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Nearly a decade ago, Under 30 alums Adam Richman and Joe Silberzweig were running a music festival called TomorrowWorld when the 7-foot-1 basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal, better known as Shaq, showed up to the front gate as an unexpected guest. The pair, then employees at an event promotion company called SFX Entertainment, wasted no time greeting O’Neal and showing him around.

“He was just blown away by the collective energy and kept saying ‘I feel like I’m playing Game 7 here,” Silberzweig told Forbes. “Then he looked at us and said, ‘I’m going to DJ this festival next year.’ I thought he was crazy.”

Over the next few months, O’Neal sent them his mixes, they offered feedback, and TomorrowWorld ended up booking him as a musical act for the following year. Then Richman and Silberzweig came up with an idea: Create their own events company and throw the NBA Hall of Famer his very own live experience.

Now in its eighth year, Shaq’s Fun House is a multi-day event that could be described as somewhat of an adult playground. “Part carnival, part circus, part music festival.” It’s put together by event promoter and organizer Medium Rare, the startup Richman and Silberzweig founded in 2018.

Since signing O’Neal as its first client, Medium Rare has witnessed a snowball effect: Football tight end Rob Gronkowski attended Shaq’s Fun House and became client No. 2, hosting Gronk Beach, which launched as a Super Bowl weekend festival in Miami and featured artists like Rick Ross and Diplo. Then Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce came to Gronk’s event and soon gave life to Kelce Jam, a music festival happening right in Kansas City. Food Network personality Guy Fieri became a client the same way.

“We’ve taken celebrities that have these incredible fan bases that weren’t expected to have a live event,” Richman added. “To be able to take what people love about them and set it into an experience is something we’re really proud of. We’ve really invented this new model.”

As they launch these new brands for celebrities, Medium Rare enters a 50-50 deal with the client where they co-own the IP. Then, as the event producer, Medium Rare will finance the cost of each event and handle logistics like securing the venue, the additional talent, the food vendors, the sponsors. As the promoter, they’ll also figure out marketing strategy. Profits are then split between Medium Rare and the client.

“Joe and I really built this on our own savings. We took no investment from the jump, built a company on our shoulders and risked everything we had,” Richman said. “It really gave us this incredible hustler mentality.”

While they initially bootstrapped, last year, Kygo’s venture firm Palm Tree Crew made a strategic investment into Medium Rare in exchange for a 5% stake. (Medium Rare is currently valued at around $50 million). While the exact funding amount is undisclosed, an investment now makes sense: Medium Rare’s portfolio has only been growing in the post-Covid-19 environment where live events are making a serious comeback.

The latest on their roster was DJ and producer John Summit, who held his first ever electronic music festival in September. Summit has been headlining events like Ultra and Electric Daisy Carnival for years—so, Richman and Silberzweig thought, why not give him a stage he can have ownership of? (P.S. read our coverage on Summit and the significance of this event here).

Summit’s label, Experts Only, partnered with Medium Rare to host two sold-out days for 50,000 fans on New York’s Randall’s Island. That venue was home to the city’s only electronic dance music festival, Electric Zoo, for over a decade until its cancellation in 2023 due to financial and logistical issues.

The Experts Only Festival is already slated to come back for another year. Gronk Beach and Kelce Jam are happening in 2026, too. In the meantime, Medium Rare is going to continue tapping celebrities and find ways to get even more creative with live events. (Their dream client? “Maybe a pretty well-known fiancé of one of our clients,” they said.)

And yes, the startup’s name was spontaneously decided over dinner at a steakhouse!

More from us next week,

Zoya & Alex

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Lister Lowdown

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-Legal AI startup Harvey has reached an $8 billion valuation. The company, which builds AI assistants to handle grunt work like analyzing documents or consolidating lengthy research for law firms, had raised about $26 million when cofounder Winston Weinberg made the Under 30 list in 2024. Now, it has raised over $1 billion following a most recent $160 million Series F. Reports of this funding had leaked in October, but the startup has officially confirmed the raise, TechCrunch reports. Forbes previously sat down with Weinberg to discuss how Harvey got its start (it involved a call with the entire C-suite of OpenAI). Read it here.

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