We've been asked to write down what we actually believe about the creator economy — not the investment pitch version, but the underlying reasoning. Why infrastructure and not content? Why early stage? Why now, given that the category is now crowded with capital? The answer requires going back to 2017, when very little of this was obvious.
The founding insight was economic rather than cultural. The cultural story of the creator economy — the idea that independent creators could build audiences and make a living from them — was already being told in 2017. What wasn't being told was the economic infrastructure story: that the tools enabling creator-owned business models were underdeveloped in a specific, addressable way. The gap between creator audiences and creator businesses was not a marketing problem. It was a plumbing problem. And plumbing problems are infrastructure investment problems.
The distinction between infrastructure and content matters because the return dynamics are completely different. Content companies succeed when they create content that audiences value more than the content they create. That is a hit-driven business — high variance, unpredictable, and dependent on creative execution that cannot be reliably reproduced. Infrastructure companies succeed when the activity they enable grows. If the creator economy grows — more creators, more creator revenue, more creator-audience transactions — infrastructure companies grow with it. They don't need to predict which creator will break out. They need to be the layer underneath all of them.
This is why we went early stage. Infrastructure companies at the early stage look like the wrong investment: low revenue, uncertain market size, no obvious defensibility yet. But infrastructure companies that are right about the direction of their market tend to have strong long-term defensibility once the market has named them. The switching costs in infrastructure are real. Once a creator's business is built on a platform — their audience segmentation, their subscription list, their digital product catalog — moving is expensive. The early stage entry is when the optionality is highest and the price is most reasonable.
What we look for hasn't changed since 2017: founders who understand the creator workflow at a granular, operational level; companies where the monetization model creates aligned incentives between the platform and the creator; and market dynamics where platform fragmentation is creating infrastructure gaps that purpose-built tools can fill. The thesis has proven out more broadly than we expected, and more slowly than we hoped. Both of those outcomes are normal for early-stage infrastructure investing. We remain in the same category with the same conviction we started with.