Slow Ventures is helping influencers accelerate their entrepreneurial plans.
The early-stage VC firm, which was founded by former Facebook VP of Product Sam Lessin, manages $770 million of investor capital and has gotten in on the ground floor at companies like Robinhood, Venmo, Birchbox, Allbirds, Postmates, and Nextdoor. Over the past few years, Slow has set its sights on the creator economy.
The firm is backing aspiring business owners with checks that range from $500,000 up to $2 million, according to Slow Investor Megan Lightcap. One creator who recently received a bump is John Fish. He’ll use Slow’s backing to build up a literary hub called Bookshelved.
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
Slow sends creator businesses “off to the races”
The investments Slow has made in creators have come out of the firm’s broader seed-stage fund. Lightcap told Tubefilter that Slow is specifically targeting creators who want to launch companies. With Slow’s backing, those creators can be “off to the races” while the venture firm takes equity (typically between 5% and 10%) in the funded business. Some of the deals have included co-investors.
Lightcap said that Slow has supported “at least six” creators so far, including linguistics expert Marina Mogilko. The recipients of Slow’s creator investments can use those funds for “anything they launch to their community,” Lightcap said.
Like other entities that invest in influencers, such as Rhett and Link’s Mythical Creator Fund, Slow isn’t necessarily looking to back the biggest names on YouTube. The more important details are things like engagement, content-market fit, and significant traction within a particular community. Lightcap shared some of the questions her firm asks when considering creators:
- What category is the creator in, and is that category compelling from an investment standpoint?
- Do they have authority in that space?
- Are they building something that’s “unique and differentiated” when compared to existing products in the space?
- Will their business idea resonate with their audience?
The answers to those questions led Lightcap and co. to Fish, who encapsulates the type of creator Slow is looking to back. The 24-year-old Canadian is not the biggest name in the BookTube community, but he has a serious following of nearly one million subscribers. “Reading has always been in my life and when I started to share it on the internet, I was amazed with the vibrance of the community that I found,” Fish told Tubefilter. “As I aged on YouTube a bit, I reflected and realized that what I was the most proud of was having encouraged many people to read more, so it was only natural to take this forward into the next step of my career.”
Fish is building a “Goodreads Killer”
To share his literary passion with bookworms outside his subscriber base, Fish began developing Bookshelved in 2018. He envisions the platform as a “digital library” where users can track their reading progress and engage with people who are reading the same books they are.
Compared to other social literary platforms, Bookshelved is less focused on reviews; instead, Fish emphasizes community. “Most platforms choose to fit somewhere in (1) Discovery (2) Process or (3) Reviews,” he told Tubefilter. “We chose to focus on (2) because it’s what readers do every day, as opposed to discovery or reviews that happen weekly or monthly.”
Bookshelved checks all of Slow’s boxes. The digital book community is certainly “compelling,” since BookTube and #BookTok are expanding literary interest among Gen Z. Fish’s platform is “unique and differentiated” from review-oriented hubs, and his fans already love the “Goodreads Killer” he teased on his YouTube channel last year.
Slow approached Fish when Bookshelved was still in beta. He described the firm’s investors as “phenomenal partners” who “understand creators and technology very well.” For his business, which has lower capital requirements than many other startups, Slow’s seed-stage support offers refreshing “flexibility.”
So where does the money go?
Creators can deploy Slow’s capital as they see fit, and Lightcap noted four typical uses for those funds:
- “Leveling up content” by increasing the sophistication of individual productions
- Hiring staff for creator businesses
- “Deploying capital” against one or two “core business ideas”
- Establishing “rainy day funds” that can be used for miscellaneous expenses.
Fish expressed particular interest in Slow’s ability to take some volatility out of his entrepreneurial plans. “The difficulty with creator-led platforms is that they can live or die by the creator’s involvement in them—we’ve seen a number of prominent ventures backed by creators that failed because the incentives didn’t align,” the Bookshelved Founder told Tubefilter. “I think that Slow’s creator fund creates an amazing alignment of interests between the creator, fund, and any companies formed by the creator (like Bookshelved).”
Lightcap admitted that creator business can be volatile, but Slow’s funding model is well-positioned to manage risk. “Equity is a really good product for volatility,” she told Tubefilter. “Debt is better for certainty, but when you don’t have that, equity is actually a pretty darn good product to finance growth.”
Slow also adds legitimacy to creator businesses by promoting partnerships between those individuals and the other entities in Slow’s investment portfolio. Many companies backed by the bi-coastal firm have synergies with creators. “We’re seeing a ton of that,” Lightcap said.
Lightcap did not indicate any other creators Slow plans to back in the future, but she noted that the creator economy has “crossed the chasm” thanks to creators like MrBeast. Influencers who are establishing their own businesses have more legitimacy than ever, and Slow is ready to stake those tastemakers as they set out on their entrepreneurial journeys.
