Happy Nice Mall

Cody Ko, a YouTube star with 5.7 million subscribers, found himself in trouble in May. Two different start-ups wanted to give him stock, and he was worried that these were potentially competitive deals.

Mr. Ko sought out someone he trusted for advice: Li Jin.

Ms. Jin, a venture capitalist, suggested that Mr. Ko, 30, be honest and forthright with the founders of both startups about potential conflicts of interest. He agreed and followed only one of the deals.

He said about Ms. Jin, “If I need something, I never hesitate to reach out.”

If there’s such a thing as an It Girl in venture capital these days, 31-year-old Ms. Jin fills the bill. It sits at the intersection of startup investments and a fast-growing ecosystem of online creators, both of which are extremely hot. And when he started his own venture firm, Workshop InitiativesJust last year and raising a relatively small $13 million for a fund, Ms. Jin was among the first investors in Silicon Valley to take influencers seriously and has written about and supported creators for years.

A Harvard graduate inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Ms. Jin is also aggressively pro-worker. He made it clear in podcasts and the Substack newsletter that creators should have the same rights as other employees. Among the ideas he advocated “universal creative income”, which guarantees creators a basic amount of money to live on.

big now Venture capital firms flock to impressive start-upsand as Facebook, YouTube and others promote $1 billion creator fundMs. Jin’s track record has made her a business guru for many digital stars trying to navigate the rapidly changing landscape.

Hank Green, 41, one of the top creators on YouTube and TikTok, said he often exchanged ideas with him on the phone. Markian Benhamou, 23, a YouTuber with more than 1.4 million subscribers, thanked him for understanding what the creators were going through. Marina Mogilko, 31, a YouTube creator in Los Altos, California, said that Ms. Jin “started the entire creator economy movement in Silicon Valley.”

“For years, he was talking about the creative economy before anyone else,” said Jack Conte, co-founder and CEO of Patreon, a crowdfunding site for creators. “He really sees the future before other people.”

Ms. Jin, who has invested in Substack and Patreon, said that although her fund is small, she plans to invest all the money in companies that are transforming working online. “Everything I invest in is a creatively driven company,” he said. “I think the impact I had was huge relative to dollar amounts.”

His credibility has increased as he also operates as a creator. Ms. Jin posts frequently on the Substack newsletter, leads an online course that teaches creators how to invest in startups, and Side Bustle Stack, a free resource to help influencers find and evaluate platforms to benefit from.

Born in Beijing, Ms. Jin immigrated with her family at the age of 6 to the United States, where her father earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Pittsburgh. His father said his first years in the country were poor, until he dropped out of school and found a job. Her family eventually settled in Upper St., with a population of about 20,000 outside of Pittsburgh, where Ms. Jin went to public school and enjoyed painting and writing. Moved to Clair.

He studied English at Harvard and continued his creative pursuits. However, at the insistence of her family, who said she “wanted financial security for me,” Ms. Jin switched her major to statistics and did banking and corporate marketing internships. After briefly working at Capital One after college, she moved to Silicon Valley at the age of 23 to work as a product manager at Shopkick, a shopping rewards app.

In 2016, Ms. Jin landed at Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Back then, the firm focused on investing in marketplaces like Airbnb. rapperThe Instacart of Latin America.

Ms. Jin was amazed at how the different marketplaces work and wrote productively About them for the Andreessen Horowitz blog. He also began to consider how different the different marketplace systems were. can evolve to help people start a business online.

This led Ms. Jin to defend her impressive industry. He said it feels personal to watch creators struggle to earn their living online, while also saying that he sees great potential in online businesses and creators as a business.

Influencers said his endorsement made sense. “Being at that big company and saying this, ahh, it felt like someone was finally saying it,” said YouTube star Mr. Green.

When coronavirus pandemic It was a hit last year and the world is increasingly online, Ms. Jin has an opportunity.

“I felt that Covid would be a very accelerator for people who want to be online-based work and entrepreneurs,” he said. “I realized that I had the opportunity to launch an entirely new fund devoted to this thesis and to be at the forefront of advancing the nature of labor and work on the Internet.”

In May 2020, Andreessen left Horowitz and founded Atelier Ventures. Since then, he has invested in creator-related startups such as PearPop, which allows influencers to profit from their social interactions, and Stir, which helps creators manage their finances. One of the few investors that big influencers know by name.

“If you talk to anyone working in the creative economy, they all say, ‘Oh, you need to talk to Li Jin,'” said 23-year-old Jasmine Rice, a former OnlyFans influencer who started a platform. Fanhouse, which Ms. Jin invested last year.

Ms. Jin also publicly criticized the funding that YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat offer influencers to create content for their platform. to the technology industrystop celebrating“funds to them”bread and circusesHe argued that creators should have ownership over the platforms that monetize them.

Ms. Jin said, “Without ownership, creators are ultimately enriching and empowering *someone* – the platform owners – with their work. tweeted out In June.

Ms. Jin said platforms should “take care not to recreate a ton of economic inequality that exists in the broader economy, rather than really empowering the next generation of online entrepreneurs.” He called a podcast he co-hosted “The Means of Creation,” a play on Marx’s means of production.

His views have made him a subject of admiration in the tech industry and left-wing political spaces. Responses to social media posts are full Humor implying that he is a socialist. Ms. Jin said she was mostly amused by the uproar.

“I’m very careful not to use that word, the S word,” he said of socialism. “Unnecessarily polarizing in the USA”

Ms. Jin said she also believes in crypto networks as they are decentralized and “aim to transfer control and ownership to their users.” We recently launched Mirror, a decentralized streaming platform, and “metadata store“helping people in developing countries make money playing video games. He has also worked with creators to print and sell their artworks. NFTs, or immutable tokens.

“All my life there has been a simmering awareness that the world is unfair and we need to push it in the direction of justice and fairness,” he said.

Since founding Atelier Ventures, Ms. Jin has moved away from Silicon Valley and raised her funds from her childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh. This summer, she was nomad and roaming the world surrounded by changing internet stars, artists, Gen Z tech founders and crypto pioneers.

In July, the founders of NFT platform OpenSea hosted a packed happy hour on a New York City rooftop on internet culture and techies, including product workers and other investors from TikTok and Twitter. He flew from New York to Paris for a crypto conference and hosted a “creator lounge” in a Left Bank cafe.

He then flew to Greece at the invitation of Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, and later attended a beach dinner with Emma Watson, Nicky Hilton, and others. Brilliant Minds Foundation.

Last month, she went to her Pittsburgh home to reunite and reflect.

“It’s so impossible for me to be here,” Ms. Jin said, “I was born in Beijing, speaks Chinese as my first and only language, and something brought me to the United States, and now I have the tools to have a voice and an impact.”