Wrapping Up 2024 and What We’re Working On

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Happy Tuesday Friends,

There is no tl;dr - just read on :-).

Reflecting on 2024 🧘 

Personal note from Jordan: This year has been full of learning and unexpected surprises since I started this newsletter with Scott. What began for me as a simple exploration of creator equity deals quickly turned into a deeper examination of the creator economy and its role in shaping the world. I want to step back to give you a bit of background on how I arrived here: for the past five years, I've been actively making angel investments, primarily backing technical founders who are developing some sort of innovative science or technology aimed at transforming our systems of production. As I’m often one of the first checks in, I was surprised to see how few founders were thinking about distribution before designing and making their products. That’s when the creator economy clicked for me as a unique channel of direct distribution to help get truly innovative products to market. I started to explore creator equity deals with a couple of my portfolio companies and that’s how Scott and I originally met.

Building New Support Systems 🌉 

Creators represent the largest and most decentralized distribution channel the world has ever seen. But they’re not just driving cultural trends—they have become the arbiters of truth by sharing objective, independent information that educates the public on nearly every topic possible. While everyone in the creator economy seems to be focusing on chocolate, tequila, and sports drinks, we’ve been trying to figure out how to best support creators and startups solve meaningful problems at scale. As 2024 comes to a close, we wanted to provide more detail on what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. None of this started with a grand plan—just one simple question:

Below is a summary of how we’re actively investing in and supporting creators, agencies, startups, and mission-aligned brands to help usher in the Creator Economy 2.0.  

• Direct Investing: Investing directly in creators and creator-first brands, offering initial checks of up to $250,000. Our focus is on creators and brands committed to solving real problems and improving human and planetary health. This commitment must be a core value, not just a marketing angle.

• Creator Equity Deals: Actively structuring equity partnerships between startups and creators. We are highly selective in who we work with, as equity-based relationships only make sense in very specific situations. After working on several transactions advising startups, we’ve developed a concrete and efficient process to maximize everyone’s time. We are working with a pretty eclectic mix of companies - industrial biobased lubricants, all-natural, whole-food nutrition for infant and maternal nutrition, and more.

• Direct from the Factory Product Design & Manufacturing Service:
  Launched a formal partnership with Veshin Factory and their four facilities to help creators develop best in class, physical products. Veshin has worked with a few big creators and are at the forefront of working with next-generation, sustainable materials (no greenwashing B/S). You can check find more information here - Direct from the Factory Overview

• Receivables Financing: Provide A/R financing to creators and agencies to bridge cash flow gaps on brand deal payments. We are offering this once a working relationship has been established as we don’t have aspirations to be a bank.

• Brand Partnerships: Brands have begun approaching us for campaign management services and connecting them with the right creators. This is not something we were actively seeking, but if its aligned with our method around solving real problems and improving human and planetary health then we will get involved,

We’re actively working on pulling all of this together into a more cohesive offering and will keep you updated as things continue to progress. Feel free to reach out to either of us with any questions or ideas on working together on any of the above items.  

This is the last piece of the year as we are going on holiday break to recharge the batteries and gearing up for 2025. Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season and a happy, healthy new year!

One more thing: remember to Go Direct this holiday season. 

Jordan and Scott

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