Retrograde
CEO Jake Browne
YEAR FOUNDED 2024
COUNTRY Ireland
hat is the company’s origin story? Retrograde’s origin story
creators. Emma helps out content creators by managing their brand deals, like a traditional talent agent would. This involves everything from inbox management to negotiation, contracting, sending invoices, collecting payments, nurturing relationships with brands and reaching out to new brands for opportunities, as well as managing gifting opportunities, event invites, PR requests and fan mail. It’s a one-stop-shop, end-to-end talent management system for content creators. And the best part? It only costs 10% of a successful brand deal. It doesn’t make a penny if the creator doesn’t, and is significantly cheaper than today’s industry-standard 20%. 5000 people sign up. The current priorities are improving the product, making sure it gives a great service and expanding its user base in the US. Retrograde has had lots of exciting opportunities to partner with brands and agencies across the world, and the team has been energised by the response from the creator community. Emma has been a hit so far, and the team are grateful for the opportunity to build such an industry-changing product. What are the next steps? Retrograde just launched last month, and has already had
» It’s a one-stop-shop, end-to-end talent management system for content creators. The best part? It’s only 10% of a successful brand deal «
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is intertwined with that of founder Jake Browne: it started with him studying to be an engineer in college and falling in love with YouTube. He went on to work in fintech, building credit risk models for investment banks, before quitting to start a production company where he got to work with content creators. It’s here that Browne realised creators have got great revenue, but often poor cash flow due to long payment terms from brands. This led him to starting the company Peblo, which bought invoices from creators and paid them upfront, taking a lot of the stress out of their journeys. Peblo was then sold to the e-commerce lending unicorn Wayflyer; Browne spent just over 18 months there before starting Retrograde. He had a friend in Los Angeles who lost a $50,000 brand deal because his talent agent didn’t respond to an email from a major company. Sick of hearing stories like this, Browne decided to do something about it, and so started building Retrograde. He’d met Grace Beverley (his co-founder) at a tech conference and they had stayed in touch. When he had the idea for Retrograde and built the original prototype, he knew Beverley was the woman he wanted to create it with, so he reached out to her and they haven’t looked back since. What is Retrograde working on at the moment? The company is currently building Emma, the world’s first AI talent agent for content
What one thing does Retrograde need most?
The team are on the lookout for great engineering talents and content producers. If anyone is interested in the creator space and changing the industry for the better, they’re encouraged
to reach out to Browne at jake@getretrograde.com.
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