We landed on building a roster around individuals we considered “alternatively influential”. And that, for us, means not people who usually make short-form content, doing one-off partnerships. We’re looking for people who have grown an audience that’s incredibly loyal to them. And back to the point on IP, who are creating something tangible for the long haul.
Who else is on your roster?
We have Sari Azout, founder of knowledge management app Sublime; Mindy Seu, artist, academic and the author of A Sexual History of the Internet, who is currently touring her performance across Europe; Kristoffer Tjalve, the founder of Naive Weekly, Tiny Awards and Internet Phonebook; Seb Emina, founder of Read Me; Kim Lê Boutin, the founder of New Ways of Seeing; Lucy Kumara Moore, the founder of The Sensual World; Severin Matusek, founder of co–matter; Kat Chan, founder of Full Serving; James Davis, founder of Drawn Distant; Jaime Perlman, founder of More or Less; and Daniel Yaw Miller, founder of SportsVerse.
Here’s a mini scoop for Vogue Business: Daniel, who’s giving the closing address at the inaugural Lions Sports event, has announced the development of a new sports talk show for 2027. Details to come soon.
So how do you define ‘alternative influence’?
I think the concept of being alternatively influential really hit something in the zeitgeist. Still, it’s not an easy question to answer because it takes so many different shapes for so many people. It can be somebody who’s able to convene a gathering, somebody who is building a product that people are obsessed with, and who is seen as having true expertise, a true specialism. We’re not necessarily looking for people who identify as being an influencer or a creator in traditional terms.
It’s more people who are like, “This is something else that I do.” And for them to want to work with a brand, they have to really feel that the brand understands the world that they’re building.
You’re hosting a dinner at Cannes this week about the post-follower era. How do you expect that to be received?
It’s up for debate. We want people to think about, “What does it mean to truly own an audience in this day and age?” How do we define the concept of influence and your relationship with your audience if it’s splintered into multiple places?
What’s the answer to that?
Where we see huge opportunity is in creators who can bring people together in real life. I think that is incontestable, no matter how big — and in many cases, it’s really actually how small that audience may be. We’re seeing people creating gatherings where there’s no content, but it’s just being there that’s important. So I think the real world for us is where we see a lot of opportunity.
How will your platform measure success, if not via engagement?
Measurement is a really important part of what we’re working on. We call it lateral influence, and it looks at depth and how influence doesn’t necessarily travel upward at scale but instead spreads sideways into taste communities. So we look at a central individual — so Mindy Seu, for example, she’s an academic at UCLA, and we map what we call her “sphere of influence”. So it’s less about how many people you’re reaching, but who are the individuals, which institutions follow her, which communities follow her. And that’s how we track the concept.
