When Mark Gillespie was 17, he landed a job flyering at Birmingham clubbing institution Godskitchen.

Within a couple of years, he’d shown the owners how to replicate their on-the-street promo on the internet, building a website and email lists that would help the club stay connected with regular punters throughout the week. This doesn’t sound like much now, but back then, at the turn of the millennium, it was borderline revolutionary.

Gillespie has continued innovating in one form or another ever since.

Today, he sits at the helm of his multifaceted entertainment business, Three Six Zero, and nurtures an enviable portfolio of cutting edge tech and lifestyle interests. These two strands, music and technology, are the threads that knot Gillespie’s life and career together.

If reinventing Godskitchen for the digital age was Gillespie’s first taste, then his career in the music industry began in earnest with Calvin Harris – and MySpace.

Since coming across Harris on the site (and offering to be his manager after a single meeting) Gillespie has sculpted the Scots producer into one of the most commercially successful artists of his generation, minting hits for everyone from Frank Ocean, Pharrell Williams and Migos to Dua Lipa, Rihanna and Ariana Grande.

Success with Harris opened other avenues too. Following a near decade-long partnership with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, Three Six Zero expanded its roster – steering the careers of Frank Ocean, MK, Willow Smith and more – and established a foothold in the movie business by partnering with Will Smith’s management company, Westbrook Entertainment, and a first feature production, Vox Lux, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law.

Gillespie’s move into the movies was partly driven by a long-nurtured love of motion pictures, and partly by his recognition that the previously separate disciplines of film, TV, digital video, music, and social media now share multiple, complementary overlaps.

In 2021, Billboard named Gillespie one of the year’s Change Agents. Music Business Worldwide has him on its list of the World’s Greatest Managers.

But for Gillespie, the gongs, milestones, and accolades are just symbols of what he’s done. A reminder that, yes, his hunches about what’s next are often right – but they’re still consigned to the past. He’s always most interested about what’s coming next.

Gillespie stands at the ever-blurring intersection of music and technology. In 2019, he took Three Six Zero back under independent ownership and began prepping the business for its next phase. The company now operates as a network of entrepreneurs, comprising managers and moguls who share Gillespie’s visionary approach and hunger for innovation. In this way, Three Six Zero’s structure reflects the decentralised direction that Gillespie believes his industry is heading in.

He currently serves as an adviser to Opulous (the decentralised music finance company launched by Ditto founders Lee and Matt Parsons), and offers a wise ear to entertainment executives trying to get their heads around the practical application of the blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and DAOs.

Gillespie is not just asking the big questions – what happens after streaming, what role will labels play, how will new creative communities form – but shaping the answers too. Because when it comes to tracking down the ‘next big thing’, most people find Gillespie’s already there by the time they arrive.