tiktok
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Abraham “AB” Lieberman and the list he wouldn’t sell
A young freelancer kept his creator relationships when a client disappeared. Those relationships became Clicks Talent. Now Abraham “AB” Lieberman is working on a different problem: building systems that can carry the business beyond his own inbox.
Yubin Ng and the business of coming back
An Astro scholarship took Yubin Ng into media. MantaYaY took him into the creator economy. Now the founder is returning to eGG Network, carrying a decade of lessons about what makes an audience stay.
Zefr knows what your ad is sitting next to
A business born around movie clips now helps advertisers judge the company their ads keep. Its wager: understanding one video is more useful than fearing an entire channel.
Humphrey Yang Learned to Make Money Make Sense
A former financial adviser turned a month of short videos into a vast audience. The trick was to make intimidating ideas feel like a conversation between friends.
Louis Lee Has Spent a Decade Finding the People Behind the Machines
Before Pika, Louis Lee recruited across Meta, Google and TikTok. His career makes a quiet case that the people who build the future are often found by someone who remembers what opportunity can change.
Liang Rubo and the Discipline of Day One
He spent years building ByteDance from behind the screen. Now the engineer who shared a dorm room, a desktop and a startup with Zhang Yiming is asking a global company to move as if it were still day one.
Zhang Yiming and the Useful Art of Disappearing
He built a company around predicting what people would watch next, then decided the most interesting next move was to leave the chief executive's chair. Now ByteDance's private founder is back near the frontier he never really abandoned: artificial intelligence.
Alta Media USA wants your next minute
A TikTok creator network on one side. A short-drama studio and app on the other. Alta Media USA is working on both sides of the same question: what makes somebody stay?
Alex Song
He spent nine years reading markets for Goldman and Bill Ackman. Now he is handing small brands the data science that used to belong only to the giants.
Ian Asher
He was the first DJ to go big on TikTok, then a French singer's decade-old song became his loudest moment. Ian Asher on trusting his gut, ignoring the noise, and building a career that outlasts the algorithm.
Benson Boone Backflipped His Way Into Pop's Front Row
He walked away from American Idol, moved to Las Vegas on a stranger's DM, and turned a diver's instinct into one of the biggest voices in pop. Two albums in, Benson Boone is still airborne.
Victor Luo
Victor Luo is the CEO and co-founder of Perfectly (YC W26), an AI-native recruiting operating system that automates sourcing, outreach, screening, and qualification for high-growth tech teams. A former machine learning scientist at TikTok who worked on large-scale recommendation systems, Victor sat through more than 800 agency-sourced interviews before deciding that hiring should work more like a recommendation engine. He is a two-time founder, a University of Virginia computer science graduate, and builds recruiting agents named Paul and Parker that deliver interview-ready candidates straight to Slack.
MantaYaY
MantaYaY is a Kuala Lumpur-based TikTok-first creator network and media company. It manages a network of thousands of creators, runs influencer marketing and social-media accounts for brands, operates TikTok Shop live commerce, and produces short-form drama and gaming content across Southeast Asia. Founded by former TikTok creators Yubin Ng and Joel Lim, the company positions itself as a full-stack partner connecting brands, creators, and audiences on short-form video.
LoudCrowd
LoudCrowd is an Austin-based software company that helps direct-to-consumer brands turn creators and customers into a measurable sales channel. Its all-in-one creator commerce platform runs influencer, affiliate, ambassador, and user-generated-content programs, spins up branded on-domain creator storefronts, and layers on AI agents that automate discovery, outreach, and program management - shifting the focus from reach-based vanity metrics to attributable revenue.
ByteDance
ByteDance is a Beijing-headquartered technology company behind TikTok, Douyin, CapCut, Lark, Toutiao and the Doubao family of AI models. Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo, it built one of the world's most powerful content recommendation engines and grew into the largest social-media company by revenue, surpassing Meta in early 2026.
1stCollab
1stCollab is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered influencer marketing platform (YC W23) that automates the entire creator-campaign workflow - sourcing creators, outreach, negotiation, contracts, payments, and taxes - while optimizing for ROI. Founded in 2022 by ex-Pinterest leaders Leon Lin, Varun Bansal, and Andrew Liu (with Carina Cater leading influencer strategy), it connects thousands of creators each week with brands like Notion, Character AI, Quora, Framer, and Gamma, letting marketers do in hours what once took teams months.
Paul Benigeri
Paul Benigeri is the co-founder and CEO of Archive, an AI-powered influencer and user-generated-content marketing platform he launched with Geoffrey Woo in 2021. A Stanford computer-science graduate raised in Paris, he spent his early career writing code at First Round Capital and RockMelt before scaling growth and engineering at the nutrition company HVMN. Archive grew from a Shopify app that auto-captured Instagram Stories into a platform used by brands like Quest, Allbirds and Hexclad, raising roughly $12M-plus and reaching a reported $100M valuation in about 18 months while staying lean and remote-first.
Vicente Fernandez
Vicente Fernandez is the co-founder and CEO of SportsManias, the Miami company that turned officially licensed sports emojis and augmented reality filters into a fan-passion business. A University of Chicago football player turned media entrepreneur, he started the company at 19 after a phone call from his mother and co-founder, Aymara Del Aguila. He went on to ship the first officially licensed NFL player AR stickers in partnership with TikTok and the NFLPA, land on Forbes 30 Under 30 for Sports, and get invited to the White House as an Emerging Global Entrepreneur.
Luke Davidson
Luke Davidson is a Canadian comedy content creator from Dauphin, Manitoba who turned TikTok sketches into a multi-platform empire. Known for his relatable family-dynamics humor and the signature move of pulling a shirt over his head to play multiple characters, he amassed 15+ million TikTok followers and 17+ million YouTube subscribers before turning 23 - earning YouTube's Diamond Creator Award in 2022. His observational comedy about awkward school moments and everyday family chaos resonates with teenagers and young adults worldwide.
Matt Lee
Matt Lee is the Founder and General Partner of Progression Fund, a pre-seed and seed-stage consumer technology VC firm co-founded with alumni from musical.ly and TikTok. Based in Oakland, California, he backs visionary founders building AI-native products for everyday consumers and prosumers, with a particular thesis around generational behavior shifts - specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha. His portfolio spans consumer tech, gaming, entertainment, social platforms, live streaming commerce, and digital health, with notable investments including Perplexity AI and Dapper Labs. He brings a global perspective from prior roles at ChinaRock Capital Management, Pereg Ventures, and engineering and consulting stints at Macquarie Group and Capco.
David Sze
David Sze is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners who built the firm's consumer investing franchise from scratch, backing Facebook at a $500M valuation in 2006, LinkedIn when it had 1 million users in 2004, Discord in 2016, and Roblox before it became a household name. A former operator at Excite, Electronic Arts, and HBO, he ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012 and remains one of Silicon Valley's most decorated consumer internet investors. He is a Yale trustee, Rockefeller University board member, and advisor to McLaren Racing.
Josh Elman
Josh Elman is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped grow Twitter nearly 10x, launched Facebook Connect, and backed foundational consumer products like Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock Partners. Currently Director of Product Management at Apple focused on App Store discovery, he is best known for his 'only metric that matters' framework - the idea that great products are defined by a core action users perform at a predictable frequency, not vanity metrics.
Lil Nas X
Lil Nas X (born Montero Lamar Hill) is an Atlanta-raised rapper, singer, and cultural provocateur who turned a 99-cent beat, a TikTok meme, and sheer internet genius into a record-breaking 19-week #1 hit before he had a major label deal. Since 'Old Town Road,' he has released three #1 Billboard Hot 100 singles, two Grammy wins, a debut album with universal acclaim, a Satan Shoes controversy that sued Nike, and a documentary on Max - all while being one of the most openly gay, openly himself artists in pop music history. Now in his Dreamboy era with a second studio album on deck, Lil Nas X remains the internet's favorite provocateur.
Sadie Jean
Sadie Jean Wilcox is an independent indie-pop singer-songwriter from Tustin, California, who turned a dorm-room song written as revenge on a cheating ex into a viral TikTok phenomenon. Her 2021 debut single 'WYD Now?' went Gold in the US and Silver in the UK, earned 100M+ Spotify streams, and went so viral mid-finals that she dropped out of NYU's prestigious Clive Davis Institute to pursue music full-time. Since then she has released the EP 'Simple Like 17' (2023) and her debut studio album 'Early Twenties Torture' (2025), toured with Rod Wave, Snow Patrol, Cian Ducrot, and Lauren Spencer Smith, and built a devoted fanbase through her 'Jeanmail' newsletter - all while remaining fully independent.
Sofia Isella
Sofia Isella is a Los Angeles-born, 21-year-old indie-pop musician crafting sharp, cinematic dark pop about womanhood, rage, and the absurdity of modern life. Classically trained on violin from age two and daughter of Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda, she grew up between Taiwan, Australia, and New Mexico before channeling her itinerant childhood into ferociously literary songwriting. Her 2023 viral breakout 'Hot Gum' (16M+ streams) led to opening for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium before 90,000 fans in August 2024, where Swift personally sent her a handwritten letter praising 'Everybody Supports Women.' By April 2026, Isella has released four EPs and surpassed 150 million worldwide streams, headlining sold-out shows across Europe and the US on her 'Her Desire, The Nemesis' tour.
Kyla Scanlon
Kyla Scanlon is an economist, author, and content creator who coined the term 'vibecession' and has built a multi-platform media presence dedicated to making economics accessible. Her debut book 'In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work' (2024) became a New York Times bestseller. She reaches over 1 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Twitter/X, and has been named to Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance. A triple major from Western Kentucky University, she left a career in institutional asset management at Capital Group to pursue financial education full-time.
Taylor Lorenz
Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist, author, and media operator who has spent her career documenting how the internet reshapes fame, culture, power, and everyday life. After stints at Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, she left legacy media in October 2024 to run User Mag, her Substack-based publication covering tech and internet culture, which quickly grew to nearly 100,000 subscribers. Her 2023 book 'Extremely Online' is a landmark social history of the influencer economy. She is widely considered one of the most influential — and most harassed — tech journalists in America.
Brooke Averick
Brooke Averick (@ladyefron) is the Philadelphia-born preschool teacher turned TikTok royalty with 1M+ followers, 68.4M likes, and zero shame. She went viral in April 2020 reading her childhood diary, quit teaching, launched Brooke & Connor Make a Podcast (named Best Comedy Podcast of 2024 by Adweek with 30M+ YouTube views), started a solo show called Obsessed with Brooke Averick, and is now publishing her debut novel — Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It — with Crown/Penguin Random House in May 2026. The internet's favorite oversharer, described as 'the app's Jewish voice of Gen Z' by Hey Alma.