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Hudson Union and Oaklins Desilva+Phillips Dealmaker Series present Yancey Strickler, Founder of Kickstarter.
Many technology start-ups aim to become unicorns, the companies that get valued at $1 billion or more on their way to probable vast riches. Yancey Strickler had no interest in that.
Yancey is co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, the world's largest and best known crowd funding digital platform for creative projects, raising over $3 billion in its short history. Strickler co-founded Kickstarter to help bring creative projects to life. In the process, he has started an important conversation about how companies can stick to their ideals, resist conformity, and contribute to the public good.
Under his leadership, Kickstarter has become a Public Benefit Corporation, a designation which means the company must consider not only its financial obligations to shareholders, but also its impact on society. As part of its corporate charter as a PBC, Kickstarter donates five percent of its after-tax profits to arts education groups and organizations fighting systemic inequality.
He has been named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People, listed among Vanity Fair's New Establishment, and received a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival.
Kickstarter's mission is to help bring creative projects to life. Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date tens of thousands of creative projects, big and small, have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community.
Kickstarter has help create over 300,000 part-time and full-time jobs, $5.3 billion in economic impact generated, 8,800 new companies and non-profit created, in the new digital economy.
Kickstarter's financials are impressive: since it launched in April 2009, more than five million people have backed more than 52,000 projects. A total of $891 million has been pledged, $763 million of which has gone to successful projects, and 54 schemes have, to date, raised more than $1 million. Established names such as Charlie Kaufman, Amanda Palmer, James Franco, Zach Braff and Spike Lee have held out their hands on the site.
There is a 91% hit rate of delivering funded projects to backers.
A long-running challenge in the world of creative projects is the ability for collaborators to be paid for their contributions. Editors, illustrators, backing musicians, crew, and other creative collaborators are often unpaid for their work on creative projects. Not so with Kickstarter-funded creative projects.
More than 10% of Kickstarter creators reported winning major awards for their work, including a MacArthur Genius grant, National Design Awards from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, a James Dyson Award, IGrammys, an Oscar, and many more.
Strickler said he would ensure that money, or the promise of it, would not corrupt their company's mission of enabling creative projects to be funded. "We don't ever want to sell or go public...That would push the company to make choices that we don't think are in the best interest of the company." Kickstarter's measures it success as a company by how well it achieves it mission, not by the size of our profits.
This very rare evening with a creative revolutionary, who has fundamentally changed the business model in the new digital economy is brought to you by the Hudson Union and Oaklins Dealmaker's Digital Series
Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, founded in 1996, New York-based is the Technology, Media and Telecommunications Practice for Oaklins, the world’s largest mid-market M&A firm. The Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, the Dealmakers Series are events for the top dealmakers and operators in the Media, Advertising & Marketing, Information, Education, Technology and Healthcare Communications industriesOaklins Desilva+Phillips Dealmaker Series -- Yancey Strickler, Founder of Kickstarter
