Candace was gifted with enthusiasm, passion and determination. As a teen in Canada, she was dragged by a group of friends to a tryout for theater group plays and Basketball leagues that she wasn’t especially interested in. She ended up winning the lead role in a play and landing a position on the basketball team. A few years later, after her accident, insurance wouldn’t pay for Phoenix’s cognitive therapy, so part of her recovery involved acting classes. 

“Acting classes” are a long way from “being an actress” But, for Phoenix: if you can imagine it, you can accomplish it. Against the odds, she landed an actual role on TV, and that snowballed into more roles. Eventually she was a recognized actress in Canada. Then, she was in a Jackie Chan movie and in Cannes, starring in an independent film called “Love Disease”, appearing on billboards next to the X-men and Nurse Betty. 

It was Brian Dennehy who encouraged her to come to the States and make her mark in Hollywood. She did move to Hollywood, and started over again. She worked in a second hand clothing store and ate ramen while she shopped her “reel” around Hollywood. Finally she got the call. It was an agent with ICM, one of the big agencies: “I’m not going to take you. You have an amazing reel, but this industry will swallow you whole. Go do something that will let you be the best you can be and don’t look back.” 

So she did. Sort of. First, she became a valet driver and worked in a kitchen as a server in an assisted living facility. She helped with the business books for a bit and then started selling units. It turns out, she had a gift for selling. (Probably she had a gift for all those jobs, but there’s not much career progress potential for a valet or scullery maid.) Pretty soon she was outselling every other team in the nationwide chain. Then, she was the superstar fixer who traveled across Socal boosting the occupancy numbers wherever their buildings were struggling. 

But, that’s not where she crossed paths with the Pasadena Angels. First, she had to quit that job and join a hospice company. For someone who had already died, working on end-of-life care had some natural logic to it. In classic Phoenix Gonzalez style, she successfully opened ten new territories in ten months. But, the Credit Crisis caused a change in management, and the new team didn’t know what they had in her. Wanting to start fresh, they laid off the old team, and Phoenix found herself unemployed, sitting in her car at 3:33pm on Friday October 3rd 2008, needing to rise from the ashes again. She didn’t ask God. She told Him: “Whatever you have planned for me, that’s what I’ll do.” 

At this point, in 2008, you’re probably thinking: why doesn’t she start a video syndication platform? Yeah. Neither was I. But, she and her future husband, Joe Pascual, conceived of dotdstudioPRO right then. Roku was introducing their app universe inside their set top box, and Phoenix realized that Youtube was a lousy solution for businesses that owned expensive content. They needed a way to monetize their catalogs via their own channel, and dotstudioPRO was the platform to enable that. 

Phoenix is the Co-Founder and President Sales at dotdstudioPRO. They have been incorporated for almost 12 years now, and they’ve only had to raise about $2.5 million in capital, self-funding the rest from revenue. Last year, they reinvested about one quarter of their $4 million in revenue to stay ahead of the industry. 

Sometimes it’s a curse to be too far ahead of the industry. Many a visionary has burned capital trying to do something that the industry wasn’t ready for and the technology didn’t quite support yet. But, Phoenix, Joe and their third partner Selena, have managed to stay far ahead and be relevant enough to generate revenue, which is something of a magic trick, but nothing compared to some of the miracles Phoenix has pulled off in the past.