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Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler: 'We're here to empower people to take over the mainstream'

Yancey Strickler visited London in the week of Kickstarter's eighth birthday  - JULIAN SIMMONDS
Yancey Strickler visited London in the week of Kickstarter's eighth birthday - JULIAN SIMMONDS

As Hollywood descended on the south of France on a mild spring day in 2015 for the annual Cannes Film Festival, seasoned directors Brad Bird and Cameron Crowe were hoping to steal the show with the release of their latest blockbusters. Bringing with them Tomorrowland and Aloha respectively, the pair were soon disappointed when a newcomer caught the attention of the film world and pushed their efforts to the sidelines.

The other movie was called Kung Fury and it was the work of David Sandberg. The English-language, Swedish martial arts film was an experiment by a somewhat impoverished 29-year-old who had never made a film before, and was both the director and lead character. Unlike Bird and Crowe’s blockbuster releases, which had all-star casts and multimillion-dollar budgets, Kung Fury started life as a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

For Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter’s chief executive and co-founder, the tale exemplifies what the crowdfunding platform was designed to achieve. “The same day that these Hollywood heavyweights come out with big movies that each lose $100m, this no-name guy from Sweden makes a movie by himself in front of a green screen that becomes the standout movie of Cannes,” says Strickler. “We’re there for those outsider voices, we’re there to try to empower people, and potentially take over the mainstream – over a long period of time.”

The campaign was an unlikely success and interest in the movie snowballed. Tens of thousands of fans rushed to fund what was described as an “over-the-top action comedy” featuring “arcade robots, dinosaurs, Nazis, vikings, Norse gods, mutants and a super kung fu cop called Kung Fury, all wrapped up in an Eighties-style action-packed adventure”. Within a month, Sandberg had raised $630,019 (£488,391). A year later, he was the star of Cannes. 

George Clooney in Tomorrowland - Credit: Disney
George Clooney in Tomorrowland, which lost out to the Kickstarter-funded Kung Fury Credit: Disney

Strickler recalls feeling excited and energised after watching the trailer for Kung Fury and seeing Kickstarter’s investment community flock towards it. “You just had to watch his trailer and you were like, ‘I’ve literally never seen anything like this before – this is new’,” he says. “It raised $600,000 out of nowhere. He’s a nobody.”

Sitting in a quiet corner of a Shoreditch hotel, away from the dozens of people hunched over Apple laptops, Strickler sips from a cappuccino and a green juice. He is wearing a green plaid shirt and thick, plastic-rimmed glasses as he describes how the tale reflects his desire for Kickstarter to encourage independent artists to “break the monopoly” large studios have over cultural production. “We’re in the business of supporting creative people and helping them put their ideas into the world,” he says.

Kickstarter

Strickler co-founded Kickstarter in 2009 alongside two friends as a way to fund artists’ and innovators’ ideas. All three came from creative backgrounds, which spurred their desire to create the platform. Strickler was a former music journalist, while Perry Chen was an artist and Charles Adler a graphic designer.

The model was simple: in return for funding, backers would receive perks such as a personalised version of a product, a role as an extra in a film, or a mention in a song or book. Kickstarter, meanwhile, would take a cut from the funding – currently 5pc.

By its second year, Kickstarter was making a profit. This week, as it turns eight, it has reached a new milestone of having raised $3bn. To date, more than 123,000 Kickstarter projects have been funded by 12.8m users.

Kickstarter's headquarters in Brooklyn, New York - Credit: Julia Robbs
Kickstarter's headquarters in Brooklyn, New York Credit: Julia Robbs

Kickstarter wasn’t cut from the same mould as most Silicon Valley start-ups. The co-founders’ end-goal has never been to make vast sums of money. “We knew that for this to be the best version of itself we weren’t going to exploit it to get as rich as possible. We weren’t motivated by money and we vowed not to take that path,” Strickler says. “We’ve always had the idea that we would never sell out and we would never go public.”

The benefits of Kickstarter for creators is obvious: as long as their idea interests the community, they can find the means to bring it to life without a great risk. But the motivation for backers is more opaque. Strickler admits the return on investment for backers isn’t particularly high, and says the main driving force is to feel a part of the process. The ethos sounds very similar to how he approaches running the business.

He describes the small-scale investors as the “mini Medici of our age”, referring to the famed Italian banking family that was a benefactor of the Renaissance. “It’s not the Pope, it’s not the king, it’s just some person who has a day job and spends their spare time acting as a benevolent benefactor for people with new ideas,” he says.

Kickstarter and its rivals Indiegogo and GoFundMe launched in quick succession in the late 2000s, opening a new chapter in the history of crowdfunding. It was the aftermath of the financial crisis, and traditional investment streams for start-ups and creative projects had mostly dried up. Looking for ways to keep innovation alive, the three platforms took inspiration from a funding method the arts sector had relied on for centuries: asking the public for support in return for a non-financial reward.

Our investors are people who are excited to be part of a new idea. They think it’s cool to have a role in it

Yancey Strickler

In 1885, renowned newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched one of the first notable crowdfunding campaigns for the Statue of Liberty’s granite plinth. After the US was unable to raise the money itself, Pulitzer placed an advert in his paper, The New York World, calling on readers to help. More than 160,000 donors, from street cleaners to politicians, responded to and fronted the required $101,091 (£1.9m today). They became part of the history of the city’s iconic statue.

The Kickstarter co-founders initially thought backers would support projects run by people they already knew, such as a musician whose first album they loved. But, as it has grown, the site has developed a community of enthusiasts who visit on a daily basis to find new ideas to back. More than half the money pledged every day comes from returning investors.

“They’re enthusiasts. They’re people who are excited to be part of a new idea. They think it’s cool to have a role in it,” says Strickler. The most common pledge is $25, and the projects that receive the most attention are new technologies and tabletop games. Strickler himself has spent tens of thousands of dollars backing more than 2,000 projects. He estimates he would come in at around 15 on the leaderboard, which contains people who have spent more than $100,000.

Mark Zuckerberg wearing the Oculus Rift
The Oculus Rift headset, funded on Kickstarter, was bought by Facebook in 2014

Both Strickler’s passion and the history of crowdfunding reflect how the platform can help boost the arts. But in the 21st century, another industry has emerged as a great beneficiary. Kickstarter is probably best known for being a launchpad for new technology products.

Famously, Palmer Luckey launched the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset on Kickstarter in a campaign that raised $2.4m from 9,522 backers in 2012. Luckey was just 19 and the money helped him develop the prototype he had built in his parents’ garage into a leading VR headset, now owned by Facebook.

The original Pebble smartwatch also started life on the platform. In the same year that the Oculus Rift launched, Pebble raised almost $10.3m in funding from 68,929 backers on Kickstarter. The hardware company, which recently sold to Fitbit, went on to raise a further $33.2m in the same way for its Time and Time 2 watches.

If the goal is to create a system without failure, you end up with something more conservative than a bank

Yancey Strickler

For all the success stories on Kickstarter, there have also been a few major flops that have left backers out of pocket and disappointed. One was the handheld Zano drone, which the makers claimed would connect to a smartphone so the pictures and videos it took could be easily shared online. Torquing Group raised more than $3m from 12,075 people before failing to deliver the product and going bankrupt. Kickstarter hired an investigative journalist to discover what went wrong.

“If the goal is to create a system that does not have failure, then you end up with something more conservative than a bank, which is very self-defeating,” Strickler says.

Zano drone - Credit: Torquing Group
The handheld Zano drone didn't live up to the creators' promises Credit: Torquing Group

Kickstarter estimates that 40pc of projects pass the threshold to receive funding and around 9pc of these fail. Part of the problem is that investors tend to be amateurs and that due diligence can be difficult. However, Strickler admits the service was never intended to be completely failsafe. “I don’t think we can ever promise a platform without failure,” he says. “We’ve approached this by being very transparent about it and embracing the fact that it does happen.”

The ability to embrace failure is engrained in Kickstarter’s business model, which prioritises creativity over return on investment. Just a few months after Kung Fury was released in 2015, Kickstarter reincorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation, a type of business that is for-profit but is committed to a purpose beyond maximising profits for shareholders.

As part of its mission statement, the company is mandated to fight for the rights of artists, promote arts and music education, and encourage equality. For Strickler, the access to independent funding offers has never been more important. “The future of arts funding in the US and UK is in real doubt. It’s not hard for me to see how the flip gets switched and we go from a land of cultural abundance to one of scarcity faster than you can imagine,” he says.

In a world where Donald Trump is US President, creativity and innovation could be at greater risk of extinction than they were in the wake of the financial crisis.

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