Jacob Pace

Jacob Pace’s brief, beguiling path to his current position as CEO of Flighthouse, a company positioned to be the next big content brand for Generation Z, is illustrative of just how forward thinking and fearless this 19-year-old executive is.

Pace, a native of El Paso, Texas, isn’t one to sit back and let opportunities come to him, or even dip his toe into industry waters with a traditional a post-college internship.  “My first step into the music business was when I was 14, starting a YouTube channel to help artists promote their music,” he says from Flighthouse headquarters in Hollywood, CA. Soon after his YouTube experience, he started writing for the one of the world’s most influential dance music publications, EDM Sauce, telling the publication that he was 24, ten years older than he actually was.

That led to freelance publicity work for a number of independent labels, all while Pace was still in high school. Eventually he met Alexandre Williams an indie label head and artist manager who needed some PR work done for one of his artists, a Gold Top single featuring Soulja Boy.  Pace performed well for the artist and a friendship between the two young aspiring music moguls was formed.

In 2015, Williams joined his childhood friend Jonathan Strauss to form a new enterprise, Create Music Group, an innovative full stack music company based in Los Angeles.  Knowing about Jacob’s work ethic, he convinced him to come join them in Los Angeles. “He told me he needed a few months to finish school before coming to work with us at Create,” said Williams. “I just assumed he meant college, not high school!”

It was while at Create that Jacob ran across Flighthouse, the music discovery channel on the video app musical.ly, a favorite among teenage music fans.  With more than 16 Million fans, Flighthouse is one of the largest destinations on musical.ly and drives more than a Billion views per month. “I initially saw Flighthouse, which at the time had about 5 million followers, as a great tool to promote the artists we worked with at Create,” says Pace.  “But after digging into it, Jonathan and I quickly realized that Flighthouse had huge potential to become a bigger brand.”

Since acquiring the channel, Jacob and his team have grown its following by more than 3X, and have just launched a Flighthouse YouTube channel.  Major labels are beginning to tap into Flighthouse to promote their releases, with outreach to major brands being planned for the near future.

Jacob and his bosses at Create Music Group see Flighthouse as the next major content brand for teens and hope to unveil original programming for the brand on its YouTube channel later this year.

“We see Flighthouse as the content brand for Generation Z,” says Pace.  And while, some would say those aspirations are lofty goals for a nascent content channel, experience shows that no one should bet against Jacob Pace.  After all he’s already put in his 10,000 hours and he can’t even get a legal drink.