Today at 1 Smart Business Story, we feast! First We Feast’s Sean Evans, host of the hit YouTube show Hot Ones and chief creative officer of its parent company, shares his vision for reinventing late-night TV as both a cultural form and a business.  

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As late-night TV fades, the new chief creative officer of First We Feast is reinventing the business, one viral celebrity interview at a time.

BY DEVIN GORDON

They advise never meeting your heroes, but Sean Evans keeps meeting his, and these late-night icons keep treating him like he’s a member of their club—a feeling that must be so brain-melting for him, it should come with its own Scoville rating.

Last year, Seth Meyers moderated an event at the Paley Center for Media featuring Evans and Chris Schonberger, the founder and CEO of First We Feast, the scrappy production company that launched Hot Ones on YouTube a decade ago. In March, Evans did a Hot Ones sketch onstage with Stephen Colbert during Conan O’Brien’s Mark Twain Prize ceremony at Kennedy Center. He’s been on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and done The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon so many times now that they’ve practically crossed the threshold into friendship, no desk required.

“The way they’ve embraced us and what we’re doing has been the most rewarding part of all of this,” Evans says, leaning forward on a couch next to me, actively listening in host mode even though I’m technically the host here, in a Midtown Manhattan photo studio just a few blocks from First We Feast’s sparkling but still-unfinished headquarters. “All I need is just an audience that likes the show and peers who respect it.”

He’s not just their peer, though. By virtue of what he’s created on YouTube with Hot Ones, Evans is more like an heir to the throne, and an equity-holding pioneer of where the form could be headed. Late-night TV has slowly eroded over the past decade, both as a business and a cultural force, losing sway to social media platforms and creators like Evans. Conan has moved on to podcasting. Colbert was canceled amid the Paramount-Skydance merger this summer, with reports that his show was supposedly losing as much as $50 million a year. Meanwhile, First We Feast’s YouTube channel has more than 15 million subscribers (The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s has 10.3 million), and new episodes roll up millions of views within the first several days. Most Hot Ones episodes debut on Thursdays at 11 a.m. ET—a long way from late-night—but only a narrow sliver of the audience watches the show then. Hot Ones may drop in the daylight, but that trademark black curtain on the set is there for a reason. Evans’s inspirations are all late-night.

“In the history of entertainment,” he says, “late-night has been the de facto place to find celebrities in looser and edgier environments. And I do think that’s also what Hot Ones is. In a lot of ways, they occupy the same space culturally.”

It certainly didn’t start out that way. Schonberger launched First We Feast in 2012 as a food culture blog for the streetwear and hip-hop magazine Complex and plucked Evans, then a writer and on-air reporter, to try hosting this goofy chicken-wing chat-show idea he’d had. Hot Ones was already a hit by the time BuzzFeed acquired Complex for almost $300 million in 2021. According to Bloomberg, First We Feast has generated $30 million in revenue and $10 million in profit over the past decade. The show has also been a condiment kingmaker: It released the Last Dab in 2017, one of a popular line of branded hot sauces. And thanks to its infamy as one of the Hot Ones’ showstoppers, Spicin Foods’ line of Da’ Bomb hot sauces celebrated its millionth bottle sold in 2021.

But by 2024, Hot Ones’ corporate overlord was struggling. The SPAC boom had led BuzzFeed to go public two years earlier and it was now facing a big decline in its market cap, from $1.5 billion to around $40 million. In February 2024, the company sold Complex—without First We Feast—for $108.6 million to pay off approximately $60 million in debt.

Several months later, in December, BuzzFeed sold First We Feast for $82.5 million in an all-cash deal to a consortium of investors including George Soros’s investment firm, the podcast company Crooked Media, YouTubers Rhett and Link’s entertainment company Mythical—and Evans and Schonberger. “We were able to extract it like a Jenga piece,” says Evans.

This price tag “represents a ton of risk,” says Brandon Katz, a media-industry expert with Greenlight Analytics, because “the transaction happened after the streaming bubble popped.” The clear winner, though, was YouTube, Hot Ones’ home turf, with its billions of monthly viewers worldwide. Plus, First We Feast has successfully expanded into merchandise, licensing, and brand partnerships. “I still think there’s scalability left in the business,” Katz says.

Unlike his late-night peers, Evans is not a comedian, or a professional entertainer of any kind. He’s just a nice, self-assured guy and an accidental streaming-media entrepreneur who possesses at least two super-talents: asking questions that leave his guests dumbstruck at the exhaustiveness of his research, and doing it while matching them hot wing for hot wing. Unlike the Kimmels and Colberts, Evans launched his show with little name recognition and no proven business model. He’s proud of their endorsements but sees himself as a different breed, as much a behind-the-scenes brand builder as an on-camera personality, more akin to Bravo’s Andy Cohen, or YouTubers Marques Brownlee and MrBeast. Which might help explain the unexpected name he answers with when I ask him whom he considers his biggest role model.

“Carson Daly,” he says. “An everyman who maybe on paper wouldn’t work but in practice does.” Daly was a radio DJ who broke out with MTV’s Total Request Live in the late 1990s, and then graduated to late-night. Now he’s on the Today show. “Hot Ones is kind of my TRL moment,” Evans says. “Carson was able to off-ramp, to have this playground in the middle of the night. He’s always been able to age so gracefully, not only in the industry, but with his audience.”

Don’t expect Evans to off-ramp anytime soon, though. Hot Ones just recorded its 28th season, “and that’s my baby,” he vows. Evans talks like a man who’d do it forever if he could. But he’s also got that entrepreneurial empire-builder side, and now he has a new title to reflect it: chief creative officer of First We Feast.

In some ways, it’s a formalization of a leadership role he’s been in all along. His assignment is taking what may seem like a gimmick—a chat over spicy chicken wings—and turning it into the anchor of an entire content universe, one powered by the operating theory that Evans, not the hot sauce, has been the real star all along.

Evans has been spoofed by Saturday Night Live twice, and both sketches featured Maya Rudolph as Evans’s Hot Ones guest Beyoncé, which in turn led to his brief appearance in the first season of Rudolph’s Apple TV sitcom, Loot. On set, Evans suggested that she come on Hot Ones to promote it. “But she was like”—and here he adopts an impressively spot-on Maya Rudolph voice—“‘Sean, I love you, but there is no way in fuh-huck I’m ever eating those sauces.’”

Hot Ones will happily compromise on the chicken—guests have eaten cauliflower, tempeh, and seitan wings—but the hot sauce is non-negotiable, and for a great many people whom Evans would love to someday interview, that’s a dealbreaker.

And so Evans and Schonberger have been hard at work for the past year developing a new series inspired by a longstanding Hot Ones post-shoot tradition: After filming a big interview, they would celebrate back at the hotel bar over old-fashioneds, becoming serious whiskey buffs along the way.

On September 29, First We Feast dropped the first of three episodes of One More Round, in which Evans nurses a cocktail with celebrities, starting with WNBA superstar Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty. Launching new series—especially sponsored ones—that highlight great interviews is a central pillar of the company’s post-BuzzFeed growth strategy; One More Round is presented solely by Bulleit, the whiskey maker and longtime First We Feast collaborator.

“We definitely have a vibe for the Bulleit series that’s a little more speakeasy, a little more understated, a little bit cooler,” Evans says, but it’s fundamentally the same DNA: a social lubricant, and a skillful, attentive interviewer. The new plan is off to an auspicious start; all three episodes have drawn over a million views each.

Sean Evans is borderline messianic about the role of the interviewer, and he believes that much of First We Feast’s continued growth as a content company rides less on coming up with a sticky new stunt and more on his ability to master this form. He brings a competitive zeal to becoming the best at it. “The interview is the oldest construct in the history of media,” he says. “That’s the siren song that’s calling me at the moment.”

Evans’s reputation on this front is turning him into a legend. His first question for SNL legend Kate McKinnon during the latest season of Hot Ones made her melt right away. (“God bless your questions,” she said, smitten.) In a moment when so many companies are trying to leverage access to celebrity, through an equity partnership done just for the PR, or a bloodless endorsement deal, First We Feast has succeeded by making celebrities feel seen and respected. His very next question, about “the earliest voices you remember doing as a kid,” delighted her once more. Then he served up the coup de grâce, a deep cut from her Long Island childhood: “What was the Honeysuckle Eaters Club?” She looked astonished, like she’d just bitten into a madeleine and not a chicken wing. “Have we met?” she asked. “Are we together?”

Hot Ones long ago reached that crucial cultural inflection point at which you go from chasing people to people chasing you—along with McKinnon, Season 28 drew Keke Palmer, Jason Bateman, Channing Tatum, and Los Angeles Lakers superstar Luka Dončić—but getting A-list yeses is only the first step in a logistical circus act that never gets easier. Now, Evans’s own rising stardom adds another packed schedule to the equation.

Last summer, Hot Ones partnered with Stella Artois on its first ticketed live event in front of 300 fans who were attempting the Wings of Death challenge along with special guest David Beckham. They did another Hot Ones Live this fall in Los Angeles with actor Adam DeVine (The Righteous Gemstones). “Now, it’s kind of a big annual Super Bowl event for us,” Evans says. “Maybe a year or two down the road, we can do an eight- or 12-city tour.”

And lest we forget, he’s preparing to lead First We Feast’s new office, taking care of the people who take care of him. “Like Maya, who did my makeup”—Evans nods over to Maya, packing up her station across the room—“making sure the lighting’s right.” (“Yes, please,” she says, smiling.) He’s the boss, too, the leader of a workplace. But if his two jobs should ever conflict, if the chief creative officer needs to be in one place but the YouTube host needs to be somewhere else?

The host wins “every single time,” Evans says. “The number-one most important thing is that the videos are good. The entire business is built on that.”