Perspectives
Essays and market commentary from the Clearwater team — on creator infrastructure, social commerce, digital media, and the economics of the creator economy since 2019.
The creator economy's first infrastructure wave was about ownership — giving creators tools to own their audience, monetize directly, and operate as independent businesses. The second wave is about scale. AI-native tooling is beginning to let individual creators operate at the production capacity of small media companies, and the infrastructure opportunity in that shift is significant.
Read more →We started writing checks into creator economy infrastructure in 2019, when the category was not yet named and most LPs looked puzzled when we explained what we were building toward. Seven years and sixteen investments later, it is worth asking honestly: what did the thesis get right, what did it miss, and what does the next chapter look like?
Read more →Music licensing has been the unsexy plumbing problem underneath every video creator's workflow for the better part of a decade. The copyright strike system, royalty-free library limitations, and manual sync licensing overhead have shaped how an entire generation of video creators sound — not because they chose it, but because the infrastructure to do otherwise didn't exist.
Read more →Every technology category has a mid-cycle moment — the point where the original thesis has proven out, the market has named the category, and the real question becomes which infrastructure layers are defensible at scale. The creator economy hit that moment sometime in 2023, and we've spent the past year trying to understand what the second chapter of the infrastructure buildout looks like.
Read more →Latin American creators represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the global creator economy — by follower counts, by content volume, and by engagement rates that consistently outperform North American benchmarks. The infrastructure gap between that growth and the monetization tools available to those creators is significant, and it's where we've been spending considerable time in 2024.
Read more →Three years ago, social commerce was a feature that platforms added — a buy button, a shop tab, a product link in a bio. Today it is a category with its own infrastructure requirements, its own analytics stack, and its own set of startups building the rails underneath it. The transition from feature to category is where infrastructure investment becomes defensible.
Read more →Clearwater Fund III closed in January 2024. We've been deploying quietly since. The thesis is the same one we've held since 2017 — creator infrastructure, social commerce rails, digital media technology — but the market has changed significantly since Fund II, and our view of where the best early-stage opportunities sit has evolved with it.
Read more →The creator economy's first decade was about finding audiences. The second decade is about owning them. There is a meaningful difference between a creator who has 2 million followers on a platform and a creator who has 200,000 email addresses and phone numbers they control directly. The infrastructure enabling that distinction is one of the most interesting investment areas in the category right now.
Read more →The oldest Gen Z consumers are now 26. They have spending power, they have brand loyalties, and they have a fundamentally different relationship with creators than previous generations. They don't consume creator content the way millennials did — they participate in it. That shift in the consumer relationship has infrastructure implications that we're watching closely.
Read more →Every time the creator economy hits a speed bump — platform policy changes, interest rate compression affecting valuations, consolidation among mid-tier creators — there is a wave of commentary suggesting the category has peaked. We've seen this three times in six years. Our view: what's peaked is the hype cycle, not the underlying infrastructure buildout, which remains early.
Read more →Fund III is in its early deployment phase. We're not writing about our investment pipeline, but we are thinking publicly about the sub-sectors that interest us most entering 2023. Social commerce sits at the top of that list — not because it's newly interesting, but because we think the infrastructure layer underneath it is still significantly underdeveloped relative to the commerce volume it's moving.
Read more →When we first started talking to the Spotter team, the concept of creator content catalogs as financial assets felt early. Video catalog value had been established for traditional media companies for decades. But for individual YouTube creators — whose catalog might be worth millions of dollars in future ad revenue — the infrastructure to access that value without selling the catalog simply didn't exist.
Read more →Fan membership as a business model is not new. But the infrastructure enabling creators to run fan membership at scale — tiered access, exclusive content, community management, direct payment processing, churn analytics — has remained fragmented, expensive, and difficult to implement without significant technical resources. Passes is building the infrastructure stack that fixes that.
Read more →The Substack era made subscription a default option for every creator with something to say. But subscription-as-infrastructure is more complex than a payment button and a content gate. The creators who are building durable subscription businesses need audience segmentation, tiered access management, churn prediction, community tooling, and payment infrastructure that works across geographies. That's a stack, not a feature.
Read more →I've spent the better part of 2021 talking to creators, operators, and founders in Latin America — primarily Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina. The creator economy there is growing faster than anywhere I've seen in North America, and the infrastructure gap between that growth and the available tooling is remarkable. Here is what I found.
Read more →Fund II is fully committed. Looking back at where we started with Fund I in 2018 and where the category sits today, the transformation is significant enough to be worth documenting. Not to celebrate ourselves — the companies we backed did the work — but because understanding what changed and what didn't informs what we're looking at next.
Read more →The link-in-bio pattern gets dismissed as a superficial feature — a workaround for Instagram's single-link limit that's been solved well enough by Linktree and its competitors. That framing misses what Stan Store is actually building: a programmable commerce storefront that deploys at the discovery layer, where creators already have their audiences' attention. That is an infrastructure position, not a features race.
Read more →Creators collaborate constantly — guest appearances, co-created products, cross-promotions, joint ventures between creator-owned businesses. But the financial infrastructure to support those collaborations barely exists. Revenue split agreements run on spreadsheets and handshakes. Stir is building the financial plumbing that makes creator-to-creator business relationships actually work at scale.
Read more →When the pandemic hit in March 2020, it was reasonable to worry about what it would do to creator economy businesses. Advertising spending collapsed. Brand partnership budgets evaporated overnight. But what happened instead was the opposite of a collapse: creators with diversified, direct-to-audience revenue infrastructure proved remarkably resilient, while those dependent on ad revenue and platform monetization were exposed.
Read more →Media companies have always wanted to know which content is working, where it's distributed, and how to allocate resources accordingly. The digital media era was supposed to make that easier. Instead, it created a fragmentation problem: content distributed across dozens of platforms, each with its own analytics, none talking to each other. Chartmetric is building the unified analytics layer that solves this.
Read more →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.
Read more →Podcasting has been "about to break out" since 2014. The format has proven durable, but the business model underneath it has remained structurally weak — advertiser-dependent, platform-fragmented, and controlled by distribution infrastructure that individual creators have no leverage over. Luminary is building the subscription layer that changes that relationship.
Read more →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.
Read more →Gumroad was our first announced investment from Fund I. The thesis was simple enough to state but strange to defend at the time: we believed direct creator-to-audience commerce would become a primary economic model for a meaningful segment of professional content creators. Not a supplement to platform monetization — a replacement for it. That view was significantly out of consensus when we made this bet.
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