Kyle Kuhns asked his boss for a day off each week to build a company. This is an awkward request to make of someone who has just given you a foothold in entertainment. It asks an employer to subsidize, at least in time, the possibility that you will eventually leave. Jason Vaughan, CEO of Le Chef Costumier, said yes. The arrangement gave Kuhns something more useful than encouragement: a recurring appointment with the business he hoped to run.
Years later, XX Artists would enter a combination with Media.Monks, carrying a staff of 125 and a client list that included Google and YouTube. That is the tidy version of the story. The more interesting version begins with a young person trying to get hired, discovering that the application process was going nowhere, and finding work close enough to entertainment to start learning how it operated.
A career discovered in the margins
Kuhns graduated from McNary High School in Oregon in 2011. His education included Chemeketa Community College and Willamette University, where he studied vocal performance before leaving. Marketing was not the original destination. Music was closer to it. One of his early independent clients was My Brothers and I, a band from Salem. His professional interests would widen from the people making music to the machinery that helped people find it.
Los Angeles supplied several kinds of employment before it supplied a business. There was Starbucks in Glendale. There was the executive assistant job at Le Chef Costumier, where the work touched projects for theme parks and touring productions. There was also a period at Sony Music Entertainment working in digital strategy and content production. The education was accumulating, even if it did not come with a commencement ceremony.
XX began as artist management and developed into social marketing. That change matters more than the neatness of a founding date. The clients' needs pulled the work toward content, platform management and digital strategy. A company whose name sounded at home on a musician's contract became a place brands could hire to understand online audiences.
The celebrity still has to learn the room
Consider Brie Larson arriving on YouTube. A film audience already knew her. A YouTube audience had its own habits, expectations and established personalities. Kuhns publicly celebrated XX Artists' work on her channel launch, stressing the value of entering the platform with curiosity about the people who had built careers there. Fame could secure attention. It could not supply every answer about how to behave once the attention arrived.
That is a useful distinction in Kuhns's work. A channel is an ongoing relationship with viewers, complete with conventions that its regulars recognize immediately. Treating it as another empty advertising surface misses much of its appeal. His enthusiasm for Larson's launch centered on learning from people with experience on YouTube. It was an argument for paying attention before expecting to be paid attention to.
His own response to recognition had a similar distribution of credit. When he made Forbes' 2021 Marketing & Advertising 30 Under 30 list, announced in December 2020, he directed the celebration toward his colleagues and collaborators. He also sounded pleasantly surprised that there had been no advance confirmation. Even a professional in the attention business can enjoy waking up to unexpected good news.
“My inclusion on this years #ForbesUnder30 speaks far more to the team I lead than to anything else.”
Kyle Kuhns, December 2020
Community, with the mechanics left in
The word community can become vague enough to excuse almost any marketing plan. XX's work offers a more concrete view. For YouTube's Hispanic Heritage Month campaign, the agency helped organize creator material into programming that ran across social platforms. Creators answered questions from viewers. Polls invited choices about cultural interests. A series paired creators from different generations to discuss their experiences. The campaign also used existing videos, giving work already made another route to an audience.
The useful detail is participation. Viewers supplied questions; creators supplied their own perspectives. Editorial work connected the pieces. That approach gives a campaign more voices and more texture than a single corporate statement can carry. It also requires the agency to think about the differences within a community, rather than treating a broad identity as one interchangeable audience.
A separate YouTube Shorts Pride challenge invited people to make videos using Halsey's reimagining of “I'm Coming Out.” XX and YouTube involved more than 100 creators and celebrities, including Anitta, Larray and Gigi Gorgeous. The campaign reported 17.3 million social engagements and 185,000 social mentions. Kuhns appears in its credits alongside colleagues from both organizations. The numbers describe the campaign's activity; the shared credits describe how many people helped make that activity possible.
reported social engagements
The number behind the combination
On July 1, 2022, S4Capital announced a conditional combination between XX Artists and Media.Monks. Kuhns was identified as XX's founder and CEO. The announcement described a global team of 125, work for brands including Logitech and Ancestry.com, and a talent practice serving more than 40 musicians, actors, artists and public figures. Artist relationships and corporate marketing had become neighboring parts of the same business.
One financial detail gives the announcement its weight: XX generated more than $12 million in gross profit in 2021, with growth above 100%. Gross profit is a specific financial measure. It should retain that label. It is neither a disclosed sale price nor an estimate of what Kuhns personally owned. The distinction is less glamorous than a guessed fortune and considerably more informative.
The combination brought XX's social and influencer capabilities into a larger organization. For Kuhns, the stated ambition was to create opportunities for employees and clients to develop and innovate. The transaction marked a change in the company's setting, while preserving the central appeal of the work: understanding creators, their audiences and the brands seeking a place in those relationships.
The workplace belongs in the story
An agency's client list is the easy part to put on a slide. Who does the work deserves space beside it. XX was described at the combination as majority female and majority diverse; more than a third of its team identified as LGBTQ+. Its workplace recognition included Fast Company's 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators and Ad Age's Best Places to Work in 2021.
Those facts help explain why the company's identity extended beyond its campaigns. An agency selling cultural understanding depends on the people doing the understanding. Recruitment, leadership and whose experience enters a discussion all bear on that work. XX's composition was part of its public business story, alongside growth and clients. It was also a reason colleagues and partners singled out the company when welcoming it into Media.Monks.
Glass balls, rubber balls, and other office equipment
For a founder in social marketing, Kuhns has been willing to sound unconvinced by a fashionable platform idea. In 2021 he questioned the enthusiasm surrounding audio, citing Clubhouse and podcast exclusives. It was a view tied to that moment, rather than a permanent verdict on everything people might listen to. The interesting habit was his willingness to ask whether enthusiasm had produced a satisfying experience for the audience.
His preferred management advice was borrowed from a colleague. Amanda Brennan, then XX's senior director of trends, distinguished between responsibilities that would break if dropped and those that could recover after a delay. Kuhns said he returned to the analogy regularly. It is an unusually practical contribution to founder wisdom. A growing company needs some way to decide which problem deserves immediate attention; treating every request as equally fragile is an expensive way to organize a day.
He also remembered Lilly Singh telling the agency's interns that hard work had no substitute. These are revealing choices of advice to repeat. Both give other people the memorable line. One concerns effort; the other concerns judgment about where effort belongs. Together they suggest a more usable account of running an agency than a schedule filled with motivational declarations.
The next chapter has familiar collaborators
Kuhns's later work has kept him close to talent. He is identified as principal at 03 Media, whose services include artist management, marketing and content development. He is based in Bend, Oregon. In April 2026, Hulu named him at 03 Media among Lilly Singh's representatives when announcing her guest appearance in the second season of Deli Boys. The agency name had changed; the professional connection continued.
His credits also extend into production. He was a producer on Doin' It, the comedy starring Singh, and an executive producer on WE Celebrate: Class of 2020. These credits put him in the making of entertainment as well as its marketing. They add another dimension to a career that began with wanting a way into the industry.
In September 2025, that film brought part of the story back to Salem, where two free screenings were announced at Salem Cinema. Kuhns had grown up going to movies with his grandmother, enjoying Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man films and romantic comedies. A hometown screening offered a pleasing reversal: the boy in the audience had helped put something on the screen.
The career now spans agency building, representation and production. Its beginning remains refreshingly specific. Someone wanted room to try an idea. Someone else agreed to make room. For all the later talk of platforms and campaigns, the first useful arrangement could fit on an ordinary calendar: one day a week, reserved for what might happen next.