Professional skateboard legend, MTV star and brand builder, Rob Dyrdek, has launched a venture studio, Dyrdek Machine, that represents a hybrid between a branding agency and venture capital firm.

The venture studio builds, invests in and advises an array of companies in categories ranging from luxury brands, sports entertainment, consumer products, and spirits to innovative technologies.

Within its first year, the venture studio has already built and launched:

  • Ultracast – Fully immersive 360/VR live content platform
  • ETN – The first SVOD skateboarding network with all original programming
  • Black Feather Whiskey – American whiskey that’s simple and pure

In Q4, it plans to launch:

  • Momentous – a high-performance nutrition company
  • Outstanding Foods – plant-based innovative foods
  • CCCXXXIII (pronounced 333) – a new concept in luxury designer goods

Dyrdek began his career as an athlete – a professional skateboarder at 16 years of age. He started his first company at 18 and continued on to build and amplify numerous successful brands. By leveraging his influence and designing new concepts and ideas, he helped turn a rising footwear and apparel brand into a $500 million global company.

Dyrdek used that same expertise to build skate brands later in his career launching the world’s first true professional skateboarding league Street League Skateboarding. Taking that strategic approach to brand development led him to create numerous television brands through his production business, Superjacket (one of the first companies under the Dyrdek Machine umbrella), and created multiple hit television shows including MTV’s Ridiculousness, with Dyrdek as the star and executive producer.

“We connect with ideas born from passion as they naturally have disruptive forces,” Dyrdek said of Dyrdek Machine. “We’ve curated a symbiotic network made up of a series of operators, financiers, distributors, influencers, and best-in-class specialists who work together to turn those ideas into amazing brands.”

The ideal partners for Dyrdek Machine venture studio would be both the experienced operators with an innovative product who need to create a brand or the creative founders who need financial or operational support.

Dyrdek added, “When you have a clear vision for what you want to accomplish and a strategic path to get there, anything is possible. By methodically applying the fundamental principles of this system, you minimize risk and create a predictable path for success.”