The future of the Creator Economy with Sasha Kaletsky from Creator Ventures

The Business of Creators is a podcast for content creators and everyone interested in the creator economy. On this show Ian Shepherd speaks with the companies supporting creators with exciting new tools and platforms and digs deeper to get the scoop on new ways to create, distribute and monetize content.

Ian is co-founder of Electrify Video Partners,  a company investing $m in established creators to accelerate their growth. Check out electrify.video.

What's the future of the Creator Economy? In the latest episode Ian speaks with the founding partner of Creator Ventures Sasha Kaletsky who explains how the firm began when Sasha and YouTuber Caspar Lee began investing in creator businesses, what they found when they mapped the progress of more than 500 creator start ups, and how Sasha believes social media will move from follower platforms to content platforms and what that means for a creator. 

Please go check it out and subscribe to the show for more interviews from industry leaders shaping the Creator Economy. 

Transcript

Sasha Kaletsky  0:00  
A generation of creators on Tiktok who ultimately can get, you know, 5 million plus followers and get 100 million views a month, but who don't truly have an audience that actually loyal to them, which I think is underlies how important it is for, first of all, for them to bring their audiences onto different platforms, but also to monetize and engage and make sure they they pull their audience into something they can actually make business from as quickly as possible. Welcome everybody

Ian Shepherd  0:26  
to Season Two at the business of creators. If you're a content creator or you work with creators, then this podcast is for you. In today's show, I speak with founding partner of creator ventures, Sasha Kalecki, who explains how the firm began when Sasha and YouTuber Casper Lee began investing in creative businesses. What they found when they mapped the progress of more than 500 creator startups and how Sasha believes social media will move from follower platforms to content platforms, and what that means for a creator. There's so much great stuff in here. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. Before we start with the show, I want to tell you about electrify video partners, a business that I co founded which invests millions of dollars into YouTube channels. If you're thinking about selling your YouTube channel or wondering how much your channel is worth, check us out at electrify dot video and get in contact, right? Let's get on with the show. So today, I'm joined by Sasha from Creative ventures. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks

Sasha Kaletsky  1:20  
for having Ian. It's great to be so

Ian Shepherd  1:23  
let's just jump straight into it. Can you tell everybody listening what exactly is creative ventures?

Sasha Kaletsky  1:28  
Probably the easiest way to to tell you is by telling the story of it really, which is how we got, how we came to be what we are. So we started, actually, as an investment club, and now we're a venture fund. So the genesis of it is that I was working in private equity at a firm called Bridgepoint, doing large cap buyouts and growth equity in the kind of consumer and technology space in London. Casper Casper Lee, my co founder is actually my cousin, so that's how we know each other. We've always been friends. And he, he's a content creator, started making videos in 2010 a first screw his channel very slowly for the first couple of years, and then kind of quite rapidly, expanded to almost 7 million subscribers on YouTube and 5 million on Twitter and various more on different platforms. And so in and he co founded a business called influencer.com in 2017 that's one of the largest platforms that connects brands and content creators. So he's kind of got the Creator side and the business side. So in 20 2019 we started investing together in early stage companies. He would see he was getting a lot of deal flow into his inbox. He would then send that to me. As you can imagine, with most kind of cold inbound deal flow, there's a mix of quality, but there were some good ones in there. And I thought, well, actually, I know quite a lot of VCs who could send, who could send us even more and potentially, potentially even better deals. So we teamed up, started investing together, and decided to share all of our deal flow with other content creators, celebrities, athletes, musicians, people like that and and so that. So we went from there, and I started doing it. We didn't charge them any fees. We didn't do any sweat equity. It was a total side gig. So I was working full time in private equity at the time, and so it was pretty busy. But we, you know, we, we basically just ran this on the side, and ended up getting into some deals that performed very well. We got really lucky with some of them. And then we used that track record of investing alongside this investment club of creators to raise our first venture fund, which we closed at $20 million in March this year. So, you know, investing the same types of themes, you know, creator tools, e commerce enablement, marketplaces and consumer social that we've always been investing in.

Ian Shepherd  3:47  
Excellent. Well, thanks for that. And can you tell us about any of those early investments that you were involved

Sasha Kaletsky  3:53  
with? Yeah, so I mean, some of the, some of the ones we've been involved with, one of them was a company called Face it, which is a an E sports platform. It's basically to match the really competitive gamers across different games, but the principal one being CS GO and that that we invested in 2019 2019 and then, you know, a couple years later, they merged with their biggest competitor and sold for $1.5 billion so that was a really good early result for us. We were super lucky with that. We invested in a company in the Creator space called beehive, which allows creators to basically build and monetize their own newsletters. It's kind of like a cross between MailChimp and sub stack, but it's a really nice kind of creativity. SaaS business that we that's exactly the kind of business we love to back and we invest in a company called bounce, which is a kind of travel marketplace which allows people to store their items anywhere in the world and get their packages delivered. So yeah, we've done, we've done, we've done, we've done lots of deals. And yeah, there's some of them, great,

Ian Shepherd  4:58  
great. And to. Tell us about the new fund, then how, how much do you invest, and what sort of stage of the businesses that you're looking at?

Sasha Kaletsky  5:06  
Yeah. So we invest mostly seed. We do pre seed, seed and series A and, and, yeah, we we invest up to 500k dollars. Usually we can go a bit higher with the help of our LPs, but, you know, our regular check size is probably, you know, 100 to 400k dollars. So that means we're unless something's really early, we're usually not leading rounds. We're participating alongside other VCs, which is a great place to be, because it means we can be super collaborative. We're not anyone's competition. We're kind of just friends with everybody. We're really generous with sharing deal flow, and hopefully people look pretty generous sharing their deal flow with us as well. Great.

Ian Shepherd  5:48  
And what particular sectors or industries do you tend to focus on? Yeah,

Sasha Kaletsky  5:53  
so we, so we, so we break it into four, kind of pretty, pretty overlapping and not necessarily perfect verticals, but we call them consumer social. That's our first one that includes gaming and social apps and all those kinds of activities people are interacting with each other via the Internet. The second one we do is marketplaces, which is, you know, I used to work at Uber before working in private equity, so I'm really into these kind of marketplace economics and all that kind of stuff. All that kind of stuff. The third one we do, which obviously, you're, you're, you know, you're obviously a big expert on, is the creator economy side of things that includes, you know, all kinds of creativity workflows and some kind of business in the box stuff for creators. But that's less what we're focused on, but we do do it. And then finally, e commerce and E commerce enablement. So all this kind of, it's not very sexy phrase these days, but you know, martech is something that we do really like. Actually,

Ian Shepherd  6:53  
great. And you shared a few examples there of some of the businesses. Could you perhaps expand on one of those in a bit more detail, just in terms of your involvement, looking at the investment, and then how you're involved in the business afterwards as well. Yeah. So, I

Sasha Kaletsky  7:08  
mean, so I think a good example because we're because we're because we're talking about creators, and because it's an area where you're an expert in, I think a good one to talk about is beehive, actually, because that is, that is one of our Creator economy companies. So we first got involved in, effectively that pre seed round. We invested first before they launched super strong team. They were basically the founding product and engineering team from morning brew, the big business newsletter. And they basically built this tech stack to kind of democratize that for the rest of the world, to basically give everybody else the same growth tools that morning brew used to grow their newsletter to be so big and so, yeah, we first invested in them before launch, in that pre seed, and we didn't invest in that company alongside a creator, because if it's so early and so risky, we tend not we tend to kind of just invest on our own and then test the waters and then, and then, yeah, we it performed super well through launch, and then we preemptively led their seed round, alongside one of our LPs, another existing investor earlier this year, writing our biggest, Our biggest debit check as they've continued to grow, and we did that alongside a YouTuber who could kind of help advise them on how to grow into the YouTube vertical.

Ian Shepherd  8:29  
Nice I saw on their website that they work with Colin and Samir. Is that right? The published press venue? Yeah,

Sasha Kaletsky  8:36  
exactly they're exactly they're supporting the published press, which is good. I mean, they're really doing a lot of they're really doing more and more and more newsletters now. And yeah, the publish press has been, I think, quite a good early client for them. They also, from a from a creator economy perspective, do this the launch house newsletter, and they do a few others as well.

Ian Shepherd  8:55  
Excellent, cool. And I was reading on Twitter that you made a note that you largely, you had an intern map, 500 creator kind of economy companies or companies supported by creators, to see kind of how they tracked. And I was curious, like, what, what were the takeaways? What did you find in that? Yeah, so

Sasha Kaletsky  9:15  
we're shortly going to publish, actually, on behalf, we're going to publish our our findings. It's actually pretty crazy. It was pretty wild, actually. So, so this amazing intern. His name is Jack. He now works at Accenture, but he was, he was a fantastic help to us last summer as we were getting going. So he, he basically had the, had they had the the task of going through, basically being spending his entire life on Instagram. I think he actually didn't have Instagram before he started the internship, and he spent his entire summer on Instagram basically finding, going through all the top creators in the world, and then all and then basically going down from there and mapping each one of their businesses and businesses they own. And it didn't include merch, and it didn't include stuff, which is basically just. An extension of their own brand. It had to be a proper self standing business that ideally didn't have their name in it and wasn't just selling their own wares. So he did that. We ended up getting to over 500 which was pretty actually, sounds that sounds easy, it's actually very hard, and it's a lot of work for him and but it was a super detailed spreadsheet, as you can imagine, because, you know, I use work in private equity, so I love super detailed spreadsheets. And I think, as you know, from your own direction, you have lots of super detailed spreadsheets, but, um, but, yeah, so, so, um, so, yeah, it was a super, super detailed spreadsheet. And it basically went through the name of the company, what it does, all the different socials handles, and basically how they're growing over time and the category and all the Google Trends stuff. And basically gave pretty from the publicly available data. It gave a pretty good view into how the business was doing that was back in 2021 Well, this has now given us an opportunity to do is to revisit those from 2021 and to see how they've actually done since, which I think is going to be a really interesting thing we're going to publish on on my Twitter and in a couple of weeks time. So, but, but so I don't want to, kind of, we don't yet have the conclusion on that, although we can make, make some guesses. So, but I think what one thing we can share, which is really interesting is actually just the sectors in which these businesses are operating. So we found that 40% of creator founded businesses were fashion. Companies were selling clothes. 20% were beauty. So 60% were just fashion and beauty, which is completely crazy to me, at least. And then there was a kind of another 35% that was mixed between, you know, all kinds of miscellaneous stuff, like, you know, games and jewelry and various other stuff. And less than 5% were B to B businesses. And you actually look at what those 5% were, those 5% B to business ones like influencer.com or like NASS dailies, influencer training business and stuff like that, those were actually some of the most successful ones. So one of the kind of key conclusions for me, for coming from that was, I think more creators should be starting B to B businesses and using their audience and leverage to help scale B to B, rather than just selling products to their audiences. Yeah,

Ian Shepherd  12:16  
makes absolute sense. And that 40% selling clothing, that, again, as you said, was separate to merch as well, right? So, yeah, had merch on, it would be huge. And yeah, I guess. I mean, I had a product business with creators before electrify. So I know how easy and how hard it is to sell consumer products and creators to their fans. Do you have any sense like, what proportion of those 500 have been successful in terms of still running or just seeing growth?

Sasha Kaletsky  12:50  
Yeah, so it's yeah, it's the absolute key question, and and my hunch is that the the average has been quite unsuccessful. Yeah, I think they're successful in generating cash for the first few months, but in terms of building enduring, lasting businesses that aren't just reliant on their creators, they're mostly not successful, but but to be fair, most businesses in general aren't successful. Most startups aren't successful in any case. So it's maybe it's a bit harsh to hold creators to a higher bar than just general business. But yeah, I think if we looked at the average one, it would be doing a lot fewer sales in year two than it was doing in like, you know, the first few months.

Ian Shepherd  13:31  
Yeah, and probably lower than they expected. Certainly from my own experience of working, most creators believe they have a huge audience, if just 5% of their audience purchased a product, they would be millionaires, famous, 5%

Sasha Kaletsky  13:46  
famous, famous numerator, designator, yeah.

Ian Shepherd  13:50  
Well, I'm fascinated to kind of read the full results. So keep an eye on your Twitter for that one. And when you're looking at assessing new opportunities at Creative ventures. What are the things that you're looking for in a business?

Sasha Kaletsky  14:06  
Yeah, so, I mean, I guess it's four things we think about. Is the market, the team, the product. And those are obviously the three that, you know, everyone really kind of talks about the third, fourth one we think, is Ian you'll definitely relate to. This is also the terms of the deal. So, you know, a lot of people get caught up in the first three, but it is very important to have to have a have terms being interesting as well. So, you know, in terms of the market, you know, it's usually things that we know. Well, unlike, you know, I talked about the four kind of key pillars of our investment thesis, those are obviously markets we think are really attractive teams. You know, what we tend to like is people who have been who've basically done something very, very similar. I know it sounds obvious, but done something very, very similar to what they're doing in the past already. So, you know, beehive is a perfect example of that, where basically the you. Tyler and the team had already built the software. They just built it as part of a different company. So all they needed to do was just do exactly the same thing they'd already done and then just improve it in various ways. And the company was a company was created. So yeah, that's, that's, that's why we think about team. And we do prefer technical founding teams generally. And we do prefer kind of larger groups of, ideally kind of diverse founders who have different backgrounds and can can leverage each other's skills terms of product. I mean, that's pretty obvious. We, like, you know, has to make sense and be good and all this kind of stuff. The final one is terms. This is, this is something that we've it's always been important to us, even through kind of 2021, and how, how crazy stuff got. It's always been important to us to be able to put some kind of anchor in the ground on why the valuation makes sense, rather than just valuing something at, you know, 100 million, because it's got a really strong team and they're building something in an exciting market. So yeah, that terms piece is definitely been really good for us, the fact that we've held so strong through that, even through this crazy period through which we've been investing,

Ian Shepherd  16:02  
yeah, yeah. And what do you see is the kind of the future for the this crazy period where we are at the moment with the macro economy the way it is?

Sasha Kaletsky  16:11  
You mean from a from a business perspective, or creative perspective, or

Ian Shepherd  16:14  
from a from an investment business perspective, and we'll come on to the creative bit later. Yeah,

Sasha Kaletsky  16:20  
so from a from a business perspective, I mean, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, obviously, it's a brutal downturn, especially for tech, you know, I think a lot of, a lot of people saying it's a great time to be investing, which I think I totally can relate to, and I totally understand why people say that, and I do probably, on balance, agree with it. But, you know, it's only a great time to be invested. Be investing if things get better before they get before they get worse, before they get worse. So, I mean, I think, I think that the simplest way that I spoke, I've spoken to rlps about this, is I think you can be really well shielded from the macro if from the macro environment. If you do two things, the first one is, don't overpay relative to the public markets. So just don't do some crazy at valuations, just because you really like this idea. Be really this one of that. And number two is, stay diversified across vintages. So don't if you invest over a four, three or four year period one fund, and you don't overpay, relative to the public markets, you're gonna, you're gonna eat all the ups as well as you eat the downs. And overall it's gonna average out in a, in a, you know, good fund performance, if you mean, invest in the good companies. So that's kind of my overall approach to macro.

Ian Shepherd  17:35  
Nice. That's great advice. And sort of two kind of themes that we follow as well electrify in terms of the channels we look at. And so what's the future for creative ventures?

Sasha Kaletsky  17:45  
Yeah, so I mean, we, we, we want to just keep compounding at, you know, really high returns. And you know, we don't we. We're not making really, really long term plans. We're kind of quite sort of short term focus and medium term focus, in the sense of, we want to really smash this fund. This first fund out of the park. We've got a couple of companies that hopefully are going to do that for us. Will then raise the second fund in a few years time, which will which, again, we don't want to go huge. We want to keep it as a kind of boutique offering for the next especially for the kind of medium term. And then what we want to do is, instead of just amassing more and more and more capital, like some of the venture funds have done, we want to just be in the best companies in the spaces when we operate, and then we think in the long term, that will give us all kinds of strategic options with regard to either staying small or getting bigger or kind of doing it however. We want to do

Ian Shepherd  18:35  
it. Excellent, great. Well, I know you've got some really strong thoughts on the Creator economy as well. And I'd love to dive into a couple of those, if that's okay. And particularly follower platforms versus content platforms. I read a couple of kind of blog posts from you on that really interesting something that I believe in myself. But can you kind of explain to everyone listening your thoughts behind that sort of transition? Yeah, absolutely. So

Sasha Kaletsky  18:59  
I mean, the way, I'll just break it down very quickly. So the way I, or the way we think about it really is, is there's kind of two. There's almost a spectrum in social media platforms between, on the one side, you've got follower platforms, where people open the app in order to see their favorite creator. Early YouTube was a good example of that, where you remember this from from, from your career, but people would have get notifications when their favorite creators video would come up, and they would literally open the app in order to watch that, and then they'd probably close it again or and then they'd open it again and see, you know, what their favorite creators posted. That's a kind of pure follower platform. And you know, Twitter was like that as well, and and various other places have been like that. On the other side, you have a, basically a content platform, which is where somebody opens the app not to follow their favorite specific creator, but just generally to be entertained. And they'll basically, you know, Tik Tok is a really good example of the. This where they open up, they're kind of addicted to the feed, rather than being addicted to the Creator, and they swipe through it, and they don't really care what they get. Some people they'll follow some people they won't follow some people their friends have liked. But it's just, it's just basically an endless feed of content and so, so that's the that's basically the breakdown of the two types, but the consequence of the creators is kind of where it where it gets interesting, which is, if you're a creator on a follower platform, your audience are, you know, by definition, subscribing to you and want to know what you think about the world. And if you were to, in theory, leave the platform, they might join you, and they might be more loyal to you on a content platform by Tiktok. You're so incentivized that so first of all, your your your user, your audience, aren't necessarily describing to you. They're just addicted to Tiktok. And if you're there, then great. If you're not there, then they don't care. The other kind of related problem is that because of the way the feed works, and only the most popular posts of surface for everybody, it incentivizes producing a huge, huge, huge volume of content every day, which actually lowers the quality hurdle, which only compounds things and makes things worse, because you couldn't possibly follow every single one of these tik tokers videos, because it's just way too much for anyone, any human brain, to be able to, to be able to follow. And so what it's led to is this kind of generation of creators on Tiktok who ultimately can get you know 5 million plus followers, and get you know 100 million views a month, but who don't truly have an audience that are actually loyal to them, which I think is underlies how important it is for, first of all, for them to bring, for them to bring their audiences onto different platforms, but also to monetize and engage and make sure they they pull their audience into something they can actually make business from as quickly as possible. Yeah,

Ian Shepherd  21:54  
yeah. And we saw that at VidCon right this year, where a number of the Tiktok stars with big following, they didn't have many people turn up to their to their meet and greet. And I saw that big names I would have thought would have lots of people queuing up. And certainly weren't in the old days of YouTube, where you had these humongous queues. And so in terms of if you're a creator, what a bit of a deeper dive. In terms of if this is happening, how can creators think about their their business in a different way? Or what should they be thinking about so the communities and and the like,

Sasha Kaletsky  22:30  
yeah, exactly yeah. And that is that really is a great question. Well, how can they actually get around this? I mean, it's getting harder and harder because, you know, used to be a really simple answer. Well, if you have a big ticket audience, bring it over to Instagram, bring it over to YouTube, bring it over to another platform that you know, that is getting harder, because even those platforms are becoming more more content, like content focused and feed focused versus follower focused. So it's definitely getting harder. I mean, there are still ways you can kind of own your own network, you know? I mean, I don't want to, you know, there's, there's obviously things like newsletters, and there's, there are still platforms that kind of do support personal engagement, but effectively, it's really hard, and so assuming you can't, let's say you try to bring everyone to other any of every other platform, but they don't, because you're just a tick tocker, and they like you on tick tock. Then, I mean, really, the thing that makes sense to do is just keep posting more Tiktok and try and monetize as quickly as you can before people, people, you know, get bored of you. If you can get sufficiently big, I think then, you know, if you can become one of the biggest creators, then you'll obviously get a lot of brand deals and make a lot of money, but it's just about making sure you can get as big as you can, as quickly

Ian Shepherd  23:42  
as you can. Yeah, effectively as you can. And there was another point that I read about recently that you put about this repetition incentive, so to repeat the same content. Yeah.

Sasha Kaletsky  23:54  
So I mean, basically because, because of the way this content platforms work, the way these content platforms work, as you know, is that you know you have to You're basically competing with all this other content. And most people viewing your content, they don't actually follow you, and they might even be viewing you for the first time, which basically means when you hit on a winner, let's say in the Tiktok feed. And Tiktok, a lot of people are watching all the way to the end and liking it, commenting on engaging with it. Then Tiktok says, Okay, this is good content. Let's send it to a load of people. You then get the reward. You get 5 million views, and you're a very small creator. Your best strategy is just to post pretty much exactly the same video again, because or not exactly, you may want to think a very small variant on it. But most people watching it, even the second time, the second time you post it, aren't going to be the same people as watching the first time you post it. And they'll, they'll like it just the same as the first people liked it, and they'll engage with that comment with it. And so again, it will do the whole you know, it'll bang. And then if you just keep doing that again and again and again, to the point where. By the time, the 20th time you've posted it, it's probably the same people that watch it the first time that they've then forgotten about it. So they'll probably engage with it and comment with it again. So it's created this incentive to just pump out, basically hit a winner, and then just pump out similar, similar, similar, similar content again and again and again, which is again. It's sad because that's not really, I don't think that's how you get a really engaged and loyal community. But you know, it's how you it's how you kind of engagement farm, and you've got all kinds of examples. And this is not in a way that it's bad, that people are doing this, because it is actually good and it's really creative and stuff. But you know, people like covid doing the same pose each time and that, again, he's a, he's a fantastic, one of the best creators in the world. But it's indicative of it. Or, you know, you've got Eva Murray, who does a kind of similar thing, where she puts the speaker over her shoulder, but it does the same post every day for God knows how long, where she would put the speaker over her shoulder and walk through to that song. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it is sad, but I think it's the, probably the rational approach.

Ian Shepherd  26:00  
And even I saw, you know, an example, or examples on Twitter as well, where there are people just posting very, very similar threads, or posts, yeah,

Sasha Kaletsky  26:10  
yeah,

Speaker 1  26:12  
yeah. Who was the? Who was it? Oh, yeah. Chris Dixon, that

Sasha Kaletsky  26:16  
was it, yeah. Chris Dixon, on Twitter, the head of the crypto at 16 z we basically just do this, like it was, where was it? Read web one, yeah, was. Read web two, read write web three, Read Write own. And then you just write like, seven different versions of that within about two months. And each one, every coin, be like, This is brilliant. This is genius. The same thing. He's posted five times. But, yeah, no, yeah. So I think repetition is really important, but almost it spits out.

Ian Shepherd  26:47  
Okay, we're slightly different topic, and these intimate social apps as you I think you described them, and maybe be real is a good example. And there are others. Do you think that there are opportunities for these moving forwards, or do you think they're just going to get eaten up by the main kind of the big protagonists. Now,

Sasha Kaletsky  27:03  
100% 1% there's opportunities for those. I mean, the way, the way I put about it in the blog post is, you know, basically a chart from follower platform to content platform. And as time has gone on, pretty much all of the originally follower platforms have become much more like content platforms. So you've got even YouTube, started off as a follow platform, has become a content platform. Twitter startups, content follow platforms, content platform. Same for Instagram. It's the most extreme example, and so I do think it's created a big opportunity for a series of apps that actually allow you to literally engage with your own friends and your people that you actually want to follow, rather than just some faceless creators entertaining you. And so, you know, be real. Be real is great example with that. I mean, obviously it's still very early. You know, there's you, if you go to a party and ask people about be real, you'll get, you'll get a lot of different opinions, but, but yeah, I mean, it's still really early. But whether it's be real or not be real, I'm sure it's an opportunity for an app like be real that focuses on people and how people can engage with their friends?

Ian Shepherd  28:05  
Yeah, I'm really curious to see if, or what the next kind of big social app is. And I guess be real is getting that way, but still not got mass market adoption yet.

Sasha Kaletsky  28:17  
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, if you look at the kind of downloads of burial. It's, it's, I think there's some kind of seasonal element to it, because, you know, you know, it's a French, French app. Yes, that launched. I think it was the beginning of the end of 2020 or beginning of 2020 Yeah, it was. It kind of got big just before the summer of 2021 had an in if you look at the Sensor Tower downloads, it grew a ton during the French 2021 summer in France, and then it kind of petered off a bit, and then kind of stayed a bit steady, and then came roaring back in the summer of 2022, and so. And, you know, obviously, again, you know, it's widely publicized, it's petering off a bit now, but the question is, will it come roaring back next summer? I mean, I think it probably will. You know, it's difficult to say, and it's always difficult to say, how good that'll be for the business if it's the seasonal social app. But clearly, people want to post more about their lives true on a beach in Ibiza, not just the same be real of their own face and their desk every day with a different color of sandwich on the table in front of them. Yeah, that

Ian Shepherd  29:18  
is very true. Very true. Um, well, before we wrap up, I'm sure you look to see loads of opportunities about web three and the metaverse. How are you kind of thinking about that at the moment?

Sasha Kaletsky  29:30  
Yeah, so, so, um, well, so to answer the question very briefly and directly, we've, we've not invested any LP money, any of our investors, money, into any kind of crypto projects, and we're probably going to keep it that way, just because that way, just because I think it makes sense for crypto risk to sit in crypto funds, and, you know, not crypto or if you're called Web two risk to sit in web two funds. So, so that's the first thing in terms of my personal, you know, investment, and Ken caspers as well. You know, I've been investing. In crypto and Ethereum Since 2017 and Casper has obviously been done, done, done, done, a few crypto investments as well. But what I think is really interesting, and I'd be interested to hear your view as well on this, is the kind of intersection between web three and the creator economy. I think a lot of people think that's like a really good overlap, because, because they for various reasons, which maybe it'll be interesting to see. If you agree with that, I really don't think so at all. I think it's a really, really bad overlap. And I think creators are probably some of the, some of the work mainstream creators, that is not web three creators, but mainstream creators are probably some of the least desirable people to launch crypto projects at all, because they have such big audiences, and they have so they make so much money through traditional brand deals and through kind of AdSense as you know, that if it's just not worth it for them to risk rug pulling their fans for a few 1000, or even for a few 100,000 The problem with these liquid tokens is that, you know, like any public market, the marginal buyer, the incremental buyer, is always losing. Because, you know, prices go up as well as down, and so the person who last bought is almost, by definition, going to lose money, then going to lose money the last but the incremental buyer, yeah, which kind of means somebody's always losing, which means somebody's gonna be pissed off, which means somebody's gonna complain, which means, like, which obviously risk that whole brand. But I don't know, what do you think about that? About that overlap?

Ian Shepherd  31:24  
Yeah. I mean, I think potentially there could be an overlap moving forward, but at the moment, it's really dangerous for creators to be sharing some of these projects with their audience and their fans, because, you know, they need to look after their audience. And great creators think about brand partnerships and authentic relationships and with brands that they would partner, because there's value there for their audience. And I think that they need to think about these projects in the same way. Don't take, you know, I promise, but think about, is this right for my audience, and for 99% at the moment, it's not so. I think we need to weigh, we need to learn to see where the real opportunities and the real value is, and then only when that comes, then we can start thinking about some of these projects, 100%

Sasha Kaletsky  32:10  
100% that I totally agree with that. And the only thing, what I would add up to, what I said actually, as I was thinking about, as you said, it is, I think there is an opportunity, potentially, for like, you know, web three creators to emerge whose audience is, like, all about web three, and want them to be purely focused on web three. They don't have that same issue of risking rug pulling their fans, because their fans are like, you know, in for opinion, for pound type of thing, yeah, whereas you're, you know, you're a web three audience, and you support Web three creator, and then the value goes down. I mean, that's kind of on you so, so I do think there's an opportunity for those people and for, you know, web three musicians, to arrive and, you know, web three specific creators, but from from a perspective of bringing mainstream creators into web three, I just don't, I don't think it's there definitely, definitely

Ian Shepherd  32:55  
not at the moment. So finally, just before we do wrap up, what are your predictions for the Creator economy in 2023

Sasha Kaletsky  33:04  
so, yeah, so the so in so, I think it's hard to say versus 2023 versus 20 moving forward verse, 2025 but I'll try and say this is 2023 prediction. 2023 I think, the size of the total monetization opportunity in web three will continue to increase in the sense of more brands are going to be wanting more money through social media ads. And of those social media ads, more of that is going to go to influences. In my personal opinion, a lot of people talking about the macro having a negative impact on ad spend, I think that is right. But I think influences mix increase influencer marketing's mix increase is going to out, probably going to outpace the overall macro reduction in ad spend. So I think that overall influencer marketing spend and influence marketing, you know, is obviously the main and advertising generally, is obviously, by far, the main power of the Creator economy at this moment. So I think that's going to increase. Now. The problem, I think, is that, because there are so many more creators, I think the kind of monetization per creator could actually end up going down quite a bit. Because I think that the new creators entering the system might outweigh the total spend increasing see what I mean. So I think it's a really good picture in terms of the the category as a whole. I don't think it's a great picture for the creators individually. I think when you also layer on top this issue of their audiences potentially being a bit less loyal to them, especially on tick tock and these kinds of content platforms, stuff like that, I think it's gonna be really tough year for actual creators. And I think we're going to start seeing more and more creators basically getting other jobs, focusing on other career options, and generally having to turning more create, being a creator, more into something they they do, rather than something they are. If you see what I mean, yeah, I think that's that's kind of one of the things that's going to start. Be more picked up on in 2023 I also think some of the, and this is more of a negative prediction, I think some of the direct monetization platforms, not obviously, not just the web three ones, but also the mainstream ones, are going to really struggle. And I think a lot of creators that have been reliant on charging their audiences directly for their content are also going to struggle

Ian Shepherd  35:28  
Cool. Well, not all bad news, but it's good to kind of get that. It's good to get that kind of no that viewpoint from you. So thank you for that. And how can people find out more about creative ventures? How can they find some of the things I know that you share online? Yeah, I

Sasha Kaletsky  35:47  
think you know our website is creative. Dot ventures. You can follow me on Twitter at s kaleck, s, k, a, l, e, t, s, k, y. You can follow my partner, Casper, at Casper underscore Lee. And then, yeah, you know, our blog is just basically on the website and in my Twitter. So if you want to have a read, then if you want to have a read, and if you have any criticism comments or anything like that, just DM me or anything like that, and I'm

Ian Shepherd  36:10  
great stuff. Well, thank you so much for being on the program. Thanks, Ian, that was the second episode in the second series of the business of creators. We have some absolutely great guests coming up, so please hit subscribe to join the conversation, and don't hesitate to send me a direct message on Twitter or LinkedIn if you have feedback about the show you.