🚀 Creator run accelerators

Creators funding startups for their own benefit.

Ok, this is a a pretty rough idea I got after reading the news that college athletes can now "monetize their brand" and Barstool Sports started signing athletes for their athlete marketing firm. It will probably be short but straight to the point, cause I personally think this could be really cool.

Are you ready? Ok here we go:

What if apart from Barstool Athletes we could have "Barstool Founders"? Wait, you may be asking what does this mean ?!?

Well, we all know that building a startup is hard. And at the same time, we are seeing the Creator Economy grow but (small) creators are still having a hard time making a fair amount of money for the value they create... So, what if we could join forces and make this economy way bigger by starting accelerators run by creators?

Founders with an ambition to build cool stuff for creators would join these accelerators, which would be funded by creators who want to invest in a better future for every creator... it's definitely promising since everyone here could end up winning.

Creators put the money and knowledge/experience for equity, founders their skills and effort for the money, and small creators enjoy the final products, hoping these make their life easier. (I don't know much about the VC/Angel investing world but maybe even small creators could cooperate with smaller checks?)

The startups (ideally focused on the Creator Economy) would be able to solve some of the biggest problems when starting out:

💵 Capital

🌐 Distribution

🗣 Advice (creators know their own biggest pain points –on every stage)

On the other side, creators would be able to own equity in startups that could change the space, them being the main users at the same time. Investing in such startups would offer them the opportunity to generate higher absolute returns –long term– whilst improving portfolio diversification. And them owning equity would mean that they worry about these startups becoming successful.

Guys, this could be huge!! There will probably be some issues I’m not aware of right now but this is promising in my opinion. Some things we should consider:

• Small creators would probably end up benefiting from the final products but, would they be able to invest in these startups? Would big creators give them the opportunity to put their money in these investments? Maybe big creators do not care about helping smaller ones...

• Would these accelerators be competitive? Would they be able to attract startups? It's a competitive space and maybe founders would rather have advice from people in the startup world (i.e. YC) rather than from creators... maybe these could be really short experiences that could go along other accelerators, or maybe some VCs could partner up with these creator accelerators and work together on helping founders build better products in this space.

This could probably be a new era of how creators can make money, funding startups for their own benefit 🤭🚀 We have already seen creators investing, but this could be next level for everyone involved. Creators run accelerators, and they live with founders for x period of time, advising and building (in public with huge distribution!!) respectively. @launch_house could help here maybe... ;)

Ok, I don't have much more to say. I'd be pretty excited if I ever see this happening. Please tag @daveportnoy and any creator/VC that could help here...

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