So this week I was boarding my flight and I was forced to check my carry-on. Dumb me, I was late to the gate. But as I walked to my seat, I saw at least 50 open spaces in the overhead. Are you fucking kidding me?

So I turned around, climbed past the rest of the disgruntled economy class, grabbed my bag at the exit door, ripped off the tag, and got back on the plane.

I will not accept dumb rules made by a system that has to guess capacity versus knowing it. Be better. Your failure will not be my inconvenience. And you know what happened? Other people got up and grabbed their bags too.

I think too often people accept the situation they’re presented, and I’m not “that guy” who thinks rules don’t apply to me. There’s a difference in how you handle situations that separates ego from responsibility.

Listen, you know ego. Fucking silver spoon, Dartmouth pricks parading around talking down to the working class and treating rules like they were made for peasants, “do you know who my dad is”. Yeah, those people…

But being responsible is different. It’s understanding right from wrong. Having a moral compass and being able to assess a situation by its impact on you and those around you. You quickly judge “is this really how it is”…. “how it should be”, and making the call to accept it, or do something about it.

A revolution starts when one person decides to say the thing we all feel, or do the thing we all know we should. Change only happens when the responsible come together; first a single spark, then two fires, and all of a sudden, the walls are burning and there are no more colored water fountains.

Clearly I could care less about United changing its bag policy. This isn’t about United. It’s about whether you accept the world around you just because that’s the way it is. Or will you take responsibility and do something about. Will you be the spark, or the fire?

You don’t have to be the first, but when you see someone take the responsibility to speak for how we all feel; stand with them.

Get up, grab your bag; and make sure everyone knows you will not accept any situation just because of how it is, when you know it’s not how it should be.

Whether it’s a bag, or a vote, or a water fountain, be the change you want to see in the world. When the many stand together and say “enough”…. You can change anything.

– Jeff

Reminder:

On March 20th at 1PM ET, OWM is hosting a free live webinar breaking down exactly how to turn creator partnerships into ownership stakes.

→ Every Founder Must Know: A $100M skincare brand just gave actual equity to three teenage creators. The CEO says no established brand has done this with Gen Alpha at their scale.

→ The Infrastructure Play: Fox named a former VC partner as head of its creator studio. Someone who spent years writing checks into creator businesses, not booking talent.

→ The Bet: Jordan Brand signed Azzi Fudd to a multiyear deal that follows her into the WNBA before she's even been drafted. The timing is the whole story.

Kimberley Ho runs Evereden, a $100M skincare brand that's expanding nationally into Sephora. Last week, she gave actual equity to three creators. Ages 14, 15, and 17.

Not a campaign budget. Not gifting. Not a flat fee. Equity. The same instrument that aligns founders with investors.

The program is called Generation E. And the reasoning behind it matters more than the move itself.

Ho surveyed over 7,000 Evereden customers and found something that should make every brand marketer uncomfortable: Gen Alpha actively distrusts polished celebrity endorsements. These are kids who grew up watching "authentic" become a corporate marketing strategy. They learned to spot the performance before they learned to drive.

So Ho stopped trying to look authentic. She made the creators actual stakeholders instead. And no other established brand at Evereden's scale has done this with Gen Alpha creators. That claim is almost certainly true.

Here's why this matters for anyone building with creators right now. The debate in most boardrooms is still framed as "influencer fees vs. equity," as if the question is whether equity is too expensive to offer.

Evereden flipped that question on its head. When a creator is a shareholder, the content stops being a job and starts being advocacy. The difference in quality, consistency, and trust isn't incremental. It's categorical. The economics work because of the equity, not in spite of it.

Think about what Evereden actually built here. Three teenagers who own a piece of what they're selling. They have every reason to post, to recruit their peers, to defend the brand, to care whether the products are actually good. Ho told Glossy the Generation E creators have "seats at the table" on product development, launch events, and pop-ups. They're not just posting. They're building.

That's not a sponsored post. That's a founding team.

Evereden isn't running an experiment. They're running the proof of concept for how brands will be built in five years. And they did it before any competitor had a chance to copy it.

The playbook isn't complicated. Find the creators whose audiences actually trust them. Give them real ownership. Let the alignment do the work that ad budgets never could. That's exactly what OWM was built to help you do.

For a decade, "creator economy" hires at major studios have meant one thing: talent coordinators brought in to manage influencer relationships. Someone to wrangle the talent, negotiate the appearances, keep the posts on schedule. Fox just did something completely different.

The News: Fox Entertainment named Billy Parks as head of Fox Creator Studios. Parks is not a talent wrangler. He spent the last several years as a partner at Slow Ventures' creator fund, where he wrote checks into creator businesses. Before that, he was an operating partner at The Chernin Group.

Fox CEO Rob Wade said Parks "understands that today's creators are founders and brand builders." Parks said creators are "building the most dynamic media business in the world on their terms."

Fox Creator Studios will co-develop IP with creators across linear, streaming, and social, with creators owning a meaningful piece of what they build together.

The Operator Take: Most studios hire talent executives to manage creator relationships. Fox hired someone who funds creator companies. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

A talent executive asks: How do we get this creator on our show? An investor-operator asks: How do we build something together that we both own? Those are fundamentally different questions, and they produce fundamentally different outcomes.

Fox isn't the only one moving in this direction. A+E just launched Storyground with a similar thesis. But the Parks hire is more significant because it puts a capital allocator in charge of IP development, not a booking desk. When the person running creator relationships thinks in cap tables instead of contract fees, everything about the relationship changes.

The studios that figure this out fastest will be in position. The ones still hiring coordinators will be writing bigger checks for the same asset in three years.

The draft hasn't happened yet. She still has March Madness to play. But Azzi Fudd already knows how to stack ownership.

The News: UConn guard Azzi Fudd is a projected lottery pick in the 2026 WNBA Draft. This week she signed a multiyear NIL deal with Jordan Brand, and the deal follows her into the WNBA after she's selected. Jordan is committing to a long-term relationship before Fudd has earned a single professional paycheck.

She also holds a separate equity stake in BioSteel Sports Nutrition alongside Patrick Mahomes, Luka Dončić, and a cohort of athlete-investors. That deal came first. She's not the loudest name in college basketball right now, but she's quietly building one of the most deliberately constructed equity portfolios in women's sports before she turns 23.

The Operator Take: Two years ago, athlete partnerships were almost entirely about audience size. Most followers. Most likely to go viral. The brands that won on those terms are not the brands winning now.

The brands winning now are betting on trajectory. Jordan signed Fudd before the draft because the athletes who will define women's sports over the next decade are being claimed right now, while audiences are still growing and equity is still affordable. Fudd understood this before Jordan called. The BioSteel stake came first. She's not waiting for leverage to arrive. She's accumulating it.

This is the pre-seed model applied to athlete partnerships: bet on the builder while the valuation is low. The founders who locked in equity deals with creators in 2023 and 2024 are watching those same creators command six-figure minimums today. The window to build these relationships on favorable terms isn't permanent.

Jordan Brand knows it. Fudd knows it. The question is whether you do.

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