In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we’re chatting with Emily Best, CEO & Founder of Seed&Spark. An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Emily regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone.

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a platform that makes entertainment more diverse, inclusive, connected and essential. Seed&Spark’s platform and national education program have helped thousands of bold storytellers raise millions to bring to life entirely new stories, and Seed&Spark delivers those stories into workplaces for employee training, engagement, and intelligence through our proprietary Impact Screening Platform. We gather the qualitative and quantitative data essential for driving lasting structural change for inclusive and productive workplaces. Emily arrived 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.