Our Creator Fund

The age of inbound is here

Slow Creator I

In a world where paid growth doesn’t work and trust, distribution, and audience are everything; the playbook to build a company completely inverts. Rather than building a product and then inorganically finding (paying for) an audience, the next generation of great (consumer and B2B) brands will organically find an audience and then build a product.

Today, we’re launching the Slow Ventures Creator Fund: a $63 million fund to back ambitious creator-entrepreneurs building businesses for their audiences. Our Creator Fund is the only dedicated source of early stage equity for this category. We’re not backing brands or funding celebrities, we’re partnering with creators by bringing minority capital to build, launch, and scale real businesses.

This has obviously started first in consumer but I increasingly believe this is the more sustainable, rational approach to growth in many categories. Community led growth > product led growth. We are on the precipice of a sea change in capital markets and how

We’ve been running a smaller scale experiment here for the last several years. But Creator Fund I is the first of its kind and fits within a larger pattern at Slow of finding novel risk in new GTMs, biz models, and capital structures (creator, crypto, franchise, buyout, vertical services, etc.) We’re backed by top tier institutional capital including MIT and U Michigan and led by an awesome team.

When Megan joined Slow to build the creator investing practice she took a huge risk: new asset class, no track record, no LPs willing to back it. Now she's backed by incredible partners in MIT and University of Michigan. She's made all of us believers and I'm so proud.

Read/watch/listen for more in Axios, on Tech Bros Pod, on CNBC, and on This Week In Startups; and check out creatorfund.co

I am particularly excited about health condition, entrepreneurship, and professional creators with the opportunity to build both consumer and B2B businesses. I’d love to help Megan and co back them.

The age of inbound is here

All the AI sales tools for enterprises and content generation tools for consumers are making sophisticated, high volume, paid marketing campaigns available to anyone and everyone. There’s a brief window, open right now, where some teams are massively outperforming by using new tools the best.

Over the long term those tools will proliferate broadly and the world will further flatten. The scale of outbound sales will increase by orders of magnitude and the well will become permanently poisoned. Your bot’s emails and calls will just go unanswered. Your AI generated SEO blog posts will go unread. Your personalized video won’t get watched.

The idea that 10x’ing outbound with AI will bring CAC down is insane.

Obviously all this new scaled outbound and templatized demand gen will crush attention, trust, and conversion rates. CACs will stay flat (make it up in volume) or shoot the moon (paid growth just doesn’t work anymore).

The only way to build a business in that future will be bottoms up demand generation and engagement: brand, audience, captive distribution, virality, reputation, network, etc.

Deep trust within your category will be essential to have credibility to get a meeting, let alone to sell. This will drive a huge change now only in how companies are built but in what models are viable and who builds/runs them.

This is why we’re so bullish on alternative GTMs and/or quantitative value props at seed: underwriting audience early is hard/impossible and banking on “they’ll figure out sales” seems like a structurally bad bet.

Schelling Point Companies

The Evolution of Perception Markets - Mike Dempsey.

This is great and deserves to be read in its entirety. Coalescence of narratives around companies as a driving force for EV, FCF, and returns is a central theme of the Dempsey Canon and this is a great addition.

The term “Schelling point,” named after Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, refers to a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication because it seems natural, special or relevant to them [...]

Schelling Point Companies do not merely sell a product or a service, but uniquely also sell an ideology. They often are built from the beginning with less clear mid-term product views but a clear goal to serve as a focal point, or a Schelling point, of their respective categories and idea space. [...]

This dynamic is especially relevant in emerging categories where the market and technology potential is yet to be defined. Schelling Point Companies attempt to own the novel category (that they help popularize and at times, create) and build an Idea Moat; a mechanism we talk a lot about at Compound that results in a dynamic where people who speak about a given technological or societal shift must mention a given company, else sounding uninformed or intentionally avoidant.

At this point when Dempsey has a new post I usually just add it to the “reading” section preemptively. I can assume it’s smart and that I’ll want to at least pretend like I read it.

You’re invited

I’m hosting a private dinners with Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta for founders, operators, and owners building in the real economy for small businesses in March in SF. To request an invitation, please fill out this application. Space is limited but we’ll do more programming around this idea.

No founder is too early in their journey to attend.