Fixated’s $50 Million Creator Management Masterplan (feat. Zach Katz & Jason Wilhelm)

0:00Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren. Yes. You got out of the house this week. Got out of the house, went to the Slow Ventures Creator CEO event hosted by Billy Parks and Megan Lightcamp. It was really, really good. Saw all the people, was schmoozing, was hanging out, had a few interesting panels. One of the ones that I went to that I thought was really cool, we'll take a step back. We've had Slow on before, Billy and Megan, and they talk about how their investment thesis in creators is really around creators that sort of are building businesses off platform and they use content to kind of, you know, blow it up.

0:38So it's really not necessarily content first businesses. So we had like Jonathan Katz-Mozits on, who's like the carpenter tool guy who they invested in, which is really cool. So they had this one woman. I don't think they've actually invested in her yet. She has a company called Five Mary's Meat or something like that. And it's because she and her four daughters are all named Mary. True story. Shout out to Miles from Rare Days who was sitting next to me. And I asked him to, I was like, I dare you to ask a question about the names. And he did. And it turns out they go by a lot of nicknames. So thank you.

1:09But she, they're a, they have a cattle ranch. And they are not, like she, the mother, Mary has no experience with that. The husband, the father had some experience in it. but just talked about how they use content to, you know, talk to their audience. And a lot of people are so obviously like, you know, cattle ranch curious. So like, how are these people that left their fancy life in sort of San Francisco to like, go do this and talking about all the different ways in which they use the cow and how they lean into different businesses. It was, I don't know. It was like kind of fascinating. It was just like, I was feeling like, is this my baby boom moment?

1:42You know, Diane Keaton movie from like the eighties or nineties where she like leaves and like stars like a strawberry jam company after like leaving the corporate world. I don't know. Are we doing this? I don't know. I can see you doing that. I mean, just going and bathing in beef tallow? Yeah. So beef tallow, tallow, I didn't know anything about tallow, is a whole thing. And like at one point she's like, you know, some people are saying it's like better than Botox. And I was like, she's listening now. It's like, say what? Excuse me? And so, yeah, she was talking about how the tallow, I guess, is like the fat.

2:11It's part of the fat on the meat. And they like render it a certain way. And she started doing it in her kitchen. And now they have like, I think they have like an industrial kitchen that they do this in. And I mean, really interesting how this woman was really inspiring because she's one of these people that just like has an idea, executes it. It goes well. She leans into it. If it doesn't, she pivots. Like she's just very like in a good way, not emotional about things. She's just like, I'm very motivated by money. I'm very motivated by a challenge. Tell me I can't do something and I will do it.

2:37It's very cool. Lauren, two things worth mentioning here. One, Slow Ventures. You said that we've had them on the show before. They are investing upwards of 60 million dollars into the creator economy. on not necessarily Mary, but people like Mary that are in these different niches that they think can get mass appeal. Yeah. For their products, when they business, diversifying their revenue is like the whole thing. Correct. It's not for creators that are going to be entertainment personalities and go on and create more content. No. It's for creators who are using all these different types of distribution mechanisms and content to get their products in the hands of more and more people in their niches.

3:13Yes. And yes. And the second thing. Sure. I think it's worth mentioning here is, you know what Mary's last name is? I wrote it down. Heffernan. Yeah. Heffernan. Yeah. Do you know about nominative determinism? Well, a heifer is like, you're going to go, because heifer is something about a cow. Exactly. A heifer is a young female cow. Yeah. She's not yet had her first calf. But I'm obsessed with this idea of nominative determinism, where like your name determines or has an outsized impact on your career choice or your personality or what you do in life. And this is another prime example. This is amazing.

3:51Fascinating. Look at you going deep. That's what we do here on Create. We go layers deep here. There was another panel that was very interesting that was sort of more about like newer creators. So this guy Warner Bailey was on it and he has a meme account called Agents vs. Assistants, which is hilarious, but very talk about niche. It's very like for like young agents in the sort of entertainment industry and just talking about, you know, talking a lot of shit, frankly. And he was doing this for years anonymously. And he was talking about the decision to sort of go more publicly sort of facing.

4:25And now he's building a business around it. It was very difficult for him to go public because he's not necessarily looking to be, you know, the face of anything. But doing that has really like exponentially grown the business. And it's really targeting these sort of young, early career stage kind of folks. He's targeting um college kids don't want to get in the entertainment industry really really funny uh really interesting guy and then this one other woman was on it just rona grooming so she's a comedian that started dog grooming business and started posting these photos of like really sappy music and like putting a hairdryer against like a dog and it was like really slow-mo and it was really funny and it blew up she has a brick and mortar store and now she's starting um her own product line called um schmoop for dogs and because she was just going there's like a real need for this in the space again using content and she's like all i really want to do is be funny but people want me to do dogs so i'm trying to figure out how to like do both so that was really interesting are we entering a world where just like everyone's new favorite creator is a different version of the sham wow guy that's where we're headed right i mean possibly well the last the last one was a woman i think she goes by she's a dentist i can't remember her name and she i mean this this is what i kills me she like noticed there's a there's a gap in the market an opportunity for like premium dental products, right?

5:38Like take me for example, by the way, I do, I do use a fancy toothpaste. So there are some, it's French obviously. Um, but like, uh, you know, we have the front nice creams and this and that, but then you go to the toothpaste aisle and it's like, nothing's been disrupted there in like a million years. It's like basically crest and that's it. So she felt an opportunity there. Sometimes I have these moments where I'm like, does it need to be disrupted? Like, do we, do we need, do we need that? I don't know. Maybe we do. um so she is doing that so i love um what slow is doing and i love this conference because i'm obsessed with sort of diversifying sort of revenue and creators and we're going to talk about this a bit in our in our interview today we have the co-founders of fixated zach katz and jason wilhelm and just we talk about how at one point you know all these big companies are bringing in you know uh creators to come and like you know be a part of their business because like gap just we didn't talk about this in the interview but like gap just hired a head of content like this is all one of the same like everybody kind of has to be a content creator if you're going to sell anything these days.

6:32And so that's ultimately what I think SLO has kind of really honed in on and what that conference was about. So it was really great. Congrats to Billy Parks, especially, who just nails it. I love that dude. He's just great. He's a gentle giant. Fantastic. Gentle giant, that one. Before we get to our interview, we want to talk about Netflix a bit. They just came out with their earnings this week. Josh, you want to walk us through it? Yeah, Lauren. So Netflix announced its Q4 earnings, which they beat analysts' expectations. They had$12.05 billion in revenue versus an estimated$11.96 billion. It also reported reaching 325 million paid global subscribers, bringing it up from 302 million in Q4 2024.

7:15It said K-pop Demon Hunters was obviously the most watched content it's ever produced. And while Wall Street may have been happy with those numbers, the stock went down because Netflix's guidance said they're going to invest a lot into programming. Part of that is their offer to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which they're putting up$82.7 billion in cash now to compete with Paramount Skydance's own offer. And a lot of it also has to do with YouTube. So this is what Ted Sarandos, Netflix's co-CEO, said on the earnings call. When we look at our share of TV time, the benchmark isn't just other streamers anymore.

7:54YouTube is TV. We are competing with them for advertising dollars and for the most professional content in the world. We're moving into video podcasts and creator adjacent formats because that's where the engagement is shifting. And so that's part of why they want to buy Warner Bros. Discovery too is because they need more and more content. YouTube, for all intents and purposes, has an unlimited supply of content. As long as it treats its creators well and provides meaningful revenue for its creators, which there's at no point in the near future indicates that it won't be doing those two things.

8:28It's basically going to have an unlimited supply of programming on its platform. Netflix, on the other hand, doesn't. It has to go out and hunt for and pay for new content upfront in order to get it on its platform. And so I just think this is, that quote is especially telling because of where Netflix was even like six months ago. In Q2 2025, Ted Sarandon said this during the Netflix quarterly earnings call. He said, there's a difference between killing time and spending time. We're in the spending time business. YouTube has a massive footprint in killing time, snackable consumption. But as they move into the living room, we are meeting them with our premium slate.

9:09And before that, in Q3 2024, Ted Sarandon said, we don't see YouTube as a zero-sum competitor for content, but we certainly see them as a competitor for the first screen. When a user turns on their TV, we want Netflix to be the first app they click, not YouTube. If we take that back even further, the first time that anyone at Netflix mentioned YouTube or kind of mentioned YouTube was from Reed Hastings back in 2017. He said, we compete with and lose to Fortnite more than HBO. In fact, we compete with sleep. So you're looking at nine years ago, YouTube wasn't even mentioned by Netflix. It wasn't even seen as a competitor or this upstart that they should be worried about.

9:48And then slowly YouTube becomes this thing that they're paying attention to. And now it's this thing they're in outright competition with. The evolution is fascinating. It's fascinating. I mean, the speed is really what's fascinating, the speed at which everything has changed. I mean, it's just, you know, listen, I think it's so important to have room for both because, I mean, I think that you can make the argument well to take a step back like you know back call it like 10 plus years ago you and i were around when a lot of folks were sort of making the argument of like there's netflix that's like the premium there's youtube that's so ugc and like you need this sort of in between middle layers so there were a ton of s pods that were sort of created sort of most famously i would say it's like the full screen one um there was also um why do i never remember the name of the one um jason collars one go 90 well go 90 was one and then the one that gave all the the money to the YouTubers, I guess maybe that wouldn't have been considered it because they were putting YouTube content on there.

10:42Anyway, moving on from that one, there were several that were in this middle layer. None of them succeeded because what kind of everybody realized is that like, yes, I think, you know, on a high level, that is true. Netflix premium, YouTube more UGC, but really they meet in the middle because you've got love is blind and things like that on Netflix. And then you've got like really amazing content. I don't know. I just Joey Graceffa series just came into my, you know, into my brain, like, you know, just like really high quality content on, on YouTube. So you've got, um, you know, both of them kind of meet in the middle as well.

11:13So you don't kind of need these other services, you know, to, to sort of fill in the gap. And the, and I think what even more though, I think we're always going to crave both crave, both consumers are always going to crave both types of content, but there's also like a piece of this that is laziness and ease. And sometimes, and our brains are getting so used to shorter content that sometimes you just want to, you know, scroll some shorts every now and again and then go to bed instead of like committing to like watching a 30 minute or hour long movie. And it's just, so it's hard because they're not necessarily competing.

11:46And I think they're saying this, they're not necessarily competing on quality of content. It's just what people feel like doing with their time is kind of changing a little bit. And so that's a really heady thing as well to figure out how to sort of battle if you're Netflix you know what I mean I think they are competing on quality content at a certain level though like at a certain level for sure Netflix is going to have YouTube beat on prestige television and stranger things and things that cost tens of millions of dollars an episode to make and produce yeah for sure but the I'd say like minimum viable entry of something compelling to watch on YouTube the threshold for that has dramatically increased over the years.

12:28Yeah. Because people have gotten so much better at being able to make stuff and the technology and the hardware around making this type of stuff has gotten so much better with them that like the average vlog on YouTube now is orders of magnitude better than the average one that was on YouTube like five or six years ago. So I think this is a serious issue where we're finally, I think we maybe have said this in the past, but like there is really this like Netflix Netflix, YouTube world, and they're going to be duking it out as dominant entertainment platforms for culture and consumption moving forward.

13:05All right. I want to get to our interview. It's really interesting. Gets spicy there for a minute. Your girl just pushed back a little bit. But I'm actually really excited about these guys. I think what they're doing is very, very interested. So very, very interesting. So we've got Zach Katz. He is the CEO and founding partner of Fixated. And we have Jason Wilhelm, the co-founder and president of Fixated. Let's get to it. Zach Katz, Jason Wilhelm, welcome to Creator Upload. Thanks so much for having us, guys. I appreciate having us. Yeah, no, this is really great. You guys have so much going on at Fixated.

13:36I just want to start, like, right away. I'm going to go to you, Zach. Why does the industry need another management company? It doesn't. Okay, we're done. We're good. No, I mean, look, the reality is, you know, coming from a very mature, very saturated industry called the music industry, where value has been shaped, reshaped, and frankly, has hit a ceiling in progressing and evolving. when I saw what was going on in digital. I absolutely saw that the industry needed so many different things. The digital space needed so many different things, you know, compared to the 70-year-old music industry.

14:21This industry here is 15 years old. It, over the past three years, has completely graduated from, hey, we're influencers. Easy come, easy go. Yep, we are technically in entertainment, but we're sitting at the little kid's table and we know it. and maybe, just maybe one day, if we're good enough over here, the big kids' table over there, Hollywood, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, will invite us to play with them. And over the past three years, that's completely changed. Digital has stolen the hearts, minds, eyeballs, dollars of the entire world. It has become the dominant force of entertainment. If anything, we can call it the new Hollywood versus the old Hollywood.

15:00I think people are going to start using that framing. So first of all, I saw that digital was the thing and it was going to be the thing forever, number one. And number two, coming from an industry where value has been defined and redefined, like we said, I saw value gap upon value gap in digital. So does it necessarily need another quote unquote management company? No, but creators are finally up to bat in the big leagues. and ultimately everyone that's frankly come before us is still representing the old version of creators, creators that have different opportunities and different ambitions.

15:38So as the needs of creators have evolved to step into this bigger opportunity, companies like ours can come in and actually meet that evolved need with an evolved value prop. I love that. So Jason, as a creator, I don't know if you call yourself a creator, a former creator, how do you think the needs have evolved since even you were sort of pumping out content years ago? I think the biggest thing is that, you know, the industry has grown and evolved so much that, you know, there's so many platforms now. Every single platform has a different algorithm, has different ways to be successful on them.

16:10And I think that, you know, so many creators today, in order to be successful on all these platforms, they need a real team around them that actually can speak the language of all those platforms. And, you know, for us, like, you know, that's a core of our business is, you know, we have a content team that understands every single platform that has been very successful in doing that before and being creators themselves in most cases. And so, you know, I think that's one of the biggest changes between, you know, 2011, when I first started, you know, making YouTube videos, and that was basically the only thing versus today is that there's just so many platforms are all very different.

16:49There's new creators every single day that are popping up all over the place. You know, competition is at literally the highest it's ever been. And to be at the very, very top, you need a real strategy, a real roadmap, a real team around you to be able to execute on that. So I think that's one of the biggest differences between now and back in the day. So talk to us about Eldridge giving you$50 million. How'd you convince them? And what is it for? A lot of it was, you know, they were talking to a lot of the traditional players and everything. And I think when we came to the table, you know, showed them, you know, the business that we were building, you know, it was just so different than anything they've heard in the space up to this point.

17:25You know, these guys have heard every pitch, you know, since the beginning of this industry. And, you know, our pitch was just very different. And I think that really resonated with them. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, Todd said in one of the meetings we had is I love the dynamic between... Todd is, to tell her the kids who Todd is. Todd Bowley. So he's the founder, CEO of Eldridge, chairman of Eldridge. So he, you know, one of the things that he said, you know, in one of our very first meetings was, hey, I love the dynamic between you and Zach, right? You know, and that's very different than any of these other companies in the space, right?

17:58And so I think it was a combination of those. And I just think that, you know, they're very smart people and they know that digital is now, you know, table stakes across the board with everything. And, you know, they wanted to bet on a horse in the race and they chose us. So, Zach, what are you doing with the money? What's it for? It's billing. you know the value prop that evolved value prop that we talked about right so um the biggest differentiator between us and everyone else is as the fact that we understand the value and the competitive nature of content so again and i'll from time to time in this conversation i'll kind of point back to the music industry the entire music industry right is completely built around the belief that creators, meaning music artists, producers, songwriters, and their works are valuable and monetizable.

18:50That's why we have record labels. That's why we have music publishing companies, right? A music company will pull somebody out of Starbucks, right, who they believe is a talented singer-songwriter, give them money to quit their day job, give them hundreds of thousands of dollars to go into the studio with the best songwriters and producers, will put 50 people and another million dollars to go market that project and then they'll put them on tour. And that's table stakes in the music industry, right? In the music industry, a manager actually needs to have one or two skills, one of two skill sets and ideally both, be able to guide their talent creatively, not write songs for them, but at the very least, let them know who they could be, you know, in terms of their musical identity, who they should be working with and collaborating with in order to make their best music.

19:41Number two, how to market that music at the highest level and how to orchestrate that marketing. When I came and took the job at FaZe Clan and I was there as president and chief operating officer, I was shocked at the industry and how little the industry knew and was involved with the content. And when we look at the revenue pie for creators, 30 % brand deals, 70 % content, and the only thing that the industry was doing was brand deals. And the conversation went like this. Nice to meet you. I'm your manager. I don't really understand anything that you do with your content. I don't understand long form.

20:17I don't understand short form. I don't understand this thing called clipping. You've been figuring that out with your friends forever. Keep figuring that out with your friends. And if you do, I'll get you a brand deal. So when I saw that coming from an industry where content is literally everything, and by the way, when you look at 10 different ways that a successful music artist makes money, brand deals doesn't even get onto that list of 10. Right? Well, just to interrupt you for a second, because I've been in this industry, you said this has been around for 15 years, so Josh and I have been doing this since literally day one.

20:47So it's not the first time I've heard the music industry comparison, but I want to push back on it, and I've interrupted you, so maybe you're going to get to this, so forgive me. The music industry, to your point, is upwards of 70, 80 years old. So there are certain barriers to entry to getting into that business that don't exist will never exist in the creator economy, right? Like I was at a company that they were trying to make it so that we would sort of represent the collaborators. Like the way, in the music industry, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are certain songwriters that are tied up with labels, and unless you sign with that label or something, you really can't get access to that.

21:19That doesn't exist in this industry, right? Like there's no barriers to entry. So like how do you think about adding value around the content when people can just call whoever and do the content with whom they are? Does that make sense? It makes all the sense in the world. And I love this question because it was asked of me two months ago from a very, very dear friend of mine that runs a music company. I was telling him excitedly how we're building this ecosystem, right? Where it's 360 talent representation, but as part of our relationship with them, we are also their production partner. And we have this incredible 25-person team of just the God squad of content across every single platform.

21:59and he's like, Zach, he's like, what do they need that for? This is an industry where creativity was democratized, to your point, Lauren, from day one. There was no entry point. There was no entry barriers. It's like, oh, pick up your phone right here and start creating and it's just as, you know, your future is just as good as your creativity, so to speak. And the answer goes like this. There's two types of music artists. Music artists who make a living. 60, 70,$80 ,000 a year, God bless them. They don't have to work a day job. They get to do what they do for a living. And then there's artists that make 10, 20, 30, $40 million a year.

22:35The difference between those two classes of citizens is one primary thing. Three to five songs that the entire world knows every single lyric to. They're called hits. And when you're looking at an industry called digital that is becoming as competitive as traditional music or Hollywood, what's going to separate you is hits. Now for Jason and myself, We're not looking to come in and be a long tail solution. We want to work with guys and girls that are the most ambitious, that want to have their face on the Mount Rushmore of the space, that want to fully reach their potential and make 10, 20, 30, 40 million dollars a year.

23:14And for those guys and girls, content is absolutely the biggest differentiator. So when we talk about Eldridge and what they've invested into, they've invested not into a talent representation business. They've invested into an ecosystem that has premium talent at the foundational level. And I'm talking about guys and girls that are wildly ambitious and whose magic show, so to speak, is totally different from everyone else's magic show. We have a full-on content studio with some of the brightest, youngest, and Jason can talk about this in a second because I think it's so important, minds in the business.

23:48And then over the past 18 months, we've built out this ecosystem, this virality engine with 25 ,000 micro creators who we can access at any given point to get billions of views per month. So now we're talking about a verticalized ecosystem and an entertainment company where you ultimately have the best talent, the best content, and the widest distribution you can possibly imagine. And so with that, we're building the gold standard digital entertainment company of the future. We're not a talent representation business. We're an entertainment company that works very, very closely with talent to meet today's needs.

24:24You know, I want to add something to that, too, just around, you know, this because I've heard this happen. I've heard this from so many people, especially, you know, people that have been in the industry for a long time on more of the corporate side. Most creators that are out there. If you were to ask them. To describe the algorithm, what goes viral, what doesn't go viral, most of them couldn't actually tell you the answer to that. most people that when they ask for YouTube advice, they're going and watching a podcast from Mr. Beast. They are going and calling their friend who's in the same community on discord.

25:05And that person is likely experiencing the same challenges that that person's experiencing. You know, I started in a, in the call of duty space specifically and the call of duty space, has been notoriously, was once peak YouTube back in 2011, 2012, and today is certainly not what it used to be, to put it mildly. Every single time I go into the Discord channel that I've been in since basically the start, since I would say 2014, 2015, whenever Discord started, it's the same questions and conversations that continue to get brought up every single time. the one thing that's not present in the space today besides a few you know i would say a few small examples is they don't have that one place that they can go to to actually learn and understand all of these different things around the platforms the algorithms what thumbnails are good what thumbnails aren't good how to make content go viral today it's very different than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, right?