The HotStart VC Podcast

Azhar Muhammad is the COO of Paradigm Sports, the athlete representation firm behind some of the most successful athlete-founded companies in the world, including Conor McGregor's Proper 12 Irish Whiskey, which sold for $600 million just three years after launching, and Dakota Ditcheva's Vann Norway fine water brand. Paradigm Sports is not your typical athlete representation firm. While most firms...

Yoni Bierig is the co-founder of Tempted, a wine-based ready-to-drink Shirley Temple cocktail co-founded with influencer, DJ, and entrepreneur Sommer Ray, whose previous company Imarais Beauty was just acquired. Yoni had no experience in the beverage industry when he started Tempted. But when he met Sommer at dinner in Atlantic City and they both ordered Shirley Temples, the idea clicked. What sta...

Deborah Benton is the founder and Managing Partner of Willow Growth Partners, an emerging growth consumer fund that has backed some of the most successful celebrity- and creator-founded brands in the market, including Katy Perry's De Soi, Gal Gadot's Goodles, and Molly Sims' YSE Beauty. She spent most of her career as an operator in consumer brands before launching Willow in 2020. The gap she saw...

Kristina Subbotina is a creator entrepreneur and startup lawyer with tens of thousands of followers who built an audience sharing real legal horror stories from her decade in Big Law, and used that platform to launch Lexsy, an AI-powered legal operating system for startups. It started with a push from an unlikely source. A General Partner at A16Z spent five months relentlessly sending Kristina con...

John Foraker is the co-founder and CEO of Once Upon a Farm, a fresh organic baby and kids food brand co-founded with Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner that recently IPO'd at a $724 million valuation on the New York Stock Exchange. John wasn't one of the original founders. Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz started the company in 2015, and John came on as an early angel investor after spending nearly 15...

Sherry Wong is a creator entrepreneur with hundreds of thousands of followers across social media and the founder of Roster, an AI hiring platform for the creator economy trusted by some of the world's biggest creators like the Stokes Twins, Jesser, and Preston. She's been creating content since 2011, back when being a YouTuber wasn't even considered cool. But while scaling her platform, Sherry ke...

Ghita El Haitmy, known online as TechBible, is a creator entrepreneur with over 400,000 followers teaching technology on social media and the founder of Eli, an AI-powered platform that auto-detects your entire tech stack, eliminates software waste, and recommends the right tools for your business. It started during COVID. Ghita was building a computer vision startup and needed users fast, so she...

Haven Lough is a 19-year-old creator entrepreneur with over 5 million followers across social media and the founder of Haven, a skincare brand built for sensitive, acne-prone skin with ingredients you can actually trust. It started with his sister. She was spending all her money on skincare, but she only cared how popular and cool the brand looked, not how healthy the ingredients were. At the same...

Aris is a creator entrepreneur with over 3 million followers and 3 billion views, best known for his viral skits as a French rich kid on his account The European Kid. That platform became the foundation for Storytime, a hyper-local marketplace matching businesses with creators in their neighborhood, where creators pay with content and businesses pay with experiences, effectively creating a new cur...

Jay is a creator entrepreneur with over 13 million followers teaching English on social media, and the founder of BigBean, a language learning app that teaches English through AI generated images and videos instead of traditional translation methods. Before building his own, he spent years using that reach to help other language learning apps grow, working with companies that reached valuations ov...

Matthew Postlethwaite is best known for his role in Peaky Blinders, but these days, he's spending less time on set and more time disrupting the beverage industry with Proda, a protein soda with 10 grams of protein, zero sugar, and the taste of an actual soda. It started with his grandmother. She was losing her hair from protein deficiency, so Matthew sent her protein shakes. She barely touched the...

Genevieve Gilbreath is a General Partner at Springdale Ventures, an early-stage consumer fund that has backed some of the most successful celebrity and creator-founded brands in the market, including Feastables by MrBeast, Goodles with Gal Gadot, and The Absorption Company with Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder. Her thesis: celebrity and creator founders aren't the business model itself. They're the...

Jackie Fast is a General Partner at Sandbox Studios, a fund that exclusively invests in celebrity-founded brands, with a portfolio that includes Dr. Bombay by Snoop Dogg and Safely by Kris Jenner. Before launching Sandbox in 2022, she founded Slingshot Sponsorship, helping brands like the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Elton John leverage celebrity influence to reach new audiences. Her thesis: celebr...

Tayla Cannon is a creator entrepreneur and physiotherapist who built a 170,000-follower audience sharing her approach to rehab and training after years of chronic back pain. That platform became the launchpad for Rebuildr, a technology platform transforming how physical therapy is delivered through asynchronous, continuous care. Her thesis: the current model of reactive, once-a-week appointments d...

Megan Lightcap is a partner at Slow Ventures, where she leads a $60 million fund investing directly into creator entrepreneurs. Her thesis: the best creator bets of the next decade won't just be on great content. They'll be on founder-creators who build entire worlds around their audience. Unlike other funds, including HotStart VC, Slow doesn't invest in the individual companies creators launch li...

Zeke Bronfman co-founded The Absorption Company alongside Twilight and Vampire Diaries actors Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder, and deliberately kept them off the packaging and website. Because this isn't a celebrity brand. The only celebrity here is bioavailability. This is a masterclass in using celebrity founders the right way: as a distribution lever, not a brand identity. After selling their ze...

When London Lazar hit 10 million followers across social media by recreating Home Alone frame-by-frame every Christmas, he didn't follow the typical creator playbook of slapping his face on a white-labeled product and calling it a day. Instead, he made a decision that would have terrified most creators: he walked away from daily posting, ditched the audience that took years to build, and went all-...

When Hannah Williams discovered she was being underpaid by $25,000 as a senior data analyst in 2021, she didn't just negotiate a raise or quietly move on. Instead, she picked up a camera, started asking strangers on the street how much they make, and accidentally built one of the fastest-growing media platforms in the creator economy. Within three weeks of posting her first video, Hannah had quit...

When Ben Guez sold his previous tech company, he didn't follow the typical founder playbook of taking time off or jumping straight into another startup. Instead, he picked up his phone during COVID lockdown, started creating content on TikTok (because he was too embarrassed to post on Instagram where his family could see), and accidentally discovered something that would become his next venture. N...

When Sam Cutler decided to take on the wellness industry, she didn't follow the typical creator playbook of launching another white-labeled supplement or skincare line. Instead, she bootstrapped Mindfull—a nutrition intelligence platform that's replacing calorie counting with real food education—and proved that creators can build tech companies that scale beyond their personal brand. But here's wh...

When Avni Barman quit her dream product management job in Big Tech with literally no backup plan, she had already spent seven years trying to make her entrepreneurship dreams work—launching five different business ideas, raising funding, hiring a team, and ultimately shutting it all down because none of it felt right. But here's the twist: in that moment of rock-bottom desperation with no money, n...

When Julia Straus partnered with 15-year-old creator Salish Matter and her father Jordan Matter to launch Sincerely Yours, she had no idea their American Dream Mall debut would draw over 80,000 fans and literally shut down the entire shopping center. But here's what makes this story different from every other celebrity skincare launch flooding Sephora: Julia brought decades of consumer brand exper...

When Joshua Cohen co-founded Tubefilter in 2007, YouTube was just two years old and the term "creator economy" didn't even exist. While mainstream media dismissed online video as "stupid shit kids are putting online," Joshua saw something different: a fundamental shift in who gets to tell stories, build audiences, and create careers outside the traditional Hollywood gatekeepers. Now, nearly two de...

When Jerome Aceti started uploading content in 2008 at just 14 years old, he had no idea he was beginning a streak that would last over 13 years—publishing at least one piece of content every single day since 2012. Now, with over 8 million subscribers across platforms and a portfolio that includes co-founding multiple startups, investing in others, and even becoming an LP in several venture capita...

When Katie Hunt received a random LinkedIn message asking if he'd ever thought about starting a celebrity brand, he had no idea he was about to co-found a pet care company with Kaley Cuoco—one of the highest-paid actors in television history who made $150 million from The Big Bang Theory. But here's what makes Oh Norman! different from every other celebrity pet brand flooding the market: Kaley run...