Whop CEO Steven Schwartz says $1.6B platform minted 650+ millionaires

Steven Schwartz, the 26-year-old CEO behind Whop, is making a very specific claim: his $1.6 billion platform has minted over 650 millionaires, and he wants the model to scale until “work” stops feeling like a sentence. Schwartz tells Fortune that the idea of people enjoying their days at work is “foreign to most,” but he argues it can be “solved” by structuring monetization so that money and passion arrive together. In his pitch, the future is about agency, not compliance: spend your time doing what you find fun, and you should not have to constantly worry about money because it comes with the work.

The proof points, according to Whop’s own numbers, are large enough to force a rethink. The company says it has minted over 650 millionaires, and it provides examples of seven-figure sellers: people selling services like coaching business programs and skills courses, plus physical items such as meal kits and vitamins. One entrepreneur, Shelby Haas, allegedly brings in $1 million monthly by teaching remote sales on Whop. Troy Adashun is described as a self-made millionaire selling health products on the platform, Alpha Lion Supplements. And podcast host Jay Shetty runs his coaching business, the Jay Shetty Certification Shool, on Whop.

So what is Whop actually selling, beyond the optimism? In plain terms, it’s a one-stop marketplace where users monetize expertise, content, and businesses. The twist is that it can cater to much narrower audiences than older commerce hubs. Where Etsy tends to dominate for certain consumer goods, Whop is positioned more like a commerce and distribution layer for creators, operators, and community-driven businesses. In other words, it’s not just “sell stuff.” It’s “turn a niche into a business, then give the niche a storefront and payments.”

That matters because Whop is doing this at scale. The company says it has around 22 million platform users, with 50,000 to 60,000 streaming in daily. Whop also points to $4 billion in annual commerce generated by businesses across 145 countries and $300 million in monthly sales. And it adds a “first success” metric that’s hard to ignore: everyday, around 10 to 15 Whop users make their first $20,000 on the platform. Those numbers are the backbone of Schwartz’s argument that the platform is not merely enabling side hustles, it is generating outcomes that look like genuine career change.

Underneath the product story is the founder’s personal timeline. Schwartz’s entrepreneurial origin story starts early. At 13, he built and sold iOS apps in his childhood bedroom that could quickly snap up in-demand sneakers. The bot operation, Sole Sniper, with Cameron Zoub (later Whop’s chief growth officer), sold bots ranging from $20 to $500 that bought popular shoes before they sold out. Schwartz describes the motivation as frustration with a fractured internet economy. That annoyance, he argues, is what later pushed him to cofound Whop, where people sell, connect, and get paid.

Before Whop, there was also the “corporate” chapter that helps explain how he now structures risk and execution. Schwartz had a college internship at Accenture in Singapore. Fortune reports he worked as a summer analyst and undergraduate student at NYU Stern School of Business, programming projects for major businesses in Southeast Asia and creating chatbots for shipping companies. He then left the $108 billion company but kept selling the tools, suggesting that building can be both a craft and a path to distribution. He founded Whop in 2021 alongside Zoub and Chief Technology Officer Jack Sharkey.

Whop’s funding also provides context for how credible this bet is in the eyes of investors. Fortune says the company has raised around $272 million in total funding. In 2023, Insight Partners led a $17 million Series A round, with angel participation from Peter Thiel and The Chainsmokers. Whop later secured a Series B of more than $50 million led by Bain Capital Ventures. And just this February, Tether invested $200 million, setting Whop at a $1.6 billion valuation.

Now comes the part executives should care about even if they never touch creator commerce: culture, hiring, and platform integrity at growth speed. While many tech companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are pulling back on recruitment, Whop is in a hiring stretch. The company has 120 full-time staffers and is recruiting for 40 open roles across engineering, growth, and design. In May alone, it onboarded 16 new staffers. Schwartz frames it as both good and dangerous. Recruiting “so many new people” creates “added problems,” and he argues those problems can be underestimated.

To reduce the risk, Schwartz emphasizes a vetting process built around demonstrable output. Creativity matters because applicants should generate ideas and actually put them into motion. But the most critical quality is end-to-end building, whether technical or creative. The hiring standard is simple, almost brutally so: has the person built something? Is it impressive and cool? He also says Whop looks at energy, asking how fun it is to be around someone and whether you want to spend a lot of time with them. For a platform company, this is not just HR. It is a guardrail against the subtle failure mode of scaling: letting execution quality drift while headcount rises.

Second-order implication for boards and operators: Whop’s model suggests that work monetization can be productized, not just pursued. If a marketplace can connect expertise to buyers at global scale, it can turn “passion” from a vague motivational slogan into an economic system with measurable metrics like $300 million in monthly sales and millions of users. For peers building creator platforms, commerce layers, or community monetization products, the bar shifts from “can we attract attention?” to “can we reliably produce millionaire outcomes while protecting culture and hiring quality at scale?” The stakes are clear: if Whop is right, the next decade of growth will belong to platforms that make income feel like a byproduct of doing work people actually want to do, not a consolation prize after the grind.