Element Underground

Element Underground is a live-music brand I co-founded in 2023 at the University of Michigan. The idea was the kind of nightlife you have to know someone to get into: curated, female-forward DJ sets, tech house and techno, rooms that feel like a community instead of a club. The reference point was Cercle, the way they turned events into a content engine.

It started as free rooftop parties in Ann Arbor and grew into a real circuit across NYC, Miami, Boston, and Ann Arbor. We have produced more than 50 shows, with multiple nights clearing over $20,000, run by a team that grew past 40 people. The NYC debut at The Crown was our first show in the biggest market we've played, a later show pulled more than 1,200 RSVPs, and across 2025 the brand did 17,000-plus attendees, $117,000-plus in revenue, and over 1.5 million social views. Every event earned on tickets and venue bar partnerships, and we kept the rights to every photo and video we shot.

That last part turned out to be the whole business. We kept capturing our own events until the footage became the product, and Element evolved into a media agency for dance music: we capture what you create. We shoot cinematic, multi-camera films of nightlife, and clubs, artists, and venues pay us to do it, from Club Space in Miami to the Brooklyn Storehouse to a shoot at a museum in LA. Five or six cameras stitched into one story.

We scale the live side through an agent model: local partners run their market under the Element brand, legal, and marketing umbrella while the core team supplies the strategy and the playbook. It lets the brand travel without diluting what it stands for.

Element is the venture that means the most to me, and not because it made the most money. It is the one where the craft is visible, and where I learned that if you do the service well enough, the asset you keep can quietly become a bigger business than the service ever was.