Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing you the pioneers of the business world together with the musicians shaping the worlds of Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today is Efe Cakarel, Founder and CEO of MUBI, the film streaming service. Raised in Izmir, Turkey, Efe’s love of film began during childhood visits to the local art house cinema with his mother. But it was excelling at mathematics that shaped his direction, first as a member of the Turkish National Mathematics Team that came third in the 1994 European Math Olympiad – I’ll ask him why they didn’t win – and later in his career at Goldman Sachs in London and New York. It was while sat in a Tokyo café, disappointed to learn Wong Kar-wai’s film, In the Mood for Love, was unavailable online that Efe had an idea, he decided to create an online cinema to, as he says, “Provide access to masterpieces to audiences around the world.” Recruiting two computer engineers to develop the prototype, Efe launched The Auteurs, as it was then called, in 2007 before renaming the business, MUBI, three years later. MUBI is now a global streaming platform, a production company and a theatrical distributor with plans to build its first physical movie theatre in Mexico City and in April last year Efe established the UK Cinema Fund, supporting independent cinemas, film festivals and organisations affected by the pandemic. Brilliant to have you here.
Efe Cakarel
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
MUBI, firstly tell me why MUBI is the name.
Efe Cakarel
The name of the company was originally The Auteurs and that’s a very difficult name to pronounce, to spell, so if you are building and if you have an ambition to build a global brand, that was not going to work out. So I decided that we needed to change it and this time I approached it very scientifically. It needed to be a name that could be pronounced across many different cultures, languages and if you actually you know really study this, the best names are four letters – consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel names.
Elliot Moss
I love this.
Efe Cakarel
Also… so, these are names that can be… and not every consonant, like it needs to be premium ones so for example ‘X’ cannot be pronounced, it doesn’t even exist in some alphabets, so it’s ‘M’ and ‘V’ and ‘B’ and so, VISA, Coke, like these are names that…
Elliot Moss
Nike. Does Nike?
Efe Cakarel
Nike. Exactly. Nike had a problem with ‘Nikee’ and ‘Nike’ but yes, those are names that can be easily pronounced, written, remembered so there is a combination of about, you know may you do the math but 3,000 or so of these and they are all taken so I ask my creative friends around the world like, can you come up with the name with this structure and everybody started to send me like BUKI, TUPO, KUTO – I didn’t like anything. One day I am in Tokyo again, the creative director of an agency called Dentsu, one of the biggest ones, is a friend and he calls me and he says, “Efe, we had a brainstorming last night and I think we have the name of your company.” I’m like “tell me”, he’s like “No, I know you are in Tokyo, why don’t you come to the office.” And I went right away and the Dentsu’s headquarters is this you know, huge skyscraper as you can imagine and this huge lobby, I entered the lobby and I saw a name projected huge on one of the walls, MUBI, I’m like oh my god I think this is it and that was it. I fell in love with it immediately, of course it’s taken MUBI.com, you need the .com. It was taken by someone in Pakistan in ’94 when I can make the registration of the domain names available, is the initials of his name Musharrafa B something and it was the name of his shop, he fixed electrical appliances in outskirts of Karachi and I called him, he doesn’t speak… his English is like way worse than mine and I’m trying to explain him that I would love to get the MUBI.com and he’s like ‘no, no, like I can’t give you my shop, like my neighbours’ and you know he fixes like refrigerators and radios and I’m like ‘no, no I don’t want the shop, I just want the…’ so, at the end of the day we couldn’t communicate what we really needed, I ended up buying the whole shop for $14,000. I wired him the money and my lawyers in the US is freaking out because they don’t want to consolidate the Pakistani entity and so we gave him back all the assets he needed and he’s super confused because he’s like well I had the money and I get to keep my shop, like anyway, if we ever go public, I want him to ring the bell in the New York Stock Exchange.
Elliot Moss
I got to tell you, I’ve been doing this a while, I have never heard such a brilliant reason and process for getting to a name and I’m just going to pause there for a moment because this is brilliant.
Efe Cakarel
This is the first time I’m talking about this in public, like you know my good friends know about the story of course and people at MUBI know it but yeah, we never talked about it.
Elliot Moss
I love the story. Stay with me for what’s going to be a fantastic ride here on Jazz Shapers with my Business Shaper, Efe Cakarel.
So you set this business up in 2007, here we are fifteen years later, easy ride, right? No battle scars. Put a straight line from starting it to incredible growth, that must be the story Efe?
Efe Cakarel
No, it’s been a very difficult, difficult journey. The first ten years was very difficult, I mean we all hear about stories of Instagrams and Airbnbs and these wonderful companies that just took off immediately but building a business is a very difficult thing and especially for me because I am an engineer, I now how to build this stuff but I didn’t know much about the industry that I am getting into, I mean the film business. In 2007 when I decided to do this, I could build it but I’m like never been to a film festival really, the market like Cannes or Venice or Berlin, I don’t know how this industry works and I just thought that I could just have a platform and show movies and it took me three years before I could even sign my first rights deal to be able to show a single movie on MUBI so no, it’s been a very difficult journey.
Elliot Moss
We’re going to pick up on the difficult journey because I think things in the last few years have shifted obviously and you’ve gone through those… the hard ten years and I say that as if it’s just like a moment, I mean ten years is a hell of a long time.
Efe Cakarel
I used to look so much younger, I mean nobody can see how I look right now but yeah.
Elliot Moss
You look lovely, look for 74, honestly, you look great, it’s no problem.
Efe Cakarel
Almost 80.
Elliot Moss
Almost 82. But the engineer in you and you know and I was reading about you and we mentioned at the beginning the mathematics and I’m very disappointed you only came third by the way in 1994.
Efe Cakarel
My father was also very disappointed.
Elliot Moss
I’m not surprised, I’m with him, I’m with him. You went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, you did a Master, an MBA rather in Stanford. You were obviously quite smart when it comes to, as you said, understanding how things work and building things. I also read that you didn’t learn how to read until you were, I don’t know…
Efe Cakarel
8.
Elliot Moss
…8. So, education for you in the context of what you do now, so you said you were an engineer but you didn’t really know the industry. There’s something going on for me as I looked at this. I went what’s your view about being an entrepreneur and what you really need to know versus the path that you took to get to this point?
Efe Cakarel
No, I think, I think it’s really important to listen to yourself and your gut feeling because even at 18, that’s still a very young age, you kind of know what you want to do with your life and you know where you want to develop yourself, you don’t necessarily know precisely what you are going to be doing but you know what your interests are. For me, my journey, it was you know very particular because I come from a very traditional family and we were in the electrical engineering business and I’m the only son in the family and I was, literally I was being grown, raised all my life to take over one day the family business in electrical engineering. It was inconceivable for me to do anything else with my life and I wanted to study like architecture and when I got into MIT, of course you know I had to study electrical engineering but when I went there, it was 1994, this was an incredible time, it was you know that September that the Netscape, was like that browser was launched and I found myself in the middle of this new thing called the internet and it was fascinating, even though it was very, very early and I decided to study computer science as well and that was the beginnings of me getting confidence in myself, I studied both electrical engineering and computer science, I had to study electrical engineering as I said but then you know coming to the end of those four years I still didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with my life so you know so I joined Goldman Sachs right and I thought that whatever I was going to be doing in life, I needed to have some financial skills, I could be running a company, I could be a manager somewhere, I mean I don’t have any talents so by definition I was going to be in business and…
Elliot Moss
You’re way too honest.
Efe Cakarel
No and if you think about it like your company is going to make some financial decisions, it’s going to raise capital, it’s going to issue debt, it’s going to go public, it’s going to you know buy other company. So I said why don’t I spend a number of years working with some really smart people building a foundation that it would open me up to do you know, whatever I want to do. And there were some good examples of that and I was very fortunate to get into Goldman and I had an exceptional four years there but I got an advice from someone that I really looked up to and I like to spend a lot of time with people who are you know older than me and more experienced. He said look there are really three things you can do, you are either going to be an advisor which is what I was doing at Goldman, or you are going to be a manager, an operator, which is what I am doing now or you are going to be an investor, right? It’s very important in your twenties for you to experience these three fields and decide what you want to build your career on and in your thirties you gain a lot of experience, in your forties is when real value creation happens. So that became my framework and I was restless, you know 24 years old, Goldman going really great so I wanted to take a step back and that’s where I decided to go to Stanford because after those three years then I could then decide what I want to do and then I Founded this and I feel like I am so lucky because I found exactly what I want to do with my life and so yes, it had worked out for me.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper today, it’s Efe Cakarel, he’s the Founder of MUBI and I think he’s quite happy he made that decision. We’re going to be hearing much more from him in a couple of minutes but right now we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovations Series which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business founders to share their industry and science and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing as Efe has. In this clip focussed on entering the arts industries, we hear from Fabien Riggall, Founder and Chief Creative Office of Secret Cinema.
You can revel in all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have a Smart speaker, why not ask it to play Jazz Shapers and there you will find a taster of our recent shows. But back to today’s guest, it’s Efe Cakarel, Founder and CEO of MUBI, the film streaming service. Just before, I want to go back to the distinction you made in a moment between advisor, manager and investor. MUBI, just give me some stats now, I read something around 9 million subscribers, around…
Efe Cakarel
12 million.
Elliot Moss
It’s gone up, that was fast wasn’t it, it was only yesterday, well done, 3 million overnight.
Efe Cakarel
Yes, we’ve been growing really significantly over the past couple of years.
Elliot Moss
So you’ve got 12 million and it’s’ film only, as opposed to some of the other streaming platforms?
Efe Cakarel
We focus on film. The other streaming platforms are skewed heavily towards TV…
Elliot Moss
Yes.
Efe Cakarel
…and they’re doing a good job but MUBI focusses on cinema.
Elliot Moss
Cinema. Biggest country? Or biggest number of subscribers today?
Efe Cakarel
Used to be UK but currently US just took over UK. Even though in US no-one quite knows about us yet, it’s the scale is really big.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of, I want to just go back to those ten years in a second and then we’ll come back to the other thing. You hung on in there, right? And you stayed. Why? What made you think, you know what, even though this is tough, even though it took me three years to get the rights for the first film, even though I didn’t know the industry, even though this isn’t growing, even though I’ve got no cash, why did you stick it out?
Efe Cakarel
Because I knew that I was working on something that has an audience. We were just very early. 2007 if you go back, when we started The Auteurs, now MUBI, to show movies on the internet, YouTube has just been around for about two years even though we started to watch long format video but it was very, very early but I knew that the consumer experience was going to significantly shift to TCPRB protocol, which is all these devices, you know the iPhone didn’t exist, the iPad didn’t exist, the smart TVs didn’t exist but it was going to move to this. And also you know, just you look at how difficult it is to execute the content driven business because it’s very capital intensive. Only a handful of really big corporations were going to be in this game, which is the case, so we strategised that right and they were going to try to go after the mass audience. What I’m doing focussing on really great cinema for an independent classic arthouse, that is a smaller niche and I knew we could create this wonderful service to super serve a film loving audience and there would be this white space that has not really been looked after by the big media corporations. So I had this strategy, I had this vision, I knew this was going to come together, it just took fifteen years for it to come together.
Elliot Moss
It just took a little bit longer than I thought it might. And in those fifteen years there’s been a lot of funding, so you have basically raised the flag and said ‘hello, I’m over here, invest in me’. People have bought into the vision. I assume Efe, they buy into you because often I talk to people about funding. What have they bought into?
Efe Cakarel
Yes, so when we first started, the first year we were building just you know the prototype, we didn’t really have you know have a business of course, I started working out of a café in Palo Alto called Cuppa Café, I would go there every morning, order some coffees and then I recruited an engineer, I found him in the open source and flew him from India and then another engineer joined me and three of us, we were just building the code base of MUBI in a café. I actually years later, the South China Post, the biggest newspaper in Hong Kong, interviewed me and asked the beginnings of MUBI and I told them the story and then something got lost in translation, the article came out, the heading, ‘From barrister to internet entrepreneur.’ They thought I was working at Cuppa Café you know and then I… Anyway so it started like that and the first seed round, we raised $750,000, 2009, it was just friends and family and nobody invested in a two page business plan, they invested in my ability to figure it out. One of my best friends, you know from Goldman, Jacomo, I literally called him Sunday night, I said look you know, I sent you the business plan on Friday, this is coming together, I don’t want to close it without you and he just like sent me a message with a number. He had no idea what the business that I am starting, he had no idea what the deal is, he just wired the money, right and this is how it started. The business plan is something completely different now of course but yes, when you are first starting, people invest in your ability to figure it out, not the business plan and that’s how I invest today in entrepreneurs as well.
Elliot Moss
We’ve gone through loads of stuff already, I feel like we’ve talked about funding and the fact that you… people trusted you to figure it out rather than saying oh this plans are amazing, they looked at you and they said you know you’re the guy. In terms of the vision that you then expanded and the fact that you’ve gone into bringing things to life physically the plans for Mexico, the fact that you are now in the production business, were these just natural extensions of the streaming service or were they to you fundamental to giving credibility to the streaming service itself?
Efe Cakarel
Well, the reason has always been not to just be a streaming service but to be a destination for great cinema. Let’s talk about us buying all the rights of the films and releasing them. We could just simply licence it from say a distributor who would buy a film but we are buying the films because we want to theatrical release them and give it as wide a release as possible in cinemas even though I am a stream, you know basically, essentially a streaming business, why? Because I do want to watch these films on the big screen and my audience would like to watch these films on the big screen so it’s very important for us to do that and you become the distributor and then the movies after cinemas come exclusively on MUBI but then you know they continue their journey and then of course you start really understanding you know the creative process and you are getting close to the directors and the producers that you work with to release these films and you want to support them at an earlier stage in their journey and you get into production, so we started to also invest in producing and co-producing these films and we think that in the long run, in order to actually create a sustainable and competitive advantage, you have to be producing your own content. So our vision from these very humble beginnings to over the next decade or so, to become a modern studio, from its production to distribution, to its own direct to consumer play with our streaming service. So we are currently developing a lot of scripts with the view that by 2024/2025, we’ll be greenlighting them and we’ll be actually producing our own movies and it’s been a fascinating journey.
Elliot Moss
And tomorrow you are going to find out whether you won some awards at the BAFTA’s?
Efe Cakarel
We have four films that had nominations at the BAFTA’s and two films, six nominations at the Oscars coming up in just a couple of weeks. So we’ve been really fortunate that the films that you know we bought and we own in many territories around the world is being recognised so the films at the BAFTA’s, The Worst Person in the World, Petite Maman and Cow (Andrea Arnold) and Drive My Car. And Drive My Car and The Worst Person got together six nominations at the Oscars. These are all wonderful, wonderful love films that we are very proud and honoured to be a part of.
Elliot Moss
Martin Scorsese referred to MUBI as the last vestige of keeping the conversation of cinema alive and sounds like he may well be right. Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, it’s Efe Cakarel, not just a creator of streaming service but now the man behind some BAFTA and potential Oscar award-winning movies. We’ve also got the brilliant Poetry from RH Factor, that’s coming up in just a moment here on Jazz FM, don’t go anywhere.
Efe Cakarel is my Business Shaper just for a little bit longer. You started at the beginning, you said in 2007 there I was, I was an engineer and I went into an industry, didn’t have a clue about it but I knew I was going to build something and then luckily you know you knew there’d be an audience and here we are now. Your relationship with the industry today Efe, with all the logical part that comes with being an engineer, both a computer scientist and electrical engineer and everything else you’ve done, how does it feel to be in the industry and do you now think you understand it?
Efe Cakarel
Well, you know I spent fifteen years of my life in the film industry and it started with passion for the art and it still continues to be a passion. When I’m in Cannes Film Festival, you know there’s all this red carpet and you know all this wonderful glamorous thing that is happening and then you walk the red carpet, you walk in, the curtains are closed and the film starts and that’s cinema. Like my knees shake from excitement before a premiere begins in Cannes and I think what happened over time is that the industry really started to see how genuine we are with our passion for cinema. It was almost like the commercial considerations almost came second to presenting something wonderful and the art and passion of and for cinema, and that turned out to be as you know in the end a great business as well but the starting point is love for cinema and that was very apparent to the industry and so people really genuinely became a part of this wonderful project. People actually would rather have MUBI invest in their movies than a pure film fancier because when MUBI invests in a film, it’s not just the money, it’s we bring our entire audience and passion and this love for cinema and we make a difference in how that film eventually also does naturally.
Elliot Moss
And all the things in your life that led up to you running MUBI, so you know the fact that you didn’t learn to read till you were 8, the mathematics focus, the focus on engineering and all that, was it all important though to get to the point where you can actually come back to what drives your heart? I mean, all those other things, although you say I didn’t want to become an electrical engineer and all those things but actually, would you have changed it?
Efe Cakarel
No, like for me to do what I am doing, for MUBI to exist, it’s not enough just to have the engineering capability to build it, it’s also not enough to have a love or passion for cinema, you need to have both and at the highest level, you need to really understand cinema in order to acquire, produce, programme, editorialise and present movies but also when you press ‘play’ the thing needs to work and it needs to work amazingly from Buenos Aires to Tokyo and that’s a very difficult engineering challenge to tackle. You also need hundreds of millions of dollars to execute this vision so you also need to really do need to understand finance and how to have that language in order to be able to raise the kind of capital to realise your dreams. So it’s very unique and very, very difficult to execute, that’s why you have seen a lot of content you know when businesses could never scale to become a streaming service, even Canal Plus with all the most important films in Europe could not build a streaming service because they are not engineers and a lot of Silicon Valley based engineering businesses tried to tackle streaming, they also failed because they don’t understand content. So, yes, you needed to have both and everything I’ve done, from my engineering background to my time at Goldman and my passion and love for cinema and spending a lot of late evenings in arthouse cinemas all over the world, yes all that came together for us to do what we are doing.
Elliot Moss
It’s been fascinating talking to you, you make it sound like it was all planned, these three little chips that you threw into the middle of the ring, obviously, the technical, the passion and the financial instruments and the financial modelling.
Efe Cakarel
I’m very fortunate.
Elliot Moss
I think it’s more than that but listen, we’ve loved having you, congratulations and good luck with whatever happens tomorrow night and in the future with the Oscars as well, fingers crossed. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Efe Cakarel
I chose C Jam Blues. I was always fascinated with this tune because it’s you know as you know, it’s all simple, it starts with only two notes, C and G, and it also offers a lot of creative possibilities for improvising and that’s been fascinating to also listen to what many Jazz musicians have done with this tune, created by Duke Ellington in the ‘40s but then has been interpreted by many people and then some years ago I came across this 1964 recording of Oscar Peterson in Denmark and wow, I wish I was this age in 1964 in Copenhagen watching that, right, and that to me one of the greatest pieces of music and one of the greatest performances on Jazz piano ever.
Elliot Moss
That was Oscar Peterson performing Duke Ellington’s C Jam Blues, 1964 version Copenhagen, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Efe Cakarel. He talked about loving to spend time with older and wise people and boy has it served him well. He understood very early on and believed the fact that MUBI had an audience and has focussed on that and on becoming, as he called it, a modern studio. And finally, I love the way he articulated, it wasn’t enough to be an engineer, it wasn’t enough to have passion, it wasn’t enough to understand how to raise money, he needed to do all three. Brilliant stuff from my trilingual Business Shaper today. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.