Investing Billions - E143: From Fame to Fortune: How Celebrities Turn Fame into Billion-Dollar Brands

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

In this episode of How I Invest, I interview Scott van den Berg, an expert in celebrity-founded brands and the managing partner of Hotstar VC. Scott shares deep insights into how celebrities are leveraging their platforms to build billion-dollar businesses and why some partnerships thrive while others fail. We discuss the shift in celebrity investments, the rise of creator-led brands, and key lessons from success stories like Ryan Reynolds' Mint Mobile, Kim Kardashian's Skims, and George Clooney's Casamigos.

Tell me about your team. A little bit about my team and myself. We have been involved in 55 celebrity-founded brands, including some of the most successful ones. So I've worked with a lot of celebrities over the last couple of years to help them do equity deals with startups. And I've also been like an angel investor

in companies of people like Selena Gomez, DJ Khaled. We are obviously co-investors in Jake Paul's Better and some others. And I also create a lot of content online about celebrity-founded brands. So whenever people are thinking about launching their own brand as a celebrity, oftentimes I'm one of the first people that they reach out to. And then the rest of my team consists of people like Ben Aykot, who co-founded Feastables together with MrBeast. That company is doing like $400 million in revenue in the second year of business. So one of the

fastest growing consumer brands ever. Another one on my team is actually one of the co-founders of the Honest Company, Christopher Gaffigan, which he started with Jessica Auva and IPO'd in 2021. Honest Company and Feastables are two of the most successful celebrity founded brands. So we like to think that beyond capital, we can also add expertise to these portfolio companies. How did Ryan Reynolds sell Mint Mobile in three years for $1.35 billion?

The company was founded in 2015 and Ryan Reynolds was actually an early customer and he absolutely loved the product. And they were able to strike a deal in 2019 where he became like a co-owner of the brand and also got like a 25% equity stake. And this allowed Mint Mobile to leverage Ryan Reynolds, millions of followers to basically promote the product for free. And this is something that traditional brands have to pay millions of dollars for. When it comes to Ryan Reynolds, he not only did it with Mint Mobile, he also did it with Wrexham Football Club and Aviation,

Gin. What is his unfair advantage? I think his real unfair advantage is actually the way how he looks at business in comparison to other celebrities. So to be honest, like having a celebrity nowadays in full-fitted company is quite a commodity. There's like thousands of startups that have like a celebrity co-founder, co-owner, creative director, whatever title you wanna give it.

And if you also look at the type of companies that they want to align themselves with, it's often like luxurious products or aspirational products, that type of companies often in saturated markets. And then Ryan Reynolds had like a click and said, why am I not focusing on unsexy, highly practical companies? So that's why he's focused on data communication. He's involved with one password, a password protection company. Those companies still have like high acquisition costs. So

thinking, Hey, can I leverage my platform? So instead of being a walking billboard today promoting this and then tomorrow promoting something else, he works together with four or five companies on a day to day basis and promote those companies for the next five to 10 years. That's what he does. He's not working with 20 or 30 companies at the same time. You help startups partner with celebrities in order to found and scale brands. What's important when you think about combining a startup with a celebrity. These companies always have to be product first. Obviously having a celebrity on board will help sell the product, but they

might have sell the first product, but the quality of product is actually going to determine that people buy a second, third and fourth product. They always have to be product first instead of like a celebrity first. It's also really important is that there's an authentic fit between the celebrity and the brand. We call this celebrity product market fit, where basically the brand is aligned with the celebrities persona, content, and audience before you actually make a jump in making this person like a co-owner or co-founder of the brand. We call this like dating before you get married. So you first get dating, then you obviously get in a relationship, then

get engaged and then you get married. And this also makes it much more authentic. I think it's always so random when a new celebrity launched like a new hot sauce brand while they never talked about this openly. And you're like, okay, why are you an authority in hot sauce? And they're like, oh, I ate it with every dish. And I'm like, okay, but you never talked about this openly. Whereas like, if you have been working together with this brand, and after six months, you say, hey, let's partner up and become like a co-founder. The audience is like, Oh, this makes so much sense because there's a deeper alignment there.

Lastly, I would say is having a strategy. You need to have a clear plan in order to make sure you can leverage the celebrities platform persona and networks to accelerate the growth of your company and make sure your product is part of their story as well. There's a lot of celebrities startup partnerships that haven't worked. What are some partnerships that have worked? If you're on a fund, then you know. Having instant access to fund insights, modeling, and forecasting are critical for producing returns, which is why I recommend Tactic by Carta. With Tactic

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It's founded by an influencer called Danny Austin. She's like a lifestyle content creator who talks about their whole life online. And it got to a point where she was like, experienced a lot of stress and that lead to like a lot of hair loss. And then she got to a point where like, I don't want to talk like in front of the camera anymore because I'm a little bit insecure. After a month, she was like, why don't I share this as well with my followers? Because I've been open about my whole life. So she started to talk openly about it. Tens of thousands of women were like, wow, thank you so much for being open because normally influencers are just showcasing the good and never the bad.

And yeah, really helping her followers be more comfortable. And then she was like, Hey, why am I actually not going one step further? Why don't I work together with like an R and D team for 12 months to find like a solution? So that's where she actually created DV hair, which is a hair serum, which helps you fight hair loss. First year that company did $40 million in sales and this influence only had 2 million followers. So I think a lot of times people are mistaken, the follower count thinking, oh, the bigger,

the better. But sometimes it's just about community and finding that perfect audience fit with the product that they're selling. If I'm a founder and I started a consumer brand that may make sense to partner with a celebrity, walk me through the process. I would go about finding the right celebrity for my brand. Recruiting first, so like going through multiple profiles to understand who would be the right fit. Obviously, first have to also create a persona. So what are you looking for from this person? Who's your audience? And make sure that that audience is overlapping with the celebrity. Also

finding out what is their personal mission. How much do they still have left in the tank? A lot of celebrities, they're very successful. They've made hundreds of millions of dollars. Are they still going to care about your little startup wanting to make it another success working for the next five to ten years? Really understanding also the celebrities mission and then you just have to connect with them. So whether it's like a direct connection or fire the management agencies, and if they're interested, you can basically go to the recruitment process where you're like interviewing them,

understanding their personal missions, understanding if they're fit, having them test the product and then doing that multiple times. I have a big mistake is that people always fall in love with the celebrity to able to get in touch with a celebrity. And then, yeah, they're kind of starstruck because this person has 20 million followers. And then they're like, what if only 5% of these 20 million followers will buy the product? I'm going to be like a billionaire. But that's not the way I should think about this. You should really think about, OK, who's the right person, not only from an audience perspective,

but also from a personal perspective, who can help my company move forward. What are the most common mistakes that brands make when partnering with a celebrity? Not doing enough due diligence on the celebrity. They're able to get in touch with a celebrity or via tele-management agencies, they're being proposed to a celebrity. After one meeting, they're like,

okay, we really have to work together with this person instead of actually looking at their audience and seeing if it makes sense, they immediately jumped to the gun and they say, oh, let's become like co-founders here. You have a 20% stake in my company and let's work together. Then they do a couple of posts and they find out it's not leading to anything. And now you have a disappointing startup and a disappointed celebrity who's also not motivating to keep on promoting the brand, but now that person is like an equity owner in your company.

So it makes it really hard to get rid of each other. So that's why it's really important to date before we get married. And another mistake that a lot of these stars make is actually that they're kind of becoming too dependent on celebrity. So they're taking a celebrity first approach instead of a product first approach. Let's say you partner with an actress and that actress has to shoot a movie for the next two months in Hollywood, she's not going to be as involved with your company as before.

So you see these spikes in revenue and that is definitely something that you want to avoid. We always kind of should build your company that is supported by the celebrity instead of dependent on. When you're dealing with celebrities, you're not only dealing with them, you're dealing with their managers, with agencies. What is it like dealing with these gatekeepers? Thank you for listening. To join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes, please click

the follow button above to subscribe. It's kind of a love hate relationship. It's a great question because kind of their business model is not really aligned with my business model, whereas I'm really focusing on long-term equity value. The traditional business model of these telemanagers is that they get a 10 to 20% cut of whatever the celebrity makes. And unlike a celebrity who has a lot of money and can say, Hey, I don't care about my next pay cut, but I want equity or want to build my own company.

A lot of these telemanagement agencies, they have to pay their employees. They have to pay rent. They have to pay utilities, the individual managers, they have to pay their employees, they have to pay rent, they have to pay utilities. The individual managers, they have targets. Those targets are based on cash that they bring in, which gives them bonuses, which gives them promotions. So naturally, they have a tendency to focus on cash over equity deals. Slowly, these tele-management agencies are getting a little bit more entrepreneurial, but yeah, they're kind of still stuck in the old way of thinking. So whenever you approach them with like an equity deal, they're like, oh, we want equity

plus cash. And then you're like, okay, let's hope they just say 25 or 50K just as a sign of good will. And then they're like, no, in addition to the equity, we want to get like a high six or even a seven figure cash check. No seed or series A startup, just have a million dollar laying around for a celebrity, not knowing what they're going to get in return. So that is just quite frustrating to be respectful. A lot of them are talent managers. They're not venture investors. So they don't know how to analyze these companies.

The questions that you get in these calls, it's like the first question without actually having any context is like, when are you going to exit your company? And I'm like, well, maybe we should start with the mission and understand what the mission is and why they're doing this, what is unique about the company and then talk about the exit later. Because we're talking about early stage companies. And also if you approach them and you have like deal A, which is like a very high growth company, they have product market fit, but they only want to offer equity. And they have deal B, a normal startup, I would say don't have product market fit, but they're willing to pay equity plus cash. The manager's influencing the celebrity to do deal B. And what is very frustrating is three

years down the line, company three goes bankrupt, of B goes bankrupt. And then internally, the management firm is like, oh, we shouldn't do equity deals because it's not paying off. And I'm like, yeah, of course, because you're not picking the right companies, because if you pick company A, you actually would have been very successful even without the celebrity involvement. But luckily, a lot of them are now getting more entrepreneurial. The largest ones even get their own venture departments, but it's more like an exemption to the rule. And they're kind of being forced to as well.

Their clients, their celebrities are like, Hey, my peers have been very successful in the space, so can you actually get me similar deals? So are they being forced to search for these deals? And if they can't find them, the celebrity is going to walk out of the door, including their 10 to 20% cut that they normally get. It's interesting because there's this effect of seeing your neighbors or your friends get big exit. In Silicon Valley, nobody really believed in equity until their next door neighbor got

$10 million or $20 million as an engineer from Google or Facebook. And then it started to become real. It started to become visceral. And I think same thing is happening in the celebrity world, where you mentioned all the successful startups. The more that proliferate, the more celebrities will take equity. Post earnings reports are more than just a data dump. They're a goldmine of opportunities waiting to be unlocked.

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Yeah, there's like FOMO going on, like all the celebrities are now, oh wow, okay, I also have to start my own company. And unfortunately, there's like a lot of bad players in the space were like taking advantage of that just saying, okay, I have this wide label product, let's just put your name on it and try to sell it. It doesn't add any value or solving any problems. So it's just more superb products and oversaturated markets. So hot stuff, we see is a new font from which we are investing in brands founded by celebrities and creators. And what has been interesting is that they have started to build their own audiences online, and then now creating businesses on top of it. And it all has to do with their competitive advantage in company building as they have a building audience. They can basically drive near instant traction to their companies for free by simply posting on their social media channels. And that is something that traditional brands have to pay millions of dollars for. But not only that, it can also help you with retail, it can help you

with investors, it can help you with PR. So there's a lot of benefits to these celebrity brands. And it has already resulted in companies like Skims by Kim Kardashian, which has set the IPO this year for $4 billion. Minmobile by Ryan Reynolds, we got like acquired for $1.35 billion. At Prime from Logan Paul and KSI, we did like $1.2 billion in sales in the first two years of business and many more seeing growth that traditional consumer brands have never seen before. And this is just the beginning.

Literally every single celebrity is thinking about launching their own brand after seeing the successes of their peers. That leads to a lot of deal flow. We don't really care about the next celebrity tequila or beauty or para company. We don't care about celebrities launching products in over saturated markets. We care about celebrities launching in offer to products and services that solve real customer problems. Those are the types of companies that we would like to invest in. Tell me about your team. A little bit about my team and myself. So we have been involved in 55 celebrity founded brands, including some of

the most successful ones. So I've worked with a lot of celebrities over the last couple of years to help them do equity deals with startups. And I've also been like an angel investor in companies of people like Selena Gomez, DJ Khaled. We are officially co-investors in Jake Paul's Better and some others. And I also create a lot of content online about celebrity founded brands. So whenever like people are thinking

about launching their own brand as a celebrity, oftentimes I'm one of the first people that they reach out to. And then the rest of my team consists of people like Ben Aicot who co-founded Feastables together with MrBeast. And that company is doing like $400 million in revenue in a second year of business. So one of the fastest growing consumer brands ever.

Another one on my team is actually one of the co-founders of the Honest Company, Christopher Gaffigan, which he started with Jessica Alba and IPO'd in 2021. Honest Company and Feastables are two of the most successful celebrity founded brands. for Goffey Gun, which he started with Jessica Alva and IPO in 2021. Honest Company and Feastables are two of the most successful celebrity founded brands. So we like to think that beyond capital, we can also add expertise to these portfolio companies. Why do so many celebrities launch tequila brands? So let's start with a statistic.

So in 2018, there were 40 celebrity liquor brands. Today there's more than 800. And probably as we ask like a celebrity why they say yeah we like to align ourselves with like high quality brands that showcase talent sophistication and that aligns well with premium spirits. I think that's BS. I think the real answer is something along the lines of the celebrities saw the successes of Casamigos from George Clooney, Aff mid-month aviation gin of Ryan Reynolds, Theramana Tequila of The Rock, Conor McGregor, JC,

they were all very successful in the space, thinking that they can replicate the successes. They're like, oh, I have a similar amount of followers, so probably I will be as successful, or even I have half of the followers, so maybe in four years' time, I can get half of the billion that George Clooney got. George Clooney famously sold Casamigos for a billion dollars.

Why was he able to pull that off? His team. So George Clooney was just one of the components, but he actually had a very experienced team who did it before in the industry. So yeah, fired that network. They were able to get in all the distributors. And then also it took him like more than 10 years to do it. Like, obviously they sold their company within four years to do it. Like, obviously, they sold their company within four years, but there was a contract that for the next 10 years, George Clooney has to be associated with the company. So it's more of like an earn out, like where they got like 300 million upfront and 700 million has to be earned over

the next 10 years. It's not just a quick flip and that's it. When you go about investing into celebrity brands, what stage do you like to invest in and why? We like to invest as early as possible. So we focus on like pre-seat and seat opportunities. This just allows us to really be aligned on strategy from day one and make sure that we have like a concrete plan on how we're gonna launch this.

Yeah, our team has a lot of experience in starting and scaling these celebrity founded brands. And it's important that they're structured the right way from day one. That's why we like to align ourselves from like day one. What is your unfair advantage? I would say it's our access and expertise. And I have like a lot of working relationships with celebrities. So oftentimes whenever they're thinking about launching their own brands, I'm

one of the first people to know I'm also a content creator in the space or create a lot of content about celebrity founded brands, which has helped me to gain more than 10 million views in the last year. Our team has been involved in 55 celebrity founded brands, including some co-founding some of the most successful ones like the Honest Company and Feastables. So we can pass on our learnings working with celebrities, turning their companies into billion dollar brands and hopefully replicating the same successes for our portfolio company. What do you wish you knew before starting in the celebrity investment space three years ago?

Great question because the industry is not very mature. So the word influencer didn't even exist 10 years ago. And I was thinking that these celebrities were very sophisticated when it came to investing in that type of stuff. But most of them have no idea what a serious A round is, let alone if you're talking about preferred equity or common equity or pro rata and that type of stuff. So you have to do a lot of handholding to help them understand what is equity, how does it work?

How do you build a company? What is a cap table? How do you divide equity and that type of stuff? They're like, okay, I want to get 10%. And I'm like, but you don't even know what the value is of 10%. There's an old VC joke, you give me the valuation, I give you the terms. Celebrities may learn the lesson over time. What would you like our audience to know about you, about Hotstar VC or anything else you'd like to shine a light on? Maybe a little bit of self promotion. If you're interested in celebrity founded brands

and would like to stay up to date in the space, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. We'd love to connect there. Awesome. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Scott Vandenberg. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow and also provides the best feedback

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