MEET THE BOARD

Ronny Ho is the Head of Dance & Electronic Development at Spotify, where she leads audience growth and engagement, oversees curation and programming, and develops innovative programs across the diverse array of dance and electronic genres. She also joined She is the Music where she co-leads the Dance Committee.

In her previous role with Spotify, Ronny worked directly with the heads of the global Music team to identify audience and genre trends that informed the launch of global initiatives such as RADAR, track IDs, K-Pop, cultural moments and ultimately led to more inclusive programs and decision making.

Ronny also founded Spotify’s Asian Employee Resource Group (ERG), where she worked across the organization to help build the framework of Employee Resource Groups at Spotify. She led the Asian ERG for two and half years, building internal programs to foster community, as well as spearheading external programs. She also built new content brands such as Jasmine, Dope AF, the Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the global Stop Asian Hate hub to discover, foster, and build the Asian creator community,

Ronny joined the Spotify Business Development team in April 2016, where she analyzed partnership opportunities to drive subscriber growth around the world, including Samsung, Vodafone, AT&T, Telia, and more. Before Spotify, Ronny worked at Citigroup Equity Capital Markets, where she was instrumental in executing IPOs and equity raises across the financial, energy & power, and technology industries.

During her free time, Ronny enjoys baking all sorts of things, catching shows at the local venues and traveling. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and human computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University

Lyte Founder and CEO Ant Taylor is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, former Ivy league basketball player and live events enthusiast.

A firm believer in the power of technology to disrupt incumbent business models, Ant has co-founded, invested in, or advised several start ups.

After an early career at Goldman Sachs and American Express, Ant joined Right Media as one of the company’s first product managers. He worked his way up through product and partnership solutions until Right’s $850M acquisition by Yahoo in 2007. At Yahoo, Ant managed a global team to continue to build, sell, and service the Right Media Exchange as well as Video and Ad technologies for the Yahoo product.

While at Yahoo, Ant invested in AdBuyer, one of the first platforms to integrate and optimize search and display ad buying. AdBuyer was later acquired by Mediaocean. Ant was also co-founder of Moat, a global analytics provider focused on making brands and publishers more effective. Moat was acquired by Oracle in 2017 and is now part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

With Lyte, Ant turned a bucket list adventure to the 2012 London Olympics into one of the most innovative technology companies in the live events industry. Since Lyte was founded in New York and San Francisco in 2013, hundreds of thousands of fans have attended many of the most sought-after live events in the U.S thanks to the tech platform’s unique ticket exchange solution. Coachella, BottleRock, the Newport Folk Festival, Arkansas Razorbacks Athletics, and Mumford and Sons are among the amazing live events Lyte has powered.

Lyte is an events marketplace for top sports and entertainment brands seeking an alternative to the secondary market. Lyte partners with major primary ticketing systems, including Ticketfly, Eventbrite, Tickets.com, Etix, Universe, ShowClix, SquadUp, Elevate Tickets, and Front Gate Tickets. Together, Lyte and its partners safely and securely enable fans to return or request tickets to hugely popular live events.

Lyte has saved fans over $10M by providing the best priced tickets to the best events. Throughout his career, Ant has also taken on many philanthropic projects, including 4POINT4, the first philanthropy-based endorsement deal for the 2012 Olympics. In 2010, after a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti, Ant was an advisor for Project Phoenix, a 12,000-seat soccer stadium concept in Cite Soleil, Haiti. The arena was designed by world-renowned architect Carlos Zapata as a world-class soccer facility and self-sustaining community. He also advised on Wellspace, a public-private partnership with U.S. State Department announced in May 2012 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Ant is a Bay Area native and lives in San Francisco with his family. When he’s not running Lyte, Ant spends most of his spare time attending live events. His favorites over the past few years are the Rolling Stones, Madonna, The Who, the NBA Finals and Bruins-Canadiens at the Garden.

A music industry executive with 15+ years of experience, Shannon currently serves as Head of Pop & Dance/Electronic music at the Recording Academy (GRAMMYs). She was included in Shesaid.so's 2019 Alternative Power 100 Music List and is currently on the Board of Directors for US arts non-profit Femme House, the Global Advisory Board for UK arts non-profit In Place of War and the Music Industry Advisory Board for 1770 Records, the student-run record label at the College of Charleston. She also works as part of the Leadership Team for the progressive political non-profit LA Forward.

Previously, she held positions including Director of Operations/Tour Manager for Moby, Manager, Publicity & Artist Relations at Universal Music Group and Junior Manager for Carrie Underwood at 19 Entertainment.

In her spare time she loves seeing live music, snorkeling and collecting passport stamps through as many international adventures as possible.

Ms. Block is a Vice President in the ESG Portfolio Management Group at PIMCO. Most recently she served as Senior Vice President and Senior ESG Engagement and Research Analyst at Rockefeller Capital Management in New York City, where she spearheaded ESG research integration and shareholder engagement efforts. She previously served as the Director of Programs for Africa and Asia at the Blacksmith Institute, an international non-profit dedicated to mitigating the negative externalities of rapid industrialization in emerging and frontier markets. She has 17 years of ESG experience, including seven in the financial services sector. She has implemented projects to reduce the environmental and human health impacts of industry and mining in over a dozen countries, working in conjunction with national governments, the private sector, community stakeholders and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Commission on Environment. She received her bachelor’s degree from New York University and an MPA in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University.

Michael Julian (Mj) started his journey working on events in New York City in the mid-1990s and since has worked with many elite festivals, event brands, artists, nightclubs, and live events across the Globe. He has become known internationally after pioneering winning digital strategies into the world of dance music and live events in the early 2000s. Mj is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and sits on Advisory boards of industry-leading companies.

Tiffany Naiman currently the Director of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Music Industry Programs as well as a lecturer in the Musicology department. She concurrently is a Career Lecturer at Stanford University. She also serves as co-chair of the LGBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society. Tiffany is a scholar of popular music, temporality, and disability studies with secondary specializations in gender, aging, voice, performance and media studies. Further, Tiffany has developed a specialization as a David Bowie scholar and her work is published in Blackstar Rising, Purple Rain (2022), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2019), David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Along with her musicological research and teaching, Tiffany is a DJ, electronic music composer, film curator, and award-winning documentary film producer.

Jake is the most prominent LGBTQ+ Event Producer in North America. He was honored as one of the OUT100 Most Influential LGBTQ+ People of the Year. His festivals in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Mexico, are spectacles, combining elaborate theatrical sets and A-list talent. He is the founder of Utopia, Dreamland and Vote Proud. He has made a name for himself as a party-giving philanthropist, producing some of the most prestigious fundraiser events for organizations, raising millions for Life Ball, Trevor Project, The White Party Gala, Ali Forney Center, GLADD, Lambda Legal and It Gets Better.