Investor Highlight: Celebrity VCs

Reviewing the deal sheets of each day’s investments makes all the deals start to look the same to me. “Tiger Global invests in another software company doing X, making it worth Y.” So to mix it up, there's nothing like stirring up traditional VC like throwing in a celebrity name such as Ashton Kutcher, Serena Williams, or Katy Perry onto the cap table. It’s a bit of a thrill to see two seemingly incompatible industries -- celebrity and VC -- come together. But then again, celebrities are masters at participating in the cultural economy and carry their own clout, making them ideal investors. Today we’re looking at the increasingly commonplace celebrity-turned-investor.

                       Serena Williams celebrating one of her VC investments through Serena Ventures

Heartthrob VC
I was first introduced to Ashton Kutcher as a bell-bottom jean-wearing lovable fool on That Seventies Show. US Weekly images of him wearing Von Dutch trucker hats and his marriage to Demi Moore were frequent tabloid fodder. Now we're more likely to see him on the cover of Forbes. Since 2010, he has been a regular venture capitalist with his own firm, A-Grade Investments, turning $30MM into $250MM in early investments in Airbnb and Uber. He now primarily invests as an angel investor and has participated in rounds totaling $3.1BN overall. Check out his latest investments here.

Celebrity Causes...like Canada
Roping a celebrity into a deal can mean appealing to that celebrity personally. For celebrities Drake, Ryan Reynolds, and Kelly Olynyck of the Houston Rockets, that cause was their motherland, Canada. Wealthsimple reached out for the company's May round of $750MM in funding. The company tapped homegrown celebs who would want to contribute to growing large brands in Canada. 

Changing the landscape
For many celebs, the demographics of VC investing are reason enough to bring their hard-earned cash to the table. Jay-Z, Serena Williams, and Pharrell all seek to invest in Black entrepreneurs, who as a group currently capture only 1% of all VC investments. Jay-Z takes a particular interest in investing in black-owned cannabis companies. As he told the WSJ, ​​“We were the ones most negatively affected by the war on drugs, and America has turned around and created a business from it that’s worth billions.” Serena Williams recently invested in Black-owned Esusu, which uses rental payments as markers of creditworthiness for people to build better credit, faster.