The Man Who Moved Creators from the Margins to the Middle of Microsoft

Joey Maestas has spent his career watching an industry graduate from novelty to necessity. He was inside Team USA's marketing operation building athlete storytelling programs a decade before "creator economy" was a phrase anyone used in a board meeting. He was at NextVR when virtual reality still felt like the future instead of a cautionary tale. And now, as the executive steering Microsoft's creator and influencer strategy, he is doing something harder than chasing a trend. He is embedding one inside a company whose business model has almost nothing to do with content.

That is the conversation Tim Spengler and I had with Joey on this episode of Lead Human, and it is one of the more useful hours we have recorded this year for anyone who creates, manages creators, or has to explain to a skeptical leadership team why any of this matters.

Watch the full conversation at https://youtu.be/GV5RSDwPTic?is=mhwFb8LWPbGSLNlv, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice, and explore more athttps://lead-human.com.

Leadership as a Learning Posture

Ask Joey what makes a good leader and he does not reach for a framework. He reaches for his own hiring decisions.

"We just hired a new creator team at Microsoft and everyone's different and has different experiences," he told us. "Someone from EA who has a great experience on building creator programs... someone from Live Nation with a lot of experience in artists and performance... someone from TikTok and a lot of the short form experience. It's been interesting because I just feel like that just makes you better, putting a good team around you, your cabinet per se."

It is a simple idea that most executives say and few actually practice: hire people who know things you do not, then let yourself be taught. Joey's version of leadership is less about having answers and more about staying in a permanent state of intake. When Tim closed the interview by summarizing the throughline of the conversation, that was the line he chose. Learning is not a phase you graduate out of. It is the job.

The Muhammad Ali Question

Every guest reveals something unplanned, and with Joey it came from a question about his LinkedIn banner. Why Muhammad Ali?

"That's just been my LinkedIn for years," he said. "Muhammad Ali has just been someone that for me, growing up, watching a lot of old fights, based on what he stood for. Very outspoken. Just inspiring for me."

Talk about the ultimate influencer, we told him. He did not disagree. It is a small detail, but it says something real about how Joey thinks about the creators he works with every day: not as a marketing line item, but as people whose cultural weight predates the term "creator economy" by decades. Ali was never chasing engagement. He had it because people trusted what he stood for. That is the exact quality Joey is trying to systematize at scale inside one of the largest companies on earth.

Proving the Unprovable

The hardest part of Joey's job is not finding creators. It is defending the budget line to executives who want a number.

"You can't go into a meeting and say, look at all this awareness we drove. Great. But it's like, what are these actual business results?" he said. His team tracks individual creator links down the funnel, not because the relationship matters less than the metric, but because the relationship has to survive contact with finance. "It's really looking at, if someone posts something, what type of conversation are we seeing from that? Did we see a spike in app downloads that day?"

And then there is the moment every brand marketer chases and can never fully engineer: creators who keep posting after the contract ends. "They just truly love the product now and they trust us," Joey said. "They could be on a trip, they could be doing something with their families, whatever it might be." That, more than any dashboard, is the signal his leadership actually believes.

Advice for Every Creator

Toward the end of the conversation, Joey gave the advice that Tim and I suspect will get clipped and shared more than anything else in this episode. It was aimed at us, but it applies to anyone building an audience.

"If you want to go into your kitchen, start cooking and show someone your meal, like start posting that," he said. "You'll get a clear view very quickly on if that's working for your platforms or not." His point is not that overthinking is wasteful. It is that overthinking substitutes for the only research method that actually works: publishing and watching what happens.

Why This Conversation Matters

Joey Maestas sits at a rare intersection: enough institutional history to have watched this industry graduate from Vine activations at the Rio Olympics to AI-generated influencers debating real ones for brand deals, and enough current authority to be shaping how a trillion-dollar company decides which of those bets are real. His closing message to anyone hesitant about this space was direct. "Don't be afraid to jump in," he said. "There's so many inspirational stories and new people that you meet, that each have their own different niche and stories to tell. It's fun because it never gets boring."

For anyone building a creator program, managing talent, or building their own platform from nothing, this episode is a working blueprint from someone doing it inside one of the most scrutinized marketing operations in the world.

Watch the full conversation atyoutube.com/@leadhuman, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice, and explore more athttps://lead-human.com.

Lead Human is hosted by Jack Myers and Tim Spengler, exploring the human side of leadership in the age of AI and unleashing the human potential.