The 5 best episodes on building a founder personal brand

00:0010 years ago, companies bought attention. Think about the billboards, the Super Bowl commercials, and all the other TV spots, even radio advertising. Today, companies are trying to borrow that same attention, but from people. The creator ad spin has gone crazy. It was projected at 37 billion in 2025, and it's up 26% year over year. It's about four times faster than media overall. My claim, and what I believe is happening is we're going from the creator economy and the small phase of just making content. Now we're at the next level, what I'm calling the media stack. What's up founders and investors? Thank you for tuning into another episode of Next Round. Ready. I'm the host, Chris, and today I want to get into where I just see all of this going in terms of the creators and the creator economy, all the different tools being created, how AI plays a part in it, everything.

01:02For context, I'm somebody that's been creating content since 2014. I started off in a little studio apartment, recording episodes in my bathroom. I've been doing this for over a decade now. I've launched well over 50 shows, gotten well past 1,000,000 downloads. I mean, who counts stuff like that at this point doesn't really matter. And I have been able to work with major brands such as Sea Geek, Nike, even NFLA little bit. Overall, I can see where everything is going in the direction that we are moving in. And just for some proof, I want to kind of show you what's happening in the marketplace right now. Open the Eye recently bought the show back in 2026. So just for a little proof, I want to break down exactly where we are and what's happening right now. Back in April of this year, Open AI bought the show TBPN. If you're not in tech, you probably never heard of it. This is a show that goes live literally every day or every weekday, obviously talking about what's happening in a tech space, the startup world, all of that stuff. They bought the show. Think about this and it was a multi $1,000,000 purchase.

02:02It wasn't like a couple dollars here there. It's a massive, massive purchase. Instead of just running ads traditionally. Then you got companies like Sofi, Medtronic, even Microsoft that are bringing creators in house. I've even seen applications for Amazon and Google. All these places are trying to hire more creators. Firms such as Rivion are hiring senior content managers for the in house creative studios. I think this is where everything is going. But that's just phase one of the process. How this is really tied together is what I'm calling the media stack and it's really has five distinct layers. First is production. This is making content easier to produce and create. Again, I've been doing this over 10 years, so I've used pretty much all the tools available and when new stuff comes out, I'm checking it out all the time. I was podcasting back when we had Blog Talk Radio, before we had Spreaker and all of that stuff. I've been doing this for a long time. So I've seen the new tools being produced and I know that a lot more is coming.

03:03At one point you needed to have a bunch of equipment in a massive studio. I remember working to get to this point now where I own a bunch of microphones and cameras and lights are everywhere. I have sound panels all up in this office. This is just my production studio. But in online world, you don't have to have that stuff anymore because so many tools are being created every single day. So if you're just a regular person, you can still look like you have a $15,000 studio like I do. Another set of tools coming up now are distribution tools. These are going to make it easier for your products, your services, whatever you have to be seen on every single platform. Really, just think about this. Companies before needed to hire a whole production agency to come in. If they wanted to produce content. You'd have to pay the person that owns the cameras, that owns the microphones to come into your office or something, record a bunch of stuff, and then you could put that out and then when you put it out, it goes nowhere. Now that stuff can be distributed at a higher level, and this is one of the areas that I think is going to blow up the fastest.

04:04Being able to put out a video or a newsletter, an article or whatever, and then have it distributed across all of these platforms. It's just a game changer. Imagine the tool where as soon as you put out a new podcast episode, if somebody searched for that specific topic within Claude ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever it is, your podcast pops up at the top. That's a game changer. And I see a lot of tools like this all the time from founders. The third layer of the media stack is the partner layer. This is where a lot of the marketplaces are popping up every single day, where there's some kind of creators being connected with the business owners. There are different marketplaces, different tools being set up now, and it's honestly amazing because it's going to help a lot more creators get paid, but more importantly, it's going to help a lot of the businesses connect with the right creators for their company. The founder that doesn't want to create content can simply go out and hire 50 different creators from one of these platforms. A lot of businesses are going to put money into this.

05:04So obviously that platform that's conducting all of this business, building all these relationships is going to be very, very profitable, whether they charge subscriptions or if they just take fees off the top of every deal that's closed. One of the most important layers in this new age world we live in is the protection layer. Now that we have so many people using AI to make content, people are going to have to protect their IPA lot more. My concept right now, I'm explaining to you the media stack concept. It's just one of many I plan on rolling out over the next few weeks. At the same time as I put this content out, I want to protect my ideas and my concepts, my opinions, my perspective. That's where the protection of content comes into play. Where if an AI platform does take this concept because they've heard me saying the video on YouTube or it's on one of my podcast episodes or an article on Twitter, I'm credited for that. I'm seeing a lot of tools that are going to protect creators in their IP. I think this is going to be really, really big for artists. And you know, everybody who makes all types of art, not just the YouTuber or the podcaster, but the person who is literally drawing art nonetheless.

06:08But probably the most underrated layer is measurement. We don't have the best ways to measure content. How great it was, our quality was, how impactful it was to different audiences. I think now that content can show up in these AI search engines, it's going to become even more important because when the companies were putting money into ads on TV and on billboards and stuff, they had different ways to measure that. You can't take the same way you would measure the success of a billboard campaign to how you measure a video campaign on Facebook or a UGC creator campaign strictly on TikTok. We're going to need new tools in this space to track all of this stuff in the different levels of success. So as you can see, the media stack is just completely fast. It's a lot going on, but this is really good and means different things for each level. So for founders, if you're building space, you got to understand that you need to build something that cannot be duplicated overnight. And I know that's really hard and it's bland and you hear it all the time because of this AI stuff. The way I like to think about it is if I'm going to build something right now, I need to have a way that I can distribute it faster than everybody else.

07:17And I think about it like this. How long would it take me to get 50 customers? Like, could I reach out to 50 people that will buy this thing? If I can't do that, I probably can't distribute it at a high level #2 when it comes to the technology, can I build some kind of data layer that can't be accessed by anybody else? Because with AI, people can duplicate everything literally overnight. So any product I'm going to build has to be built on my years of experience, my skill set data I have for other people within this industry. And I'm trying to compound on that. A rule of thumb is if you're just building a feature set that Canva or YouTube or cap cut, one of these other platforms can come in and duplicate overnight, then you don't have an actual company. You need to build something that cannot be stolen that way because you have some kind of cheat code of access. This is why your experience is so important. Even a team you work with, the people who are around is so important. The media stack also is going to impact a lot of brands and operators, right? You got to think about what is your advantage and where do you live in this space? Because I've talked to so many agency owners who they might have a way for you to find partners. Like I see I get these DM DMS all the time on LinkedIn where people are like, hey, I can help you connect with so and so, and that's valuable.

08:33But I think where you need to be going is another layer, right? Not just I can help you partner with these people, I'm going to measure your results. So if you're an agency owner, for example, and you help brands make content, that's great, but you need to have another layer that is proprietary to you and your system and your process to measure the results of their campaigns, right? That's the next level. Then if you have a way you can help distribute your clients content, you see how every time you add a layer, you become more and more valuable. Now this space is also going to impact investors. If you're an investor, you cannot look at this any longer as it's just a creator economy. We're past that, bro. It's so much more than just this individual creator in their basement, this little podcaster. It's not that anymore. We're at a whole nother level where creators are impacting our elections, they're impacting these multibillion dollar companies. If the bigger brands like Andreessen Horowitz, you know, Y Combinator, the biggest firms in the world, they manage billions of dollars, are leveraging content, are paying creators, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollar every year, you got to take it seriously. Like I think a lot of firms are going to get left behind because they don't want to take content seriously and it has to go past just you recording a video or two per week for your Instagram account or TikTok page.

09:51That's not enough. You have to be all in on this. And if you're not, you're going to get left behind. So I believe every company is going to be a media company in some way at every single level, whether you're outsourcing to individual creators, using marketplaces to do that, whether you are connecting with creators and you bring them into your company and you have have them on payroll. Every company is going to be committed in the creator space overall over the next couple weeks. I'll keep breaking this down on my Friday episodes. Make sure you subscribe. If you're a founder, make sure you complete the fundability assessment. Send me a company I love looking at new decks and checking out companies, all of that stuff. If you're an investor, make sure you connect with me on LinkedIn and we can talk some more. I'm Chris. I will see you next time.