Jeff Frommer, a serial entrepreneur, wants to move creators beyond paychecks in an industry built on fleeting sponsorships. His new company, OWM, offers what he calls the first “creator equity platform,” a system that enables founders and creators to exchange influence for equity in businesses they believe in.

“Founders need more customers,” Jeff says. “And if you want more customers in today’s attention economy, more people need to know you exist. So, who influences those customers, and how do you get them invested in your success?”

Launched in September 2025, the platform already counts more than 5,000 creators and hundreds of startups across verticals such as health and wellness, gaming, tech, and food and beverage. Early agency partners include VaynerSports, Wasserman, Select Management Group, and Underscore Talent, while investors range from Alex Hormozi’s ACQ Ventures to creators like Victoria Garrick Browne and Corp Bro.

From Media Mogul to Ownership Evangelist

Before founding OWM, Jeff co-founded and scaled MALKA Media, a content and entertainment studio that produced podcasts with Mike Tyson, Kevin Garnett, and Theo Von, as well as several Netflix and Showtime features. He bootstrapped the company from “two guys and a dog” to more than 200 employees, selling it to MoneyLion in 2021 for $75 million, later serving as the company’s Chief Content Officer.

That exit gave Jeff both perspective and distance. “Builders build,” he says. “And I wanted to build something that could help. If you ask every founder what they need more of, the answer is always the same: customers.”

Jeff began noticing a pattern during his angel investing. Founders would take his capital and then turn around to pay influencers to market their startups – influencers who had no real stake in the outcome. “That didn’t feel aligned,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘What if the people who influence customers were on the cap table too?’”

Solving Two Problems: Distribution and Incentive

OWM addresses what Jeff calls the two biggest challenges for growth-stage companies: distribution and alignment.

First, startups struggle to reach customers without spending heavily on advertising. “You can pay Meta or Google, or you can pay creators,” Jeff says. “But the better path is to make the people who influence your customers actual investors.”

Second, creator partnerships often fade after the initial campaign. “A lot of influencer deals die after the first hype cycle,” he explains. “But if you turn creators into owners, they stay invested in making the brand succeed.”

His campaign to replace “#ad” with “#owner” sums up the shift he envisions: from transactional marketing to shared enterprise.

Building the Infrastructure for Influence-for-Equity

While the idea of trading influence for equity isn’t new, its execution has always been limited by legal and operational friction. “Equity deals have historically lacked a standard contract,” Jeff notes. “Every deal starts from zero. It’s costly, it’s slow, and it doesn’t scale.”

OWM standardizes the process through the OWMA, a hybrid agreement that merges an influencer marketing contract with a stock option purchase agreement. The company also manages a Creator Stock Option Pool (CSOP) that works like an employee stock option plan but for creators. According to Jeff, this allows founders to allocate equity efficiently across multiple creators and their managers without multiplying legal costs.

“If you want to give ten creators equity, each with a manager, that’s 20 people on your cap table,” he explains. “Our CSOP makes that one line item.”

AI at the Core: Meet Andy

At the heart of OWM’s matching engine is Andy, an AI business coach named after one of Jeff’s late friends, a fitness influencer “who just wanted you to win.”

Andy analyzes both founders and creators to identify optimal partnerships. “If I know everything about your business and your customer,” Jeff says, “I can find that customer inside a creator’s audience.” The system cross-references four data layers: business persona, customer persona, creator persona, and audience persona.

For founders, that means seeing not just who a creator is, but whether their followers match the company’s target audience. For creators, it means learning which brands fit their own audience’s interests and values.

Currently, founders can test the platform by inputting their website to see sample matches. Jeff reveals that in future updates, creators will be able to do the reverse – asking Andy what kinds of businesses align best with their followers. “If a food influencer says, ‘I want to start a blender company,’ Andy can tell them whether their audience actually cares about blenders,” he explains.

The goal, he adds, is to turn OWM into “an ownership management platform for founders who want to get more customers,” powered by actionable AI intelligence rather than guesswork.

Early Traction and Deal Flow

Since its soft launch, OWM has facilitated more than $1 million in cash-and-equity deals, according to Jeff. Founders of venture-backed startups are already structuring hybrid partnerships in which creators receive partial payments and partial ownership.

Jeff shares a typical case: a dating app partnering with a leading dating influencer. “Maybe she takes a bit less cash, but gets 1% of the company,” he says. “She’s category-exclusive, she talks about the product everywhere, and she’s genuinely invested in helping it grow. That’s a co-founder-level partnership.”

He encourages founders to think beyond one-off endorsements and to build a creator advisory board, i.e., a small group of creators who spend time advising on content and distribution strategy. “If no one knows you exist, you die,” he says. “You need people who talk to your customers every day.”

Expanding Access Beyond the 1%

Jeff sees OWM as a way to democratize ownership for the “middle class” of creators who drive most engagement but rarely access equity deals. “The top 1% already have venture teams and lawyers,” he says. “But what about the creator with 500,000 followers? What about the people who can’t afford six months of negotiation?”

He believes influence should sit alongside capital, celebrity, and experience as a legitimate form of investment: “If I can make more creator-owners, they’ll change the culture and conversation around ownership itself.”

In Jeff’s view, the next frontier goes even further – enabling people to invest sweat, not just cash or influence. “You might not have money or followers,” he says, “but you can work your way into ownership. That’s where this all leads.”

Redefining Entrepreneurship

For Jeff, the line between founder and creator is already dissolving. “Everyone needs to be a creator,” he says. “If you can’t tell a good story about what you’re building, how are people going to know you exist?”

That mindset, he argues, defines modern entrepreneurship: distribution as a differentiator, storytelling as a core skill, and ownership as the new aspiration.

Quoting Charlie Munger, he adds, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” In OWM’s world, influence becomes the new incentive and ownership the outcome.

‘Impossible Has Many Options’

Jeff envisions an economy where equity is as accessible as sponsorship once was. “If you don’t have cash, you should be able to do something to earn it,” he says. “The ownership economy means I have the opportunity to do something to earn a stake, and if I do, I can become an owner.”

After building, selling, and rebuilding, Jeff says his philosophy has changed. “Life isn’t about the pursuit of happiness,” he reflects. “It’s happiness in the pursuit.”

He finishes with a line he’s trademarked, which captures both his entrepreneurial journey and OWM’s mission: “Impossible has many options.”

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