Anik Devaughn on the creator economy's missing infrastructure, in Inc. Magazine

Inc. Magazine's feature on the creator economy opens and closes on Anik Devaughn, founder of Wired to Create: creators finally own the audience, but nobody built the rails underneath it. It is the exact problem he set out to solve years ago, as OZONE, the venture he built inside Quincy Jones's world.

On 31 July 2026, Inc. Magazine published a feature by Jasmine Browley on the creator economy's next problem: creators have built billion-dollar audiences, and the industry has no management model to match. The piece opens on Anik Devaughn's framing. An actor has an agent, a manager, a lawyer, and a studio. A creator has to be all four, while building the business in real time. That, he told Inc., is not a harder version of the same job. It is a different job.

Inc. introduces him as founder and CEO of Wired to Create, an AI-native tech and media company that has spent years building infrastructure around exactly this problem. His argument runs underneath the whole piece: power has moved to whoever owns the relationship with the audience, and creators own that directly now. But owning the audience is not the same as owning the infrastructure, and that, he says, is the part nobody fixed. Payments, rights, contracts, and revenue splits still run on structures that have barely changed in decades.

It is not a new position for him. It is the one he has held longest. From 2015, Anik spent seven years building a platform for precisely these rails: OZONE, a venture that grew up around Quincy Jones, co-founded with his son Quincy Jones III and built in no small part out of the elder Jones's Bel Air home. Its chief marketing officer, Arturo Nuñez, now founder and CEO of the brand consultancy AIE Creative, had run global marketing for Nike Basketball and then Apple across Latin America. On the platform, creators from excluded communities could be found by brands and paid directly, with no manager or agency taking a cut for permission. The version Anik wanted ran on verifiable identity and transactions that settled without an intermediary, which in 2018 was the correct architecture and an impossible one, because the rails did not exist yet.

Which is what makes the Inc. feature read, from his side, less like commentary and more like a return. The industry is now arriving, out loud and in a national business title, at the conclusion he reached before the infrastructure could carry it. He puts the fix plainly: the industry does not need better middlemen, it needs rails. His own account of getting there early, and coming back with the parts, is the essay that sits beside this one.

The industry doesn't need better middlemen. It needs rails: payment, rights, splits, contracts. All of it still runs on relationships and PDFs.

Anik Devaughn in Inc. Magazine, July 2026