Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler on the creator economy, crowdfunding origins, and his new 'artist corporation' legal structure

next level. You can get started for free at adio. com. Um, should we bring in our next guest, Yansy from Metal? Yansy. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks so much for joining. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the music. Yes. Yes. Yes.

We're trying to be a real newscast here. Uh, I would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself. I want to go through some of your history, then artist corporations, then we can kind of dig through the the the more modern era. Yeah, sure. I'm a my name is Yansancy Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur.

Started out as a music journalist and running a tiny record label and being in the world of early digital music and then was a co-founder of Kickstarter and helped make crowdfunding a thing.

uh was a co-founder and then CEO and very much kind of an accidental entrepreneur who started as a creative person whose idea just took the form of a business and kind of crash course and what it meant to make a technology product in a very different era of the internet and what it meant to build like a real marketplace.

What was the first Kickstarter project or the first one that uh like really went big and you kind of watched it unfold and you realized that uh this would work? It was it was three weeks in. It was a musician from Athens, Georgia named Allison Weiss who was like making an EP.

She had a $2,000 goal that she smashed through in eight hours. And up until then, we didn't show money you raised above the goal because why would anybody make more than their goal? like just hadn't even occurred to us. And she like introduced the first stretch goal that same day.

And like really the the template that is still what people follow in crowdfunding was like one woman in her dorm room, you know, that really laid the template for how you keep an audience engaged and like what you do when the internet is bringing more love to you than you expected.

What do you think the secret of success to that first $2,000 fund raise was?

like a lot of uh a lot of crowdfunding these days or even even if you're building an audience on something like Substack or Patreon, it's like you kind of need the audience already there and then you go and convert it to money at uh you know with some sort of project and you're kind of building up all this goodwill and people kind of expect oh they're like I've gotten so much value.

It's rare that you see someone come out of nowhere with uh you know a successful project. So what was the story there? It was that where there had been a page template, she made it come alive. She was funny. She was personable. She talked to camera. Like very modern. It feels modern. At the time, you're like, "Whoa.

" Like like my computer is talking to me, you know, and it it just felt very personable and there's a level of energy that just she just knew what the internet wanted and knew how to create that dynamic. And I really like still as a role model for for what I think it is to be a creator online.

But it also was a different era of the internet where people would share links. Yep. Where you know there was that level of generosity and curiosity and it wasn't just like selfies or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Take me through some of the eras of the internet. First I have I have a good Kickstarter story.

a childhood friend of mine, uh, Miles came to me when I was just graduating college and he had this crazy idea for consumer product and he pitched it to me. He'd already like basically taken a loan from his parents.

A lot of like basically like college debt level loans for this idea that I thought was completely I thought it was a little bit silly and a little bit crazy. And he was like, I'm working on this. I'm going to launch it on Kickstarter. Uh, you know, do do you want to help me with it? And uh I love Miles.

He's always creative and talented, but I didn't I didn't get the idea. Yeah. And uh basically like 6 weeks later, he launches on Kickstarter and he did like a million dollars in the first day. Wow. And it was just this amazing story. It was so incredible to watch him take this massive risk.

He had this personal risk because he needed to spend money to get the product to the point where they could launch on Kickstarter and did all these deals to make it happen. Uh and it was just it was just incredible.

uh to watch and enable him to to build this company and and I think what's what was magical from the side of the entrepreneur is every launches are such a key part of business and oftentimes people put too much they put too much emphasis into launching like a SAS company because you're going to launch and people don't care that much about SAS.

maybe you have a good video or maybe your investors talk about it positively, but Kickstarter is just like it felt like it can be this very like binary thing where you just don't know what's going to happen.

And consumer products specifically, it is very hard to judge what consumer products will hit before you just put it out there. And uh the kind of the variable nature of it I just think is is fascinating to watch. So um thank you for building the platform. It uh it just has created so many great stories. Yeah.

Can you take me through some of the uh different eras of the internet? Um I'm interested to hear about all the different ways that kind of money and funding has changed.

You know, you have the, you know, the Kickstarter era or format or anything to uh subscriptions on an ongoing basis to even things like the Tik Tok creator fund where you're getting paid out based on views.

What what how how do you think about the buckets and then what do you think is great and what do you think maybe needs work?

Well, I zero preparation for this, but I've always I've always wanted to do like a David Halber stan history of the internet like big picture, but yeah, I would say like uh I mean there's the bulletin board zone up until like 2000s and I would say 2000 to06 is like hardcore hard mode.

Like that's when we were first trying to make Kickstarter and you needed a server room and a dude with a ponytail to like have a blog, you know? It was like a high bar to get over. But even during the time we were struggling like AWS EC2 launched, Amazon payments launched, uh, PayPal extended its marketplace product.

So you started to see the first building blocks where non-technical founders like us could actually make a product and could make a successful business and that those things really came online yeah like 07 to09 2010 and then you have I think the good old days of 2010 to 2016 of like we're all exploiting the hell out of the Facebook social graph and it's you know gray you could braidless, the Twitter connect to find every person everywhere and like the internet's just this playground of like what can we do together?

Uh and then I think 2016 to 2020 was the defection, the collective defection where it's like Substack, Only Fans, you know, more Dark Forest, like more and less and less mainstream media, more and more like I'm going into the rabbit hole of something online. Like that is where I make money.

Um, and then there was just an event that I did with other internet where where people talked about this, but it ends up that like a room full of 20-year-olds called like COVID crypto era is just like just scam period. And then they call period 2023 on to where we are now as scam or be scammed. Mhm.

But like AI, crypto, SAS products, like recurring subscriptions, all of it is leading to this feeling of like someone's going to ding your credit card or like rug you or whatever, like no matter what. So, you got to like be on your toes and do that back at people.

My favorite is it's like almost impossible to truly cancel a credit card now because like you tell, you tell MX, you tell MX like the feature, uh, hey, like I don't want this card anymore, but I want to keep my service with you.

And then they're like, "Well, here's a new card and a new number, but like we're going to give it to all the people that you subscribe to like 5 years ago. " Y and it's just this incredible tax.

Well, where are the pockets of of positivity on the internet right now in I don't know if you want to call it the creator economy, but uh whatever whatever term that is. Are you seeing anything before before there? How did you react to the creator the creator economy becoming a popular phrase among venture capitalists?

Yeah, venture capitalist kind of discovered they kind of created the creator economy. You kind of took a you but VCs it was better than the passion economy that that one gave me a harder record scratch. So the rebrand but yeah I mean listen every one of these phrases is a VC talking their book like that's it.

You blog blog your book. That's the move. But um but I don't think it's wrong. I mean, what what's what's wild is that this job of being a creator, which I'll define as like a full-time self-expressor on the internet, a commercial self-expressor, that's like a 15-year-old profession.

And it is also the most desired profession for people under the age of 20. And unlike being an astronaut, like everyone can become one. Sure.

and and the the right now we have this perspective that like the creator economy is maybe a bubble and like it's you know some convergence of technology that you know who knows like it'll probably dissipate.

If you step back a little bit and look at the longer history of the space, it's actually shockingly recent to where even like commercial uh artistic production like movies and music and books and the way we think of them now that industry is less than a hundred years old really if you look at like a lot of the big players.

But even the word and concept of creativity, the concept of creativity was invented in the 1940s by United States defense department grants that were trying to find defense department. Let's give it up for the military. They created they created the basically we love them.

They were looking to find divergent thinkers for the military. Okay. So they studied artists and engineers who would like pull allnighters and like what makes them tick? what's their drive?

And they discovered that there was this innate drive that they theorized was a democratic essence of genius that could be taught to anyone. And it was the concept of creativity. The word entered the dictionary in 1966. The United States education system was remade in the 60s to become creative.

So like creative writing programs, brainstorming entered the school system. So I am a second generation creative American and like but the whole idea of self-expressing as a form of improving things or as a way to create more commercial value is a is a extremely recent idea like just two generations old.

So if you think of the idea of being a creator like that is just building on something that was already there. And what I've come to see is that like we're 25% into the 21st century right now 2025. And I think the main forces of this century so far are internet, phones, AI, and creativity, cultural expression.

Like it takes up more space, more people do it, and it's just going to grow. And a lot of my work now is just thinking like, well, let's take this seriously and let's treat it as a real industry. Let's treat it as a real business. Let's treat it as like a way that people can get healthcare and have real jobs.

And so if we take that approach and also take the internet seriously, you know what's missing? And that's really been what I've been about the last few years. The there's a bunch of interesting places we could go with this.

Um I I I I want to get to the artist corporation and how these uh how these I don't know influencers or new creators like scale.

But I'm I'm also interested in this idea of um what actually has changed because uh this show we have kind of discovered and done a bunch of different tests and explored the space and changed things a lot. Uh we're obviously deeply leveraging the internet.

This will be clipped on X and Instagram and Tik Tok and it will go out all over the place. We are using modern distribution tools. But in many ways we keep coming back to this idea that you know we are making daytime television. This is a talk show. And so we are retreating in many ways to the formats that work.

And when we find that we go back to what has been you know lindy or discovered or has been around for a while, we see that that's what people still want. And I and I've thought about this in the context of Mr. Beast.

He's he's making a game show and game shows have been popular for a long time and he's distributing them in a different way and there's a different style and editing style. Like what really has changed? Yeah, you know the the big change is that the person the creative person has full control.

Not full control but ownership over the production and the distribution. Yes. Even if you just own the account, right? So you're you have an account that you don't really own the production. You don't end the own the end app. Yep. But you own the account that that gives you a lot of range in order to do things.

we'll pull up a post from somebody that was posted like a minute ago and like television could never do that because they would have to like you know make sure that that they had to clear it and and do and do all these different things.

So um I think that's the biggest the biggest change is the the creative people owning those two key being more entrepreneurial and the cost we handle that internally. Okay. So, yeah, I'm super fascinated in like what what actually is new, what pieces have stuck around.

Well, I think that um and I include us in this affectionately. I think it's the revenge of the losers where in the past, you know, all media was like heavily gatekept and you had to go to whatever school and like the seats were so limited. YouTube was for losers. YouTube is if you couldn't get on real TV.

Like all everything on the internet was that.

every part of the internet creative stack was like you aren't good enough so thus you're here but there's more of us than there are winners and and if you give us the same tools and you give us time many people are very smart many people can you know take in a lot of information and create a talk show like out of out of your minds and out of a limited set of tools and the notion of the notion of hierarchy for where we go for things has been erased as a result of this and you know it's it's for all legacy players it's total havoc and they have no idea what's going on.

I think for anyone who's a consumer just coming up now like the world honestly makes kind of sense. It's pretty wide open. You can find or get access to whatever you want. But like you all are able to generate a lot of attention and drive a lot of things. But what you own is an interesting question actually.

like you own the your brand IP, you know, do you own your followers? Do you own your what of your relationships do you own in which way? Like it gets fuzzy, but there is for sure like a a cultural equity that is being built up by this project.

Equity that because you have sponsors, you can convert into revenue, you can convert into an investment, you can treat as a proper business. And that's what more and more people are finding creatively.

And so like to make a media business or to bring in multiple revenue streams or the things that a modern creator is finding is a different way of operating like a small business or a studio than people have experienced in the past and we're all sort of speedrunning this.

There's not a lot of communication between groups like people are there's like there's a lot of weirdness. Yeah.

The interesting thing the reason the the creator economy as a venture trend broadly failed and because a large amount of the investment dollars were flowing into building kind of business infrastructure for creators and and misjudging that creators are ultimately just businesses and they can use ramp they can use like they can go to bank of America and get a bank account.

Oh, you're talking about the niche specific financial and so even though even though the creator kind of wave and trend has just exploded and continues to to create all these amazing things, the investment dollars that flowed into the category broadly broadly did not return. Yeah.

I I'm also interested in uh the idea of the the actual structure.

There's a lot of uh like on that note there's a lot of uh influencer businesses where really like most of the value acrruel is in the actual talent and they could shut down their accounts and go to Hollywood and get a deal that would pay them directly just as a W2 employee and you see that with you know folks like I believe I was thinking about the example of Jim Kramer or actually going back through talk shows Johnny Carson was unique in that he owned his shows IP, but then the Tonight Show and the Late Show are now owned by the networks.

And if you watch Jimmy Kimmel, he's essentially a there might be a production studio that he owns a piece of, but it's mostly just he's on a really high salary from the studio and the network. And that seems to work fine. I mean, Jay Leno never owned his show. He has a huge car collection.

He seems to have done very well. Um, but then there are also folks who are building CC corps and trying to build corporations and they realize that that maybe the best way to monetize attention long term is to launch a product like what Mr.

Beast has done with Feastables and it's a it's a new corporation then maybe that gets spun out and maybe that becomes its own thing and they sell that and it and that's less tied to his face and his talent. So there's a whole bunch of different paths.

walk me through what you think like reasonable cases are or or or the good or bad bad or have I missed anything and then talk to me about the future of where all this goes. Yeah.

So right now, right now, if you're a creative person looking to go more pro or scale what you're doing, you know, there's there's very different categories.

Like an online creator is a very specific set of like you're probably getting a direct deposit from an ad, you know, from some ad partnership or something hitting your bank account. There's a question of how should you accept those funds?

If you're like a visual artist or someone like that, your legal structure will determine whether you can get a grant or you're eligible for certain funds. and like that is actually the only way to get money if you're that type of artist. So right now people face there's a couple decisions.

Um, one is do you orient your career around seeking philanthropic money, which if you're a classical artist is really kind of what's there for you? Or if you're a creator, are you an LLC? Are you an S corp? Are you trying to like properly raise money? Are you a CC Corp?

And there's a whole big whole big mess in the middle. um where I ran into with a I'm part of a collective of writers called the Dark Forest Collective and we published a book together that's done $100,000 in transactions all running through a split that we made on Metal.

So all the money just automatically distributes to each of us as a royalty through Stripe and I'm running that without any sort of legal structure which is not the smartest thing but started thinking about what if I made an LLC for this like what should I do and ended up when I've been talking to artists for a long time about their different needs and saw an opportunity to try to craft a different type of LLC that would give creative people more economic security, better access to healthare and the ability to grow wealth and equity And so to do that, we're structurally taking a making a version of an LLC that will have within it a set of specific provisions around creative purpose, certain rules about governance, certain separation of creative rights and financial rights, uh setting in how an equity structure would work, including rules about how you can get pulled together to get access to better health care rates with a bunch of AC corps together and just creating a a little wrapper shield that allows any sort of creative project to instantly go from I'm now incorporated with legal protection for a very cheap amount and I can scale to like an investable business using this form up until a certain point.

Sure. Um there's two paths to making that happen and we're pursuing both. One is to like you pass laws. So you say, "Hey, let's define what an A is. Let's make it something you could legally register as. " We're pursuing that path. The other is most of these things are things you can already do with an LLC.

They're just it requires lawyers and a lot of like specifics. So the other path is to make it as a a software protocol. Sure. And so just make a a cororp in a box and a way that any internet native group of people can begin to build and access collective equity. Yep.

And so both of the we're working on both of those at the same time. The ultimate is to get both. Yeah. But um but yeah, we see it as a way that people to what is uh what's the history of these new corporate structures? Uh, I remember I feel like BC Corp is relatively new. S Corp also feels somewhat new.

Yeah, it's very cool to be like, "Oh, yeah, by the way, you can just create a new entity. " It's amazing. Uh, not just a new entity, a new type of entity. Um, I I I feel like LLC and CC Corp have been around for probably hundreds of years, but there's a bunch of new ones. Um, what have you studied?

What have you learned? And like what's the actual path? Is this federal legislation? Do you just go to Delaware or something? How does that work? Yeah, escort was the 1950s.

Um there have only been a handful of new corporate forms made this decade or this this century PBC's uh certain types of co-ops L3C's but yeah it when I was CEO of Kickstarter we became one of the first PPCs and so I just happened to watch that law get made and it always paid attention to the fact that it was really technical and boring and just worked.

Uh and so I just thought about that same playbook and could you could you do that? So corporate laws pass on a state level. Yeah. Um and depending on how law is written, people can register it and be doiciled, you know, from anywhere in that state.

And so we're talking to legislators and the bar associations in a few specific states and sharing with them our draft that our lawyers have helped make and you know talking to them about what does it look like to try to put a bill together.

Y uh and so our target is to have something pass next year and to have first pilot programs and we'll definitely have this protocol like you can do it with a some skin of an LLC that we'll have out sooner. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

Um, I one of the ideas that I thought was interesting was this idea that uh as an artist or a creator, you wouldn't necessarily need to prematurely select a path between nonprofit donations, grant money, tax incentivized donations. I love that.

I think that uh like the the elites are not funding enough like libraries and museums and all of these different things. I think that just making it easy for that to happen is is is actually a key unlock.

Uh, but then also I love the idea of somebody being able to, you know, actually build up a a subscription business on top of it and write regularly and have supporters and earn cash flow and and and pay employees.

Um, I I want to get your take on OpenAI structure because they have an they it feels like they've done something similar but at a thousand times larger scale with a nonprofit that owns a for-profit and there's a GP LP. Um, and that feels like kind of a nightmare scenario.

Uh, but, uh, are there any learnings there or or are there any areas where you'd be worried about someone potentially like abusing a system that allowed someone to take uh, nonprofit money and for-profit money?

Or it would be confusing where somebody would say, "Hey, I made a donation, but now you're licensing this into a movie. I wanted you to make a a painting and and or an installation or something, and now Disney's paying you a billion dollars. " like I I I want my share. So yeah, walk me through some of that stuff.

Yeah, I mean if you're talking about open AI or ESG, I mean I think form follows capital is the lesson. You know, just people are going to shape to whatever is most investable and like one of our core constituents as we're working through this process are investors.

So there will be an like an investor advisory board that's like, hey, look at our sheet here. let's make sure that we're not, you know, we're not screwing something up and that we're actually speaking to the ways you get returns and the way that we create um value.

Um uh but yeah, I mean I think I mean there's infinite ways for things to go wrong. Uh I I think that I mean people abuse LLC's today, of course. I think Yeah, I I've had the attitude of I I like that like the bar to be an entrepreneur is will and it's not qualifications.

And I think the bar to be an artist and a creator is about will and not about qualification. So the the way I've tried we try to structure it or think about it is easy to start but as you want to do things that have a financial implication like say taking nonprofit funds.

there's maybe a step you go through before that where you're not a full nonprofit, but hey, like don't abuse this and screw it up for everybody, which I think is what happens with, you know, trust gets earned and spent and so you're trying to protect it from being spent in the worst ways.

But you you have to have some of those safeguards. Um, but every option I think about that's about divided deciding the courts, right? Like that's what happens with the other structures is that they get defined and then and then precedent is set across a whole bunch of different legal filings eventually.

Um I you're in New York City, right? And you've been in in the New York City tech scene for years, correct? That's right. Can you give me your reaction to the Mumani like news? I mean massive come from behind moment. Did you predict it? Uh what what have you been seeing? Are you excited about it?

Uh what are you optimistic about or maybe pessimistic about? I don't know. I mean, God bless anyone who's the mayor of this city. Uh, great greatest city in the world. Hardest thing to govern. You know, talk about a tough executive job. Um, I'm reading The Power Broker at the moment.

Actually, finishing that, so you get a real appreciation for the strangeness of New York City politics. Oh, yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, I think it's I I I'm excited to see youth. I'm excited to see energy and not old corruption is nice.

I also think the realities of New York City's political system are like Byzantine even to experts and I don't know what will actually res happen as a result of this. Yeah. Uh so it's hard. I think probably almost all concerns are overblown and just uh but yeah, I don't know. We'll see.

Do you think that uh we we we were toying with this this this idea?

I'd like to get your feedback on um just that out of the 2024 election, there was this narrative around the podcast election, uh the idea of like the brocasters that got Donald Trump elected because uh Trump was much more uh aggressive or maybe just open to podcast invites from Andrew Schultz and Tim Dylan and Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan.

And the Kamla campaign maybe was less aggressive or turned down some of those opportunities.

But when I was mathing it out, I was just seeing that the total number of minutes that Americans spent watching each candidate, I think Donald Trump probably outnumbered by 100 to one just because there was a 4-hour Joe Rogan with him with 20 million views.

You math that out, it's a lot more than the 20 minute Kla Harris interview on 60 Minutes or whatever. Um, Mom Donnie feels like he's done some podcasts, but it feels like almost the first iteration of the next next generation of going direct or owned media channels, producing his own content successfully.

People have, plenty of politicians have put out a TikTok. None of them have actually broken through in the sense that he doesn't have his own podcast. He didn't go on the big podcast.

He hasn't done either Rogan or uh Pod Save America or I don't I don't even know if he's done Chapo or anything, but he has he has he's gotten a ton of attention and I'm wondering what you think that says about the future of the shape of social media and getting attention and the and the future of politics.

Well, I think you could see Yeah. Lot lots of owned lots of owned media because what even is other media anymore? I mean, such a it's such a crapshoot. Um, and you can absolutely drive drive attention that way.

Uh, there was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple months ago that talked about how it's like some shockingly small number of the population, 10% buys 80% of the alcohol in America. Those numbers are probably wrong, but it's like a small percentage buys almost all of it. Yeah.

And it made me think that like I wonder if every brand is ultimately like that. that there is like a a small percentage of the population that's a hardcore and that is like the true brand value something.

So someone like Trump who maybe is broadly unpopular but has like a 38% like hardcore 10 Q rating makes him maybe the most powerful person in culture. And I think that we're seeing with someone like this, it's like that it is the high Q rating with a devoted minority online.

That is we keep underestimating how powerful that can be. Yeah. He has the thousand true fans if you want to use that analogy like and that means that those folks will not Yes. It's only a thousand views but it's a thousand views on every single post and it's comments.

a thousand comments, a thousand reposts and that multiplies to and it might be a hundred thousand true fans for him. It might I mean he said he wanted to knock on a million doors.

He has several hundred thousand I think 800,000 Tik Tok followers like like that that but he has true fans whereas a lot of the other candidates I feel like just like the difference has always been true fans plus a category of people that are saying anybody but Quuomo. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

And if you like 2024 to me, you know, all social media is an ad. And so podcast like these these are non-ad spaces. They feel like the real spaces.

So if you're brand only living in like broadcast social like you're just a CPG advertiser basically like you aren't you aren't engaging in a real way and like this is this is people know this is real and then over there in the feed that we're around is like largely [ __ ] Like we all we all know and that's that's how we're processing everything now.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh anything else about this was great. Kickstarter or anything? Yeah, this was fantastic. I think you should lobby uh Zoron to get 0% corporate tax on the ACOR. There we go. Could be some way to get some momentum.

There's some way to do that with the borrow borrow a page out of big business, you know. Talk talk to Weisenthal about it when he's done. See what he We will. We will. Thanks so much for this was great chatting. We'll talk to you soon. We got to tell the great TVPN nation about Finn. Can we pull up Finn AI?

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Uh I have we've consistently loved point of view and it feels like we need to create a a founder kind of therapy corner because has the ability to just kind of like cut through the noise. Um and we're very excited to partner with them. So finn. ai/TVPN,