One serendipitous meeting connected talent manager Troy Carter and Suzy Ryoo–and now, Ryoo is Carter’s business partner.
Forbes
By most traditional metrics, Suzy Ryoo had a successful start to her career: she had studied finance and business strategy at the University of Southern California, began working in entertainment finance and, in 2010, joined media communications giant OMD Worldwide. But after five years at the firm, Ryoo began to feel restless.
“I thought to myself, it’s been five years. What am I doing next? Am I going to be here for another five years?” she says. “That’s about the exact time that it felt like the oceans parted, and a certain person came into my life.”
While it’s true that business success can take a village, it’s also true that one person can alter the course of a leader’s trajectory: One investor, one customer, one mentor, even, can change everything for someone else. Through “The One,” a new video series from Forbes, we’re going to discover “the ones” behind some of the country’s most successful and powerful women. For Suzy Ryoo, the cofounder of music and tech firm Q&A cofounder, the person who changed everything was Troy Carter, the investor and talent manager best known for his work with artists like Eve and Lady Gaga.
Carter hired Ryoo to help with his work at venture firm Atom Factory, transforming Ryoo’s career. It’s the exactly the move she needed, but didn’t realize she wanted.
“The opportunity to work with Troy, that pretty much was so serendipitous,” she says. After a few years of work at Atom Factory, Ryoo and Carter decided to start an entirely new venture, one focused on music and technology and in which she manages brands and artists, forges technology partnerships and, most importantly, identifies investment opportunities and makes the decision whether to invest or not.
Ryoo and Carter’s partnership is one built on honesty and mutual respect—and it’s one that Ryoo believes is replicable.
“I would very much encourage men to be allies, and to fight for every opportunity where they can become an ally, because we know that this gender parity gap—whether it is at the board level, or with regards to compensation—is going to take a long time to solve,” Ryoo says. “We might have made wonderful progress through organizations like All Raise and Time’s Up over the past five years, But there’s a long way to go. And it’s going to take every ounce of effort from both men and women and everyone in between.”
What led to Ryoo and Carter’s first serendipitous meeting, and how exactly did they decide to be business partners? Click through here, or watch the video below, to find out. And be sure to tune in next week for our next episode of “The One.”
