Rhett and Link are investing in creators who “have the ability to scale.” Their latest target is musician Daniel Thrasher.

By 04/22/2022
Rhett and Link are investing in creators who “have the ability to scale.” Their latest target is musician Daniel Thrasher.

Last year, YouTube stars Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal — known collectively as Rhett & Link — announced the Mythical Accelerator fund, which will invest in individual digital-native influencers. As it launched the Accelerator, McLaughlin and Neal’s Mythical Entertainment revealed comedian Jarvis Johnson as the first recipient of its investment dollars.

Now, Johnson has company. The second creator staked by the Mythical Accelerator is Daniel Thrasher, a musician whose witty videos have brought three million subscribers to his YouTube channel.

The video that put Thrasher on the map is still the third-most watched clip on his YouTube channel, even though it came out 10 years ago. In 2012, to celebrate the arrival of his new piano, then-19-year-old Thrasher “accidentally” composed the theme song to the hit TV show The Office. He uploaded a video about it and it’s received more than 21 million views since then.

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Thrasher’s new videos perform well on YouTube, and he has a strong audience on TikTok as well, but his presence on other platforms is less pronounced. With the six-figure investment he’s receiving from the Mythical Accelerator, the musical comedian will be able to build up his accounts across the social web. “I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on Snapchat, I’m hardly on Instagram,” Thrasher told Forbes. “And I don’t have any products.”

These gaps in Thrasher’s development — and his potential to fill them in — helped convince Mythical to stake him. “When we’re looking for creators for this program, we’re looking for creators that, first and foremost, have established good ‘content/market fit,’” Mythical VP of strategy and business development Neel Yalamarthy told Forbes. “We’re looking for creators who have really tapped into creative concepts that resonate with a fandom—and have the ability to scale.”

Even before joining forces with Mythical, Thrasher had already entered into his next phase of growth. This summer, he is planning to go live with a four-show tour. The Midwestern event series will begin on June 11 in Milwaukee.

The Mythical Accelerator extends Rhett & Link’s previous activities in the mergers & acquisitions space. In 2019, the duo pulled off one of their biggest coups to date by scooping up YouTube comedy brand Smosh for an reported price of $10 million. The follow-up fund added another $5 million to Mythical’s war chest, so even though the media company has already backed Johnson and Thrasher, it still has plenty of money left to spend on ascendant online video artists.

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