From Vice, November 12:
She gets $1.7 million. Sam Lessin’s venture firm gets 5% of her creator earnings for 30 years. “it's def not indentured servitude,” he says.
For decades now, Sam Lessin has been ruminating on an idea: What if instead of investing in companies, you could invest in people? What if Lessin could apply the venture capital model to human beings, allowing talented young thinkers to exchange traditional debt for freedom?
When he first tried as a young man to create a company based around this idea near the turn of the century, he admits, the world was not ready for such a proposal. “People thought I was complete loony,” Lessin told Motherboard over Zoom. So in the intervening years, he worked at Bain and Company and co-founded two tech startups, one of which was acquired by Facebook in 2010, after which Lessin became vice-president of product management at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant, and then a venture capitalist.
But he couldn’t entirely shake the idea. And as the creator economy began to evolve into a real industry in recent years, he saw his chance to put his idea into motion. Earlier this year, his venture firm, Slow Ventures, set aside $20 million to invest in creators themselves. Now the firm has gone and done it, joining a few individual investors in spending $1.7 million in the future of Marina Mogilko, a 31-year-old YouTube personality with multiple popular channels that touch on topics like life in Silicon Valley and learning new languages. (Slow Ventures is also investing in “serial entrepreneurs” like the Liberman siblings, at least two of which are coincidentally individual investors in Mogilko.)
The decision to invest directly in humans brings about a host of legal, ethical, and moral questions that Lessin will surely need to confront head-on. The idea that someone might sign a 30-year employment contract and that society should explicitly value a human brings up questions of indentured servitude and worse—claims which Lessin sees as entirely ill-founded. (“it's def not indentured servitude,” he recently wrote in response to someone who said the legal issues seemed “daunting.”) He believes that he is setting society on a path where we are free to invest in our favorite humans through multiple venture rounds, providing young, brilliant people with the money to fund a path to success that doesn’t exist today....
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