Slow Ventures Raised $64M to Bet on Creators - Jack Raines Explains Why

Happy to be here. Happy to be...

Humbled and honored to be here. Happy to be here. Um, to answer your first question, I did write a book called Young Money. I got an early copy right here. That's the early copy. Comes out in August, but like everybody, pre-order a million copies. Young Money by Jack Raines, so I can earn out my advance. My publisher's happy.

It's hardly a personal finance book and more of a like, how should you make the most out of your 20s book, which does involve money. Um, the basic gist is young people are more anxious than ever before. Nobody knows what to do for a living, where to live. AI is going to take our jobs. We're all going to be in the permanent underclass. Well, I think that's all kind of [__]. Um, my take is that like, there's never been a better time to be risk-on as a young person and try and do a lot of interesting stuff and just see what hits and where you want to double down and where you have leverage. And like, that could be starting a company, it could be moving across the world. Like, there's just like, you don't have to lock in on something at 22 and then spend the next 20 years of your life doing that. Like, take some shots, try different stuff. Like, the whole point of being young is to be risk-on with your life. And like, that's Young Money, is like the defining decade for people who are a little bit less neurotic, is kind of my take on it. So, anyway, that's Young Money. Pre-order your copy, pre-order 100 copies, as many as you want.

So, yeah, I would love to go in on the LinkedIn shitposting. So, the brief backstory is I realized at the young age of like 25 that LinkedIn is the best marketing platform on the planet, because everybody has to be on there if they're employed, and nobody is going to post on there because they're worried about losing their job. So, if you are willing to actively post on there, you will get an insane number of eyeballs basically for free. Now, what most people do is the whole hustle culture [__] or like pay some ghostwriter 10,000 bucks a month to like make them look like a thought leader. Venture capital's full of this. Every VC general partner is paying some kid in like, I don't know, like Phoenix to ghostwrite for them. It's obnoxious. But, I realized if you satirically make fun of all the hustle culture stuff, you can go mega viral. And then, as your posts blow up, you can link whatever you want, get people to pay for it, subscribe to it, whatever. So, I speed-ran like LinkedIn satire for basically 2020. I still do it sometimes in 2022 and 2024, hammering it. Top three, top three, top three posts. Number one, claiming I got vaccinated 1,000 times as a side hustle when they were paying people [laughter] to get the shot in New York. I said I made a hundred thousand dollars getting the COVID shot. I would go to every clinic in New York and people are commenting like, 'You're the reason why minorities can't get vaccines.' And then I would double down on the bit. I would say, 'No, no, no. The vaccine is actually bad for you. I'm saving people's lives.' I was like [laughter] an anti-vaxxer who was making a lot of money and I'm like, 'I get cell service in the subway now. I can see through walls.' This [__] was crazy.

Claiming the hotel breakfast one is the best though.

So I, a couple of months after moving to New York. New York is notoriously expensive for a broke grad school student. And I had this really long post claiming that like I had a personal finance hack. I hadn't paid for food in three months in New York cuz I would go to random hotels around Manhattan, sign off on other people's rooms, get the continental breakfast. I was taking girls to dates at like random like bougie hotels in Tribeca, sign off on room 421, just get out of there. And I was like, 'There's 250 hotels I haven't hit yet. So I can keep this up for probably a calendar year before having to double down.' I mean, the comment section was just like chaos. It's like people are tagging the New York Police Department. They're like, 'This is crime.' I said, 'What are you talking about? This is just called being thrifty.' It's like I had to meet with the Dean of Students at Columbia Business School because some alums had like sent her a screenshot of it over email. So I then screenshot her email and posted that on LinkedIn and said, 'Who snitched?' And like...

It was out of control. I thought I was getting kicked out of school. It turns out I managed to maintain my enrollment status for the next two years. But um, yeah. I was employed now, but I still like, I don't know. People should have more of a sense of humor on LinkedIn. And I try to make LinkedIn fun. It's a boring website. I try to change that.

I thought I was going to get kicked out. Columbia let me. They thought the shitposting was funny. I thought it was going to terminate my enrollment for a moment there. Um, yeah, I mean, it's when you double down on a stick like that, it's actually pretty useful because you start self-selecting for working with and associating with people who like your sense of humor. And like any company that would take issue with... Like, for example, I could probably not work at Goldman Sachs now because one of my posts claimed that I won a Goldman Sachs-sponsored beer mile to land an internship at Goldman Sachs. [laughter] Yeah, it was like when David Solomon was on his whole like DJ stick. And I was like, oh, yeah, like he decided to host a beer mile because one, every banker is an alcoholic, and two, like he's been hanging out at Coachella too much. That one was nuts. So, I probably can't work at Goldman. That's okay. Um, but like places that I have worked and people that I have worked with like the sense of humor. I got my book deal from a LinkedIn shitpost. An editor at Penguin saw it and then found my Substack through that. So, it's been a net positive ROI already. So, that's pretty cool. More people should shitpost.

Yeah, I mean, the Goldman Sachs one hit several million views alone. Like, I would say cumulatively 50 million on LinkedIn is probably accurate. And then I would post the screenshot of the LinkedIn [__] post on Twitter, and those would hit like 10 million. Like, LinkedIn and Twitter combined probably 150 million impressions, LinkedIn alone 50 probably. Um, yeah. It's like Twitter was kind of like an inside joke of like, 'Oh, everybody on LinkedIn's an idiot. Look at this.' And then on LinkedIn it's everybody's like, 'This guy sucks.' Like, one of my now pretty good friends, a guy named David Perell, he's pretty big on Twitter. You guys might know him. Um, I met him like two or three years ago in Austin for the first time, and he was like, 'Dude, I thought you were an [__] because of your LinkedIn stuff.' I was like, 'Satire.' He's like, [laughter] 'I thought you were just being a dick on the internet.' I was like, 'No, no, no, like sometimes I do, but not that stuff.' Yeah. So, you're all... But no, I mean, the amount of inbound I've gotten from just like very interesting... Like, there's been a lot of like founders, investors, just like random people running big businesses that are like, 'This kid's [__] hysterical.' That's been great for me just from a like networking thing, I guess. Yeah. So, between that, like getting a book deal off of it, it worked. I don't know. Like, what more can you ask for?

Yeah, being a creator myself, yeah.

So we had this bet like a few years ago. I wasn't working here then, so I'm using 'we' excluding myself. They, Slow, prior to me, had this bet that like, 'Okay, the internet is getting more and more siloed, where like my internet is different from your internet is different from your whatever.' And people who have established themselves as like domain experts in like their niche, and they have a big YouTube channel or like podcast or whatever, are like really well positioned to leverage that distribution to make massive companies. Like, the way startups always worked was take the really smart weird kid from Stanford who wants to build AI God and give him like $20 million and then he builds a product and hires a go-to-market team. You can kind of like invert that now where you get like a good entrepreneur who's carving out a niche, like kind of like what you guys are doing with the show. You get a good entrepreneur carving out their niche. They can build a legit business on top of that and then they can hire the like weird technically talented person to help build the back-end tech stack. But distribution is like a pretty compelling moat and we ended up raising like a $64 million fund to invest directly in like those creators. Like put money in their holding company, they can use it for whatever businesses they want off their platform. And we've done like several deals out of that fund. Um, one of my personal favorites, Jonathan Katz-Moses, woodworking creator. He would love the cowboy hats. I mean, he's got a sick business where like the dude just loves like building stuff in his shop in California. He also has his own KM Tools business that just like crushes and like if you look up Jonathan Katz-Moses...

Yeah, so like that's like the first deal we did. So it's stuff like that. Like person who's like the face of a niche. It's like, 'Okay, you can probably build multiple hundred-million-dollar businesses off a platform and you just own that distribution.' So like, why would... nobody's really tried to tap into that yet. Why? It's like everybody's swimming in like the OpenAI alumni pool. Like here's a billion-dollar pre-money seed. Nobody's giving the YouTubers love yet. But like they're probably... I mean, all these, they're already like printing cash. Most of these guys are already profitable. It's like give them a little money to hire some people, build the thing up, let's see what they do.

Yeah, I mean, one of my personal favorites and he's already crushing it, and he's going to continue to crush it. He's like too big for us, but like this is what a win would look like, catching somebody like this earlier. Like Ryan Serhant, the New York...

...or real estate broker. Like, I mean, that dude is like the man. Like being able to parlay both building a massive real estate business, but also has the Netflix specials. He's incredibly charismatic on camera. Like he...

He's so good at algorithm slop. Like if you ever watch a full Mr. Beast video, it's pure brain rot, but he's better at brain rot than anybody.