Snoop Dogg has founded or co-founded ten different companies. Sofia Vergara is splitting her attention between cocktails, coffee, and skincare. The pattern is everywhere, celebrities treating entrepreneurship like a diversification strategy instead of a singular obsession.

This isn't just bad business; it's brand suicide. At HotStart VC, one of our fundamental investment criteria is celebrity ownership and commitment. We analyze how deeply celebrities lean into their ventures, what else they're working on, and whether their focus might be spread too thin. Because when a celebrity treats your brand as one of many side hustles instead of their primary mission, everyone loses: the brand, the investors, and ultimately, the celebrity's credibility.

Today, I'm breaking down exactly why this happens, what it costs, and why the celebrities building billion-dollar brands all have one thing in common: singular focus.

I post daily on LinkedIn about celebrity- and creator-founded brands. That consistency has helped me grow to 35,000 followers and generate over 25M impressions.

One tool that has been a game-changer for me is Stanley, an AI content advisor that learns your voice and helps you create authentic, high-engagement posts.

Stanley is hands-down one of the most valuable tools in my stack, and I recommend it to anyone looking to post more consistently and confidently.

I’ve partnered with the Stanley team to give The Fame Game readers a free 3-day trial so you can experience the difference yourself.

If you’ve been wanting to show up more on LinkedIn, this is the perfect place to start.

You'll get a 3-day free trial with my link: https://stanley.stan.store/?ref=scott-van-den-berg-22b534150

Let me show you what celebrity-founded brand overload looks like in practice. Snoop Dogg has co-founded:

All while touring, recording music, acting in movies, and doing paid endorsements.

Today he'll promote cannabis products. Tomorrow it's ice cream. Next week, one of his three alcohol brands. His Instagram has become a revolving door of products, leaving followers wondering what's being sold today. When every post feels like a different commercial, nothing feels authentic anymore.

But Snoop isn't an outlier. He's become the norm in today's celebrity-founded brand landscape. To understand why, we need to examine what's driving this destructive trend.

The Celebrity Gold Rush Mentality

The numbers are intoxicating. Celebrities watched George Clooney sell Casamigos for $1 billion after just four years. They saw Rihanna's Fenty Beauty reach a $2.8 billion valuation. Kim's SKIMS hit $5 billion. 

These exits created a gold rush mentality. But instead of thinking "I should build ONE billion-dollar brand," celebrities started thinking "I should launch FIVE brands and see which one hits."

The temptation multiplies when you realize:

What starts as strategic diversification becomes destructive dilution. Because here's what they missed: Clooney didn't have a tequila, apparel, and coffee brand running simultaneously. Rihanna didn't launch beauty, beverages, and pet products at once. They picked one thing and obsessed over it.

Before we dive deeper into why multiple brands fail, let's understand what focused dedication looks like in practice.

Jessica Alba turned down starring roles in major films to build Honest Company. For years, she wasn't on movie sets; she was in product development meetings, fighting for safer ingredients, and building relationships with retailers. She lived and breathed one mission: creating safe products for families. Her singular focus helped build a company that IPO'd at $1.4 billion.

Rihanna did something even more dramatic; she paused her music career at its absolute peak. No albums. No tours. Instead, she spent years perfecting inclusive shade ranges, working with chemists, and understanding formulations. She rejected countless other brand opportunities because Fenty required her complete attention. That obsession built a $2.8 billion beauty empire.

These aren't stories of celebrities lending their names to products. These are stories of celebrities becoming operators, dedicating years to singular visions. The difference between their billions and others' failed ventures? Focus.

Every moment a celebrity spends on Brand X is stolen from Brand Y. It starts with social media. When Snoop posts about his gin on Monday, his cannabis customers feel ignored. When he promotes ice cream on Tuesday, his wine enthusiasts check out. By Friday, when he's pushing pet products, his entire feed feels like QVC.

But it goes far beyond social posting:

The math is unforgiving. Ten brands don't get 10% each of a celebrity's time; they get 10% of their energy, 10% of their network, 10% of their creativity. But success doesn't scale linearly. A brand with 10% of a celebrity's focus doesn't achieve 10% of potential, it achieves nothing memorable.

I watched this play out with a beverage brand that thought they had secured a game-changing celebrity co-founder. Six months in, that celebrity launched two more ventures. Suddenly, retailer meetings got postponed because the celebrity was "busy with other commitments." Product development stalled waiting for approvals. The marketing team couldn't get content because every photoshoot conflicted with another brand's needs.

One founder summed it up perfectly: "We thought we were getting a co-founder. Instead, we got a time-share." Every brand thinks they're the priority until the next shiny opportunity launches.

The most successful celebrity-founded brands solve problems the celebrity genuinely experienced. But when celebrities launch in multiple unrelated categories, authenticity evaporates.

Take Sofia Vergara:

Three different audiences. Three different lifestyles. Three different versions of Sofia. Which one is real?

Celebrity-product-market-fit requires genuine authority. When someone bounces between promoting ice cream, cannabis, wine, and pet products in the same week, they don't feel like an entrepreneur sharing their passion. They feel like a billboard available to the highest bidder.

The audience notices. Comments sections fill with skepticism. Sales suffer. Brand equity erodes. What could have been category-defining becomes just another celebrity cash grab in consumers' minds.

Imagine investing $5 million in what a celebrity calls their "life's work." They pitch you their deep passion, their commitment to building something transformative. Six months later, they're launching another brand.

This happened to one of our LPs: "We backed their tequila at a $50M valuation. They couldn't stop talking about their grandfather's recipe, their connection to Mexico, their vision for the category. Nine months later? They launched a skincare line. Our sales dropped 25% the quarter they shifted focus. The celebrity who spent hours discussing agave farming is now posting about retinol."

When you invest in a celebrity-founded brand, you're not just betting on celebrity-product-market fit. You're betting on that celebrity's sustained attention, their platform dedication, their ability to stay interested when the work gets hard. Multiple brands destroy that bet.

The damage compounds. Other investors see the divided attention and pass on follow-on rounds. Retailers lose confidence when the celebrity misses key meetings. Team morale crashes when the supposed visionary is visibly checked out. What started as a $50M valuation becomes an unsellable asset.

At HotStart VC, one of our most important criteria when investing in brands founded by celebrities and creators is their skin in the game and commitment to the brand. This means we need to see significant equity ownership (10%+ minimum), contractual exclusivity for at least 36 months, and genuine operational involvement beyond social media posts. Without these fundamentals, we're not looking at a celebrity co-founder; we're looking at an expensive marketing campaign.

Here's what we actively look for: celebrities who discovered their passion for a category before any business opportunity appeared. Who have a track record of sustained focus on previous ventures. Who are willing to sign agreements that prevent them from launching competitive brands or diluting their attention. These aren't nice-to-haves; they're requirements.

The red flags make themselves obvious. When we see celebrities with less than 5% equity calling themselves "co-founders," we know they're spokespeople at best. When they're juggling multiple active brands in unrelated categories, we see divided attention before the company even launches. Vague "advisor" roles without clear responsibilities? That's a recipe for disappointment when you actually need their involvement.

A founder recently approached me about their celebrity brand with a "heavily involved" A-list name. I looked at the cap table and found a C-tier celebrity who put in a $25k check for less than 0.5% equity with no active involvement agreement. When I asked about their role, the founder admitted the celebrity "would post when they could." That's not a celebrity co-founder, that's an expensive Instagram post waiting to happen.

Before you think I'm completely against portfolio approaches, let me be clear: Multiple brands can work, but only under very specific conditions.

The Jake Paul Model: Unified Audience, Natural Integration

Jake Paul runs Betr (sports betting), W (men's grooming), MVP (boxing promotion), and Anti Fund (venture capital). Here's why this works where others fail:

He talked about each of these markets authentically for years before launching anything. His interest in sports betting, personal care, boxing, and investing all preceded the business opportunities. More importantly, these brands never compete for the same promotional moments.

When he's in the ring or promoting a fight, Betr and MVP content flows naturally, but W grooming products would feel forced. When he's getting ready in the morning, W makes perfect sense, but pushing his betting app would be bizarre. During business podcasts, Anti Fund fits the conversation, while his other brands would derail it. Each venture has its own authentic context where the others simply don't belong.

Most importantly, each venture has dedicated teams and infrastructure. Jake acts as strategic founder and face of the brands, not the operator trying to manage everything personally.

The Grace Beverley Ecosystem

Grace Beverley built Tala (sustainable activewear), Shreddy (fitness app), and Retrograde (AI talent manager). This works because Tala and Shreddy serve the exact same audience – young women interested in fitness and wellness – with complementary products that enhance each other. When she promotes working out in Tala gear while using the Shreddy app, it feels natural, not forced. Retrograde targets a completely different audience: creators who follow Grace as their blueprint for building successful businesses. And she's not talking about AI talent management when she's working out. Each brand has its own lane without competing for the same promotional moments.

The Ryan Reynolds Sequential Success

Ryan Reynolds mastered something even smarter: building one brand to exit before starting the next. Aviation Gin got his complete focus for two years until the $610M exit. Only then did he shift to Mint Mobile, which received his undivided attention for three years until T-Mobile paid $1.35B. Then came Wrexham FC.

The key? TIME. Each venture got years of focused attention, not scattered months. There's no confusion about what Reynolds is building because he's only building one thing at a time. Sequential success beats simultaneous mediocrity every time.

But here's the truth: Even when multiple brands CAN work, we typically don't invest. Why? Because these are exceptions that require perfect execution, and most celebrities overestimate their ability to replicate these models. For every Jake Paul, Grace Beverley, and Ryan Reynolds making it work, there are 100 celebrities destroying value across scattered ventures. We prefer to bet on focused obsession over divided attention, even when the celebrity swears they're "different."

The celebrity focus crisis isn't just bad business; it's a systematic destruction of what could be category-defining companies.

The irony is painful: Celebrities who try to build everything end up building nothing. While those who choose one obsession build billion-dollar empires. Snoop's ten brands combined are worth a fraction of Rihanna's singular focus on Fenty. That's not a coincidence, that's math.

For investors, the message is crystal clear: When a celebrity pitches their fourth concurrent brand, you're not looking at diversification. You're looking at dilution. When they promise this one is "different," you're hearing the same lie they told three other investor groups.

For celebrities, the wake-up call should be deafening: Your audience sees through the hustle. They know when you're passionate versus when you're cashing checks. Every additional brand doesn't expand your empire; it shrinks your credibility until there's nothing left but a feed full of products nobody believes you actually use.

The celebrities who understand this truth build legacies. The ones who don't? They build LinkedIn profiles listing a graveyard of ventures that each got 10% effort and delivered 0% results.

In the attention economy, focus isn't just an advantage; it's the only currency that compounds. Everything else is just expensive noise.

The latest episode of the HotStart VC Podcast is here. This week, I’m joined by Joshua Cohen, co-founder of Tubefilter, the publication that has covered creators since the earliest days of YouTube and helped define the creator economy long before the term existed.

In this episode, Joshua breaks down what he saw in online video in 2007 that mainstream media missed, how Tubefilter became the Variety and Hollywood Reporter for creators, and why his latest company, Gospel Stats, is bringing long overdue transparency to the multi-billion dollar YouTube sponsorship market. We also talk about the four waves of creators, why 98% should not launch their own companies, why follower count is a misleading metric, and when creators should actually consider raising capital.

Now available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

About HotStart VC

HotStart VC is launching a new fund to invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators. We’re building the go-to platform for creators and celebrities launching brands, providing capital, strategic support, and the infrastructure to scale.