David Steward II, founder and chief executive officer of Polarity and an Academy Award-winning producer, is the St. Louis American Foundation’s 2024 Entrepreneur of the Year.
Steward founded Polarity in 2018. It encompasses a portfolio of content companies that produce graphic novels and comics, animated television, streaming, cinematic features, and gaming. In 2019, he launched Lion Forge Animation and produced Hair Love, which won the 2020 Academy Award for Best Animated Short. That company was rebranded to include a wider range of content as Lion Forge Entertainment in 2023. Steward founded his first entertainment company, The Lion Forge, LLC, to publish comic books in 2011.
Steward has maintained his initial mission – to publish comics and graphic novels with content for everyone, regardless of gender identity, ethnicity, or cultural background – and expanded it to cover more forms of content. Executing this mission has led him to build unusually diverse rosters of talent. Polarity and its subsidiaries employ more than 60 staff, 70% of them minorities and women. Of its more than 35 productions, 90% feature minorities and women.
For his inclusive leadership, Steward was recognized in Variety’s 2022 Inclusion Impact Report, highlighting the entertainment industry’s most impactful advocates for inclusivity. The Hollywood Reporter listed Steward among the 75 Most Powerful People in Kids Entertainment in 2023, another mainstream industry accolade.
Steward’s namesake father – David Steward, founder and chair of World Wide Technology – received the St. Louis American Foundation’s inaugural Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2000. The American asked Steward Sr. about his son following in his footsteps.
“My son honors his family legacy of faith-filled entrepreneurship. I know his grandfather, Harold Steward, the original Steward entrepreneur, would be overcome with emotion at the work Dave II has accomplished. My wife, Thelma, and I are extremely proud of the groundbreaking work he has done in the animation and entertainment industries,” David Steward said.
“We know there is a bright future ahead for our son and his company as he continues to follow the faithful call for his life. He is using his entrepreneurial spirit and highlighting the importance of diversity while touching many lives for the next generation and beyond.”
The American spoke to David Steward II about lessons he learned from his father, how he has grown a diverse portfolio of diverse entertainment companies, and why St. Louis is the place where he thinks his two young children can learn to follow the North Star.
The St. Louis American: Obviously, this honor is about you and your companies, but there are two major figures I need to get out of the way first, and one is your father. I asked him about your winning this award, and he talked about your being, like him, a faith-filled entrepreneur. How does faith guide what you do with your companies?
David Steward II: I’ve learned a lot of lessons from my father by watching him start his businesses, how he grew them, how he worked with others, how we treated people, how he conducted business. The guiding tenants of how we have always operated are all biblically based. Sometimes it’s simple things in terms of treating people well at various levels in your organization, whether it’s the person helping clean up the building or the executive vice president. Everyone in our organizations is treated with respect and in a way we would like to be treated as well, and these things have been instilled in me by my father. We have to run our business and make a profit, but we’re not going to cut corners or treat someone badly just to make a profit.
The American: I see comparisons and contrasts between your businesses and your dad’s main business. There’s a shared sense of ambition, scope, and scale. You acquire businesses, you add businesses, you grow, and that’s what he’s always done. As a contrast, he was always selling things that everybody knew the world needed – technology and supply chain solutions – but you’re selling people things with a lot less obvious market value. What pushback and feedback did you get when you said of all the things you might do, this is what you want to do?
Steward: I’ve always had a passion for visual arts. My dad told me early on, “If you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” He’s always instilled in us to follow our passions and our dreams. And what we’re doing, it’s a commodity product, and certainly there are other comic book and animation companies, but we are very different. There are no other companies focused on diverse content and working with diverse creators. We really blaze trails in working with diverse creators that have been very marginalized, Black artists and writers and other persons of color. With the types of stories that we’re putting together, coming from those diverse creatives’ point of view, we’re doing something that a lot of companies have really leaned on us for, whether it’s HBO or Nickelodeon. We’re helping them find those diverse creatives’ work and these stories.
The American: That brings us to the other major looming figure who is not you or your companies, and that’s the 2018 film Black Panther. I know that was a major studio production and not like what you do in that sense, but when that happened, I thought, “Dave Steward saw this potential before anybody else.” The way that Black Panther happened, did it open doors for you?
Steward: That was one of three things that happened all around the same time. Black Panther was important in that it showed executives in Hollywood that Black content from Black creators is important and it’s very lucrative, as well. Another thing, sadly, was George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Suddenly, you had all these companies focus on trying to clean up their act for years of marginalization of Black creators, executives, etc., and trying to diversify content. Then, for us, there was producing and being a part of Hair Love and the success of that. So, you had this environmental shift, but also our own success trajectory that we created with Hair Love helped to propel us into the spotlight.
The American: Looking at your track record, “diversity” for you is not a code word for “Black.” Your staff and content are genuinely diverse. What’s your diversity strategy?
Steward: It’s not one that’s exactly written on paper. Our strategy is our mission, which is diverse stories authentically told. To tell diverse stories is very important for us – and to include people who look like the people we’re portraying on screen. So, if I’m going to do a Native American story about a Native American group, then I’m going to have people representing that Native American group on that creative team in meaningful positions. Because of that mission, we naturally end up having a diverse staff. Our team is naturally grown as naturally diverse because of the types of things that we’re doing in the marketplace.
The American: Is there any way you monitor your content diversity?
Steward: It starts with looking at the marketplace in general. Over the last few years, if you look at kid’s content, there have been a number of green-lit and produced shows that have Black girls. But there’s not a lot of shows that have Black Boy leads. So, there needs to be shows featuring more Black boys. We need to find shows featuring Hispanic boy leads. We’re seeing holes, then we produce and look for content that can fill those holes. Content buyers tend to move like a herd, almost. Where they see one opportunity, they all tend to shift towards that particular direction, which leaves holes in other areas. So, we make sure that there’s representation across the board.
The American: You started Lion Forge in St. Louis. Now you must have your tentacles on both coasts. Are you still a St. Louis resident?
Steward: I’m here in St. Louis. I was born and raised here. I want my kids to grow up here, and they’re firmly involved in the school system here. I just take monthly trips to L.A. to do what I need to do.
The American: Why did you want to raise your family in St. Louis?
Steward: I think when we get to the big cities, especially like New York and L.A., I think they kind of take on a different value set than you have here in the Midwest. I think life is a little less complicated, let’s say, here in St. Louis. There’s still a kind of common agreement on right and wrong and that, I think, is harder to get in other places. I think it’s important my kids get engaged with the proper North Star so they can handle whatever else comes at them in the world.
