To date, we’ve largely covered small firms… in the tens of millions in revenue.
We’ve yet to touch the “billions”.
As yes, some larger firms will be doing more cashflow. But typically that cashflow is split between hundreds, if not thousands of shareholders.
But is there a larger business where a single owner benefits from all their cash?
Absolutely.
Meet Leonid Radvinsky.
He is still rumoured to own 100% of the roughly $600m cashflow stream OnlyFans produces.
🤑
Fortunately OnlyFans operates as Fenix International Ltd, an UK based company, so it has to file annual accounts.
Here are the 2024 numbers:
After paying 25% to the UK government, this leaves Leonid with approx. $500m to play with.
As you can see, revenue and profits exploded during Covid and and then kept climbing:
How does this translate into dividends for Leo?
Shedloads of social networks were created, only a couple won. And the rest got bought by Zuck.
How many adult platforms were created?
A fraction of the amount.
And it’s for that reason, that Leo can get away with a homepage like this:
I’m being silly…
But let’s face it, I would much rather compete with 10 than with thousands. The truth is, you just don’t have to be that good if less people are competing with you.
This made it easier for OnlyFans to get to scale, and when they hit scale and people realise the extent of the opportunity, it’s too late as the network effects kicked in.
During Covid, traditional adult entertainment stopped. Not that I know the kinds of things that happen in the adult entertainment industry, but I’m pretty sure it would be hard to do them socially distanced.
This was ideal for OnlyFans as Covid couldn’t spread through screens.
They were ready for the habit change, and it seems like the habit change has stuck.
Two things make Leonid a perfect fit to run this business:
1. He’s comfortable in the grey areas
Leo has previously been sued by Amazon and Microsoft for spamming, allegedly ran websites selling hacked passwords and has been suspected of money laundering.
Whilst other founders/investors would run from a business like OnlyFans, Leo ran towards it.
2. He has experience in the niche
Prior to buying the struggling business, Leo made his first few million with “MyFreeCams”. Here users could consume content for free, but then would need to pay with tokens to have the creators do things. Token revenue was split between the creator and the platform.
We see this a lot with businesses that produce excessive cashflow: the opportunity seemed to be a perfect fit with the founder.
But obviously this is survivorship bias: e.g. the business would not have produced excessive cashflow if there wasn’t a good founder fit, so we don’t ever hear about those businesses.
Typically billionaire stuff:
Go where other people won’t.
Choose an opportunity you are uniquely suited for.
Less competition = ideal founder/business fit = more cashflow.
Thanks for reading.
For the love of cashflow…