How Venture Capital Is Powering the Next Wave of Creator-Led Businesses

Introduction

For the past few decades, influencers have been told that attention is their most valuable form of currency. The creator economy is often referred to as the “attention economy,” as millions of brands and creators compete for the attention of users across social channels. Although creators are able to monetize this attention through adsense and creator programs, influencers are increasingly realizing that ownership is the ultimate strategy for long-standing wealth. Influencer-founded brands from beauty and fashion to food and beverage now dominate social commerce and retail, thanks to the business expertise and extensive audience understanding of creators. The fuel behind this movement is not just adsense or brand deals. Rather, venture capital firms are taking notice and investing in creator-owned businesses.

The Influence Factor Podcast feat. Billy Parks

Firms like Slow Ventures are reimagining what it means to back creative talent, treating creators as innovative founders with the potential to build scalable, enduring businesses. This past week on The Influence Factor Podcast, our host Alessandro Bogliari, CEO and Co-Founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory, chats with Billy Parks, Venture Partner at Slow Ventures, about the evolution of the creator economy and how influencers are kickstarting successful businesses of their own. “Creators used to rent their audiences to brands,” Parks explained. “Now the best ones are building businesses around them.”

Tune in to The Influence Factor here!

Reimagining Venture Capital for the Creator Economy

Influencer-founded brands have all of the key factors founders aspire towards: dedicated communities, built-in trust, and direct feedback loops with consumers. Considering creators innately have these qualities and an in-depth understanding of their fans’ wants and needs, they have the unlimited founder potential to test ideas with their audience and monetize greatly with high-demand products. This powerful dynamic of creators as founders is what draws in venture capital firms like Slow Ventures. “Creators are not just renting their audiences anymore…the most ambitious ones are building real, off-platform businesses,” Parks shared.

To investors, the proven performance of influencer-founded brands translates to lower acquisition costs, faster traction, and impactful products and services rooted in genuine community demand. At Slow Ventures, established creator CEOs “deeply focused on niches” and filling gaps in the market are the most attractive for investment. As Parks puts it, Slow Ventures is interested in creators with niches “in a passion category so they have an audience that is willing to transact and that is interested very specifically in this creator that has a voice of authority in a space.” By partnering with creators who have real authority in a specific category or niche, VCs benefit from a “moat” of trust and success that other businesses, from start-ups to legacy brands, cannot easily replicate. Megan Lightcap, Partner at Slow Ventures and head of their Creator Fund, explained to TechCrunch, “The difference between creator-led opportunities and what opportunities may exist for an existing brand is that, because the audience attaches to the creator as a whole person, the surface area and permission of what they can go build is actually much greater than, you know, a singular product coming.”

Inside Slow Ventures’ $60M Creator Fund

What is the Slow Ventures Creator Fund?

This February, Slow Ventures officially launched the Slow Creator Fund, a major step towards the future of venture capital and strategic investments in creator-led brands. According to Parks, the $65M fund invests $1M to $3M in influencer-founded brands to support in scaling their business operations and exploring new product development. Most commonly, influencers who are a part of the Slow Creator Fund utilize their capital to hire new leaders for supply chain management, social media strategy, and distribution. The official Slow Creator Fund site also notes that Slow Ventures receives an equity stake, usually around 10%, and “the right to follow on with capital into ventures that decide to pursue additional financing” in exchange for its investment.

Slow Co-Founder Sam Lessin and Investor Megan Lightcap, leaders of the Slow Creator Fund.

How Does Slow Ventures Select Partners For Its Creator Fund?

In an interview with Net Influencer, Lightcap outlined the following 4 key factors Slow Ventures looks for when selecting an influencer-founded brand to invest in.

1. Creator’s Mindset: “The creator really needs to think about themselves like a founder and entrepreneur and less like talent,” Lightcap explained, noting that equity, systems, and scalability should be top of mind for influencers, rather than fame or virality.
2. Community Quality: Strength and quality of community are essential for a creator-led business. Lightcap shared that hyper-niche creators have more invested and loyal audiences who are driven by learning and shared passion rather than passive entertainment. These communities are thus more inclined to purchase from a creator brand. “The community stickiness is so much greater…The reason for attachment is often way more emotional,” Lightcap explained.
3. Category Potential: Every investment also depends on the market opportunity within a creator’s niche, meaning that Slow evaluates how big the category is today and where it’s headed considering consumer behavior. “In the case of woodworking, you can sit there and be like, you know how big it is, you know how many dollars moved through the system last year. You can size this market,” Lightcap notes.
4. Traction and Scale: Each of the above pillars ultimately translates to traction and scale. According to Lightcap, “We can understand traction both from a content and community perspective, but traction from a business perspective,” highlighting the significance of seeing early proof that a creator can successfully convert their audience into dedicated customers.

Meet the Creators Turning Influence Into Equity

Slow Ventures has partnered with several leading influencers across diverse content verticals. Below are four standout partners and the key ways they’re redefining what it means to build an influencer-founded brand in today’s creator economy.

Slow Ventures Creator Fund Investments

Backing visionary creators building the next generation of businesses

Marina Mogilko Language Education	Who is Marina Mogilko: Marina Mogilko is an influencer with over 11M YouTube subscribers, best known for her linguistics content. Now, Mogilko is focused on building out her own language learning business as well as exploring new tech and AI tools to assist with everyday language needs. How Slow Ventures invested in Marina Mogilko’s business: Before launching the Creator Fund, Slow Ventures had already experimented with creator investments through its seed portfolio. In 2021, the firm invested $1.7M in Mogilko to expand her creative and language-centered business ventures in exchange for 5% of her future earnings over 30 years. In an interview with Business Insider, Mogilko shared, “It’s an opportunity for me to scale down on the number of partnerships I do and focus on creating instead – and thinking about ideas and different companies I can build for other creators.”
John Fish Reading, Education, Pop-culture	Who is John Fish: John Fish is a pioneer of the reading niche across social platforms, with a collective following of 1M. Fish is best known for his content series covering his experience at Harvard and his lists of favorite reads. Fish’s curiosity for knowledge and pop-culture has accumulated him a large following of passionate learners online, which he was able to monetize with Bookshelved. How Slow Ventures invested in John Fish’s business: Fish first began development of Bookshelved, a community-focused platform for tracking and reviewing books, in 2018. Slow Ventures invested in Bookshelved in 2024 to better target Gen Z audiences and provide more flexibility for Fish’s business development. “The difficulty with creator-led platforms is that they can live or die by the creator’s involvement in them—we’ve seen a number of prominent ventures backed by creators that failed because the incentives didn’t align,” Fish shared with Tubefilter. “I think that Slow’s creator fund creates an amazing alignment of interests between the creator, fund, and any companies formed by the creator (like Bookshelved).”
Jonathan Katz-Moses Woodworking, DIY	Who is Jonathan Katz-Moses: Jonathan Katz-Moses is a viral woodworking star on YouTube with a passion for invention and creative DIYs. His YouTube audience can explore over 400 videos dedicated to woodworking techniques, tools, and projects, creating the perfect synergy of education and entertainment. How Slow Ventures invested in Jonathan Katz-Moses’s business: This August, the Slow Ventures Creator Fund made its first official investment in KM Tools, Katz-Moses’s company which designs and manufactures patented woodworking tools. According to a report from Forbes, Slow invested $2M to help him expand his facility to 33,000 square feet, hire a 15-person team, and file new patents. Katz-Moses has since greenlit over 30 new products and begun collaborating with other makers to bring their ideas to life.
Steven Bartlett Business, Entrepreneurship	Who is Steven Bartlett: Steven Bartlett is a business and entrepreneurship influencer, better known as the host of the Diary of a CEO Podcast. Beyond content creation, Bartlett is the Founder of Steven.com, Co-Founder of onchain app-builder Thirdweb, and an investor in over 60 companies. How Slow Ventures invested in Steven Bartlett’s business: Slow Ventures’ marked its most high-profile investment to date this October in Steven.com. The firm co-led an eight-figure round at a $425M valuation, backing Bartlett’s creator holding company. “By bringing together creator IP, capital and our infrastructure, Steven.com is positioning itself to lead in the next era of the creator economy,” Bartlett told Prolific North. “My ultimate ambition is to build the Disney of the creator economy – and the strategic partners this funding round has brought on board has enabled me to take a big step in that direction.”

The Future of Creator-Led Businesses with Billy Parks

Our exclusive podcast interview with Billy Parks offers brands and creators the ultimate inside look at the future of creator-led businesses. The following are some key quotes and takeaways from Billy Parks’s feature on The Influence Factor Podcast.

• “Creators used to rent their audiences to brands. Now the best ones are building businesses around them.”
• “If you’re going to spend five years building an audience, build a business too…something that can exist long after the brand deals stop.”
• “Creators know their audiences better than brands do. The best thing a brand or investor can do is get out of the way.”
• “Five or ten years from now, we’ll look back and see that the real wealth in this space came from creators who built businesses, not those who just made content.”
• “The next wave of creators will be the ones who merge content, community, and commerce into one ecosystem.”

The Influence Factor: Top Creator Economy Podcast

Want to learn more insights into the creator economy? Tune into The Influence Factor, a leading influencer marketing and creator economy podcast featuring top marketing leaders across diverse industries. Ranked in the top 0.5% of podcasts, The Influence Factor is your go-to source for more marketing strategies, data-driven case studies, and more.

Notable past guests include industry leaders such as:

• Raja Rajamannar (Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Mastercard)
• Jennifer Healan (VP of Brand, Content, and Culture at McDonald’s US)
• Dace De La Foret (AVP of Social Media at Nationwide)
• Sam Friedman (Senior Director of Content Partnerships at the NFL)
• Jonathan Kolozsvary (Global Head of Small Business at Visa)

Find our full library of past episodes here, and make sure to follow The Influencer Marketing Factory for all the latest creator economy news and social media updates!

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