Unlearning Hollywood: How a Creator Economy Entrepreneur Turned Management Into Infrastructure
“Most of the time when we hire people from film school, there’s more they need to unlearn than to learn.”
That’s how creator economy entrepreneur Zack Honarvar opened my Columbia class this fall.
It’s a line that captures the tension perfectly. Legacy systems teach specialization—writer, DP, editor, producer, creative executive. Business affairs.
The creator economy demands versatility.
There is no “that’s not my job.” Everyone wears every hat, because the audience doesn’t wait for your department head to sign off.
In Zack’s world, creators don’t just make things. They run them.
When I started shifting some of my focus from legacy media to the creator economy, I expected to find chaos—no rules, no structure, no road maps. I connected to a small group of people to be my Sherpas—builders who had carved out their careers in a world without the walls of Hollywood. They had built systems where none existed, thriving without permission or precedent.
Their mindset was so different from mine.
Where I saw structure, they saw constraint. Where I saw hierarchy, they saw opportunity.
And every time I asked these sherpas who I needed to meet to truly understand this new ecosystem, one of names that inevitably surfaced was Zack Honarvar.
We were introduced. And like so many success stories in the creator economy Zack carried that same mix of humility, curiosity, and radical openness that now feels like a prerequisite. Because when there’s no system, the only way forward is to build one—to build the bridge as you cross it.
That takes courage. And a beginner’s mind.
The Collapse of Specialization
Before building an empire for digital creators, Zack worked at Shopify, helping launch its streetwear and men’s fashion divisions.
That e-commerce DNA—margin discipline, audience data, direct-to-consumer focus—became the foundation of his philosophy.
In 2017, he left Shopify to work with a group of unknown YouTubers called Yes Theory.
They were broke, brilliant, and totally untrained in the business of scaling creative work.
Zack’s first insight wasn’t about storytelling—it was about infrastructure.
He remembers those early days vividly:
“We were a team of six. No one was a producer. We just said, ‘If we don’t figure this out, no one will.’”
They did figure it out.
Yes Theory grew from a scrappy YouTube channel into a global lifestyle brand, moving from rented apartments to international production
And as they grew, Zack kept asking the same question: What are the hidden systems behind creative success?
That obsession led him to build them himself.
The Architecture of The Good Internet
Today, Zack’s holdco—The Good Internet—houses three core businesses:
Good Story Studios, a modern management and development arm where he works with creators like Yes Theory and Airrack.
Fan of a Fan, a D2C platform handling product design, manufacturing, and fulfillment for creator brands.
Boring Stuff, the unglamorous but critical back-office operation that manages finance, HR, and compliance for creators.
Each piece solves a structural problem most filmmakers will recognize: how to protect creative time while professionalizing everything around it.
Zack describes this strategy as building systems that protect creators by internalizing logistics—a kind of “infrastructure moat” around their businesses. By owning the logistics—money, merchandise, management—he protects his creators from burnout and lets them focus on what matters: the work itself.
As Zack told the class, the real competitive advantage isn’t just great content—it’s the infrastructure that makes scale possible. It’s a deceptively simple idea that Hollywood missed for decades: the back office is the creative engine.
And here’s where you see how Zack’s brain really works. He didn’t just build the picks and axes for his clients—he built businesses out of the picks and axes. That’s entrepreneurial thinking in the creator economy: designing tools that both empower others and create value on their own.
From Storyteller to System Builder
In Hollywood, we were trained to treat art and commerce as separate disciplines—parallel lanes that rarely intersect. Some of the best producers and executives manage to straddle both, but the system itself is designed to keep them apart.
Zack doesn’t.
He treats every creator like a venture-backed startup—Yes Theory, Airrack, and dozens more.
Their job is to make great work.
His job is to make sure that work can sustain a business, not just a moment.
“A creator has to think like a startup founder,” he said. “You don’t build a video. You build an ecosystem.”
He explained to my students that in the creator economy, the fastest way to grow isn’t to chase virality—it’s to eliminate friction.
The more you offload the “boring stuff,” the more creative time you win back.
Operational efficiency becomes a creative multiplier.
The Swiss Army Filmmaker
If there’s one archetype that defines Zack’s world, it’s the Swiss Army creator:
part editor, part marketer, part entrepreneur, always in motion.
“The more skills you have, the less replaceable you are,” he said. “On YouTube, a great editor who understands story, pacing, and retention is worth their weight in gold.”
Hollywood rewarded mastery of a single craft. The creator economy rewards fluid intelligence—the ability to learn, adapt, and execute across domains.
It’s not dilution, it’s defense. Versatility is the new security.
The Emotional Pivot
When we talked about fear—of failure, of irrelevance, of change— Zack mentioned an early career experience collaborating with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood who had a massive and highly successful production company.
“I realized something: even they had no idea what they were doing. No one does. The people who win are just more comfortable not knowing.”
That’s the creator economy’s quiet truth. It rewards experimentation over certainty.
Iteration over ideology.
It’s the opposite of the studio mindset that prizes finished products and polished decks.
Here, you build in public.
And you make peace with the fact that half your best ideas will fail in daylight.
That humility is what defines Zack’s generation of builders. It’s what separates them from the old guard of “experts.”
The Filmmaker as Founder
By the end of our class, it was clear Zack’s story wasn’t about management—it was about evolution. He’s part of a new species of creative executive who designs systems instead of waiting for permission.
When one of my students asked how filmmakers should approach this new reality, Zack didn’t talk about chasing trends. He talked about earning freedom.
“You start by making something small every day,” he said. “That’s how you get your reps in. That’s how you earn the right to go long-form.”
It reminded me of his analogy about pottery: one class spends a semester making one perfect bowl; another makes a bowl every day.
In the creator economy the second class wins.
That’s the blueprint. Make fast. Learn faster. Unlearn what no longer serves you.
Epilogue
“I’m the first to admit how content has become a commodity because of the creator economy,” Zack told my class.”
But that admission isn’t nostalgia—it’s awareness. He knows the system didn’t kill art. It just made art operational.
For filmmakers, the lesson isn’t to abandon cinema for content—it’s to build the systems that allow cinema to survive in the open ecosystem.
The ones who will thrive aren’t just directors or writers.
They’re Swiss Army filmmakers—founders of their own creative infrastructure, fluent in art, data, and business.
In a world where no one really knows what they’re doing, Zack’s model is as close to a compass as we have.
This is interesting Ben. I guess I’ll have to do more research into exactly what these guys create and what it has to do with film or how it interacts with film. To be honest, I didn’t quite get it. I understood some of the philosophies behind this guy’s business which are interesting but I guess I wanted more concrete examples of what the product is, who his clients are etc.