Welcome to the Slow Creator Fund,
@StevenBartlett! He’s taking on the challenge of bridging technology and consumer impact—and bringing his 13+ million-strong audience along for the ride.
“The story of entrepreneurship is being rewritten.” -
@mmlightcap
A reminder of how we're underwriting this new asset class of Creators:
CREATOR: Steven is both a proven operator and a first-rate creator. He spent 6 years building his first company to a multi-hundred-million-dollar valuation before creating one of the largest media platforms in the world, reaching tens of millions of subscribers. He has demonstrated an exceptional ability to leverage his media platform to inspire audiences, accelerate his ventures, and secure preferential deal terms for his investments. Beyond hosting The Diary of a CEO, Steven travels globally to meet guests while simultaneously scaling his media enterprise — launching spin-off shows, incubating companies, authoring books, and more. He has built a world-class team, including a dedicated “Failure Team” focused solely on rapid experimentation and new product testing — a unique structure that institutionalizes innovation inside a creator-led company.
COMMUNITY: Steven’s content centers on business, entrepreneurship, and personal growth, featuring long-form conversations with founders, CEOs, and cultural thinkers to explore not just what they know but how they became who they are. Through these conversations, he has cultivated an intensely loyal, intellectually curious community united by a shared drive for self-improvement and progress. His flagship show, The Diary of a CEO, is now the world’s second-largest interview podcast, with more than 13 million YouTube subscribers and 70 million monthly views/downloads. The show surpassed one billion total streams across all platforms by late 2024 and, as of October 2025, exceeded one billion YouTube views alone. It remains the #1 podcast in the UK and Europe, adding roughly 600K new YouTube subscribers each month and achieving a 500% compound annual growth rate — making it one of the fastest-growing media properties globally.
MARKET: Steven sits at the intersection of modern media, entrepreneurship, and personal growth. His platforms attract an audience of affluent and aspirational professionals, founders, and creators — a demographic highly attractive to sponsors and advertisers. Data from this high-signal audience also fuels Steven’s incubation efforts, enabling him to identify trends and launch new B2B and B2C ventures with built-in demand. For example, he recently launched FlightCast, a podcast hosting platform built for video that simplifies distribution and analytics across platforms (Steven uses this technology for his own video podcasts). Together, these initiatives position Steven as both a leading voice and an infrastructure builder in the fast-expanding creator economy.
BUSINESS DILIGENCE: Steven’s business is comprised of three complementary pillars: a global media franchise monetized through sponsorships and partnerships, reaching tens of millions across multiple shows and platforms, an incubation arm that builds and launches new B2B and B2C businesses informed by insights from his audience and own entrepreneurship experience, and an investment fund with more than 40 portfolio companies including SpaceX, Whoop, and Lovable. These pillars create a powerful flywheel where audience insights from the media ecosystem inform business incubation and investment decisions – compounding both impact and system-wide enterprise value over time.
🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT: Today I’m excited to announce we’ve closed a major investment to build the Disney of the creator economy!
In 2017, on my way home from work I picked up a $100 mic from the Apple Store, went home, plugged it into GarageBand, opened my diary and started talking about the things inside it.
I edited the episode (terribly) and published it as a podcast called “The Diary Of A CEO”.
That decision changed the course of my life…
💡 That’s the day I became a “creator”.
It cost me $100 and a laptop to start my own show and build my own audience in 2017.
Thirty years earlier, in 1992 when I was born, I would have needed millions in funding, a warehouse full of broadcast equipment, and - most expensively - permission from network executives who controlled the only distribution channels that had any reach!
WE NO LONGER NEED PERMISSION TO CREATE! 👊🏾
A seismic shift is underway in the “attention economy” and I don’t think most people realise how profound it is...
When attention shifts from institutions to creators, everything shifts: how elections are won (as we saw in the last US election cycle), how society is shaped, how companies are built (funds are now investing in distribution not ideas), and how capital is allocated (we’re seeing the rise of creator-investors / funds).
The new centre of gravity is not the institution, it’s the individual creator.
🏰 For the last century, companies like Disney demonstrated the power of a single piece of intellectual property.
🐭 They built a global empire by taking a character like Mickey Mouse and building a universe around him - films, theme parks, and merchandise.
💸 This created a flywheel of immense, compounding value which changed the course of the last century.
We are building the modern version of this model.
But in our world, the IP is not a fictional character.
The Creator is the new franchise.
Our mission is to turn individual creators into global brands with the same scale and impact as Disney - but in the modern internet era. We focus on three core pillars: Creator Media (like The Diary Of A CEO), Creator Ventures (their products and companies), and the Creator Technology (like Flightcast) that powers it all.
We’re already powering some of the world’s most exciting creators and today we're announcing a major 8-figure strategic investment into Steven . com at a $425m valuation that brings some of the world's most forward-thinking investors and many of my favourite founders on board to build this future with us!
Thank you to all of you for the support and encouragement over the years ❤️ and to my 100+ colleagues who are building this future alongside me.
If you want to join us on this mission, please let me know below! 👇🏾