Introducing... Self Funded!

Ten years ago, starting a business “around yourself” usually meant being famous first. Celebrities put their names on makeup, fashion lines, or consumer products and called it a brand.

But over the last decade, something has shifted. Professionals, not just celebrities, are building businesses around their own experience or expertise.

That’s where Self Funded comes in.

It’s the idea that you don’t have to choose the conventional “lanes’: a W-2 job climbing a corporate ladder, a product-based startup chasing venture capital, or 1099 freelancing. There’s a new path where professionals are creating businesses around themselves: using what they know, what they have experienced, and what they are uniquely good at to build something profitable, durable, and fully their own.

Sometimes that means turning your own experience into a business. Your customer is a former version of you. Think about Pat Flynn, who built Smart Passive Income after creating a course to help architects pass an exam he once struggled with. Or Sarah Michelle Boes, who turned her NP exam prep into a business that eventually sold for millions.

Other times it means leveraging your expertise. Emily D. Baker was a prosecutor who turned her legal training into a wildly successful YouTube channel. Codie Sanchez leveraged her Wall Street background into building an investing and media platform around “boring” businesses. These aren’t celebrity stories; they’re expert stories.

Self Funded businesses start scrappy. At first, you are the product. You’re monetizing your time. But the difference is this: you’re building an asset as you go. Whether through services that can be scaled, playbooks that can be handed off, or communities and platforms that grow beyond you, you’re creating something bigger than building yourself into a job.

My interest in this goes back more than a decade.

As a student at Harvard Business School, I became obsessed with the idea of people as brands. At the time, it was mostly celebrity and celebrity-adjacent: Jessica Alba launching Honest Company, Rachel Zoe building her own business and brand on the back of her styling prowess, chefs and trainers crossing into product. I even met with Anita Elberse, the HBS professor who literally built the celebrity brand playbook, and asked her how to be the person behind those businesses. Her advice? Go back to CAA, the talent agency where I had interned.

And I did work with some celebrities building brands: Tyra Banks while she was at HBS herself, and Coach K on leadership development. But what fascinated me even more was what was happening outside the celebrity bubble. At the time, non-celebrities such as Amy Porterfield, Marie Forleo, and Lewis Howes were turning their own knowledge and experience into businesses. That was the spark.

Fast forward several years... While at DraftKings, riding a rocketship of growth, I started to notice more and more of my peers and friends (lawyers, doctors, MBAs, operators) leaving traditional jobs to build something for themselves. Not lifestyle influencer businesses. Not hobby side hustles. Serious, ambitious, profitable businesses that weren’t dependent on venture capital or someone else’s promotion ladder.

That’s Self Funded.

This is about creating your own destiny. Not waiting for a promotion. Not hoping someone else sees your value. Not risking everything on the slim odds of a billion-dollar exit. But also not settling. This is ambitious, challenging, transformative work.

The trends are clear: freelancing is increasingly normalized, personal branding is mainstream, tools are easier than ever, and people are rethinking their relationship with work after COVID. We’re at an inflection point.

And that’s why I’m launching Self Funded, as both a podcast and a platform: to tell these stories, share frameworks, and build a community of ambitious professionals forging their own path.

Because the future of work isn’t just corporate or venture. It’s Self Funded.