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I want to tell you why PAXA exists, what the name actually means, and how I got here — before you read anything else on this site.
I'm a creative first. That's the honest starting point for all of this.
My head was always full of ideas — songs, TV formats, films, whole worlds I'd sketch out in detail and never build. That was the constant from early on. Music was the one I actually pursued, because it was the one I could start on my own: I began writing in my early teens, and it eventually turned into a short-lived music career, if I can call it a career — I'm not sure the word survives that much scrutiny. But even then, what I was drawn to wasn't only the making. It was the business behind the making.
By university I was trying to make entertainment work from every angle I could reach: producing, throwing events, DJing. Some of it went well enough to keep going. None of it went well enough to live on. And the thing I kept noticing wasn't that we lacked talent — the people around me were genuinely good — it was that nobody, including me, could explain where the money in any of it actually went. Everyone knew what a good night looked like. Almost nobody could tell you whether it had been a good business.
That's the question I couldn't put down: how does the money actually work here?
Then I got properly into music, and found the answer was uncomfortable. There is a lot of money in it. But it only reaches you if you understand how the business is built — publishing, mechanicals, performance royalties, splits, masters versus writing, who administers what and who collects it. Most artists never get taught any of it. They understand streaming income, because streaming income is the one number that shows up on a dashboard. Everything else — often the larger, more durable half — stays invisible to the people generating it. And it's worse for writers and producers than for artists, because they're further from the spotlight and just as far from the paperwork.
That was the first time I saw the pattern clearly: the money isn't hidden, it's just illegible to the person who earned it. Which turns out not to be a music problem at all.
I found that out properly a few years ago, advising a creator finance company on the tech side — my first real look at the creator economy from the inside rather than as an observer. The company was built around wealth management: creators were earning well, so the assumed problem was what to do with the money once it arrived.
It took me a while to work out that this was the wrong problem. Not a useless one — but not the one that was actually breaking people.
The real gap was business and corporate management. How do you build a small business that survives a bad quarter? How do you hire a team that's genuinely competent and that you can actually afford — rather than one that looks impressive and quietly eats every month's income? How do you invest in your own content the way a producer invests in a slate, with a budget that has to return something, instead of spending whatever last month happened to bring in and calling it reinvestment? Most creator content budgets aren't budgets at all. They're expenditure with a hope attached.
And underneath all of it, the thing almost nobody had: a view of their own business performance rather than their content performance. Views and engagement are measured obsessively, in real time, on dashboards designed to make them feel like the score. Margin, revenue concentration, contracted versus one-off income, cost of delivery, what the business is actually worth — mostly unmeasured, often unconsidered. You can be the most-watched person in your category and have no idea whether you're running a good business or an expensive hobby that occasionally pays.
Wealth management assumes the enterprise underneath is sound and just needs its proceeds allocated. For most creators, the enterprise underneath is the thing that needs building. That's the point where this stopped being an observation and started being something I wanted to build.
I was studying international relations at the same time — how power moves, who sets the terms, why some places make the rules and others live by them. It sounds unrelated to financing creators. It isn't. Once you've spent time on trade routes and who controls distribution, you start recognising the same structure everywhere: a label deciding which records get pressed, a retailer deciding what gets shelf space, a bank deciding whose business is legible enough to lend against. Different scale, identical shape — someone at the centre, setting terms for everyone else.
I grew up in London while grime was becoming grime and Afrobeats was turning from a diaspora secret into a genre the entire world eventually had to catch up to. I watched both go from something you had to already be inside a culture to know about, to unavoidable — on nobody's permission but the culture's own. For someone already thinking about how power shifts, that was the clearest live demonstration I'd ever seen. It's also the single biggest reason I believe culture has to come first in anything I build. You can't shortcut it and you can't buy it. You can only be paying close enough attention when it happens.
Professionally, I got into tech and became a product manager, working through the digital transformation era just before Covid — when enterprises were moving from consumer-facing websites to real e-commerce, and data stopped being exhaust and started being the asset. That period taught me something I've never stopped applying: an industry doesn't change when the technology arrives. It changes when someone works out how to measure the thing everyone was previously guessing at.
Music stayed the side hustle, but by then it had changed shape. I wasn't chasing my own release any more — I was managing artists and producers. Somewhere along the way I'd made a decision that shaped everything after it: instead of putting myself behind a mic or a keyboard, I used what I was learning at work — product thinking — to help scale the people around me who were behind one. Afrobeats producers, specifically, at the exact moment the genre was exploding commercially and the infrastructure behind it hadn't caught up to the demand.
Managing people is also how you actually learn a business, as opposed to reading about it. You end up in the rooms where the terms get set, reading the contracts because somebody has to, working out what a split really means when the money finally lands. I was learning the music business in the only way that seems to stick — by being responsible for someone else's outcome inside it.
And it made very little money. I funded it with my salary, and later with advisory work: supporting digital transformations and acting as a fractional CTO for startups. Which is its own quiet lesson about the industry. The work I cared about most was the work paying least, subsidised by the technical work I was better paid for. That is the standard arrangement for most people building something creative, and almost nobody says it out loud.
That's where the pattern stopped being an observation and became something I'd watched happen to people I knew. Splits nobody explained properly. Publishing signed away for an advance that didn't cover what was actually given up. Producers whose records still earn today, structured so almost none of it comes back to them. I didn't set out to study creator IP. I backed into it trying to make sure people I respected didn't get taken advantage of.
The product background mattered more than I expected at the time. Agile exists because you don't know the right answer up front — you ship something small, you learn from what's actually true instead of what you assumed, and you adjust faster than the market punishes you for being wrong. Product-market fit is the discipline of refusing to believe your own pitch until the market has confirmed it for you. Distribution is the discipline of remembering that a great product nobody can reach isn't a great product yet. Every one of those lessons transfers directly onto building a company for an asset class that doesn't exist: you don't get to assume the rubric is right, you test it against real businesses, and you build the distribution — the workspace, the tools, the reason a creator comes back — before anyone will trust you with the harder problem underneath it.
I moved into ad-tech next, at Amobee, and the move was deliberate. I could see retail dollars shifting out of shelves and shopfronts and into digital and content — the budgets were following attention, and I wanted to be where that was being priced rather than where it was being spent. Ad-tech had already answered a question the music business never had: attention can be measured, priced and traded at scale, in real time, by people who have never met the audience.
That was a genuinely useful education, and an incomplete one. Ad-tech got extremely good at pricing audiences. It never got around to pricing the people who built them — the creator was a placement, a slot, a line in a media plan. Enormous machinery for valuing attention, none of it pointed at the person generating it.
Later I consulted for a celebrity venture studio, where I was mentored by David Olusegun, who founded it — someone who showed me what it actually looks like to build structured, institutional-grade ventures around a person rather than around a product alone. I've also had the benefit of two friends whose instincts have shaped how I think about this more than they probably realise: Rahmon and Jeremiah. More than one idea in this letter started as a conversation with one of them.
Chasing entertainment at university taught me to ask how the money works. Music taught me most people never find out. International relations taught me to look for who sets the terms. Grime and Afrobeats taught me culture comes first. Producers taught me what happens when nobody assesses the deal properly. Product taught me how to build something before you're sure it's right. Ad-tech taught me attention is measurable. David taught me how to build around a person properly. PAXA is what happens when you finally put all of it in the same building.
Which brings me to the name, because it carries the same argument.
Pax is the Latin word for peace — though historically, a Pax rarely meant peace for everyone. It meant the peace that settles in once one power has already won: Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana. Each one describes the same shape — a long stretch of relative order, maintained by a single dominant power that controlled the trade routes, the capital, and increasingly the information flowing through both. Wealth concentrated at the centre. Everyone else operated on terms the centre set.
Media has had its Pax. A handful of studios, networks and labels decided who got distribution. Retail has had its Pax. A handful of chains decided who got shelf space. Finance is having its Pax right now, in real time — a handful of institutions still decide who gets priced as an asset and who doesn't.
PAXA starts with that word on purpose, and then does something to it. Demos is Greek for "the people" — the root of democracy, the root of "demo." Put next to Pax, it's not a subtler brand of empire. It's a bet on where power is actually going: away from the institutions that used to sit at the centre of media, retail and finance, and toward the individuals who used to be their raw material. You can already watch that shift happening — in who gets to publish, who gets to sell, who gets to raise money without asking permission first. It's also why PAXA is built people-first as a company, not just as a thesis: the creator is the client. Never the inventory.
Then there's the A on the end, which is the part people actually ask me about. Pax is the order. Demos is the people. Agency is what the order is actually for — the thing gatekeepers hold onto the longest and hand back last. You'll meet that word again later in this letter, in a different disguise. That's not an accident. The old agency dies because the people it used to hold agency over no longer need it to reach anyone. PAXA is that sentence, compressed into a name: the system, for the people, built to hand agency back instead of holding onto it.
That's the whole thesis in one word: media, retail and finance are being democratised at the same time, and creators are standing at the exact centre of all three. PAXA is the infrastructure for what they build once the order, the power and the agency are actually theirs.
Say the word "creator" to most of the industry around them and you get one of two answers: talent, or influencer. Both are wrong, and both are wrong in the same direction — they describe someone valuable to other people's businesses, not the owner of one.
Talent implies someone else discovers you, manages you, and structures the upside around you. Influencer implies borrowed relevance — attention rented out on someone else's behalf, for someone else's brand.
Neither describes what's actually happening. A creator originates IP — content, format, likeness, catalogue. A creator builds and holds a distribution asset that didn't exist before they built it. A creator carries the risk, keeps the equity when the structure allows it, and runs something that behaves, in every way that matters, like a media enterprise. The correct word is entrepreneur. Everything about how this industry has been built — the deals, the management structures, the tax treatment — has assumed the first two words. PAXA is built on the third.
There's a further distinction worth making, because the industry conflates it constantly: being a creator and being a creator of IP are not the same thing. Anyone posting video is a creator in the loose sense. A creator of IP is someone whose output survives being separated from the platform it was posted on — a format that could run without them, a catalogue with resale value, a likeness with a licensing history, a brand a licensee could put shelf space behind. The first is a job. The second is an asset. PAXA exists for people building the second — and for the much larger number of people already building it without realising there's a name for what they have.
Most creators have never been told, in plain terms, what their business is actually worth — and almost everyone around them has a reason not to tell them clearly. A brand looks at a follower count and picks a number that suits the brand. A platform pays out whatever an algorithm decided attention was worth this month. Nobody sits down with a creator and says: here's what you've built, here's what's genuinely strong about it, here's what's fragile, and here's exactly what would make it worth more.
That's the starting point for everything PAXA does. Before capital, before a deal, before any of it — a creator should be able to see their own business clearly enough to make good decisions about it.
We call the discipline behind that underwriting, because that's the honest word for assessing something properly, on evidence, rather than guessing. But the word was never the point. The point is what comes out the other end: a clear number, and a specific, ordered blueprint for growing it — not a vague pep talk about "believing in your brand," a plan you could actually follow.
Music got here first, and it took decades. A song's rights can be split, sold, licensed and valued with real precision — mechanical royalties, performance royalties, sync fees, publishing splits, catalogue multiples. None of that infrastructure appeared by accident. It was built slowly, by an industry that had to invent the machinery to price its own output: rights societies, collection agencies, standardised contracts, comparable-sale data stretching back generations.
Video-first creator IP has almost none of that yet. A format, a catalogue of episodes, a likeness deal, an audience — these behave like assets, but hardly anybody has built the machinery to price them the way music prices a song. That's not a criticism of the creator economy. It's a description of an industry that's roughly fifteen years old, trying to do in a decade and a half what music took the better part of a century to build.
PAXA's job is to import that maturity rather than wait for the creator economy to reinvent it from scratch — the same sync-and-royalty discipline music built for itself, rebuilt for video, for format, for likeness, for every part of a creator's business that doesn't have a publishing society to call.
We are not a talent management firm. We don't represent creators, we don't take a cut of their deals for making introductions, and we don't sit between them and the people who want to work with them. That's worth saying plainly, because it's the category people reach for first and it's the wrong one.
The agency model was built for a world of scarcity — a handful of screens, a handful of labels, a handful of gatekeepers — and its value proposition was access: getting you into rooms you couldn't get into yourself. Access isn't scarce any more. A seventeen-year-old with a phone can reach more people this week than most agencies could place a client in front of in a year.
What's scarce now is different. Knowing what your business is actually worth. Structuring capital against it without giving away the thing that makes it valuable. Protecting the IP inside it before it's signed away. Running the operation well enough that the good years compound instead of evaporating.
That's not representation. It's infrastructure — and you don't need a percentage of someone's career to provide it. Which is the other half of what we're not: we're not trying to own creators, sign them, or become the gatekeeper the last model was. If the whole argument is that power is moving to the people who make the work, building a business that quietly takes it back would be a strange way to make the point.
The same clarity does different work depending on where you sit. Creators get told what their business is worth in plain terms, and exactly what to do next. Brands get partners who understand their own audience, rights and delivery well enough that working together stops being a guessing game. Investors get what any other asset would come with: what's strong, what's fragile, and what's actually driving the number.
If you've heard me talk about this before, you've heard me talk about these four, in this order, because the order is the argument.
Most creators already do all four, instinctively. What's usually missing isn't talent at any stage of it — it's a business built underneath the four that actually holds onto what they're worth. That's the piece PAXA is built to be.
I've built this operating across London — my hometown — Los Angeles, Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg, Riyadh and Hong Kong, on purpose rather than by accident. The capital that will eventually want exposure to creator IP is concentrated in a handful of Western centres. The people building the fastest-growing, most culturally significant enterprises increasingly are not.
The clearest proof of this isn't in the creator economy at all. It's Korea.
K-pop and K-drama are worth studying closely by anyone building in this space. A domestic industry serving around fifty million people became a global one — and it did so while building the surrounding apparatus itself: training systems, IP structures, distribution and licensing, and capital markets around all of it. A drama produced in Seoul now releases simultaneously in a hundred countries, and the licensing revenue returns to the rights holders who made it.
The lesson is structural rather than geographic. Cultural specificity wasn't the obstacle; owning the infrastructure was the variable.
Afrobeats, Amapiano and Nigerian film have all travelled globally on the strength of the work alone. What differs between those movements and the Korean one isn't talent or appetite — it's how much of the surrounding structure the originators held onto. Where the infrastructure is owned locally, the value stays local. Where it isn't, the culture travels and the economics don't follow.
This is why I don't think of these as emerging markets in the way that phrase is usually meant — a polite way of saying "not ready yet." They're markets the existing infrastructure has never priced properly, because it was never built to look there. That's a measurement failure, not a maturity one, and measurement failures are exactly the kind of problem you can build a company to solve.
The creator economy has spent a decade proving the audience is real. It hasn't yet proven the audience is an asset — something that can be priced, financed, and passed down. That's the decade ahead of us, and it's the one PAXA is built for.
Today we're opening our private beta. It starts small and stays deliberate — we'd rather get the first ten assessments right than the first thousand fast. If you're a creator building something you actually want to own, or a brand or investor who wants to work with businesses that have been properly assessed before they were pitched, I'd like you to be part of it.
— Ray
Founder & CEO, PAXA
PAXA is onboarding a limited beta cohort.
Creators, brands, and investors — request access.