Naked Ambition: Tim Valenti on Building Brands

Tim Valenti remembers wanting to be an ambassador to a foreign country when he was growing up in his native Honolulu. “I wanted to be in international relations,” Valenti recalls. “I wanted to work at the U.N.” It’s safe to say Valenti has cultivated countless relationships both on U.S. soil and abroad during his 20-plus years of travels as an entrepreneur in adult entertainment. In fact the founder of NakedSword without question is an influential industry ambassador who built what today can best be described as a gay adult entertainment empire. Under Valenti’s leadership, the NakedSword Network operates on the cutting-edge of streaming technology and content, powered by its diverse collection of acclaimed brands that include the flagship NakedSword.com, NakedSword Originals, TheSword.com and NakedSword Film Works (NSFW). Valenti in late 2015 also took the reins of Falcon Studios Group, the world's largest producer of gay male erotica, as the president of the company. Falcon Studios Group is home to three legendary brands: Falcon Studios (est. 1971), Raging Stallion Studios (est. 1999) and Hot House Entertainment (est. 1994). The former communications major at the University of San Francisco is also the senior vice president of the North Carolina–based Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network—better known as AEBN, which is NakedSword’s parent company. But it all started on the Hawaiian island of Oahu for Valenti, who will be 2020 inductee into the GayVN Hall of Fame on January 20 at the GayVN Awards Show at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. “It’s funny, I was a local kid that spoke pidgin that lived at the beach that had big dreams of being in different countries around the world and sort of being in charge,” Valenti adds with a smile. “I travel—I go all over the world and I love it. I love just being in different places and tasting different things.” Valenti first got accepted to American University, the private research institution in Washington D.C., before ultimately deciding on college in the Bay Area. “My parents had a really bad breakup and I ran away from home and basically lived at my cousin’s house on the beach the last year-and-a-half of high school. I just surfed every day and waited to get to the mainland,” Valenti says. “And they wouldn’t let me go all the way to Washington, D.C., because they thought if I went that far I’d never come back. So that’s why I ended up at [University of San Francisco] and Catholic school. “But yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. I kind of feel like I’ve met every kind of person you could imagine in this world, so I got part of it going.” Tim Valenti at the Phoenix Forum with Eric Schut, Davyd Dixon and Eric Paul Leue. Photo courtesy NakedSword Valenti, who turns 60 on January 8—he shares a birthday with Elvis Presley—this year is celebrating NakedSword’s 20th anniversary. He revealed at press time in December that NakedSword was in the midst of a complete overhaul of its platform with the grand unveiling scheduled for the second quarter of 2020. “We did launch the first version of NakedSword in 1999 as a token-based streaming site, not knowing too much about the adult business. It was more a streaming product that we were trying to see if it would work and it kind of bombed pretty big in that we had a lot of customers buying huge packets or streams—like a thousand dollars worth of streams—and then charging it all back,” Valenti explains. “Because in those days they could do it. And there was nothing we could do. There was no recourse because in those days with credit-card companies and streaming businesses in porn it was like you’re in the wrong, no matter what. "So we took down the site and said if we’re going to be involved in the adult business we better really understand what it is we’re doing and come up with a better product. So we re-launched NakedSword in 2000 and it took off.” Did it ever. Now one of the most popular gay adult video membership sites in the world, NakedSword.com features more than 20,000 scenes from 200-plus independent gay porn producers. The network’s content production house, NakedSword Originals, creates premium gay porn features available on NakedSword.com as well as on DVD, while the network’s blog, TheSword.com, covers the entire spectrum of gay adult entertainment and culture.  Meanwhile, NakedSword Film Works (NSFW) curates short films at NSFilmWorks.com.  But NakedSword business is only one part of the day for the busiest man in gay porn. Valenti’s responsibilities for Falcon Studios Group entail overseeing a vibrant DVD production and releasing business as well as maintaining an elite lineup of membership sites for the studio brands. Sites such as FalconStudios.com, RagingStallion.com, HotHouse.com, FetishForce.com and ClubInfernoDungeon.com are among their current offerings. The Falcon Studios Group also supplies content via OnDemand under the brand FalconTV as well as licenses content. The Group's media outlets include HUNTeZine.com and Blog.FalconStudios.com—the official e-newsletter and blog. Indeed, Valenti wears many hats at the office—which is located within walking distance of the University of California at Berkeley. “Sometimes I don’t know how I do it—I honestly don’t,” Valenti jokes. “I think one thing that helped was I sold our building in San Francisco a couple years ago, so I did cut out some commute time that made things a little bit easier.  “We have really cool offices in Berkeley now, which is where I live. And it’s about a block from campus so there’s a lot of energy here. It keeps you really going and it actually helps with the pace of how you do things—to keep things going and just juggle all the balls.  “I just think I’ve done it my whole fucking life, so it kind of comes natural to me. I don’t really break down about, ‘Oh, there’s too much going on.’ I get a little loopy and lots of times when it gets to be so crazy I think my breakdown is just to act silly. We do pranks and have fun. We have to laugh a lot. We have to laugh otherwise we’re fucked.” Valenti says that it’s taken most of the past four years to unite his staff to the point where “everyone has each other’s backs.” “Because of we sort of melded it all together. There’s an entire group not including AEBN—what we call the West Coast—is Falcon, NakedSword, and our studio and distribution business in Nevada. I think there’s about 40 to 45 of us altogether. And then there’s AEBN. NakedSword had a strong relationship with AEBN when we merged with them in 2007,” he says. “But they’re on the East Coast; they’re a big straight company. We’ve had to look for the ways that we can integrate and we can do things together. And that’s another thing we’ve done in the past couple years successfully, we’ve found the places of intersection where we really can work and help and benefit each other.  “And it’s been a lot in technology. We are currently in a big rebuild of the entire NakedSword platform and network that we will be launching at the end of the summer, 2020, which is incredibly exciting.” Valenti continues, “I actually was in a meeting this morning. We’re at one of those forks in the road in development where we have to make some decisions about what we’re going to invest in. These are the kinds of things that make me so excited because a whole new world is going to happen for us again in 2020 in terms of how we can create products on the fly based on our users and what they like. “There’s just a whole new world coming and we’re actually building it ourselves.” Before Valenti entered adult when he was still working in the advertising space he started Cubik Media in 1996 as an online marketing and development business. His early experiences with Cubik have proven invaluable as he diversifies his NakedSword platform. “I’ve retained as much as I could over the years of the development aspect of our business,” he says. “So we’re not just handing off things to other people to hopefully build for us right. We have our own team that actually does development. “Now we work with the AEBN team so that synergy has helped us a lot as well to keep things here and not be so reliant on others or even on off-the-shelf types of things that you really can’t scale to what we need for our business.” Valenti worked at a large San Francisco ad agency in the ’90s, spearheading their web department and building some of their first enterprise sites for corporate clients such as Hitachi, E-Trade, IBM and “Sesame Street.” “So it was kind of a mishmash of first-generation websites which were really more marketing material type of sites than they were doing anything sophisticated like we can do now,” he says. “But once I started Cubik Media in 1996 I went out and got a few game clients.” One of Valenti’s first clients was the game publisher Eidos Interactive. “And I pitched them to build websites for a new product they had called Tomb Raider. And it was in its first iteration and with this star, with this stick figure star called Lara Croft. Well, 40 websites later and Lara Croft turned into a big movie star and very voluptuous one at that. “ Tomb Raider games have sold more than 74 million copies worldwide since its first release in October 1996. “We were very fortunate to build all of the product online around Tomb Raider and Lara Croft and a lot of other games. GameSpot, we did their logo and their marketing. And some other game companies. But in that period of time is when we learned how to stream media,” Valenti continues. “And we were one of the first companies actually building streaming media websites. E-Trade was a sort of classic corporate-type of client where we created a thing called the E-Trade Trading Game. We basically simulated—we set up accounts for people who wanted to learn how to trade online and we taught them how to do that through streaming video and games. “We had about four years of corporate non-adult America where we sort of learned our trade—which was streaming media—and I really wanted to bring that to Hollywood. So I went down to Los Angeles in 1999 and pitched all these big studios on building streaming sites to stream their movies and was pretty much laughed out the door.” Valenti received the same kind of feedback from everyone. “‘We’re not ready to do that. People will just steal it!’ All the usual arguments. ‘People will cannibalize it, steal it,’ blah blah blah. So they weren’t quite ready, but I was,” he says. “So I was like, ‘We’re in San Francisco. I’m gay. There’s like 20 gay production companies here. Let’s try this on another level. That was really the whole entry into adult. It was really just wanting to use this technology somehow and put it to use. So it was gay porn in San Francisco. “And we did have a straight streaming site in those days called Vagina Beach which is so embarrassing now… It’s like don’t hire a gay guy to brand your straight porn site. “We weren’t really into that one so much.” Valenti with longtime colleague Sister Roma. Photo courtesy NakedSword Valenti’s company built Titan Media’s first streaming site; it helped build Falcon’s first streaming site; and a host of other studios, too. “And really I think helped the majority of gay studios sort of take that step from the DVD world onto online platforms and online streaming,” Valenti adds. “That was very helpful to us when it came to NakedSword because we not only needed their content but we were partners with them and helping them develop their own streaming products. “I’m very proud of that actually because it did take a lot of…it took a few years to get studio owners to understand the benefits of streaming online and having an online storefront.” Valenti learned a lot about leadership along the way. In particular, he says that understanding the pulse of your staff is critical. “I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned and that I apply today—and I struggle with it but I’m much better with it—is I’m very aggressive and I’m very competitive but I think to be a really good leader and to actually bring the troops with you you have to really reach into yourself and have empathy and understand where people are coming from and what their positions are,” Valenti says. “Because not everybody may have an agenda or is competitive as someone like me. That’s kind of a natural thing. But if you want to bring people with you you have to really truly understand and try and walk the walk with them—if you want them to be walking the walk with you.” Valenti continues, “And that’s a hard thing to do sometimes, especially when you want to get it done. Or you want to win. I don’t want to destroy, but I want to win. So I want everybody ready on Day 1 and I want everybody to have as much fuel as I do in terms of enthusiasm and understanding what it is that we’re taking on. “And not everybody can do that on Day 1 and not everybody is built that way and not everybody is there because of that. You can’t expect everybody to be you.” It comes down to believing in your vision, he adds. “If you believe in people and you believe they have a talent that you can use and is good for the overall group and for the overall product and our mission, then you have to foster it,” he says. “And you have to be able to learn how to have the patience to do that and the heart and the kindness really a lot of times. “You can’t just be like ‘fuck you, get somebody else.’ It really doesn’t work. That’s a real recipe for disaster. And I’m glad that I’ve seen that from the beginning and it’s helped a lot. It really has because there’s been some really difficult situations and times and transitions. The transition into running the NakedSword Network and then assuming control of all the Falcon Studio group was a big cultural challenge. The cultures of the two companies were very different.” Valenti with the Falcon/NakedSword team at the 2019 GayVN Awards. Valenti says another valuable lesson he has learned is to keep the faith. “What I’ve noticed from a lot of folks that I’ve worked with over the years is they give up too soon,” he says. “And a lot of times I think that comes down to what’s your definition of faith and what does faith mean to you. “It doesn’t mean religious faith, it just means faith in yourself, faith in your idea, faith in your vision. If you see things a certain way and you really think you can do it and you believe in it, have enough faith to give yourself the right amount of time or to meet the right people or to get yourself in the right kind of situation.  “I’ve seen so many amazing people with great ideas give up too soon. And so I would just say obviously develop your skills, never stop learning, always be interested in others and what they have to say and their opinions and their views and their visions. Those are all the habits of people who probably make it. But what I see more than anything is just people giving up too soon." As Valenti adds yet another accolade to his remarkable career—he was an AVN Hall of Fame-Industry Founders branch inductee in 2011—he is grateful for the support. “I’m so very honored. I have such great admiration for just AVN, GayVN as an institution over all these years,” Valenti says. “I know that there were times when I was trying to build a business either at NakedSword or now that I’ve taken over all the Falcon products. Really it’s been great to know that there are organizations like GayVN and AVN who can help out and spread the word or give us a platform. And just support us in general.  “So for you guys to recognize how hard I’ve worked and some of the things we’ve done—myself and all the really talented people here at NakedSword and Falcon—it’s pretty awesome. “And I kind of was joking around to folks. I’ve been very fortunate over the years and getting a lot of accolades actually…and this is sort of like. I’m sort of running out of time. I’m going to be 60 years old in January, so this is a nice birthday present for me and it’s kind of like geez, now what? “I’m just going to have make better movies and create better streaming products, that’s all.”