The Man Who Thinks the Creator Economy Is Broken — And How ZOOP Plans to Rebuild It
When a little-known startup made a late-stage bid for TikTok in 2025, most people had never heard of ZOOP. Fewer still knew the name RJ Phillips.
Inside the creator economy, though, RJ had already spent years thinking about the same question that now sits at the center of ZOOP’s mission: if creators, artists, athletes, and communities generate the attention, why do platforms keep so much of the value?
RJ is not a typical social media founder. His background is in capital markets, where he spent more than a decade managing institutional fixed income and macro strategies across global markets. He later completed an Executive MBA at Kellogg-HKUST and is an alum of Harvard Business School. That path gave him a perspective that is unusual in consumer tech but increasingly relevant: he sees platforms first through the lens of incentives.
To RJ, the problem with much of social media is not that it lacks scale. It is that the economic model is misaligned.
“The internet makes enormous amounts of money,” he has said in various forms. “The real question is who deserves most of it.”
That idea now sits at the heart of ZOOP. Unlike many startups trying to enter social media by promising a better algorithm or a cleaner interface, ZOOP is making a broader argument. It is not trying to replace one feed with another. It is trying to rethink how online attention is organized, distributed, and monetized.
A Different Bet on Social
ZOOP’s model is not anti-algorithm. RJ is quick to point out that personalized discovery matters and that users want relevant content surfaced quickly. What he rejects is the idea that one centralized, opaque feed should define the entire online experience.
Instead, ZOOP is building around channels and communities.
RJ often describes it in terms people immediately understand: traditional television. If you want music, you go to MTV. If you want cartoons, you go to Cartoon Network. You do not need one giant stream of everything all at once. You choose where you want to be, and then discovery becomes more contextual, more intentional, and ultimately more useful.
That philosophy is central to how ZOOP is launching. The platform is currently in preview mode, beginning with three channels rather than an unrestricted content free-for-all. Anyone can sign up, but content creation is initially more limited: users need an invitation, a physical QR code, or access from someone already creating on the platform. Invitations are limited, a deliberate attempt to shape culture early rather than scramble to retrofit it later.
It is a strategy RJ sees as disciplined rather than restrictive. Build the environment carefully first, then expand discovery layers through algorithmic learning and AI-powered curation as the platform matures.
The Economics Come First
If the channels model is ZOOP’s structural bet, economics is its ideological one.
RJ believes the current creator economy systematically under-rewards the people who actually generate attention. On major platforms, creators may build audiences in the millions, but monetization is often inconsistent, narrow, or controlled by systems that prioritize the platform’s interests above their own.
ZOOP’s pitch is blunt: effort should more directly equal reward.
The company has said creators can earn up to 80% of generated revenue, with additional upside through a referral model. That is not framed internally as a marketing gimmick, but as a different allocation philosophy. Instead of treating creators as inputs into a larger advertising machine, ZOOP wants to position itself as infrastructure that takes less and returns more.
RJ’ argument is that the money is already there. Big technology companies have shown for years how profitable digital attention can be. The question, in his view, is not whether the internet can support generous creator economics. It is whether platforms are willing to structure themselves around that principle.
He argues many incumbents are not. Their priorities are broader, their overheads heavier, and their ambitions often spread across multiple business lines. ZOOP, by contrast, is trying to stay tightly focused on the core product experience: the infrastructure, tools, and monetization pathways that bring creators and audiences closer together.
As the company moves out of preview mode, RJ says that the product suite will include free content, paywalled content, virtual goods, physical goods, referral income, and eventually broader advertising revenue participation. The goal is to give creators multiple ways to build sustainable businesses, not just chase sporadic viral moments.
Beyond the Western Feed
There is another theme RJ returns to often: geography.
He believes one of the biggest blind spots in modern social media is how much culture remains boxed in by region, language, and platform bias. ZOOP’s ambition is not just to host creators, but to help culture travel further.
That is part of the logic behind its channel strategy and its focus on exclusive intellectual property partnerships. The company has already positioned itself around major cultural moments and sees those relationships as a way to create built-in distribution, stronger fandom, and more durable communities. RJ talks openly about expanding beyond Western-centric patterns of discovery and bringing more of the world’s culture into one connected ecosystem.
His framing is expansive: K-pop, Bollywood, Chinese music, Japanese music, sport, performance, live events, fandom. Not as isolated silos, but as cultural worlds that deserve better distribution and better monetization.
That global instinct also shapes how he talks about the future of the platform. RJ does not see ZOOP as just a place to post. He sees it as a place where online engagement can spill into offline activity: meeting around shared interests, attending events, buying tickets at face value, participating in communities that feel real rather than purely algorithmic.
For him, that is where the creator economy is going next. Not just content, but participation.
Trust, Context, and the AI Era
RJ is also clear that the next phase of social media will require more transparency, especially as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in everyday internet culture.
He has spoken about the need for clear labeling when content has been altered or created with AI, and about building in user controls, including an AI kill switch. The broader point is not anti-AI. It is pro-trust.
In RJ’ view, users increasingly want to know where they are, why they are seeing something, and whether what they are looking at has been materially changed. That is another reason he prefers channels over one monolithic feed: structure creates context, and context creates trust.
It is a notably different tone from much of social media’s last decade, which often treated frictionless scale as the highest goal. RJ seems more interested in legibility. He wants discovery to be broad and intelligent, but also transparent and intentional.
The Operator Behind the Vision
It would be easy to cast RJ as a contrarian trying to pick a fight with big tech. But that misses something important. He sounds less like a disruptor for disruption’s sake than like an operator who has spent a long time studying systems and decided the current one is inefficient, imbalanced, and overdue for redesign.
His financial background shows up in the way he talks: in incentive structures, value flows, allocation models, and long-term alignment. Yet the product he is trying to build is cultural, not clinical. It sits at the intersection of entertainment, fandom, identity, and commerce.
That may be what makes him an interesting figure in this space. RJ does not come out of social media as a lifelong platform builder or software engineer. He comes out of markets, where understanding who captures value is often the whole game.
ZOOP is his attempt to apply that thinking to the internet.
Whether it succeeds at scale remains to be seen. Social platforms are notoriously hard to build, and even harder to shift culturally once incumbents dominate the field. But RJ’ thesis is simple enough to travel: the people making the culture should get more of the money, users should have more context and control, and online communities should be organized around clearer identities than one endless feed.
That is a bigger ambition than fixing creator payouts. It is an attempt to redraw the relationship between platforms, audiences, and the people who make everything worth watching in the first place.
And for RJ Phillips, that is the real point of ZOOP.
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