Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) The Creator Economy Opportunity With @JoshConstine

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

For years, I quoted Josh Constine on this show because he was one of the breaking news-iest folks over at TechCrunch for years. Well, now he’s gone the well worn TC to VC route, and is a principal at SignalFire. I noticed Josh had his name on a SignalFire report looking at the creator ecosystem, not as some sort of weird outlier, but as an actual, mature economy. It’s the best breakdown I’ve seen of the creator economy overall… as we say extensively, currently the fastest growing category of startup business. So, I called up Josh to discuss the report. It’s linked in the show notes if you want to read it for yourself, but listen to this episode. If you’re not taking creators seriously as entrepreneurs and a category of startups, you’re missing the boat on something big. Enjoy. SignalFire’s Creator Economy Market Map Sponsors: BuyRaycon.com/tech Metalab.co TinyCapital.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg podcasts, this is Foundry, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough for years. You'll remember I quoted Josh Constine on this podcast because he was one of the breaking newsiest folks over at TechCrunch for years. Well, now Josh has gone the well-worn TC to VC route and is a principal at Signal Fire.

I noticed Josh had his name on a Signal Fire report that was looking at the creator ecosystem, not as some sort of weird outlier, as an actual mature economy. It's the best breakdown I've seen of the creator economy overall, as you'll hear us say extensively in a minute. It's currently the fastest growing category of startup business. So I called up Josh to discuss the report. It's linked in the show notes if you want to read it for yourself. But listen to this episode.

If you're not taking creators seriously as entrepreneurs and as a category of startup, you're missing the boat on something big. Enjoy. Josh, so we're going to talk about this report, which is Signifier's Creator Economy Market Map. And I might end up in this episode essentially just reading you data points from it, which is kind of fine because there's so much fascinating data in here. But the main reason why I wanted to talk about this is because I think people continue to think of creators and the creator economy as just some like sort of Mickey mouse stuff. But your data shows in really quantifiable ways that this is already and becoming more so a real industry. So let's just start with a sort of high-level takeaway from your report and maybe

why the report was commissioned in the first place. Sure. So the big takeaway here is that there are now 50 million creators. Those are content creators making content for a public audience and monetizing it. That includes about 48 million people who are doing it on a more part-time amateur basis, and 2 million people who are doing this as their full-time job. And that includes, you know, YouTube creators, Instagram influencers, Twitch streamers, as well as podcasters, writers, illustrators, a wide variety. But we're really seeing YouTube has the biggest number of professionals. That's over 1 million creators with over 10,000 subscribers who are making a real professional living out of it.

And I think the big takeaway, though, is that creators are becoming founders because now they really need to cobble together a ton of different tools and team members to really be able to monetize their content, to grow their distribution, to activate their community, and to build a cult following around them. And that means that there's a huge opportunity for new startups to come around and offer help with financing, distribution, growth, data science, analytics. and that's exactly what we're seeing, an explosion of startups in the creator economy. And to be clear, I mean, that is the purpose of the report was, you know, we want to invest in this area. And so we're giving you our layout, our lay of the land to see if anybody's out there doing anything in these niches. And we're going to go down at all. But so again, it's sort of been a joke for a while that, oh, you know, one day the whole economy will just be all of us subscribing to everyone else's shows, you know. But, you know,

50 million creators, that's a real number and that's global. But this is the point where I start to actually read data points. So 50 million, it's, but you break it down in terms of there's maybe two million professional individual creators. So by professional, we mean doing, it full time and either it's the majority of their income or all of their income or some large chunk of their income. Exactly. And what you've seen is that now there's actually a higher percentage of people. When you ask American kids, 29% of them say they want to be a YouTube star when they grow up, whereas only 11% say they want to be an astronaut, the old favorite position. Because I think a lot of people are realizing that they just want to spend their time

doing what they love. They don't want a career path that leads to a cubicle. And when they look at their creator heroes, they see them doing what they love, following their passions, whether that's in gaming or art to art or photography, videography, making comedy. They see the people doing what they love and that passion is so approachable and enticing right now. And I think there's this widespread waking up of American consciousness and the world's consciousness that you don't end up on your deathbed wondering, all those things I could have owned. No, it's all the things I could have done. People want to care about what they're spending their time doing, not just the output of it. So it doesn't mean that creatorship is necessarily the most lucrative career, but it might be the most fulfilling because you get to do what you love.

And so now, like you said, there's two million people who are doing this full-time professionally, about a one million on YouTube, 300,000 on Twitch, 500,000 on Instagram. And then you have the other sort of 47, 48 million amateur creators who are making some part-time money on this. which includes like ad revenue share, sponsored content, influencer posts, tips from live streams, or selling content directly, like through their own courses or through monetizing newsletters. And when you put this all together, it creates the fastest growing segment of small businesses.

And that's why we wanted to make this report. We know there are going to be a number of amazing startups that are going to emerge in this space. And we wanted to show that we've done the research and we believe in them. And we're really about it from the team standpoint. point as well. You know, I was a creator for 10 years at TechCrunch. I was writing content. I was a public speaker. I was trying to go down this path. Meanwhile, Wayne Hu from our, from Signal Fire Seed Fund, he worked early weaving monetization for YouTube. Wai, who co-wrote this report, has done an incredible breadth of research on the space. And we've already made a bunch of

investments. We're backers of carrot, which is a credit card for influencers, which helps them finance their content production shoots. We're in Chad Hurley. The YouTube co-founders new startup Green Park Sports, which is sort of for a digital fandom of sports teams. And we back a company called Face Rig, which makes a live motion capture avatar system so live streamers can actually wear sort of cartoon face and live stream it with all their emotions coming through so they can give their broadcast fans, their streaming fans, something new to look out for. And so you put this all together, this is just an incredibly explosive space with huge opportunities and we want to meet more founders here. All right. And I think that the key

that you said, you just said it or it's in the report where the creators are becoming businesses. You're calling them startups or whatever. And the report goes into like the history of it. So, you know, 20 years ago or so, the platforms start to pop up that allow people. Like I said, again, I went to film school and I remember, you know, us like, you know, getting high in the dorm room and thinking about like, you know, you won't have to go to a studio anymore, you'll have all the tools you need to just create your own stuff. And like the idea that if like, you know, if something like Breaking Bad came back or something like Vince Gilligan should just be

able to release it as an app and not, you know, all of that stuff has sort of come true, which is what I find fascinating. But it's, it's the idea, the platforms, the YouTube's especially, you know, with the stranglehold on video that YouTube has, it was always advertising base number one. And then Number two, it was you're dependent on this platform, but what we're seeing in these last few years is that you can be a creator and you can have so many different revenue streams, you know, everything from advertising is still the biggest one, right? It's a huge one, but subscriptions are becoming a major portion of this as well, even though for a smaller set. So I can kind of walk you through this evolution that we've seen

over time. So, you know, what happened first was this birth of the media platforms. And here, it was, you know, platforms like Instagram and YouTube were rising up, especially YouTube was the iconic one. And there, you had to monetize through the platform. You got a revenue share from YouTube directly. And that meant you had to play nice with YouTube. You had to make content that was friendly to their algorithms and that worked, you know, that was somewhat family safe or appropriate for YouTube. Then you saw the rise of the second wave, the second layer of the creator economy. And that is the rise of influencer marketing. And so here we saw brands come in and say,

oh, we want these creators to monetize not just the actual views, but their reach, the distribution to fans, and the influence that they have over their purchasing decisions. And so then creators started to become not only beholden to the platforms, but to these brands. They had to be able to make content that was brand safe. They had to work with these brands to make sponsored content pieces that made sense and carried that brand's message.

And still, they were monetizing by their sheer total reach. But again, that doesn't have any sense of freedom. You're still beholden to a platform. You're still beholden to the brand. Right. So it's not the revolution that we're hoping for. Right. You're mostly beholden to the masses.

You have to make lowest common denominator content that appeals to everyone to maximize your reviews, which really at the end of the day, you don't become relatable or a hero to a very small subset of fans that are in some specific niche. And it's just kind of soul-sucking to try to make something for everyone all the time. You don't get to explore your more personal passions. And that's why we're so excited about layer three of the creator economy. And layer three sees the diversification of revenue streams. So suddenly creators, you know, they built their, they built an audience on the platform and they monetized through the platform. Then they grew their audience on their platform and they monetize through the influencer marketing.

And now finally, they're taking that fan base that they've built up on the platforms and bringing it off platform to other places where they can monetize much more directly for a specific niche of their fans. And that's especially popular because it ties in with a lot of really important themes about how people want to create.

They want to create content that feels relatable, that feels purposely tied to their fanship. And thanks to things like new, algorithms like TikToks, they can get that content delivered to the exact right fan, even without the fan following them already or going and searching for them. And so they stop being beholden to the common denominator. They can make niche content that appeals to their interests and their fans' interests, and they can monetize them much more deeply, not just through ads and through sponsored content, but through tipping, through patronage, subscription payments. They can sell

merchandise, which is a huge, huge way that people are getting really is. big revenue streams. We saw the biggest musicians in history have often made their money not through selling music, but through selling T-shirts like Dave Matthews band or Bon Jovi or the Grateful Dead. These bands that have had these really long

arcs of monetization. And then there's newer platforms. You have things like cameo and these sort of VIP experiences where you're getting shoutouts from your creator or you're doing one-on-one talks with them, as well as digital content sales like selling a course. If you're more of like a substack

writer. You might monetize with a paid newsletter, but you also might run your own course on podium, or you're teaching people whatever your specific skill is. And there, you're monetizing, you're making a lot more money off of a lot fewer fans. But no matter what creator you're talking about, everyone has some of those super diehard fans that they can monetize. And basically, creators are taking a page out of the social gaming playbook. You know, the gaming companies realize that they made most of their money off of a tiny fraction of their fans that they called whales. And that's the same thing that's going on with creators now. They can actually tailor their content specifically to their biggest fans. Well, and we're about to go into the like breaking down the

different business opportunities in the space. But there's twofold of what you're just saying is that number one, if you move off of just being beholden to one platform, first of all, you can monetize each fan at a greater percentage to you, essentially your margins increase. because you can mix and match of the thing. So I'm wondering if essentially the biggest opportunity, and I don't know, because it would almost be each creator who would want to do this bespoke, but what you're describing is bespoke each creator,

it's not like they're abandoning the platforms. They're pulling a little from A, a little from B, a little from C, so is the biggest opportunity here, allowing each creator to conglomerate that and sort of regularize that into one sort of push button sort of business. There's definitely a bunch of platforms emerging that are trying to help creators cobble together all those different monetization streams into one link. So they don't have to promote themselves on 20 different networks.

They can just send themselves their fans to one homepage that has all of their monetization options. And yes, they're definitely still, they're not leaving the platforms. They're still using them to grow their audience. They're just not relying on them for the monetization. Right. And I think the big platforms aren't good at this because most of the top social platforms, they made their money off nickel and diming their endless user base with advertisements. And so they're used to whatever is the biggest scale.

They don't really think about how do you make more money off of fewer people. They think about making the money off of the maximum audience size. And so a lot of these platforms have neglected tipping merchandise, subscription platforms or direct sales of content. And meanwhile, a lot of these creators are sick of the policy murkiness on these platforms where you don't really know what the rules are about what you are and aren't supposed to do. And especially for some more racy creators, they're really, they're suddenly getting shadow banned, they're losing all their reach, they're getting their accounts suspended.

And you've seen the rise of only fans as this alternative for creators who want to be able to sell content with a variety of different revenue stream. and avoid that kind of policy murkiness. So because these platforms have neglected these new revenue streams and they haven't treated creators well and communicated well with them about their policies, you're seeing those creators try to monetize off platform. Yeah, so I guess maybe I'm making the sin of thinking this,

God forbid me, as a creator myself. But, you know, right. Like, it's sort of, you know, we're used to the idea of a sales funnel and, you know, listeners to this podcast, please forgive me for talking about you in this way. But, you know, it's one of the reasons why, you know, I did podcasting versus YouTube. Like, you know, Josh was just describing the, you know,

the lowest common denominator of ads where YouTube doesn't care because they have however many trillion views, right? So, and so then you have to do the broadest possible stuff. And so if you want to do a niche thing, If you want to do just a tech news sort of thing, like it doesn't fit because YouTube, you'll get like a $3 CPM. And like podcasting was attracted to me

because there's a $30 CPM. But there's even a level beyond that where if you can get the ARR going and the subscriber stuff going, you can essentially double or triple the money that you make from each listener or each fan or whatever. And so essentially it creates a universe where niche makes more sense,

than going for scale for a whole lot of things. Absolutely. Because people are getting, like, if you build content that's specifically for a subculture, for a specific demographic, it's going to be a lot more relatable to them. It's going to be a lot closer to their identity. They're going to align themselves much more closely with it. And they're going to want to start to shell out to drive that affiliation, that sense of being part of the creator's journey.

I think we're also just seeing this general secularization of society where people are moving away from religious communities, which were often a support network that people affiliated with. And with COVID and social distancing, people are feeling ever more isolated. And so they're looking for a club, a cult, to affiliate with. And some of these creators effectively act as charismatic cult leaders. And meanwhile, this content is just so much more relatable, and you're seeing this giant shift in the aesthetic quality of content over time.

So what we've seen is that a few years ago, the Instagram aesthetic rule. This was that perfectly manicured, glamorous type of post that brand advertisers and platforms wanted to work with. And, well, that sort of recreated what we think of as traditional celebrity. When you see a traditional celebrity on TV or in a movie or in a magazine, they're always like perfectly glammed up, right? But it's, but it creates a big distance between the fan and that celebrity. And they don't feel relatable. And so you don't feel like you want to be part of their journey that you don't feel like the creator needs you at all. But what's happened over time is that the Instagram,

aesthetic is in decline. People want to feel like they're making something that is real and authentic and is much more relatable. And that means creators are moving towards less manicured content. They're doing more off-the-cuff shoots, you know, weird angles, blurry shots, more like candid shots, not everything being perfectly posed and manicured from the start. And what that's doing is it's making creators feel much more close to their fans. They don't feel like there's such a giant delta between them. And when you see someone, you're like, oh, I could be them. You want to support them. And meanwhile, this also leads to a reduction in the barrier to entry for content creation. If you want to make perfectly polished content, you need a big production studio.

You need fancy equipment. You need great editors. But if you're willing to just abandon that and be more relatable, you can get started with just your phone. And that makes the barrier to entry to being a pro creator so much lower. And then over time, as you grow your audience and you grow your monetization, you can grow your budget and add on some more of that production quality, but it's making the funnel to get it started a lot lower. And I think that that's super, super important for getting a wider breadth of voices in here. And that's the thing maybe I'm most excited about of this whole niching of creatordom. And that is that suddenly you're going to see people that you never got a chance to see on camera

or in positions of power in the media. People who, you know, we talk a lot about representation in the media with films trying to get more diverse actors and actresses on screen, and creatordom is going to exemplify this. Suddenly, every subculture, every niche, whether that's, you know, Dungeons and Dragons TikTok, or, you know, these different forms of like meet YouTube or the, or someone who's just a, you know, a creative writing tutor, you know, they can all find their own niche, create content that's just for that group of people, and you're going to get a different group of sometimes underrepresented demographics able to become creators. And, meanwhile,

while, by having a content which can go viral on its own with new algorithms like TikToks that don't require you to have built up a giant following over years, you can think on Instagram and YouTube, you have to build up followers, you know, day by day with consistent posting for years and years to build up a big audience. You have to be a grinder, yeah. You have to grind it out, exactly. But on TikTok, you make one great thing, you know, it's assessing content based on its individual quality, not on the aggregate quality of the creator. So all you have to do is make one video where most people who see it love it, and all of a sudden you will just get vaunted to the front of the for you page of TikTok. You'll gain millions of followers,

and you can start your creatordom profession and your career there. And that also means that it opens up creatordom to people who didn't have the time and money to invest in being an unpaid creator for years. You can think of this as the parallels to the unpaid internship problem, where unpaid internships are discriminatory because they only basically allow people who have financial stability to join them. Because if you don't have savings, you can't take a job for free. And similarly, if you didn't have any savings, it was hard to be a creator for free for years to build up that following.

But now with these new algorithms, then you're getting the ability to get popular quickly, it opens up and democratizes creatordom for a much wider set of people. So you're getting not only niche content built for every subculture, every culture, everybody gets their own creator, but you're seeing representation and new demographics and diversity amongst creators.

that you never get from the traditional media gatekeepers. Or even from the way that digital media has operated for the last 20 years. I remember from the beginning of blogging even, like if you got there first. You could get diversification of voices if you got there first, depending on who got there first. So again, I think Eugene Way talked about that in his essay about the TikTok algorithm too. Let me just, I'm going to pick two or three things at random to poke at that I found interesting. in terms of this report trying to look at what potential businesses there could be here. So number one, this comes back to the idea of like the scale and the platform.

Like a Twitch or a YouTube can get like take rates as high as like 30 or 50% of the revenue generated by content. But then these sort of more direct with your fan stuff by their nature again of it being more direct between the creator and the fan. like a cameo, a, um, uh, only fans, a patron, like their, take rate is only like five or 10%. So is that a problem in the sense that if you were going to create a startup that was like a Patreon 2.0, like is there no way to achieve scale in that model of a, of a business? I definitely think you can achieve that scale because when you offer a lower take rate, you attract creators. They don't start to make that decision like, is it better for me to just try to own my audience somewhere else or

build my own tools or stick with the big platforms? They say, well, it's such a small cut that I have to give away to this platform that's offering some special monetization tool and may as well join up with them. But you definitely have seen a ratcheting up of rates over time. So, you know, Patreon started with a 5% rake, which is so low, really tough given how much Patreon actually does for creators. And so it's, you know, it grandfathered in its original creators. but now new ones that sign up are closer to like 8 or 10% of a take rate, which I think is more reasonable for startups. But at the same time, these new platforms for and specific monetization tools,

they're not saying we're going to build your audience for you. And so you have to bring your own audience. And so because of that, they don't deserve as high of a take rate because they're not providing as much of a service. They're not providing the audience and the monetization. They're just providing the monetization tools. You have to bring your own audience. And so I think it makes sense.

that there's a smaller take rate. But there's still a great opportunity to build a big business. First, because, as we said, creator-dom is exploding in popularity. 50 million pro or semi-pro creators exist now. There's a big total addressable market. But also, once you become a fundamental part of a creator's monetization stack, you have so many opportunities to upsell other types of services. So Patreon started with just this rake on your subscription fees, but now it lets you offer all these additional services, you know, it's working with merch providers, it's working with other websites to give you these additional options and you can sort of layer on some modization that

way. And I think that that's going to be really popular. And meanwhile, you, by giving people a diversity of different monetization options, the way that like only fans has, you know, only fans let you do subscriptions, let you do tipping, lets you do one-off content sales. It appeals to a wider subset of creators. And so you're still able to build a big business there. In the influencer marketing space, my understanding is that largely the businesses that have been built there have been sort of agencies, like the talent agency model. I think that you ask in the report, like who will be the double click of influencer marketing? What are you talking about? What are what is the opportunity that you see in terms of building a business around influencers?

I mean, in terms of the influencer marketing space, yes, the biggest companies we've seen have moved in as agencies where they effectively, is a middleman connecting the brands and the creators. They help brands find creators that are the right fit for their type of content and style. They help creators, you know, reach out to brands and not have to do that full sales process so the creators can focus on just doing what they love and making the content. And they handle all of the sort of economics and logistics of the payment transfer in the middle and making sure everyone does their part and abides by the contracts. And so that's been a huge space. And so, you know, you've definitely seen companies like captivate and, you know, grin, aspire IQ. that are building these kind of platforms and marketplaces for creators.

But there's also some more DIY ones where creators can basically put themselves up for auction on platforms like the plug. And that's become very popular as well because creators get to work a little bit more directly with the brands. They don't have to deal with as heavy of a middleman. But I still think that there are a lot of opportunities here because a lot of these platforms have specifically been built for brand safe, brand advertising sponsors. content. Not a lot of them have focused on a whole other area of creator down, which is like the meme creators. It's kind of lower quality content, a little bit more like remnant. You know, you can think of this, but there's opportunities to monetize this because they still have huge reach and you can monetize different types of content. So you can think that with a traditional like sort of, you know, pretty creator, they might be able to do makeup brands and fashion companies and things like that that, you know, are basically stuff you use as a person. And the ad is basically going to be their face on camera using the product. But if you're a game company trying to get downloads of your game, you're advertising on a platform like that is going to be tough because it's so different than the content the creator normally makes.

But a game screenshot looks a lot like a meme screenshot. And so you're going to see platforms emerge that help different subsets of creators beyond the more traditional influencer influencers to be able to monetize. You mentioned right at the beginning, like the idea of creating tools and things like this to allow all the different angles of this market be more successful. One of the biggest ones is like literal, I mean, this is so obvious. This is the, in a gold rush, you can make the most money by selling the pickaxes and things like this, like selling the tools.

And you have these companies, and I'm talking about like literally the creation tools, like the Canvas, the affinities. And we're seeing some of these tools built into some of these platforms as well. but I'm wondering, you say in the report that the problem with that is that Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla in the space. But I don't even think that that's true because Adobe, it's like for, Adobe is a fantastic business that made its money on the creators of the last generation where if I'm a video or photo creative, like, I have the need to professionalize and have these super complex, comprehensive tools. but the creators today don't necessarily need that much depth or specificity. So I almost was reading that part of the report and thinking, like, this is where it's at. Like, just Adobe is so right for being blown up.

I agree from the standpoint that influencers definitely want tools where they don't have to necessarily do all the work themselves. You've seen apps like Trash and Quick, which automatically edit together short video clips to make kind of a mini-movie or a vibe check video. And you've also seen tools for making gifts like Bochi and Capuang that help you sort of make more slapdash memes and creation. But the fact is that the creators who are using these are probably not going to pay the same rates that a professional content creation business that uses Adobe is going to be able to pay. And the companies that have made the best. The companies that have been the most successful here are the ones that tie a network to a tool.

So like Instagram, for instance, offered a lot of photo editing tools, but there were lots of photo editing apps that existed before that. It was pairing it with a network where they could make the money on the advertising rather than selling the tools that was really popular. And so you're definitely going to see all of the platforms build more and more tools in-house over time to try to draw creators there. You've seen Snapchat be very successful there. It's been able to retain creators just because they love its augmented reality filters, for instance. But I do think that there will be, there's opportunities to build those tools, but you need to figure out, the monetization is the hardest part. It's easy to maybe get scale, but we saw tools like Prisma, which was the style transfer, sort of AI filters that let you completely change

the look of photographs. They got really popular, but never really were able to monetize because that kind of audience of end user creators is tough to make a lot of money from if you're only charging them a small amount per month or a small upfront fee. Well, and then to sort of wrap it up, I mean, the point that you make is obvious, if you look at it through the lens of this is the fastest growing segment of small businesses at the moment. It's literally tools like helping with accounting, helping with customer relationship management, things like that. Essentially, again, if the thesis is that every creator is creating, is a startup, is creating a small business or a medium business or a big B business, any of the tools that any business would need, that's potentially the opportunity for a startup to serve that need. Exactly. It's a lot easier to make money if you're the tool that the money flows through instead of the content flows through.

If you're making a photo in something, you know, you might be able to get that option somewhere else and you can easily switch between tools. But if you're talking about, you know, the credit card that you're using or the patronage platform that you're stuck on where you're, you know, you have some network effect there, your users are locked in there. It's going to be a lot harder to switch between them. And you're just going to get a lot, a lot, uh, a lot of a lot higher opportunity for margins than if you're just building the tool of the content flows through. But I think the biggest, most important takeaway I want your listeners to think about is that creators are the new founders. We're at this inflection point in history. You have to be, to be a professionalized creator, you need to cobble together all these different skills and tools. It used to be all you had to be was an artist. Now you have to be a product manager, a designer,

a community engager, an e-commerce expert, a data scientist, not just an entertainer. And that means that these companies, the companies that succeed in building these tools are the ones that are going to make it as easy as possible for creators to cobble these all together, to stitch them all together, and to have the lowest friction experience so they can use those tools, get the money, get the growth, get back to doing what they love, turning their passion into their profession, making content. Well, I obviously linked to the piece in the show notes. So if people want to get a look at this comprehensive, it's the best run down. of the sort of creator ecosystem and marketplace and economy that I've seen so far. So it's very interesting. It's from Sigma Fire. And so let me end by this.

I think the last time you were on the show, you were still at TechCrunch. You're at Signal Fire now. You're in the VC pool now. Are you enjoying the waters over there? I love it. Eight years at TechCrunch was incredible. I made my name there. I learned all the skills and expertise that I was able to.

to find and I love that experience. I love being a creator day in and day out and just having one single job, which was crystallizing information for my fans. But being a VC means you get to do this on a bigger scale where you're not just influencing what people think, but what actually gets built, what succeeds. And I think that, and my favorite part of being a journalist always ended up being the last five minutes or ten minutes of an interview where I was talking with them and jamming with founders about product and PR and strategy. And now that's my whole job. I love it. So if you're building something into creator economy and want to get some feedback on what you're building or just learn more about the opportunities, and you want to hear more

about what Signalfire does, we build, bring this amazing recruiting platform, bring this huge advisor network with the Instagram founders and the YouTube founders and Slack CEO, all these incredible leaders in tech who can help your business. Signal Fire is really doing, bringing something special to the table. And that's why I left an otherwise very good job in journalism to become a BC is because there's really something special going on at Signal Fire. Well, thank you, Josh, and thanks for running down that whole report, which was awesome. My pleasure. Thanks so much, Brian.