Cherub Is Quietly Rewriting Who Gets To Own The Future
How Jaclyn Johnson is building the infrastructure for creators, angels, and founders to actually own what they build together.
For most of modern startup history, getting funded has depended less on the strength of your business and more on who you already knew. Jaclyn Johnson, the entrepreneur behind Create & Cultivate and now co-founder and CEO of Cherub, has described the traditional path to capital bluntly: if you didn't work in Silicon Valley, didn't go to a school like Wharton, and didn't have a parent already inside venture capital, the deals simply never made it to you. Not because you weren't ready. Because you were never in the room.
That's the problem Cherub was quietly built to solve, and it's why the platform deserves a much closer look from anyone who has ever felt locked out of a fundraising conversation they were more than qualified to be in.
What Cherub Actually Is
Cherub started, fittingly, on a hike. Johnson, already a prolific angel investor herself, was telling her now co-founder Angeline Vuong, formerly of Opendoor, about a deal she thought she'd love. Vuong's response was the whole thesis in one sentence: she wanted to write checks, she just had no idea where to find opportunities in the first place. Less than three percent of accredited angel investors actually invest, and the research behind Cherub suggests that isn't disinterest, it's access. So Johnson and Vuong built the access.
Today, Cherub functions as a full fundraising operating system. Founders build investor-ready data rooms, request warm introductions, and get discovered by a growing network that now includes more than 2,000 angel investors writing checks anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000. Over $12 million has already moved through the platform into early-stage companies. It's been described, accurately, as what Coinbase did for crypto, a way to take something that used to feel gatekept and intimidating and make it something you can actually walk into.
Turning Audience Into Ownership
What makes Cherub genuinely new isn't just the angel marketplace, it's the third seat at the table Johnson has built for creators. Through Cherub's newest tier, creators can move past the sponsored post entirely and take real equity in the brands their audience already trusts, whether that's advisory equity, sweat equity, or a stake earned through affiliate performance.
Johnson has watched this shift happen from the inside, both as an operator and as an investor who has personally backed more than twenty-five companies, including Sephora fixtures like Ceremonia and Crown Affair. Her read on why it's accelerating right now is refreshingly specific: marketing, not engineering, has become the most expensive line item on a founder's cap table. Early-stage VCs have started asking founders point-blank whether they have a creator involved before they'll write a check, because a creator with a genuinely aligned audience lowers customer acquisition cost and de-risks the entire raise.
But Johnson is also the first to push back on the sloppy version of this trend. Follower count isn't a qualification, alignment is. She tells founders to screen for creators whose audience already looks like their actual customer, to spell out real deliverables instead of vague promises to "post sometimes," and to size equity to genuine involvement, typically two percent or under for an advisory role, climbing toward five to ten percent when a creator is functioning closer to creative director or co-founder. Her rule cuts both ways: creators need to understand exactly what they're signing up for too, including the illiquidity and real risk that come with equity instead of a flat fee. As she's put it plainly, you cannot structure a creator relationship around assumptions, follower counts, and good vibes.
The Math That Could Change Who Gets Rich Next
For decades, the wealth created by a category-defining company flowed almost exclusively to founders and the venture firms who backed them early. Cherub is one of the first platforms making a serious, structural case that the people who build a brand's cultural relevance, the creators, the early customers, the community, deserve a stake in what they helped create, not just a flat fee for a post that disappears in 24 hours.
If that idea takes hold at scale, the implications reach far past any single cap table. Women already raise a fraction of total venture capital every year, and access to angel networks has historically mirrored the same old-boys infrastructure Johnson is trying to route around. A platform that funnels capital through creators and community members, rather than exclusively through institutional funds, has a real shot at closing that gap simply by changing who gets invited to invest, and who gets treated as investable in the first place.
It's worth asking, even speculatively, what happens if this actually works at scale. If enough small, culturally-backed businesses can raise real capital without ever sitting across from a traditional VC, does that eventually chip away at the dominance of the big, homogenous retail machines that only a handful of massive funders can bankroll? It's a genuinely open question, and maybe an overly optimistic one, but it's the kind of question a platform like Cherub is bold enough to make you ask.
Image via Pinterest.
Why This Belongs In Every Founder's Toolkit
Whether you're actively raising or years away from it, Cherub is worth understanding now, both as a resource and as a preview of where founder-investor relationships are heading. The businesses that will define the next decade won't just be well-funded, they'll be well-loved, with cap tables that reflect the actual community that built them.
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