I don’t know why I thought I’d get to disconnect and enjoy time with my family this Spring Break. I promised myself I could plan my schedule around it and ensure this was time for us, not dad working with a better view, but I’ve never been great at separating work and life, and seeing it play out in my sons eyes this week, well, it just made me sad.

My kids are so young, and all I think about are these moments that I want to truly spend with them. Burn in core memories before they grow up and forget that I’m their hero. Will they remember me as the dad who didn’t go in the lazy river because he had to “take a call”, or the dad that left his phone in the room and just slowly walked the forest trail, spotting butterflies and playing I Spy.

But client deals are falling apart, a creator dinner in London being planned, a big pitch happening today, and a huge product launch coming end of month that design and engineering need my feedback on. Ten thousand other details that Hormozi may say if you can’t break away and leave your team to it; you have the wrong team, but the reality is, my team is awesome, we’re just a startup that needs its leader.

But my family also needs their dad. So what to do? I’ve lived my whole life like this, balancing the entrepreneur first as the boyfriend, then the husband, and now; the father. And most times I made it work, trying to leave on a Friday morning so I’m right into the weekend, and then as the trip tapers, work starts to load in Mon/Tues and I start to disappear, but at least we had a good start!

But with Easter, spring break with the family meant doing a Mon-Fri stint, and every day I wanted to play Uno or ride bikes or simply do whatever thing runs through a 3 year olds imagination, I just couldn’t give it my all. Every email and slack required a response that took up the headspace I had hoped to replace with a cold beer and a young boys smile.

And the worst part, I know they know. They know when daddy is there and when he isn’t. I’m half present playing Marco Polo because I’m running scenarios about the call I have to pop out for at 530. The first time my son swam without his swimmies is a huge moment, and yet my mind registered it only in passing, like a stranger in the subway, not the most gleeful smile I had ever seen that I’ll never have a photo of, and now, no real memory of.

I could just be a baseball coach. Get a 9-5 job and live an unremarkable life. What’s wrong with that? My friends wouldn’t think less of me. My family would see more of me. But deep down inside, as much as I question why I put myself through this, I know it’s because this is who I am. I’m not built for unremarkable or for the casual consistency. I’m built for something else, and although I don’t know what it is, I find myself through this constant struggle, a search that I hope one day leads me to it.

I’ll leave you with a story if you haven’t heard, I hope changes your perspective. I’ll paraphrase it a bit.

—

A businessman was sitting on the beach during his vacation and saw a fisherman coming in on his small boat with quite a few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”

The fisherman replied, “Only a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay at sea longer and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “Because this is enough to feed my family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I wake up early in the morning, go out to sea to catch a few fish, then come back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and as evening comes, I usually join my buddies for a drink — sometimes we play guitar, or sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman made a bold offer to the fisherman. “I run many businesses back home, I could help you to become a more successful person.”

“From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you’ve saved enough money, we’ll buy an even bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you’ll have many boats, with your own company and your own plant for canned food. By then, you will have moved out of this place and into the city, where you’ll have a giant office and many employees.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in a giant house, and when the time is right, you can take the company public and you and your family will be rich.”

The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “Well, I guess after that, you can finally retire, and if you want, move to a small house on a beach, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with your grandkids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when the evening comes, join your buddies for a drink, while you play the guitar and sing and dance throughout the night!”

The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

—

Am I the fisherman, the businessman, or maybe someone else, like the man outside the glass box, thinking both these two are idiots.

So I ask again, is it all worth it?

→ Every Founder Must Know: Joe Burrow, Anna Kendrick, and eight other celebrities took equity in a gummy brand. Eighteen months later, Unilever paid $1.2 billion.

→ The Operator: Corporate Natalie just launched an influencer agency that works backwards. Creators write the brief. Brands show up after.

→ Industry Move: Bryson DeChambeau, Grant Horvat, and the Bryan Bros just built a YouTube golf network backed by Blackstone's David Blitzer.

This week, Unilever acquired Grüns, the greens supplement gummy brand founded by Chad Janis in 2023, for $1.2 billion.

The headlines will credit the product. The retention. The retail velocity. And they should. But they'll miss the most important part of the story.

In August 2024, Janis closed a $12 million Series A through Plus Capital, the venture firm that helps celebrities invest both personal capital and social capital into the brands they back. The names that came onto the cap table:

NFL: Joe Burrow, Dak Prescott, DK Metcalf.
NBA: Klay Thompson, Paul George.
Hollywood: Anna Kendrick, Nina Dobrev, Steven Yeun.
Music: Morgan Wallen.
Creator: Rachel Mansfield
Action sports: Shaun White.

Not paid spokespeople. Not ambassadors. Equity holders. Every one of them on the cap table with skin in the outcome.

That round valued the company in the low hundreds of millions. Six months later, a $35 million Series B led by Headline pushed the valuation to $500 million. Fourteen months after that, Unilever wrote a $1.2 billion check.

Every single one of those names just made money on a gummy bear.

How He Got There

Janis didn't start with a roster of All-Stars. He started with a chalky glass of powdered greens during the summer of 2022.

He was a student at Stanford Business School at the time, and he'd previously worked as a VC at Summit Partners. That role put him on the boards of fast-growing DTC brands like Chubbies, Thuma, Brooklinen, and Dr. Squatch. He knew what worked in building a consumer brand. And he knew this powdered greens habit wasn't going to last.

"There's just no way I'm going to keep this habit past 30 days," Janis told Inc. The chalky taste. The messy powder. The sediment that had to be rinsed out of a glass every day. So he asked the obvious question: what if the same nutrition came in a gummy bear?

He spent a year on the formula. He found a facility that could pack gummies into a sachet. No one else was doing it. He tested formats and landed on the gummy bear shape because, as he put it, "consumers love a gummy bear." Then he scraped together $400,000 from Stanford classmates, friends, and family, and launched on his DTC site in August 2023.

Within a couple of weeks, Grüns was doing $5,000 days. By December, it was on Amazon. A $1.8 million pre-seed closed that same August, with money from Sugar Capital, SilverCircle, and two founders Janis knew from his VC days: Chubbies co-founder Kyle Hency and Brooklinen co-founder Rich Fulop.

By February 2024, the numbers justified a $6 million seed round. That round brought in Selva Ventures, Able Partners, and Pltfrm Ventures, the firm that helped get MrBeast's Feastables snack bars into retail.

The business hit profitability 14 months in. It crossed nine figures in annual recurring revenue. By the time of the Unilever acquisition this week, Grüns was shipping ten million gummies every day to over one million customers, with 95,000+ five-star reviews, and the number-one position in greens supplements on both Amazon and in U.S. retail. Seven thousand doors across Sprouts, Target, Walmart, Costco, H-E-B, Wegmans, and Ulta Beauty.

But the inflection point, the move that turned a fast-growing supplement brand into a $1.2 billion acquisition target, was the Series A.

The Cap Table Is the Growth Strategy

Here's where the story becomes an OWM case study.

When Janis brought in Plus Capital for the Series A in August 2024, he wasn't buying endorsements. He was building a distribution architecture.

Plus Capital's model is specific: celebrities invest real money into the company, and they also invest what the firm calls "social capital." That means the people on the cap table aren't passive LPs watching from the sideline. They're financially incentivized to use the product, talk about the product, and put it in front of their audiences. Not because of a campaign contract, but because their equity gets more valuable every time the brand grows.

Think about what Janis actually assembled. Joe Burrow reaches the NFL audience. Dak Prescott and DK Metcalf widen that to different fanbases and demographics. Klay Thompson and Paul George open the NBA. Anna Kendrick, Nina Dobrev, and Steven Yeun cover Hollywood and pop culture. Morgan Wallen owns country music's 18-to-34 demographic. Rachel Mansfield reaches the wellness and food community.

That's not a marketing plan. That's a distribution grid. Every major audience segment in America, covered by equity holders whose incentive to promote doesn't expire after a campaign window. It compounds.

When Joe Burrow's audience sees Grüns, it's not a sponsored post that disappears in 24 hours. It's a long-term signal of conviction from someone who put his own money in. The audience reads that differently. Trust is the signal. And trust drives the retention that made Grüns worth $1.2 billion in the first place. Ninety-five percent of customers using the product four to six times every single week.

And Janis ran a second layer underneath: a massive micro-creator operation of 250,000+ nano and micro influencers activated through gifting and affiliate commissions, generating over 1,500 pieces of UGC per month that fueled paid ads and TikTok Shop. That army drove the volume. The celebrity equity holders drove the trust. The two layers together are what made this a billion-dollar outcome.

The Lesson for Every Founder Reading This

The sequencing matters. Janis didn't recruit Joe Burrow on day one. He spent a year on the formula. He launched with $400K. He proved the product worked. $5,000 days within weeks, profitability in 14 months, nine-figure revenue. The retention was real before the cap table was stacked.

No serious athlete or celebrity is going to stake their name and their money on something their audience will reject. The product has to work first. The retention has to be earned, not manufactured.

But once it works? The smartest move Janis made was offering equity instead of writing checks for posts. A sponsored post has an expiration date. An equity stake doesn't. When your distribution partners own a piece of what they're promoting, the incentive to talk about the brand doesn't end after the campaign. It compounds with every quarter the brand grows.

Grüns went from a guy rinsing sediment out of a glass in 2022, to a $1.8M pre-seed, to a $6M seed backed by MrBeast's retail partner, to a $12M Series A that put the NFL, NBA, Hollywood, and country music on the cap table, to a $500M valuation, to a $1.2 billion exit. In three years.

If you're still writing checks to creators for single posts, you're paying for rented attention. The founders who are putting creators on the cap table are building the brands that Unilever, Danone, and PepsiCo will acquire for ten figures.

That's exactly what OWM was built to help you do.

The News

Natalie Marshall, better known as Corporate Natalie, launched Expand Co-Lab this week. It's a creator-led influencer marketing agency, and it's built on a premise that should make every traditional agency nervous: the brief is broken.

Here's how most influencer deals work. A brand hires an agency. The agency writes a creative brief. The agency finds a creator. The creator gets the brief and makes something that technically matches what was described. Everyone revises. The content lands flat. The brand wonders why their influencer budget isn't converting. The agency collects its 20%.

Expand Co-Lab inverts the entire sequence. Brands come to the creator during the brief, not after. Creators aren't hired talent in this model. They're strategic partners in the room before anyone has written a single word. The agency doesn't take commissions from creators. It makes money by making the brand's content better before the creator ever picks up a camera.

The founding collective includes Brandon Smithwrick, Varun Rana, Corporate Bro, and others, all B2B creators with direct audience access to the buyers brands actually want to reach.

Marshall's resume backs the bet. Notre Dame. Deloitte. She started Corporate Natalie as a side project, a character, a parody account, and kept going long after any rational person would have stopped. Now it's 1.4 million Instagram followers. 827,000 on TikTok. 276,000 on LinkedIn. Forbes 30 Under 30.

She appeared on our Owners Only podcast this week, and she described the mindset behind all of it as "delusional confidence," the irrational certainty that the work is worth doing even when no one is paying attention. At the 47:15 mark of the episode, the conversation turns to making creators owners through equity, what it actually means for a creator to take an ownership stake instead of a check, when it makes sense, and how to tell whether you're being given a real piece of the business or a token gesture.

The Operator Take

The influencer marketing industry is a $32 billion market. Most of it is structured the same way: agency takes 20%, creator gets packaged and sold, brand gets content that could have been made by anyone. Natalie is building the correction. Not because it's a better business model for her, but because getting creators into the room earlier produces better outcomes. Better outcomes drive brand results. Brand results drive repeat business.

The distinction she draws on the podcast, Creator vs. Influencer, matters more than it sounds. An influencer promotes. A creator builds. The moment you start thinking of yourself as someone who builds rather than someone who promotes, the entire deal structure changes. You stop negotiating for the highest rate. You start negotiating for the right alignment.

If you're a founder and your creator strategy is still "find someone with followers and give them a brief," you're competing against brands who are bringing creators into product development before the brief is written. Expand Co-Lab is built for the brands that figured that out.

Listen to the latest episode of Owners Only with Corporate Natalie here:

The News

Bryson DeChambeau (2.6 million YouTube subscribers), Grant Horvat (1.6 million), and the Bryan Bros (800,000) just formed a network. Combined: 100 million hours of annual watch time, 14 million monthly viewers, 82% aged 18 to 49. Most of them watching on their living room TV.

That's a television audience. This week, they started acting like one.

Source Media Group launched Source Golf, a YouTube-based network that packages these channels into a single advertising buy. Year-round daily inventory. No tournament windows. No cable bundle. The creators keep their channels, their formats, their editorial independence. Source Golf sells the ads against the combined inventory.

The money behind it: Bolt Ventures, the investment arm of David Blitzer (Blackstone chairman, 76ers and Devils co-owner), led a Series A earlier this year. The co-founder, Steve Strand, spent 13 years at Nike rising to Director of North America Brand Narrative. He knows where brand dollars go.

The Operator Take

The PGA Tour ran the Creator Classic in 2024 and 2025, borrowing creator audiences to reach younger fans. In 2026, they didn't schedule one. So the creators built their own network.

Traditional golf advertising means buying the Masters or the U.S. Open. Four weekends a year. Massive CPMs. No continuity. Source Golf offers the opposite: daily inventory, year-round, priced at digital rates, on the screen where the audience already watches.

Grant Horvat left Good Good Golf in 2022 to build his own channel. He has equity in Takomo Golf, a club brand he grew through his content. DeChambeau turned his channel into one of the most-watched athlete pages on YouTube. These aren't influencers waiting for brand deals. They're operators who own their distribution.

And now they've figured out the next step. Individual reach is valuable. Coordinated distribution is worth multiples of it. That's what Source Golf is. Three creators who realized that packaging their audiences together and selling it like television gets them ad dollars none of them could command alone.

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