Jake Paul Takes Me Inside His $180M Venture Fund: ‘I Live, Breathe and Sleep This’

Over lunch in L.A. last week, Jake Paul told me the secret to his next act: “If you own the attention and you own the distribution, then the rest is history.”

Paul, 29, is now trying to prove that thesis in venture capital. Anti Fund, the investment firm he launched with entrepreneur Geoff Woo in 2021, has more than $180 million under management, can write checks ranging from $250,000 to $30 million, and holds stakes in OpenAI, Anduril, The Boring Company, Polymarket and more than three dozen other companies.

It’s an unlikely evolution for someone who became famous as a teenage Vine star and spent years being dismissed as an internet provocateur and general knucklehead. But the very thing once seen as a liability — his brash journey from YouTube to the boxing ring to the Trump White House, with a massive audience following along — has become in today’s upside-down media also his edge.

And he’s hardly alone. Across the creator economy, top figures are increasingly trying to turn fleeting attention into something more durable: equity.

Earlier this month, Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett announced he’d teamed with Authentic Brands Group — owner of more than 50 retail brands, including Reebok, Eddie Bauer and Drake’s OVO — to invest up to $400 million in creator businesses.

And on Monday night I attended a private dinner in Beverly Hills hosted by Cherub, the two-year-old investing platform from Create & Cultivate founder Jaclyn Johnson, where the theme was helping creators turn their audience into ownership. Creators, Johnson told the crowd, have “the power, the distribution and the trust” that startups often look for. Leveraging those skills, they can transform their influence into generational wealth. It’s risky, yes — over half of all early-stage investments fail. But make a bet on the right business, and you’ve got yourself a retirement plan.

Today, Paul takes me inside his playbook, including how he harnesses spectacle and outrage into powerful currency that’s become the foundation of a billion-dollar business plan.

“I live and breathe, eat, and sleep this,” Paul says. “It’s pretty much nonstop every single day since I was 18 years old.”

Keep reading for more from my sit-down with Paul, including:

• Anti Fund’s biggest bets and new targets for checks from $250K to $30M
• How his celebrity boosts the companies he backs — but can sometimes backfire
• His OpenAI connection — including the $50M lift Woo says Paul delivered
• What access to Trump, MBS and Silicon Valley actually buys him
• Paul’s powerful flywheel — sports promotion, betting, content creation, venture funding — and how his Hollywood ambitions fit in
• The bets Paul thinks everyone else is missing