Whop co-founder and CEO Steven Schwartz shares the story behind the platform and the worldview driving it.

Steven and his co-founder Cameron met as young teenagers in a Facebook group and started building businesses together almost immediately. Running those early ventures meant stitching together a long list of separate tools to accept payments, talk to customers, and reinvest earnings into growth. Whop grew from a simple wish: a single place where all of that could happen.

The discussion explores the structural shift in how younger generations think about work. For Steven, the idea that work and life are separate is a waste of time, and a career built for someone else holds little appeal. Rising education costs and anxiety about AI and labor displacement are adding pressure, pushing more people toward betting on themselves. Steven stays optimistic, believing the internet makes greatness possible for anyone willing to try.

Whop sits at the center of this change as the first platform to successfully merge a social network with payments, a combination that has proven difficult for even the largest social companies to crack. As more people choose to build work around what they love, Whop is positioned to become the home of an internet economy where earning a sustainable income is open to anyone with an idea and the drive to pursue it.