Dilawer Hussain, co-founder and head of product at the publishing platform Ghost, compiled a LinkedIn ranking of the five best “business creators”. Four of the five, however, are not just faces for advertising. They built companies around their audiences.
Steven Bartlett has gone furthest. His podcast The Diary of a CEO is one of the most-watched interview shows in the world, and the company he built around it now raises capital like a technology startup.
Steven.com brings together media and its own investment fund
Bartlett’s company Steven.com received an eight-figure investment on 27 October 2025 at a valuation of $425 million. The round was led by the funds Slow Ventures and Apeiron Investment Group. Bartlett holds more than 90% of the holding company, which groups under it the media divisions FlightStory and FlightCast, as well as his own investment fund, Flight Fund.
The podcast from which all of this grew works as the top of the funnel. According to the announcement, The Diary of a CEO has more than 13 million subscribers on YouTube and 70 million monthly plays. Bartlett also invests himself. Through Flight Fund, he has put money into more than forty companies, including Lovable, Replit and WHOOP.
His own ambition is captured in one sentence. Steven.com wants to be “the Disney of the creator economy” and to combine “creator IP, capital and our infrastructure” in a single ecosystem, according to Bartlett. A podcast, content rights, capital and production facilities under one roof.
Bloom, Abdaal and Do make a living from books and courses
The same pattern holds for the rest of the list, just on a smaller scale. For each of them, the starting point was content that built their own audience.
Sahil Bloom left finance and started writing The Curiosity Chronicle, a newsletter that comes out every two weeks and that, according to his publisher, several million people read each week. From the newsletter he developed the book The 5 Types of Wealth, which the publisher describes as “the instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller”. Alongside his writing, he owns the holding structure SRB Holdings and groups his early investments in the SRB Ventures fund.
Ali Abdaal is a doctor who became a YouTuber with more than six million subscribers. His book Feel-Good Productivity is “an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller”, as the publisher describes it. It has been published in more than thirty languages and has sold over 400,000 copies. He turned his YouTube following into a book business and educational courses.
Chris Do built The Futur, an educational company that teaches creatives how to run a business, out of his viewers. A graphic designer and director himself, he became the producer of courses and of a community for designers around the world.
Creators are becoming investors themselves
The last name on the list shows where the creator’s role is heading. Jay Clouse runs Creator Science, where, through a newsletter, a podcast, a members’ section and YouTube, he advises professional creators on how to treat their content like a business. He is also an investor himself. His profile lists stakes in Kit, Carry, Kick, Maven, Gumroad and Beast Industries.
This is a signal for the European market. Money that once flowed to software startups is beginning to flow to creators with stable audiences. Bartlett’s round took place in London, and the announcement framed it as the largest European financing to date for a holding company built around a single creator. For a brand, this changes the starting question. The creator’s audience is no longer just an advertising channel, but an asset into which capital is invested.
In all five cases, the audience came first and the company came after it. Bartlett’s valuation shows that capital is starting to price in that order too.
Comments