li jin

Today’s guest is Jennifer Phan - co-founder of Passionfroot - a platform empowering creators to partner directly with brands and agencies to monetise their product and services, be it a podcast, a newsletter or YouTube channel.

Born to immigrant parents, Jen started her career as VC investor before seeing a gap in the market for creators who are trying to earn money directly from their work. Passionfroot takes care of the admin and business side of earning a living from your work and helps to remove the barriers and gate keepers which have historically been in place and held many creators back.

In this conversation, Jen and I discuss the wave of creators turned entrepreneurs, why she wants to empower creators anywhere in the world, what the next frontier for creator entrepreneurs looks like, as well as some of the platforms she recommends to help you grow your community.

This is a great conversation with lots of fantastic lessons for founders and creators so I hope you get as much value out of it as I did.

Please let us know what you think of this episode and please rate, review and share - it means the world to me and helps others to find it too.

Jennifer on Twitter / Passionfroot website / Passionfroot Podcast, Creators on Air here / Newsletter here

Danielle on Twitter @daniellenewnham and  Instagram @daniellenewnham  / Newsletter here

In this episode of DAOn the Rabbit Hole, we’re talking to Li Jin, Co-Founder and General Partner at Variant Fund as well as a podcaster, writer, and educator. Li’s here to talk about DAOs and the creator economy.

Li tells us about her journey into crypto investing from her background in venture capital and defines what is meant by terms like the ownership economy and creator economy. She talks about the “Web 3.0 Renaissance” and how decentralization can reward creators.

We talk about 100 True Fans, the idea that the value of attention is more important than the amount of attention. Li talks about how DAOs and community ownership fit into the new creator economy.

Can the ownership economy help tackle wealth inequality and reconfigure the relationship between capital and labor? Li dives into this topic. She also shares some examples of communities that are doing a great job of co-creating and co-owning with fans.

We discuss some of the potential challenges facing community ownership, and things that could go wrong. Li shares some of the reasons creators might hesitate about joining the Web 3.0 economy. Finally, Li shares her thoughts on what the creator economy could look like ten years from now.

To continue this conversation and stay up to date on all things DAOn the Rabbit Hole, you can follow Diana @ddwchen, Anay @anay_sim, and RabbitHole @rabbithole_gg on Twitter. You can also follow our guest, Li Jin, on Twitter @ljin18.

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If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, subscribe, and share with your friends and family so we can keep taking you down the rabbit hole with us. 

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. In very good Show News™, Chris is back! He's working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. Get hype!

Today though, we had a delectable dish of dynamic doings, namely news items of the following persuasion:

• Bitcoin broke the $50,000 barrier, something that we wanted to talk about. Especially in light of Coinbase's $77 billion valuation. Natasha walked us through some growth metrics, and Alex was sad that he isn't already retired. Danny remains a full-on crypto bull.
• And on the blockchain thing, Blockchain.com raised $120 million, proving that there is huge amounts of capital available for the guts-and-bolts tooling of the bitcoin world.
• Li Jin, who coined the term 'passion economy', has closed her debut $13 million fund for startups within the same category. She joined other investors in our latest survey on the creator economy's changing tides. 
• Off of $1 million in ARR, Circle has brought on $4 million in funding at a valuation north of $40 million.
• A16z invested in Stir, which helps creators manage and view their various income streams. The funding total was not disclosed, but is reportedly valuing the company, still in beta, at $100 million.
• TalkShopLive brought on new cash for live video shopping. 
• Pipe17 closed an $8 million round that caught our eye. By building a service to help smaller ecommerce operations connect their tooling to one another, the company is betting on smaller ecommerce needing pipes to link up their various software services. This reminded us of Alloy, another neat company in ecommerce automation that also recently raised money.
• From there we riffed on the software market itself, its size, and the potential for investors to loosen their rules of intra-portfolio competition.
• Public raised $220 million, OutSystems raised $150 million, and Ally.io raised $50 million.
• Finally, a wave of edtech startups is over Zoom University and hopes to create much, much better. alternative.

Credits: Equity is hosted by TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm and Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

Li Jin is an investor who focuses on the Passion Economy, a term that she coined herself that means this new economy where individuals monetize their skills. Li has been interested in and an active participant in the Passion Economy for years now. She embraced early blogging platforms and has recently launched a podcast of her own.

With a degree in statistics from Harvard and work experience in strategy at Capital One and product management at Shopkick, Li had a well-rounded background that took her to Andreessen Horowitz where she invested in early stage consumer tech companies and developed her thesis around the Passion Economy. She recently left to start her own firm (Atelier Ventures) where she could focus exclusively on early stage founders in the Passion Economy.

Li has an incredible perspective on the industry and a very different vantage point than most of the people we have on this podcast. She is able to look at the industry from a ten thousand foot view and share learnings that she has gleaned from her work with entrepreneurs across all verticals.

Bottom line, Li dispenses incredible advice and this is a must-listen episode for anyone in or interested in the Passion Economy. (That means you creators).


For more on Li:
Subscriber to her newsletter (https://li.substack.com/)
Learn more about about Atelier Ventures
Follow her on Twitter (https://twitter.com/ljin18)

For more about Trove:
@trovebusiness
www.trovebusiness.com