Sam Gibbon - Founder - Kulcho

Imagine building a business on land you don’t own. 

That’s the reality for most creators today.

Sam Gibbon spent years at the BBC, shaping how content reached new audiences on platforms like YouTube, social media, and streaming services.

So it was fitting that over breakfast, our conversation circled around the strange reality of the creator economy today. A world that promised independence, but in truth, often leaves creators more exposed than ever.

You might have 10,000 followers or 10 million – but if your audience lives on someone else’s platform, it isn’t really yours. One algorithm tweak or policy shift can undo years of work. (Just ask the creators hit by Meta’s October update, when earnings collapsed by 90% almost overnight.)

This is the world Sam is building against with Kulcho. Not another content platform, but an infrastructure layer – tools that give creators direct ownership of their audiences and monetisation. Quiet foundations that matter more than the spotlight.

A few themes from our conversation stayed with me:

- Focus beats possibility. Even if you can serve everyone, starting narrow helps you learn faster and grow stronger.

- Infrastructure is underrated. The layers under the surface can be the most defensible, even if they’re not the loudest.

- Ownership matters. Whether it’s content, community, or technology – holding on to what you build changes everything.

We also touched on the perennial founder topic of fundraising, comparing the UK and US landscapes and what it takes to raise a strong round while building on real, early revenue.

Sam left me thinking about the irony of today’s platforms. They set out to hand power back to creators, but somewhere along the way, that mission blurred. 

Founders like Sam are working to put it back where it belongs.