The rise of the CEO-creator

Over the past decade, Jonathan Katz-Moses has built up a YouTube audience of 591,000 subscribers. Impressive, but there’s an even more impressive number attached to that platform presence. On the back of that YouTube channel, he has erected a profitable woodworking tools business that did nearly $6 million in revenue last year – and that just landed its first investment deal. 

Katz-Moses had initially followed the standard creator business playbook, relying on brand deals and affiliate sales for revenue. But he quickly decided that wasn’t the path for him.

“It just became very obvious that if I wanted to create something that was sustainable, was exit-able, was something that would support my family, that I had to do it myself. Because at that point, it was very clear I just owned a full-time job promoting things for other people,” said Katz-Moses.

That pivot is what ended up putting Katz-Moses on the radar of venture capital firm Slow Ventures. Slow Ventures is building up a portfolio of what venture partner Billy Parks dubbed “CEO-creators.” With a fund of $64 million, the VC firm has invested $2 million in Katz-Moses’s KM Tools in exchange for what Katz-Moses described as “a strong minority” stake in the business. 

“We target somewhere between 10% to 15% [stakes] when we do these investments at $1 million to $3 million. That’s our general range,” said Parks. “We don’t take board seats; we don’t have control. We want to find founders who are running their own shop.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was this always the plan, to be a creator and then have your own business and that be the main thing? As opposed to being a creator be the main thing?

Katz-Moses: Yes. Immediately this was my goal. From month six on YouTube is when I posted my first quote-unquote invention or product. I originally had done the YouTube to promote this because I had no other way to do it, no money. I thought that only mega-corporations were the ones who developed products. 

Creators much larger than me at that time were getting less [money for sponsorships] than I would just for using one of my products in a video and selling it. Then I started doing affiliate links; I said, “If I’m going to mention these products anyways, I should get a commission for it.” 

Then I started to see the numbers and had this epiphany. One year I did $3 million in affiliate sales for one company and another $10 million on Amazon, and I said, “I’m putting other people’s kids through college.” None of these companies invented these products. So I said, “I can do that.” And this thing grew into Katz-Moses Tools that you know today.

How many years into it did you go from the creator income being your primary income stream to KM Tools being your primary income stream?

Katz-Moses: Three years.

So that would be, what, 2018. It feels like around that time there was a rise of more creators launching their own businesses, not just merch lines. Emma Chamberlain launched Chamberlain Coffee in 2019. Was there something in the water in that era?

Katz-Moses: You know what happened? Amazon changed their affiliate commission structure. Amazon was paying 8% to 15% commissions at that time. And then all of a sudden, Amazon said, “Hey, look, we own the market. Why are we paying people to send people to somewhere they would go anyways?” So they cut affiliate structures down to less than a percent for a lot of things. And so suddenly there was a massive source of revenue for people just chopped out from under them. 

That was when there was a shift towards a heavier sponsorship model and a heavier desire to develop products. It just became very obvious that if I wanted to create something that was sustainable, was exit-able, was something that would support my family, that I had to do it myself. Because at that point, it was very clear I just owned a full-time job promoting things for other people.

Billy, at Slow Ventures you all are prioritizing creators like this, where they’re creators but that’s not their primary business. Why is that the focus?

Parks: What we’re seeing right now is that creators realize there are ways to make money with affiliate links, working with brands, and there’s ways to actually be a scaled media company. But to exit on that is really tough. Exiting a media company is really tough for digital talent. 

For Slow, we’re really looking for CEO-creators who want to build businesses that can be venture scale, which is to say, it’s fine if you’re making money with brands, but it can’t be your main focus. Our biggest signal is: Does this person want to build a business of scale?

Jonathan, how much revenue is KM Tools throwing off each year?

Katz-Moses: Last year were just below $6 [million]. We had a little bit of a dip during the trade war. It was essentially a two-month embargo on Chinese goods, and I don’t care what place in the supply chain you are in, it all leads back to China. We manufacture over 100 of our products here in Santa Barbara, but things like 3D printer filament, that comes from China. And so we took a little bit of a hit. But I do think we’re going to have a big growth year this year. I would love to hit eight figures this year. Realistically we might come just slightly shy, but we will see growth. And we’ve seen about 2x to 3x growth every year for 10 years now.

Profitable?

Katz-Moses: Yes. I mean, I bootstrapped this company. We’ve never taken an investment or loan until I met Billy. And that’s a scary thing to do. Part of the investment that was so attractive to me is we’d hit a glass ceiling. When you get to $6 million in revenue, you are outlying so much operational cash flow that you have to choose things like, do I let a popular product go out of stock so I can take the revenue from that last inventory and put it into product development? Or do I reinvest in things a lot of our customer base already has?

Slow’s investment was so cool because they said, “We just want you to cook. You’ve proven yourself, and we want to give you some money for the next phase.” 

Billy, what was it you saw in Jonathan’s business that led an investment to make sense?

Parks: We think in terms of team and theme. Team is Jonathan. He’s proven he’s put his money where his mouth is. He’s built a great business. He’s done it profitably. He has built team members. He’s brought on quality advisors. He’s built such a great backend that he’s actually working with other creators who have awesome product ideas that Jonathan helps them develop and takes them through the manufacturing and testing processes. 

And then the area that Jonathan is in with woodworkers is a very interesting areas. There are several businesses in that space doing more than $50, $60, $100 million. It’s a passion-niche area. This is an area where Jonathan can continue to be a leading voice in, support other members of the community and build a really scaled business that he has real industry expertise about.

Jonathan, how many employees do you have?

Katz-Moses: I’ve got a lot of employees now. 15-plus on payroll, and then another five to eight fractional [employees]. I just hired a fractional CMO. I’ve got product developers who may do their own thing as well. 

How do you think about the content creation side of your business going forward? You’re still putting out videos, but the cadence isn’t that regular. Is it something where there will be a day soon in which you’re not putting out videos? Or do you need to up the cadence now that you have this funding?

Katz-Moses: My first love is teaching and educating and giving people good advice. That is the thing I miss most about bootstrapping a large company is that was unceremoniously robbed from me. And the coolest thing about this investment is I get the opportunity to get that back. We have a huge plan for a content calendar. I just hired somebody yesterday who will be able to assist me in preparation for videos. We have a content team who’s really good at the marketing side of things. My CMO is coming in six days a week to shoot organic content with me. So we can build out a team of people who can help spread the gospel, if you will. 

If you lose touch with your customers, you lose touch with your products, you lose touch with your bottom line. It’s important to develop a loyal audience that trusts you. And so it is a very tricky tight rope to walk to say my entire revenue is based on products I sell, but I also need you to believe me when I talk about things. 

My cadence was destroyed because I grew a big business. But my absolute number-one goal is to get back to regularly posting on all the platforms.

What we’ve heard

“It feels like influencer content but that influencer is not posting it to their own audience. They are creating it and then turning it over to the brand to own outright.”

— Sway Group’s Danielle Wiley defining what “creator-generated content” is

Numbers to know

$39.99: Monthly subscription price for the ESPN+Fox streaming bundle that will launch Oct. 2.

$29.99: Monthly subscription price for ESPN’s standalone streaming service that will launch on Aug. 21.

$7.7 billion: How much Paramount will pay over 7 years for U.S. rights to UFC fights starting next year.

~$1.6 billion: How much ESPN will pay over 5 years for U.S. rights to WWE tentpole events, including WrestleMania.

3.4 million: Number of streaming subscribers that Warner Bros. Discovery gained in the second quarter of 2025.

10.4 million: Number of streaming subscribers that AMC Networks had at the end of Q2 2025, the same count as the end of 2024.

What we’ve covered

YouTube’s deliberate pace on scalable creator ads raises eyebrows among marketers:

• YouTube is lagging behind other platforms when it comes to letting brands running creators’ videos as ads.
• Three marketers told Digiday that YouTube’s scalable creator ad products, such as BrandConnect, were more complex and less seamless than other platforms’ options

Read more about YouTube’s creator ads here.

Dentsu’s latest deal signals rising holdco interest in NIL creators:

• The Japanese agency group will use MOGL’s matchmaking service to source college athlete creators for brand deals.
• MOGL’s platform is connected to 30,000 college athlete creators across 1,100 U.S. universities.

Read more about NIL creators here.

Live shopping companies credit marketers’ rising focus on influencer performance for growth in 2025:

• TikTok and Whatnot have reported shopping sales growth in 2025.
• Live shopping platform Fanatics said an undisclosed number of people purchase an average of 17 items per month on its platform.

Read more about live shopping here.

WTF is brands’ new investment in creator-generated content?:

• Unlike user-generated content, this content type refers to content that brands hire creators to make and that is distributed on brands’ own channels.
• It’s basically creator as ad agency versus creator as independent media entity.

Read more about creator-generated content here.

What we’re reading

Why the NFL now owns part of ESPN:

The NFL may have been motivated to take a 10% stake in ESPN in order to prop up a traditional rights holder and preserve competition against tech giants that may feel less pressure to bid up the price to air games, according to Stratechery.

Why Disney is folding Hulu’s standalone service:

Disney spends roughly $3 billion a year on Hulu’s non-programming costs, and it’ll save much of that money from folding Hulu into Disney+, according to Variety.

Paramount’s Skydance era:

Paramount, a Skydance Corporation — which is apparently the new name for the company formerly called ViacomCBS — has finally sold itself off and now needs to sort out how to cut $2 billion in costs under David Ellison’s ownership, according to The New York Times.

Google’s CTV ad sales shift:

Google no longer requires streaming services on its Google TV CTV platform to give the company a share of ad inventory to sell and instead is simply asking for a cut of ad revenue, in a sign of Google’s struggle to scale up Google TV, according to The Verge.