The way Arthur Leopold sees it, there’s an $800bn gap between creator attention and traditional ad spend. It’s what led him to found Agentio, an AI-native platform for creator advertising, and it’s what he’s here to talk about on the latest episode of the Further, Faster Podcast. Arthur is a heavyweight when it comes to the the creator economy – before launching Agentio in 2023, he was the President of Cameo, the wildly successful platform that allows anyone to book a personalised video from their favorite celeb – and his conversation with Antler Partner Jeff Becker is a must-listen for anyone who wants the inside track on AI, social media and ad-tech.

Arthur got his competitive spirit from an early age – he is a twin and was a competitive ski racer. He first got really fired up about the power of social media after high school, when he worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, building groups and fundraisers through Facebook and MySpace: “Lo and behold, I became like one of the largest fundraisers for Obama as an 18 and 19 year old.” Soon after he became the youngest elected delegate in New York State. “I'd always had this fury, passion and belief that the norm can just be broken through,” he says. “If you follow the crowd, you're going to get the same output as everybody else in the crowd. But if you're sprinting alone, you're going to see an entirely new world.”

He honed his “five quarters” work ethic at Linkedin, where he’d get in at 7am and leave at 7pm everyday. “Everybody else is working one week, you're working a week and a half. And that continues to compound. If you do just two hours more per day than everyone else, you have five quarters while everyone has four,” says Arthur. “So you don't have to be the smartest guy. You don't have to be the greatest seller. But if you're able to work just a few hours more per day than everyone else, you're going to learn more. You're going to make stronger relationships. You're going to be more thoughtful. And your output's going to be that much greater than everyone else.”

It helps explain why Arthur's companies have had such explosive growth. Cameo, which was founded in 2017, hit a $1bn valuation during the pandemic. And Agentio, which was founded in 2023, is already valued at $340m, following a $40m Series B. Agentio builds on the same opportunity. “I saw that technology could eliminate the friction between fans and their favorite people. And the belief was that there was this thousand times opportunity on the B2B side.”

As Arthur explains: “Everyone knows that influencer marketing is powerful…The challenge for every marketer is that if they want to partner with creators today, they have to

work through this sea of friction and opacity and manual workflows and spreadsheets and 200 email long chains and this whole process that frankly is very archaic. The belief was that if you could eliminate those challenges not only could you enable marketers to work on stuff that they actually want to work on but you could also shift paid media dollars to the creator space.” 

To learn more about the ways Agentio is redistributing ad dollars in the creator economy, what it means to be truly AI-native, and how Arthur consistently lands top-tier backers, listen to the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff-PuauiL3M