Ian Shepherd was working at Disney when his eldest daughter started watching YouTube. Around 2015, he began paying closer attention to the people holding her attention. His career had taken him through established entertainment companies. Her viewing habits pointed towards a different set of stars, often making their work with far less support. Children have a way of delivering a market analysis without preparing a single slide.
The attraction for Shepherd was practical. He could see creative talent carrying too much of the business alone. An audience might arrive for a distinctive voice; keeping that audience supplied with worthwhile work required all sorts of less visible labour. His eventual answer would involve hiring, production, distribution and investment. The magic, in this account of the entertainment industry, needs someone to organise the calendar.
Today, the London-based co-founder and co-CEO of Electrify works with creator businesses including Veritasium, Astrum, Mentour Pilot and fern. His wager raises an awkward question for an industry built around individuals: how do you make a business less dependent on its founder while preserving the reasons people liked it in the first place?
A fan base walks into a shopping centre
Before Electrify, Shepherd had worked across Disney, Universal Music, Turner Broadcasting and BT. Commercial roles in those businesses gave him experience of entertainment as an organised enterprise. He subsequently founded The Social Store, helping social media creators build consumer products and events. It was a way to take an audience relationship off the screen and find out what else it could support.
In September 2018, that proposition had a particularly tangible setting: Birmingham’s Bullring & Grand Central. The Social Store was behind Hearts by Tiana, a clothing and merchandise brand connected to the young YouTuber Tiana. A pop-up was announced for 22 and 23 September, bringing products usually sold online into a physical shop, with appearances by Tiana during the weekend.
The appeal was refreshingly literal. Fans who knew someone through videos could meet her and browse the range. Shepherd explained that the online launch had prompted demand to see and buy more. For a business built around digital attention, the shop supplied a useful test: would people carry that relationship into another setting?
Later that year, Shepherd appeared in License Global’s 40 Under 40 selection. He was also explaining influencer marketing to students at Norwich Business School. The commercial questions were already there, before the newer vocabulary took over: who trusts this person, what do they value, and what might they choose to do together?
The meeting behind the media company
Shepherd’s route into Electrify brought together two kinds of experience. He understood the creator business. Owen Maher and Justin Reizes had worked in investing, including at KKR. The three founded Electrify in 2021. Their partnership connected knowledge of creative businesses with the machinery for buying stakes in them and financing their next stage.
The early proposition concentrated on established YouTube channels. These were businesses with an audience and income already in place. Electrify could invest alongside the founder, take on operational work and help expand the company. It could also provide an exit for owners who wanted to sell. Different creators could arrive at the same negotiating table with quite different ambitions.
In February 2023, Electrify announced $50 million in funding led by MEP Capital. The following September, Capital D became its first institutional equity investor, taking a significant minority stake. At that point, the channels in which Electrify had invested collectively counted more than 30 million subscribers and 10 billion lifetime views. Those were portfolio figures, rather than Shepherd’s personal audience.
Its stated growth plan involved making more and better content, reaching other platforms, adding revenue streams and improving decisions through data. The company aimed to at least triple revenue and profit in its investments. That was an ambition attached to the model; an announcement of financing could hardly establish the outcome. The interesting work would happen after the agreement.
Success with fewer things on your desk
Shepherd’s description of the working relationship is revealing: “It feels much more like joining forces than being ‘managed’.” The choice of words addresses an obvious sensitivity. A creator who has built an audience has already made thousands of editorial decisions. Bringing another business into the room gives that business a great deal to learn before it has anything useful to change.
One of the clearest public examples is Derek Muller’s science channel Veritasium, which joined Electrify’s portfolio in 2023. At Web Summit Qatar in February 2025, Muller and Shepherd discussed its evolution into a team business. Hiring and delegation were part of that transition. A channel may begin with one person’s curiosity, but research, scripting, editing and graphics soon become substantial jobs of their own.
That makes the transaction an organisational question as well as a financial one. A creator who remains involved needs room to decide where their contribution matters most. The business needs colleagues capable of carrying work through without routing every decision back to one desk. Otherwise, an investment can buy a larger version of the same crowded calendar.
Shepherd has described taking pride in changes such as a creator hiring a senior colleague or getting enough support to step away. They are modest milestones beside the usual public scoreboard of views and subscribers. They also make the business proposition comprehensible. A team has become useful when the founder can leave something in its hands.
“After thousands and thousands of downloads, zero subscribers is a humbling place to begin!”
Ian Shepherd, on taking his podcast to YouTube
The interviewer starts at zero
Shepherd has his own reason to appreciate the discomfort of building an audience. He hosts The Business of Creators, a podcast whose origins lie in a network he set up in 2017. Originally called The Business of Influencers, it grew to more than 500 people. The name changed, and his explanation includes a small admission: he never much liked the word “influencer”.
The show gives him a role on the other side of the creator conversation. He interviews founders, investors and operators about the work behind their businesses. In 2024, after three years and more than 50 episodes, he announced the move from audio into video. An existing history of downloads did not bring an existing YouTube subscriber count with it. Even the person investing in established channels had to face an empty counter.
It is an appealing wrinkle in his public career. He can discuss distribution as an executive and then encounter it as a host. The podcast has covered physical products, digital tools, commerce and the organisations growing around creative work. Those conversations sit close to the questions he had been exploring at The Social Store, with a much wider cast.
On 12 October 2026, his guest was Raj Shamani, discussing the systems behind Figuring Out and its growth into a substantial team. The conversation covered research, preparation and experimentation. Alongside the podcast, Shepherd writes about the creator economy for Forbes. His public work keeps returning to the decisions that turn an individual’s output into an operation other people can help run.
The audience keeps changing rooms
The scope of Shepherd’s business has continued to broaden. In June 2026, Electrify partnered with Rowan Cheung’s The Rundown, a business that had grown from a daily AI newsletter into publications and educational products. The announced arrangement kept Cheung and his team leading editorial direction, with Electrify contributing operational support and shared resources. A company associated with YouTube was investing in a relationship that also arrived in an inbox.
September brought InGenius, developed by people across the Veritasium and Electrify teams. It gave stories about economics, geopolitics and social science their own editorial home. Its first film examined the shipping-container lock’s role in global trade. The project had spent more than a year in development. Growth, in this case, involved making room for ideas outside an existing channel’s subject boundaries.
On 14 October, Electrify announced Patrick Walker as chief strategy officer and Al Brown as EVP Creative and Editorial. Their experience spanned YouTube, Facebook, VICE and other production businesses. The appointments pointed towards further work in formats, intellectual property and distribution. Shepherd’s career had crossed from established media into creators; the expertise around him was now crossing those boundaries too.
hours watched on television screens across Electrify’s YouTube channels, October 2025 to September 2026.
About 36% of total watch time. Company-reported figures, October 2026.Television itself had become part of the story again. Across Electrify’s channels, more than 130 million hours of viewing took place on television screens between October 2025 and September 2026, about 36 per cent of total watch time. The household screen that had helped frame Shepherd’s early observations was now carrying creator-founded brands. The programming had moved; the living room remained available.
Who gets to keep the relationship?
Shepherd has argued that the next stage of the creator economy will put greater weight on communities and direct relationships with engaged fans. He has connected that view to recruiting for memberships across Electrify’s portfolio. It follows a thread through his career: the pop-up shop, the professional network, the podcast and the investment business all explore what an audience relationship can become.
There is a delicate balance in that ambition. A founder can bring in capital, employ specialists and produce work in new formats. Each addition creates another decision about the audience’s trust. Shepherd’s practical challenge is to help build the organisation around that trust while giving the person who earned it more choices about their own work. For someone whose business involves growing companies, making a founder’s diary smaller is a pleasantly specific measure of progress.