Lee O'Denat
Lee O'Denat
Lee "Q" O'Denat (February 11, 1973 - January 23, 2017) was an American internet entrepreneur who founded WorldStarHipHop. He died in his sleep on January 23, 2017, from a heart attack.
Early Life
O’Denat was of Haitian heritage, raised by a single mom. An early job at a Circuit City store encouraged his love of computers.
One of his first web ventures was an E-commerce site selling mixtapes by his famous friend DJ Whoo Kid, known for his collaborations with Queens rapper 50 Cent.
O'Denat later harnessed the power of YouTube and crowd-sourced videos to create his wildly popular WorldStarHipHop website in 2005.
World Star Hip Hop
Lee "Q" O'Denat started the website in August 2005 with his wife Brianna Padilla as a distributor of mixtapes. Shortly after the website's beginning, hackers destroyed the website. O'Denat later restarted it as a content aggregator. Thereon, WorldStar focused on hip hop beefs, in addition to softcore pornographic video models, which were previously popular through "street DVDs" such as Smack, Cocaine City, The Come Up and additional raunchier counterparts. O'Denat used the setup of OnSmash.com, a website which had already been distributing that sort of material. O'Denat said that this led to tension between the two websites. He added "Once we went 100 percent video, showing that original hood stuff, we prevailed."