Sasha Kaletsky and cousin Casper Lee started investing together in 2019, launching a creator-focused syndicate that let high-follower creators co-invest without fees. They eventually formalized it into Creative Ventures, a VC fund that raises from institutional LPs instead, though creators still participate when it makes sense.
So is it by choice that these creators are not your LPs, or did you do it on purpose? Was that—
we did it on purpose, yeah. So, so, you know, I'll tell the story of it basically. We started, we started in 2019 investing together, Casper and I. Casper is a content creator, grew a big audience, created quite a large business called influencer.com, which does influencer marketing for a lot of big enterprises. They employ like 150 people. It's quite a big company now. And he's co-founded various other businesses as well. So he's got the creator thing and the founder thing. And we were cousins, so we started investing together. And we created an investment club. It was called Creative Investment Club. I was working full-time in private equity at the time. And we invited other creators to come and invest with us. Like people with over a million followers could come join us to the deals we were investing in. We didn't charge any fees or carry, or we weren't trying to profit from it in the short term. We were just trying to invest in the best businesses, and we figured that having a load of value-add people investing with us could help us get into those kinds of deals.
So it did start with creators?
Exactly. So you— yeah, so you're right. So we did that back in 2019 as a side gig. We did some deals, we got lucky with some of them, some of them went well, and we developed a good track record. And so then we started thinking, okay, maybe we can turn this into a venture capital fund. So I left my job in private equity to go start this fund, which we renamed from the terrible name Creative Investment Club to call it Creative Ventures. Much better name. It was so cringy having it, by the way. Having a terrible name for your startup is the worst thing ever because every single time you introduce yourself, it's like makes you embarrassed. You know what I mean? You cringe every time you say it. Can you imagine how bad that is?
I can, I can. But how— How are you guys like, yeah, good to go? This is it.
On the— yeah, well, actually, to be honest, we— I've skipped out a whole nother even worse name that we had called Creator Collective Capital, which was halfway through. But that, that we just like erased that in the history of the— yeah, so that was, that was bad. But so in any case, so then we started, then we launched our venture fund, which Casper and I are the co-founders of, and that we invest in consumer internet startups. Our LPs are not creators. Our LPs are funds of funds, family offices, other VCs, my old colleagues, and, you know, people like that. And then in terms of creator involvement, we still sometimes invest with creators from time to time when there's some value they can add, but it's not like a formal thing. It's more of an unstructured thing.
So did you figure that creators weren't making the best business partners after that attempt of syndicating your way through to then build a fund?
No, creators were really good investment partners for us. Creators, I think creators add a lot of value when doing investments, but I don't think it's good for a VC fund to be reliant on them.
