Dimitri Villard

Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

For more than four decades Dimitri Villard, has written, developed and produced stories that captured the imagination. As writer, technologist, entrepreneur and banker, his work has touched nearly ever facet of entertainment. He brought wide-ranging talent to such diverse fields as film, television, music, entertainment finance and digital asset management.

The son of a career diplomat, Dimitri saw the rich tapestry of human stories in cultures across the world. His own path led him from St. Alban’s to Le Rosey and then to satirical comedy while a student at Harvard College, in his role as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon at the apex of the publication’s impact on American culture.

A lifelong Blues aficionado, Dimitri’s path led to music when he founded Jet Set Records, a pivotal rhythm & blues label of the era.

After his success in music, he moved into motion pictures as a financier, writer, and producer. Early in his career, he financed Joe, director John Avildsen’s first picture, starring Peter Boyle. He then co-founded one of the first pay cable tv companies, which he sold to Times-Mirror. From 1980 to 2001, he produced a number of motion pictures, including In Love And War, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Sandra Bullock and Chris O’Donnell (New Line); Disney’s Flight of the Navigator; Once Bitten, starring Jim Carrey in his first film role and Lauren Hutton (Goldwyn); and many others including the cult hit Hide And Go Shriek. He also received a writing credit on In Love And War and Once Bitten.

Although his career as a writer and movie producer flourished, he took on a side job as an investment banker in the 1990’s, with great success. Concurrent to his filmmaking, he became a Managing Director at the investment banking firm Laidlaw & Co. Then, he became Director at the investment banking firm Société Générale, where he was responsible for M&A and private placement transactions in the entertainment industry. He was involved in numerous financing and merger transactions, including the sale of Trimark to Lionsgate, and Polygram to Universal. Ever the entrepreneur, he also co-founded Image Organization, an international film sales agency.

Subsequent to his investment banking career, he ventured into entertainment technology. He became Chairman of the Board of Dax Solutions, Inc., a provider of digital production services to the motion picture industry from 2004 to 2008. Next, he was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ArtistDIRECT, a public company Internet technology business, from 2009 until 2012. There, he oversaw the company’s transformation from a music destination website into the entertainment industry’s premiere anti-piracy service provider with the acquisition of MediaDefender and MediaSentry.

The grandson of prolific entrepreneur Henry Villard, Dimitri continues to build new ventures. He is on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles chapter of the Tech Coast Angels, the largest and most active private venture capital group in the United States. He invests in early stage technology ventures and serves as an advisor to a number of startups while continuing to develop projects for film and television.

Roger Conley Wood

Roger Wood was raised in Huntsville, Alabama and Edison, New Jersey, as a member of the Conley Family. During his childhood, he was introduced to old Hollywood through his mother’s acquaintanceship with Isabel "Belle" Washington Powell, a Cotton Club dancer and actress during the Harlem Renaissance. The doyenne of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard took a shine to Roger when he was only 10 years old, signing his first book, a series of profiles on the glamour of the Buffalo Soldiers of the Wild West, commissioned by his mother, Valerie Conley Wood.

Roger’s early career in Media, Entertainment and Technology began as high school student. At only 16, his father helped him secure an entry-level software role at AT&T Network Systems. There, he supported the AT&T-6300 computer, then graduated to billing systems for the first digital 5ESS multi-switch configurations. That exposure to self-optimizing networks and predictive routing would provide a foundation for his later work in Artificial Intelligence pattern recognition in digital media.

In grad school, his field study tackled the subject of on-demand movies. He and his classmates talked to scores of companies including Liberty Media, then a innovator in on-demand entertainment led by John Malone. Their final analysis concluded that in the near future, all entertainment would be on-demand, with ‘anywhere anytime’ engagement as the norm.

After grad school, Roger was named head of strategy and marketing for Motorola / Nextel, where his portfolio included product placement in entertainment. His division’s mobile phones became fixtures in 1990s action movies as plot devices in films like SPEED with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, HEAT with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, and TRUE LIES with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He made sure Vogue editor Anna Wintour always used Motorola products at Fashion Shows.

At only 30 years old, Roger was appointed Corporate VP of Global Marketing for Reebok Ltd. The brand was the first major fashion brand to fully embrace e-commerce at the apex of the Internet boom. Under Roger’s leadership, Reebok brand timed the Reality TV wave perfectly. Its footwear was a major product in SURVIVOR, SEASON 1, the CBS / Mark Burnett hit that shaped the Reality entertainment genre for a decade afterward. That product placement deal forever changed the way reality show production was financed with the pre-sale of product placement in advance of negotiations on tv distribution.

As a management consultant on Wall Street, Roger founded the Media, Entertainment & Technology (MET) Practice at Willis Group, the risk finance giant then owned by KKR. While simultaneously serving as the COO of the Executive Risks Practice, his clients included Sony Pictures, Viacom (Paramount, Comedy Central, Country Music Television) Earthlink, PanAmSat and Barnes & Noble.

After his time at Willis Group, he then joined the founding team of Amobee Media, a startup backed by venture capital firms Accel and Sequoia. Amobee was acquired by SingTel and became the largest distributor of mobile media and entertainment in Asia, outside of China. Post-acquisition, Roger served as an M&A consultant to SingTel in Singapore, guiding the office of Singtel group CEO Chua Sock Koong to five (5) subsequent acquisitions of other digital media companies.

Roger would be appointed VP of DIgital Media for Hearst Corporation, a dominant publisher of women’s media with Cosmo, Elle, Marie Claire, Bazaar, and Town & Country. At Hearst, he led Social, Mobile and Location-based media for iCrossing, the company’s internal agency. He partnered with other key iCrossing executives to launch Live Media Studio, a pioneering effort in serialized production of social media content. His division also did the UX design for the first apps for Apple News+, then called Apple Newsstand, for iPad and iPhone platforms. As a result of his work with Hearst, he became a consistent presence at New York Fashion week, espousing the power of mobile to change the way fashion trends are communicated by designers and discovered by consumers.

in the past decade, Roger has been a an investor, board director or advisor in more than 24 early stage companies, including several AI and Machine Learning platforms for predicting which audience sentiments on subjects, plots, themes and performers. During this time he was a consultant within Paradigm Talent Agency, between 2014 and 2020.