The deal changed.
The tools needed to catch up.

Chris Cavell is the Founder and CEO of StarlightIQ, the operating system for brand-talent partnerships.

Chris is a two-time Emmy Award-winning storyteller with over 15 years of experience across entertainment and technology, and holds an Executive MBA from Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

He spent a decade at The Ellen DeGeneres Show, rising from Talent Assistant to Senior Talent Executive and booking some of the biggest talent in the business. He went on to lead talent partnerships at Calm for six years, where he secured dozens of celebrity brand deals with talent including Matthew McConaughey, Diane Keaton, Cynthia Erivo, and Malala Yousafzai. He also supported activations around names like LeBron James and Harry Styles, and more recently spent a season with The Jennifer Hudson Show.

Over that same span, Cavell has watched the industry transform, as the rise of social media opened brand deals to everyone with an audience, not just the small pool of agency-repped talent who once had access. The infrastructure never kept pace. He has seen that gap firsthand in the creators and talent doing the deals, the people managing them, and the brands negotiating from the other side, all spending more time on logistics than on the work that brought them into the industry in the first place.

StarlightIQ is his answer: one system for everything that happens once a deal is signed. It tracks every deliverable, keeps usage rights and exclusivity in view, and catches late payments before they become lost ones, so creators and talent can spend less time managing the business and more time on the work that brought them to it.

Emma Slater has lived the problem StarlightIQ solves. For 14 years, she’s performed on Dancing with the Stars while creating content every week, delivering for dozens of brands including Chase, Audible, and DICK’S Sporting Goods, and running her own creative marketing agency. That puts her where creator and business meet, and she knows how much falls through the cracks: the deliverables, the deadlines, the approvals, and the payments you have to chase. As a Founding Partner of StarlightIQ, she’s excited to bring solutions to her peers who are juggling the same things.

On the ballroom floor, Emma won the Mirrorball in Season 24 with Rashad Jennings and partnered with Andy Richter last season. This season she’s dancing with Savannah Bananas star Jackson Olson. Born in Sutton Coldfield, England, she built her career on the world’s biggest stages before DWTS, as a principal dancer in Dirty Dancing in the West End and Burn the Floor on Broadway, and in the film Mamma Mia!

As social media took off, DWTS turned into something fans follow all week. The Season 34 premiere drew 21 million votes, up 163% from the year before, and the finale drew 72 million, more than double the previous season. Emma grew with that shift. She has nearly 2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X, with 84.7M likes on TikTok alone, and she co-hosted the Dancing with the Stars Live 2026 tour across North America.