Born in Ghazir, Lebanon, during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, Slaiby spent much of his life in an air raid shelter. He fled to Montreal, then to Ottawa alone at age 16 and spoke little English when he arrived. There, he met a boy from the neighborhood named Ahmad Balshe – a Palestinian-Canadian rapper who ended up becoming the artist XO Belly – who introduced him to Esmailian, whose own family had emigrated from Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.
In the early 2000s, the three opened businesses together, when Slaiby and Balshe co-founded hip-hop label / R & B Capital Prophet Records (Esmailian headed the street promotions and later became an entrepreneur). Five hundred kilometers to the west, in Toronto, Tesfaye and Taylor had their own turmoil. Raised by single mothers in the suburb of Scarborough, they were, as Tesfaye puts it today, “basically homeless”, students who dropped out of school and posted their music on YouTube and Facebook – without their face. “We kind of played this mystery for about a year,” says Taylor, “until we got to the point where we couldn’t hide his face anymore, because he was just famous.”
In 2010, Esmailian was living in Miami, working to break Belly on the city’s hip-hop scene. But when a friend sent him some tracks by an emerging Toronto artist who called himself The Weeknd, he dropped everything and booked a flight back to Canada the next day. “This boy is ahead of his time,” Esmailian remembers thinking. “I knew right away.”
On the first of many nights together in the city, Esmailian and Tesfaye went to a Toronto club with some mutual friends the same night that Esmailian landed. The two were fast friends, and with The Weeknd’s debut mixtape, House of Balloons, about to explode, Esmailian became “the manager, the road manager, the security guard and the driver”. By the end of 2011, Tesfaye had released two more mixtapes, and the hype around him had escalated accordingly. Being in Balshe’s apartment one night around that time, he and Esmailian met Balshe’s neighbor, Slaiby. “La Mar and Abel were going through a difficult time,” says Slaiby. “They had a different team that screwed up their business. The songs were flying. His career was flying. But their business was in a danger zone because they didn’t have the right team. “
“We surrounded ourselves with people who thought they knew everything and almost literally ruined our chances,” explains Tesfaye. Slaiby’s most pragmatic approach – “You understand what I’m good at and I tell you where to go for everything I’m not good at,” he says – appealed, and he and Esmailian freed Tesfaye from his bad business. They became co-managers of The Weeknd, and soon after, the four men founded XO.
At first, they realized that taking risks – and operating on their own timeline – often made sense. Weeknd’s “mysterious aesthetic”, as Taylor says, meant that his music had to speak for itself. “I think that’s what really captivated everyone and catapulted Abel into the stratosphere,” continues Taylor. This buzz soon translated into large potential salaries, but the XO team did not attack them: when an Australian promoter offered a $ 160,000 show, they refused and others like it, opting to play in clubs across Canada. “I knew how important it was to build the tourism business,” says Esmailian. “At that point, we could have gone on to step four or five, but I knew we had to start with step one. We were in places with 500 people, but there were 2,000 people outside trying to get in. “
When the major record companies inevitably started to circulate, this wave of growth became a lever. Among those interested were Republic Records co-founders and brothers Monte and Avery Lipman. “They came to Toronto, like, 10 times,” says Esmailian. “These guys don’t run a small business – and going to Toronto, you have to deal with customs – but they kept showing up.