🔴 He stopped posting at his peak. Now, he runs 4 companies

When your livelihood is reliant on your personal brand, how do you stop making content without losing your income?

Our guest this week is Caspar Lee, a semi-retired YouTube creator who had 15 million followers across platforms at his peak. He was part of “The Brit Crew,” a friend group that dominated YouTube throughout the 2010s.

Today, he runs four businesses: an influencer marketing agency with 180 employees, a talent management company, a venture capital fund, and a student housing venture.

None of them need him on camera.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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By Natalia Pérez-González

At his peak, Caspar Lee commanded 15 million followers across platforms. His last YouTube upload was two years ago; the one before that, five. The slow end of his YouTube career aligns with the growth of his four businesses — Influencer.com, MVE Management, Creator Ventures, and Proper Living — which have given him financial independence from platform algorithms and content output.

The South African-raised creator started on YouTube in 2011, eventually becoming part of the "Brit Crew" — one of the earliest YouTuber collectives, consisting of Zoella, Alfie Deyes, Joe Sugg, and six others who pioneered collaboration-driven growth. The group shifted from producing skits to intimate daily content, and was among the first to cross into mainstream success with publishing deals and lifestyle brands.

Caspar’s audience grew through constant collaboration within this network, and as his influence and income grew in tandem, he began to notice gaps. Brands didn't know how to work with creators. Creators had no representation that understood their business. The infrastructure didn't exist.

Those skills — orchestrating collaboration and building from scratch — transferred directly to building businesses. Entrepreneurship, in his telling, is just another version of those same creative muscles, applied at scale.

Creators whose face or persona is central to their own content struggle to find an offramp. Where's the business model that scales beyond your personal brand? In hindsight, Caspar's transition looks planned, but it happened gradually; it was never a tightly calculated exit strategy.

He co-founded Influencer.com with Ben Jeffries in the early 2010s, as a way to formalize how brands collaborated with creators — an industry that, at the time, was still in its early stages of development. The company now employs 180 people and runs campaigns with companies like Apple TV and Delta Air Lines.

From there, Caspar co-founded MVE, a creator-focused talent management agency co-founded with WME (William Morris Endeavor, one of entertainment's largest agencies). Then came Proper Living, a student housing venture in South Africa that uses social-first marketing to reach Gen Z tenants. Finally, Creator Ventures, the $45 million fund he runs with Sasha Kaletsky, invests in consumer internet companies that stand to benefit from strong storytelling and distribution. (Full disclosure, Creator Ventures invested in beehiiv's seed round, and beehiiv owns Creator Spotlight).

Each business feeds the next, forming a loop that wasn’t premeditated but makes perfect sense in retrospect:

What ties them together is less a formal strategy than a shared sensibility: leverage creator knowledge without requiring creator visibility. Some creators build successful consumer brands that rely primarily on their persona for distribution — merch lines, beauty products, clothing brands that need constant, personality-driven content marketing to survive. It’s easier to step back from content creation when you’ve built businesses that no longer rely on your face.

At the height of his creator career, Caspar had amassed substantial content capital. He was among YouTube’s most-watched creators. His channel still ranks in the top 1,000 by subscriber count, years after ceasing consistent posting. He successfully converted his following and influence into infrastructure that allowed him to walk away from content creation — without any financial downside.

A few things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:

Creator skills are essential in sustaining businesses. Your follower count may plateau or decline, but the skills you develop while creating —relationship building, attention dynamics, systemic thinking — compound applied outside content (see more on this under Steal this Tactic).

For Caspar, being a former creator is the foundation of his expertise: he understands both sides of influencer marketing (what brands actually need versus what they think they need, what creators can realistically deliver versus what requests are unreasonable).

His businesses work because he's solved problems he personally experienced — misaligned expectations, poor briefs, pricing gaps. This double-sided knowledge is nearly impossible to acquire without having been in the creator seat, and the relationships and credibility he gained serve as permanent leverage.

Connect with Caspar on LinkedIn.
Learn more about Creator Ventures, Influencer.com, and MVE Management.

Caspar built his businesses from a position of strength — 15 million followers and perfect timing as the creator economy matured — but his evolution from creator to entrepreneur is illustrative, whether you have 15 million followers, 15,000, or 1,500.

We understand all creators are entrepreneurs.

Caspar made the leap by recognizing how his creator skills — like brand partnership development, audience development and collaboration — could fuel businesses that didn't require him on camera.

These skills have business equivalents. Brand partnership development becomes business partnership development; convincing people to collaborate on videos becomes selling co-founders, investors, and employees on a common vision. Audience development becomes market development.

A creator’s edge lies in understanding how to captivate attention, build relationships at scale, and create sustainable, strategic systems that drive engagement.

Two or more? You have the foundation to start building.

Your reach isn't just in your follower count or subscribers — it's the credibility, relationships, and pattern recognition you develop while creating. At any scale, this converts into business leverage.

These specific numbers are meant to be general — remember that it’s always about who is in your audience more than how many people are in your audience.

Start building your next act while your current one still works. Your content is most powerful when momentum, audience trust, and creative energy are at their peak. Use that window to plant something that can grow without you.

You don’t need a full pivot — just one small, independent stream:

Your content builds capital; your business turns it into independence. The smartest creators build both at once.