The New Creator Business VC Rush — and Slow Ventures' $60M Bet
More investors want in on YouTubers' bevvies, beauty lines and more. How big are the checks, who's getting them and what Covid's 5th anniversary has to do with it
I write about content creators, digital platforms and the $250B global industry they power — including the new creator arms race between Netflix, Spotify and YouTube. Email me tips, story ideas and memes you can’t keep to yourself at natalie@theankler.com
Hello from Frisco, Texas, where later today I’m attending the unveiling of Dude Perfect’s shiny new headquarters — which I hear features a mini-golf course, a 45-yard football field and a hidden candy room. The $5 million, 80,000-square-foot facility is opening less than a year after private equity firm Highmount Capital made a reported $100 million-plus investment into the Dude Perfect business. You’ll get a full report from me on it next week (hopefully I’ll have a first-person account of that candy room), but today I’ll dive deeper into the state of money from investors like Highmount that’s flowing into the creator economy.
The cash infusion into the trick shot kings of YouTube came on the heels of several other investments into creator-first businesses. In 2022, husband-wife team Matthew Patrick (aka MatPat) and Stephanie Patrick sold their channel The Game Theorists and its spinoffs to Lunar X, which had launched a year earlier to invest in digital-first media and entertainment brands. Then, education channel Veritasium raised an undisclosed sum from investor Electrify Video Partners. But things have been a little quiet since the Dude Perfect fundraise last year. In fact, Rhett & Link’s Mythical Entertainment has fielded investor (or perhaps acquirer?) interest for some time now, though a deal has yet to materialize.
That’s what makes last week’s news of a $60 million fund from Slow Ventures to invest specifically in creator businesses so interesting. “The team at Slow had been thinking about creators as entrepreneurs for a while and had seen the rise of really interesting companies come out of these creators,” Megan Lightcap, a Slow Ventures partner who is co-leading the new fund, Slow Creator, tells me. The thesis, she explains, is essentially that some creators aren’t just making entertainment on YouTube but also have the DNA of entrepreneurs. “We think that they’re going to end up building some really important businesses.”
In other words, Slow Creator wants to invest in the businesses creators are launching on the back of their YouTube channels — think MrBeast’s Feastables and podcaster Jocko Willink’s JockoFuel — not in the channels themselves. “What gets us super amped is there is this huge long tail of creators who are doing fabulously well within their niche,” says Lightcap. “Sometimes they don’t even identify as creators; they’re doing a thing just because they love it . . . They’re not going to VidCon and all that stuff. They’re just deep in their niche and doing really, really well. For us, that screams opportunity.”
There are obvious benefits for creators who decide to raise funding, whether to grow your channel — just look at First We Feast, which as Sean Evans told me last month, went independent with the support of backers like the Soros Fund Management and others — or build a business, like Emma Chamberlain, whose Chamberlain Coffee raised a $7 million Series A in 2023.
But taking on investment money isn’t for every creator. It means giving up equity in the business you’ve built and preparing to eventually exit your own business altogether. “It’s tricky because it’s all about them,” says lawyer Tyler Chou, who works with top YouTubers like Sam and Colby and ZoeUnlimited in addition to posting her own YouTube videos as The Creators’ Attorney. “It’s their face, their personality, the audience is so focused on who they are.”
In this week’s Like & Subscribe, I’ll tell you:
How the creator market has “matured in step” with investors’ interest in creator businesses
Which creators have scored the biggest infusions from VC and other sources
The ideal creator profile for Slow Creator to invest in — and what kind of checks it’s ready to write
Why insiders expect to see more creator exits from businesses now
What kind of creator can benefit most from this model
Why one attorney advised a top client against taking an 8-figure sum from private equity
When Hollywood will jump in (again) — and the shocking cost of late entry
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