Illustration by Brian Edwards/Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Raising Cane's
In recent months, the bank SoFi named finance creator Vivian Tu as the company’s chief of financial empowerment; the NFL appointed motivational creator Dhar Mann as chief kindness officer of the Super Bowl; the German gummy candy company Katjes tapped comedian Jake Shane as its new chief creative officer; and dirty soda chain Cool Sips made MomTok star Whitney Leavitt its chief creative and brand officer.
Now, another creator is joining the C-suite: YouTuber and podcaster Mike Majlak is joining AI podcast start-up Rebel Audio as chief creator in residence, Majlak told Verified exclusively.
Majlak co-hosts the hit show “Impaulsive” alongside Logan Paul. The podcast has hosted guests ranging from Tom Brady and Neil deGrasse Tyson to Mark Cuban and even President Donald Trump. In his new role, Majlak said he will not only help promote the company — which launched in April with $3.8 million in funding and strategic investors including the state of Tennessee and advisors including Mark Burnett— but also work on content and product development. He will also help recruit other creators to launch their own podcasts.
While some creators’ C-suite titles are primarily honorific, Majlak’s new role with Rebel Audio is the latest example of creators taking on roles that go beyond the typical promotional arrangements. Business leaders recognize that creators’ abilities as entrepreneurs and subject matter experts can help them grow and develop products. And, for creators, taking on an executive role can be a way to build equity and hone in on projects they're passionate about.
Majlak compared the current moment in the creator economy to the celebrity-co-founded businesses a decade ago, when some were tapped not just for their names and likenesses but their business expertise.
“I come from the podcast space, and I also have a bunch of business acumen from the world that I lived in before I was a creator, which was on the brand side at brands like Lovesac, and understanding that marketing world,” he said. “It’s becoming an efficient strategy for new businesses to tap into all the different roles that creators fill, from both the back-of-house and front-of-house standpoint.”
Monica Khan, the founder and CEO of Creator Revolution and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company, echoed that creator executive titles borrow from the celebrity model to help accelerate sales and business. The broader potential, she said, is if the creator can serve as the “creative brainchild behind so much more that a company could be doing, and not just in an influencer marketing capacity.”
Majlak said he hopes to help other creators and aspiring podcasters avoid all the “growing pains and obstacles” he faced — and that he will tap his “own network of some of the biggest creators, podcasters and influencers in the world” as he helps develop content.
He said it’s hard to tell which successful short-form creators are able to make the move to long form, and argued that Rebel Audio’s tools will allow them to get their practice in so that people such as himself, while scouting talent, can identify who may make a good podcaster.
“Long-form is really what separates the new wave creator from a creator that has longevity. And longevity is the name of this game,” Majlak said. “Anybody can pop off. Anybody can have a million view video on TikTok. But when you’re able to start engaging hundreds of thousands of people weekly for years at a time, in a long-form format, that’s where businesses are built.”
That longevity can unlock the path of fewer, more impactful deals that Majlak and other veteran creators are seeking. Majlak said he still operates “a bit like a crackhead in the sponsorship world” but that he’s stopped promoting causes he “doesn’t feel morally aligned with,” including casino gambling.
Originally, he and other big-time creators avoided brand equity deals in favor of cash “because we had not yet seen successful creator project exits or even many successful revenue models for creator products.” That changed after the success of creator-owned or -founded brands such as Prime Hydration, Feastables and Alani Nu.
“All of a sudden, the equity model becomes a lot more attractive to macro creators, because they start, after years of making — and it might sound crazy to the average person — but after years of making millions, if not tens of millions of dollars annually, the idea of a potential exit for millions or tens of millions of dollars was not very attractive to creators. I already make that much money. I’m getting those deals anyways,” he explained. “Now, when some of these products are doing billions of dollars in annual revenue, [it] becomes a nine, 10-figure exit, and so that becomes a much more attractive equity offering.”
Khan noted such creator C-suite roles are not without risk. Creators must properly negotiate the ownership and IP of what they create within a company and their equity or compensation, and for brands there’s a a key man risk “if something were to happen to a creator, reputationally speaking, the risk of getting canceled is always a thing – what does that mean for that company?”
Jared Gutstadt, the founder and CEO of Rebel Audio, said Majlak receives equity and has already been working with the company’s tech team on user experience and testing the product and workflow.
He characterized the company — which offers AI tools intended to make producing a podcast as simple as it is to edit a video using the TikTok interface — as creator-friendly because, for example, creators using the service will own their own IP.
“Most of the people who have come up through podcasting, the Joe Rogans, they started in traditional media to a degree, and then they leveraged this as another way of communicating with their audience one to one,” Gutstadt said. “I think that there’s a whole new generation that will become your social audio, almost the equivalent of like your SoundCloud rappers. It’ll spawn a new genre, the same way that TikTok spawned a whole new category of celebrity.”
This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by Washington Post Creator, a new business outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.
