by Janee Bolden

March 31, 2026

Venus Rose Is Building Creator Economy Infrastructure Where Black Founders Thrive In The AI Era

At the center of Rose’s work is a warning creators can no longer afford to ignore

For years, creators have fueled culture while watching other people build the systems, own the platforms, and profit from the data. Venus Rose is working to change that.

The Norfolk, Virginia, native launched Haus of Creators after years of working at the intersection of culture, fashion, music, and brand storytelling. Now, she’s applying that same creative vision to a much bigger mission: building infrastructure that helps creators understand AI, use it strategically, and ultimately become owners in the next phase of the digital economy.

“I think the message that I want [people] to get is that this is to build the new infrastructure for the creator economy with AI as a tool and partner,” Rose told BLACK ENTERPRISE. “We want to help creators build AI tools and build AI companies in the end.”

That vision is at the heart of Haus of Creators AI Labs, a new pre-incubator Rose launched last month. The initiative is designed to help creators move beyond using digital platforms and toward building the products and businesses that will shape what comes next.

Rose said the deeper she got into tech spaces, the more obvious the disconnect became.

“When I really put myself in the environment…the first initial disconnect that I saw [was] that we weren’t there at all,” said Rose, who attended North Carolina A&T before graduating from St. John’s University. “These engineers and these multimillion-dollar companies…they’re building tools to onboard us and make us consumers.”

That realization sharpened when she began attending AI and finance events and saw how disconnected many companies were from the people they claimed to serve.

“The problem that I see is that these AI tools and AI companies are being built for creators, but not by creators,” she said. “There’s no insight at all from us.”

For Rose, that gap is especially urgent for Black creators, who have long driven trends, shaped culture, and supplied the energy behind entire industries without controlling the platforms or intellectual property attached to their work.

“What’s most shocking to me is how obsessed these people are with the entertainment industry and us,” she said. “But we have no type of ownership at all. They’re running everything…and then owning the IP of all of our creativity.”

That imbalance is what pushed her from creative work into ecosystem building.

“This is why I’m so passionate about building this infrastructure and ensuring that I’m educating people from our community,” she said.

Rose launched the AI Labs pre-incubator Feb. 12, with a New York Fashion Week event sponsored by Raspberry AI. The timing let her tap into a moment when the city was already full of creatives, founders, media professionals, and industry insiders.

“I targeted New York Fashion Week because I knew it was going to be a massive amount of people in New York, so I wanted to maximize the exposure,” she said.

The response was immediate. According to Rose, the event drew 607 RSVPs and brought together fashion insiders, influencers, venture capitalists, investment bankers, media, and workers trying to understand what AI means for their futures.

“We talked about what AI was, how we use it, and then Raspberry came in with a presentation after the panel, and they showed the audience in real time what it looks like to use it and how to use it,” she said.

That real-time demonstration mattered because Rose is trying to demystify AI for communities that are often treated as end users instead of innovators.

“All of it is our data,” she said. “All the stuff we put on the internet for the past decades, and they’re taking that, and they’re generating it.”

One of the biggest misconceptions Rose is working against is the idea that AI is either too technical to understand or only relevant as entertainment.

“What I am realizing from my experience [is] the creators don’t know anything about AI,” she said. “When people think AI, they’re thinking about a dancing dog…the dog doing a Harlem Shake on Instagram or their cat doing back flips.”

Her workshops are meant to shift that mindset. Each month, Haus of Creators AI Labs focuses on a different piece of the process, from understanding AI basics to building a minimum viable product, developing a community, and learning how to protect intellectual property and approach capital.

“I created a curriculum,” Rose said. “Each month is going to help a creator get to the point of where they’re ready to build and launch.”

That includes teaching creators that they no longer need massive budgets or technical backgrounds to start testing ideas.

“Most creators don’t know that you can vibe code,” she said, referring to using tools like ChatGPT or Claude to generate programming and create early-stage software demos. “Most people think, ‘Oh, I got to have a software engineer background. I got to go to school [to] code.’ No.”

Instead, Rose wants creators to understand that AI can lower the barrier to entry if they approach it with ownership in mind.

“You don’t need $100,000 to hire a software team to get this done,” she said. “You can actually do this yourself.”

That is why her programming does not stop at tool usage. Rose is also bringing in venture capitalists, investment bankers, legal experts, and entrepreneurs to help creators understand the business side of building.

Her goal is to help participants identify a problem, build a demo, create a community around the idea, and then learn how to protect it and position it for investment.

“Now that you got the product, you got to know how to market it,” she said. “Then the next workshop is going to be about creator business models, IP, and capital.”

Rose said that approach is resonating in finance spaces too, where institutions increasingly recognize the size of the creator economy but often lack authentic access to the communities driving it.

“Everyone knows that the creative economy is a one trillion dollar business,” she said. “They have yet to come across anyone in that space that has the connection and culture that I have.”

She said that cultural proximity is part of what makes her model different.

“My angle is that I have culture and I’m in the culture,” she said. “I’m not observing urban. I’m not a fan. They’re all fans.”

Rose also believes AI is changing how younger founders approach entrepreneurship.

“They know how to scale companies,” she said of Gen Z. “Having access to AI has solved the information gap.”

She pointed to her own experience using AI to help launch her nonprofit quickly, something that once would have required a longer, more expensive process.

“I was able to open my nonprofit in two weeks because of ChatGPT,” she said.

To her, that speed represents a fundamental shift away from gatekeeping.

“Gen Z is skipping past all of that because they don’t have to wait on gatekeepers,” she said. “They’re surpassing the gatekeepers.”

That is part of why Rose believes the next generation is positioned to think beyond jobs and toward systems.

“We were too busy trying to work for a magazine or get a job,” she said. “They’re building their own infrastructure.”

At the center of Rose’s work is a warning creators can no longer afford to ignore: if they keep feeding platforms and tools they do not own, they risk becoming even more vulnerable in the AI era.

“This is why I am encouraging them to build their own tools,” she said. “The fine terms of these products, most of these products, is they own your IP as soon as you onboard it.”

Her advice is direct.

“Stop thinking like a consumer and think like a builder,” Rose said. “Think from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Think ownership.”

That philosophy also shapes the program’s accessibility. Rose said the resources are open to creators, investors, technologists, influencers, educators, media professionals, and brands.

“This is for everyone,” she said. “These are free resources. These are free events every single month. I’m not gatekeeping anything.”

In five years, Rose sees something bigger than a successful program. She sees an entirely different creative economy, one where Black creators are more deeply involved in building the companies, tools, and platforms that define the future.

“In five years, I see a new infrastructure for the creative economy scaled and with more involvement from us,” she said.

For a founder who has spent years watching culture be mined, repackaged, and monetized by outsiders, that change feels necessary.

If the first era of the creator economy was about visibility, Rose is betting the next one will be about ownership—and she wants creators to be ready.