Thread by @david_perell

The career path of a creator has three stages:

1) Discovery: Hone your craft and find the idea you want to be known for.

2) Income: Ditch the corporate world and become financially independent.

3) Equity: Get ownership in a business that’ll grow without your daily involvement.

The playbooks for the discovery and income phases have mostly been written: be prolific, attract an audience, and build a Personal Monopoly.

But right now, there are few paths towards generational wealth and escaping the day-to-day grind.

That’s where the attention is shifting.

Open questions:

1) When will the first creator IPO?

2) How can we normalize the “Chief Evangelist” role at companies so creators get equity in startups?

3) Can creators build generational wealth without managing a big team?

4) What are the leading causes of creator burnout?

Productizing yourself brings you into the income phase.

But once you’re earning a living, your attention shifts to scale. You become a systems-designer. At that point, you can either hire a team or become a jack of all trades — which will hurt your creativity.

(h/t @naval)

Just as the finance world has strategies to diversify people’s investments, the creator world needs strategies to diversify people’s livelihood.

Multiple platforms. Multiple identities. Multiple revenue streams.

If concentration builds wealth, diversification preserves it.

Right now, my entire career is devoted to helping creators move through these three phases: discovery, income, and equity.

As a sector of the economy, creators don’t have the language or the frameworks to think intelligently about what they’re doing — so they mostly wing it.

When you start as a creator, your production volume is driven by sheer tenacity.

But if you’re going to increase both the quality and quantity of what you publish, you need systems. That’s when you start creating intellectual supply chains and standard operating procedures.

Many creators get stuck on this transition to building systems because it‘s such a foreign way of thinking.

Instead of seeing yourself as an artist, you start seeing yourself as a business. And that‘s a foreign mindset for most creators, who enjoy the work of craftsmanship.

Open questions:

5) How can creators port their real-name audience into a pseudonymous one without losing clout?

6) What will virtual, team-run creators look like? The style guide will be the product, like NPR and the New Yorker which transcend any individual.

(h/t @balajis)

I've been thinking about ways to match creators with a vision for a startup with entrepreneurs who can build it.

Creators should get the benefits of equity without the downside of operations. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs benefit from the creator's audience.

(h/t @businessbarista)

The world we’re moving into is going to look a lot more like this series of tweets from @MrBeast: creator investing is going to normalize and influencers with reach are going to blow up the creators they give money to