Jet-setting business ‘guru’ for digital stars

YouTuber Cody Ko, who has 5.7 million subscribers, found himself in a pickle in May. Two different start-ups wanted to give him stock and he was concerned that they were potentially competitive deals.

So he called someone he trusted for advice - Li Jin.

Ms Jin, 31, a venture capitalist, suggested that Mr Ko, 30, be honest and upfront with the founders of both start-ups about the potential conflict of interest. He agreed and ended up pursuing just one of the deals.

"I'd never hesitate to reach out to her if I needed something," he said of Ms Jin.

If there is such a thing as an It Girl in venture capital these days, Ms Jin would fit the bill. She sits at the intersection of start-up investing and the fast-growing ecosystem of online creators, both of which are red hot.

And while she formed her own venture firm, Atelier Ventures, just last year and has raised a relatively small amount - US$13 million (S$17.4 million) - for a fund, she was among the first investors in Silicon Valley to take influencers seriously and has written about and backed creators for years.

A Harvard University graduate who was inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, she is also aggressively proworker. She has made it clear in podcasts and her Substack newsletter that creators should get the same rights as other workers.

Among the ideas she has championed is a "universal creative income" which would guarantee creators a base amount of money to live on.

Now, as large venture capital firms flock to influencer start-ups, and as Facebook, YouTube and others introduce US$1 billion creator funds, Ms Jin's track record has made her a go-to business guru for many digital stars trying to navigate the fast-changing landscape.

Ms Jin, who has invested in Substack and Patreon, said that although her fund was small, she planned to put all the money into firms transforming online work. "Everything I invest in is a creator-focused company," she said. "I think the impact I have is outsized relative to the dollar amounts."

When the coronavirus pandemic hit last year and the world was increasingly pushed online, she recognised an opportunity.

"I felt like Covid would be such an accelerant to online-based work and people wanting to be entrepreneurs," she said. "I realised I had an opportunity to start an entirely new fund that was devoted to this thesis and that would be on the forefront of evolving the nature of labour and work on the Internet."

In May last year, she quit Andreessen Horowitz and started Atelier Ventures. She has since invested in creator-related start-ups such as PearPop, which lets influencers profit off their social interactions, and Stir, which helps creators manage their finances. She is one of the few investors whom large influencers know by name.

"If you talk to anyone who works in the creator economy, they all say, 'Oh, you have to talk to Li Jin,'" said a creator who goes by Jasmine Rice, 23, a former OnlyFans influencer who started a platform called Fanhouse, which Ms Jin invested in last year.

Ms Jin has also publicly criticised the funds that YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat offer influencers to make content for their platforms. She has implored the tech industry to "stop celebrating" the funds, calling them "bread and circuses", and argued that creators needed ownership over the platforms that made money off them.

"Without ownership, creators are ultimately enriching and empowering *someone else* - platform owners - with their work," she tweeted in June.

"There's been a simmering awareness for my entire life," she said, "that the world is unfair and we need to push it in the direction of justice and fairness."

Since starting Atelier Ventures, she has moved away from Silicon Valley and runs her fund out of her childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh. This summer, she was travelling around the world surrounded by a changing cast of Internet stars, artists, Gen Z tech founders and crypto pioneers.

In July, she co-hosted a packed happy hour on a New York City rooftop attended by the who's who of Internet culture and techies, including the founders of the NFT platform OpenSea, product people from TikTok and Twitter, and other investors. From New York, she jetted to Paris for a crypto conference and hosted a "creator salon" at a cafe on the Left Bank.

She then flew to Greece on an invitation from Mr Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, and later attended a dinner on the beach with Emma Watson, Nicky Hilton and others, which was organised by the Brilliant Minds Foundation.

She has since headed home to Pittsburgh to regroup and reflect.

"It's just so improbable that I'm here," she said, "that I was born in Beijing speaking Chinese as my first and only language, and something happened to bring me to the US and now, I have the tools to be able to have a voice and influence."

NYIMES