💃 Daily tech, business, & growth ideas | 🚀 Contrarian - what the crowd does, I do the opposite | 💻 22 y/o building cool products

🙋‍♂️ Yo. I'm a GenZ indie hacker & startup builder. Check out:

- engagekit.io to boost your LinkedIn outbound and organic inbound traffic
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And 4 more apps to launch in 2025.

Ky-Nam 🧑‍🚀

Strategic Leader | €130M+ Revenue from 20+ Product Launches | €100M+ in Fortune 500 Deals | LinkedIn Top Voice | Speaker & Thought Leader

Executive with 20+ years of experience scaling global teams, driving multi-million euro deals, and launching high-growth digital products. Proven track record of delivering results across business development, content distribution, and consumer products globally 

Strategic Growth: Spearheaded the launch of 20+ digital and consumer products, generating 385M+ installs and over €130M in revenue. Personally closed €100M+ in partnerships with Fortune 500 companies.

Global Leadership: Built and led high-performance teams in 15 countries and across 3 continents. Currently leading business development, consumer products, and content distribution at a leading global media company.

M&A & Advisory: Key player in multiple high-impact acquisitions - Shouji Mobile (Tencent, 2012), Spil Games (Azerion, 2019), and Underscore Talent (TheSoul Publishing, 2022). Founder of Mournival Consulting, guiding startups through €500K–€5M fundraising rounds.

Industry Voice: Recognized LinkedIn Top Voice. Speaker at GDC, Advertising Week, MIPJunior, PGConnects, and more. Published 40+ articles on AI, creator economy, and media strategy. Contributor to Entrepreneur.com Leadership Network.

Specialities & Core Competencies 
Strategic Execution • Go-to-Market Strategy • Revenue Growth • P&L Management • Digital Media • Content Licensing & Acquisition • Platform Growth • User Acquisition • Product Monetization • Media Partnerships • Cross-functional Team Leadership • Scaling Operations • M&A Strategy • Fundraising • Thought Leadership • Creator Economy • Data-Driven Strategy • Omnichannel Content Distribution

Patrik Wilkens

Khaby Lame's "$975M deal" is now worth less than the press release that announced it. I knew I'll have to write this post eventually, but I didn't think it would happen this fast.

Follow-up to my earlier post (in the comments). The situation got worse.

ANPA (Rich Sparkle Holdings) closed at $9.15 today. Down 95% from its $180 peak. Below the price when the deal was announced in January. 

Khaby's ~36.75 million shares (his effective 47% stake) are now worth roughly $336M on paper. Except "on paper" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 

This is a stock with 34 employees, $6.25M in annual revenue, and average daily volume of 154K shares. He couldn't liquidate his position if he wanted to. 

And with lock-up provisions on newly issued shares, he probably can't even try.

This is exactly what I flagged. An all-stock deal with a micro-cap shell company is not a $975M exit. 

The real damage here isn't to Khaby's bank account. His actual net worth from brand deals, Hugo Boss, Binance partnerships is still $20-25M. He'll be fine.

The damage is to the creator economy's credibility at the institutional level. 

Every time a headline screams "Creator closes billion-dollar deal" and the reality is a reverse merger with a Hong Kong financial printing shop, it makes the next legitimate creator M&A deal harder. 

VCs and strategic acquirers already struggle to value creator businesses. Deals like this don't build confidence in our industry. 

We keep celebrating paper valuations as if they're exits. They're not. An exit is cash, or liquid public equity with real float and institutional holders. 

With the stock tanking so fast and hard, even the strategic roll-up strategy seems out of the window. In my initial post I suggested that Khaby can use the stock value to roll-up other creators and create more value for everyone. 

And don't think that was it! Khaby signed over his likeness for 35 more month. Let's see what happens to the projected $4B in annual live-commerce sales through Khaby's audience. Annual. ... and his personal brand in the process.

Patrik Wilkens 

👋 2 Billion subscribers, 330 Billion views, 35 platforms, 100+ IPs

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The Battle

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