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What is going on DTC Pod Today we are joined by Ben Matthews who is a general partner at Knight Ventures. This conversation is going to be really interesting because Knight is one of the VC funds that's kind of at the intersection of everything consumer, creator and culture. They've partnered with some of the biggest creators in the world and launched some businesses you guys may be familiar with Mr. Beast Burger and Feastable as well as they are now incubating other sort of businesses. So they really touch everything from commerce to consumer to SaaS and even things in AI. And now they're even incubating businesses. So Ben, we're going to have a lot to talk about. Why don't we start a little bit about with your background, tell us about yourself and tell us about how you got involved with Knight Ventures and what Knight Ventures is all about.

Yeah, first off, huge fan of the Pod, longtime listener, first time caller, so excited to be here and really excited to jump on today and talk to you about a lot of the brands that we built, a lot of the brands that we've invested in. Just kind of what we're seeing happening in the Market, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. So my background, I came at this from venture capital. So I was a vc. I worked at a. Well first, a long time ago I was a product manager at Google. Outside of that though, I kind of fell backwards into, into vc. I got a job at a phenomenal fund which is called Bessemer.

And I worked at Bessemer doing a lot of different types of investing, early stage software, early stage consumer, for many years and really noticed that a lot of the power of our dollar when we were investing capital was going right back to Facebook and Google. Like 50 cents of every dollar was just evaporating. And I was watching this, this kind of tier of money as it came from like rlp us to founders, founders sending it back to those platforms. So I watched the tax accumulate over year over year and just marketing and customer acquisition getting so incredibly hard for these brands, particularly direct to consumer brands. And notice that the ones that were having the most success, the portfolio founders that I worked with that seemed to be thriving were really finding hacks on acquisition. And primarily they were finding it through content. And they were either generating their own content, they were kind of like founder led CEO, content led CEOs or they just, they really understood how to navigate this new emerging world of influencer creator. I call it content.

You think about it, any, any content that's created as a, as a vehicle for US customer acquisition. So I noticed this trend and kind of dove deeper into it and realized that, you know, a lot of the world was moving towards, towards a world where if you didn't really understand how to make content, if you didn't understand how to use it, really, you weren't going to be in a position to win as a consumer brand. So I left, started a fund with these two guys who really were at the forefront of talent. They started a business called Knight and Knight Media is a talent management company. Today reps like 250 of the most popular people on the Internet. And these people are anyone like a, like a Mr. Beast. We rep a guy named Kai Sonat.

So huge lifestyle creators, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, IG, TikTok, any platform. We have massive, you know, podcasts, hosts that we rep. And these people have tremendous amounts of influence. And what we did as a fund is we started working with our founders. Instead of helping them with the normal things that a venture fund helps with, we did some of that, but also more importantly, we help them figure out how to acquire customers and how to kind of peruse through the forest of influencer and get what you need out of it. So we've been doing that for about three years now as an early stage fund. We invest across a whole bunch of different categories. But most interestingly, I think we, we started about halfway through the life cycle of the fund, realizing that we actually had a lot of the, the leverage as a fund, and we started incubating companies.

And what we noticed is, you know, we could, we could get a brand into the eyeballs of, you know, hundreds of millions of people with some of the people that we had represented as a management company. So we built, we built 14 companies in the last three years as incubations. We've worked with people like Mr. Beast, we've worked with, built a menopause company with Halle Berry. We've done, you know, CPG businesses, we've done marketplaces, we did a legal tech, AI SaaS business. We've tried all different types of things with this strategy and have all the scars to show it. Have a lot of lessons around building brands with talent. All the kind of the pain, the glory, the joy, the struggle, and really just watch the future consumer brands unfold before us, both as a fund and as an incubator.

So it's been a really fun ride. And yeah, I'm stoked to be here today to talk about it.

Awesome. And I'm super excited to talk about building brands with talent, what that looks like and picking, digging into some of those lessons. But maybe we start with some of the businesses that I'm sure, you know, our listeners and everyone is super familiar with. Maybe, like, why don't we start with Mr. Beast Brands, right? Like Beast Burger and Feastables. Right in the CPG space. I think everyone knows what Feastables is. The, you know, chocolate bar that's kind of taken over everything from D2C to retail, as well as the Beast Burger, which I believe that came before Feastables.

Right.

And that was.

Yeah, yeah. And Beast Burger was a complete accident. So Beast Burger was almost as. It was like a stunt. It was a, it was a video that Mr. Beast was going to do or that he did. And what happened was there was such a demand for it. I think the team at night woke up the next morning and kind of said, I think there's actually a business here.

We should, we should look into doing this. So that is a business that was really a ghost kitchen. A ghost kitchen direct to consumer business, where we were utilizing all the kitchen space that was empty and unused during the pandemic for all these small Businesses and putting together a really good menu for people around Mr. Beast brand and Mr. Beast's name. And again, that thing jumped from being a stunt to a nine figure business extremely quickly and, you know, never intended it to be a business in the first place. So I think we learned a lot about, you know, the way to set up a business. How to do things right, how to do things wrong.

And pretty quickly after that we, I think we realized with, with Jimmy, with Mr. Beast, we had somebody who was, you know, possibly becoming the most popular person on the Internet, you know, sight unseen, period. End stop. Like, there's no debate about it. And when we saw that, you know, he had always talked to us about wanting to start a snacking business, it was a huge partigan, you know, something that was authentic to him. You know, he had grown up with a gastrointestinal disorder. You know, snacking was really important to him, but healthy snacking was even more important to him. So he wanted to build a business in the snacking space.

We actually initially looked at doing jerky. We looked at doing a bunch of different things. You know, I have old mockups of, of all sorts of funny, different packaging for all different types of food products that we considered. But ultimately, just given his audience giving him like, what we all got really excited about was confection. It was chocolate. It was building a business around a category that we felt like had a tremendous amount of opportunity to be innovated on and whether we just really weren't seeing anything that was fun, frankly, you know, like chocolate candy is meant to be a really fun category. And we felt like everything around that category was fairly serious and stale and stiff and that he could bring something really phenomenal to it. And I'd say the last thing is, you know, much like any beast oriented idea, the seed of it really came from a video, it came from a stunt.

And that stunt was the idea that, you know, we could give away a chocolate factory, that he could kind of be the modern day Willy Wonka. And that is exactly where we went with the brand. So we launched the business. We launched the business in, I think the business was launched in, want to say 21. And we started with Direct to Consumer. Had a massive, you know, massive, massive sellout with, with Direct to Consumer starting a Shopify page and pretty quickly realized, like we were going to need to build a retail business here to build something big enough to meet the demand of his audience. And then launched with Walmart across all doors pretty shortly thereafter. And honestly, the truly the Beast was at Least unleashed.

After that, like, we. The business scaled extremely quickly. We were, you know, we had a team at night who was. Who had gone from effectively, you know, working on a lot of different company ideas. It took up all of our time. We were hiring tons of people quarter after quarter and really kind of building the railroad tracks as the train went down it. So that, that was an incredible experience. And I think even today, you look at the business, it's changed so much.

We've changed the product, we changed the brand. You know, there's a lot of different things we can get into, but I think the most important thing to know with any one of these. These talent brands is like, I truly believe that, you know, there's probably only 20 people on Earth that are big enough to build their own brand as a singular human being, where you're not doing collaborations, where you're really just kind of putting your head down and saying, this is my brand. Go out and buy it. Looking into a camera and asking for it. And, and Beast is one of those people. And, and it's just been incredible to watch that translate. And, and every retailer we work with, every online channel we work with, I think is continually blown away people.

Most people we talk to our 40s and their 50s, they have no idea what this person is. And then they see the people flush flooding to the stores. I think they're. They're pretty overwhelmed most times. And that's exactly what we want to do with, with our customers.

Well, and that's something that I'd love to kind of pick apart. So you just said there's probably like 20 people on Earth who can just like, spin up a brand and like, do whatever they want and be like, hey, go buy my stuff, and they'll go do it. What do you. What about for everyone else? Right, Because I think the idea of companies launch with creators and partnership, I think a lot of people have, you know, seen what you've seen in terms of getting distributions. Difficult. Here's a way to do it. Let's partner with a creator. But, you know, it's not all.

It's not all roses. And it's not easy partnering with a creator necessarily, because you might, you know, give a big portion of your company to the creator you're partner with. Maybe they drive a little bit of an initial interest. But like you're saying, if they're not One of those 20 people who can, like, you know, they themselves stand as a business, what does that look like for you guys? How do you think about it? You know, how. What. What things have you seen in the creator space where creators are partnering with brands to, like, launch and, you know, what works and what doesn't work in that.

In that case, yeah, it's a great. It's a great topic and honestly, something I spend a ton of time thinking about. I mean, like, 99.5% of talent companies will fail. We have a tracker internally where we're keeping track of every. Every one of these brands that's launching. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff out there. But the challenge is it's just, as you know, it's exceptionally hard to build a successful consumer brand. Most good consumer brands that we interact with, whether it's online or on a retail shelf, have been around for over 10 years.

You know, it's been slow growth, it's been a grind. It's been growth through debt and giving up equity here and there and barely surviving sleepless nights. It's really hard, you know, in. In kind of a want it now culture that we have right right now, these days in 2024, to build these brands that just pop up overnight. And, you know, what we see, aside from like, in my opinion, a mountain of ideas that are not going to work. Ultimately, what we see is, you know, we see brands that, again, either do one of two things extremely well. I think the first thing is they. They partner with one of these colossal giants, right? You have to have somebody who not only is a huge audience, right, you don't need to have an audience as big as Kim Kardashian, you don't need to have an audience as big as Mr.

Beast, but what you really need to do is you need to find somebody who has a real authentic message that connects with the product and more importantly, has experience looking into the camera and asking their audience to do something. You know, asking their audience to pull out their credit card and buy something or take some action. A lot of times we work with huge talent internally, and you'd be shocked. They get 20 million subscribers on YouTube and they can't sell more than $6,000 worth of sweatshirts. And that's just because it's not the type of content that they make. It's not the expectation that their audience has from them. So I think, like, the brilliance of like a Kardashian, for example, is that she is been spending her entire career as an influencer asking people to take actions. And, and all those are commercial actions.

So as a result, when you build a business like skims, I think it was a beautiful execution. Not only in the actual product, but really picking somebody who had an authentic story around Shapewear and who had an audience that was used to taking that call to action. And that was a huge challenge, even with Feastables in the beginning. Right. Feastables doesn't have an audience that's used to doing things, you know, that Jimmy asked them to do during his videos. But, you know, that took training, that took certain types of, certain types of content, certain types of advertising, you know, changing the call to action and changing the way that we did promotion, ultimately getting a customer a point where they just, they just thought about Feastables and Mr. Beast as one entity and, you know, he was, he was speaking about it enough that that really kind of broke through the chasm of, of where you need to get to, to really have an impact on having someone's change in their buying behavior.

Yeah, I think that's such an important point about like the, not just the reach of the creator, but the relationship between the creator and their audience. Right. I mean, I was actually just chatting with a friend who like, I guess launched a, a dog supplement brand with like, a massive, like, dog creator. But like, again, it was like he was like, you know, we're not doing as well as I thought we were doing because, like, people are coming to this page to consume content, like fun friendly content about dogs. They're not like, they don't know who's behind the account. They don't know, like, what this supplement's about. It wasn't like there was a trust there to buy. So, like, sure, they're doing some volume, but it's not like blowing it out of the park.

From a partnership perspective, the next thing I'd like to, you know, follow up on is, you know, once you've nailed the kind of alignment in terms of the creator, the authenticity and being able to like, speak to the audience and, you know, get an action out of it. What else do you need to look for in a creator to ensure that, you know, the business is going to be sustainable? Because once you tie a creator too far to the brand, if something happens to the creator, if they lose interest in the business, like, how do you think about that in terms of the long term?

Yeah, so. So, you know, the whole thing is like three things, right? It's like, right talent, pick the right talent, pick the right business and then write execution and we could talk to each one of those. We're talking about talent right now. So in talent, you know, first of all, we do a huge deep dive to Understand someone's audience, who they actually are. Like the data that most social, social media platforms give you about who a person's audience is is completely broke. It, it oftentimes doesn't match up and align with the actual audience that person is, is pitching to or, or creating content for. So we do a lot of research, surveys, trying to understand who actually is in the audience, how is that, how is that audience engaging with the content and that the actual creator, do they have a lot of reps selling things Like Merch is an incredible proxy to understand whether or not people will pick up their credit card and pay. So you get to see really by somebody's portfolio of work and their content whether or not they, you know, will they shill? I think is the most important question we ask.

Will this person stare into a camera and ask somebody to do something? You look at somebody like Logan Paul, you can say what you want about him. The guy gets up and he shills products. It's incredible. Same thing to Dwayne the Rock Johnson. He'll go on the Today show and I'll have a glass of tequila, of taramana tequila. He has no problem doing that. And he recognizes that that's directly tied to the conversion of the product. I mean Dwayne's incredible.

He just, he just did a $40 million year with a shampoo brand. He doesn't have a piece of hair on his head. It's just because he's incredible. He's incredible at just promoting again and again and understands that really when it comes to earned media, it's reach times frequency. So you have to hit that frequency. You know, a lot of these people have the reach. They just don't want to talk about it enough because they're either shy, they care too much what their audience thinks, they don't think it's cool. You really just need somebody who's shameless.

So. So we always talk about the shameless shill as an important part of talent. And then I think the other thing is, you know, probably second most important question, but it could be the first, first most important question is like will they give a fuck about this after one year? Because what I see with most of these businesses is somebody's excited about it at a point in their career. Maybe they're in between albums, maybe they're in between movies. It's a lull. They've always wanted to start X type of brand and they treat it as like a three month project. They do some promotion about it and then they start a new album. Or the NBA season starts and they kind of move on with their career.

So a lot of the, a lot of times the question that we ask ourselves when we're picking talent is what priority does this take in this person's life? Not just this year, but next year, in the next five years. And I think it's really hard to start a business like this with an NBA player who has a $60 million contract with the warriors on the other end of all the other things that he's doing versus the thing that I love about digital talent is for a lot of them, this is it. This is the thing that's going to make them a legacy generational wealth player. And it makes it so much more important that priority really matters. So that's a huge piece of the puzzle when we're thinking about town.

Well, and I think another big thing about the difference between a digital creator and like an NBA player is like, it's also like what you were saying about, you know, the NBA player might be making $50 million a year, right? So like when it comes to building a business, like, yeah, it's obviously cool to like build a business, but like for a lot of these digital creators, they are directly monetizing their brands through the businesses that they're launching through the ventures, so finding like true long term alignment. And that's why it's like, it's like kind of the same thing if you're looking to start a business right? Like you, sometimes you don't want to just start a business with someone out of convenience because it's like, oh, I want to work on this right now and this person wants to work on it right now. It's like you want to think about like, what are the values behind your partners that you're working with and how are you going to establish longer term alignment?

100%. 100%.

The, the next question that I wanted to talk about as it pertains to some of the talent stuff is how do you, how do you identify the products that you want to work on? You said once you figure out the talent, that's important, but also it's super important to figure out the business that you're building and the products that you're doing. So how do you figure that stuff out?

It's a great question and I think that it's tough. It's like, you know, I, I see certain products getting launched with, with huge talent who I think live on that list of 20 people in the digital space. But they pick something that is terrible. It's just a terrible business. It's really hard to execute. Maybe it's cold chain. It's just, it's really challenging from a unit economics part point of view. And I'm always cringing because I'm just like, God, they got bad advice somewhere along the line.

So, you know, the picking the right business is no different from what I've been doing in, in venture capital for 15 years, which is really understanding, you know, where is there an opportunity to build a business that can be $100 million annual revenue business with great unit economic margins. Right. So something that is probably not too heavy to ship. I think liquid is extremely difficult. The cold chain working with storage and cold storage and grocery store people don't recognize that there's just not a lot of frozen section in a grocery store to go around. And then just understanding supply chain kind of where opportunities for innovation is. I think you could have a talent slapped on a brand. We call it a logo slap.

You could do a logo slap, but at the end of the day, if the product is not better, cheaper, more convenient, you know, kind of falling in the category of what makes a good consumer product, then you're free, screwed. So you've got to also pick something where there's an area for opportunity in an area for, for innovation in a category. And we really treat it like making any type of venture investment that we do. We spend a lot of time talking to buyers in the space, buyers from Walmart, Target and Grocery and C store, talking to other venture funds, talking to other founders, understanding where there's opportunity in the market to build something really compelling. And you know, sometimes we start these businesses because we work with a talent and that talent really has an idea. They want to build a business in X space and we, we generate ideas from there. But a lot of times where we come at this is we really want to start a business in the nicotine space or we really want to start a business in, you know, the noodle space or, you know, whatever it may be. And we'll go out and we'll try to find like who do we think the five most interesting talent in that space is who, who really kind of hit all the qualifications that you and I just talked about.

So sometimes it's talent out, sometimes it's, it's, it's business model first. But really it's any type of business you think about in the same way that you think about it as a venture capitalist.

We are really excited to announce that DTC Pod is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals. And we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC POD and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network@HubSpot.com podcast network.

Totally. And then the last question was, I know we touched on like management and execution of these brands. So like how do you, like when you guys are incubating or you're working with talent, like what does the structure sort of look like? How do you set these things up to make sure that you guys are incentivized, the talents incentivize and that you're able to like bring on the right management? Like what does a typical thing look like? And then how do you find that, you know, team to actually run the, run the operations in the business?

It's a great question. First of all, incubation I think is like, it's like, it's an art. It's like really difficult to string these things together. A lot of people ask us like, what does a typical deal look like? And the reality is like every deal is a snowflake. Every deal has its own different and idiosyncrasy synchronicity is like it all, it all has interesting shape and form to it. But most of the time what we're doing is obviously we have a capsible. Creating talent wants to have some ownership, the incubation fund is going to have ownership, the investors will have ownership. But the most important part, aside from getting those things right, is that you have phenomenal operators.

And I think that the opportunity that we've seen with early stage CPG and early stage consumer is that right now if you're a fuck, if you're a phenomenal five star founder and you go out and you're trying to raise for an early stage, pre revenue, pre seed CPG business, you know, unless you're the Rxbar guys I know you had on recently, like it's, it's extremely difficult, extremely challenging to raise capital for that. And as a result, you know, when you have a venture studio like Knight who can immediately day one give you an unfair competitive advantage, a really well diligence business idea, and then also capital, it does attract star players. And that's really what it comes down to is we want to find people who have just an absolute dog in them and who were otherwise going to be starting a business by themselves. And really you take them through a four to six month process of inception where you start talking about the idea, you start talking about the talent, everybody starts meeting each other and then over the course of meeting that person and working with that person, they flip. They ultimately end up knowing way more about the space than you do. They're spending way more time thinking about it than, than you. You are. They can't stop thinking about it, they can't stop texting you about it, they can't stop calling you about it.

They're obsessed with it. And when you find somebody who is phenomenal operator and they've been incepted, that's when you leap at the opportunity to work with them and start building a team around them. So that's, that's how we've done it in the past. And you know, we've gotten extremely lucky. We found phenomenal operators to run our businesses. And I think a lot of is because you got to find the right, the right form of packaging. We talk about our business. You know, when we, when we meet as a talent management company and we talk to people in the entertainment industry, they're like, what is this, what's this incubation stuff you guys do over here? What is that? And the way that we talk about it, which I think is not too dissimilar or not too off base, is we talk about it as packaging.

Back in more old Hollywood days, you would have, you know, these talent management firms, they would package movies, right? They'd have actors and writers and directors all on staff. They'd work with the studios and they package together these films. They'd say, let's put Leonard DiCaprio with Matt Damon and we're going to create the Departed. We're going to create whatever movie and we're not doing anything too dissimilar, right? We're, we're basically packaging based off of what we know is a need in the market with a talent that's authentic to that need and an incredible operator putting the right money behind it and pushing in the right direction and hoping that we can strike gold.

One other thing that I'm just curious about, I know your, your team, some of your teams in L. A, you're in Austin and one of the other guys that we recently had on the pod, Nicholas from Tina, they did a partnership where he, I think he was his business. He had been around for like five years in the Yerba mate. Space was doing really well. And then he got a cash infusion from Tiny and they brought on Huberman to like kind of partner together and blow that brand up. And since then it's been doing really well. It's taken off, you know, nationally. That's kind of how they like did their launch into the US and just in massive retail, etc.

So I'm curious, is that a model that you've seen that you guys are interested in or do you typically only incubate from scratch? Yeah. What are your thoughts on that sort of model of, you know, finding a talent, finding a brand that's like kind of got some of that supply chain chops and everything going and then, you know, marrying the two?

Yeah, we actually raised capital for effectively what you're talking about is a private equity firm to go after the strategy. And we've done a, we've done, we've done a lot of diligence on deals. We haven't found anything yet, but it's something we're extremely interested in. And I think that it's, it's extremely difficult to start something from scratch. But you have a lot of brands that exist today that have great products, incredible founders, and a lot of times all that needs to happen is that final piece of the puzzle in terms of packaging. An example I'll give that I think is kind of right in our wheelhouse that we saw straight from Knight's roster was Ryan Trahan. And I think what Ryan has done with Joyride has been a remarkable case study in that which is, you know, you take a product that was, it was doing well, it was a great quality product in terms of the candy space. And you brought in somebody who is a founder that had a real authentic love for it and was willing to put in the time to make it successful.

And Joyride is sold out in most places. It's sold now. It's trending to become one of the best selling candy brands in Target. And Ryan might be one of the most brilliant founder creator business operators that I've ever seen. He just understands the assignment, which is I need to do everything in my power, use my leverage to push a brand forward. So, you know, Ryan has done an extraordinary job with that and I think there's tons of opportunity in the market. Again, it's really challenging to find the right mix. I can't tell you how many emails we get from dying direct to consumer businesses or dying CPG companies that are looking for kind of that, that last gasp.

If only we had X talent Come in. It would make everything better. Those are not the right model. The right model is when you, you really find an authentic match and the connection works. And I'm going to see, we're going to see a lot more, we're going to see a lot more things like that in the future. I particularly think, like you mentioned the Matt opportunity. You know, I think wellness is, got an endless opportunity for that. I think the other thing that we're starting to see is they don't need to be Mr.

Beast level to make that type of private equity deal work. I think those deals work with smaller talents and work with talent that is more specialized to the audience of, of, of the actual product. So we're going to see a lot more of that in the future.

Super cool. And then one other thing that you had talked about, obviously if you're not incubating, you guys are investing in companies. So why don't you tell us about some of the companies that you've invested in, what's really interesting and then how does, you know, how does it work? Do you, are you able to kind of like bring in some talent where it makes sense or like what, what does it look like for you guys in terms of just investing traditionally in companies?

Yeah, I mean we, we've been running this venture fund now for about three years, made about 40 investments across all different types of categories. And we, like you said, we help our founders navigate the world of influencer. The irony is a lot of people come to us and they're like, oh, can you get Mr. Beast to promote X products? And I think the thing that's changed a lot even in this time that I've been doing this job about the creator economy is a lot of the value in promotion used to be at the top of the market. It used to be at the type of people that frankly Knight represents. But over time, I think all the value in the creator economy has moved to the middle. It's a messy middle. It's extremely difficult to navigate.

It's hard to get a hold of people. There's 25 different SaaS, companies that proclaim that they can organize the creator economy for you. But that's really where the value is. That's where the arbitrage is, where you're catching somebody that is frankly creating better content than they're currently getting paid for on a CPM basis. And that's really where we direct a lot of our portfolio companies to, whether it through agency partners or just our own understanding of who the best talent is. I Mean, the funny thing about the management company here at Knight is, you know, I come from the world of venture capital and a lot of times at VC funds you have these analyst teams and if you ask some a partner at a venture fund like, hey, what does an analyst team do? The reality is they just sit and they try to figure out what's going to be the next big company. And not too dissimilar from a venture fund in the management world. We have an entire coordinator team, like junior, junior manager team here at night who, when people ask me what that group of people does, I say they're basically trying to find the next viral moment on the Internet, the next viral sensation.

And they have a tremendous understanding of Internet culture and where things are trending, where things are moving. So a lot of the times we offer up that team to our portfolio companies to give them access to understand, okay, where is the value, where's the arbitrage opportunity? And somebody that I could work with that's not going to dry out my bank account because I'm an early stage startup, I don't have a lot of capital. But where's the, where is the arbitrage opportunity in that messy middle of the creator economy? And that's a huge value add because just understanding who, who to be working with is 90% of the battle. The execution on how to do it is certainly important, but a lot of it is around the who. So that's, that's a huge part of our value add and something we've been able to help out with.

And what do you think, like what are some of those big trends, you know, or creators up and coming creators or you know, more broadly like what are some of the trends you'd say you're really excited about as it pertains to like the creator commerce sort of landscape?

Yeah. So, you know, we spend a lot of our time in, in this world. We, you know, we spend time in content, we spend time in, we spend a ton of time in commerce as you mentioned, and other consumer categories. I mean, I think the first thing is you just seen an absolute, everybody has the same, same answer, but you know, 60% of the people that were lower level employees that are doing very low wrote manual work, I just don't believe they're going to be necessary as full time roles in the next couple years. Today I have a friend that runs a content agency that shared on LinkedIn, you know that they basically have replaced a media buyer wholeheartedly. They replaced a media buyer with an AI agent to manage $100 million account. So I just think you're going to see a lot of changes when it comes to, you know, the types of applications, the application layer software that's currently assisting with marketing or assisting with, assisting with media buying, assisting with, with your, your financial books, assisting with insurance. I think what you're going to start to see is people just whole, you know, in whole stretches replacing roles, whether that be a media buyer or a brand rec or talent coordinator.

So that's, that's a, that's an area that we're spending a lot of time on. We're frankly just thinking about all the different companies that we work with, all the different employees at those companies and asking ourselves, are these jobs going to be around in a couple of years and what are the second order derivatives of those changes? So that's been a huge space for us that we've been, we've been watching and yeah, just a remarkable change with some of the technology that's coming out.

Yeah, it's wild. Especially on the, you know, the operational side. I think that's what everyone's like looking at right now. It's like a, you know, there's, especially for you guys, you can look at it both ways. A what business should we be investing in? And to how can we like optimize all the operations of our own business and all the businesses that we own? And then on the content side of things, are there any trends that, in a content creator landscape that you're excited about? Like, I don't know, like live shopping or other platforms or social commerce or like what are some of the trends that you might be seeing in the creator landscape that have you guys excited?

Yeah, we spent a lot of time in live shopping, which I think live shopping is really interesting. I think the mo. One of the most interesting areas in kind of where content commerce are colliding. I just think that TikTok is building, with TikTok shops, they're building the first true connective layer between content and commerce. I think we've talked about it. It's been a huge buzzword for over a decade now, but there really just hasn't this single platform where you don't really even need to do anything as a brand, as a marketing manager for a brand where you can coordinate an entire campaign and create tremendous amount of conversion all within one platform with the right incentives aligned. And that is, you know, I've been keeping an eye out on a lot of the recent conversations around the TikTok ban because I think that TikTok is halfway through absolutely breaking the commerce model and doing something that, you know, Facebook kind of tried to do, didn't really succeed. IG shops didn't really get there with.

But you know, I spend probably 20 minutes every day opening up my dashboard and looking at which brands are trending on TikTok shops and the amount of people that are making money off of it, the amount of brands that are starting to engage with it. At first it was really kind of low level brands and things that were really cheap and knockoffs, but the amount of brands that are starting to engage with it. I really hope the platform stick or sticks around in whatever form it can because I do believe that's where commerce is headed. I don't see a world in which if you're running a brand, 50% of your marketing outlay isn't going to be through a channel where you're getting somebody to speak directly to an audience through their content. It just seems inevitable. Yeah.

And I think another big thing that like TikTok shop was able to do is, you know, like you were saying, align incentives. Like people are so tired of, like, everyone wants to work with creators. Sure, you've got ads that you can run and you can maybe whitelist them, but like, you know, the fact that they were able to like align incentives between that entire creator business sort of relationship has been really big. What do you, what do you think is going to happen? I know you said you've been keeping up with it. If you, if you had to guess today, what's your, what's your guess? Is Tick Tock getting banned or is it, is it going to be around for a while?

I, I watched the Trump, I watched the Trump speech the other day. I don't know, he could come out and say something completely different, but he was starting to back away from it, which makes me believe that they're, they're not going to do it, that that TikTok will end up being fine. I think he's much more pro business and, and I don't believe that it will be banned. If anything, it could be sold to an American entity just for, for, for safety reasons. But I, I truly believe nothing's going to happen to it. You know, people often ask me because I spent a lot of time in my career investing in social. They're like, when is the next TikTok going to come around? My hot take is that there's not just, there's just not going to be another social media platform. And I know that's crazy because there's always been another social media platform.

But when you consider what was required to get TikTok off the ground, the People's Republic of China, a communist nation having to invest tens of billions of dollars in customer acquisition is just not something that an Evan Spiegel in a dorm room at Stanford, even with the power of venture capital and all of that cash, can really accomplish anymore. So I think TikTok is here to stay. I think TikTok shops here to stay. And it's really going to be disruptive because as far as incentives align, and again, there may be a day in which they're opening and changing prices that they don't align as well. But if they align as well as they do right now, it's a great living for people who are looking to take advantage of their audience. And I think. I think that's where the market's headed.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other, you know, sort of interesting there, I feel like originally in Trump's first term, I think he was thinking about banning it, especially specifically because of the China thing. Then I think when he was, like, getting in the reelection process, I think TikTok was one of the platforms where they were actually allowing content to be, like, somewhat positive about him. So he's probably in this kind of catch 22, where I think then the current administration was the one that wanted to, like, resurface the TikTok ban. So it's been kind of all over the board. But I kind of tend to agree with what you're seeing. I think it'll be around in some sort of format. Whether there's a for sale or not, we'll see.

But I think the. The infrastructure should be here to say so, Ben, as we kind of wrap up here, this has been an awesome convo in terms of, you know, just kind of really breaking down the creator commerce landscape. What you guys are seeing working, what's. What's not working, you know, do you have any last thoughts here? Like, anything that you're. Anything else that you guys are really excited about this next year, Whether it's, you know, specific companies that you guys are looking to launch, different trends that you're looking to jump on, companies that you're incubating or companies investing? Anything else that we may have missed that, that you guys. That has you guys hyped up?

I think one of the companies that we incubated that I'm particularly excited about that I'll finish that. First thing I'll say is I think I have a lot of times People ask me, younger people ask me, like, what can I do? Like, how can I. How can I build a brand? Or how can I do anything in my career? And I just think having an audience is tremendous power. I think it's the ultimate equalizer. And I think that if you're a successful professional 10 years from now and you don't have a social following, you don't have a presence, I think it's going to be extremely hard for you to be relevant. So I always encourage everybody to, like, take advantage of content, take advantage of an audience. And it's, It's. It's like the lifeblood.

It gives you so much opportunity and access. Every single one of my friends that have gotten to hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, you know, they just are such weapons. Anytime they need anything, if they need a filmographer, if they need somebody to do a quick design, you know, they just tweet it out and it's done within minutes. So I think it's the most incredible thing you could do. And it's one of the things that I always recommend to people. The company that I was going to mention really quickly, that is actually, you know, something that's growing really quickly in our portfolio and something that really surprised us because we weren't expecting it. It was a pivot, is a company that's called Trobio. And what Trobio does is really interesting.

What, what they realize is that, you know, they had access through what they were building before to a lot of data, a lot of video data, and we're selling it in a way that didn't end up working in the market. But what ended up happening is these huge LLM companies, whether it's OpenAI or Meta or, you know, Insert, any of the 500 companies that have built that are building foundational models today in video, they started contacting Trobio. They said, hey, we really need data. We're starving for data. And really the problem right now with the Internet is most of these companies have scraped all of the data on the Internet, and there's not enough data to train models, to build good enough large language models and foundational models that do video. You know, you're seeing it right now with OpenAI and Sora, but they're frankly just. They've run out of data. So the thing that's really interesting is if you talk to any creator, any production company and studio, any.

Any. Any university film program, they'll talk to you. This thing about. They'll talk to you. This thing about. That's called shot ratio. Shot ratio is for every one minute of video that actually gets posted, how much is left on the cutting room floor. And that other 49 minute minutes, that other 49 hours of footage is what's called dark data.

And what Trovio does is it ingests all the dark data in the world. By collecting it, they're shipping tons and tons of terabytes of hard drives and movie reels and they're using it to train these models because there's so much data out there that never sees light of day that was created. Think about the amount of videos that just exist on your phone. And all of that is extremely powerful data. So it's just a, it's just one of those stories, one of those great entrepreneurial stories of kind of tripping into this remarkable business opportunity. And I think what it really proves is that, you know, if you're a content creator today, if you're, you know, if you're somebody that makes their living doing that, you know, there's more than one way, more than just adsense in order to bank on for monetization, there's going to be a lot more ways for you to monetize your catalog in the future. And continuing with that trade is like the absolute best thing that you should do. Coming back to what I was saying before, because having an audience is absolute power.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean we're, we're all about content here. I, I know that how powerful creating content can be, content can, you know, scale your own brand, help you launch a business. In the case of what you guys see, you can, you know, if you're one of those top 20 content creators in the world, you can literally build anything you want. So, Ben, want to thank you for coming on. This conversation has been a blast for anyone who wants to connect with you, find you. Why don't you shout out your socials, where can we find you on LinkedIn, Twitter, that sort of thing.

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to connect with anybody that's interested in this world. My Twitter is Ben Twitter B E N TW I T R Find me on X Would love to chat. My DMs are open and thanks so much for having me. It's been a blast.

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