What's up, DTC Pod. Today we're joined by Ronak TREVETTI, who is the co founder and CEO of Pietra. So, Ronak, why don't you kick us off, tell us a little bit about Pietra and the services that you guys are building out for the creator economy.

Thanks for having me. Pietra is a platform that allows creators to launch and scale their own consumer product lines without having to hire a team or really figure out any of the hard operational stuff.

One reason I was really excited to have you on is because, first and foremost, like, a couple of the creator led brands that we've had on the podcast already have used you guys. I know there's a lot of overlap. You guys are backed by Founders Fund, who are Miami based. We're Miami based, so we hear great things about Pietro all the time. And obviously, in the podcast, we're really focused in on not only consumer and commerce brands, but as well as creators who are launching their own brands as well. So why don't you walk us through the traditional process? Like, what does it look like for someone? If you're a creator, you have an audience, and you're looking to now extend the reaches of your entrepreneurial sort of spirit and get into other sort of stuff. What does the current landscape look like with Pietra? And actually, before that, what does it look like without Pietra?

Yeah, great question. I think this is kind of the underpinning of our company, but when we were looking at creative individuals and entrepreneurship, now you can call them creators, influencers, social savvy, entrepreneurs, whatever you want. We noticed kind of two ways that someone can start a business. We found on one end, there were these super mega creators that were big enough for operating partners to essentially come to them and say, hey, look, we're going to give you a bunch of money and we want to start a business with you. And when they say with you, they literally meant we're going to take most of the money and we're going to use you as a marketing figurehead, essentially, and you're big enough that we can actually put a bunch of risky capital behind because we are betting that we can build a business around your name and your likeness. And that was a very popular and still is a very popular model for the top 0.1%, right? If you're big enough, someone's going to be able to back you with their cash, their team, and you as a creator at the top of the totem pole, can kind of sit back and play that creative director role almost, right? Just go promote and get some money in the bank. That was one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is this other industry that was built out over the last ten years or so, which is this made to order ecosystem where it wasn't the top mega celebs that were designing really cool product lines like George Clooney and his alcohol brand or the Rock or whatever it was infrastructure around.