Partner | Artist-Entrepreneur Strategy & Investment Lead

Mauricio Mota is an investor and entrepreneur with 25 years experience across Edtech, Media, Entertainment and Impact Investing in the US and Latin America. Recently he founded Ashé Audio Ventures with JuVee Productions, Viola Davis’s and Julius Tennon production company. He also served as executive producer of East Los High, an award-winning drama series that earned 6 Emmy nominations during its run on Hulu for its realistic portrayal of Latino high school students. The show also became a global case of Impact Investing and how Social Impact for its partnerships with philanthropies and non-profits. 

Mota began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 15 when he developed a storytelling board game, which he sold door-to-door all over Brazil. It is now present in over 5,000 schools. It later became a YA book collection and has been used by many Forbes 500 companies and the United Nations to foster creativity and innovation for their  Millennium Development Goals. The game’s patent was used as the foundation for a literacy social network employed by 700,000 kids in public schools across the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Later, Mota founded multiple companies, pioneering multi-platform content by designing and creating products and content for TV channels, Audiobook companies, movie studios, and advertisers globally. Mauricio was the first Latin American to speak at the Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT. He has been a judge on many international juries, such as Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Festival of Media, the Emmys, and the One Show. Mota represents the 4th generation of one of the most important Latin American storytelling legacies and has helped his mother re-shape the estate created by his grandfather, Nelson Rodrigues, who is considered the Brazilian Shakespeare, into the largest and most diverse IP estate in Latin America. Most recently, he designed The School of Series, a TV series/IP development lab that aims to shape the next generation of showrunners and content creators in Brazil.

Mauricio currently serves as a General Partner of Starfish, an organization built by artist-entrepreneurs of color to help other underserved artist-entrepreneurs turn their culture-defining ideas into career-defining ventures. He sits on the boards of Young Storytellers (a non-profit focused on mentoring low-income students through storytelling), A Call To Men (non-profit focused on reshaping manhood in society), the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and the Center for Third Space at the Annenberg School (an Institute focused on shaping the next generation of business leaders). Mauricio also has spoken for national and international audiences including the World Bank, The White House Fellowship and the State Department.