PODCAST: Inside Berklee—Panos Panay, BerkleeICE

In this episode of Inside Berklee, Panos Panay '94 talks about the synergy between music and entrepreneurialism, and founding the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE).

November 8, 2016

When Panos Panay graduated from Berklee in 1994, he didn't think much about how his music education related to his business acumen. In fact, over the course of his career for the next 20 years, which included starting his own successful company, Sonicbids, he almost thought of his music background as something to hide.

But after he connected with Berklee President Roger H. Brown, who later served on Sonicbid's board of directors, Panay began to reassess the role of music in business. The process, he says, "really made me embrace this music background and that it wasn’t disconnected at all from the journey that I had. Not only did it inform it, but in many ways it was a catalyst and accelerator.”

After selling Sonicbids in 2013, he began talking to Brown about teaching Berklee students this synergy between entrepreneurialism and music, and what emerged from those conversations was the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE), which Panay founded and directs.

In this episode of Inside Berklee, Panay talks about his journey back to Berklee, and how the various aspects of BerkleeICE—from courses and lectures to internships and trips to places such as Silicon Valley and SXSW—support the entire Berklee student body by revealing that being a musician is its own form of running a business.

Producer: Bryan Parys
Engineer: Andres Gonzales Cardona
Recorded at the BIRN Studios