He wrote bots to buy sneakers before they sold out. He was thirteen. The habit stuck.
Steven Schwartz. He runs a company built for people who never wanted the desk in the first place - and he is sitting still just long enough for the photo.
Whop sells the checkout for an economy that was already happening in Discord DMs.
Steven Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Whop, a New York company that lets people sell software, courses, trading communities, and other digital products to their followers. He is 26. The company he runs was last reported at a $1.6 billion valuation, processes something on the order of $4 billion in annual commerce, and, by Schwartz's own count, has minted more than 650 millionaires. Those are his numbers, offered in a Fortune interview, and they are the kind of numbers a founder says out loud precisely because they are hard to independently audit. What is easier to verify is the shape of the thing: a platform that took the informal software bazaar of Reddit threads and Discord servers and put a payment button underneath it.
The origin was self-interested, which is usually the honest kind. Whop started as a way for Schwartz and his co-founders to sell their own software to people in Facebook groups and Discord servers. Then they noticed the pattern was everywhere - hundreds of thousands of people already trying to buy and sell software with no infrastructure, just handles and PayPal links and a lot of trust that mostly held. Building the storefront underneath that behavior turned out to be the business.
The first company was called Sole Sniper. Schwartz and Cameron Zoub - who is now Whop's chief growth officer - built an iOS bot that could snap up limited-edition Nikes, including a run of Kobe 7 Easters, before they sold out. The bots sold for somewhere between $20 and $500. Schwartz was thirteen and working out of his childhood bedroom. It is worth pausing on the fact that he was writing and selling commercial software at an age when he could not legally sign most of the contracts involved.
Then came the wilderness years, which he talks about more than most founders talk about their failures. Roughly two dozen ventures: a disappearing-chat tool that arrived before Snapchat did, a hamburger delivery service in college, marketplaces, consumer apps, games, social networks, SaaS products, agencies. Somewhere in there he interned at Accenture's Singapore office, programming chatbots for shipping companies, and graduated from NYU Stern in 2021. The 23rd attempt was Whop. The lesson he draws from the run is not romantic. His advice to people asking how to repeat it is four words: find a real problem to solve.
Schwartz's hiring test skips the resume, and he says the quiet part out loud. The only thing that really matters, he told Fortune, is whether the person has built something, and whether it is impressive and cool. If so, welcome to the team. The second filter is stranger and more revealing: energy. How fun is it to be around this person? Do you find yourself wanting to spend time with them? For most companies that would be an illegal-sounding way to hire. For a company whose entire pitch is that work should be fun, it is at least internally consistent.
The office follows the same logic taken to its extreme - a sauna, a steam room, a piano room, a podcast studio, a photo wall, and a shoes-off policy. It is easy to file this under startup excess, and maybe some of it is. But Schwartz treats the workplace as a product decision rather than a perk, which is a different bet: that the environment is part of what the company is selling to the people it wants to keep.
The mission, stated plainly, is grand enough to invite eye-rolling: a world where people earn a living on their own terms, doing work they find fun, and where money worries become obsolete because income follows passion. You can call it naive. It is the kind of sentence a 26-year-old with a billion-dollar valuation can afford to say. But it is also, for the 650-odd people Schwartz says have crossed the millionaire line on his platform, apparently already true. The interesting tension is that the mission is romantic and the mechanism is not - the mechanism is a take rate on digital-goods transactions, the same unglamorous machinery that powers every marketplace since eBay.
Schwartz is mentored by Justin Mateen, a Tinder co-founder, and backed by a cap table that runs from contrarian venture capital to a stablecoin giant. It is an unusual set of patrons for a company whose customers are, in large part, people selling trading signals and fitness plans and how-to-flip-NFTs courses to strangers on the internet. Whether that base compounds into something durable or churns is the real question under the valuation. For now, Schwartz keeps quoting the same figure: ten to fifteen people hit a $20,000 milestone on the platform every day, he says. It is a claim, and it is also the whole pitch in one number.
Reporting drawn from Fortune, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Starter Story, The Org, and Whop. Financial and platform figures (valuation, millionaires, commerce volume) are as reported by the company and press coverage, and should be read as claims rather than audited numbers.