Slow Ventures Backs 3 More Creators in Its $64 Million Bet on Niche ‘Cults’

This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.

On Wednesday, the venture capital firm Slow Ventures unveiled three of its latest investments, none of which, if you can believe it, have anything to do with artificial intelligence, agents, or wearable technology. 

Instead, the Slow Ventures team has taken equity stakes in three creators—Erin McGoff, Will Lasry, and Kyle Lee—whose areas of expertise lie in career advice, textile manufacturing, and commercial fishing, respectively.

The investments, which range from $1 million to $3 million, are among the latest that Slow has made in the creator economy, according to Megan Lightcap, a partner at the firm. McGoff received a $1.5 million investment, while Lasry raised $2.5 million. The firm declined to specify how much Lee raised, saying only that it fell within its typical $1 million to $3 million range.

The deals are not all new—Lee raised in 2025, while McGoff and Lasry raised this spring and summer—but none of them have been made public until now.

With the three investments, Slow now has seven completed investments, two in progress, and expects to ultimately back roughly 20 creators in total, according to Lightcap. The financing for the investments comes from the $64 million Slow Ventures Creator Fund, which the company debuted in February 2025.

The fund, alongside the $250 million investment vehicle raised by CAA and IMC in June, represents one of the most prominent examples of institutional capital to be earmarked for use in the creator economy.

The creator economy has experienced bursts of investment before. Notably, during the heady days of the pandemic, creator economy platforms like Jellysmack raised hundreds of millions of dollars, only to retrench sharply as the market cooled. But the ecosystem has matured in recent years, attracting more consumer attention, a greater share of marketing budgets, and a mix of interest and concern from incumbent media operations.

Creator businesses are inherently smaller than traditional startups, often centered around just one person. And they prize financial discipline not as an abstract value but as a necessary precondition for survival. Their competition, of course, is everything else on consumers’ feeds, most of which is user-generated and produced for little to no cost.

As a result, firms like Slow have had to craft new strategies for getting involved with creators, according to Lightcap. Rather than invest in a specific product, for instance, Slow invests in a holding company launched by the creator, taking an equity stake that is generally below 15% to 20%, typically. 

The structure is comparable to investing in Beast Industries rather than Feastables, per Lightcap. Slow is betting on the entrepreneur and the ecosystem of businesses they might ultimately build.

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It does not take a revenue share, and the structure does not give it an identical ownership percentage—15% to 20%—in every underlying company. If a creator partners with an outside firm on a product in a 50-50 joint venture, for instance, Slow would have its equity stake only in the 50% of the business the creator owns.

The firm does copious amounts of due diligence before investing, which includes many of the same practices it uses for traditional founders, as well as additional research it uses to gauge the strength of a creator’s community. 

That process can include contacting followers directly to ask why they follow and trust a creator, alongside analyzing factors such as audience engagement, commercial traction, and the size of the category the creator operates in, according to Lightcap. Once Slow invests, however, it takes a deliberately hands-off approach: The firm does not take a board seat or impose performance KPIs, according to Lightcap.

Critical to the success of this strategy is identifying the specific type of creator that Slow considers a sound investment, according to Slow Ventures cofounder Sam Lessin.

The firm broadly sorts creators into two camps: entertainment creators, like MrBeast and Alex Cooper, and niche creators, who are considered authorities in specific spaces by their audiences. The latter might have smaller audiences, but Slow believes the depth of their relationship with those audiences gives them an advantage when launching businesses.

It joins a handful of media organizations, including Morning Brew, Caliber, Smooth Media, and Workweek, in touting that hypothesis.

“I think we’re past the moment of mass-market creators, like Beast Industries,” Lessin said. “What we invest in are cults. The most valuable cults are not the ones that you can talk about on CNBC.”

McGoff, Lasry, and Lee reflect this thesis. McGoff has pioneered a pragmatic brand of career advice for Gen Z professionals, while Lasry and Lee apply the creator perspective to textile manufacturing and commercial fishing, spaces often overlooked by traditional media.

The three are each central “nodes” in their respective ecosystems, according to Lessin. They monetize their followings through a variety of ventures, including a direct-to-consumer CPG flash-frozen fish business, and plan to expand into other sources of revenue. 

Critically, none of these creators are explicitly building media businesses. Each of them does monetize their following with advertising or sponsorship, but doing so is not their priority, per Lightcap. They treat their audiences as a means to a broader commercial end, rather than the end itself.  

For Lessin, investing in these creators gives Slow access to trusted authorities in durable industries, a commodity that will only become more important as AI fragments the consumer journey and engenders distrust across the open web. 

In fact, AI has only strengthened that thesis, Lessin said. As the technology makes products cheaper and easier to build, the product itself becomes less defensible and trusted distribution becomes more valuable.

“The premium on trust has never been higher,” he said. “It is so easy to make a product that having a better product is no longer investable. Trust and community are what is investable.”

The investments are unlikely to yield the same outsized returns as seed funding in technology startups, per Lessin, but that diminished reward reflects, in part, their higher likelihood of success. 

Whereas many tech startups receive funding with little more than an idea scribbled on the back of a napkin, these creators have already built large, loyal audiences, revenue, and commercial traction, making a total loss less likely.

Whether this strategy will succeed remains an open question. Slow anticipates deploying the entirety of its $64 million over a two to three-year time horizon, and the results of those investments will likely take years themselves to be borne out. 

But the model showcases a new tactic for institutional investors looking to invest in creators, another data point in a growing constellation of evidence that the next wave of influential businesses will likely get their start as single creators.

Talking Heds

Lynch Leaves: Condé Nast chief executive Roger Lynch announced his departure from the company on Wednesday, marking the end of a seven-year tenure with the legacy media operation. According to a note he sent to staff, Lynch is stepping away in order to become the new CEO of Mattel, and he will be replaced on an interim basis by board member Mike Perlis. Lynch, who joined Condé Nast from the music platform Pandora in 2019, presided over the company during a period of immense, challenging transformation. He cites a handful of success metrics in his valedictory note, including the growth of commerce (170%) and digital subscription (155%) revenues since 2020, but does not offer similar data points for advertising revenues or the overall business. His exodus, notably, comes one week after the fifth iteration of Vogue World. During his tenure, Condé Nast shuttered or folded in a number of its smaller titles and has endured, like others, a disconcerting drop-off in search traffic. Whoever replaces Lynch will face a stark reality: the Condé Nast business, while long on pedigree, continues to contract in practical influence.

Superstudios’ Spring Studio: As I have written before, in-person experiences—including advertising—continue to grow more valuable. The latest evidence of this theory came earlier this week, when the Italian events company Superstudios acquired a majority ownership stake in Spring Studios, the company that operates the TriBeCa venue and its events business. The investment, an eight-figure value per a person familiar with the deal, aims to give the Milan-based firm its first foothold in the U.S. Superstudios generated $45 million in revenue in 2025, a figure it aims to grow to $240 million within five years through an aggressive acquisition strategy. As much as the events space feels oversaturated, it continues to benefit from tailwinds, such as a growing distrust in digital content and an increased need for networking as a result of remote work, that show little signs of stopping anytime soon. 

Shamrock Snags Saylor (EXCLUSIVE): The private equity firm Shamrock, which owns ADWEEK, invested an eight-figure sum to acquire a majority ownership stake in the social-first advertising agency Saylor on Wednesday. The agency, founded in 2021 by former Disney and Netflix executive Will Trowbridge, will soon be combined with Mutiny, an agency that Shamrock acquired earlier this year, in February. Mutiny focuses on gaming, while Saylor specializes in entertainment, giving the merged operation a nominal expertise in fandom writ large, a skillset whose value is applicable to far broader categories, per Trowbridge. Trowbridge will lead the newly combined company Saylor as CEO, while Mutiny CEO Geordie Larratt-Smith will become its chief commercial officer.

Podcaster Pinball: Podcast creator Guy Raz, host of the popular program How I Built This, announced on Tuesday that after 10 years at NPR, he acquired the rights to the series and has partnered with Vox Media to expand it into a multichannel product, including video and live events offerings. The news comes just two weeks after Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, hosts of the popular New York Times podcast Hard Fork, announced that they were rebranding the show to Machine Gods and decamping to NPR. (On Monday, Roose also joined The Atlantic as a contributing writer.) The revolving door between The Times, Vox Media, and NPR is emblematic of the broader land grab for podcast talent, as hosts with proven track records jockey for cushier gigs. As Joanna Stern, herself in a similar situation, recently pointed out, the steady circulation of podcast talent reflects the emergence of a new kind of relationship between media companies and A-list reporters. 

CNN Jubilee: On Monday, CNN announced that it is partnering with the YouTube series Jubilee to host a town hall with Texas Senate Candidate Rep. James Talarico on Oct. 14. The tie-up is an intriguing partnership. Jubilee has become a YouTube sensation, with over 380 million monthly views, thanks largely to its signature format, which features a lone figure debating a subject with a group of everyday folks gathered in a circle. Such confrontational show-downs have long thrived on YouTube—and on traditional television before that—but Jubilee hams up the tension further with melodramatic thumbnails. The partnership is an audience-crossover play for both brands, while providing Jubilee with the legitimacy afforded by a legacy news imprimatur. I anticipate many more such deals in the coming few months. 

Quote/Unquote

Rashida Jones is the CEO of Uncensored, the media company Piers Morgan has spent the last two years building around his YouTube show. Jones joined in March after four years running MSNBC, alongside a funding round led by Raine Ventures and Antenna Group, with a mandate to turn a talk show into a global media company.

Six months in, Uncensored has added verticals devoted to history, royals, and soccer, drawing 4.6 million YouTube subscribers across its channels. It has licensed content to Channel 5 in the U.K. and is talking with streamers about where else its shows could live, all while running on a budget built for YouTube rather than cable.

This interview has been edited.

Mark Stenberg: Most people know Uncensored as Piers Morgan’s show. What does it look like now?

Rashida Jones: Piers is the flagship. He does a daily show and has built a massive audience. Around him, we’ve launched verticals that hit different genres: History Uncensored, Royals Uncensored, and Football Uncensored. Those bring in different audiences and different advertisers. My working plan is six or seven verticals this time next year. 

Mark: Where does revenue come from beyond advertising?

Rashida: In 2027, we’ll do a lot more live events, taking the shows on the road. But licensing is the big underutilized space for creators. Linear platforms want our content and will pay a premium for it. We’ve licensed to Paramount’s Channel 5 in the U.K., and we’re in conversations in other territories. 

Mark: When it comes to licensing to streamers, which are the most attractive?

Rashida: I’d look at who doesn’t have content like ours. Netflix has scooped up a lot of digital-first shows already. Prime has expressed interest but hasn’t brought in creator-first talent, so there’s white space. It’s early enough that not everyone has picked their dance partners. But if you believe the trades, consolidation means there may not be as many partners in a few months.

Mark: How do you keep costs in line when you’re competing with creators who spend almost nothing?

Rashida: There’s a sweet spot. It has to look professional enough for advertisers, with a proper set and a proper control room, not a kid in his basement. But it can’t feel overproduced, because audiences find that inauthentic, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. We’re lean intentionally. We don’t want an infrastructure that looks like traditional media, with resources sitting dormant for big parts of the week.

Mark: Is Uncensored profitable?

Rashida: For any viable media company, the goal is profitability, and we have a plan to get there. We’re much healthier than we were six months ago. But my mandate was growth, and you have to spend money to make money: on a more experienced team, on talent, on new shows. This is the building year.

Pulled Quotes

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