On the Thursday following Flamengo’s Brazilian title, Otto arrived at the office around 10am. On the agenda, recordings for and . Days before, he and the team had delivered one to YouTube within 24 hours: Otto preparing a whole pig to pay for a bet linked to Palmeiras’ defeat.
The entire operation takes place at Cheff Otto’s headquarters, in a commercial building near Berrini, in São Paulo. The 160 m² space contains an office and two studios. Nine people work in person, with another six working remotely. For 2026, the plan foresees the addition of 11 more employees.
Among the objects in the environment, a silver suitcase draws attention: for the 10 million subscribers reached last month.
Continues after advertising
It is a business structure. And it explains why the creator defines Cheff Otto as a gastronomy hub that operates as a media company, with a startup mentality.
“I realized that a team builds something much bigger than I could do alone. Today it’s not me. Cheff Otto is a media, content, projects and new business company.”
Until the beginning of this year, this structure did not exist in São Paulo. The content was produced in Sorocaba, Otto’s hometown, with the support of two friends who grew up with the business. Leonardo Oliveira, business director, and Filippo Rolim, production director, followed the rise until the channel became the largest gastronomy channel in the country.
Continues after advertising
Before the change, a third pillar was incorporated: Marcelo Filho, editor-in-chief. He left the traditional market to take on a central role in the operation. Today, the channel receives 25 million monthly viewers on YouTube alone. In total, there are 110 million views and an average of 3.5 million per piece of content, reaching 18 million followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
The trip to São Paulo was well planned. In addition to structuring the brand as a media and business platform, proximity to the advertising market would accelerate partnerships. There are already more than 20 campaigns with brands such as Latam, Bimbo and McDonald’s. There are ongoing conversations for the 2026 World Cup with CazéTV.
For someone who five years ago made short videos and went viral on TikTok teaching practical recipes, the meteoric rise is no illusion. As CEO, Otto receives a salary of R$9,000 to maintain the company’s working capital and financial discipline. He lives in São Paulo with his fiancée, Giovanna Gabriotti, and describes a routine without luxuries.
Continues after advertising
The maturity with which he leads the media startup contrasts with his age: Otto had turned 23 the week before my visit to the studio.
In the 2h30 I spent there, I was able to see in practice how the ideas defended by Sean Atkins, former president of MTV, materialize in the world of creators. In a recent text, Atkins listed what linear TV was unable to transfer to this new ecosystem: fewer layers of approval, less cult of the brand and less confusion between career time and expertise.
“A 22-year-old who has already gained 10 million followers knows something that I will never fully understand.” Except for age, Atkins could have been talking about Otto.
Continues after advertising
It is from this point that the story moves forward to explain why the next wave of media will be built at the intersection between creators and traditional players willing to relearn. Atkins calls this a pivot: moving from creators as rented distributors to creators as narrative and community architects.
Chef Otto summarizes it well: Brand + Creator → Narrative → Audience → Community.
From creator to communicator; from shorts to TV
Although he is at the center of Chef Otto as a creator, Otto defines himself as a communicator. The way he organizes his speech delivers this. He pauses, chooses words and structures ideas like someone thinking about an audience.
Continues after advertising
“To be a good communicator, I need to be a good storyteller, a good writer.”
Otto is immersed in a dense book on screenwriting, recommended by a friend’s father who was once in the media business.
His speech moves between cultural references, such as the award-winning Life is beautiful 1997, and the practical dynamics of the market, citing cases such as Casimiro, and Grupo Primo. Otto likes analogies, and uses one of them to explain his strategic shift from short videos to long, produced content.
Read more:
“It’s like radio in 1920. Then came TV, then the internet, podcast… Podcast is radio again. It’s closing the cycle. Everyone migrated to short-form. But the market today demands content to sit and watch, with slow paceon TV. So much so that YouTube is now bigger than Netflix.”
As someone who “studies other markets”, Otto has mastered the numbers. He cites Nielsen’s share from memory, with “YouTube” at around 12% compared to Netflix’s 8%.” In , YouTube maintained 12.9% and Netflix fell to 8.3%.
This dominance of TV explains why social platforms . Last week, Instagram launched the Instagram for TV app in the US, focused on Reels.
But Otto doesn’t just want to replicate those on TV. Its objective is more ambitious and reflects a change in priority: 70% of its audience already consumes content on TV.
“We are starting to make content that could go on TV, but we show it and link it to a YouTube channel”, he explains.
The movement takes place in a market that has entered a maturation phase. As throughout this year, the creator economy will generate around US$250 billion in 2024, almost 10% of global media and entertainment revenue. By 2030, it should exceed US$600 billion, according to Doug Shapiro.
Otto sees the gap in this growth. For him, there is clear space for “quality content for TV in gastronomy and entertainment”, precisely because few are willing or prepared to deliver at this level.
This is where the stated ambition comes from, bluntly: “We are going to be the next food TV.”
The obsession with “chasing attention” and the premise of testing, failing, and climbing in public
At YouTube’s annual 2025 event, Otto was cited as an example of the new generation of “entertainment startups”. The logic behind this appears in one of your recent readings, Fall in love with the problem, not the solutionby Uri Levine, which he uses to differentiate between startups, traditional media, and creators.
“Startups chase problems. Media companies and creators chase attention. The creator solves what it feels like to watch something good.”
It’s a vision that goes back to the essence of what he produces: entertainment. This year, Otto released the first season of . There, guests try the “hottest in the world” peppers from their brand’s product portfolio. The channel has more than 82 thousand subscribers.
“Is Pimentedos gastronomy? It’s an interview program with food, but it’s entertainment.”
In the fight for attention, Otto assesses that TV remains profitable, but stuck with structures and formulas that are not very adaptable. While creators operate in another way: they test in public, make mistakes quickly and adjust in real time.
Read more:
“What creators do is empirical. It’s basic marketing: test, learn, adjust. Whoever builds a company as a creator is learning a new market while operating.”
This mindset also redefines the way we measure results. In a recent interview with Kaya Yurieff & Jasmine Enberg, Kim Larson, YouTube’s global head of creators, reinforced the same point:
“You don’t expect immediate positive ROI on every marketing campaign. With creators, the path is also to test and learn.”
Learning speed as a competitive advantage
The cycle of testing and learning in the creator economy is accelerated by the dynamics of the medium itself. Sean Atkins calls this “learning speed.” In traditional media, iteration happens before airing. Among creators, it occurs in public, with immediate and scaled returns.
Earlier this month, Cheff Otto published the sixth and final episode of the series, in partnership with Latam. In 12 days, the almost 18-minute content filmed in Amazonas accumulated 481 thousand views and more than 2,200 comments on YouTube. In total, the six long videos have already reached more than six million views.
The project was created in 2024 by Otto’s team and approved by Latam in 2025. It went through six months of pre-production and involved 12 professionals from the internal team and another six from an external script and production team.
“It doesn’t have to be six months”, ponders Otto. “The brand is still used to working with TV. It’s television content. The Latam client is wonderful, it was easy to work with, but it still required the necessary alignment.”
With full control of the operation, he claims that the six episodes could be produced in two months.
“We do it at about a tenth of the cost of TV. We are fast, agile, efficient. We have no waste. TV is inflated and inefficient. We are not.”
Advertising pays the bill, but the future is a media holding company
Advertising still supports Chef Otto. Without disclosing numbers, Otto states that 2025 was a record year, with revenue almost twice as high as 2024.
“Today, we are still largely a media and advertising company.”
Astro’s sauces represent a small slice of the business, between 5% and 8%. This must change. For 2026, the launch of a line of household items and the creation of a franchise arm are planned.
Over a five-year horizon, the Chef Otto brand’s media operation should account for just 5% of the holding’s revenue. Growth will come from products and new businesses.
Otto speaks of holding literally. The thesis converges with a thesis that: the evolution of personal brands to HoldCos of creators.
In the model suggested by investor Aaron Miller, assets are organized under a parent entity (an LLC or C-Corp) that centralizes governance, strategy and capital raising. Each business unit (a product brand, a franchise, a channel) operates autonomously and may have its own team and funding.
Otto, however, has his own reading of capital. He does not seek dilution via traditional financial contributions. The bet is on media for equity.
“Our currency is media. Our value is high, we are able to negotiate relevant stakes and accelerate companies”, he says. “This has been done before. Edu Guedes built this model with a less sophisticated name, being a partner in companies of which he is the face.”
In the end, the media is a mere “shell business”
In June 2024, Jeffrey Housenbold, venture capitalist and former managing partner of SoftBank Investment Advisers, took over as CEO of MrBeast, the global reference of the creator economy and a case closely observed by Otto.
Less than nine months later, Housenbold told Bloomberg that he would cut about $100 million in costs to make the operation profitable next year, with a projected $300 million in profit.
It was a reading that entertainment would start to function as a sales channel for other businesses. Video games, drinks and well-being would be at the center of the strategy.
in March by connecting the case to Brian Morrissey’s analysis of the historical misalignment between venture capital and the media. Recent experience shows that venture capital and content businesses are rarely a good fit.
As Morrissey summarizes, media tends to operate as a “shell business,” used to feed verticals with superior economics or adjacent goals.
Housenbold’s projection reinforces this thesis. By 2026, media revenue is expected to represent just 20% of Beast Industries’ revenue. Feastables, a chocolate brand, is expected to triple in size in the same period.
Otto’s plans follow the same direction, but on a different scale. The holding company under construction treats the media as an engine for acquisition, distribution and validation, and not as the final destination of the business.
This convergence supports the ambition to internationalize the brand. “2026 will be a year of inflection”, says Otto. “We’re going from eighteen million to around thirty million followers on fronts that don’t just depend on my face. This diversifies revenue and gives stability to the business.”
Just like MrBeast, Otto understands a point that still escapes most of the market: audience alone is not enough. Media businesses require content, distribution and monetization acting as an integrated mechanism. The difference is that, now, this system is being designed by creators who learned too quickly to repeat the mistakes of old media.
