A cabeça do VC “pragmático” que está comprando o OnlyFans

James Sagan, a 34-year-old venture capitalist based in San Francisco, is about to take control of OnlyFans. He justifies this move by stating that he seeks to "make money, not preserve narratives." In his first interview after leading a consortium that purchased a 16% stake in the platform in March, the CEO of Architect Capital told The Information that he plans to expand his stake until the company becomes majority-owned and that he has no intention of stepping away from the core business: selling pornography.

Sagan's predecessor as OnlyFans' controller is Yekaterina "Katie" Chudnovsky, widow and mother of four from Leonid Radvinsky, the entrepreneur who bought the business in 2018 and transformed it into the phenomenon it is today. Radvinsky, who made a fortune in the early 2000s creating a pornographic streaming platform (MyFreeCams), was battling cancer and had previously attempted to sell OnlyFans before passing away in March this year.

Sagan, who initially acted as a consultant for the family to facilitate the sale, ended up buying the business. He now asserts that the fit was obvious and emphasizes his "pragmatic" approach to the market. Prior to OnlyFans, Sagan's major investment was Juul, a startup for electronic cigarettes. "If the billions of smokers in the world migrate to Juul, which is much safer than a cigarette, we would save hundreds of billions of dollars globally in avoidable healthcare spending," he said in The Information.

Sagan argues that adult content and sexual work are ancient practices and that OnlyFans is the safest way to consume them. "It's about reducing harm," he said. Among the "advantages," he argues that there are no intermediaries, creators keep 80% of the revenue, and the site is heavily monitored with human moderation of all content, low rates of CSAM (material that depicts or promotes child sexual abuse), and identity verification processes equivalent to opening a bank account.

"To a pragmatist, this is an undeniable disruptive business model, much better for anyone participating in this market, and that's why it's so successful today," said Sagan.

Sagan also believes that OnlyFans' model of paying directly to content creators without selling advertising like on major social networks is the future of the creator economy. In the long term, he sees an IPO for OnlyFans, with banks already showing interest and no legal obstacles to the company being listed. (NASDAQ: HOTTT?) However, before that, Sagan intends to make OnlyFans more acceptable for a "team of top talents" who still hesitate to post their content on the platform.

He plans to create new tools and financial products for creators and improve payment processing. "With this, there will likely be other use cases and more creators joining the platform. And if the content remains adult, that's fine. We won't shy away from that," he said. Sagan also mentioned that one of the strongest points of this thesis is its low disruption by AI.

"OnlyFans is likely the platform with the lowest probability of being impacted by AI, and the reason is that people don't use OnlyFans for the quality of the content, which AI may be able to replicate faithfully, but for the human connection," he told The Information. "There's a loneliness epidemic of which we're all aware, and this is the only place on the internet where you can communicate authentically with a human, and that's why people pay for this content."

Indeed, OnlyFans generated $8 billion and earned $1.4 billion in revenue in 2024. Sagan invested in the company at a valuation of $3.15 billion, paying just over twice the revenue.