00:45:46 · Yoni Rechtman
[00:45:46] S1: yes, I think it's a question of when though, because like, OpenAI OpenAI was so profoundly nonconsensus from its start. It wasn't even... Let alone a c corp. It wasn't a for profit company. So it's... All of this stuff looks in... Like, the present looks inevitable in retrospect, but the number of companies that are, like, wildly successful today that were deeply, deeply nonconsensus at the time... You know, OpenAI is actually a really good example of this where, like, it was not an investable business at its inception. It wasn't an investable business for its first, like, five or six years. Anthropic, people thought was an insane thing to even attempt at the time. Cognition started as a video conferencing app. Clay wandered in the desert for like, you know, ten years. There's so many examples of this, and in retrospect, yeah, we all know what the chart looks like, and eventually the chart starts going crazy, and it was always gonna happen, and it never could have gone any other way. Like, each one of those are really, really... I mean, Ramp. Ramp was like the stupid... Everyone was like, what the hell are they doing? Don't they know about Brex? And like it's what? It's worth five times Brex now? So like, these things always look... Like winners always look inevitable in retrospect. I just don't believe in that as as the reality on the ground, and think history largely proves me right. What the problem is with this whole sort of like idea of king making is it's not putting... This is gonna be an overwrought metaphor. It's not putting a crown on the crown... On the head of the crown prince upon the death of his father. It's like putting a crown on a baby out of the womb, and believing that that the crown itself confers legitimacy instead of the, like, the legitimacy conferring the crown. And in each one of those examples that I mentioned, those are businesses that now today, like have unlimited access to capital, and incredible talent, everyone wants to work there.
00:47:50 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:47:50] S0: But they they're like rejecting what people, somebody was calling it like the coconut seed round, you know, saying coconut round [00:47:55] S1: or mango seed round. Yeah. [00:47:59] S0: That's where you're sort of pushing back again, the sort of we're gonna put so much capital into It's the question [00:48:03] S1: of scale. [00:48:04] S0: I think [00:48:04] S1: there are businesses that require a lot of capital up front, and like that's a tonne of risk and power to you if you have the, you know, if you have the piggy bank to pull that off, and you know, the balls to do it, like good for you. I think that is different than saying by mere dint of putting a bunch of money into this company, we just know it will work. Like that's not true. I don't think there's any evidence in history to suggest that that's true. [00:48:30] S0: You guys have had a very creative creator economy strategy. I mean, Sam has been bullish on this idea of like, we need to invest in a person, not Like, just a get our talents into someone who's promising like now and like, [00:48:44] S1: watch them go. Is this when you ask us for money? [00:48:47] S0: No, no, we're too far along. [00:48:50] S1: But think about how much further along you could be with a couple million dollars [00:48:53] S0: for Yeah, how's that strategy going of investing in individuals?
00:48:53 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:48:53] S0: for Yeah, how's that strategy going of investing in individuals? [00:48:58] S1: So basically, we have in addition to our seed fund and our opportunity fund, we have a third vehicle, is our creator fund, which is a $65,000,000 fund. And basically what it does is rather than investing in like consumer media brands, or the companies started by creators, we're trying to make these like sort of, you know, three sixty deals with creators to just capitalise them for everything that they do, and we own our piece [00:49:25] S0: of Who runs that? Fund?
00:49:25 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:49:25] S0: of Who runs that? Fund? [00:49:27] S1: So that's run by my partner Megan and Sam. Megan, like Cap, is awesome. She came in to slow at the same time I did to kind of figure out this and, like, really make it a thing, and and it's going really well. The idea is basically that, like, in a world where... And I would put this under, by way, like second order effects of AI, in a world in which like all of these kind of performance channels are getting really like clogged up, owned access and distribution is like a hugely valuable asset. And so rather than saying, hey, like, we wanna be media investors, we wanna invest in media brands that can go and build really big businesses on top of them. And so there's a lot of, like, obvious places for this. You know, I think, like, Glossier honestly is a good example of this. It was started out of Into the Gloss, which was a blog that Emily Weiss started. And then like built this really big commerce company on the back of it. So like all of those kinds of consumer opportunities I think are fairly obvious. We backed this guy Jonathan Katz Moses, who's like a woodworking creator on YouTube, who's built this really successful like tools business. I think that these opportunities are also Do we bring [00:50:35] S0: in the entrepreneur or is there somebody beside them to run the business or are they?
00:50:35 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:50:35] S0: in the entrepreneur or is there somebody beside them to run the business or are they? [00:50:39] S1: It depends. I mean in our view, he's the entrepreneur. Like does he need someone to help him, like to help support him on, you know, maybe it's a president or something, to help support him on the operations of his business? Totally. We can maybe help him with that, but it's largely on him. As ever, like we're money. You know like, we're money. We're willing to make bets that other people aren't willing to Right, it's [00:51:05] S0: like you run your business, good luck. [00:51:07] S1: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like let's find incredible entrepreneurs, and it just, we think we've found a whole new category of entrepreneurs that like the market doesn't yet really have a good way of backing. But are we a peak creator yet, or where do [00:51:20] S0: you think we are in this sort of arc of?
00:51:20 · Eric Newcomer, Yoni Rechtman
[00:51:20] S0: you think we are in this sort of arc of? [00:51:22] S1: No, I mean I think it feels very evident to me that that's just what the future of, I don't know, all media is. Like, I mean we're seeing more and more companies adopt, like mature, large companies adopt strategies that look like that because they're finding that their performance channels just like don't work, and they need some way to reach people and to talk to people. So this is very clearly like, we've looked at any number of b to b companies doing like some version of this, and we're gonna look at a lot more over time. I'm really bullish on the idea. We'll at healthcare companies. I'm really bullish on the idea that we're gonna find these kinds of like creator led opportunities horizontally, not merely within like, you know, consumer discretionary categories. Yeah, running a newsletter can definitely feel like running a marketing channel [00:52:14] S0: without I a mean, thankfully our events business [00:52:17] S1: You have a, yes. [00:52:18] S0: Has delivered on like, Oh, that's something that, people just don't love paying for content. Know, obviously, Sam is married to Jessica Lessin, who I work for, and really believes in subscription. Even she has expanded the business beyond just subscription. But I just think, as much as I love our subscribers and think it's a cornerstone of newcomer's business And