Yancey Strickler

Inside Kickstarter: Co-Founder Yancey Strickler on Building the Crowdfunding Giant

July 18, 2024

Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the founder of Metalabel, a platform for releasing collective work. He’s also the author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. I’m thrilled to share our recent conversation in this episode.Yancey started out as a music journalist before applying his talents to helping the world share its creative pursuits. For him, creativity and humanity are implicitly connected, and so he’s been a forerunner in thinking about how to build companies that bring good things into the world and are also successful without devolving into extractive behaviors. Not that any of this is simple. As Yancey says, “Everything is harder than you think. To do anything well is so hard. [But] if you put in the work, you don't need to fear it.”

We talked about the founding and growth of Kickstarter, which has been profitable since its 14th month, the power of humility, past mistakes and future hopes, why he started Metalabel, and more including: 

• The innumerable inventions that make up our world 

• Crisis hopping in Kickstarter’s early days

• The challenges of funding speculative projects

• Being one of the first Public Benefit Corps

• Creativity and self-knowledge

• Company building as an art

• Collective creativity

• The Bento MethodMeanwhile, here are a few takeaways from our conversation:1. There are downsides and upsides to originating a new category: Crowdsourcing seems totally normal to us now, but only because Kickstarter led the way. At the beginning, there were years of struggle to even get people to understand the idea of conditional purchasing. But once they got the site built and people could see what it was, the excitement and adoption of this genuinely new platform were: “instantaneous – people knew they got it, they got what it was, they got how to use it.”2. Maximizing growth isn’t always the right tactic. “We always had this thought of ‘we're not trying to be as big as possible. We're trying to be what feels right, what feels faithful in some nebulous way’,” Yancey says of Kickstarter. Staying true to their passion and their mission at the start ultimately led to success.3. Crisis can be good. In many cases, it leads to uncovering the truth about what’s really going on. Instead of just trying to figure out how to make whatever’s going wrong go away, disaster can bring about real change. 4. Organizations are their own entities. They exert force on the people who found them and run them within them just as much as those people guide the organization. Learning to co-exist in that relationship is an art. “[Metalabel] exists beyond us without question. It has its own physics, its own personality that you need to listen to and be humble before. You're supporting it, you're serving it. And there's just so much art and humility and really hard work that comes with seeing it through.”

—

Brought to you by:

Mercury – The art of simplified finances. Learn more.

DigitalOcean – The cloud loved by developers and founders alike. Sign up.

Neo4j – The graph database and analytics leader. Learn more.

—

Where to find Yancey Strickler:

Where to find Eric:

• Newsletter: https://ericries.carrd.co/ 

• Podcast: https://ericriesshow.com/ 

—

In This Episode We Cover:

(00:36) Welcome to the Eric Ries Show

(04:44) The invention of the high five.

(07:22) Our world is the product of innumerable inventions

(08:22) The story of Kickstarter

(13:48) The difference between a fad and a trend

(15:50) The early days, and difficulties, at Kickstarter

(17:24) How Kickstarter introduced standards

(18:58) The a-ha moment: “Kickstarter is not a store”

(20:42) The need for company sacrifice

(22:06) The tension between risk and failure

(24:16) Kickstarter’s early days and how Yancey became CEO

(27:12) Mistakes, burnout, and stepping down.

(30:05) Yancey without Kickstarter

(31:45) Disentangling from the old and starting anew

(35:21) Public Benefit Corps and why Kickstarter was among the first ones

(39:19) The challenges of running a good company that makes a profit

(42:07) Crowdfunding and creativity

(46:31) The future of creative work

(47:12) MetaLabel

(48:48) The curator role

(50:26) Moving from solo to cooperative work

(52:04) The Leaders Guide on Kickstarter

(54:30) Doing work for yourself, in a community of peers

(57:29) Self-knowledge as an entrepreneurial asset

(59:35) Organization building as an artistic discipline

(1:04:30) Humility, fearlessness, and hard work

(1:06:25) The Royal Society

(1:10:04) Rejecting the extractive model

(1:14:50) Succession planning and deprioritizing financial maximization

(1:19:52) A new version of the hockey stick graph

(1:21:20) The Bento Method: women vs. men

(1:26:48) The Golden Ratio

(1:30:18) The Dark Forest

(1:33:27) How the internet has redefined individuality 

(1:36:49) Online institutions of the 21st century—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] 

Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.