Creekstone

Creek Stone is a new venture fund built around an unusually concentrated bet: systematically investing in ByteDance alumni founders. Of its first eight portfolio companies, seven trace directly to ByteDance product lines — including the founding team of 数美万物, which assembled three members from Douyin's original "seven-person team" . The fund was launched in 2025 by partners 钟陆欢 and 李一豪, who spent their first six months failing to raise from traditional LPs and instead self-funded the initial capital before turning to other GPs for support; by early 2026 they had closed a first fund of tens of millions of dollars from a highly dispersed LP base of 17 names . The name itself came from a four-model prompt battle — ChatGPT, Gemini, Doubao, and Kimi — with Doubao ultimately supplying the winning "Creek Stone" (小溪, 石头), meant to signal a "stepping stone" rather than "hunter" posture toward founders . The strategy has drawn both enthusiasm as an aggressive early-stage talent play and skepticism as a form of "pandering to top-tier VCs' preference for接盘" .