Jaclyn Johnson, founder of Create & Cultivate, Chrerub and Receipts, Photo Credit: Brit Perkins

Photo Credit: Brit Perkins

After years spent building rooms for ambitious women to network, connect and learn from one another, Jaclyn Johnson is focused on something else: getting the next generation onto cap tables.

Today, Johnson’s focus extends far beyond community-building. Increasingly, she is focused on ownership, angel investing and expanding access to the rooms where wealth is created.

That philosophy is shaping her work across Cherub, the investing platform she launched in 2024, as well as Receipts VC, her new fund and advisory platform focused on backing “proof, not promises.”

It also reflects a broader shift in Johnson’s own philosophy around power, wealth and what female founders actually need in order to build lasting financial leverage.

I spoke with Johnson over Zoom, where she shared her thoughts on how to think like an angel investor, what’s broken in the VC funding landscape and why today, “calm is her advantage.”

For over a decade, Johnson built Create & Cultivate into one of the most recognizable platforms for ambitious women, highlighting conversations around entrepreneurship, creator culture and modern work long before those topics became dominant across social media and startup ecosystems.

Through conferences, content and networking events, Create & Cultivate became synonymous with the aspirational female founder era of the 2010s.

(I remember the first Create & Cultivate I attended back in 2016; I still credit that platform for propelling my writing career and I’m still in touch with some attendees I met there.)

After a reported $22 million exit, burnout and eventually buying Create & Cultivate back in 2024, Johnson began reassessing not just how she wanted to build, but what she wanted women to gain access to in the first place.

In April, Cherub launched Private Rooms, a feature allowing founders, operators and insiders to build curated investing communities around trusted networks instead of traditional institutional pipelines.

Johnson opened the platform’s first room herself, giving members of her community the opportunity to invest alongside her in companies she personally backs, including Always Alpha, the first talent agency built exclusively for women’s sports, cofounded by Allyson Felix; energy drink brand Benny; The Carry, a premium weighted vest company designed for women; and Isle of Monday, often described as the “Rent the Runway of vintage fashion.”

“Always Alpha was built on the belief that women deserve to own every part of this moment – on the field, in the boardroom and on the cap table,” says Felix.

The launch reflects a broader shift in how startup investing is becoming more accessible, visible and community-driven.

That shift has pushed Johnson deeper into startup investing and angel networks at a moment when many women are increasingly becoming accredited investors themselves, but still remain largely excluded from traditional venture ecosystems.

Historically, startup investing has operated through tightly guarded institutional pipelines. “Unless you’re working in Silicon Valley, went to Wharton or your dad works in VC, you usually don’t get access to these deals,” Johnson says. “It’s a very inside-baseball ecosystem.”

For Johnson, the goal is not simply encouraging women to invest, but helping them begin to see themselves as investors in the first place.

“People think angel investing means writing a $500,000 check, but that’s not the reality,” Johnson says. “You can invest $1,000, $5,000 or $10,000.”

“Women are already trend forecasting every single day,” Johnson says. “They know what products are resonating. They know what communities are growing. They know what people are spending money on. But traditionally they weren’t being brought into the investment side of those conversations.”

That realization became one of the core ideas behind Cherub.

Before launching the platform publicly, Johnson tested the concept through a small investor newsletter featuring 40 startups. According to Johnson, every company received investor views from people they otherwise would not have reached; half secured investor meetings and 20% raised funding within three months.

Johnson says the response reinforced something she had already been observing informally: more women than ever have capital, consumer insight and strategic instincts, but many still don’t see themselves as investors. Because startup investing has historically been associated with elite venture firms and wealthy insiders, many prospective angels assume they need massive amounts of capital—or access—to participate.

She now encourages women to think about angel investing the same way they think about other forms of diversification.

“You might have public markets, crypto, real estate,” she says. “This is another channel where you can support founders and invest in their future.”

Johnson herself approaches investing through a highly personal lens. Rather than chasing categories she doesn’t understand or hype-driven opportunities, she focuses primarily on products and businesses she genuinely uses and believes in.

“I’ve made investments in categories I don’t know, and they’re my least favorite investments,” she says. “I like to invest in things I understand, where I feel like I can actually provide value.”

She also pays close attention to founder psychology and resilience.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to the founder,” Johnson says. “Their ambition, focus and drive.”

Increasingly, Johnson is also vocal about what she believes is broken inside venture capital itself, particularly for early-stage founders.

“They say they invest early stage,” she says of many venture firms. “But they want you at a million dollars in revenue first.”

According to Johnson, the result is a widening funding gap where founders are simultaneously expected to scale quickly while receiving less true early-stage support.

She believes the pressure has also created an unhealthy startup culture obsessed with billion-dollar outcomes while undervaluing sustainable businesses capable of generating meaningful wealth without becoming unicorns.

“There needs to be more conversation around funding for the middle,” Johnson says. “A $100 million exit is still an incredible outcome.”

Increasingly, Johnson believes founders need to think more critically about whether certain decisions are actually serving the business, or simply serving external expectations around scale and success.

“One of the biggest questions founders need to ask is: ‘Is this good for me, or is this good for the business?’” Johnson says. “Those are two very different things.”

That perspective comes directly from experience. Heading into 2020, Johnson believed Create & Cultivate was tracking toward a $50 million to $75 million trajectory before the pandemic devastated the events industry almost overnight.

“We were this close to a really groundbreaking exit,” she says. “Not just financially, but from a storytelling perspective for bootstrapped female-founded businesses.”

The experience and the emotional aftermath of the acquisition ultimately reshaped how Johnson thinks about ambition, growth and sustainability. “Anyone who’s been through an acquisition knows it’s one of the most stressful experiences of your life,” she says.

“I think there’s been a huge paradigm shift around value,” she says. “People are realizing they can build sustainable businesses on their own terms.”

That philosophy is now shaping the next chapter of Create & Cultivate as well.

After buying the company back, Johnson and Create & Cultivate CEO Marina Middleton decided to raise venture funding for the first time rather than bootstrap the business again from scratch.

Previously, Create & Cultivate had been entirely self-funded. But Johnson says the new version of the business required a different strategy and a different level of scale.

“We had a conversation about whether we wanted to stay smaller and grow sustainably or really go big,” she says. “And we decided we wanted to build something massive.”

The company ultimately raised $2.6 million from a mix of venture capital firms and strategic female angel investors, making Create & Cultivate one of the few VC-backed event and media platforms focused specifically on ambitious women.

Johnson believes the timing is especially significant as AI accelerates digital saturation and consumers increasingly crave real-life connection and community.

“There’s a massive return to in-person experiences happening right now,” she says. “People want connection.”

Johnson’s relationship to ambition has also evolved.

“In 2016, my mentality was ‘build, build, build,’” she says. “Now, calm is my advantage. Experience is my advantage.”

“There was a time when women felt like they had to be one thing,” Johnson says. “Now you can diversify your career, your wealth and your identity.”

And increasingly, Johnson believes the future of women’s entrepreneurship depends not just on putting women in the room, but helping them own part of it.