How I Invest with David Weisburd
E143: From Fame to Fortune: How Celebrities Turn Fame into Billion-Dollar Brands
07 Mar 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.
Full Episode
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 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 Aycott, who co-founded Feastables together with MrBeast.
And that company is doing like $400 million in revenue in its 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 Feast of Walls 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 Rexham 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 involved with a company is quite of a commodity. There's like thousands of startups that have like a celebrity co-founder, co-owner, creative director, whatever title you want to 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 telecommunication.
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.
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