The Landlord Changed (But The Rent Is Still Due)

📔 Jeff’s Diary (yes, I’ll let you read it)

No matter what you’re building, the first thing you should do is write down who the top 10 potential partnerships are that if they all announced to their customers what you’re building, would take your business to the next level.

Partnerships are the best way to scale. If you're acquiring customers via hand-to-hand combat, you just don't have the resources to win as many customers as you could if you simply found who already had the trust of your customers, and is willing to partner to extend that trust to you.

Then you should look at which 10 creators who influence your customers would be the 10 trusted partners at the person-to-person level.

If you combine partnerships (B2B partnerships, brand-to-brand partnerships) with P2P partnerships (people-to-people partnerships), a creator, an influencer, an athlete, a musician; the person who your customer listens to and trusts, that's where you really create accelerated scale.

That’s where I decided I failed. I teach this to founders every day, yet as I’ve self-reflected, it’s apparent ‘Have I executed this strategy myself?'

So I paused the daily email responding to customers and got back to first principle thinking.

I now have 10 potential partners and 10 potential creators lined up who I can't wait to announce in the coming weeks and months.

And if you think there's a great opportunity to partner with us, as a person or a brand, I want to hear from you because we have hundreds of founders, thousands of creators, and tons of managers and talent agencies that we talk to every single day.

If our customers are your potential clients and your customers are our potential clients, that's where the best partnerships come to fruition.

And I’m all about partnering to scale, so should you.

Mwah. 😘

– Jeff

📆 WHAT WE WILL HIT ON THIS WEEK:

→ Every Founder Must Know: The TikTok deal is finalized. Here is what the new "US Joint Venture" actually means for your distribution.

→ The Asset Upgrade: YouTube just dropped a feature that turns your old videos into "Real Estate" by letting you swap ads in the back catalog.

→ Required Reading: Jeff sat down with The Growth List to explain why the next billion-dollar brands won't be started by founders—they’ll be started by creators.

🇺🇸 The "American" TikTok

It went down to the wire, but the deal is done. As of yesterday, TikTok is safe in the US, but it looks different. A new "US Joint Venture" with Oracle and Silver Lake has been finalized to satisfy the Executive Order. Oracle and Silver Lake now own a 50% stake in the new US entity, and the algorithm is being "retrained" on US soil.

Why this matters: 

For the last two years, the "Ban" was the biggest excuse in the boardroom. "We can't invest heavily in short-form because it might disappear." That excuse is gone.

But here is the reality check: Private Equity doesn't buy things to make them "fun." They buy things to monetize them. Expect the "Enshittification" curve to accelerate.

• More ad load.

• Higher costs to boost posts.

• Stricter "Brand Safety" guidelines that kill the raw, unpolished content that actually converts.

The Lesson for Founders: 

The "Wild West" era of TikTok is over. It is now a legacy media asset. The founders who won in 2023-2025 were the ones who rode the organic reach.

The founders who will win in 2026 are the ones who treat TikTok like a funnel, not a destination. Do not build your house on Oracle's land. Use their land to drive traffic to your list.

⏳ YouTube Invented Time Travel

In a blog post on Wednesday, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan dropped a feature that flew under the radar but changes the unit economics of content completely. Creators can now swap out branded segments in their "back catalog" of videos.

The News: 

YouTube is rolling out AI-driven tools that allow for dynamic insertion of content and even the use of a creator's likeness in Shorts. Previously, if a creator read an ad for "Casper Mattress" in a video from 2022, that ad lived there forever. It was a "static" asset. Now, the inventory is dynamic. A video from 3 years ago can sell a product from today.

The Operator Take: 

This is the moment Content becomes Software.

If you are a brand, you typically pay for "News Feed" placement (Instagram/TikTok). That inventory expires in 24 hours. YouTube just turned its inventory into Perpetual Real Estate.

You can now buy a sponsorship on a "Classic Video" that gets 50k views a month, every month, forever. Stop buying "New Impressions." Start buying "Legacy Trust." Find the creators with the best library, not the best viral hit.

⚖️ The "Slop" Resistance

A massive coalition of creators launched a campaign yesterday to fight back against Big Tech's "AI Scraping." This isn't just about copyright. It's about value capture.

The News: 

Nearly 800 creators, including major artists and authors (Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, Joseph Gordon-Levitt), are demanding licensing deals for the data used to train AI models. They are saying: "If you want to replace us, you have to pay us first."

The Operator Take: 

This reinforces the bifurcation we’ve been warning you about.

• The "Renters" (AI Companies) want free data to build commodity content.

• The "Owners" (Creators) are locking down their IP.

If you are a founder using generic AI copy for your brand voice, you are building on a crumbling foundation.

The future of brand equity isn't in "perfect" AI text. It's in the messy, human, legally protected work of real creators.

Slop is a depreciating asset. Trust is a compounding one. Buy the trust.

💄 The "Sephora Effect"

This week, Natalie Barbu released a thesis on The Growth List that gives a name to the shift we've all been feeling: "The Sephora Effect."

The News: 

Natalie’s article—which is centered around a sit-down interview with our very own Jeff Frommer, CEO of OWM—argues that "Brand IP" is dead. Walk into Sephora. You don't see logos anymore. You see people. Fenty (Rihanna), Rare (Selena), Rhode (Hailey).

Natalie points out that legacy conglomerates are losing shelf space because they are trying to buy attention, while creators are simply monetizing the trust they already own.

The Operator Take: 

Natalie is spot on. As we discussed in the interview, the next billion-dollar brands won't be started by "business" founders.

They will be started by creators (like Alix Earle with Poppi) who own the distribution first. You can't "buy" the kind of loyalty that makes a customer walk into a store and grab a product because of the person on the box. If you are a founder, read her piece. Then ask yourself: Who is my distribution partner?

Listen to the entire conversation here:

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