0:00:00.0 Wayne Brown: Hello, I’m Wayne Brown, and welcome to The ET project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talents all over the world whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. In today’s episode, our guest is a very gifted individual with a huge future in whichever, in whatever direction she may choose. She’s the author of the recently released book called The Creator Revolution, and her name is Catherine Yeo. After speaking with Catherine, we are pretty confident that you are going to be hearing a lot more from her in the years ahead, Catherine Yeo is a creator, entrepreneur, and an investor studying computer science and English at Harvard University. By the age of 15, she’d accumulated a following of hundreds of thousands for her online content and turned content creation into a business.

0:00:55.8 WB: Over the years, her writing has spanned fiction, technical blog posts, personal essays, and now The Creator Revolution: How Today’s Creative Talents Are Shaping Our Tomorrow. Her work has previously been featured in Teen Vogue, Los Angeles Times, NBC, and other publications though. Though Catherine spends much of her day’s coding and her night’s writing, she always makes time to read and swim and cheer her heart out, watching her home NBA team, the Golden State Warriors. So with that, I welcome you all to find a quiet location where you can tune in uninterrupted for the next 30 minutes as you listen to Catherine Yeo and I discuss leading through the online Creator Revolution.

0:01:48.0 Speaker 2: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

0:02:01.8 WB: Alright, welcome everybody to the ET project. And today we have a very special guest. It’s great to welcome Catherine Yeo onto the show. We’re gonna be talking about her book and all things related to online business, I guess, Catherine. So welcome to our show, and I look forward to our conversation.

0:02:26.5 Catherine Yeo: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, huge honor, and I’m super excited to talk more about today’s online business entrepreneurs and creators.

0:02:34.9 WB: Excellent. Excellent. We’re gonna move into the book shortly but before we do that, I’d like to ask my guests if they have any fun facts they would like to share about themselves.

0:02:45.9 CY: Yes, it’s taken me many years to figure out what an interesting fun fact about myself is, but my fun fact is that I got to take a selfie with Apple CEO Tim cook with an Android phone, and the story there is that I got to meet Tim Cook at one of the annual Apple developer conferences, and everyone there who saw him was lining up to take a picture with him, of course, and I love Apples, I use a lot of Apple products. The only one I don’t use is an iPhone, I use an Android phone, and I still had the courage to go up to him and ask for a selfie on my Android phone. He took one look at the phone and told me, “You need to upgrade your phone,” which… A memory I’ll never forget.

0:03:35.0 WB: Fantastic. Fantastic, and did he ask you to swap the phone before the photo?

0:03:40.6 CY: He made that remark, and I was glad he still took the picture with me.

0:03:45.9 WB: Very nice. You, you have a… You are very young of course but you have a interesting background already, looking at your bio and flicking through your book, there are so many great stories that I’m sure we’ll touch on. We won’t have time to go deep on everything but maybe if you could just share a little bit about your background, as an intro to our conversation? Would be fantastic.

0:04:13.8 CY: Yeah, absolutely. So, what got me here today to writing this book called The Creator Revolution starts in my own story as a creator. I used to publish a lot of fiction and art on the internet, it started out because I was a very big nerd of fandoms like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and I started writing fan fiction and making fan art for these, these great franchises that I was a huge nerd and a fan of. I discovered a lot of these cool online communities, places I could share my work with others, and then we would enjoy, discuss, and give each other feedback on. From their pivoted to just original, regular fiction, all kinds of art, and grew my audience from there to hundreds of thousands of people. And it got to the point where I was able to essentially turn this into a side business, where people were paying for… Where people would pay me to request specific pieces of writing or art. And I really enjoyed it because like this was a creative passion of mine that I never imagined I could monetize as a craft.

0:05:26.1 CY: And I guess I didn’t realize I was a creator back then but I definitely recognized the potential of how our technology was evolving to the point where it could empower any individual around the world to start a business like that, to lead their own ventures, monetize their artistic and creative endeavors and passions. And now fast-forward to the start of the pandemic, and I was sitting at home, and like everyone else, both consuming and creating copious amounts of content, and here I was watching everyone around me, even people who… Demographics and people who usually didn’t quite participate in the whole content trend, both consuming and creating content. And I thought this was super interesting, I thought maybe this is the time to sit down and document this era what led to the rise of digital content creation and write about the paths of opportunities and impact that has arisen from this. So interviewed hundreds of creators, investors, employees at companies like YouTube and Roblox and compiled all these insights and that turned into the book that we see here today.

0:06:36.1 WB: Very interesting. I read somewhere online or in your bio that at a very early age, around 15 or 16, you already had in excess of 100,000 followers.

0:06:51.6 CY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so through that business, yeah, I think age 15 to 16 was the most dedicated I was as a creator, really spent a lot of time and heart into it, and that’s when I started making money.

0:07:05.8 WB: And I’m one of those other demographics that you just referred to, so I’m at the other end of the age scale here. I’m 62, going on 63 next year, but I’m a content creator and I’m really…

0:07:21.2 CY: Absolutely.

0:07:22.3 WB: Having been introduced to you and your book, I’ve just given myself this title now as a 62-year-old content creator, and I love it.

[laughter]

0:07:34.0 CY: Yes, you should definitely be proud. Your podcast is incredible and then bringing incredible value to so many people out there who you’re informing and educating and inspiring a lot of people with your content. And age definitely isn’t a constraint, I know we’ll talk more about it in the context of the book, but there’s creators at the very young end of the scale, much younger than 15, there’s creators all the way at the end of the spectrum. China has a 93-year-old live streaming sensation, she teaches online audiences about poetry. And she’s 93 and killing it, so age isn’t a factor here. Anyone can be a creator.

0:08:17.3 WB: Wow. That’s incredible. Anything out there in the world today that’s got you excited or got you frustrated, anything happening in your world.

0:08:27.5 CY: That’s a good question. I think a lot of my headspace today is thinking about the intersection of technology and creativity. How technology can be better built and improved to support any kinda creatives, whether it’s a content creator or writer, an animation artist, a filmmaker, anything in that space, so I spent a lot of headspace thinking along these lines lately.

0:08:55.9 WB: And you have a very interesting career already at such a young age, working in venture capital, and you’re still studying, I believe you’re studying at Harvard. You do coding, and aside, in your spare time, you do some writing.

[laughter]

0:09:13.0 CY: Yeah.

0:09:14.7 WB: It’s quite incredible.

0:09:14.9 CY: Thank you. Yeah, it just means I have a lot of existential crisis about what to do next, because I love doing a lot of things.

0:09:24.3 WB: Very good. I liked your comment in your bio, that in your spare time you spend a lot of time screaming out support for your local basketball team.

0:09:34.4 CY: Absolutely.

[laughter]

0:09:37.0 WB: So it’s not all hard work.

0:09:39.9 CY: Yeah, yeah, sometimes in college, because on the East Coast and college, it gets… It’s three hours after when my basketball, like local basketball team plays on the West Coast, so you’ll hear me screaming and cheering at like 1:00 AM in my dorm room.

[laughter]

0:09:56.5 WB: Excellent. Well, let’s move on to the book The Creator Revolution: How Today’s Creative Talents Are Shaping Our Tomorrow. First of all, congratulations, great book.

0:10:07.2 CY: Thank you so much.

0:10:07.6 WB: I didn’t manage to read all of it, first confession, but what I did get through I thoroughly enjoyed, and as I say, I now consider myself the 62-year-old content sensation.

[laughter]

0:10:23.5 WB: So I’m really loving it, but if I just quote from Amazon. In the intro to your book, you talk about some 50 million people consider themselves as creators and more than 200 million pieces of content get published every minute. That’s just phenomenal, right? That’s…

0:10:45.7 CY: Right, and that number goes up every day.

0:10:48.5 WB: Right. Now what was interesting to me, and I have a question around this statement, but you’re predicting that the new golden age of opportunity is upon us sort of thing, and as technology advances and evolves that we’re going to see even more creation occurring. What do you expect that future looks like? Any ideas at this stage?

0:11:13.7 CY: Yeah, I think that’s the golden question. Right? What does the future look like for all of us, but I personally see that creators will become pivotal at every cornerstone of our society, they’re already transforming like the idea of an economy and what it means to work, not everyone is subjected to the idea of working in a cubicle.

0:11:37.2 CY: Instead, a lot of people are out there owning their business or with a lot more autonomy as a creator, leveraging the expertise and passions they have and turning that into some form of business. You also have creators having more influence than a lot of celebrities and athletes these days when it comes to influencing what their audience is buying, the products they’re shopping for, so totally transforming modern e-commerce. A lot of creators are the teachers and what I call the “knowledge creators,” they’re educating our current generation.

0:12:16.7 CY: I see my cousins who are younger than me. They’re proper digital natives, grew up with mobile phones, iPads from the get go, and for them it’s so interesting seeing… When they need to look up information, they go to their favorite creators. Or for me, I often go to YouTube or blog posts over directly searching on Google first, it’s a totally different understanding of education, and I had a lot of fun talking to educators who are creators when I was writing my book as well. Of course there’s a whole…

0:12:50.6 CY: The future of entrepreneurship, brands, businesses, so many currently big ones are already being headed by amazing creators and influencers. I’m sure that trend will continue as they continue to launch more like products, more startups. They’re the businesses of tomorrow. And lastly, another really big thing I’m excited about, and we’ve already seen this happen in the last decade, is how content creation is democratizing access to representation in media because traditional Hollywood or whatever the equivalent is for other countries as well, has been a gatekeeper of who can be seen on the screen or like outside of Hollywood, who is being written about in literature. And so it’s been really exciting to see the increased diversity of stories and voices in mainstream media because you now have the power to put yourself out there and tell your story, provide your journey and background for people to see or learn about as an independent creator online. So lots of exciting areas, and I don’t know what exactly the future will look like, but I’m excited to see it unfold.

0:14:07.3 WB: There are so many great questions that come to mind as I listen to you speaking about some of that, and we’ll come to some of the people shortly that are… In particular on YouTube, they’re transforming how income is generated in such a dynamic way, and as you said, we tend to associate Hollywood movie stars with people that are making millions each year through their movies, and now we see this happening in social media, which is quite incredible, and…

0:14:40.9 WB: Right. Or social media creators who make the jump from social media too, like Netflix projects and big movies. Or Issa Rae, the incredible mind behind HBO’s show, Insecure, she started her own shows back on YouTube before she made it big and had the chance to direct and write her own shows, so it’s a lot of great stories out there like that.

0:15:08.5 WB: Yeah. That’s phenomenal. Before we go too deep into that, I’m just wondering for some of the older demographic that may be listening here, when we talk about content creation, it’s such a broad spectrum of methods or mechanisms that we can use to create content, and I’m just wondering, what’s the most common methods of content creation that are occurring? I know it’s a big list, I don’t expect everything, but…

0:15:39.7 CY: Right. I think I’ll take a step back and first even define what I consider to be digital content because the word “content” itself can be used in a lot of ways. So I would divide it up into five categories. Generally, the first is video, so like short-form videos like TikToks, longer videos, YouTube videos, music videos, online-course videos, anything there, audio, so a podcast like this, music, short clips, images, so artwork, photos, infographics, like Instagram is big for that, for sharing your photos and art, or Tumblr is a mix of images, and text, fourth category, so blog posts, fiction writing, newsletters, tweets, poetry, any form, and text is shared widely these days on anything from like LinkedIn to Twitter to Substack to personal blogs, so many platforms out there. And the last one I call “experiences,” where people who lead online communities, they create games, virtual events, so many different forms of experiences that I still consider digital content.

0:16:56.2 CY: And so in creating all this digital content, there’s no restriction on how to do that or what kind of content to publish, how to create it, but there definitely are a lot of leading platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Substack, Facebook, Twitter and there’s always an evolution of it. For blogging, it’s gone from RSS feeds to blogspot, to medium and Substack these days. It just continues to evolve, these platforms continue to change but the art of content creation and the existence of it hasn’t.

0:17:36.8 WB: Right. It’s a little bit beyond me at my age, I have to say, I feel sometimes because it’s hard to keep on the crest of the wave with all the changes that are happening. Just when I think I’ve caught up, something new comes across my desk, and I think, “Oh, here we go again, so.”

[laughter]

0:17:51.8 CY: I feel the same way sometimes. Don’t worry.

0:17:53.9 WB: Great. One of the areas that’s really fascinating to me, and we’ve already touched on it to some extent, is the whole dynamic around the potential for income generation, it opens up a number of challenges from the traditional work sense. And so if I look at myself as a 45-year veteran, where we go to the office, we have a team of people, we’re leading that team of people, and that’s how we produce our income, but today of course, many people have a dual income source and they’re starting to ramp up their online activity to generate this income. I see the younger generation may not even get to that traditional stage. They may be totally focused on online income, so there’s people you mentioned like Ryan Kaji, is it K-A-J-I? Sorry, Ryan, for pronouncing your name terribly, but Ryan I think turns 11 this year and is already earning high twenties, thirties of millions of dollars each year through his YouTube channel.

0:19:10.9 CY: Yeah, incredible.

0:19:14.0 WB: I could say he’s an exception, but there are so many others out there that are doing maybe not to that extent, but they’re producing income in this way. And so for me, I’m just wondering, you mentioned, what was it? 50 million people creating? How many of those 50 million content creators are actually looking to generate income? Any idea?

0:19:35.6 CY: Yeah, so after I finished writing my book and submitted it there was a report that came out, just in April, so relatively recent, a report by Linktree, who found that there are… They consider there are 200 million creators who make some form of money on the internet, so a 4X value of the 50 millions, but it’s a statistic that includes people who might just make money part-time or very little, like that might not be their focus, and of the full-time creators who are very intentional and need content creation to sustain them income-wise at a full-time level, they found that only 12% of full-time creators make over 50,000 a year. Okay, so there definitely are a lot of creators who are earning income, generating some sorta revenue from content creation, but making it sustainable at a full-time level is still a really challenging task in itself, so I think you’ll see a lot of… For now, a lot of creators who are still doing it part-time or at night or like doing it as a side hustle, for fun or for money or for entertainment, there’s a lot of reasons to do it, but it takes them a bit before they can really jump into it full time and think of it as a comprehensive career.

0:21:03.4 WB: Okay, so we still have… As leaders of industry, we still have a way to go with our employees, but it does lead to the question of, as employees start to gravitate to looking at income through online in the traditional sense, how do leaders try and maintain the engagement with their workers where we already know engagement is so low across most industries already, I’m fearful that with even more distractions out there, it could get worse. Right? And I’m just wondering, so our listener base are primarily executive talents, and so as they move through their career as leaders, I think it would be interesting to explore the topic. How do we maintain engagement with our workers that have an interest in online activities? Yeah.

0:22:01.4 CY: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I’ve seen companies across the spectrum about this. I’ve seen companies who are really supportive of their employees who spend their time outside of work, creating content or building these side hustles, especially companies who are content platforms themselves, I think like LinkedIn and Substack, these kinda companies, I think they better understand what benefits or what these employees want to get out of content creation. I’ve also seen the opposite, where a company is super against this idea. In my book, I profile a creator called Tony, and he was a part-time employee at Sherwin Williams, the paints company. And at the end of 2019, he started making TikToks about mixing paint together as a way to get more customers to buy paints from Sherwin Williams. Like he’s very passionate about paints, thought it would be cool to mix them together.

0:23:00.2 CY: So he bought paints from the company, like he didn’t use company resources and then started making these videos, and it was viral video after viral video because it’s this beautiful mesmerizing art of watching like paint mixed together. And given his growing success, he started to pitch at the corporate level of his company that they should try to leverage social media like TikTok to further develop brand awareness and marketing efforts, but instead of applauding his marketing proposal and his work so far, they fired him instead. So that’s a situation of how corporate leaders didn’t really understand and align on what content creation could be at the employee level. Like Tony was a really passionate employee, very like excited about selling paints, and for him making videos made him happy as an employee, and at the consumer marketing level, it clearly was working, it was a huge lever in driving consumer growth, and then today, a lot of organic TikToks are often more effective than paid ad acquisition, so both at an employee level and a marketing level, like content creation could have been useful but the corporate leaders there didn’t quite see it that way.

0:24:19.8 CY: So like my personal take is that as long as an employee, isn’t creating content using company resources or revealing company secrets, I think companies should try to support their employees who have these passions or expertise they wanna share creatively for both sustaining employee happiness, like giving them something to consider outside of the context of work. Like, I don’t think it’s a distraction if it makes them a happier employee every day and there’s no need to police or infringe upon these passions as long as that’s not infringing on their work time.

0:24:58.3 CY: Additionally, I’ve seen something really interesting, that more people are documenting what it is like to work at blank company, like “day in the life as a designer at this company,” and these kind of content or videos has helped increase the awareness and reputation of the company, and if it’s a consumer product, you can go further to leverage employee content creation as a marketing tool, so I think there’s a lot of opportunities and pathways to include content, like employee content creation as a driving force in the growth of your company. You just have to think more creatively about how you want to see it and what kind of goals your employees have in doing so.

0:25:46.3 WB: So it’s definitely an avenue that personally I’ve not pursued, but listening to some of the ideas that you just mentioned, I can see huge potential. As you say, it just takes a little bit of thought, probably a great opportunity to sit down with your team and talk about what’s interesting them at the moment, and what are they doing online? Is there anything that could be co-created during their day or perhaps even during their lunchtimes to help keep their enthusiasm and their engagement? So yeah, excellent. What does your world look like? How do you stay connected as an individual who is very, very much an online creator? How do you find it for yourself?

0:26:34.9 CY: Yeah, I definitely try to separate my time working versus creating or engaging with content, I definitely want to make time for both, but I know that when I am working, work is the priority, so I definitely try to separate the two and the time I spend on the two, but it sometimes intersects in the sense that like I can share my content with my coworkers and perhaps they all find it helpful or they recommend me other pieces of other articles or blog posts or content relevant to our work to consume as well and then share with each other. So I think at a high level, that’s what it looks like. It’s hard to ignore online content in every form.

0:27:23.2 WB: It’s an area I think that we should be trying to embrace rather than put our head in the sand, so to speak, and look for ways, if we can find ways, then I can imagine that it’s going to be a plus so long as we do it with enough thought and we do it with enough communication and discussion with our teams, I see it could be a means of creating greater loyalty. Is there anything in your book specifically that we haven’t touched on that you think is topical for our listeners?

0:28:02.4 CY: I think one thing that really would be relevant in mind for corporate executives to think about if their employees are engaging in content creation and growing their online ventures is that as a creator, one of the biggest challenges is, you really frequently and quickly run into mental burnout, and burnout is achieved faster if you’re essentially working 1.5 jobs or two jobs, your main job during the day and then your side hustle at night or on weekends, it’s really taxing on yourself, both mentally and physically and even emotionally, so as a leader, I think it will be really helpful to consider what kinda support mechanisms you can provide, what kinda resources you can offer on the topics of mental health and wellness and understanding around this whole space.

0:28:57.9 WB: Interesting, so there’s always two sides to every scenario. Right?

0:29:02.4 CY: Absolutely. Yeah.

0:29:05.0 WB: I’m not gonna ask you for any medical suggestions or advice here, but are there telltale signs that you’ve noticed maybe within yourself or within your group of friends when you can start to see people feeling a little bit burnt out or stressed after a long night of online activity?

0:29:24.5 CY: I think the signs look different for everyone, so I don’t really want to speak for everyone there, but I guess at a high level, just for creators, mental burnout can come from quite a variety of factors. In addition to the dual lifestyle, you also might be frustrated with not being able to dedicate more time or you are not seeing your audience grow, or stress over the financial side of things. If your consistency is such a big part of being a creator, that if you’re busy with work, it’s hard to be consistent with content creation then. It’s a really big challenge to balance that with a job, with a family, with seeing your friends, there are trade-offs you have to make, it is just an exhausting cycle that never ends, so that’s some of the behind-the-scenes reasons as to why this could unfold.

0:30:27.8 WB: Any key takeaways in relation to the future of online creation or what we should be looking for as the next new and great journey in this field?

0:30:41.4 CY: Yeah, I think I’ve touched on a lot already, so also to be… I guess like a brief TLDR is just that… Like my book is structured into three sections, so a very quick TLDR there is… First section is about how creators are reshaping our society abroad, so transforming the economy, shopping and commerce, education, media. Second section is about how The Creator Revolution has granted us a new reality, where as an individual, you can create your own success because you can control your own narrative and outcome, so you see individuals leveraging content to build their own brands, becoming entrepreneurs, amplifying representation in media for whatever community they represent, and the third section is about just challenges and opportunities. There still are. Creators face a lot of challenges. We talked about mental burnout, they also face hate comments, harassment, so many elements to it, and as a society, we must work towards addressing these issues together. Another issue is how platforms are skewed towards the top 1% of creators, so a lot of things to consider, but a lot of exciting things to still look forward to, so that’s what I’m excited about.

0:32:06.1 WB: And before we wrap up, anything that you’re working on at the moment that… You’d like to share any? I think you said no new books coming at the moment, but any projects you’re working on at present?

0:32:18.6 CY: Yeah, no, no new books, I think I need to sleep for two years after the first one. Currently, I’ve been investing in startups and individuals building our tomorrow, especially interested in the people building the future of technology-assisted storytelling, talked to quite a few startups this week who are building really interesting things, democratizing the tools for indie filmmakers or integrating brands into the metaverse, thinking future-forward, what does that look like? Yeah, I was just thinking a lot about how our future can continue helping individuals become their own businesses, how these technologies, these emerging technologies can empower individuals, so I guess that’s about it.

0:33:12.7 WB: That’s enough. That’s a big area to be considering, so fantastic. Where will people find you if they wanna connect or they wanna look at your book and access…

0:33:24.0 CY: Yeah. You can find my book at my website, catherinehyeo.com/creator. My book’s available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s, bookshop, anywhere you buy your book online. Internationally, outside the US, Amazon’s the best option, and you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram @catherinehyeo.

0:33:47.6 WB: Fantastic. Yeah, we’ll put all those links in our show notes so that people can find them. Catherine Yeo, fantastic discussion, really interesting topic I think for a lot of people. The book, once again, The Creator Revolution, please do yourself a favor. If you have any interest in this field and the future that this holds, then I would highly recommend for everyone to grab a copy but it’s been a great pleasure to have you on the show, Catherine, so thank you very much.

0:34:19.6 CY: Yeah, it’s been my honor. Thank you so much, Wayne.

0:34:23.4 Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us on the ET Project, a show for Executive Talent Development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at @coaching4companies.com.