Kickstarter partners with Google on Next Wave Fund: $10K non-dilutive grants for early-stage tech founders, up 52% YoY

Speaker 1: A crazy detailed legend. Yep.

Speaker 12: Well, our project is right on the border with Louisiana, so that's the that's why we got in the background on the lithium side.

Speaker 1: Well, you're a legend, and thank you for coming on the show. Legendary appearance.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Great great to

Speaker 1: meet you. Have a fantastic weekend. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Another one. We got another guest, Everette Taylor. He's the CEO of Kickstarter coming in the Ultradome. He's in the waiting room right now. Everette, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Speaker 8: I'm really I mean, it's sunny Florida right now, so I'm escaping the cold in New York right now.

Speaker 1: So I'm

Speaker 8: feeling good. You got it going?

Speaker 1: Amazing. I I I'm very excited to talk about the Next Wave Fund. But first, I'd love to know a little bit about your journey to Kickstarter, where the business is today, what your day to day is like, how big is this company, sort of set the set the ground for us.

Speaker 8: Yeah. So, I mean, Kickstarter, you know, started in in in 2009. I've been here Yeah. About four years And you know, we're the largest creative crowdfunding company in the world. We still are today. When I came into the company though, the company was in a bit of decline. We were down 20% year over year. Really? And since then, you know, we've grown dramatically year over year. Last year, we had another record breaking year. This year, we're already up 52% year over year over last year. The company has been scaling and growing we are transitioning just from a crowdfunding company to more of a creator economy company.

Speaker 1: How has the AI boom, the gen AI boom benefited or changed Kickstarter projects? When I think about the, you know, the catnip of Kickstarter project, it's like a board game that probably took a lot of time to to to build. And if the if the idea is great, I might not care if somebody used an image gen model to speed up the, you know, the graphics for a tree on the back of some playing card. I could see this being a bit Yeah.

Speaker 2: Not at all. I mean, I'm sure a lot of Kickstarter creators historically were spending a ton of money on renders.

Speaker 1: Totally. Totally. But at the same time, there's does this exist at all or is this just AI slop and there's a community dynamic and there's an artist displacement dynamic? And so have you grappled with the pros and cons of the last two years crazy boom in AI?

Speaker 8: Yeah. It's a it's a it's a great question. On the AI side, funny enough, gaming is where it's probably the most controversial. Right? Because gaming tends to be very artist forward.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 8: Right? And so, we've gotten probably the most pushback and some of the most negative pushback on the AI side from gaming because they really want to see artists be able to have jobs and do their thing. And so, you know, we were one of the first major tech companies to have our own AI policy. Every Kickstarter creator, if they're using AI, they actually have to say upfront how they're using AI Yep. Crediting the artist if they're using another artist, etcetera, etcetera.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 8: But on the design and technology side, these new AI powered, you know, tech products, especially in the hardware side, it's booming. Right? So both categories are growing, but you you see the differences in how people are accepting of AI.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes sense. Talk about the partnership with Google. What's the news?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So this week, we announced the next wave fund with Google to power the next generation of tech innovation. I'm a, you know, founder myself. I saw the struggles, you being an early stage tech founder struggling to get funding. And so, what we really wanted to do was give early stage tech startups and small business owners the funding they need, the tools to be successful Mhmm. The guidance that they need, and also be able to leverage Kickstarter's audience of millions of people to really get their first customers and scale their product. So this fund is focused on innovative products in hardware, software, gaming, and connected technology. And people will get $10,000 upfront non dilutive capital from Kickstarter and Google to launch their products and their companies on Kickstarter. And we wanted to focus on these areas because Kickstarter has just a natural product market fit for technology and gaming. They are our two largest categories, and we also have a large audience for both.

Speaker 2: So you're going to have a huge portfolio.

Speaker 8: Well, Kickstarter doesn't take Kickstarter doesn't take any equity. I mean, I have a aura ring right now. I wish we did take some equity on that. But but but, yeah, we don't take any we don't take any equity. And so this is really as a way to support people, give them the tools that they need to be successful. And also build a relationship with Google. Right? These people will have an opportunity to to apply to Google accelerators for their business as it grow and scales. They'll get access to our team that, you know, has decade plus of experience in scaling new products. So it's a great opportunity for a lot of people.

Speaker 1: Where can people get started? Take us through the is there an application process? Where does the where does the journey start for someone who wants to participate?

Speaker 8: Yes. So you can go to our to our website and and check out the Next Wave Fund.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 8: You can apply. This is for entrepreneurs or small businesses with fewer than 20 full time employees. Mhmm. Like I say, your project has to be focused on technology or digital gaming. Sure. And unfortunately, we we've been hearing this, and we gotta we gotta shout out to our international creators. But this this is for The US only.

Speaker 2: So Okay.

Speaker 8: At least one member of your team has to be a citizen of The US and be 18 years old. So

Speaker 1: Well, lots of opportunities. And thank you for taking us through it. Thank you for taking the

Speaker 2: time to

Speaker 1: chat with us.

Speaker 2: Great great to meet you.

Speaker 1: And great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: Peace, guys. Cheers, Everette.

Speaker 1: Goodbye. There are many more conversations going on in the timeline today. One was kicked off I think by Josh Kushner. Think he sort of started this. There were some other people talking about data center beautification, and he summed it up perfectly. He says make data centers aesthetically beautiful. And so people have been quote tweeting, posting, riffing on this, sharing different ideas. More people would be pro data center if every data center had a beautiful open to the public heated pool. That's an interesting twist. Full water slide. I think half pipe is a big idea. Monster truck rally constantly going on. These are ways to, you know, win people over sort of a nitro circus going on data center.

Speaker 2: Truck rally on the roof of a data center?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sort of a universal basic Nitro Circus. So you get are you familiar with Nitro Circus? Are you are is this a three fingers moment for you? Are you like, I'm familiar?

Speaker 2: No. I'm just imagining

Speaker 1: never actually to Nitro Circus.

Speaker 2: I'm imagining they're building the like dirt bike ramps over the data center Exactly. Back flipping over. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Julie Young shares a trick. This one neat trick that Los Angeles uses to hide oil deckers. We have a few oil derricks in LA that are disguised as synagogues. They are literally just sitting in the middle of the city, Lowell. Surprisingly, people are aware. There's a number of data centers that are disguised in Los Angeles as well. Usually, you can tell because there's no windows in the building, but these exist in downtown. Usually for edge computing, for, like, the content delivery network. You put a store in your Netflix videos there, that type of stuff. Not doing training runs, not gigawatt clusters. I did look up how how energy intensive Bitcoin is relative to what we think of AI. I think the numbers are OpenAI and Anthropic are around two gigawatts in terms of capacity, something like that. We've heard about the Colossus Data Center. The average Metacamp is around half a gigawatt. Zuck's building something in the one gigawatt range. There's gigawatt a week plans. But if you were to put the Bitcoin network current sort of estimates using between a 120 and a 170 terawatt hours per year, what is that in average power in gigawatts? It's between 14 gigawatts and 19 gigawatts. And so that's where you should sort of comp Bitcoin to if you're putting it in AI terms in in in the numbers that we throw around, which are usually like a one

Speaker 2: Before our next guess, Palmer Lucky has been getting into it with someone on the timeline. He says responds to someone named Clifford by saying, dumb tweet, Toto has been fabricating advanced ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing for many years. They make more money from that than toilets. Strong technical moat in a rapidly growing industry. Clifford says, perhaps. Fair point. But call me dumb under your real name or s t f u coward. Just like not realizing that he's talking talking about me.

Speaker 1: But isn't Cliff Asness like a big deal? I think he's an author. He's a his papers. I've I've heard of Cliff Asness before.

Speaker 2: That's funny because

Speaker 1: And so it is funny that they just like didn't over oh, he's a co founder of AQR Capital Management, hedge fund manager. Is this the right person? Forbes estimated net worth of $3,000,000,000?

Speaker 2: I believe

Speaker 1: I think this is accurate. I think he he yeah. Global Alpha. He started career in nineteen ninety, twenty Yes. Worked at Goldman Sachs. AQR Capital

Speaker 2: the the, like, Anderol

Speaker 1: You just have seen the SVP SPVs or something. Stable asset management and other institutions in the aggregate made commitments of several $100,000,000 to a new multi manager hedge fund. He's published in academics. He's done a bunch of stuff. I've heard of him I've heard of him before, so this is very funny.