I’m back from LA where we hosted our 2nd Creator CEO Summit! Thanks to everyone who joined us, and for those who couldn’t make it, the next one will likely be in NYC.
Separately, next Wednesday, we are hosting a casual fireside chat with Nathan May who has helped creators like Jay Shetty, Isaac French, and Arnold Schwarzenegger convert their newsletters into revenue. Sign up here.
After key man risk, the second most common question we get about the Slow Creator Fund is how we make money on creator investments. Historically, our answer as been straightforward: most likely the same way we do in our seed fund.
While we invest at the creator holding company level, we expect liquidity to come from a monetization event, like an acquisition or IPO, at the individual company or brand level. For example, SKIMS going public or FlavCity + Bobby Approved selling to Mondelez. In our view, an entity-level exit beneath the holding company is the most plausible outcome for a few reasons:
Our creators are entrepreneurs, not just talent. They’re building more than IP and media businesses. They focused on products and services, iterate quickly, and take multiple shots on goal
Distribution is necessary, but not sufficient. The businesses our creators build are grounded in a hypothesis about their community or niche, not singularly reliant on reach
This aligns with how follow-on capital works. When a creator needs more capital, we typically invest in one (or more) of the distinct companies they’ve launched — and ideally after there is real traction and there’s a probable chance it’s a breakout success
Historically, this model has also been the most legible to our fund investors (LPs) and the broader capital market, though that’s changing quickly. Which brings us to an alternate exit path…
What if the “whole thing” exits? What would it look like if all of a creator’s media, sponsorships, IP, commerce, and ventures were sold as a single entity? A few years ago, this would have been difficult to underwrite, with only a handful of examples to point to. Lately, however, it feels like we’re starting to see what a new liquidity path for creators, and their investors, might look like.
October 1999: Martha Stewart Omni Living goes public as a consolidated lifestyle and media business built around Martha Stewart’s brand. It included core media and content assets, merchandising and brand licensing, and other businesses lines like direct to consumer and web and digital assets. Not only was Martha well ahead of her time as a creator, she also established an early blueprint for creator liquidity
January 2026: This week, Rich Sparkle, a Nasdaq-listed financial services firm, announced its $975 million acquisition of Khaby Lame’s company, which manages his global brand and commercial activities. From the Rich Sparkle press release: “The move signals a shift from one-off brand deals to a structured, exclusive, full-chain, platform-style commercialization system—designed not merely to monetize attention, but to industrialize it.”
While the press release is bizarre, hard to understand, and feels 100% AI generated, the 3-year deal seems sufficiently holistic encompassing media, brand deals, sponsorships, commerce, and future product lines. It also includes rights to his “AI Digital Twin” (a phrase I thought we retired two years ago), which may foreshadow more creators productizing their likeness — something we previewed with Jake Paul and Sora. Anyway, I’ll be waiting to see them hit the $4bn *revenue* target over the next 36 months 🍿
2027??: Mr. Beast’s holding company, Beast Industries, has hinted at a future IPO. Its CEO recently said “At some point, we want to be able to give the 1.4 billion unique people around the world who have watched Jimmy’s content… a chance to be owners of the company."
Beast Industries is massive spanning media, Feastables, an Amazon deal, a theme park, his stake in Lunchly (?), and speculated new companies ranging from a phone business to fintech to a creator-brand marketplace. It would be pretty cool to see this company go public. Jimmy is an incredible entrepreneur and, like Martha before him, has helped define how creators can both create and capture enterprise value at enormous scale
Of course, there is a third outcome: the creator’s business simply cash flows. A profitable business is valuable in its own right, and sustained cash flow gives creators optionality — allowing them to stay in the game long enough (and without dilution) to decide to reinvest and take another swing, or continue operating while collecting distributions.
While an exit of a creator’s entire business is intellectually compelling, this outcome is likely reserved for the few building Martha- or Beast-scale empires — of which we hope to back some! For most creators, we believe the more likely outcome is building and exiting individual brands or companies, rather than selling the entirety of their media, commerce, and IP.
This is why we are so focused on creators building products and businesses that serve a distinct purpose and can, overtime, survive with or without their distribution. This independence should increase both enterprise value and optionality when it comes time for an exit.
We’re still very much in the early days of creator entrepreneurship. But expanding the range of credible liquidity paths (across the spectrum of success) is a necessary step in the industry’s maturation.