AI talent turns down $100M and a ping pong table.
Meanwhile, one solo founder lands an $80M exit, and 40K people join the waitlist for blockchain TikTok.
Appreciate all the love last week — a few of you said the deep read on Sam Altman’s latest blog was your favorite issue yet.
I’ll keep that format in rotation for whenever a topic deserves the spotlight.
This week, we’re back in Rich Future™ velocity mode.
Tracking underpriced momentum, new rich economics, and the $80M solo play that made the internet pay attention.
Meanwhile, the Fed’s still playing the same old song, the markets are not, and Meta is offering $100M+ to lure OpenAI’s talent.
Is Zuckerberg winning?
Let’s get into what moved this week across finance, AI, and the future of work.
The Solo Playbook Just Got a $80M Sale
Six months after launch, Maor Shlomo sold his company Base44, an AI-powered app builder, to Wix for $80 million in cash.
He did it without:
→ venture funding
→ sales team
→ 10-year roadmap
Instead, Shlomo opted for ‘building in public’ as marketing strategy. Every tech choice, margin update, and even acquisition hints were shared in real time with his digital community. Then the internet spread the word.
Base44 hit 10,000 users in three weeks and cleared $189K in monthly profit by May.
The $80M sale price is impressive, obviously. It’s also symbolic.
Rather than focusing on staffing up or chasing VC intros, he scaled a story.
By documenting in public and baking actual profit into the product, he created narrative leverage most founders outsource to PR. Base44 became inevitable because the receipts were real, the timing was right, and the internet already believed in the upside.
This is what AI-powered leverage looks like: fast execution, margin awareness, and distribution you don’t have to pay for.
💡 Big Picture: $80M is no longer reserved for teams of 80. It’s now a validated outcome for solo businesses with great tech, lean margins, and strategic momentum.
Creator Economy to Hit $528B by 2030
The creator economy is on pace to reach $528 billion by 2030, up from $191B in 2025, growing 22.5% annually.
Creators aren’t just scaling content. 80% now use AI tools to operate more like lean media companies than influencers.
According to Forbes’ 2025 Top Creators list released this week, the highest earners are optimizing for ownership.
Alex Cooper (#5 on the list) launched Unwell Hydration to extend her media IP into consumer products.
Alix Earle (#32 on the list) signed an equity deal this year as the face of canned tequila brand SipMargs, proving equity > endorsement is the new creator math.
This shift is drawing serious capital.
Slow Ventures launched a Creator Fund in 2025, a signal that creator-led enterprises are being viewed (and valued) like early-stage startups.
As distribution gets automated and personal brands become full-stack businesses, the real opportunity is building tools and ownership that outpace virality every time.
💡 Big Picture: Personal brands are becoming portfolios. What starts with content ends in products, equity, and cap tables.
(We break down how to turn content into brand leverage in June’s Prime Drop — catch up here.)
Fed Signals Stagflation While Markets Shrug
The Federal Reserve held rates steady this week at 4.25%–4.5%, while projecting 1.4% GDP growth and 3% inflation in 2025.
The textbook stagflation combo: sluggish growth paired with elevated prices.
But markets barely flinched. Equities ticked upward. Rate cuts are still priced in. Everyone’s acting like it’s 2021.
That’s because we’re no longer operating under old economy logic.
I wrote about the new economy forecast back in March, inside our very first Rich Future weekly brief.
In the new economy, old monetary policy is noise.
While most people are scanning for rate pivots, smart builders are stacking uncorrelated assets:
→ Skills that aren’t market-priced
→ Systems that generate leverage without burn
→ Income streams that stay liquid in dry cycles
Cash is yielding 4%+ risk-free. Meanwhile, risk assets are priced like the Fed already cut twice. The mismatch is your invitation to build differently.
When logic breaks, leverage compounds.
💡 Big Picture: Don’t wait for the Fed to bless your momentum. Assets that self-compound are the new Rich Future™ flight path.
Why 40K People Joined the Waitlist for TikTok on Blockchain
A new app called Own launched its public beta this week, positioning itself as a decentralized TikTok alternative built for creators and fans.
With over 40,000 people on the waitlist, the signal is loud: the future of creator monetization is going on-chain.
Built on a fast, low-cost blockchain network, Own lets users post short videos, images, and text. But unlike traditional platforms, it also rewards both creators and fans with a tradeable $OWN token, tracked on the blockchain.
This is a HUGE moment for the future of media and money.
Instead of platform-first monetization (where creators earn pennies and fans earn nothing), Own flips the script: value is shared, transactions are transparent, and every piece of content has proof of ownership.
The monetization model is fully Rich Future™–coded:
→ Fans earn tokens by engaging
→ Creators keep up to 95% of their in-app sales
→ Content can be licensed or resold with rewards baked in
In short, it’s a platform where distribution meets DeFi, and creators actually own the upside.
💡 Big Picture: We’re seeing the blueprint for creator wealth diverge from centralized platforms built on ad revenue → to decentralized protocols where ownership, liquidity, and global access are standard features.
Wondering what this shift looks like in practice? I break down why Substack is the first real proof of concept — read here.
The $100M Talent Standoff: Altman vs. Zuck
This week on Uncapped, a new-ish podcast hosted by Jack Altman, he chose to interview his brother. In the interview, Sam Altman confirmed that Meta has been making $100M+ offers to poach OpenAI talent.
“None of our best people have taken them,” he said, emphasizing that OpenAI’s edge is a culture of momentum, shared mission, and more promising upside.
Zuckerberg’s goal is to staff up Meta’s new superintelligence team and has been offering wild packages to both OpenAI’s and Google Deep Mind researchers to try to make that happen.
Despite Meta’s aggressive recruiting tactics, the best talent is staying put.
Why? Because innovation doesn’t thrive in high-comp stacks alone. Altman pointedly said Meta’s current AI efforts “have not worked as well as they hoped,” and implied that money without mission is expensive noise.
The $100M takeaway: talent gravity is no longer about perks or prestige. In this economy, it’s about proximity to real momentum.
Vision-driven teams are outperforming corporate dinosaurs, especially in a frontier tech race like AI.
💡 Big Picture: If you’re hiring, investing, or building anything ambitious, bet on conviction over compensation. Vision attracts. Culture compounds. And no one’s staying for the ping pong tables.
PS: this interview is the latest on Uncapped with Jack Altman and it now lives on the Rich Future™ podcast playlist, which I update weekly with new podcast episodes to keep your edge sharp in the new economy.
Save it, binge it, stay five steps ahead.
As we wrap up this week’s brief, consider this your signal to start building for where the new economy is headed —
When you upgrade your subscription to Rich Future Prime, you get:
Monthly leverage drops (tools, prompts, frameworks)
Deep-dive Q&As + strategic breakdowns
Exclusive discounts on all Rich Future products, courses & merch
The latest in Rich Future™ Prime :
The June Q&A is now available, including insights on:
→ content systems that don’t fry your brain
→ standing out in AI-saturated feeds
→ how to increase your brand equity (& become Forbes-worthy)
→ what I’d do differently after building a 55K+ audience across platforms if I were starting from scratch today
Anddddd, Prime members voted last week on the first Rich Future™ digital product (Future-Proof Investing) which will launch in July.
As a member, the product discounts will make it a no-brainer to be on the inside.
Catch up on the Q&A & join the crew:
Let’s build your Rich Future™
Kalei x