Hello Kind and Curious Leader,
Jason Johnson walked into the Licensing Expo with me last week and said, remember when we did the ATV booth?
It was the first time I had been back to the Expo in seven years. Jason was with me at Disney, then DreamWorks, then Awesomeness TV. He has seen the inside of more booth builds than most people have seen conference rooms. The booth he named was the one that almost did not happen, in a market that was not sure why we were there, for a company most of the buyers walking past us could not have explained to their own boards.
This is a story about disrupting or being disrupted, about five years of timing, and about the people who took the bet with me.
In 2014 I left a CEO suite to take a job as the first head of Consumer Products at Awesomeness TV. My new office was the edge of a ping pong table in West LA. I went from a private office and an assistant to a folding chair and a power strip. I loved it. The audience was moving and the org chart at my old company could not move with it. You could feel the shift in the room every time a teenager pulled out a phone. The question was not whether to bet. The question was how fast we could get there.
The roster we were building consumer products around in those first eighteen months: Teala Dunn, Tyler Oakley, Sawyer Hartman, Josh Leyva, Cimorelli, Ingrid Nilsen, Amanda Steele (Makeup by Mandy). In 2026 those names sit comfortably inside a creator economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2014 most boardrooms could not have picked any of them out of a lineup, and the people in those boardrooms controlled the budgets we needed.
So we built proof.
Kohl's collaboration. A national mass retailer partnering with a digital-native creator network at scale, in a window when most retailers were still treating YouTubers as a novelty category. The deal alone took months of explaining what an audience looks like when it does not show up in a Nielsen rating.
Melrose Avenue pop-up. A physical retail experience where the customer journey was the creator, not the SKU. Fans came for the person and bought the product on the way out. That is the standard creator commerce playbook in 2026. We were prototyping it in 2015.
Licensing Expo booth, and the cover of Licensing International Magazine, November December 2014, Volume 17 Number 6. The photo was me surrounded by Josh Leyva, Sawyer Hartman, Amanda Steele, and Ingrid Nilsen. The headline read, "Awesomeness TV: The New Vibe." The cover line read, "an exclusive look at how Jim Fielding is taking this upstart multi-channel YouTube network and its most popular creators into the world of brand building, licensing, and beyond." A trade publication, in 2014, had to explain to its own readers what a multi-channel YouTube network was. The cover was doing the same educational work the buyer meetings were doing.
We were not ahead of our time. We were paying tuition for the entire industry's education.
One scene. In 2015, in a meeting with a major national retailer, the category lead asked me, with a straight face, what is YouTube. That was the headline question. The more typical ones were quieter. Why should we care. Why take the risk. And the one that landed in those rooms more than I expected, said almost as an admission: we know teens and tweens are not in our stores or online with us, but we do not know where they have gone.
We knew where they had gone. The work was getting the budget holders to believe us long enough to write a check.
Sales did not hit plan. We needed marketing dollars in multiples of what we had. The wins were real and the trajectory was right and the timing was wrong by about five years. I look at TikTok Shop, Instagram Shops, and creator-led commerce at scale in 2026 and I see the playbook we were sketching on whiteboards in West LA, only now the buyers are not asking what YouTube is. They are asking how fast they can scale on three platforms at once.
None of that work happened because one person saw something coming. Brian Robbins, Joe Davola, and Brett Bouttier built a company that bet on creators before the rest of the industry had language for it, and they trusted a consumer products team to figure out the licensing model from scratch. When DreamWorks acquired ATV in 2014, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ann Daly did not fold us into the existing playbook. They protected the experiment. They funded the booth. They put a YouTube creator on the cover of the industry trade. That kind of cover from leadership is rare, and it is the reason any of the receipts above exist.
Being right early and being rewarded are different events on different timelines. The market did not punish us for being wrong. The market needed five more years before it could spend money on what we were selling. If you are looking at AI right now, or at creator-led commerce at the next level, or at whatever shift your board has not yet named, the question is not whether you can see it. The question is whether you and your team can afford to spend the years it takes to teach the room.
Here is what we learned in those rooms that I still use every day. Warm gets further than sharp. The temptation when you are explaining the basics in a meeting with people who outrank you in title but not in pattern recognition is to get tired, get smug, get edged. The discipline is to keep showing up kind and clear, meeting after meeting, knowing some rooms will never get it and a few will, and the few is what moves the industry.
I left the CEO suite because I did not know enough about where the audience was going, and I needed to be in the room with the people who did. The creators on that magazine cover taught me more about audience behavior in eighteen months than a decade of legacy retail had. Curiosity is the operating cost of doing this work past fifty. If you stop being a student, you stop being useful, and the next ping pong table seat does not get offered to you.
I would not tell anyone to take a risk for the sake of taking one. The version worth taking is the calculated one. You know what you are betting. You know what you can afford to lose. You know who is in the boat with you. And you know that the timeline you sold the board is probably wrong by a factor of two or three, and you are going anyway. That is not recklessness. That is conviction with math attached.
I walked the Expo floor in 2026 with Jason. We found Erin Morris. We found Elizabeth Litten Miller. We found John Lustyan. We found other people who had been on that journey with us, who had taken the ping pong table seat in their own way, in their own years. We stood in a hallway and reminisced about a booth that does not exist anymore, for a company that has changed hands more than once, in an industry that has reorganized itself around what we were trying to explain to skeptical buyers a decade ago.
And Ingrid Nilsen, who was on that 2014 magazine cover with us, runs a fragrance and candle brand now called The New Savant. She is a founder. I help her any way I can, not because there is a deal in it, but because that is what showing up looks like when the years stretch out. The ping pong table did not buy us the deals. It bought us the people. Walking the Expo floor with them in 2026 is the receipt that matters most.
If you are sitting in a CEO suite right now wondering whether to take the smaller seat at the harder table, I cannot tell you the numbers will work on the timeline you want. I can tell you that the choice is rarely between disrupting and standing still. The choice is between disrupting on your own terms or being disrupted on someone else's. And twelve years later, the people who took the bet with you will still be the ones standing next to you on the show floor.
That is the part nobody writes about being early. The deals are not the asset. The room is.
In Community and Conversation,
Jim
