OG: Approved - Walker Ward
Featuring the Next Generation of Storytellers Rising from the Creator Economy
Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.
Name: Walker Ward
Instagram: 556K Followers
Tik Tok: 235.6K Followers
Who Is Walker Ward?
Walker Ward worked on the sell side of Wall Street for six years. Then he got fired and started making videos about the people he used to work with.
The first character was the Wall Street Intern. A clueless kid in the Hamptons with a little bit of disposable income and no idea how to use it. The video went up in late July 2023, filmed on the LIRR with an empty train car behind him. Within two months he had 20,000 followers. By June 2024 he had a quarter million.
The characters multiplied from there. Palm Beach Dad drives a restored Defender, walks his golden retriever while his wife shops, and drops the GDP of a small country on his dad’s house account at the club. The Get Ready With Me Girl was a parody of beauty influencers that Ward performed with sticky notes as mock acrylic nails. David Goggins shows up when staying hard is the only option. Each one is a compressed character study of a specific American archetype, performed with the commitment of someone who grew up around these people and paid attention.
Ward is from Princeton, New Jersey. He played hockey at Hobart College, studied acting for a summer at NYU, and spent his Wall Street years making internal comedy videos during COVID. The content career really started during the pandemic with a show called Nature Walks with Walker, where he dressed in a captain’s suit and sailed an Amazon raft down a river in his parents’ backyard. The audience at the time was roughly 3,000 friends he had cornered into following him around Manhattan.
The Tribeca UpNext Creators program selected him for the 2025 class. He’s worked with brands like Rhone and Vineyard Vines and has begun partnering on larger campaigns, including a recent Office anniversary activation. He is now represented and moving into more traditional entertainment conversations.
In June 2025, Sharp Entertainment called. Ward had interned there in 2015 and remembered watching the hosts thinking he wanted that job someday. The call was about a dating show where he drives a hot-pink pedicab through New York and tries to match strangers in the backseat. The format works because Ward treats every rider like a character he already understands.
The interesting part is where the ambition actually points. He has said in interviews that movies and television are the goal, and that he is using social media to get there instead of bartending and going on auditions. The character work is not an end in itself. Each sketch feels like a micro-audition for the kind of ensemble comedy where a supporting character shows up for two minutes and steals the episode.
Three Things We Love About Walker Ward
The characters come from the inside: Ward spent six years on Wall Street and grew up around the country club world he satirizes, which is why the details land. Nothing feels guessed.
The Sharp Entertainment loop actually means something: Interning for those producers in 2015 and returning a decade later to host one of their shows shows that the work is translating beyond the feed.
He treats the internet like training, not the destination: The goal is film and television. The daily posting, the characters, the brand work, and the Tribeca selection all feed that.
