alternative to traditional Venture  Capital. The current fund size is $375 million in permanent capital and the firm only invests in ‘Challenger Brands'. Other Positions. Schmitt previously worked for EMI Music as President of EMI Music's catalogue division and President of Global Marketing. In 2018, Schmitt Co-Founded Fabula AI, which aimed to solve the problem of online disinformation, or 'Fake News' by looking at how it spreads on social networks Twitter announced its acquisition of Fabula AI for an undisclosed sum on 3 June 2019. Personal life. He has two children, living in London, presumably