Female Founders: Bonnie Comley of BroadwayHD On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
I think that becoming a founder is more related to personality than gender, founders are usually self-driven individuals with a great desire to succeed. Women can make a big impact in industries by providing greater diversity and new ideas, while also connecting with the vast number of female customers. There are businesses, such as Broadway, in which statistics show that female customers, in this case, ticket buyers, outnumber males by some 20 percent. Such businesses with similar demographics should be particularly intriguing to women entrepreneurs who have a keen and intuitive understanding of their market.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bonnie Comley.
Bonnie Comley, Board President of the Drama League, is a three-time Tony Award-winning producer and founder & CEO of BroadwayHD, the world’s premier online streaming platform delivering over 300 premium live productions to theatre fans globally. Comley has also won an Olivier Award and two Drama Desk Awards for her stage productions and has produced over 40 films, winning five Telly Awards and one W3 Award.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I am a Broadway producer turned entrepreneur from Massachusetts. I graduated from UMass as a business major and went on to earn my master’s degree in TV production from Emerson College. Later, I added Columbia Business School to my academic achievements.
I managed to combine my business knowledge with my interest in entertainment. Serving as an on-air television reporter for Travel Channel’s NightLife TV, I covered theater, and along the way, met an agent who saw more potential for me as a performer. This led to voice-over work, television commercials, soap operas, and nine off-Broadway theatrical roles. My appetite for theater also kept me reporting on the topic for a performing arts publication where I would meet a host of Broadway notables.
Fast forward a few decades, and I have amassed a Broadway career which includes producing significant shows from dramas such as War Horse to the lighthearted hit musical comedy Legally Blonde. And along with the Broadway productions came the thrill of being honored with prestigious awards from the Broadway community and by academic institutions. My educational honors include The Distinguished Alumni Award from Emerson College, The Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Massachusetts, and the business honor society Beta Gamma Sigma. In fact, the Music Theatre Program at Boston University is named in my honor, the Musical Theatre Society Room at Emerson College bears my name, and the 500-seat theater at the University of Massachusetts is named the Comley-Lane Theatre.
In 2015 I became founder and CEO of BroadwayHD, the world’s first and foremost online streaming platform delivering over 300 premium filmed live productions to theater fans globally. BroadwayHD has borrowed from the Netflix streaming model and applied it to theater, featuring Broadway and off-Broadway productions in their entirety, as well as productions from London’s famed West End. Offering unlimited, on-demand access to premium full-length stage productions, BroadwayHD invites viewers to enjoy filmed live theater from the comfort of their own homes and at a time suited to their convenience. BroadwayHD is using streaming technology to eliminate the geographic and economic barriers along with the physical limitations of a theater — bringing Broadway to viewers’ homes.
BroadwayHD also ensures ease of access for its customer base and is available to anyone via tablet, laptop, desktop, or mobile phone as well as on TV, accessible through Apple TV and Google Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Prime, Firestick, or dedicated apps for iOS and Android or via the BroadwayHD website.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
In a ground-breaking first for the Broadway industry, on June 30, 2016, the BroadwayHD team and I, in partnership with the Roundabout Theater Company, made history becoming the first Broadway show to be live-streamed. The historic performance of She Loves Me was viewed in real-time by audiences in over 84 nations around the world. On that day, BroadwayHD and She Loves Me were trending on both Facebook and Twitter. Media and customer testimonials praised and lauded the live-streamed production, validating the theory that filmed Broadway shows have a worldwide audience.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Being a founder means taking a passion for a business and making it a reality, as I did with my love of theater. I believe that being a founder is within everyone’s grasp, as long as they are dedicated to working hard and spending many hours on the details it takes to launch a successful business. I also believe that along with having passion, founders need to have a long-range vision of what they are trying to achieve and be open to new ideas since it’s very likely that there will be some detours or roadblocks to overcome along the way. It’s also important to be budget-conscious, and always looking for the resources you will need to achieve your goals, which typically includes utilizing the right technology and having the best human resources you can find. It also helps to be amiable and optimistic!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are a lot of people who helped and inspired me along the way, from marvelous instructors at UMass, Emerson, and Columbia Business School to my husband and family to the many remarkable women I’ve met in the theater community as such Charlotte St. Martin who, since 2006, has been the head of the Broadway League, the trade association for Broadway talent, theater owners, producers, presenters, and general managers. Anyone who can remain at the top of a multi-billion-dollar industry for 15 years has leadership skills worth emulating.
But when it comes to stamina and discipline as an entrepreneur, I point to my parents as shining examples. My dad was an elevator mechanic and my mom quit her job at the New England Telephone Company to start their own business on our kitchen table, long before home-based businesses were a thing. They were two young parents of four children but they were also hard workers and risk-takers. My mother always told me that the only people who never fail are the ones that aren’t doing anything.
Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to an EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding women back from founding companies?
My deep knowledge of the technology, expertise in marketing, and producing this specialized content have put me at the intersection of art and commerce. I also enjoy spending time mentoring and inspiring the next generation of female tech entrepreneurs. My personal motto is “find a mentor, then be a mentor.” I feel that the ideal mentor is a mirror reflection of yourself but with more experience. Of course, in the real world, this mirror reflection is hard to find in workplaces without much diversity, so, allies can be the answer. Find a workplace ally who is willing to support you with advice and guidance, in your career path you can have multiple mentors and allies as you immerse yourself in the industry of your choice and learn as much as possible about how it works.
At BroadwayHD, I have also ensured that the company has a 50:50 gender split. Safeguarding the gender-diverse workforce at BroadwayHD allows the company to serve an increasingly diverse customer base. I also wanted more flexibility in managing a work-life balance for myself and my employees, so in 2019 BroadwayHD transformed into a remote and cloud-based organization. While it was still expected that employees would travel into the New York City offices on a regular schedule, the aim was to encourage employees to develop the infrastructure and home office environments to allow them to work flexibly if necessary. This perceptive modification of working practice and evolution of company culture allowed a smooth transition to the fully remote working environment adopted following pandemic-related lockdown restrictions, without facing any decrease in productivity or any negative impact on its subscriber base.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
I think that becoming a founder is more related to personality than gender, founders are usually self-driven individuals with a great desire to succeed. Women can make a big impact in industries by providing greater diversity and new ideas, while also connecting with the vast number of female customers. There are businesses, such as Broadway, in which statistics show that female customers, in this case, ticket buyers, outnumber males by some 20 percent. Such businesses with similar demographics should be particularly intriguing to women entrepreneurs who have a keen and intuitive understanding of their market.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
One of the myths I’ve heard often is that founders are their own bosses, which on the surface sounds marvelous. However, what those perpetuating the idea of this fantasy business life don’t recognize is that there are many responsibilities, some of which are not positive, such as letting people go, having to cut back to stay within a budget, making a host of tough decisions that may affect numerous people, and steering the ship through calamities from economic downturns, to natural disasters to pandemics. Being a founder has its perks, but the position also comes with a lot of headaches and many hours of lost sleep.
Another common myth I dispel is the one that says entrepreneurs are born, not made. The perfect example of someone whose early career path was focused on reporting on theater and honing her acting skills, I became an entrepreneur after being part of an industry that she loved for many years. I was not the young entrepreneur ready to take on the business world by storm. In fact, I wasn’t thinking that way, nor were the majority of entrepreneurs I’ve met along the way. Most founders have gained career experience before taking the plunge into starting a business, they weren’t simply born to be entrepreneurs.
There’s also the myth that says founder(s) know exactly what their audience wants. The vast majority of founders are doing a ton of demographic and consumer research, often learning through trial and error and opting for smaller risks over large ones until they hone in on their target audience. BroadwayHD has grown steadily, but cautiously, as we learned what our audiences want and how we could provide them with the best possible streaming service, it’s always best not to presume you know what people want.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
For a while now I have been working on a “Listen Up” initiative, it is designed to bridge the widening gap between the beliefs and opinions of so many people. We believe it begins with the most basic tool we have, communication. Once a month everyone has to listen to someone with a conflicting opinion. This means listening without judgment, without debate, without prejudice. The goal is to understand why this person with a very different point of view has come to this conclusion and maintains this belief. You don’t have to change their minds and they don’t have to change yours. But we believe if you “listen up” very closely, you might be able to comprehend an issue from a different perspective, and that can make a huge difference.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I have long been an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and am pleased to see that after lockdowns and isolation, more people are willing to listen. In 2021, 1 received the WP Theater’s Women of Achievement Award for my work in gender equality.
My parents taught me to challenge gender norms at an early age and dared me to enter into all-boy arenas. I was handed power tools as a young girl and told, “some people will tell you that you can’t but you can do anything that the boys can do.” I was also warned that I would face resistance, but I was always able to push forward with encouragement from my family.
In my overalls and work boots with sawdust in my hair, I built treehouses and I made furniture. I could change the tires, the oil, and the muffler on the family car. I could drive a snowmobile, dirt bike, and a manual transmission pickup truck at 55 mph in reverse. I could also cook, sew, clean a fish, and milk a cow — I mastered all these things before I graduated from high school. Having such a diverse background, and challenging “gender norms” it was no surprise that I ended up working in the theater!
The theater has always been a space for people to break “gender norms”, the place to witness people doing what they were told they could not do, or dare not, do. It’s been a battleground for social justice which is what drew so many of us into the industry, even those of us who have spent years in this industry and become part of the privileged category, clearly recognize the imbalance and want to be part of the solution.
I want to reach a time of gender parity in the theater, while continuing to strive for diversity, equity, and inclusion. With statistics in hand, we continue moving in the right direction. When we talk about gender equality, for example, we find that women leaders are more likely to mentor and hire other women, and are more likely to create an inclusive environment, which results in more women entering that workplace. In recent years, there has been a tremendous advancement of women in the top levels of theater. These women, running regional theaters will hire more women executives, who will hire female designers, who will look for scripts by, and about, women. The same can be the result across minorities who bring in the talent that so greatly deserves to be given such opportunities.
So, what am I doing as a founder to support gender equality and DEI? One of the greatest aspects of BroadwayHD is that we offer audiences in 120 countries the opportunity to watch full-length stage plays and musicals that depict a wealth of stories about the struggles, the turmoil, the failures, and the successes of fascinating individuals, who were told they couldn’t do something because of their gender, race, religion, culture or sexual orientation. Therefore, BroadwayHD is not just about bringing people quality entertainment, it is also very much about amplifying stories and voices from a single theatrical production and making them heard around the world. For example, we can extend the life of shows by women playwrights, like Paula Vogel and Dominique Morriseau, composers like Shauna Taub, and Val Vigoda, and directors like Rebecca Taichman, Sally Cookson, and Lisa Petersen and share them with a global audience long after the curtain has come down on the final performance. These beautiful shows at the height of their production values will be seen around the world and will inspire others to step up and use their voices. Authentic theater can only happen when we let people tell their own stories and present those stories to as many people as possible.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. I wish someone had told us that we didn’t need four offices, in New York City, Portland Maine, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.. Today, we have people working remotely in four locations, but only one office remains in Manhattan. Like so many businesses, we’ve become remote, and it’s working out extremely well.
2. The learning never stops and the business is never static. There will always be challenges and roadblocks. BroadwayHD is a perfect example of this. Many companies tried to digitize theater but the union agreements weren’t negotiated in advance, streaming technology had buffering issues, etc. It was a long list of challenges. But we tried to methodically address each roadblock and find a solution. BroadwayHD is heading into its seventh year of business and we are constantly integrating new technology and adjusting to the market.
3. Key employees will come and go. Sometimes the best people to launch a business are not the best people to run the business. BroadwayHD started as a concept, a startup, and has become a successful streaming platform. Several high-level BroadwayHD executives have moved on to launch other tech businesses. Even I have to admit that as the company grows, I rely more on teams of experts, as I am confident I have chosen the best fit teams for BroadwayHD.
4. The online theater audience is not the same as the Broadway ticket buyer. While there is certainly overlap, and the Broadway ticket buyers were early adapters, there is a huge global underserved audience with an appetite for live theater. When BroadwayHD launched in 2015, the marketing dollars were spent to advertise in English to US consumers. Within days of launch, there were so many requests for the service from foreign countries, that BroadwayHD had to adjust to collect international currencies.
5. Being agile in business is not failure, it’s recognizing that there is a better path to success. BroadwayHD started off with a theory that everything needed to be live-streamed but soon discovered that it was more important to the BroadwayHD audience that the shows were available to them on-demand and at their convenience than they were watching while the show was taking place. In other words, the “live event” aspect was less important than having access to the shows. BroadwayHD’s library of 300 plus full-length musicals and stage plays is available on-demand which is a different business model than the original live streaming from theaters at 8pm business model. The best understanding of the market comes from being in the marketplace.
Bonnie Comley
36 West 44th Street Suite 400
New York, NY 10036
212–315–0402
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this!
Female Founders: Bonnie Comley of BroadwayHD On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.