Reco

Our fourth annual list highlights the most innovative startups protecting today's businesses from cybersecurity threats.

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Jensen Huang doesn’t agree with Sam Altman on the accepted level of cyber threat in order to get more powerful AI models. Also, the FBI arrested an OpenAI engineer after he was accused of planting a hidden recording device. And Anthropic says small models could soon self replicate onto everyday objects. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and Senior AI Reporter Beatrice Nolan break down the biggest stories in artificial intelligence.

Jensen Huang to AI Doomers: “I Don’t Know Why You’re Building This Technology” | Fortune AI Weekly

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Athletes make their highest-stakes decisions in real time, under pressure and in full public view, setting an example for the next generation of competitors in the process. This conversation brings together leaders from sport and business to explore what executives navigating disruption and constant change can learn from how competitors perform, recover, and lead under pressure.  

Janet Evans, Chief Athlete Officer, LA28 
Gina Mastantuono, President & Chief Financial Officer, ServiceNow 
Moderator: Alicia Hatch, US Sports Chief Commercial Officer and Women's Sports Leader, Deloitte 

Hosted by Deloitte

Leading Through Disruption: Lessons From Elite Competitors

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In the six years since its pandemic-induced boom, OnlyFans has gone from an obscure site to a platform synonymous with the rise of independent adult content creators. Since it was founded in 2016, OnlyFans has minted 5,000 millionaires and paid out $30 billion to creators who use the platform. With $1.5 billion in revenue last year and a valuation above $3 billion, it’s one of the most successful tech companies to come out of the U.K. And yet OnlyFans is still a magnet for controversy. With new investor Architect Capital, CEO Keily Blair is tackling pain points like its creators’ exclusion from the mainstream banking system. She’ll talk about leading a company that everyone has an opinion about.

Keily Blair, Chief Executive Officer, OnlyFans
Emma Hinchliffe, Most Powerful Women Editor, Fortune

Powering the Creator Economy

Hi Keely. Hey Emma, how are you doing? Good. So you are the CEO of OnlyFans, which is best known as the site for adult content creators. What reactions do you get when you tell people what you do? Usually disbelief, probably more often than not. I think when people picture the CEO of OnlyFans, they don't see this, essentially, a 43-year-old mother of two who lives in London. OK. Last year you did 1.5 billion in revenue and you're valued above 3 billion. But you're such a lean operation, you have less than 50 full-time employees last I checked. How is that possible? Um, that's possible because we have a really deliberate hiring philosophy where we hire very senior strategic leaders and very hungry junior staff. We don't like to have a middle layer of management, um, and we also work with a number of independent contractors across our trust and safety development teams, engineering teams to enable us to scale when we need to and to contract when we need to. OK, fascinating. We should talk more about that after people can learn from that strategy. So, the life of an OnlyFans creator was depicted on the Apple TV show Margot's Got Money Troubles earlier this year, with Elle Fanning playing a single mom who um starts making nude content on OnlyFans because she can't get childcare to get a job outside of her home. Did you watch the show and did it accurately represent the OnlyFans creator experience? I did watch the show. It was fantastic. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it. The book's also brilliant as well. Um, most companies would be thrilled to be featured in as many popular culture TV shows as we've been featured in and to have the brand recognition that we have. Um, and you always have to remember these things are works of fiction, right? They're it's not actually depicting the life of a, an OnlyFans creator. Our creator community is, we've got 5 million content creators, 2.5 million of whom were active in the last year. And you know, our content creators spread a wide gamut of individuals, right? We have adult content creators, we have sports content creators, we have comedians, we have musicians, you name it, it's probably on OnlyFans, although we are best known for our adult content creation. One of the things that I'm most proud of that we've done as a company is we've paid out $30 billion to creators. So you're right, Margot had money troubles, and so Margot needed to earn money. And so therefore she went to OnlyFans rather than going to Instagram or to TikTok or to anywhere else, because she was actually able to own her content and to monetize her content, most importantly. And since we were created in 2016, we have made over 5000 people millionaires from being on OnlyFans. So, yes, sure, clap for that. So you have strict content rules in place and yet there is still reporting about bad actors on OnlyFans. A Reuters investigation uncovered women who had been trafficked into filming content, and OnlyFans accounts were pretty central to the Tate brothers' operation as well. What goes through your mind when you hear about things like this happening on the platform that you lead, and what is OnlyFans' responsibility to stop it? What goes through my mind, I think that is absolutely horrific whenever you hear about anything involving trafficking or the exploitation of women or men on any platform, including on OnlyFans. It's our obligation to take those things incredibly seriously. Um, we have a very, very strict trust and safety operation. We work very closely with law enforcement, and one of the big differences between us and a lot of other social media platforms is there's no anonymity on OnlyFans. So when cases like that happen, which are thankfully rare, but they do occur, um, we are able to provide law enforcement with action. Information because we don't have end to end encryption, we don't have anonymity, so we're able to provide details of who the people are who were involved in that and we also work proactively with law enforcement where we identify patterns of behavior to help to arrest people, to help to do investigations, and to really support convictions. Um, so I'm very proud of the work that we do to assist law enforcement where bad actors manage to exploit our platform. Much of the revenue that creators earn on OnlyFans comes not from creating content but from messaging with subscribers. What does that tell you about our world today and how people are seeking intimacy? We're all seeking intimacy, right? Like that's, that's, I think, even more important now than it ever was before and particularly with the advent of AI, um, I think, you know, the conversations that we have in this room, the conversations that we have outside, the networking events that we, we go to, it's all about seeking connection. Um, and OnlyFans enables fans to connect with the content creators who they follow, um, and those, as you mentioned, a lot of the content is messaging, um, and so a lot of that is really mundane things like did you go to the gym today? Like what did you have for breakfast? Not everything's all the sexy chat, like that, that does happen too, obviously, but a lot of it is actually just day to day communications between individuals. And someone's paying for that on OnlyFans rather than seeking that with someone who they know in their real life. That's true, and in some cases they are paying to unlock those messages, but in some cases they may be subscribing to free for a cre to a creator. I don't think OnlyFans is a substitute for people's offline interactions, but certainly if you're lonely, it's better to be able to speak to somebody than to nobody. So we are seeing the rise of these low budget AI driven micro dramas across social media. Some of them are highly sexualized, potentially dipping into OnlyFans territory, and you also have a platform called OFTV that is your safe for work entertainment platform. What opportunity do you see for OnlyFans in low budget entertainment? I think high budget entertainment is where we'd want to go, obviously. Um, so OFTV is our safer work streaming platform, as you mentioned. It features OnlyFans content creators, um, in a number of different ways. So either it's pure user generated content where the creator creates it and uploads it to the platform subject to certain guidelines. It's stuff that we co-create with our creators. They come to us with an idea. They may need funding, they may need assistance. We help with that. And there's OFTV originals, um, and a number of our OFTV originals have been. Picked up by places like Netflix, for example, so we view it as an avenue for our creators to be able to broaden their fan audiences, uh, and to be able to really connect on a broader level with people. Um, a fishing show that we do called Real Rivals was also picked up by Prime, um, so we see a real actual transition from us as a hub for entertainment content featuring OnlyFans creators to go out into the wider content ecosystem because the desire for content is almost never ending at the moment. So is OnlyFans gonna be making microdramas? I don't know. It depends what our creators want. Um, I think that's the most important thing. What we do is always driven by what our creators need from us and, and want us to provide. Um, we're quite a rare business insofar as that we only succeed when our content creators succeed because our entire business model is based on 80/20 revenue splits. We have no advertising on the platform, for example, and so 80% of every dollar spent on the platform goes straight to creators. So, Leo Rubinsky, who was the very private owner of OnlyFans, died of cancer in his forties earlier this year. You have now brought on a new investor called Architect Capital, which bought a 16% stake in OnlyFans. And Architect is interested in building financial products for OnlyFans creators. Tell us more about that. What products will you build and why do creators need them? So thank you for mentioning Leo. Um, it was obviously a very sad year for us in that sense, um, and obviously a personal friend too, um, and so in terms of what that meant for the, for the business for the architect transaction, we've always looked to solve problems for our creator community, as I mentioned, they're at the heart of everything that we do. And one of the things I've spoken to you about before is actually the, the issues faced by adult content creators in terms of accessing the basic financial services that the rest of us often take for granted. Um, so one of the things that we want to do is to build out banking products to help our creators to have that financial security that they deserve, um, and to be able to have access to capital, to be able to grow their businesses, to be able to have certainty that they're gonna be able to, you know, turn up and access their bank account and not have it be shut down for no other reason than they're creating adult content. And this is something you know a bit about personally, even as the CEO of OnlyFans, not a content creator yourself, you have been rejected by a bank before, is that right? That's true. Yes, that, that did happen and it was. Quite, it gave me an awful lot of empathy, frankly, for our content creators. I'm a very boring lawyer person who has never had any issues like this before in my life. And so, um, actually experiencing that firsthand really gives you a huge amount of empathy for. What people go through, I had alternative options, right? I had other banks that would be very happy to take me on as a customer. That's not the case for all of our adult content creators. And so solving a real problem that exists in society and actually the OCC identified adult content creators, one of the most chronically underbanked groups in America. Um, so we really wanna fix that. What makes it possible for you to do that? Because mainstream banks are not just getting rid of adult content creators because they feel like it, they're doing it because they fear accidentally enabling crimes like sex trafficking. So how are you able to offer these services where others feel they can't? Because we have full visibility of the content that's been created, right, there's a huge difference between perceived risk and actual risk. So if you think about the OnlyFans ecosystem, obviously because there's no end to end encryption, we know who our content creators are. We've done the KYC. We've seen their government IDs. We know what their flow. Of income is like we know the content that they're posting, we can see that it's lawful, we can see that it's consensual, and so we don't have that perceived risk because we actually understand what the real risk is rather than just based on a perception. So it actually gives us a unique insight to be able to offer these financial services products. How would this change OnlyFans as a business? Do you see yourself becoming a financial services company that also makes content? I, well, I've often said to people that actually OnlyFans is so many things. We are a content business, but also we're a payment platform essentially. We really are like the Shopify for content. Our creators are small businesses, you know, 668% of content creators identify themselves as small business owners, and 88% believe that that's going to their business is gonna grow in the next year. And so in terms of actually offering those services to creators, it. Really is for us we're like actually we're giving them tools to enable them to grow their business as entrepreneurs to enable them to connect with their fans and so payments has always been a huge part of who we are and part of our ecosystem. If you can't get paid, there's no point in creating paid content, right? So it's a natural progression for us as a business. We're solving a problem that exists in the financial system and we're empowering, frankly, a lot of women on our platform who are facing these issues. What else is architect's expertise going to help you introduce? I think one issue that comes up is discovery, because for anyone who doesn't know, OnlyFans has not had an algorithmic feed. Basically, to find an OnlyFans creator, you need to find them on Instagram or X or Reddit, and then kind of follow the clues and hunt down their OnlyFans account. So is that something that you think might change? So we've been looking at a lot of different options in terms of the different products and services and tools we can build for our creators, as you mentioned, architects specialism is in financial services products, so they're really helping us to solve that piece of the puzzle. For the rest of the business, you know, for, for me, our expertise is in content creators and, and what they need. And so thinking about discovery, we've already started to trial discovery in certain countries now, but it's again thinking about discovery in a way that's thoughtful, um, and that makes sure that we're not highlighting explicit content in the discovery feed, for example, um, to make. that it can be accessed outside the paywall, but the people aren't going to stumble across content that they don't want to see. And we're looking at multi-currency pricing, for example, in different jurisdictions, real-time translation using AI, lots of different opportunities, all of which are aimed at assisting our creators to grow their businesses. What have you learned from these trials in different countries and where have they been? Uh, so we were largely trialing it from different markets. So we looked at the Netherlands as a good trial market in relation to discovery, and that's only been live a week. So come back to me on that one, essentially, but we're, you know, we are starting to see that real journey between people finding creators on the discovery page and then deciding to come and subscribe. And same with multi-currency pricing. We're seeing people using that as an option to be able to pay in, in a currency other than dollars, which is our typical, typical currency on the platform. So architect has said that OnlyFans could pursue an IPO. What is your plan and would the markets be receptive to that? Is there a precedent? I would say the closest precedent to OnlyFans is Reddit. Um, Reddit obviously is a social media platform. It has a high concentration of adult content, uh, on the platform as well. Um, in terms of when or how, I have no big announcements to make today. I'm, I'm really sorry, um, in terms of a timeline towards an IPO, um, we have to build the tools that we need to build. We need to consolidate, obviously, having taken on minority investment and really understand what that looks like, but it is definitely on, you know, we're, we're thinking about that pathway towards an IPO and working towards that as being a potential goal for the company. Last question for you. Some executives here are dealing with a crisis every once in a while, maybe more often in the past couple of years. You're leading a company that is controversial 100% of the time. What is your best advice for them on how to lead through controversy? My best advice on how to lead through controversy is to lead with integrity. Um, it's actually, you know, every company is gonna have problems, and the magnitude of those problems will vary from company to company and from issue to issue. Um, but being very clear about what you believe in as a leader, why you do what you do, taking responsibility for any area of the crisis that is the fault of the companies, and being mindful of your stakeholders throughout is probably sound advice when it comes to dealing with the crisis. Thank you, Keely. It's my pleasure.

The Fortune AIQ 75 recognizes the organizations turning AI investment into real business results. But what separates these companies, which are pulling ahead from the ones still stuck in pilot mode? As President of Global Customer Operations at ServiceNow, Paul Fipps is in boardrooms with CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs at the world’s largest enterprises as they move AI from ambition to execution. He’ll share why some organizations are moving faster than others and why the ones winning right now are treating AI as a growth driver, not a cost center. 

Paul Fipps, President, Global Customer Operations, ServiceNow 
Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media Fortune 

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