Determining Your Worth in a Digital World

How a Former Cop Empowers Net Creators at the Negotiation Table—and Keeps His Ethics Intact

By MICHAEL AUSHENKER | Contributing Writer

Steve Heineman looks a decade younger than his 56 years. Not surprisingly, the former cop works out at Gold’s Gym in Venice and takes his health very seriously as he ventures into the wild waves of Silicon Beach.

He is probably as fit as when he was a boots-on-the-ground member of the Santa Monica Police Department, where he served from 1989 to 2012.

But today the former police lieutenant has reinvented himself as a Silicon Beach venture capitalist with the website Social Bluebook.

Created by Chad Sahley and Sam Michie—two former employees of YouTube content creator Maker Studios—Social Bluebook is essentially a “Kelley Blue Book” of online talent.

It’s a potentially vital tool for advertisers to determine “micro-influences.”

So, how does it work?

Say, one is a musician with a YouTube channel, or, like Heineman, has a startup trafficking in an online commodity, such as a food blogging site or a digital media outlet.

Their online presence may attract many likes, shares and unique visits—but what is all of that internet traffic really worth?

A free service to online creatives, Social Bluebook determines a site’s brand value based on the entity’s social media activity, crunching down age, usage and other demographic metrics and assigning a dollar figure to it, which becomes a negotiation starting point between said creative and an employer or advertiser.

“We want to give them a platform to participate in their success,” Heineman said over lunch in The Village, explaining how some of the creatives essential to the establishment of Maker Studios were left in the dust with no intellectual property rights as Disney acquired Maker in 2014 for more than $500 million. “The talent was at such a disadvantage before because of the lack of transparency.”

“A lot of people are being taken advantage of. We’re sick of seeing our friends getting ripped off. Everyone deserves to have a fair shot of getting what they deserved,” Sahley added.

Aligning a Silicon Beach venture such as Social Bluebook makes total ethical and professional sense to Heineman, who is no stranger to the entertainment industry, either.

Heineman’s wife, Kathy Lingg, has enjoyed a storied Hollywood career, most recently as a producer running Palisadian cinematic force of nature J.J. Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot and in TV shows such as “Fringe,” “Almost Human,” “Alcatraz” and “Westworld.”

Heineman himself had a brush with the entertainment industry early on.

After growing up in Manhattan, he decided to eschew the family business, a textile brokerage started by his grandfather. Upon relocating from the East Coast to California, Heineman aspired to become an actor. He lived in Santa Monica and became a founder of the Tamarind Theatre in Hollywood.

However, the creative life proved financially unreliable, so he became a policeman because  he “didn’t want to be a struggling actor.” He cottoned to police work, he added, because he always felt that, as an actor, he would excel at playing a cop.

In Santa Monica, Heineman worked on a variety of beats, starting out in patrol and eventually doing undercover detail, vice and narcotics, and beach and harbor patrol.

After meeting his wife, Heineman briefly moved into her Laurel Canyon home for a year. In late 1990, they moved to the Palisades.

“This place has stayed the same,” Heineman said. “Santa Monica has changed drastically.”

A lifelong passionate sports fan (particularly baseball and football), Heineman has long coached youth baseball in Santa Monica as well as guiding his two sons, Tyler and Scott, to play in the San Gabriel Valley Arsenal, a league he started up. Both of his boys today play on Major League Baseball teams—Tyler as a catcher for the Milwaukee Brewers and Scott as a Texas Rangers outfielder.

In addition to Tyler and Scott, now 25 and 24, respectively, he and Lingg have a stepdaughter, Emily, 30, a Koreatown-based photographer.

Inglewood Mayor James Butts, who met Heineman in 1991 when he was appointed chief of police for the city of Santa Monica, remains good friends with the former cop.

“The city was experiencing high levels of crime and issues with the use of force,” Butts said.

“I was looking for high competence, emotionally intelligent professionals within the Santa Monica Police Department to become leaders and lead the evolution of the SMPD to become a high-tech, high-touch organization that could bond to the community. Steve Heineman was such an individual.”

Butts quickly promoted Heineman to sergeant and placed him in charge of policing the Santa Monica Pier and Third Street Promenade.

“His finest work was the transformation of Third Street from a place that people avoided to an international tourist destination,” Butts said, recalling how this retail and dining destination was riddled crime and a saturation of homeless persons that invited loitering, public intoxication and public urination.

Heineman commanded a team of bicycle-mounted patrol officers. When he started, there were only two officers with Santa Monica’s H.E.L.P. (Homeless Enforcement Liaison Patrol) unit and Heineman was one of them.

“Homelessness is not a crime,” Heineman explained, who said he enjoyed getting to know the transients he worked with. “Santa Monica was the most progressive community by far [in how it dealt with social issues].”

On the streets of Santa Monica, Heineman witnessed and assisted down-on-their-luck individuals struggling with substance abuse and psychiatric problems.

“It was extremely uplifting,” Heineman said. “It ended up being one of the best experiences of my life.”

What really surprised him was the victimization of the transient population by others in the transient population, he said.

“He was creative, innovative, compassionate and effective,” Butts said, remembering how fluidly Heineman’s team connected the homeless with services and cut down crime, indirectly leading to a tripling of tax revenues derived from the Promenade.

Likewise, Sahley and Michie explained how Heineman’s humanity, empathy and sense of social righteousness translate superbly into his new role as Social Bluebook chairman.

“He’s got a big heart and he cares about the little people,” Sahley said. “He’s also a friend. Once he heard about what we were doing and how we were doing it, he wanted to be on board.”

“We’re all about authenticity,” Michie added. “Steve is a very authentic and genuine person.”

Of late, the Palisades has seen its share of tech activity. Although Snapchat is based in Venice, its founder, Evan Spiegel, grew up in the Palisades. Matt Going, co-founder of Anytime Mailbox, is also a Palisadian, as are many high-level executives working at video game companies such as Activision.

Recently the COO of Oculus, Laird Malamed, who once shepherded Activision Blizzard’s Guitar Hero franchise, lived in the Palisades for many years. According to Crunchbase, such diverse entities as Foodida Corp, a crowd-sourced food delivery company; Pipeliner CRM, a marketing site; and The Ski Channel are all based in the 90272.

Officially launched in 2015, Social Bluebook makes its money not by charging creatives to join but from those parties interested in employing the creators through the site.

“We make our money from the advertisers,” Heineman said. “[The site is] very convenient.”

Today, Heineman’s online evaluator has 81,000 registered users, among them musical acts Adele and Maroon 5 and athlete David Beckham, said the company’s founders.

The company has also established a financial platform built on equity crowd-funding, allowing anyone to become an investor in Social Bluebook.

Meanwhile, Sahley and Michie refine the site, basing ideas on user input.

“We’re simultaneously interviewing customers and advertisers—[asking them] what would help you grow your business,” Michie said.

Operating out of Social Bluebook’s headquarters in Santa Monica and in Westlake Village, where Sahley resides (Michie lives in Mar Vista), Heineman appears pleased to stay connected with the city where he enjoyed a long career in law enforcement.

“Santa Monica is still a great place to work,” he said.

It’s also a cornerstone of Silicon Beach, just down the hill from Heineman’s beloved Palisades.