In June 2019, if you told an LP that you were investing in the "creator economy," you'd get blank stares. The category didn't have a name yet. We were describing it as "direct creator monetization infrastructure" and watching people's eyes glaze over. Here is why we kept going, and what we were actually seeing that made the thesis legible to us before it was legible to anyone else.
The evidence was in the behavior, not the narrative. Sahil Lavingia had built Gumroad into a platform that independent creators were using to run real businesses — not side projects, not passive income experiments, but recurring-revenue operations that supported their creative work full time. The numbers were real. The retention was excellent. The creators who found the platform stayed and grew. That data existed in 2019. Most investors weren't looking at it.
What they were looking at was the platform economy — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok's early rise, the Substack launch that would come later that year. The attention in venture capital was directed at audience aggregation: which platform would capture the most creators, which creator would capture the most audiences, what the advertising economics of attention looked like at scale. The infrastructure layer underneath that economy — the tools that let individual creators run businesses independent of platform economics — was not the narrative. It was the footnote.
We spent the better part of 2018 and early 2019 building our view from the bottom up. We talked to creators who were using direct monetization tools — not the mega-celebrities but the professional creators in the 100,000 to 2 million follower range who were trying to build sustainable businesses. What we heard consistently: platform monetization is unreliable, brand deals are irregular, and the thing they needed most was a way to own a revenue stream that didn't depend on an algorithm. The infrastructure for that didn't adequately exist. That was the gap.
The unnamed category was the signal, not the liability. When a market is too early to have a common name, the investors who develop conviction before the category crystallizes tend to get the best entry points. We were not certain the category would develop as we expected. No early-stage investment is certain. But the underlying economic logic was clear: creators had audiences; audiences had willingness to pay; the plumbing to connect those two facts was underdeveloped. That's a market.
Three years later, "creator economy" would become one of the most heavily used phrases in venture capital. We were glad we didn't wait for the name before building the thesis.