Community as a Growth Hack with Karat Financial CEO Eric Wei

Commerce Ventures
24 min readJul 24, 2023

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This is an overview of our interview with Eric on our podcast, Commerce Conversations. Listen to the full episode here.

The creator economy is in full swing. Creatives on social media and streaming platforms today are building massive audiences and generating huge revenue through their content. But despite this vast and growing wave of creator-led economic activity, most traditional banks still don’t see them as actual businesses worthy of their service.

This can make it difficult for even high-paid content creators to access certain essential banking services, from car loans to mortgages, or even credit cards. Add to that a general lack of education about the financial services options that are available, and it’s a recipe for a large base of underserved creators.

The idea for Karat was born when cofounder Eric Wei spotted the opportunity created by this gap in basic banking services. The company’s core belief is that content creators who make a living through what they produce are legitimate, viable businesses, and every bit as entitled to accessing financial services as any other small business. So they set out to create an entirely new financial infrastructure made to serve content creators.

Karat knows a thing or two about creating content themselves, with a popular YouTube channel, millions of views on TikTok, and a well-listened podcast featuring radically honest conversations with a broad swath of well-known content creators, from financial influencers and YouTubers to entrepreneurs to magicians. In a recent episode of our Commerce Conversations podcast, Wei sat down with Head of Content Claire Jacobs to discuss how Karat is building a better and more inclusive financial landscape for creators.

Who is Karat?

[00:00:06] Claire: I want to start at a basic level for those who might not know you. Tell me a little bit about your journey.

Eric: We’re building a better financial system for creators. So if you’re a YouTuber, an Instagram influencer, a TikTok or Twitch streamer, you are a business, albeit a new and different type of one that makes a living from content. Many of these new types of businesses really struggle to figure out their finances around getting access to credit, help with their taxes, setting up business bank accounts. And so that’s what we help them do.

A Startup For Creators, by Creators

[00:00:58] Claire: This is obviously a creator startup, but along the way you’ve kind of become a creator yourself via TikTok, the podcast, all of these things that are boiling up at Karat and becoming super, super popular — millions of likes on TikTok. Why are you doing all of this? Did you set out to become a creator and how are you envisioning that as part of the Karat journey?

Eric: Our content strategy was really motivated by two things. The first is tremendous business value. The second is that personal connection you alluded to from a business perspective as more and more people learn how to make content. That’s how they’re learning to receive information and learn about new things too. The way to win distribution and marketing today isn’t necessarily through running ads, it’s by creating genuinely compelling pieces of content that people will go and watch. We believe in this thesis because our entire client and business segment we work with does this to grow reach and revenue for their products and services. So we said well, why shouldn’t we do this for ourselves?

Eric: I used to work at Instagram. I’ve worked with creators for a long time. Personally, growing up I always wanted to do something more creative and learn to express myself. But I didn’t think it was something that was realistic or possible. So instead I went into a career working in investment banking, management consulting, and tech. In figuring out our content strategy, we realized the most compelling thing is to try and put a human face onto what our company is doing. Given that this is something I’ve already personally been interested in, it was a very natural fit to be like ok, the way we increase distribution awareness of care is actually for me, the co-founder, to go forth and talk about what we’re doing and let people get to know myself and the clients we work with.

Claire: It seems like it has a very human lens to it. I know you had been doing more creative work in the past with Instagram, but was that jump from supporting to actually now being in front of the camera difficult for you?

Eric: I find it really hard. As I mentioned growing up I was so focused on ensuring that I did a good job in terms of landing in a financially stable and safe occupation that anything like putting myself on camera felt narcissistic. It felt like navel-gazing, like, why would anybody wanna listen to me? Why should I do it? And part of what eventually got me to try was, as I mentioned, seeing all my friends, seeing everybody finding it so casual and simple to make content nowadays. It’s the same reason Karat exists. Other people are figuring out this ease and simplicity, and it motivated me to try doing it for our company, too.

Finding the Right Creative Partners

[00:03:44] Claire: You hit a note I was curious to ask about earlier on, which is the folks you are selling to are already creating content themselves. That’s what is fueling their small business, really. And so now you’re identifying ways to co-create with them. How are you identifying the folks in your customer base that you want to build this with that are willing to do that? Is it kind of an easy ask in that way?

Eric: Our target client is someone who’s made a living from their content. Whether it’s shared via subscriptions, shared with users on Patreon, Twitch, or from ad revenue being shared with them as on YouTube or even sponsorships they’re doing themselves, which you see a lot of with Instagram influencers. Like any other businessperson, they’re focused number one above everything else on what’s going to help me grow my business faster. For them, that’s things that either help them make more content, more money, or build their following base, while reducing the time they need to spend on everything else. That is not one of those three things. Our very first product was a business charge card that provided them with limits that actually made sense, because we underwrote them based off their financials and social stats instead of their credit history.

Keeping Karat in the Conversation

[00:05:57] Claire: Is there anything more to talk about there in terms of keeping Karat top of wallet, top of mind for these folks? You guys already entered a nascent space that didn’t have a lot of competitors because people didn’t know how to underwrite these folks. In that community, is it content that’s kind of fueling the loop to keep Karat on top? How do you think about that?

Eric: That’s exactly right, because these creator businesses are making six, seven figures and they’re not even incorporated. We often get the question like, why would somebody ever come to Karat for a business credit card when they can presumably get the same fantastic product and service from Wells Fargo, Chase, etc.? Well there’s two differences. The first of course, as you said, is that you don’t necessarily have amazing credit built up. Many of the traditional providers aren’t giving these businesses the limits they need. The second is from a trust awareness perspective. They’re making over a million dollars and aren’t even incorporated. They don’t even know what these things are or how credit cards work or how to apply for them. And when they see all of their friends they work with already use us, then they get to know us more personally through the content we do, it makes a huge difference. So even though we all try to be these really rational creatures, evaluating one financial product versus another, a lot of times it just comes in from “Have I heard of this, and do I trust it?”

Accumulating Trust Pays Dividends

[00:07:40] Claire: I want to switch gears a little bit into more of the humble, non-humblebrags. What has creating all of this content for Karat generated in terms of business outcomes?

Eric: The focus for us has been on building that card in every creator and YouTuber’s wallet that they pull out and say hey, that’s a Karat card. Because our vision is once you have the card, we’ll be able to cross-sell you into other financial products and services that you also need, but might not have considered because you didn’t have the time to assess properly and didn’t know who to trust.

Eric: We’ve been around for about four years. Even in the first year we launched the card we were seeing 50, 60, 70% growth month-over-month. And it was primarily organic, because this population didn’t really know much about how to figure out their finances. That’s why when they found a source that they actually trusted and heard of, they leapt on it. There was almost this pent-up demand that just didn’t know where to go that all suddenly just swept into us. Similarly, we launched our bookkeeping and tax service about a year ago. Initially we didn’t know what to expect. As I mentioned before, this space is really based on trust, and we had explored bookkeeping taxes as one of our very first products to start with, but there wasn’t much interest because no one knew exactly what we were doing. But when we relaunched it after having built up that trust and credibility, we again saw double-digit growth every month and quickly exceeded even our capacity to serve.

Helping Professional Content Creators Take Their Rightful Place in the Economy

[00:09:41] Claire: When you think about the opportunity to gain trust to then cross-sell, what are the exciting things in the pipeline you’re able and willing to share that you’re seeing all of this pent-up demand for? What do folks have an appetite for?

Eric: If you consider any normal SMB, and the pain points they have around moving money and managing it, from a product perspective that translates to moving money in, like payments and invoicing. Moving money out, like cards and transfers. Storing that money, bank accounts. Managing that money, maybe some level of analytics and wealth management. Trying to get more money, credit. In the creator space, every single one of these is a very genuine and hard-pressed pain point as well. So when we think about sequencing, it’s not so much hey, do creators need this? Because we know they do. In fact, many of them come to us and ask hey, can you help me with this mortgage? Can you help me set up a basic bank account? Can you help me process my payments? On our side it’s much more about what makes sense for us to execute that we think we can maintain high quality, but also a potential venture-scalable future. That’s why we started with cards, because it’s really software, right? Once we onboard onto the card, there’s not much additional work we need to do except from a customer support perspective, and it’s something they’re using every day. It’s extremely tangible. It builds really, really high trust.

Eric: We went into bookkeeping taxes afterwards, where it’s more of tech-enabled services. Because even though it’s not as simple as oh, here’s a card I just spend and use it. It was such a huge pain point that so many creators said, I just don’t know who to go to, that we realized there was a lot of business value if we went in and figured this out. We sort of want to alternate between these two different types where one is very foundational, top of mind, doesn’t necessarily drive as much revenue and LTV for us, but it really builds the ecosystem, and ones we can monetize and make more of a profit and alternate between them. So what we’re considering after this, for example, we know many creators have asked us for help in setting up business bank accounts. Some have asked for help around invoice factoring, and we’re assessing our own capabilities when we think it’s time to properly execute and launch according to what we know these creators need.

Building Trust in the Digital Banking Era

[00:11:58] Claire: At the end of the day, the ability to then open up these different kinds of opportunities is all based on that original trust from the most sensitive pain point, which you guys really leveraged from that content and that community angle. In another lens, I’m curious how you imagine the broader financial institution market that is not super creative-friendly, not very creative, and isn’t generally known for creating a lot of community and content, apart from the folks that actually operate in it as maybe FinTech investors or those making FinTech products. How do you think, if at all, this industry can pile on to the trend of building more authentic communities as a way to engage their users?

Eric: Historically we haven’t seen as much about this due to structural reasons. Once upon a time to offer a financial product, first of all you’d need to have a brick-and-mortar branch so people would go to you and trust you. Then you need to spend a lot of money guarding the money there. The second is from a technological perspective and the third is from a regulatory perspective, it was a lot of work to get a banking license and build a company. So as a result, the products you build end up catering to the lowest-common denominator, aka everybody. You didn’t really have to go and build targeted work around community, because who else are they going to use? You can use the bank, or you can keep it in your mattress, and that’s obviously a strictly worse alternative. What’s really cool is in the last 10 years it’s become so much easier to build financial products than ever before. Now it’s digital. The fact that you can partner with banks means you can work together on the technological and regulatory perspectives instead of having to go and rebuild that from scratch. That’s why you’ve seen such a plethora of financial products and services first focused on specific use cases; Venmo for payments, Robinhood for investment. And now gradually growing more and more into not just differentiated use-cases, but differentiated populations. Obviously you’ve seen Mercury, for example, has targeted startups. Or Nova Credit has targeted immigrants. As soon as you start to focus on a specific segment, that’s where the community part becomes really important. Because it’s not just about having an underwriting advantage for the specific population, it’s also from a marketing acquisition POV where I want everybody in this space to know who I am and what I’m doing.

Eric: It’s hard because community is something that is inherently not super scalable. It’s about giving people these really cool, curated brand experiences where they think highly of you. I think that’s why the content part is so important. Content is how community scales. If you go and meet somebody and talk with them, that could have been a very meaningful interaction for that one person’s life. But if you make a video of it, which frankly could be 15 seconds on the iPhone, you post it and potentially millions of people are going to see it.

Striking the Right Balance Between Content and Community

[00:15:33] Claire: It seems like having the mindset for replication, where one thing definitely should not be one thing, it should be five so you can get more engagement with it. I think the digital players in this space have been doing a really excellent job. I wonder how you’ve been feeling about the recent volatile market for larger, more incumbent players in the banking space, too. Do you think that’s changing the way those teams will be thinking about recreating trust and credibility with their consumers? Does that mean community might actually have a space at the table at these larger brick-and-mortar spaces that never really had to do this well?

Eric: I think there’s two points here. The first is at this current moment, there’s more focus on ensuring the core banking infrastructure in America, and frankly the world, is stable before saying we’re gonna go and build the coolest new “Dogecoin for Uber drivers named Kevin” app. We saw a little bit more of that a couple of years ago. Now I think it’s more like, if you hold my money, will it still be there? So that’s a pretty big shift. The second, if you think about some of these recent collapses in the first place, they were driven by bank runs. They were driven by animal spirits. It is in the actual business model of a bank to obviously have a money multiplier, to have a reserve ratio such that if you think about it, any bank is potentially at risk of a bank run. It just occurs if people are scared. And I’m not saying just go and build good community and everyone’s gonna be super happy and hopeful, because let’s be honest: SVB actually did a fantastic job building community and it still didn’t work out right. But it doesn’t hurt in times where peoples’ fear, uncertainty, and doubt can manifest into wiping out billions of dollars of shareholder value. I think you do have to consider well, what can I do to help to reinforce trust, awareness that I exist, and that I’m doing the best I can? I think that’s a big part of where content and community can be helpful.

Claire: You don’t want to have community without the content, content without the community. That example of SVB seems perhaps like the content side was lacking, even though that authentic community really was there.

Eric: Yeah. I think we think highly of everything SVB did in the community. I think it’s a case where everyone’s just freaking out. I spoke with a number of other founders and investors and folks in the space who said they had been really scared by the communications that had gone out from SVB in the early days of the situation. Where they watched the webinar and felt more scared, not less. These things matter.

Community and Content as Business Differentiators

[00:18:25] Claire: You mentioned Mercury as a standout for you. But I’m curious to hear, when you think of other folks, whether they be financial institutions, FinTechs or not, who do you think is doing community and content at a really Grade A, first-class level? Apart from Karat, of course.

Eric: So yes, number one I actually do think Mercury’s done a really good job. Number two, I’m actually gonna pick a slightly older example than most recent-crop FinTechs. Look at Square and CashApp. When CashApp launched, Venmo had already been around for a long time. Payment apps really die and thrive based on their ability to build network effects. So in a way it’s actually very challenging and tricky to say “oh yeah, here’s a company that has already built this really cool digital peer-to-peer payments app, and they have tremendous network effects, and from a product perspective there’s a couple of things we can do differently, but yeah, let’s go in and fight them.”

Eric: The way CashApp did it was actually a really strong focus on community and branding. They targeted parts of the country Venmo had not been as focused and strong on. CashApp innovated. At this point you can Google and find a ton of rap songs and rap artists who name drop CashApp. It became like a cultural phenomenon with certain parts of the population. That marketing community differentiation really helped them stand out against Venmo.

Be Real, Be Vulnerable, But Try Not to Overshare

[00:19:53] Claire: A different note here. I think what you were speaking about earlier on the level of humanness and authenticity that comes with all of these efforts, that are mammoth efforts. Looking at the way Karat has approached this, you guys have taken a pretty vulnerable approach to sharing things beyond just the business level: about these creators’ lives, and about your own life. Have you received any hate or negative reactions to that? I’m sure not everybody is in your corner, but what’s the story been like there?

Eric: I think there’s 3 points worth mentioning here. The first is, for those of you who don’t know, at Karat we follow a 3-stage consideration funnel. The first is just brand value, top-level awareness: what is Karat, and can I trust it? A lot of the content we put out there has been podcasts where we interview other well-known famous creators. My focus in those has been let’s just get personal, let’s just be human, let’s be real. Instead of, let’s just try to push Karat 10x times. Because the goal is to get people to say wow, not only is Eric just a thoughtful and real human being, but I’m also getting to see these creators who I see their content on a regular basis as humans. That builds and engenders trust in Karat as a brand. Oh, Karat is real, these creators are coming on and doing something with Eric and getting really real, it’s something I should potentially look into.

Eric: Then we have other parts in the funnel. In that middle bucket, we have more content that’s around things like, what’s the difference between a debit card and a credit card? How do you build your credit history? How do you think about taxes? Then we have that last step of the funnel where we are actively speaking with people and saying hey, you should potentially consider coming onto Karat. The mix of these three all works out really well together. At the end of the day, you do need to be vulnerable. It’s this tricky balance of how vulnerable are you going to be? I’m a big believer that as a brand, you need to develop a differentiated point of view, especially as a startup. Potentially, the larger you get as a company, the more important it is to be brand safe. There’s so much legacy, there’s so much sunk cost. If you do something that pisses people off, the risks to your business are tremendous. But when you’re a startup, when you’re the upstart, the only thing you really have is that you care a lot and you’re trying really, really hard and are really focused. So you almost need to be willing to be a bit more pointed in your perspective. In our podcast we end up getting very real and personal around things like this is what I’m scared about, this is how I had to change and grow as a person, this is something that I’m still trying to figure out. There are people that probably won’t love it, and that’s ok, because it’s a minor trade-off to take for people who really, really care and are really, really into it.

Eric: The third point I’ll say is that even with that being said, there are still things I’ll never talk about live on air. So number one, yes, we have a funnel on top of a funnel. We do have this piece around just brand awareness. Whereas number two, you do have to be vulnerable and accept that some people won’t be happy. And number three, there’s always going to be things where everything we do on it is still considering how this reflects on Karat the company. It’s not about getting the most clicks and views as possible. We joke that if we really want to get a million YouTube followers we would just produce content of people dancing on the top part of this video and put subway surfers or whatever on the bottom part. That’s what you see on TikTok and it blows up. But like, so what? Those views are worthless because they’re not actually recruiting and engaging the types of clients that you want to work with.

Claire: It sounds like just having that hard boundary of “this is what we absolutely will not be sharing”, but anything else that might further what we are trying to accomplish with the broad audience, that’s on the table.

Choosing the Right Time to Launch a Content Strategy

[00:23:59] Claire: When did you start really homing in on that funnel? If you make that more applicable to the folks that are going to be listening in that are in the startup founder journey, when do you think this is something that folks should really be focusing on?

Eric: So, in the early days of Karat, we focused much more on community than content. Because again, content is what you do when you have community and you’re ready to scale it out. The same way you don’t want to invest a lot of money in sales and growth if your product isn’t a market fit. Don’t go super hard on content if you don’t even know what your brand is and what people care about. So in the early days, how we grew, it was literally my cofounder and I just going to conferences and events and meeting creators and pitching them. Really just trying to understand the 15 different problems they had, and then picking a few of them, going to them with prototypes and seeing are they interested, do they care. The card was our third or fourth try. We tried bookkeeping and taxes, we tried business capital. In 2020 we even went to creators and YouTubers and offered to try to get them PP. That’s literally free stimulus money, and creators would be like, what’s the catch, you scammer? You’re offering me free money, how are you going to screw me? And it was from those initial relationships we built with creators, where we actually built something they found helpful and appreciated. Then it was just about building organic relationships and friendships with them, where eventually over time, they would invite us to other events, they would connect us with other people. So we sort of built this very grassroots following even before we started to really focus on content.

Claire: So it doesn’t sound like it’s a, “oh, well we hit 15 full-time hires, so we knew we really needed to move forward with content.” It sounds like it was more of a hey, we noticed we were really resonating with our core group, and that kind of lesson, that kind of content, those kinds of conversations were gonna be valuable to folks who we haven’t been able to connect with IRL or on a deep, deep level.

Community Fails, Faceplants, and Foul-Ups

[00:28:10] Claire: What are the biggest content community fails that you’ve experienced or seen up to this point?

Eric: I think you have to be thoughtful about two or three things. Number one is the degree to which you rely on paid influencer sponsorships, influencer marketing. When people watch these, they usually know deep down it’s not organic, it’s not real, and so you can go into it immediately. But then you in a way might end up hurting your brand image and brand value because it was too soon. And people are like, well I’m just seeing this because you paid lots of money and don’t actually care about the product. At Karat, we made a principal decision early on not to do creator brand sponsorships. Our content is organic, so when a creator sees another creator talking about Karat and they reach out and ask what they think of Karat, the answer isn’t “oh I don’t know, they just pay me a lot of money to talk about it.” Instead it’s like oh yeah, Karat’s cool. And I’ve seen people who lean too soon into well, I have money, I need to produce venture-scale returns. Let me just deploy that money. Let me just buy influencer sponsorships, and there’s no ROI and it’s not successful.

Eric: To be clear: influencer sponsorships can be helpful as an amplification lever once you’ve already built some of that organic brand trust and value. But if no one’s ever heard of you before and you’re just blowing up everywhere, paid, it’s kinda like hmmm, I don’t know what’s going on.

Eric: I think the second thing you need to be very aware of is how hard do you sell. Again, that depends on the trust you have. In the early days we were literally trying to give away free money, PPP, but our brand value was negligible. The trust quotient required is very high. And so the more we tried to be like no! It’s real! It’s actually free money! The more people were like oh, go away and leave me alone and don’t talk to me, you giant scammer. So I do think you have to be thoughtful about how you do the sell.

Eric: The third thing when it comes to mistakes I’ve seen, you also can’t get too deep in the space. For example, I consider myself very lucky and privileged to have built real, organic friendships and relationships with many creators in the space. If I’m going to an event, I am conducting myself as the co-founder of Karat. I don’t even drink — you have to be very thoughtful and careful. So you might be getting to spend time with these people, but you’re trying to help and service them. I think I’ve also seen founders blur the lines. They think oh, it’s just customer development, I’m just spending time with them. You need to be cognizant and respectful of the fact that there’s also a business you’re representing in that context.

Claire: In such a high-trust-needed kind of product and field, that makes a lot of sense. Even though you want to create an environment of total trust and total relaxation amongst the community, you still have to add a bit of a layer of distance to it, in a way.

Eric: Yeah, and it helps, because we make mistakes all the time. And when we do, we go and explain them openly. And so I’m sure there are creators out there who are like yeah, Karat screwed this up. But I don’t think they’re like, …and they did it on purpose and they hate me! It’s that trust, it’s that respectfulness, it’s that professionalism that’s really important when you’re doing community and content.

Using Failure as a Learning Tool

[00:31:40] Claire: Recapping what you’re saying on that first point of seeing other folks almost cut themselves off before they even really have the chance to get started. I imagine a good amount of that is investor pressure and metrics because it takes time to understand and go through the failure process of what kind of content actually resonates with the folks that I’m trying to be close with.

Eric: Yeah. In a way, it’s a microcosm of how to think about a startup in general. When you do content, it’s just a question of when are you ready to scale? Which is a question of what do you have. I remember we went through Y-Combinator in the Winter 2020 batch, and for the entirety of Y-Combinator we were focused on a business capital product, almost like Clearco or Pipe for Creators. And we were showing good numbers, you have the classic hockey stick up and to the right. But Kevin and I sat down and were like, we just don’t think this is the long-term, sustainable business model we want to follow. Because whenever you’re providing capital, you face a lot of adverse selection if all you’re doing is capital and people haven’t heard of you before. Ideally if you go into capital you want that to be built on top of the product workflow they’re already in. It’s more like Shopify Capital, right? They’re using Shopify, Shopify has context and data on whether they could be good to provide capital, too. And we were just like, I don’t want to continue to just be this business capital provider.

Eric: And so we made the decision, before demo day, to actually completely pivot the company. We were like no, we don’t think this is it. We actually think it’s gonna be a card. And the deck that we raised money from, including investors that have stayed with us and invested in our most recent round today, the deck is literally like, creators are businesses, they’re real, they need help, we think this potential solution is really helpful. We got a lot of traction on it, then we realized it’s actually not the right thing, and so we’re gonna kill it and launch something totally different. We don’t really have any metrics or data to show you, so ignore the hockey stick graph we showed you in the last slide because we’re going to stop doing that. But we’re going to do this cool card thing, here’s a mockup, and we think it’s gonna work. The great thing about the venture ecosystem is that it’s not unusual to pitch when you’re early-stage. As an investor, you’d much rather have your founders be like “ok, I don’t think this is working,” and we try to do something different. As opposed to being like, “oh well, I’m stuck in it, it was working, this is what I’m gonna do now.” And so it worked out. But yeah, that’s the lesson we took away from content. Don’t go and make content about everything if you’re just like what are we even doing? What even is our brand? Do people even care about us? We took a couple of years before we started doing content.

What the Future Holds for Karat

[00:34:12] Claire: Before we wrap up here, I would love to hear about your future plans. What are we imagining in the crystal ball that is Karat? Whether that be change or growth of content creation. How do you continue to plan surprising and delighting your audience?

Eric: Goldman Sachs just released a market report saying that the creator economy is some absurdly high number, like over 500 billion in TAM. And at first glance you might think well that’s a lot of numbers, I wonder how they got there. But then you think about it and you’re like ok, fundamentally speaking, do I think people are going to make and watch more content going forward or less? And if they’re making more content, are there going to be more people finding ways to make money from that, or less? And are they going to have more problems, or fewer? If you believe the answer to all of those is yes, then it’s a big opportunity to solve these problems if I build a one-stop financial shop that helps creator businesses succeed and manage their money. That’s a billion-dollar opportunity. I always see it in the context of when I look at all of these market reports on the creator economy rising. Every single major change we’ve had in the last three years, whether it’s cultural or technological, has had something to do with content.

Eric: Let’s go through three off the top of my head. Number one, the emergence of TikTok. TikTok was all about making it easier for people to find and discover content, the realization was you could push it through an algorithm instead of a social network. The second thing that came after that was NFTs and crypto blowing up. And then there’s this central realization of oh, now there’s more ways to monetize the content you’ve made by proving ownership. And now even the recent focus on generative AI is like, oh, cool, now it’s easier than ever to make that content too. So really every major development in the last few years is all around easier to produce and find or make money or just make the content in the first place. I think that’s going to continue, and we want to be the financial provider ecosystem for this phenomenon.

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Commerce Ventures

Early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology innovators in the retail and financial services eco-systems.