Within the booming creator economy, creator-led businesses possess a lot of untapped potential, so The Drive Agency is turning its clients into founders. The year-old talent management firm led by CEO Patrick Zielinski and Chief Talent Officer Leila Marsh is building what Zielinski and Marsh describe as “diversified, creator-led companies” in categories like AI, data science, beauty, and parenting.
In a statement, Marsh — who spent seven years as the Founder and CEO of PRIZMA MGMT — dubbed The Drive Agency “the antidote to the short-term mindset that often plagues this industry.” To help the creators on her client roster develop sustainable, long-term revenue streams, Marsh teamed up with Zielinski, an early Cameo hire who went on to hold a creator-facing role at LinkedIn.
The Drive Agency offers a diverse set of services for its clients, including brand partnerships, guidance around product development, speaking gigs, staffing solutions, and digital revenue streams. “We treat every creator as the founder of their own business,” Zielinski said in a statement. “We identify their expertise – AI, career strategy, data, parenting, for example — and map out what a real business looks like around it.”
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Since its launch last year, The Drive Agency has executed more than 1,000 brand partnerships on behalf of 30+ clients. In an email to Tubefilter, Zielinski and Marsh said that those deals range from “one-off pilots to long-term ambassadorships of three to six months,” with some clients taking home “over six figures with a single brand partner.”
“We started representing these experts to help them unlock the knowledge they have in their heads and help them monetize it whether that be through paywalled platforms, newsletters, digital products, and courses,” Zielinski and Marsh told Tubefilter. “We got into this space because we wanted to help this next generation of subject matter experts monetize their expertise – and, naturally, brands have wanted to tap into their expertise as a result.”
Zielinski’s work at LinkedIn, including his curation of the platform’s Top Voices list, built a foundation for LinkedIn’s future creator-focused endeavors. Flash forward a few years, and LinkedIn now serves as the “home base” for many Drive clients. Other clients who are “more prominent on Instagram and YouTube” are building up on LinkedIn as well. “Brands like to see followers and impressions on LinkedIn,” Zielinski and Marsh said.
Ultimately, The Drive Agency’s work goes far beyond a single platform, with each creator’s business tailored to its leader’s strengths and interests. Marsh’s longtime client Brad Mondo is working with Drive to expand his haircare line XMONDO. while “work hype man” Sho Dewan is sharing his expertise through speaking engagements at events like Adobe MAX. Career-oriented creator Colin Rocker has landed sponsorships from Microsoft CoPilot and Adobe Express for his IRL community For The First, while Nana DelRey has built “a sorority for female entrepreneurs” through Kynn.
The variety of these ventures shows us the wide net The Drive Agency is casting. Its clients come from diverse backgrounds but share a drive (no pun intended) to maximize their creator businesses.
For sponsors in the tech sector, the stories told by Drive’s clients are quite compelling. “The tech and B2B creators I now have the privilege of representing have spent years inside corporate environments, building products, leading teams, and earning specialized education across software engineering and data science,” Marsh told Tubefilter. “Their content is an extension of a professional body of work that already existed before they ever picked up a camera. The audience they’ve built is niche by design, and for enterprise and tech brands trying to reach this targeted tech-focused audience, that specificity is incredibly valuable.”
