For many entrepreneurs, the dream is to build something entirely their own. Franchising offers a different path: owning and growing a business within an established system. A January 2026 study from the International Franchise Association reported that 64% of franchisees are first-time business owners, making franchising an entry point to entrepreneurship for many aspiring founders.

Few executives have spent more time thinking about that trade-off than John Peyton. Before becoming CEO of Dine Brands, the parent company of Applebee’s and IHOP, Peyton built his career as a brand leader across the hospitality industry, including at hotels, restaurants, and consumer-facing businesses. Since taking the helm in 2021, he’s led two of the country’s largest casual dining chains through post-Covid era challenges like cost inflation, the growth of takeout and delivery, and changes in consumer behavior. “What we know about younger guests is that they like to photograph their food,” Peyton told Founder Brew.

Peyton spoke with Founder Brew about why franchising can be a pathway to business ownership, the traits he sees in successful operators, and the leadership lesson he had to learn after becoming CEO: what got him the job wasn’t necessarily what the job required.

Many entrepreneurs dream of opening their own restaurant concept. Why should an ambitious restaurateur choose franchising instead?

There’s a big difference between opening an Applebee’s or opening John Peyton’s Bar & Grill. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re going to invest in opening a restaurant, when you invest in a national brand like Applebee’s, you’re getting a menu that’s been tried and tested for generations across the country, as well as the innovation that comes with it. You’re getting a national marketing and advertising platform; you’re getting our technology; you’re getting the restaurant design; you’re getting the brand standards, our social platforms, our training.

Read more about Applebee’s approach to franchising.—JH

Most e-commerce companies dream of building a subscription model that generates meaningful recurring revenue. Fewer are willing to walk away from it once they do.

That’s the bet Amber Venz Box is making.

As co-founder of LikeToKnow.it or LTK, she built an online affiliate and commerce marketing company to monetize her work as a personal shopper and early online influencer on her own website and on social networks like Instagram. Now, as LTK focuses on its own social shopping platform featuring individual creators, her plan is to pivot away from charging brands and instead openly share the data her platform has collected about creators and product sales with them.

The decision reflects her belief that the creator economy is entering a new phase—one where creators are increasingly building businesses around audiences they can reach directly.

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Amber Venz Box gets candid about stepping away from a model that generated predictable revenue, where she thinks the creator economy is heading next, and what it’s like building a startup outside of Silicon Valley or New York.

What systems need to be in place for creators to turn their community into a business?

One of the first things is they think of themselves as a professional. The second is they have a true plan of what their business is going to look like, meaning: How often are you going to publish? What are my goals? How am I going to measure that?

One of the most important and unsaid things in the creator industry is making sure you’re providing the service the consumer wants in the way they want…people like to be in aggregated content channels, whether it’s an Instagram, it’s an LTK, it’s a TikTok or LinkedIn, and so meeting that customer expectation is something that LTK has taken on on their behalf.

You have to know what the value of your business is. I tell creators: Your opportunity set is your daily reachable audience—however many people know you, and you can reach them daily, reliably. Don’t get distracted by shares, sends, saves, follows, and all those things that ultimately don’t matter.

Read more about Venz Box’s decision to walk away from recurring revenue.—JH

Seltz, an AI search startup building infrastructure for AI agents to access and cite machine-readable data for web search, raised $12.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by B Capital and Speedinvest, with United Ventures, Italian Founders Fund, and Future Back Ventures, the venture arm of Bain & Company, participating. (Fortune)

Baseten, a provider of systems software for running AI application workloads, raised $1.5 billion in Series F funding at a $13 billion valuation. The round marks its fourth fundraise in 18 months and was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management. (Reuters)

AppsFlyer, a San Francisco-based data analytics company focused on digital marketing, reportedly raised more than $1 billion in Series E funding at a $2.7 billion valuation. Co-founder and CEO Oren Kaniel declined to comment on specific deal details, but confirmed to Axios that Moloco, Google, Meta, and Unity each took minority stakes in the startup. (Axios)