Hello, Content Creators. Silicon Valley’s Investors Want to Meet You.

The online influencer culture is starting to draw serious interest from big venture capital firms. But the real money could be in digital tools, not the personalities.

Last summer, Tucker Schreiber, a 28-year-old co-founder of a start-up called Combo that was building a video editing platform, noticed a lot more emails in his inbox. Though his company had no employees and no products, and hadn’t even said it was looking for money, investors were sending him a stream of messages. “I started getting five to 10 inbound emails daily for a couple weeks straight from investors,” he said. Mr. Schreiber’s start-up was riding a boom in investors targeting the so-called creator or influencer economy. The boom in the creator economy itself has renewed interest in social media among venture capitalists, who for years thought there was little point to looking for social upstarts with the likes of Facebook and Snap (which owns Snapchat) sucking all the air out of the market.