Kevin Wall

Kevin Wall Born March 15, 1952 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is an Emmy Award-winning producer and new media entrepreneur who created and produced Live Earth -- The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis.

Wall grew up in a family of fourteen (the twelve Wall children all had names beginning with the letter "K") who worked and lived in a roller-skating rink called the Roller Dome. He gained his earliest experiences programming music as the Roller Dome disk jockey. Wall says it was this experience that gave him insight into "the power of music to move people." He and his father and brothers laid all the wood flooring in the Roller Dome's 20,000 square foot rink. Wall's expertise with wood flooring introduced him to a job with an Ann Arbor, Michigan company that built portable music stages. Wall then began promoting and staging concerts at colleges throughout the Midwest United States.

Newly-formed ties to the music business led him to Los Angeles, where, in 1984, he founded BoxTop Entertainment, a producer and distributor of live music. In 1994, Wall established BoxTop Interactive, which three years later, he merged with iXL, an Atlanta-based media and internet consulting company, for an estimated $70 million. He served for three years as vice-chairman of iXL, overseeing the strategic acquisition of 42 small Internet companies to build an organization with more than 3,000 employees in seventeen cities worldwide. Prior to the burst of the Dot-com bubble in 2000, Wall, with an impeccable sense of business timing, exited iXL to partner with high-tech investor Art Bilger (vice-chairman of Akamai) in Shelter Capital, a $200 million venture capital fund with current investments in the semiconductor, software and media convergence industries.

Wall is married to Dr. Susan Smalley, a geneticist on the faculty at UCLA who has done pioneering work in the genetics of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). They have three children, Patrick, Timothy and Kelly.

The first Live Earth concert, staged on July 7, 2007 (07.07.07) at ten venues on seven continents, was arguably the largest "concert for a cause" in history. 156 musical acts, including Madonna, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Alicia Keys, Lenny Kravitz, Black Eyed Peas, and The Police participated in the event, which drew an estimated worldwide audience of 800 million for radio, television, and Internet live and on-demand. To produce Live Earth, Wall partnered with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, whose film, An Inconvenient Truth, had initially inspired him to take action on the climate crisis. Proceeds from Live Earth were donated to Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection. The second concert will take place on December 7, 2008 in Mumbai, India.

In his career, Wall has produced and/or distributed over 300 major live concerts, many of them tied to activist causes (benefit concerts), including the concerts to free Nelson Mandela, Roger Waters and Pink Floyd at the Berlin Wall, The Prince's Trust Concerts, Live AID, and Live 8, for which he was worldwide executive producer and won the first Emmy ever awarded for an 'interactive event.'

Live 8, staged on July 2, 2005, was the inaugural production of Wall's newly-formed multimedia production company Network LIVE, which, in 2006, became Control Room, a leading multi-platform producer and distributor of live entertainment events, and the production company behind Live Earth. (Other key participants in Live Earth were Control Room's head of music programming, Aaron Grosky; worldwide production manager Lily Sobhani; and worldwide broadcast producer, Andre Mika.)

Kevin Wall is a founder of Sustainable Holdings a company which has Joined forces with Dimensional Fund Advisors to launch a new fund which weights its holdings based on companies' sustainability scores. Sustainable Holdings has developed a proprietary algorithm to quantify environmental sustainability practices of public companies

External links

* [http://www.controlroom.com Control Room corporate site]
* [http://www.liveearth.org/who_we_are.php Bio on Live Earth site]
* [http://www.sustainableholdings.com Sustainable Holdings corporate site]
* [http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-cause18may18,1,216449.story Saving the planet, one chord at a time] "Los Angeles Times"
* [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19558073/ Live Earth hopes action follows global concerts] Msnbc.com
* [http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/2007/06/29/kevin_wall/index_np.html Three questions for Kevin Wall] Salon.com
* [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/09/100121802/index.htm Here Comes The Sun, "Fortune Magazine" ]