In today’s talent ventures landscape, talent has realized the power of leveraging their brand and their reach more than ever before. Talent has leveraged their brands to create their own businesses, invest in startups, receive equity stakes in startups/businesses, and more. Typically, talent would get paid for social posts and/or promotion in exchange for a certain dollar amount. These types of deals still occur. However, after 50 Cent’s equity deal success with Vitamin Water, Ashton Kutcher’s success with startup investing, and George Clooney’s success with Casamigos (just to name a few), some talent started to realize the power of equity and long-term value creation versus paid sponsorships only. In this article, I’ll cover examples of the talent-led businesses being built, deals being done today, current trends, and where I believe opportunity exists in the market.

The music industry culturally is one of the most important industries. Musicians shape culture in numerous ways: live entertainment, liquor, fashion, jewelry, cars, and lifestyle. For as much impact as artists have from a cultural and financial perspective (how much consumers spend because of them), music artists have been underpaid. The music industry generates about $43B in revenue a year. However, only 12 percent of that goes to artists. Artists receive the bulk of their income from streaming, touring, and merchandise sales. Unless you are a mid-tier to A list artist, gaining income from streaming is incredibly hard, which means most artists cannot be an artist full-time.

I have been a sports fan all my life. I grew up in a household where we watched College Gameday every Saturday morning before college football games began, we watched every NFL game every Sunday & Monday Night, never missed playoff games for the NFL or NBA (and sometimes MLB depending on who the stars were that season), never missed the Super Bowl, the NBA Championship, March Madness, or the College Football Championship. As a result, sports became a huge part of my life. I played baseball, football, and basketball competitively from an early age up until I was in high school.

I have been going down the rabbithole within the crypto ecosystem over the last year - doing everything from: personally investing into tokens/protocols, buying NFTs, evaluating crypto startups for investment, investing in crypto startups, evaluating NFT media startups for investment, creating web3 strategies for creators & athletes, educating/advising creators of the perks of web3 and how those perks apply to them and their businesses, facilitating brand partnerships, participating in DAOs, evaluating DAOs, strategizing music NFTs releases with musicians, and the list goes on.