Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home.

I'm Brian McCullough.

For years, you'll remember I quoted Josh Constein on this podcast because he was one of the breaking newsiest folks over at

Tech Crunch for years. Well, now Josh has gone the well-worn TC to VC route and is a principal at Signal Fire. I noticed Josh had his name

on a Signal Fire report that was looking at the Creator ecosystem, not as some sort of

weird outlier, but as an actual mature economy.

It's the best breakdown I've seen of the Creator economy overall, as you'll hear us say extensively in a minute. It's currently the fastest growing

category of startup business. So I called up Josh to discuss the report. It's linked

in the show notes if you want to read it for yourself, but listen to this episode.

If you're not taking creators seriously as entrepreneurs and as a category of startup,

you're missing the boat on something big.

Enjoy. Enjoy.

Josh, so we're going to talk about this report, which is Signal Fires Creator Economy

market map, and I might end up in this episode essentially just

reading you data points from it which is kind of fine because like it there's so

much fascinating data in here but the main

reason why I wanted to talk about this is because I think people continue to

think of creators and like the creator economy as just some like sort of Mickey Mouse stuff.

But your data shows in really quantifiable ways that this is

this is already and becoming more so a real industry.

So let's just start with a sort of high-level takeaway from your report and maybe why the report was commissioned in the first place.

Sure, so the big takeaway here is that there are now 50 million creators.

...