Max Gredinger has a theory about why — as a teen growing up outside Boston who ran a hip-hop blog and loved mixtape culture — he had the confidence to not only firmly decide on a career in the music industry but start managing artists.
“Realistically? Probably arrogance,” Gredinger says with a laugh. “A feeling that I knew something that people who were far more seasoned than I didn’t know.” That feeling didn’t exactly lead him astray: Through a friend who knew Mike Posner’s cousin, Gredinger ended up crafting the digital marketing plan for Posner’s first mixtape (which led to the artist’s global breakthrough hit, “Cooler Than Me”) as a high school junior. He ultimately graduated from Syracuse University’s Martin Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries.
But Gredinger, who’s now a partner at management company Foundations, gleaned a bigger lesson from his youthful confidence: “There’s a total benefit to not knowing how the business works when you’re just entering the workforce, because you don’t even think about things in or outside the box — you don’t even understand the concept of a box.”
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That mentality is now helping the 35-year-old guide the career of one of today’s most unconventional artists: the jazz-classical-pop-blending, Icelandic Chinese singer-songwriter Laufey. With the 2025 release of A Matter of Time (the follow-up to her Billboard 200 top 20 album Bewitched two years prior), Laufey had an astonishing breakthrough year, topping four Billboard album charts (Independent, Jazz, Traditional Jazz and Vinyl Albums), notching her first Billboard 200 top 10 and winning her second Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album. She also embarked on a still-ongoing tour that’s taken her to arenas like New York’s Madison Square Garden. Across its first 43 shows, the run has grossed $47.2 million and sold 446,000 tickets — increases of 432% and 245%, respectively, from the 2023-24 Bewitched tour.
“I was immediately struck by all of it: her voice, her playing, and I absolutely fell in love with the music,” Gredinger recalls of when, during the pandemic, his then-assistant (Jackie Karlsson, now Laufey’s operations manager) first directed him to videos of covers she was posting online. Upon meeting, he and Laufey bonded over their mutual love of Norah Jones. “She just had this from-go mandate of what she wanted to do and this unrelenting drive,” as well as “adamance that [her music] be for Gen Z, her generation, first,” Gredinger remembers. “Management only works at scale when the artist is the most committed person by far — and she works her ass off, she cares so much.”
The A Matter of Time rollout took shape in February 2025, with two days of global team meetings at opera house Harpa in Reykjavík, Iceland, with both Laufey and her identical twin sister and creative director, Junia Lin, present. “Junia and Laufey were leading the charge in the weeds on ideation implementation,” Gredinger says. “They personify ‘dynamic duo’ — Junia is, in some ways,
like an extension of [Laufey’s] brain.”
One of the main ideas discussed there (and, in the end, one that became crucial to the tour) was making fans at any venue feel immediately immersed in Laufey Land — the term for Laufey’s Discord community and social media. It’s part of an “ecosystem” Gredinger helps the artist keep fully integrated that
includes her book club, a foundation supporting youth orchestras and her New York Times bestselling children’s book, Mei Mei the Bunny.
“She knows her audience better than anyone,” Gredinger says of his 27-year old client, who he’s fond of calling “the most impressive digital executive that I’ve worked with.” When it comes to partnerships, many of which are offered to her, Laufey’s instinct, along with whether Gredinger can “pretty quickly answer the ‘why’ of it,” lead the way. “We talk a lot about the power of no,” Gredinger says. “There’s really only one North Star: It has to be something she’s excited about.” (One recent example: For an Amazon and Lexus celebration of Miles Davis’ centennial, Laufey wrote and performed new lyrics to the Kind of Blue instrumental “Blue in Green.”)
Laufey is a natural fit at Foundations, which represents some of the most innovative young voices in pop, including Noah Kahan, Chappell Roan and Slayyyter — and Gredinger says he and partners Drew Simmons, Steve Bursky and Brian Winton collaborate often. His dynamic with Laufey works in large part, he says, because “we have a similar, very direct communication style. It’s efficient, and there’s never anything left unsaid.” While he defers to her on all things creative, “I love the operational, boring, nitty-gritty business admin stuff, and she loves that.”
When we speak in mid-June, Laufey has just wrapped the Asia leg of her tour in Shanghai and will soon gear up for its final dates in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico. When it’s over, she and Gredinger will have crossed another entry — playing arenas — off their “moon shots” list. But Gredinger is careful to
note that doesn’t mean any one end goal is in sight, and he sees Laufey’s long-term potential as limitless. Back when they first started working together, “I told my wife this would be the most universal project that I ever worked on,” Gredinger says. “I never thought about it through the lens of a ceiling.”
This story appears in the Aug. 1, 2026, issue of Billboard.