Steven Schwartz was just 13 years old when he started his first part-time job. Like many teenagers his age, he wanted a pair of sneakers – the Nike More specifically, a Kobe 7 Easter shoe, but his parents didn’t want to pay for it.
Instead of stamping his foot in protest, he found a like-minded teenager on FacebookCameron Zoub to help him build a bot that buys limited edition sneakers for people before they sell out.
“We spent the next eight years developing a lot of different products,” says Schwartz Assets“We’ve built marketplaces, we’ve built consumer apps, we’ve built games, we’ve built social networks, we’ve built SAS companies, staffing agencies, and we’ve done pretty well.”
Now, in their mid-20s – and at least 22 side jobs later – Schwartz, Zoub and a third co-founder, Jack Sharkey, run Whop, a marketplace for digital entrepreneurs. Think Etsy meets LinkedIn.
According to Schwartz, the platform, which launched in 2021, is currently valued at around a quarter of a billion dollars and processes around $400 million worth of transactions annually.
22 side jobs in the making
Anyone old enough to remember the days of dial-up Internet can hardly imagine building a company online and working part-time as a technology director after school.
But for the generation that grew up with smartphones rather than on the playground, trying to become an entrepreneur is not so far-fetched.
In fact, according to LinkedIn, the job title “founder” is currently the second fastest growing among Generation Z graduates.
“My generation doesn’t want to be consultants or bankers. They don’t even want to be astronauts anymore. They want to create content online, they want to find customers online and they want to find friends online because the Internet is so powerful,” says Schwartz.
“When you are better informed and have more information about what people can do, why would they want to do something that is not the most exclusive experience and the most fun for them?”
It’s not just Generation Z that has embraced the “be your own boss” hype with open arms.
Being able to work wherever and whenever you wanted during the pandemic awakened the entrepreneurial spirit in many people – and this did not go unnoticed by Schwartz.
“Every single person in the world wanted to have a side job,” he adds. “They didn’t want to work nine to five anymore, they wanted to do something they were more passionate about.”
The only problem? Many had no way of getting in touch with customers.
If you start pottery or painting in your free time, you can sell your work on Etsy.
But when Schwartz discovered that “hundreds of thousands of people” were trying to buy and sell software on Reddit, he knew there was a gap in the market that could be filled.
“We saw this as a great opportunity to build something that could streamline the process and get more people involved in this marketplace – at the time there was no customer support, no reviews, no simplified payments.”
Now, he says, 4 million people a month turn to Whop to channel their inner Jeff Bezos.
After starting at least 22 side jobs – from a disappearing chat tool like Snapchat From the existence of Snapchat to running a hamburger delivery service in college before finding success with Whop, Schwartz has some words of wisdom for those looking to take the plunge into self-employment: “Just do it.”
“We have learned that failure is somewhat implicit,” says Generation Z. “Some of them will succeed, some will not.”
As exhausting as it sounds, Schwartz simply presents it as a matter of getting up and trying again. In fact, if Schwartz had given up on his project number 5 and taken an office job, Whop would not exist.
Schwartz’s most important lesson: Don’t let fear of failure stop you from even starting.
“The biggest takeaway is that if you want to start a business, you just have to start it. You can’t be successful in business if you don’t start a business. That’s the first step,” Schwartz laughs. “So I think just doing it is a big deal and you don’t have to worry about ‘what if it doesn’t work?’ Because what if it does work?”
Mentoring from Tinder co-founder and support from Peter Thiel
It’s not just the remote freelancers who are convinced by Schwartz’s vision.
In its last funding round earlier this month, Whop raised 18 million US dollars.
But it wasn’t until the digital marketplace had about 1,000 monthly users earning about $1,000 a month that investors took notice, Schwartz says.
It only took one early investor to get Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Facebook’s first outside investor, and introduced Schwartz to Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen.
“We talk all the time,” the 25-year-old comments on his relationship with Mateen before pulling out his cell phone and reading out the latest motivational text message that the entrepreneur-turned-investor sent him.
“To put it another way: ‘Good things take time and it’s a pretty long game – a marathon, not a sprint,'” it says.
“People tend to get a little upset and say, ‘Why isn’t everything working all at once?’ but the reality is it just takes quite a long time and if you persevere, according to his philosophy, you’re probably going to be very successful.”
Nevertheless, the young CEO has great ambitions for the success of his company.
“In five years, we want to provide a million people with a sustainable income per month, and our version of a sustainable income is $2,000 per month,” he says.
“And in the long term, we believe that everyone in the world will make money on the internet. We believe that the internet is powerful enough that literally every single person in the world could use our platform to make a living.”
But “the human interaction is still really great”
Although he’s banking on a future where people give up traditional careers in business to make money online on their own terms, Schwartz doesn’t follow that mantra at home. Whop’s 50 employees are expected to commute to the company’s “aesthetic” Brooklyn headquarters most days.
And he doesn’t see why the two are in conflict with each other.
“It’s not an office job – it’s the least office job there is and so I don’t think it’s really about making money online,” he added. “You can make money online while working in person with other people.”
He believes that the complaint young people have about working in an office is not that they waste time and money commuting or that they have a better work-life balance at home, but rather that the reason is the outdated office space.
“They hate the offices they don’t like. But if it’s a Generation Z office, it’s going to be a cool office,” he stresses, listing the many reasons why Whop’s workspace is superior to a traditional vertical tower.
“We have to take your shoes off, we have lots of cool snacks, everyone has really nice monitors and I think it’s just about creating the most amazing experience,” he says. “We have a room with a piano, we have a big photo wall, we have a podcast studio, we have a sauna and a steam room in the basement.”
“We want to make sure everyone is in a really comfortable mental state, myself included.”