Slow Ventures has taken equity stakes in three creators—Erin McGoff, Will Lasry and Kyle Lee—investing between $1 million and $3 million each from its $64 million Creator Fund, the firm announced Wednesday. McGoff, who gives pragmatic career advice to Gen Z professionals, received $1.5 million. Lasry, who covers textile manufacturing, raised $2.5 million. The firm declined to specify Lee's amount, saying only that it fell within its typical $1 million to $3 million range. Lee, whose space is commercial fishing, raised in 2025; McGoff and Lasry raised this spring and summer. None of the deals had been made public until now.

None of the investments touch artificial intelligence, agents or wearable technology. With these three deals, Slow now counts seven completed investments and two in progress, and expects to back roughly 20 creators in total, according to Megan Lightcap, a partner at the firm.

The financing comes from the $64 million Slow Ventures Creator Fund, which the firm debuted in February 2025. Alongside the $250 million vehicle raised by CAA and IMC in June, it stands as one of the most prominent examples of institutional capital earmarked for the creator economy.

The creator economy has seen investment booms before. During the pandemic, platforms like Jellysmack raised hundreds of millions of dollars, only to retrench sharply as the market cooled. The ecosystem has since matured, drawing more consumer attention, a greater share of marketing budgets and a mix of interest and concern from incumbent media operations.

A new structure for a different kind of founder

Creator businesses run smaller than traditional startups, often centered on one person, and they treat financial discipline as a precondition for survival rather than an abstract value. Their competition is everything else in consumers' feeds—most of it user-generated and produced for little to no cost.

That has forced firms like Slow to craft new strategies, Lightcap said. Rather than invest in a specific product, Slow backs a holding company launched by the creator, taking an equity stake generally below 15% to 20%. The structure is comparable to investing in Beast Industries rather than Feastables, per Lightcap: Slow bets on the entrepreneur and the ecosystem of businesses they may build.

The firm takes no revenue share and does not hold an identical ownership percentage in every underlying company. If a creator enters a 50-50 joint venture with an outside firm, Slow's stake applies only to the 50% of the business the creator owns.

Slow runs extensive due diligence, combining the practices it applies to traditional founders with additional research into the strength of a creator's community. The process can include contacting followers directly to ask why they follow and trust a creator, alongside analysis of audience engagement, commercial traction and category size, according to Lightcap. Once it invests, the firm stays deliberately hands-off: no board seat, no performance KPIs.

Betting on 'cults'

Critical to the strategy is picking the right type of creator, according to Slow Ventures cofounder Sam Lessin. The firm sorts creators into two camps: entertainment creators like MrBeast and Alex Cooper, and niche creators whom their audiences consider authorities in specific spaces. The latter may have smaller audiences, but Slow believes the depth of their relationships gives them an edge when launching businesses. Morning Brew, Caliber, Smooth Media and Workweek have touted a similar 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 fit the thesis. All three act as central "nodes" in their ecosystems, monetizing followings through ventures that include a direct-to-consumer CPG flash-frozen fish business, with plans to expand into other revenue sources. Notably, none of them is building a media business. Each monetizes through advertising or sponsorship, but that is not the priority, per Lightcap—they treat their audiences as a means to a broader commercial end.

For Lessin, these investments give Slow access to trusted authorities in durable industries—something he argues will only grow in value as AI fragments the consumer journey and breeds distrust across the open web. AI has strengthened the thesis, he said: as technology makes products cheaper and easier to build, the product becomes less defensible and trusted distribution becomes more valuable.

"The premium on trust has never been higher," Lessin 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 tech startups, per Lessin, but the diminished reward reflects a higher likelihood of success. Unlike founders pitching an idea on a napkin, these creators have already built large, loyal audiences, revenue and commercial traction, making a total loss less likely.

Whether the strategy succeeds remains an open question. Slow expects to deploy the full $64 million over a two-to-three-year horizon, and the results will likely take years to bear out. But the model offers institutional investors a new tactic for putting money into creators—and adds another data point to the evidence that the next wave of influential businesses will get their start as single creators.