Latest / Influencer Marketing with Fexingo: Creators, Sponsorships, and Modern Endorsement Deals / How Influencers Are Launching Their Own Venture Capital Funds
Transcript
- Lucas: So you've got a creator with ten million followers. They've done the merch line, the ghost kitchen, the skincare brand. What's the next logical step for someone sitting on that much audience trust and cash flow? Luna: Start writing cheques to other people's startups apparently. Lucas: Exactly. I want to talk about something that's quietly become one of the bigger shifts in the creator economy: influencers launching their own venture capital funds. Not just angel investing, not the occasional seed round — we're talking dedicated vehicles with institutional LPs, formal carry structures, the whole thing. Luna: I've seen the headlines. MrBeast has something. Emma Chamberlain too. But the numbers I've seen are all over the place. What's the actual scale here? Lucas: Let's use a concrete example. Earlier this year, three beauty influencers — you'd know their handles but the point is they collectively have about 25 million followers across platforms — announced a fund called Creator Ventures. They raised seventy-five million dollars. Their stated focus is early-stage consumer brands, specifically ones that can use influencer marketing as a distribution moat. Luna: Seventy-five million is real money. Who are the limited partners? Lucas: That's the interesting part. About a third comes from the creators themselves — they're putting their own money in. The rest is from family offices and a couple of institutional investors who see the thesis. The fund charges standard two-and-twenty, but the GPs — the creators — have agreed to waive the management fee for the first two years. They want to prove the model before taking a salary. Luna: So they're betting on their own deal flow. What kind of companies are they looking at? Lucas: They've already made four investments publicly. One is a direct to consumer supplement brand. Another is a software tool for creators to manage sponsorship invoices. Two are apparel lines — but here's the angle: in each case, the fund's LPs — the creators themselves — have committed to posting about the product at least once. It's like the term sheet includes a guaranteed marketing blitz. Luna: That changes the risk profile. A traditional VC invests and hopes the company figures out customer acquisition. These guys can guarantee a million eyeballs on day one. Lucas: Right. And that's the core thesis. They're not just providing capital; they're providing distribution. The fund's pitch to startup founders is essentially: we'll give you two hundred fifty thousand dollars and a post from someone with a 5 percent engagement rate. That post might be worth more than the cash. Luna: Do we have any data yet on whether those posts actually convert better than traditional ads? Because I remember the early days of influencer marketing — a lot of likes, not a lot of link clicks. Lucas: Fair question. The fund shared some internal metrics at a conference last month. They track what they call 'creator-attributed revenue' — basically, sales that come through a unique discount code or affiliate link within 72 hours of the post. For the supplement brand, that number was around 34 percent of first-time customers. Compare that to a typical Facebook ad campaign where first-touch attribution might be 10 to 15 percent. It's promising, but it's early and the sample size is tiny. Luna: Still, 34 percent is hard to ignore. So is every top creator starting a fund now? I've seen Casey Neistat's thing, MrBeast has his... Lucas: Not every creator, but the ones who are doing it tend to be the ones who've already built businesses. MrBeast's fund is different — it's more of a rolling fund, smaller deals, and he's investing in other creators directly. Emma Chamberlain's is structured more like a traditional VC with a ten-year horizon. The common thread is that they all have a thesis around 'audience as alpha' — their followers are a data set that tells them what products might work. Luna: That's actually something we've touched on before, this idea that the audience can be a source of insight. I mean, if you're a beauty creator and you see your comments section constantly asking for a specific kind of moisturizer, you know there's demand. Lucas: Exactly. And a traditional VC would spend months doing market research to figure that out. The creator gets it for free, in real time. So the question becomes: can creator-led funds generate better returns than traditional early-stage VCs? Because if they can, we might see a structural shift in how consumer startups get funded. Luna: There's a counterargument though. Running a VC fund is hard. It requires sourcing deals, doing diligence, managing relationships with LPs, handling legal — that's a full-time job for a team of professionals. Can a creator who's also posting three times a day really give portfolio companies the attention they need? Lucas: You're right, and that's why the best of these funds are hiring actual VC professionals. Creator Ventures has a former partner from a boutique consumer fund as their managing director. The creators are the face and the distribution engine, but the operational work is done by people who've been doing this for years. I think the model works if the creator doesn't try to do everything themselves. Luna: It's almost like they're becoming a new kind of limited partner — they contribute attention and market insight instead of pure capital. Lucas: Speaking of LPs, one thing that caught my eye is that some of the larger creator funds are now being backed by traditional VC firms. Sequoia, for instance, has reportedly considered allocating a small portion of their own fund of funds into creator-led vehicles. That's a signal that the institutional side sees this as more than a fad. Luna: So what does this mean for the typical brand deal? If a creator can get equity in a startup plus a guaranteed post, does that replace the old sponsored-post model? Lucas: I don't think it replaces it, but it adds a new tier. The typical sponsored post is still going to be the bread and butter for most creators. But for the top 1 percent — the ones with loyal audiences and business acumen — this becomes another revenue stream and a way to build long-term wealth. The interesting tension is with the brands themselves. If a creator invests in a competing product, they might not want to promote the incumbent brand. You could see conflicts of interest emerge. Luna: That's a real issue. Imagine a beauty influencer who has a deal with L'Oreal but then invests in a direct competitor. The contract probably has exclusivity clauses. This is going to get messy. Lucas: It already is. I've heard of at least one case where a creator had to choose between a seven-figure brand deal and a two-hundred-thousand-dollar investment in a startup. They chose the investment, because the equity could be worth more long-term. That's a bet on their own ability to grow a company versus taking a guaranteed paycheck. Luna: That's a big shift in mindset. Creators are thinking like founders, not just endorsers. Lucas: And that's exactly the kind of shift that makes this topic worth watching. We're only a few years into this phenomenon. If Creator Ventures hits a home run on one of their investments, you'll see a flood of copycat funds. If they don't, the model might retreat to a few specialists. But it's hard to ignore the logic. Luna: I'm curious about the next wave — will we see creators pooling resources into a single mega-fund? Like a syndicate of top creators across niches? Lucas: There's already talk of that. I've heard whispers about a group of five or six creators — across beauty, gaming, and lifestyle — discussing a combined two-hundred-million-dollar fund. The pitch would be that they cover multiple consumer verticals and can offer cross-promotion. Imagine a gaming creator promoting a beauty startup to their audience. That kind of cross-pollination is hard to replicate with traditional VCs. Luna: That's brilliant and also terrifying for traditional marketers. You'd have a distribution network that cuts across demographics, all coordinated by a single fund. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the long-term vision. The creator becomes not just the advertiser but the gatekeeper. And if you're a startup founder, you might start thinking: do I even need a traditional ad agency if I can get funded by someone who will also handle my go to market? Luna: It's a fundamental unbundling of the marketing function. The capital and the distribution are merging. Lucas: Yeah. And on that note, I want to come back to something we were saying earlier about the value of these conversations. If you find these marketing shifts useful — maybe you're a founder thinking about fundraising, or a creator considering your next move — we do want to mention that listener support is what keeps this show ad-free and independent. If you feel like throwing a few dollars into the tip jar, it really helps us keep digging into topics like this. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, and it genuinely makes a difference. We don't run ads, so that direct support is how we justify the time we spend on research. No pressure, but if it's something you've thought about, that's where to go. Lucas: Alright, back to Creator Ventures. I want to talk about one investment in particular that I think illustrates both the potential and the risk. They put money into a company called Shelf — a meal-kit service that sources ingredients from local farms. The creator who led the deal is a food influencer with about 8 million followers. Luna: I saw that. The post she did got 2 million views in 24 hours. But I also read that the company had some supply chain issues — they couldn't fulfill all the orders from that first wave. Lucas: Right, and that's the flip side. The distribution engine works so well that it can overwhelm a startup's operational capacity. The fund had to step in and help Shelf find a third-party logistics partner. So the value-add isn't just marketing; it's also operational hand-holding. That's something a traditional VC might not be as good at, but a creator who's built a merch line knows exactly how hard logistics can be. Luna: So the creator brings both demand generation and operational scars. That's actually a powerful combination. Lucas: It is. And it suggests that the best creator VCs won't just be the ones with the biggest audiences, but the ones who've actually run businesses themselves. The ones who've dealt with customer service nightmares, inventory shortages, and shipping delays. Those scars are worth more than a million extra followers. Luna: So what's the one thing you'd tell a marketer or a founder to watch for in the next twelve months? Lucas: Watch the performance of those first few funds. If Creator Ventures or MrBeast's fund show a net IRR above 20 percent in three years, you'll see every major creator agency launching a fund. And that will change the balance of power between creators and brands. Brands will have to compete not just for sponsored posts but for investment dollars. The creator becomes a stakeholder in the brand's success, not just a paid mouthpiece. Luna: That's a fundamentally different relationship. And it might actually create more authentic marketing, because the creator has skin in the game. Lucas: Exactly. It aligns incentives in a way that the old model never quite did. So I'll be watching the numbers closely. For now, it's still early innings, but the signal is clear: the top creators are becoming investors, and the smartest brands are going to figure out how to partner with them on that level. Luna: Good place to leave it. Next episode we should look at the flip side — what happens when a creator's startup fails and their audience turns on them. Lucas: That's a great idea. There's definitely a risk of reputational damage. We'll dig into that next time.