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The cultural and creative industries (CCI) are seen as an important growth-promoting vehicle in modern policymaking circles. However, creative firm growth is still largely an enigma, with only little across-firm variance being explained in the extant literature. This theoretical essay reviews what is known, and explains why the creatives and their industries are a very special case. Specifically, we argue that both the micro-level motivational drive of the typical creative and the meso-level opportunity structure of the CCI are very distinctive, with far-reaching consequences for a (firm) growth theory tailored at the CCI: creatives are motivated differently than are non-creatives, and the opportunities in the CCI are different from those in the non-CCI. Jointly, the micro-level characteristics of individual creatives and the meso-level features of the aggregate CCI generate a macro-level ecosystem with very distinctive selection processes. Taken all this together, this implies that we take the first step toward developing a CCI (firm) growth theory that is both nested in and distinctive from a general theory of firm growth.