#239 – A New Golden Age for Creatives and Founders with Li Jin of Variant

What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these n d hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Li Jin. Li, how's it going? Good. It's nice to be here again. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It's nice to have you. I think you were last on the show in February. It's It's about ten months ago. And I think I introduced you as the patron saint of the Passion Economy back then. So the Passion Economy, very similar to the creator economy. It's a sort of explosion of individuals moving on to the Internet and making a living online by creating things, whether it's YouTube videos or tweets or blog posts or courses. But since then, you've had a lot of stuff going on. You've raised a lot of money. You've been investing more money than ever. Even at the New York Times, you're really cool, sort of huge profile on you. And they called you the investor guru for online creators. So maybe that's your your new title. What was that experience you want? Called me the it girl in venture capital, which which people have really glommed on to, hilariously. The it girl in venture capital. It's it's a lot. It felt nerve wracking and exciting. It's one of those moments that I think you never even allow yourself to envision can happen because it's just so far fetched and feels like, you know, how many people really get the privilege of being profiled in such a international forum like that. But it was an awesome experience. I did it remotely. I was calling in from Greece, Athens at the time. Taylor Lorenz wrote it up. She is an amazing reporter who I have learned so much from over the past few years. I think she's really on the cutting edge of writing a lot about the topics that I care about, but from a news angle. And so it was just really, really such an honor and a privilege to be written about by her. What is that process like of being profiled by, like, a huge newspaper? Is that, like, is it, like, an arduous thing, or is it, like, super quick, efficient, like a podcast recording? Well, it is pretty extensive behind the scenes. A lot of it, I did not even see because, essentially, what happened was I had, you know, a normal conversation kind of like this with her. But then after that, she contacted and talked to a lot of people who had interacted with me or worked with me over many years. It was it's kind of like getting a new job, and then, your employer is …