Co-Founders

Co-Founders

Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis, Adesha Adefela

Music Team Led by Victoria Theodore

American Conservatory Theater

For seven years, Esata has been coding in her mother’s West Oakland basement, creating an interacting avatar of her deceased father, Cyril — an incredible accomplishment for someone non-degreed who learned to code with her dad on an Atari 2600.  Esata wants to take her 3D, digital “Dadvatar” and cross over the Bay to San Francisco, hopefully to be one of the few accepted into Accelerator, the premier chance for start-ups to receive big-time V.C. funding and Vegas-style fame.  

Her dream and her journey as a young, Black woman’s unheard-of attempt to break into a Silicon Valley dominated by mostly white bros explodes onto the stage in an exciting, invigorating, and exceptionally entertaining new musical, Co-founders, premiering now at American Conservatory Theatre.  Created over several years here in the Bay Area in conjunction with A.C.T. by Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis, and Adesha Adefela, Co-Founders is a visual and musical celebration of Esata’s raw ingenuity and gutsy boldness with original music by Victoria Theodore (music team leader) spanning the genres of hip-hop, soul, R&B, rock, funk, jazz, and more.

Esata is a proud Oakland-er who wants to make it big so that she can insure her Mom, Deb, does not have to leave their deteriorating family home and move to a new development in Antioch.  With jaw-dropping, big-stage sound, Aneesa Folds confidently intones Esata’s intentions to her neighborhood buds, Kamaiyah and Dhameer: “I’ll code away ’cause I’m here to stay.”  Those two are themselves entrepreneurs-in-the-making as Kamaiyah (Ryan Nicole Austin) is working on a prototype app for nails (as in fingernails); and Dhameer (Jordan Covington) — who is also an Uber/Lyft/Doordash/Instacart driver — has created an app called OnScreen, a “Pixar for your car.”

In Dhameer’s Uber, the three meet Conway, a white dude who claims he is “the Steve Jobs of Methenberg, PA” (his hometown).  Conway is also in town to enter the ten-week, Accelerator contest.  As the locals give him a tour of Oakland (just our first glimpse of the mind-boggling, cutting-edge, 3-D projections designed by the combined efforts of David Richardson and Frédéric O. Boulay), they rap through a rapid-fire, visually amazing, and funny history of Silicon Valley (“Valley to Vallejo”).  Together, Esata and Conway are ready to rock it out and go for the moon in the Accelerator contest of would-be, next-generation Jobs, Wozes, and ‘Zucks.

But when Estata receives an email stamped “Rejected,” Aneesa Fields really proves her vocal excellence as she emotionally, powerfully sings her disappointment in a soul-stirring “Anchored to the Shore,”

“Eyes on the horizon,

Reaching for a star

Just across the Bay,

But I am anchored to the shore.”

With her avatar dad (Tommy Soulati Shepard, projected as Dadvatar from a site offstage), Esata raps “Back in the Day” as he encourages her to code, code, code her way back into the competition.  A now onstage Dadvatar dances away with his daughter as multiple screens in the back and front of the stage explode in coding and cartoons.  Esata with grit and gusto sings, “I will find a passage, I will code a way; I will take advantage of being from the Bay.”  The title of that song is actually  “Captain Hacker,” and hack Estata does to change that ‘reject’ to ‘accept.’

Now the adventures at Accelerator really begin for a young coder who definitely does not look or act like the other competitors but who is lightyears ahead in terms of her own abilities.  She finds herself with others who are developing apps like “Racist Insurance,” “Buttbit, the Fitbit for Your Butt,” and Conway’s own “AV Reality” (a virtual world tour with star-studded avatar guides).  Conway’s defiant belief is that “the most important thing is the idea” (code be damned), soon leading to a necessary partnership with the code queen herself, Esata, with Roe Hartrampf’s fabulous falsetto notes intertwining with Esata’s more-grounded but equally beautiful ones as they sing that together, they are “Going Places.”

But there are many hurdles yet to cross and many people to persuade of their unique brilliance.  Foremost is the king of cliches — big hype, and fast-talk, Victor Alexander — the founder and leader of Accelerator.  Bay Area stage favorite, Keith Pinto, has a heyday playing the ego-inflated mastermind of introducing new entrepreneurs to the Valley’s financiers, employing everything from his own rapid hip-hop lyrics and dance moves to Broadway, big-number notes and dance steps. 

Victor’s sidekick, Chadwick (Deanalís Arocho Resto), brings their own ability to wow with vocals that can ring to the rafters as well as touch the heart with sincerity.  Chadwick rallies the competing wanna-be’s to their first app demonstrations while later offering encouragement to a discouraged Conway to “Find the Light” and “stand in your truth.”  Chadwick’s own progression from a slick, high-heeled mouthpiece of Victor to a discovery of their own voice for aspiring, often-overlooked entrepreneurs is one of the wonderful sub-plots of the evening.

Besides being one of the musical’s co-creators, Adesha Adefela is also magnificent in both the role of Deb, Esata’s strong-willed mother, and in the role of the Valley powerhouse V.C., Sandy Hill.  Her range of acting and vocal skills are on full display, first as the brassy, air-piercing Venture Queen Hill sings “I Hate Bad Pitches” to the cowering young entrepreneurs and then as a comforting mother who urges with deeply moving depths and heart-rendering notes, “Let Him Go” to a daughter who is too-long hanging on to a Dadvatar as the Dad she still misses so much.  In both roles, Adefela is stunning.

Jamil Jude directs the multi-faceted, often complicated, and always intriguing production with multiple touches both creative and innovative.  Juel D. Lane has designed a full array of choreography, with a variety of both fast-paced and lock-in-place hip-hop moves particularly employed.  With so much emphasis on multi-layered videography, Arnel Sancianco’s set design is appropriately simple but does wonderfully envelop the stage with a West Oakland neighborhood feel.  Ben Covello directs music in general as well as conducts and plays keyboard as part of the four-person, out-of-sight band (with beats provided throughout by Will Randolph V).

Like most new musicals, the two-hour, forty-minute (plus intermission) premiere probably needs some scene and song trimming here and there.  However, where there are here and there a few minutes that feel a bit unneeded, those minutes are brief; and the pace and storyline continues in a nice clip.

Esata’s journey — like that of many hopeful techie entrepreneurs — is full of twists and turns, surprises and disappointments, dead-ends and unexpected pathways.  Like others, her ego inflates to the point of an inevitable bursting as she is awarded the title of “Super Nova” and as she sings in an arrestingly full voice, “I am fire, I am gold, I’m a vision to behold.”  

But in the end, Esata realizes that innovation is not just people like her thinking differently, “Innovation is different people thinking.”  With that important ah-ha, Esata finds a way that Oakland wins as she wins.  How she gets there and where she lands makes for a compelling and quite inspiring Co-founders, a new musical that is a great gift by American Conservatory Theatre to the Bay Area and one where we all leave with a challenge for our own lives that “You gotta believe you can code in a new way.”

Rating: 4.5 E

A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production

Co-founders continues through July 6, 2025, in a two-hour, forty-minute (plus intermission) world premiere production at American Conservatory Theatre, the Toni Rembe Theatre, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco.  Tickets are available online at https://www.act-sf.org, by phone at 415-749-2228, and by email at tickets@act-sf.org.

Photo Credits: Kevin Berne