The next day, Miyashiro sat in a small conference room with a few employees. His assistant projected her computer onto a screen. There were about thirty tabs open. Miyashiro wanted to see the rate at which people were tweeting about the song, which Lowe would be playing in minutes. “Does anybody have Apple Music?” he said. “Where does Zane Lowe play?”

Hip-hop Web sites began posting about the song. “Oh, shit,” Miyashiro said. “Pitchfork just fuckin’ posted it. That’s wild shit. God damn.” It was twelve-thirty. They waited for Travis Scott to wake up, so that he could tweet about the single.

Wu, his mother, and his manager monitored the song’s progress on their phones between promotional appearances. They were in an Uber when it reached the top of the charts, and they looked up and screamed. Wu was the first Chinese artist ever to top iTunes’ rap charts, and the second Asian, after Psy, whose “Gangnam Style” was a novelty hit in 2012. Wu also became a top trending topic on the Chinese social-­media network Weibo.

At 88rising’s offices, Miyashiro was too exhausted to bask in this new success. He was overseeing the song’s global distribution, its promotion across a range of social platforms, and an arsenal of related memes. He flopped down on the couch in his office and tried to post a picture on 88rising’s Instagram account, but it wasn’t working. It was strange, he said, because Instagram had verified the account that morning. He found the e-mail and showed it to me. I pointed out that it was a phishing scam; the account was being controlled by a hacker. “It’s fuckin’ up my whole vibe right now,” he exclaimed. As some no-name rappers from the Bay Area diverted 88rising’s Instagram traffic to their own account, I asked if 88rising had any cybersecurity protocols. “Shit,” Miyashiro said, lightening up for a moment. “We’re too hip-hop for that.”

Miyashiro has a hard time explaining what, exactly, 88rising does. We were eating curry at a Japanese restaurant around the corner from the office. “C.A.A. has talent,” he said. “They’re an agent business. Vice has a great media platform.” Before finishing his thought, he looked down at his phone and laughed, and asked if he could take the call. The screen read “Migos,” the popular Atlanta rap group. After a short conversation, in which every sentence was punctuated with “bro,” he switched back to cogent C.E.O.-speak. “People from the business world say, ‘Hey, Sean, you should start positioning your company as this new hybrid media company that can play in these different mediums and make it work together.’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.’ ”

Miyashiro’s ascent is a symbol of the current tumult in the music industry. Recording sales are on a permanent decline, but there’s still money to be made from catchy songs, particularly if you have a vision for whom to collaborate with, or how to reach new markets. Like a traditional talent-­management company, 88rising oversees the careers of a few rappers and singers, and, like a rec­ord label, it releases and distributes music. Like a media startup, it produces video content for its artists and other clients. These videos are inventive and polished, ranging from short, viral memes and commercials to music videos and feature-­length documentaries. They do basic things in a clever way, from interviews in virtual-­reality settings to live performances in Koreatown karaoke bars. (One of the best features the rapper Lil Yachty trying to freestyle over a song by the K-pop group Big Bang.)

Miyashiro was raised in San Jose, California. His father, who is Japanese, worked as a mechanical engineer, and his mother, who is Korean, mostly stayed at home. Miyashiro went to the type of Silicon Valley high school that has a sizable and competitive Asian-­American population, and where most students go on to four-year colleges. But he lacked focus. He spent a lot of time hanging out with friends whom he describes as “wannabe” Asian gangsters, looking tough in the parking lots of bubble-tea cafés.

Miyashiro enrolled at San Jose State University, but he would often drive to campus, circle the parking lot, and, if he couldn’t find a space, go home. One day, he realized that the university’s student clubs staged concerts. He visited African-American fraternities and Asian Christian groups, and began putting on the shows they wanted to see. He also started to throw warehouse parties in Santa Clara. He stopped attending classes, and he turned his work as a campus promoter into a string of marketing jobs in the Bay Area, including one for what he describes as a “social network for hipsters.” Eventually, he helped to launch Thump, Vice’s onetime electronic-music site, where he brokered deals for corporate sponsors eager to align themselves with dance culture.

In 2015, Miyashiro left Thump, looking for his next challenge. One day, Jonathan Park, whom he’d begun managing, showed him the video for Keith Ape’s “It G Ma,” an appealingly jagged and raw rap song. Miyashiro and Park got on FaceTime with Keith Ape, who was in South Korea, and persuaded him to come to the South by Southwest talent showcase, in Austin, Texas. Soon, Miyashiro was Ape’s manager, too. Miyashiro drew on his industry contacts and, for a little less than ten thousand dollars, got Waka Flocka, A$AP Ferg, and Father to record a remix of “It G Ma” with Keith Ape and Park. Around this time, Miyashiro told a friend over dinner at Quarters Korean BBQ, in Los Angeles, that he wanted to build something. That night, the friend connected him to Allen DeBevoise, of Third Wave Partners, who became his first backer. “It was mad easy, bro,” Miyashiro told me. “It was easy as fuck. I’m being dead serious.”

DeBevoise shared Miyashiro’s belief that a portal for Asian culture could serve both a long-ignored audience and the mainstream. “I heard his vision, and I said, ‘This is it,’ ” DeBevoise recalled. “I was sold, probably, in twenty minutes.”

“One of Sean’s strongest qualities is selling the dream,” Donnie Kwak, the 88rising Web site’s first editor, recently told me. Kwak had worked at traditional media companies such as Complex and ESPN, and the idea of devoting himself to something Asian was appealing.

The new company had money, but for months Miyashiro, Kwak, and a handful of employees couldn’t decide where to devote their resources: videos or essays, short form or investigative features, content production or artist management. They built a couple of Web sites but didn’t publish them. Miyashiro was now living in student housing in the Bronx with his wife, a graduate student in virology at Einstein College. He worked out of a Dunkin’ Donuts nearby, and took meetings in his car. “It was f— I was about to say it was fire,” he told me, growing solemn. “It wasn’t fire. It was what it was. We didn’t know what the fuck it was going to be.”

In early 2016, Brian Imanuel, as Rich Chigga, released a video for a rap song called “Dat Stick.” Over a menacing, squelching beat, Imanuel, a scrawny Asian with an exceptionally deep voice, fantasizes about driving a Maserati and killing cops. The song went viral, in part because of how incongruous (in the video, Imanuel wears a pink polo shirt and a fanny pack) and outrageous (he uses the N-word) it was. Imanuel, who was homeschooled in Jakarta, says that he learned English by watching YouTube videos. Miyashiro and Park, who had been following Imanuel on Vine, called him and offered to fly him to South by Southwest to perform. Imanuel said that he’d have to ask his mother—he was sixteen years old. She agreed, but he was unable to get a visa.