I’m a venture capitalist. My job is to find new, undersaturated talent markets and to invest in those before they even know they are venture-scalable. Content and Creators are what I’m betting on. They are my two loves.

Over the last five years, I’ve been watching billions of dollars being thrown to what can only be described as the “creator economy” and it’s clear that most of those bills were set on fire. I don’t want to blame anyone for that - since “Creator” is something so misunderstood that we can’t even decide on its definition or who is/isn’t one.

Creator is a $200B industry. Creators are rich. Creators need this product.

All assumptions. I’ve invested 1) with, 2) for, and 3) in Creators, professionally. I guarantee that there are maybe four or five investors on the planet that can say that. My biggest takeaway is this: The Creator ecosystem is an underdeveloped ecosystem. It’s been entirely misunderstood and hasn’t matured.

I started this newsletter is to continue to find out why.

If there is absolutely any point to get across in this blog, it is that you should not be raising money just because you are:

1) making money. Or because you are

2) famous.

It has to be because you believe content allows for Creators to have access to insights on humans that can lead to new product creation unlike traditional businesses and brands.

Note: Do not raise venture capital to just have someone slap on some random product and use you and your audience as a distributive channel. You are more than your distribution.

This is the story that will guide you through your pitch deck, your pitch, and your entire company’s creation.

What have you seen from your audience?

What have you heard that they want or problems they have?

This discovery that there is a new problem is exactly what VCs like to hear from the jump.

A deck is the first piece of content a potential investor is getting exposure to from a Creator as a venture-backable Founder. No pressure. The good news for Creators is that most good decks are story-driven & insight-driven. These will come naturally.

With all of that being said, if you want to work on multiple things at the same time (content, products, licensing, rockets, etc.), you’re going to have to show that you can move things.

A lot of the time, with a Distribution-First mentality, some investors think that translates to product. That doesn’t always have to be the case. Come to think of it, if all you can do is “move product: and haven’t tried to use your influence to grow your business in any other new way, that wouldn’t be very Founder of you. It would be very Media Executive, but again that’s not why you want to raise venture dollars.

Using distribution as a Founder looks like:

Screenshot examples of these and piece together how you’ve used your distribution to grow into a true Founder. Bake them into proof that you use distribution beyond just converting.

Being a Creator, regardless of what kind, means that you can translate something to an audience. That something can be your own or belong to others, but regardless they all come down to being great stories. Great stories can move product and also move ideas.

Sometimes, Creators rely too heavily on storytelling abilities as their leg-up in raising money. Not because it isn’t interesting and not because those stories haven’t been validated by a larger (and probably more important) audience (their audience), but because Creators have a large barrier to prove they can built anything remotely proprietary other than Media and Stories.

With that being said, every deck tells a story. Decks are naturally sequential, like storyboards. For more on how to format a deck, we’ll chat about that next.

Also, we snagged our own Bookshop.org! I’m having a hard time deciding if I should throw in a curation of my personal favorite books as Emily Herrera (of course mostly Creator, Content, and other related with some more personal favorites) or to keep it strictly Creator Capital. Lmk!

Thank you for taking the time out to read this. REPLY to this email to let me know what you think about this piece OR feel free to find me on X.

— Em.