I was naive. That’s the short version.
EJ was a co-organizer during the early NYC planning phase. We were building lineups together, coordinating with venues, doing the grunt work that turns an idea into an event. He was part of the team. I thought we were building something together.
Then EJ stole money from my party. And brought people to intimidate me while he did it.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of the amount or the exact mechanics. What matters is the pattern: someone I trusted with operational access used that access to take what wasn’t theirs, then showed up with backup to make sure I couldn’t do anything about it in the moment.
The theft forced a full restructure. I had to scrap the old team and rebuild from scratch. The people who were supposed to be partners became opps overnight. Not because of a disagreement or creative differences — because they stole from the project and then tried to intimidate their way out of accountability.
That restructure is where the “biz first, friends last” philosophy was born. Not from a book or a podcast. From getting robbed by someone I called a collaborator.
The cancel war that followed was connected. I fired staff for theft. They retaliated with a cancellation campaign. The usual playbook: screenshots out of context, whisper networks, the whole thing. People who had never been to an SLIST event suddenly had opinions about what kind of person I was.
But the community held. That’s the part nobody expected. The people who actually showed up to the parties, who danced until 8am, who knew what the project was about — they didn’t leave. They bought tickets. They told the cancel crowd to find something better to do.
The comeback was the Silo event. A top-tier venue invited us to organize an event out of nowhere. The same haters who tried to push the project out of the scene watched us walk into a venue they couldn’t book on their best day. That hit different.
Here’s what the EJ situation taught me about team-building in this scene:
Trust is earned over multiple events, not given upfront. When things go wrong — and they will — character reveals itself. The people who funnel money through fake contracts, the people who threaten violence over lineup disputes, the people who disappear when the cops show up — they all look the same during the planning phase. You only find out who they are when pressure hits.
I’ve since tried building teams multiple times. Every time, the same pattern: shared ownership leads to shared problems. People jump ship at the first hiccup. Collaborators who promised commitment evaporate when it gets hard. August 2024 was the final purge — multiple team members removed simultaneously for stealing or gross negligence.
The conclusion I landed on: SLIST is meant to be a solo project with strategic delegation. Not because I can’t work with people. Because every time I gave someone actual ownership, they used it against the project. You can delegate tasks. You can never delegate decision-making authority.
EJ and his goons thought they were taking money from a party. They were actually building the operating philosophy for everything that came after.