Damian Pelliccione

A PIONEER IN THE MAKING. Damian Pelliccione's entrepreneurial journey is particularly unconventional. Facing great triumph and turbulence in a time where representation in media did not exist, they broke outside the box and not only paved a path that had not yet been laid, but illuminated it for those to follow.

Damian is the CEO of Revry, the world's largest queer TV network, which they co-founded alongside Alia J. Daniels, Christopher Rodriguez and LaShawn McGhee in 2016. Seven years later, Revry reaches millions of viewers across the globe with free LGBTQ-first live TV, movies, news, series, and original programming.

The story of Revry begins when Damian moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to pursue a career in acting. After a promising 5-year start, the effect of the Writers Guild of America strike killed the momentum, forcing Damian to rethink their options. In 2006, they took a turn to pursue a career producing content made for the web, just one year after YouTube had launched. "I realized the traditional chains in the entertainment industry and barriers to entry had been taken off.”

As an early adopter of a then-“New Media”, Damian was known as an expert in the field, leading to job opportunities at YouTube Spaces in LA and NYC, teaching creators live streaming strategies and consulting for various startups. It was during this time that Damian took on a position in Business Development at Make.tv, a German-based startup. Working at Make.tv, Damian was thrust into the international TV market and found themselves working with big broadcasters in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

While preparing for a major TV convention in Amsterdam, Damian, “a self-proclaimed Apple-phile” caught Apple’s big September live stream and watched as Tim Cook introduced the brand-new operating system for Apple TV (tvOS). This is when Damian had the idea for Revry. "About a month later, I pitched Alia, Chris and LaShawn this concept of creating a queer streaming app. Everyone immediately saw the vision and we were off to the races!”

BEING UNAFRAID TO TAKE A CHANCE. Despite their untraditional path into business, entrepreneurship runs in Damian's family. Born in Toronto, Canada, their father Lawrence, an immigrant from Italy, built and eventually sold a Canadian cheese empire. They are also inspired by their mother Celeste, a career liberal politician who rose to power as one of the first female chairwomen of the school board. “Cheese and Politics, that's how I was raised”. Both were significant sources of inspiration, but Damian believes they had one other essential attribute for a career as an entrepreneur: “NO FEAR!”

"I moved from Canada to New York and then to LA and was moving into a sector of business where I had no family connections. One of the first things you must accept as an entrepreneur is a willingness to fail and fail greatly, in many ways. All those failures are your life lessons to get you to the point where you can succeed. I believe the success we're seeing with Revry now can be attributed to all those failures I had in my twenties and thirties."

With Revry's content reaching hundreds of millions of households across the globe, including countries where LGBTQIA+ folks are marginalized, Damian hopes the platform will not only amplify underrepresented voices within the queer community in the entertainment world but change the broader zeitgeist, opening up a progressive conversation.

"I believe that media, specifically great content, can shape hearts and minds and help normalize the queer experience. We now live in this culture of immediacy, and one of the things that we need to work towards is counseling others to understand our lived experience and make space for everybody regardless of how you identify. We need “counsel culture”, not “cancel culture” in order to create real and lasting change for our community throughout the world."