Simmons case study

Read the case study, Russell Simmons Hip-Hop Entrepreneur Starting and Operating a Small Business by Mariotti and discuss the following questions:
hip hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons turned off his cell phone and took a rare moment to admire the view from his fourteenth floor office in mid town Manhattan. at 47 Simmons knew he had a lot going for him. as the president of rush communications he sat at the helm of a constellation of successful enterprises, including a record label a clothing line a philanthropic arts foundation and a multimedia production company. lately he had been thinking about how to leverage his influence as a hip hop mogul to inspire young people to get involved in social issues such as voter registration and education reform. yet when he was growing up in Hollis, queens in the 1960s and 1970s Simmons never could have imagined that his life would have turned out like this.
Window of opportunity
Early on simmons decided that he wanted to make his own way in the world.. his father had been a teacher and his mother worked as a recreation coordinator. both enjoyed stable jobs but simmons who never liked school very much enrolled at the city college of new York as a sociology major. that year something happened that permanently changed the course of his life. he went to hear a rap artist named eddie cheeba perform at a club and was amazed to see how the rapper had cast a spell over the audience with his freestyle rhymes. in simmons own words.
just like that i saw how i could turn my life in another better way all the street entrepreneurship id learned i decided to put into promoting music
At the time rap and hip hop were underground musical styles but Simmons set out to change this. he believed that rap music had the potential to reach a larger audience and so he teamed up with another aspiring rap producer named rick Rubin. Rubin had built a recording studio for rap artists in his new York university dorm room. together they decided to transform ricks studio into a viable and legitimate record label. by 1985 def jam records was officially underway. def jam experienced its first surge of success when it scored a number one hit with run dmcs remake of the aerosmith hard rock classic walk this way.