What is the potential for creators in the payments sector, and how does Stir fit within this space?

Payments is interesting as a wedge for creators because it's how they get paid. Sitting in the money flow is always a very compelling place to be for any business and arguably any human.

Stir came together because I was looking to build financial products for creators. Joe, the CEO, got introduced to me by my friend Brian at Forerunner. He got introduced to me as a smart person who was thinking about the creator space.

Joe did an amazing job of spending time with creators, managers, and other people in the ecosystem, from editors to producers. He made this discovery that all these creators were essentially running small businesses, and they were hiring people, and paying people, and they were having to split the money that was coming to them from a brand deal or from YouTube across all these different folks. Splitting the money was an incredible pain in the butt, and not only that, they had to pay a fee—mostly through PayPal, and they had to pay it every time they interacted with anybody else.

That was happening because they were running on these rails that were not designed for business use cases and were not feature-rich to that point.

The insight there was that there was this whole category of creators that we all know are making tons of money out there in the world and that they just operate very differently. They get paid via brand deals, so revenue comes in very lumpy. It operates a little bit like the movies, where you might assemble a set of producers that are working with you, and if someone's not available, you maybe need to add another person or add someone that's going to do graphics and so on. All that work is very, very complex to do on the back-end.

What we found at Stir is that if you build a product that's really tailored for that use case, you see really strong adoption because people show up, and they know it's built for them. Then you're just scaling as creators scale and the number of platforms they want to be on scale.

Stir has ended up being a really exciting business. And that approach, focusing on starting with where the money is, is generally a very good rubric for doing customer discovery and product discovery.