Slow Ventures Doubles Down on Creator ‘Cults’ With Another $9M — And the VC Math Is Getting Dumber

It’s Thursday and Slow Ventures is back at it, shoveling another $1–3 million apiece into three more so-called ‘niche cult’ creators, bringing their running tab on this delusion to $64 million. If you thought the era of VCs treating vibes as due diligence was over, wake up: the money printer is still humming for anyone with a Substack and a Discord.

Here’s the playbook: find a creator with a reasonably rabid following, drop a seven-figure check, and cross your fingers that an audience who likes one thing will buy anything. If you think that’s a business plan, congratulations—you’re why the creator economy is drowning in failed ‘portfolio businesses’ that no one asked for. Slow’s partners are betting these ‘trusted’ audiences will turn into unstoppable ecommerce engines, when in reality, most of these mini empires are a graveyard of half-baked collabs, ghosted merch drops, and one sad NFT.

Let’s be clear: there are maybe three creators on the planet who can turn a fanbase into a real, multi-pronged business. The rest are lucky if they can sell out a limited-run hat. But VC FOMO is terminal—especially in autumn, when everyone’s chasing Q4 wins for their LPs. So Slow keeps writing checks, convinced that the next MrBeast is hiding in an Instagram comment thread. What they’re actually funding is a cargo cult: worship the metrics, ignore the economics, pray for an exit.

Meanwhile, real operators are left cleaning up the mess after the hype fades. The creator gets bored, the audience moves on, and the VC quietly writes down another loss. But hey, at least they got a few thousand new Twitter followers out of it. If you work in growth or platform ops and you see a Slow-backed ‘creator business’ in your inbox this month: run, don’t walk. You’re not building a company, you’re propping up a lottery ticket for someone else’s portfolio review.

Here’s the uncomfortable fix: stop funding personalities and start funding products. Put your $3 million into something people actually need, not another influencer’s vanity project. Or just admit you’re gambling—and let the rest of us build things that last.