Born: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology, The State University of New York at Buffalo
First job: I worked in catering halls for years. I was 16. I worked as a busboy, head busboy, waiter, bartender. I think everyone should be a waiter at least at some point in time. You learn so much about how to deal with crisis, how to deal with people, how to make them happy on a personal level. Before that, I worked in camps doing music — I was the music instructor, but really that was my first real job.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Probably a rock star. I’m not giving up on that. When I was 16, I was playing in a band, and we were playing at these clubs in Brooklyn and opening up for big names at the time. … It’s sad; when I was 16, I kind of peaked my rock stardom. I’ve been in a band almost ever since up until a couple years ago.
Whom do you admire most and why?
In life, and I know this is so cliché, but definitely my father just because he was also a musician and he was also extremely creative and passionate about life. The one thing that he instilled was he was always happy to go to work — who the hell is always happy to go to work? Everyone has bad days. Everyone has problems, but he never showed that to the family.
What’s your favorite movie?
I’d say ‘Fight Club’ is probably my No. 1 favorite movie. ‘Fight Club’ is one of my favorite movies because it encapsulates a point in time when I first graduated college, it encapsulates where we were as a culture at that time, the challenges that we face, and there’s a lot of good lessons about materialism and counterculture.
Lunenfeld on establishing a vision and values: The vision needs to serve as a prediction, and it should be a work in progress — slightly unattainable. For us, the vision is that Moxie is creating the agency of the future. We are creating — it’s not to say that we are or we’ve achieved this. It’s creating that sense of a work in progress and something that we’re all striving for.
You can’t put [your core values] up on a wall and say, ‘This is what we are today.’ When we were crystallizing what our values were, it was really a reflection of who we are, not who we want to be. The difference between your values and your vision should be who you are. Your vision should be who you want to be.
Everyone really underestimates how important, what people consider, the soft stuff is in a company — the touchy-feeling things. I was a cultural anthropology major in school, so for me, it’s all about what drives your culture, what are the things you stand for, what are the symbols that point those things out. When you think about it, a company really needs to be a drive, a culture, a vision, and everything you do has to ring true to that, otherwise everyone’s just going to call bullshit on you.
