Meet The Disruptors: Sean Dickerson Of MADE Nightlife On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Pretend that money doesn’t exist, decide what you would enjoy doing every day for free — and then figure out how to monetize that. If you find you like spending 8 hours a day on photoshop making clothing designs and you’re fulfilled by that process, not the result but the process, then designing clothes is the thing you need to figure out how to be paid for.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sean Dickerson from MADE Nightlife.
Sean Dickerson, a well-known name in the Los Angeles nightlife scene, has paved the way in Hollywood as one of the top social industry curators. Dickerson has been hustling in the nightlife industry for the past 11 years while also playing a key role in hosting concerts and after-parties for notable celebrities and VIP guests in the city. Over the past decade, Sean has made his mark in the industry by leveraging his strong rapport with nightlife venues and personalities to create memorable and sought-after events. Currently, Dickerson hosts exclusive weekly parties and pop-ups, that offer one-of-a-kind curation and living innovation. Today, Dickerson plays an integral part in the MADE executive team. His accomplishments include curating guest lists that guarantee memorable nights and engaging a global audience with his efforts.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I moved from Baltimore to Los Angeles when I was a teenager. Both of my parents had been actors for a time. They divorced when I was a baby. My father was a playwright, and I was raised my whole life around the theatre. I began acting at a young age, with aspirations to write and direct. You get introduced to an artist’s life, which is one consisting of late nights, and I was a child that was routinely up long past his bedtime. The adults would want to go out after a rehearsal or a performance and hit a bar or restaurant/lounge and here I am, an only child, with my single parent who couldn’t afford a babysitter, tagging along with the grown-ups.
As early as seven or eight years old I remember being too young to be in some nightspot, surrounded by musicians, actors, and writers while they argued about novelists or debated Meisner and Strasberg over scotch and sodas. There was always an excitement to this type of social environment that I remember being very drawn to. There was a romance to it. I loved the way it made me feel.
As I became an adult, I was attracted to the idea of not just hanging out in those settings but being in control of those settings, and how I could use my own inspirations to craft rooms where different types of interesting people could cross paths in and form a connection.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
I think all creativity is disruptive when it’s introducing new thoughts and experiences.
It forces you to accept new feelings, and it will continue to until one becomes numb to it, until it’s been copied enough that everyone is doing it, and then it becomes stale and formulaic. At which point, you must create something new again and disrupt the monotony.
I think we’re seeing that currently with both the Drake “Honestly Never mind” album and the Beyoncé “Renaissance” album. I look at everything that’s artistic, from music, to film, to curating an evening as, “How do we guide you towards feeling greatness, whether that feeling is rooted in something that’s revolutionary, or it’s a feeling that’s rooted in nostalgia.”
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I had managed to get myself in with a bar owner in West Hollywood who had a gorgeous space that I wanted to do a weekly Wednesday night party in. I really hadn’t accomplished much at that point so for all my big aspirations around what I wanted this party to be, I didn’t really know how to execute it properly. I’ve never been interested in just having a party with club promoters. I reached out to some friends of mine who were managers for a couple of high-profile actors, and I offered them up the idea of us throwing this party together. These guys knew a lot of famous people and I thought “We don’t even need any promoters; the bar isn’t that big, just the three of us, and our relationships will pack this place out with beautiful women and celebrities” and all the other cliché fantasies that people have when they’re trying to throw a party in Hollywood.
Our first night was decent. Enough people
came to check us out that it wasn’t a complete waste of time, and we could build momentum for the next week. Surely the next week would become the magical, enchanted evening I was manifesting.
It wasn’t. We failed miserably. Not only did we take an L, but the three of us and all our “relationships” also couldn’t even fill that 100-person capacity room with more than 30 people the whole night. After giving us a chance with those first two weeks, the bar said, “Thanks but we’re moving on.”
What I learned was there’s a big difference between throwing a party somewhere versus starting a successful weekly event where you need to both look great and make money. You have to overkill a night if you want it to work. You think you only need to bring on two people to work with you, you need twelve. Really you need twenty. And you need club promoters. Men and women, do this for a living. Getting people to show up somewhere for you is legitimately one of the toughest jobs in the world to perform. And doing it nightly, weekly, is nearly impossible to do without burning yourself out. Try corralling human beings in a town of ten million that has endless options for places to eat and drink. You need more than just a cool rooftop or a celebrity entourage to see success. You need a team.
A big team. And that team needs infrastructure.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I’ve had so many people make substantial contributions to this journey I’m on. Creatively, my father probably made the largest impression on me. I’m positive that my outlook on most things comes from his influence and I’m very grateful for him. In the hospitality space, I look at my partners at MADE; Mark Tung, Devrin Anderson, Milton Pittman, those guys have been dominant in that business for so long and their knowledge about how to do that successfully for decades is unmatched. I would point to guys like Tony LaPenna and Brian Toll at H. Wood Group and Pavan Pardasani at Tao Group also. They’ve always been so generous with their time, their resources, and their experiences, to guide me in ways that go beyond what most folks are willing to help you with.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I think all disruption is necessary and it may seldom be comfortable. At would point does disruption become destruction and when is destruction necessary? Destruction of prejudices, destruction of institutions. Those may be instances where we have to collectively go a step beyond disruption in order to eradicate them.
I guess the line has to be drawn somewhere in the sand between disruption and destruction, and whether over time you can have one without it becoming the other. I think you can, but we need both.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
The best advice I’ve ever received or given is to pretend that money doesn’t exist, decide what you would enjoy doing every day for free — and then figure out how to monetize that. If you find you like spending 8 hours a day on photoshop making clothing designs and you’re fulfilled by that process, not the result but the process, then designing clothes is the thing you need to figure out how to be paid for.
My father wrote every day. Whether he was being paid for it or not, he wrote.
He used to joke that a powerful film producer once said to him, “Remember, a writer writes.”
It was nonsensical in the context that it had been said to him but as a general life rule it applies so simply. Whatever you enjoy the process of should be what you give all your bandwidth to. I believe if you do that then the money will follow. Life is too short to spend it doing something you’re unfulfilled by for money.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Right now, we’re working on Wale’s next album, and it sounds amazing. He’s genuinely one of the most talented people I’ve ever spent time with, and he belongs in the conversation with the greatest songwriters of his generation. I also did some work with Major League Baseball over the summer when the all-star game was in LA. That went well so we’re looking at future collaborations between us and that’s exciting for me as a lifelong fan of the sport.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
There are so many books out there that have impacted me; pretty much anything David Simon has ever written is at the top of the list.
Geronimo Pratt “Last Man Standing”
William Goldman “Which Lie Did I Tell”
Peter Gatian “The Club King”
Joe Bastianich “Restaurant Man”
The Dalai Lama “How To See Yourself As You Truly Are”
Steven Pressfield “The War Of Art”
and the Insight Timer app. Heavy on the Insight Timer app.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
The thing that the entertainment business and the hospitality business share in common is they’re both incredibly cutthroat. These people aren’t your friends. At least not the overwhelming majority of them. I remember being told once, “When you can accept the transactional nature of these relationships, then you’ll find peace.” That’s the best lesson I’ve ever received.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think normalizing meditation and teaching it as early as preschool, the same way we teach math and language, would have an overwhelming impact on how human beings process the trauma we experience. I wish I had found it earlier in my life and I feel the difference in how I process things when I’m practicing regularly versus when I’m not.
How can our readers follow you online?
Twitter/IG @sean_dickerson
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Sean Dickerson Of MADE Nightlife On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
