Teresa Phillips, CEO and co-founder
Spherex
Phillips offers a cutting-edge solution for an increasingly global entertainment biz, hyper-conscious about offending viewers’ cultural sensibilities. Using a combination of AI, machine learning and old-fashioned human curation, her company analyzes movies and TV series to ensure they are relevant and appropriate for 240 different territories around the globe, assessing everything from legal compliance and appropriate audience range to religious references and cultural taboos.
“We’ve really created a cultural playbook for how content providers and platforms should operate in a regulated international environment, and that has never existed before,” says Phillips, who launched Spherex three years ago.
Phillips took a circuitous route to Silicon Valley moguldom. She grew up on a farm in Kansas, then did a seven-year hitch in the army, serving as an executive assistant to four-star generals and diplomats at the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Belgium. Following stints at companies including CyberCash, Time Warner Cable and Yahoo, she made her first foray into tech entrepreneurship in 2006 with Graspr, a social network for user-generated instructional videos that attracted $2.5 million in Series A funding. Unfortunately, her thunder was stolen by another video sharing startup, YouTube, which was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock the same year.
“I actually was talking to [YouTube] about joining them and I said ‘No, I’m gonna do my own thing,’” she says. “That’s one of those things where you say, ‘What was I thinking?’ [Graspr] got off the ground, but I didn’t have the runway to scale it.”
Today, Spherex counts Google/YouTube as one its clients, along with Paramount, Lionsgate, Comcast/NBCUnversal, HBO, AMC, Starz, PBS and Samsung, and the business continues to grow.
“I just got an email this morning from one of our clients and they said, ‘We’ve got 100,000 titles that need ratings for these 25 markets,” she says.
—Todd Longwell
Source: Variety
