Emily Best,
Founder and Chief Executive Officer,
Seed & Spark
Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a platform that bridges online and offline experiences to make 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 them for maximum impact through live community events across the country and as diversity and inclusion training in companies across the globe.
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 work with her father at 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 product 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. She also runs workshops to help independent content creators successfully crowdfund, build an audience and pitch their projects. She visits 20-30 cities a year as a part of Seed&Spark’s national education program.
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, an elite accelerator program for the country’s top entrepreneurs. 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.
