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Drake's OVO Family Business
Family Business
With his friends, Drake made OVO an institution. Now the men behind the boy are figuring out what to build next with all that power, and how they’ll do it.
 
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Across the street from S.O.T.A. Studios, a brand new live/work complex in an industrial cul-de-sac at the edge of Toronto’s West End, a blonde in a colorful sports bra and a pair of running shorts stands atop a speed boat parked in a gravel lot, cleaning it with a hose and a bucket. It’s a humid August day, the sun is way up in the sky, and the neighborhood is quiet, save the occasional car driving by. The woman likely has no idea what goes on in the squat gray building 100 feet away, where Drake records and where October’s Very Own—the label and clothing brand he jointly owns with manager Oliver El-Khatib and engineer and producer Noah “40” Shebib—has recently planted new roots. There are two cars parked outside; near the entrance, a pair of hockey nets is set up.
Drake has been famous since the early days of the Obama presidency. Meanwhile, the team that’s buoyed his career has operated partly under shadow. Drake’s OVO associates have avoided press and chosen to let Drake speak as their representative; the likable picture he’s drawn in return is an aspirational folktale, of a kid from Toronto who became a star with the help of his best friends. But as Drake enters a new stratosphere of pop stardom, OVO is reckoning with what it means to scale a small business. The construction of the multi-million dollar studio and office space has marked an important step for the company—a centralization of its sprawling efforts, and a more formal approach to its undeniable growth.
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S.O.T.A.—the acronym stands for “state of the art”—was built over the course of a year and a half by 40, the producer largely responsible for masterminding Drake’s sound and the superintendent of the OVO Sound label. This is where he and Drake have been working on Drake’s upcoming album, Views From the 6 , but it’s also 40’s home; only a door separates his condo from the studio and office. In the studio’s sparse and modern lounge, abstract black-and-white geometric shapes jut out from the wall, and a blue light beams from the ceiling, brightening up the space-gray decor. Everything is sleek and cold, except for a watchful wooden owl sitting alone on a white cabinet. The figure looks like the crew’s official logo, a minimalist outline derived from the birdlike look of the letters that form OVO.
When I meet 40 there, he’s coasting on two-and-a-half hours of sleep. (Insomniac dedication to work earned Shebib his nickname—40 is shorthand for “40 days and 40 nights,” the mythical length of time he’d stay up to work on a project.) He’s dressed in a white-and-blue T-shirt from a recent OVO collection, and the hem of his light blue jeans spills over a pair of white-and-gold OVO Jordan 10s, produced with Jordan Brand as part of its first endorsement of someone who isn’t an athlete.
Later, perched on a chair behind his boards, 40 points to an elevated part of the studio where a cushioned bench lines the wall. “I sit here,” he says. “Drake sits there. We work.” The two have been at each other’s sides for seven years—“for some reason, the way Noah hears things is the way I hear it,” Drake told The FADER in 2011. “We have a creative relationship,” 40 says. “We go into the studio and we make music together, and that’s the most important thing to me. I protect that with my life.”
40’s instinctual understanding of Drake’s nuances, and the technical know-how he learned as an intern of legendary engineer Noel “Gadget” Campbell, have been instrumental to Drake’s success. With S.O.T.A., 40 now aspires to also become “an ultimate resource” for PARTYNEXTDOOR, Roy Wood$, Majid Jordan, and the other artists on OVO Sound’s growing roster who’ll use the studio as a clubhouse. “I’m able to help them with their process and how they’re recording, or with toys and instruments and machines that they didn’t maybe know about,” he says. “I can expose them to knowledge. I pride myself on my skill sets. I care about this stuff. I built this massive place, right?”
The skilled community that will work at S.O.T.A. is a living rebuttal to the old idea that being from Toronto ruined your chances of global music industry success. “The conversation when I was a kid was, ‘Will anyone ever do it?’ The conversation now is, ‘Who’s next?’” 40 says. “Someone else is gonna come through a door [that Drake opened], but I don’t know if someone else will ever make a difference like that. We did the heavy lifting. No one else has to come do that heavy lifting again. It’s been done.”
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