Imagine you’re building your dream company and you turned off all social media, threw away your phone and just went full founder mode for a month. Do you think you’d be farther ahead than your competition?

You’d certainly save 20 minutes from the Instagram algorithm you get sucked down every toilet break, and you’d probably save another hour from the group chats you feel obligated to stay up to date on. But is the world around you holding you back from your own speed to success, or something else… like you?

I think perspective is the most deterministic factor for growth, and it’s why “keeping up with the Jones’s” is a saying that for some feels negative, and for others, is so competitive it that it keeps them working in their head even while they sleep. In a race, someone else’s pace pushes you to keep up or fall behind, and if you’re playing to win, you’re either in the front pushing everyone to their limits, or someone else is pushing you to yours.

It’s why scrolling is an anxiety trap for every masochist entrepreneur who’s already going through the rollercoaster of building. You have to listen to every 19 year old dropout talk about how they vibe coded a dick measuring app that’s doing $30k/MRR, or read a stranger on LinkedIn announce they hit $100M run rate in under 6 months because their agent CMO found some secret sauce (and they’ll tell you about only if you comment “smokestack”). Am I jealous or disgusted?

It’s a real fuck you moment. Without a mirror, it’s hard to judge yourself, and without competition, know if what you’re building is good, great or just…. Meh. Investors see the same. Where are you on the chart? Where do you exist in the magic quadrant? Are you the leader, or the laggard.

Some days I want to tune out the noise because it makes me feel like I’m not good or great; and other days I look at my feed as aspiration, as the drive to pick myself up and say “fuck it, if they can, so can I”. Many days I feel behind, but like Golden Tempo, sometimes those in the back are just waiting patiently to make the right move and strike.

So use perspective as a weapon; even if some days you have to bleed a bit… just to use it.

→ Every Founder Must Know: Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and the writer-director of Squid Game just put personal money into ElevenLabs. They didn't license their voices.

→ The Studio: A creator management firm with 1.5 billion combined followers just hired Hollywood out of Range Media to run its new in-house studio. We have a first-hand read.

→ The Signal: Digiday just put a real number on the equity-over-sponsorship shift. OWM is the inbound pipeline.

On May 5, ElevenLabs disclosed the full investor list on the $550 million+ Series D it first announced in February. Jamie Foxx is on it. Eva Longoria is on it. Hwang Dong-hyuk, the writer-director of Squid Game, is on it.

They wrote personal checks. They join existing investor Matthew McConaughey, alongside more than 30 actors, musicians, athletes, and entertainment executives investing in the company for the first time.

The numbers: $11 billion post-money valuation. More than $500 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $350 million at year-end 2025.

The institutional list reads the way you would expect for an AI infrastructure company at that scale. BlackRock. Wellington. Nvidia. Deutsche Telekom. Salesforce.

The personal list is the story.

Hollywood spent the last year and a half pushing back on the AI voice category. Licensing terms. Voice clones. Unauthorized uses. The 800-creator letter we covered in Issue 7 was one chapter of that fight, and the fight is still going.

This week, three of the named new investors chose a different position. Foxx, Longoria, and Hwang wrote checks instead of demanding licenses.

Hwang Dong-hyuk is the cleanest tell in the round.

He doesn't need ElevenLabs to license his voice. He is a writer and director, not a voice asset. He already owns one of the largest pieces of IP on Earth.

He bought equity anyway, because the platform that powers the next decade of dubbing, narration, and synthetic performance is going to sit underneath every studio and streamer he ships through. He didn't pick a fee. He picked a position in the infrastructure his entire output is going to run on.

The best creators in your category are running the same logic, with less acclaim and less leverage, but on the same math.

This is what OWM was built for. We find the creators whose careers compound with the category they cover, and we make them owners before they end up as licensors. Conviction in, upside out.

Hwang knows it. Foxx knows it. Longoria knows it. The question is whether you are still paying per-use fees to the creators who could be compounding alongside the infrastructure your category runs on.

Pioneered the nootropic energy pouch category in 2022, available at Target and Walmart. Prepping a Series A as they scale DTC from retail-led. Strong organic repeat customers with Gen Z as second-largest segment.

Instant coffee in trademarked hexagonal pods using nitro lock tech. No machine, tastes like fresh-brewed; he’s live on TikTok multiple hours a day scaling fast. Raising $3M seed round, backers include GNC's CEO and NFL players DeAndre Hopkins and Sean Clifford.

Crushing social commerce and scaling to hundreds of millions in rev. Knows the power of creators as owners which is why they’re raising a Creator Round to put creators on the cap table. Investor presentation here.

The best tasting sustainable seafood you can buy delivered fresh to your door. Met him at Paperboy Ventures event, he’s an absolute killer. Every should subscribe and watch this business fly as we all realize our store bought salmon is putting plastic in our gut.

For months, this newsletter has been making the same argument: the talent companies are going to become the studios, the studios are going to become the distributors, and the creators are going to end up as co-owners of the infrastructure. This week, Made By All shipped that exact move.

The News:

On May 6, Made By All launched Made By Us Studios, a premium production studio built at the intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy.

Tanya Cohen joins as Co-CEO from Range Media Partners. Leanne Perice, the founder of Made By All, continues as Co-CEO. Nic Stanich, the ex-Freeform alum who came in to run MBA's marketing studio arm in December 2025, is now President of Production. The studio pulls from Made By All's existing creator network of 1.5 billion combined followers.

Perice has been building toward this for nine years.

She closed her first creator deal in 2014 for $1,000. By 2015 to 2017, those deals were $10K, then $15K, then $25K a week. Made By All has doubled revenue annually since, signed Vine stars before "creator economy" was a phrase, and just opened its first international office in Dubai.

The framing she uses for the new studio is "Creator Hollywood," top creators sitting in the chair as creative directors for brands, not placement slots. Made By Us is the eight-month financial and conceptual build behind that idea.

We have a first-hand read on this one.

We structured an influence-for-equity deal with Hannah Stocking for OWM's launch video, the one currently sitting on the OWM homepage. Hannah is represented by Made By All. Made By Us, the studio that just officially launched, produced it - we wanted to be their first client, because we believe in their model - like they believe in ours.

The same firm represents the creator, owns the studio that shot the content, and is sitting next to the founder structuring the equity deal with her. The closest comp is Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning's company: talent and producer in the same shop, upside compounding in one place.

Made By All is building that vertical for the creator economy, and we ran the model on ourselves first.

The Operator Take:

When the management firm is the studio, "partnership" doesn't start at distribution anymore. It starts at ownership. The creators who define your category are already inside that studio's network, and Perice has spent nine years training the firm to treat them as creative directors instead of reach vehicles.

Digiday ran a piece this week on how mid- and micro-tier creators are starting to push for ownership stakes instead of sponsorship checks. The framing the article uses is "security."

Sponsorship income is volatile, contracts are short, brand teams turn over constantly. A small equity position in the right brand outlasts the campaign cycle.

The News:

The piece cites the macro proof points the equity model has been built on, Alix Earle's stake in Poppi before the $1.95 billion PepsiCo exit, Michael Jordan's Nike royalty structure as the original blueprint.

The new development is the demand creep down the pyramid. Mid- and micro-tier creators are now asking the same question their macro counterparts asked five years ago, while the structural ceiling is real: nearly 80% of all influencer collabs cost under $300, and the equity economics of a one-off micro deal are hard to land without long-term alignment.

The Operator Take:

The demand has reached the bottom of the funnel before the infrastructure has reached down to meet it.

Whoever solves standardized equity at the micro tier now writes the deal terms the rest of the market copies in 2027. The "Creator Equity Plan" deck slot is coming (let us know if you need help setting one up 😉). Show up to the micro creator with that slot already filled in, and you are the brand they sign with.

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