Kickstarter’s Perry Chen on 10 years and billions of dollars of crowdfunding
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Perry, why don't you give me your title at Kickstarter? Sure. I'm founder and chairman. I served as CEO a couple of times, probably about for six years of our 10 years in total. You were most recently CEO until a couple weeks ago, I think. Yeah, I think maybe it's about a month at this point, but yeah. Yeah, and depending on when you listen to this, Kickstarter has just turned 10 years old. Yes, yes, very recently.

I think exciting. I mean, it is exciting. It's also just, you know, 10 years is so long. It's hard to believe. It's a weird company because it is both a noun, right? In the same way that Kleenex or Xerox is a noun. Everyone sort of knows what Kickstarter is, even if they can't identify you or the company. They know it's crowdfunding. Also, weirdly, for a sort of well-known, well-established internet company, you guys are pretty quiet. Yeah.

I'm not accused of throwing an election for Donald Trump or undermining democracy or being a haven for Nazis or running weird misinformation campaigns. So congratulations on that. More positively, you've generated, what, four plus billion followers?

For various projects? Yeah, I think that sounds right. That's an astonishing number. Thank you. I mean, what's really interesting is a couple years ago there was an economic impact report done by a UPenn researcher. And it talked about kind of how the secondary effects of the money raised in the projects on Kickstarter was I think an additional—I hate to get this wrong, but it's like you could do 2.5x—

of the money raised for like the trickle down impact. So you raise X money for this project and then that, then that project that employs these people or right. You go out in the world and you spend the $4 billion is spent on putting the film together, making the book, designing the thing. And that in turn creates this kind of, uh, economic, um,

economic impact, including, you know, the creation of organizations, part-time and full-time jobs, hundreds of thousands. So it's pretty amazing. It's not, you know, at our heart and soul, our primacy, our primary thing is that these projects exist in the world and they have this kind of qualitative effect on people, right? What is it to go see a

see a film. What is it to go see and like have an object that makes you think like all these things. But this secondary stuff is real and it's, you know, we appreciate it. And it's something, again, we didn't anticipate. It just kind of

What we learn is what occurs. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about how you started and what you were thinking about this when you started. Everyone has a founding myth, basically, for their company. Some of them are made up, hoping yours is accurate. You had this idea. You're in New Orleans in 2001. You're doing music, and you have this idea for a crowdfunding thing. Then it takes you about eight years more to actually launch it.

You're not calling this a crowdfunding idea, right? No, I mean, it's got to be at least a decade before that maybe term existed. Maybe not, you know, but better part of a decade. So your thought was, I wish there was a thing on the internet that helped me raise money to do a thing? Well, you know, I think a lot of the ideas that really work tend to be the kind of where they come from scratching the person's own itch, who is the kind of...

who like begins the journey. And so for me, I was living in New Orleans. I was probably mid-20s or so, maybe early 20s. And I wanted to throw a concert during the Jazz Fest in New Orleans, which is obviously one of the biggest events of the year. Not in the official capacity, but there's all these hundreds of little concerts that happen around it during the two weeks of the Jazz Fest. So I wanted to do that. I wasn't a music promoter. I was just a DJ and a musician. I love music and I wanted to bring these artists in from Austria, Germany,

I thought it'd be a great event. However, the costs were going to be high. You got to give those people on an airplane. I think it was about 15,000 bucks or something all in with the venue. I did some of my legwork and I realized I talked to the venue, but at the end of the day, I was like,

Yeah, I don't think I can do this. I can't front this. Yeah, I can't. Or if I do, this is just like everything. It's just like it's all, you know. What really bothered me was I was like, I think the artists would really enjoy it, getting an opportunity to come to New Orleans, experience Jazz Fest. Some of their music had been influenced by New Orleans music, even though it was electronic. I think the audience would really like it, seeing like the lineage of kind of New Orleans music and then going to late night events and seeing like how like more contemporary ways it's being used and twisted. Yeah.

And so I thought it would work. However, I just couldn't take the risk. And was this always going to be an internet idea? Because 2001 is post-internet boom, but the internet is still there. The internet hasn't gone away, but the idea of making businesses on the internet has gone away temporarily. Yeah, I think, right. And I didn't, I wasn't so aware of this, right? I never, I wasn't really working, you know, I never worked in the internet space prior. So for me, I was just like, oh, thinking about

could this exist online or this should exist online. And then, as you say, it's a different era. This is pre-social media in the way we have it now. This is MySpace and pre-YouTube and pre-video being like so ubiquitous, certainly user-generated video.

So in my mind, you have to imagine the thing I'm jumping off of is eBay, right? Like a listing-based service, probably photo-driven, copy-driven. Craig's Listie. Yeah, like, you know, somewhere between those two things, right? With this kind of mechanism of funding. So that's really the birth of it. And it was only in the eight years it took—

that all these things rose. And when did you decide this is, this moves from, this would be a cool thing for me to have, or this would be a cool thing for me to enable the next JazzFacts concert I want to run to. This is a business that I want to do. This is a business that I want to run and spend all my time working on. For me, the way it sat was, this is something that should exist. I had no inclination to start a business. As I said, I was living in New Orleans. I was working on music. For me, I'm like,

That's what you do after you grind for 40 or 50 years and maybe if you can make it happen. I was living that life at that point. I didn't have a ton of money, but it's like, why would one go off and do something for a long time that's really, really hard and ultimately probably to come back there? I'm already living the life that I want to live when I'm 50. I'm living the life that I want to live, and I found my peace. It doesn't involve having a lot of money. Yeah.

So really what drove me ultimately, and part of why it took a while was I thought it was a good idea, but, you know, I had to see why it would be something I would do. And it was only because really understanding that this is just not my problem, but all my fellow artists and creators' problem, which is that, you know, it's hard to get funding for things. So it became bigger than just, hey, I would like this to exist. It became this could really...

be an important piece. So we flash forward to 2009, you picked up two co-founders, a little bit of funding. I was listening to an interview you did the other day. You had David Cross as an initial backer. Yes, David Cross from Arrested Development and many other things. Mr. Show. Mr. Show. I love that David Cross is your seed money. He was our first investor. And I remember seeing you guys sort of around. He's the hidden force behind...

behind the technology boom. It's fantastic. I love it. Because I think he's off the internet again. He was on for a while. I remember seeing you guys around New York startup land and sort of there's a class of New York startups, Tumblr, Etsy, Foursquare. That would be an interesting retrospective of that cohort. I really think right now is an incredible time to kind of look back at that. I was just talking to Dennis Crowley about that. Right, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Meetup. Yeah. I think of Twitter as a New York startup.

Really? It's not, obviously, but just because there were so many people on the investment side, Union Square, and those guys were always sort of hanging out in New York. I think of them sort of in that class, even though San Francisco gets to claim them.

And all of those were sort of, well, they're all different stories. David Karp was doing this thing as a project for high school. So when you guys get around to, okay, now we've got some real money. We're actually launching this site. If we flash all the way forward to now, you guys are a public benefit corporation. We'll talk about that. You're mission-driven. You're a for-profit company, but you're different than your sort of standard Internet company. Was that clear in your head in 2009 that we're going to do this, but it's going to be sort of a different take on capitalism now?

than the standard internet company would be? Not in the, like, so yes, in terms of like ultimately how we were going to make decisions. No, in terms of like the deep understanding of the law and the corporate structures and the mechanisms that would be required. So even when we raised money, you know, we told our investors that, you know, we're not going to profit maximize. We're not going to just do whatever it is to make money. We're not going to,

We don't want to go public. We don't want to sell the company. So all these things which are really about mission primacy, I think even terms like mission focused, which we use and are kind of almost, they don't serve really what it is well. I think it's really easy for people to understand nonprofits, the green pieces of the ACLUs of the world, to understand their mission primacy, the environment, the First Amendment. I think when we get to kind of like the

the space we're in, which is kind of, you know, in the spectrum, in the binary world of eat the world sociopathic for-profit, fully non-profit, sitting in the middle in a way, you know, do people interpret when you say mission like a for-profit, which is like just some stuff we write on the wall to convince everybody that they're actually doing something positive, or is it like a non-profit, which is like literally that's why they exist. It is definitely like a non-profit, right? That's why we exist, full stop. And you knew that going in?

Yeah, because I have no interest in working at a technology company. So when you're talking to someone like a Fred Wilson from Union Square, who does a lot of interesting stuff, but is very much focused on getting a return, it's just his job. And again, that class of internet startups he invested in did amazing. When you have that conversation with Fred Wilson and say, we're never going to sell this company, we're never going to go public, it's going to be very difficult for you to make money on this investment. How does that conversation go?

Yeah, I mean, I think that I've always found that, you know, people have said before, like, you get married to your investors. And I think that's a really important kind of way to talk about it because I think often it's easy to focus, both from the investor's perspective and the entrepreneur's perspective, or whoever they're talking with, the CEO, on, like, getting the deal done. But the thing is, you're going to work with these people for a very long time, and it's...

If you tell each other things that aren't true, convenient lies often, or convenient half-truths. Like, we trust the entrepreneur. Or, don't worry, I want this to be super, super, super big.

just to get the deal signed and move on, it will always come back to bite you, just in the same way it would in a romantic relationship, I think, as well. So I think with Fred and other investors at the time that also invested in more classic startups, I think my approach was always just tell them how it is. Tell them how you plan to make decisions. And then if there's a way it can work for them, then you can move to the next stage of conversation, which is to try to understand, is that true?

Because I'm wondering if they had the same conversations with people, you know, with the Twitters and Etsys of the world. And, you know, those are companies where I think Fred Wilson publicly said, yeah, I had to fire the CEO. I think he said he had blood on his hands once. Oh, Jesus. About firing Jack Dorsey years ago. I can't remember who he killed.

The point is, I'm sure he had meaningful, deep conversations with lots of folks. And in the end, there's a decision about we need to push this founder out or we need to get a return. We need to sell the company. You're from the get-go saying, I'm not into that. Yeah, I think that there's – I would encourage entrepreneurs to think about there's three vectors that you have to think about.

Okay, one is, it's not just the paper. It's not just the contracts, right? It's also like, you're having a conversation with a person. So are you being upfront with them? You know, are you being ethical, telling them what you plan, letting them make the decision, and choosing open eyes to go into this arrangement with you? Meaning that later, I believe you have the moral authority that if they're coming at you, hey, I don't know my LPs, you can say, look, look, it's not what you told me. That's just one.

Now, the other thing, too, is you remember that this person is also just playing a role, right? Somebody else could be sitting in that seat representing the fund or the family or the institution. If you're a nonprofit, it could be MacArthur. Different people could be sitting in those seats representing their role, and they may not share the opinions of the people that were there that made the deal, and that's actually appropriate.

So you want to also make sure, okay, contractually, really legally. I want to protect myself if you get hit by a truck or you quit or whatever. What's the legal relation? What's the contractual relation? So you want the kind of ethical moral. We've laid out our truths. We've agreed here. The second is that contractually—

Even if it's not you. Right. I've looked you in the eye and we've made a deal. And then we're also going to have a contract that protects me if you're no longer here. Sure. Exactly. And I think both ways should protect you that I am also living up to the way I've positioned it. I don't love the investor as boogeyman kind of thing because I think we're all the boogeyman, you know. Yeah.

What's the third one? You can come back to it. I think that's interesting what you said about the investor being the boogeyman because it's come up in the sort of media discussions the last few years. Like, oh, it's the venture capitalist's fault that these media companies aren't succeeding. Yeah. They put too much money in or they put too much pressure in or they force them to sell or they force – and from what I can tell, I think –

at least half of that is wrong. And at a minimum, the people who are running the companies need to bear at least half the blame. The third thing I do recall, and at first I just want to say I totally agree with what you're saying, it's to be shared. I think it's a really good conversation to have. I think the third thing is like, what is it that you're ultimately doing a deal with? So there's so many different types of investors. There's the individual that can invest in whatever they want. It's their money. However, there's people who represent institutions and funds.

And they're representatives, so you want to understand, okay, ultimately, what is this thing that is ultimately giving the money that I'm making the deal with? So you need, in this instance, to understand, say, what is Union Square, right? What is the arrangement they have with their LPs, their investors? Right, who are their LPs? Oh, their pension funds, which means— Yeah, or even just that, what is the auspices of the relationship with the fund? What have they promised them? What are the returns they promised them? What are the rules that they're going to operate to, whether it's Fred or somebody else sitting in this seat?

And so you want to understand all those things and then build something that is fair and works for all that. And then you have to allow everybody to be able to say, this doesn't make sense for us. And I go into every conversation with somebody institutional, really being like, trying to convince them it doesn't make sense because I would only want to work with somebody who really is like, can convince me why. I think there's 99.9% of the time, it wouldn't have made sense for a Kickstarter to work with a fund. I think there was just a confluence of reasons why

with Fred, with Union Square at that time, with the low valuation it was at the early stage, with the relatively very small amount of money that Union Square was putting in, that those things allowed that to occur. And then even with that, for example, a lot of people don't know, Fred's been on our board for almost 10 years now, but that's not a board seat that USV quote unquote owns. And that was part of the thing. We're like, you know, you know a lot,

love to work with you. USV doesn't have a deal that gives them a board seat. Right. And so it's like things like that, where it's like, I wouldn't presume that there aren't things I could learn from the experience that Fred has had, but also to say that tying in a seat for Union Square in perpetuity is not something that I feel is appropriate for what we're doing. However, as long as it works, which it's worked wonderfully, just as an individual, Fred has been amazing.

I mean, you know, he's made $0. The guy's worked on our board for nine years. You're his least successful investment. Yeah. I don't know about least successful. But yeah, I think that's a better way to put it. Least successful, successful investment in terms of fun. I want to talk more about structure. But first, and we'll take a break in a second, but I do want to just go back to when you launched. When, because I think this is an interesting question.

thing that people sometimes talk about. You launch in 2009. When does it click? Like, oh, not only is this working sort of at a small scale, but this could really get big. This could eventually be a $4 billion thing, plus however much I can imagine. It's funny because I think that sometimes you start, you know, when you're, you know, at the beginning, it's like you're doing everything, right? It's the kind of classic...

Garbage has to get taken out, you got to do it. I wrote all the copy on the website for the first two years as well. So everything's one inch in front of you. And then to do this, I was like, "This should exist in the world." And then Charles and Yancy, we met and it was like, "This should exist in the world." Yeah, my co-founders. And then early employees, very early, it's like, "This should exist in the world." The ones that helped us build it even before it existed.

And really, that's it. Like, that's as far as we got. Like, it's funny. Like, we didn't have projections and, like, all these things were like, this should exist. That's what drove us. When we launched, within the month, there was a project by this woman, Alison Weiss, who's a singer-songwriter, and she was in Georgia. And she put up a project. Like, she had gotten an invite from somebody. The first six months, we had an invite system where we just gave out invites and let them just go.

And, you know, woke up in the morning, literally, I remember like going and, you know, see what's new. There's probably three new projects. And it was, she had nailed it. It's like, it's like probably the first time somebody saw on Twitter where somebody took 140 characters and nailed it. And you're like, oh, this is a format. Do you remember how much you raised? I'm going to guess maybe less than 10,000, probably between 5 and 10,000 for an album, an acoustic album. Yeah.

But it was just her video was so good. Again, we didn't coach her at all. She just knew how to use it. Her rewards were really smart. One of her backers like put her over the goal in the first day or two. And she like did like she like Skyped with the woman who she didn't know in Australia recorded that Skype session.

This is the thing we made and it's being used exactly the way we sort of imagined it might work. And better. And better. And like, you know, theory is one thing, right? Like I think often we're in a moment now where we live in an academic theoretical world often. This was like in practice. And then when did this sort of like, you know, classic internet hockey stick thing happen? We're like, oh. Never. No, it didn't. Kickstarter's never hockey sticked. We had that kind of, I don't know, what do you call this? It's a kind of like a... Slope? Slope.

Yeah, like a nice 45 degree thingy. Healthy, reasonable business line. And that was a blessing. It's a huge blessing. I can't, I really empathize with entrepreneurs and staff and board members and even users of companies where they have the hockey stick, where it's the classic servers are melting, we need 100 people here this month. I mean, I can't imagine what that does to decision making and culture and all those things. And so...

The companies change. Every time that happens, the company, literally the company that started and the company that's there at the end of that cycle is a different company. That makes sense. But I also remember there was just a wave where like everyone's doing a Kickstarter and my inbox is full of people trying to promote their company via a Kickstarter and it's now a verb. And weren't you like a time 100 person? Like it seemed like there was definitely a moment for you where you had real velocity. For sure. I mean, I don't mean to say that like, I just think, you know, if you have that slow, steady climb at some point, you know,

People catch on in a way, and it's more prevalent in the media. And then there's always been a press around projects. So if there'll be a big project, then there'll be a press moment. And maybe that seems like it speaks to where the company is at in a moment, but sometimes it's just, here's an interesting project that somebody's interested in the media. All right. Well, let's think about hockey sticks. We're going to take a quick break and hear from an advertiser who may be having a hockey stick moment of their own. We'll be right back.

Think scaling AI is hard? Think again. With Watson X, you can deploy AI across any environment. Above the clouds, helping pilots navigate flights, and on lots of clouds, helping employees automate tasks. On-prem, so designers can access proprietary data, and on the edge, so remote bank tellers can assist customers. Watson X works anywhere, so you can scale AI everywhere.

Learn more at IBM.com slash Watson X. IBM. Let's create. We are back with Perry Chen. You have just heard what we call a programmatic ad. We hope you listened to it. Right, Perry? Advertising is evil. What?

We love advertisers that support this show. It's a tension economy. So let's talk about that. Bringing down democracy and all that. Did that theory of commerce and advertising and capitalism, we talked about this a little bit, again from the get-go, was that baked into your projects? That this would be a way for people to create art, media, other projects and not have to go through traditional funding mechanisms?

You know, I almost want to say it was a little even, it was like more simple. It was like, at the end of the day, for artists, creators, people want to make things. I think that the more funding channels, you know, they're so constrained, they're so hard to get, that we just wanted to create another alternative. Just more options. And we wanted to make our alternative something that we felt was, you know, that you could be, you know, proud of and you could stand by and you maybe didn't have to make

certain sacrifices, whether it's creative or ethical, for that channel. So how do you feel about the fact that sort of your mechanism, right, the idea of craftsmanship,

crowdfunding loosely has now been picked up and copied and modified or attempted to be used by everyone from other companies that pretty much do exactly what you're doing, like Indiegogo, to things that are much more generic, like GoFundMe. Patreon has a subscription version of this. And then periodically you see the biggest companies in the world, right? YouTube and Facebook trying to like pick up a piece of what you've done. Does that make you feel proud? Like,

I did a cool thing, you guys are all figuring it out, or YouTube should not be doing a crowdfunding thing? I think ownership over ideas is a tricky thing. I think that once they're out there in the world, people will build on them. To me, all these things you mentioned, actually, I understand if it can all fall into one parent, but I really see all the differences in them that are really material in my mind.

And I think that a lot of these things were things that, you know, I think focus is really important. You know, our mission is to help bring creative projects to life. Our mission is not to be...

the largest crowdfunding company. And I think that that's really instructive on a day-to-day basis as to like, what do you want to do? Because again, like the GoFundMe thing now sadly has become a way people cover medical costs. I think they raise more money on an annual basis through GoFundMe than we do at this point, I would guess. It's bananas. But on the other hand, you'd think, well, if people are already using Kickstarter to fund someone's acoustic album, why not help them also pay for a surgery they need, which is also going to allow them to produce an album a year from now. Yeah.

Similarly, Patreon, which is an interesting company, Jack Conte is an interesting guy. The big difference, right, is it's a subscription service essentially, right? We're going to pay you on a recurring basis because we want to support you, whereas you guys are project-based. You tried a version of this, I think, called Drip, right?

Yeah, so we did this kind of R&D side project called Drip that's still out there, but it's invite only. We've closed the invites and it's going to, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan from XOXO, really incredible kind of community, are in the process now of kind of working on the next gen of it, which hopefully won't be much, you know, sometime this year. We'll all learn more. But yeah, you know, our focus has always been on this project.

this way of doing it, right? So the properties are, one, it's project-based, as you say. The other is that the funding is conditional, right? You have to reach the goal that you set to get the money.

The other is it's a rewards-based kind of patronage, not like you get 1% like an investment model, which I think as the laws have shifted in certain places, people have tried some of the crowdfunding investment kind of things. Has not really taken off. Has not really taken off, correct. And so for us, there really has continued to be this real focus on trying to continue to iterate and perfect things

a tool for helping creative projects come to life. And I think that speaks to maybe some of the, I need money, you know, for surgery or something like that, you know, why we've never done those things. How often do you have a conversation internally like,

We should do this either because our audience wants to do it, our users want to do it, our creatives want to do it. It would allow us to make a bigger business and that could be a good thing. Yeah, I think the important thing again is the primacy of a lot of the questions you're asking would be if we were a classic corporation with a shareholder primacy, meaning that the ultimate goal is maximizing shareholder value. And you debate short or long term, but that's it.

Again, with an organization like ours, which is to help creative projects come to life, that's the primacy.

And so every conversation you have has that in the room. And what about the version of the conversation that says, right, primacy, focus on mission, that's all good. On the other hand, there's no reason that we have to do things exactly the way we did them 10 years ago. Oh, of course. We should evolve. We should try new things. And if we're bottled up, we're eventually going to – it's not going to work. No, but the thing is that you try new things absolutely to help creative projects come to life. That's the primacy. The primacy is not keep doing what we're doing. You shouldn't do that.

You evolve to better serve your mission, but to better serve the mission you have, right? Say for Greenpeace, there's probably, I don't know their mission, but something about the environment. And that's really more of what I'm saying, not the specifics of how you go about and do those things. Right. So your version of Patreon, right? You wouldn't call it that, but your subscription style thing that was Drip. Yeah.

That makes sense to me, right? Like, it's the same mission, but we're not going to make it specific to a project. We're still going to have the same end goal, which is to help someone make something cool. And we still focus on the same group we focus on Kickstarter, which is not subscription use for any type of thing, which still was kind of the same kind of cohort of ultimately people that are looking to produce creative projects. Yeah. So when we launched it, it was within that prism as well. So why do you think that didn't work for you guys?

Well, I mean, I think a couple of things. One is that I think classically focus is always so important. You know, it was, you know, it was an R&D thing, you know, it was kind of invite only. I think that it's good to kind of sometimes, you know, you got to take a little bit of risk. Otherwise, you end up being, as you say, you don't evolve. You also need to be able to try things and then

pull back at the right moments, and you learn. I think that we tried to do something really narrow, which is like, we're not going to just do subscriptions. We want to do subscriptions for this cohort and see if we can help drive forward the space. We're not interested in market share. It's like, can we help make subscriptions something more viable for the types of creators we serve?

I think subscriptions has been showing legs in the digital media space for decades.

like recurring digital media. I think for other things, podcast, web series, things like that, I think for other things, it still hasn't yet shown it's an effective broader tool. And so I think we were trying to see if, you know, could we, since that's our market, or the creators we serve to serve our mission,

We wanted to see if we could kind of push the conversation forward through that. You guys have done a lot of technology-focused stuff, a lot of gadgets, and then a lot of media-focused stuff. Is there a kind of Kickstarter project you would love to see more of that just hasn't really happened for some reason? Or it hasn't happened with the same velocity or volume? I mean, I think at this point we're really past the point of hasn't really happened because it's been over 150,000 projects. You know, the

The projects that raise a ton of money or that really fit with the kind of focus that is really prevalent in the media get the press and go out there. But if you really go dig in deep... Yeah. But you guys also put out your numbers and you say, this is where the bulk of our stuff has been happening. You can sort of see it. Right. But if you go and see that, you're going to see the bulk in music and film, not in...

Not in the areas that get the most press, actually. When you see the most dollars, then you start to see it differently. But you see the most projects, like the amount of music projects that are funded that raise $6,000, it's really large, short films, things like that. And so I get it. It's like the quote-unquote sexier stuff for press, it does start to feel outsized. But all this to just say to your question, I do think that

We've kind of seen, you know, there is a way where Kickstarter is like a cultural map, right? It's like a map of culture. You see kind of things, subcultures in the creative world that are kind of coming up. You start to see the small projects that come onto Kickstarter that are these scenes, these genres, like big.

maybe not being birthed, but kind of not too far after. So you get sort of an early warning system, like this is bubbling up in the culture, this is interesting. Yeah, and I don't, you know, the truth is that how much we're paying attention to that, like where we're like kind of, you know, where we have a map where we're like, oh my God, look at this new genre bubbling up, like that would be awesome. And I think those are the kind of things that are really exciting. How much could we do something like that that could then, again, serve helping creative projects come to life? Could we notice nascent creative movements

And find ways to like... I'm right away going to like, oh, and then you could sell that to someone because that's important information. Yeah, no, we're not trying to sell a trend report. I could see you bristling even without asking it, yeah. I mean, like, look, I'm not trying to be... I'm a pragmatist and like, you know, any kind of strong opinion I have around things like, for example, advertising, like, it doesn't come from like a kind of... It only comes from the fact that I believe that

Fundamentally, it ends up driving the attention economy, which I think is undermining our general sanity and consciousness. I'm not really interested in demonizing individuals. Or individuals at supported podcasts that you're on. Look, there's a lot of artists and creators that have taken money and sponsorships and done commercials and things like that. Again, that's why I say the one thing I am

A question in the place we are right now in culture and in discourse is, you know, when things get, conversations get too academic and we live in a practical world. So I think there's a place for both, but it can't just be academic. And like if I were to sit here and say, you guys shouldn't do any advertising, I wholly believe this with my heart.

However, I understand that people that are here are trying to make practical decisions. Well, then maybe we don't even have a podcast to exist and the impact the podcast could have doesn't exist. And so how do we even judge that? These are hard things to decide. And then are we here to basically solve this problem or are we just one tiny cog?

that ultimately has to go the way the wind blows. And again, you're not prescriptive about that, right? Within sort of the boundaries of we have these rules about what kind of project can work here, but if you want to do this and then eventually create an ad-based business, Godspeed, we're not going to stop you from doing that.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're trying to appropriate that much control, especially over creators. We can say what you can and can't do on our platform. I do remember, again, this is when I would assume the first few-ish years of you of Kickstarter and when it, again, sort of kicked off and all of a sudden, you know,

Warner Brothers was crowdfunding. Now, I'm always confused whether they actually use Kickstarter or someone like you to fund a Buffy the Vampire. No, no, it was a Veronica Mars movie, right? We did have a Veronica Mars movie, yeah. And Zach Braff, the guy from... Yeah, he did.

Zach Braff, Spike Lee. And every time that would come up, they'd be like, wait, this isn't what Kickstarter is supposed to be used for. People were upset by it. And again, my inbox would just be full of people who were using you as a marketing mechanism in the same way that IPOs were supposed to be marketing mechanisms in 1999, right? The thing existed so people would pay attention to it. I'm assuming, from the little I know about you and the little conversation we've had, that you must have bristled about some of that. Yeah.

I think it's interesting. I would say that I am certainly somebody who, in general, when I see something where the celebrity and the brands and all this stuff is coming, I'm like, damn, it's over.

so i'm super sensitive to kind of like the reactions of people the party got too big it's not cool anymore no you forget cool i mean this is utilitarian stuff like you know we're i'm an artist we're trying to get work done like i think a lot of artists were and creators were there to be cool and creators who are there to like just get the work done i've always loved filmmakers because filmmakers like cool musicians and i love music i'm from music cool musicians

In their mind, it's always like, how does this make me look? A filmmaker is like, I'll wash your car, I'll clean your house. Like, I just want to make my movie. And I want someone to see it. Yeah, and I really admire that. I really admire how they can put the ego aside. I'm sure a lot of musicians would like to. I know it's a more ego-driven business, so I don't, you know, I know it's something they may have to deal with more.

But reorient me. What was your question again? I'm getting there. Just sort of how, again, I don't know if it actually happened or if it was just my memory. Oh, yeah, sorry. Like Motley Crue was showing up in my inbox saying we've got a new Kickstarter for an album. Well, there was a Motley Crue. But the example I like to talk about is The Great Spike Lee. I don't know what people think. I don't know if people think that Spike Lee can call up Hollywood and Hollywood's just like, where do we wire the money? That's just not how it works.

So who more is a place that's to help creative projects come to life for than an independent filmmaker, Spike Lee, who has a canon of work and wants to make a film and isn't so easy for him to get the money? And when he does, they're probably like, okay, Spike, why don't we change this and why don't we change that? Who is it for? I don't understand when people say,

oh, you're too successful. Now, if he's trying to make a Burger King ad, yeah, but that's not what he's trying to do. He's trying to make an independent film with a script he wrote in the way he wanted to make it, and he was going to go to his fans, who he's given his work to for 20 years, and ask them for their support. I mean, I get the impulse of celebrities are here, so they must be bad or wrong, but I just say underneath it, it's wrong. Not only that, but the results of

Spike Lee bringing his thousands and thousands of people was we saw people who came to back Spike Lee's project go on to back onto their independent filmmakers. So as opposed to what people thought is like, oh my God, people are going to come to Kickstarter and they're going to see Spike's film and they're going to give him 10 bucks instead of mine. That's not how it works. He promotes it. He brings people in. And then now those people go and some of them, a few percentage, back other projects and brought...

You know, that's meaningful. Bring it on, Spike Lee. Bring it on, Zach Braff. If you have a cool thing you want to do, if you have a thing you want to do and it fits in our parameters, fine. We're not worried about being sort of appropriated as a marketing mechanism. No, I think you want to be worried about that. What I'm saying is that this manifestation is not that. I understand why it can seem like, oh, it is that.

But that case, the Spike Lee, these independent creators coming, to me is not the case. That's not the case. So I don't mean to say, like, there's still a lot of things that we don't do, as opposed to all the other sites you mentioned, for the most part, which are like anything. We are probably the tightest by far, but what we do and we don't, we're trying to keep it a space for creative work.

But it's unfortunate. I understand how it occurred. I think that those guys and Spike had to go through a whole media cycle where he was getting hit. And I think it's really unfortunate, especially for somebody like him. But we released a blog post trying to show some of the numbers to show how this sense of it's a pie getting cut up amongst creators. And now these big names are taking a bigger piece. Actually, it's not how it works. The pie is still getting sized.

Right. And he's bringing people to the, he's bringing pie, you know, some, I don't know, some pie makers or something. I like that. I'm hungry. So the metaphor is working in some way. You know, let's take one more quick break. Maybe we'll hear from a sponsor. Maybe we'll hear from one of my friends at Fox media who wants to talk about one of their shows. Who knows what we're going to hear? It's programmatic. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Polestar. Innovation is at the heart of every Polestar car and their SUV Polestar 3 is no different. From

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Back here with Perry Chen, who's going to go to Chinatown after we have this conversation. You grew up in New York City? Yes. Yeah, I was born in 76. Grew up in the city, you know, in the 80s and 90s. Different city. Yeah. And— You do not meet a lot of native New Yorkers in this business. This is something—if you don't mind, I want to talk about this. I hear this over and over, right? The spaces that I'm in a lot these days in art or around Kickstarter, you hear this a lot. Oh, my God, a real New Yorker. Yeah.

And it's true. Sometimes it means Westchester. Right. But, you know, every once in a while, like, you know, I also meet somebody and we're like, oh, you're from the city? You're from the city? And we're like, and I looked at the stats a few years ago because I was like, this is befuddling to me. And it's about, you know, 50-50 in New York City, New York City born and not. So the rate at which we're actually stumbling upon each other in the kind of spaces that we're in

is not indicative of the population at large. What do you think that means? Well, I think that means that these are bubbles. I think it means these are bubbles. Bubbles, sort of cultural bubbles, not economic bubbles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are cultural bubbles. And they're, you know, I mean, you can't decouple them from being economic bubbles as well.

I think about a lot just about entrepreneurs and writing about entrepreneurs and talking to them. This is not an original idea, but a lot of them are from the top of the socioeconomic stratosphere. They're not very rich. They have a safety net of some sort, even if they don't think they have a safety net. They could drop out of college or they could not take a job. And again, in terms of the life, they tend to be in their 20s because that's when you have the most sort of flexibility.

So you grew up in Chinatown? No, I grew up in the city, but I grew up on Roosevelt Island, actually. Okay. Which, if you have not spent time in New York City, you won't know where that is, but that's the cool trail. Yeah, it's pretty much the center of New York City. It's a small island that opened in 1976 as a project by the state of New York. When it opened, it was all government housing. So these are projects done by the state of New York. There's a thing called Mitchell Llama, which is the kind of the...

the government initiative in which this created all subsidized housing. And it was this grand experiment by the state. So now it's between the east side and Long Island City where Amazon wanted to go. And there's this cool park there they've opened up. It was there this summer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was 76. My parents moved there when I was three months old when the island opened, within the first six months of it opening. What did your parents do? They're both city workers. So my mom was a teacher. She taught at public schools, public high schools.

The longest tenure she had was at Martin Luther King High School, which is in the West Side in the 50s, I think. My father's a social worker for the city of New York. He worked in elderly home care. So he basically would go around for people that were kind of on welfare or otherwise city supported and making sure that these elderly people had a

that the home attendants that had been assigned to them by the city, they were getting their medication, they were getting whatever help they needed. And he would just walk around down here, Lower East Side, Chinatown, et cetera, do that, and come home. So your parents are government workers, and then at some point you're now in internet land and you're doing internet startups and you're raising VC funding. How aware are you at the time that your background is vastly different than most of the people you're working with, talking to, trying to help, or working with and talking to?

Is that something in the forefront of your head or it sort of slips in the back most of the time? I think it gets more and more, it's become more and more apparent. I think it was always there, but I would say like it was apparent and I think each year it gets more and more apparent. Do you feel like that's something you want to like address or that's just a fact of life and you shrug and it is what it is? Well, I mean, I think the times in a way call for it. I mean, I think we're in a moment right now where people are really interested in talking about where do we all come from? You know, what are the experiences that you bring to the table? And so in that sense,

I'm interested and I'm happy to talk about that because as you say, like,

I think sometimes it's easy for people, even given how radically different Kickstarter is from any other company, is to just say, "Oh, you're a founder of a company or founder of a quote-unquote tech company." And you have a picture of what that person is, even if you can't articulate it. You do. And you do. And I would too. And I would too. And I do too. I mean, you know, it's just like, you know, it's like bias, you know, it's like everybody's got some sort of thing going on. We're human. So I do too. And I think then it's important to kind of lift the hood a little bit.

So you're not just projecting and you're kind of understanding, you know, where things are coming from. And so, yeah, you know, that's my experience. Like for me, I wasn't in the technology space. I wasn't looking to get into the technology space. I wanted to solve a specific problem that called to me that I felt was socially important. I continue to deeply believe in it.

And, you know, I come from a place where my parents were, you know, before social justice was, you know, now a new term, but this was the old 70s, 60s social justice, right? And that's the household I grew up in, right? It's like do something, you know, try to do something that contributes. And I think that's what's driven like a lot of the decisions, which is like, I'm not going to turn this into some sort of vehicle that somebody else can use to profit maximize. I'm also not going to do that.

I'm only here to try to solve this problem to the best of my ability. And, you know, my responsibility is to steward this to its mission, to help creative products come to life. That's why it exists. And I won't take, you know, I'm not going to take the shortcuts or I'm not going to take, I'm not going to exploit it to enrich myself because I can and because everybody else does it and nobody would really question me. And I don't do it to be, you know, like, I don't need to like talk about it or say like, hey, I didn't do this and people, everybody else took the money and ran.

But because this was normal, you know, in a way like this. Listen, every day, all of us make decisions that aren't maximizing our

material interests, right? Some of us think that way. Yeah. But not that many. Right. Well, I mean, it's true. I do think maximizing material interest, I don't think you have a lot of people who are doing that. Like a lot of people maybe like going overboard. I over-index based on the people I talk to and write about, but yeah. Yeah, right. So that's true. But I mean, as a personal level. Yes. Like that's, you know, in a personal level, maybe not as in their role at the company, which is greatly, the dissonance between those two things is deeply problematic.

Right. Between like what what people are mandated to do. But I'm just saying like. But there's a culture of saying, again, this is both CEO culture and also just sort of pop culture. Now, if you go up to the WeWork upstairs, the hustle culture, right? This idea of like you should be spending all of your time trying to figure out how to maximize your time so you can get maximum. But what I would say is that do those people not see their family?

No, no, by the way, I think it's weird and gross. Yeah, no, I'm just saying, like, do those people not see their family? Do those people not see friends? Like, I'm sure it's all well beyond anything I would think is, like, the right way to be a person in society. However, I think what I'm saying is, like, except for true sociopaths and psychopaths, everybody is trying to balance it in some way. And they may over-index well beyond anything I would, like, feel like is okay.

And so I'm saying we all choose to calibrate differently, right, within that. There was a rough article about you in BuzzFeed last year. I'll do this very short version. It's after you. The least read article in the history of BuzzFeed. It did... I remember it was funny because I only found it through Google. I didn't remember seeing it across the first time around. Anyway, it's about you coming back and the second time to run the company and a lot of folks leave, rslash are pushed out. And at one point...

It has you talking to the staff about this and talking about your background and explaining that you've got a different sort of take on the world, kind of sort of in defense of what had been happening. Did that argument – do you think that resonated with the company when you talked to them? Well, you know, I think it's always challenging to talk about like –

a body of people as like one mind. Sure. Right? It's like when people are like, "What, you know, the black photos are going to do this." What did all the people think? Yeah, you know, so, so yeah, there was probably maybe 120, 130 people at the time. And I'm sure there was a diversity of opinion. And for me, I was more of like, "Hey, you know, I knew everybody really well for the first five years that we built this, that I was here straight through. We're a small organization. There's more chance to interact and get to know each other, more touch points.

and five years of making decisions together. And then I was away for three and a half years, and I was away. I mean, like, I came back and I only knew maybe 20 people of 130. Why did you come back? It was never my plan. You know, I couldn't have been happier going back to the studio working on art. But, you know, I've always felt like a responsibility as a steward of the company.

And not because of legacy or any of that stuff, to be honest, because I think, I don't really think that the stuff is that important. It's very personal. It's very ego driven. But what I think is that like, there's such a long continuum of people that have been involved in Kickstarter. From people who invested, you know, my friend who was a school teacher invested. It's not just like, you know, the Fred Wilson of Utah Square. People who invested, early employees who took, you know, much lower salaries to help

bring something to life. So they sacrifice, say, the kind of money they could have made because they felt the mission is important. I mean, this is a long continuum of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that I was the primary touchpoint for, you know, telling the story of Kickstarter, saying why this mission is important, saying what we wanted to create. And at the end of the day, for me, that was like, to live up to the responsibility was, you know, when the company kind of, you know, needed some help, that I wouldn't opt out of that.

And I didn't say that this is something I wanted to do, but I didn't... So that signal goes up, Perry, we need you back. Turn it down. Yeah, it wasn't necessarily like that. Like, hey, I got a call from the board and they're like, you know, I'm on the board. The board isn't that massive. But it was more of like when we saw that, hey, maybe we need to...

It's hard when a company exists. Most companies are trying to like, let's run during the bell, let's run to sell. It is a much more difficult thing to try to exist in perpetuity and actually try to get better. So it's challenging. And when we saw like, hey, rising that challenge is so hard and we may not be on track for that really hard thing.

What do we do? And then, you know, we look around, it's like, hey, if we want to make a change, do we have anybody right now that we think would be able to step into this role? And when we didn't think we did, then I think it's like, okay, well, I'll see what I can do, you know, and try to help and try to get things, you know, again, where they need to be for the mission.

And then again, step back into a role that's a more supporting role. Which is what you're doing now. Which I'm doing now. Was that always the plan? I'm going to come in for a couple years and then I'm going to step out again? I don't think the time-wise was ever really a thing. It was more of if it's three months, if it's longer. I think, again, I was driven by not just the responsibility that I felt to that long lineage of things. And I hope the sooner the better. And what was the thing that needed to get fixed when you came back?

What was the problem that you were trying to solve? You know, I don't think it was any one thing, but it's try to be a little bit like, not try to sprawl too much. I would just say like, everything works backward from the challenge, right? And the challenge for Kickstarter is to help creative projects come to life. And then the challenge is how do we have the most impact and the most impact over time? Because, you know, we're not working on one day, we're working as a thing. And so, and to do that, you start to ask yourself, well, okay, well, to do that over time, it has to be able to evolve, right?

And that means it has to be something where you can continue to get really great people to come and bring their ideas and bring their energy. People are super passionate about the mission. And some organizations you see, they just exist. Like some organizations, you're like, this thing seems like it's...

Like Yahoo just existed, right? Like at a certain point. And I think that for doing the reason those happen. It couldn't articulate why it existed. But the reason is because there's a group of people who are like, we're only focused on the next five years and then we're all going to be gone. And the mission here is to make the most money. It's just handed off to people who are trying to do that. If you have a real mission, right? Like then, like a Greenpeace, like that again is the mission. So how do you not only have an organization that just exists, but is like,

gets into a cycle where it can continue to be better. So that's like another, a second order problem. And then the other thing, which is key, is how do you make it so it's not dependent on any one person or any two people or any three people or four people? Because if you want something to exist in perpetuity...

How does it work without you showing up periodically and saying, "I'm the founder and this is my mission"? Correct. 100%. That was like going in the door of the five things to solve, X's to solve for, that was at the top of the list. So when you noticed you were stepping down, at the same time there was a story about the fact that your staff was unionizing. I don't think that things are connected, but the interesting thing to me was there was a line, someone printed an internal memo that talked about you guys raising money.

I'm trying to figure out how that works 10 years in when given this whole conversation we've had about that you're not going to sell, you're not going to go public. Totally, yeah, I'd love to talk about that. You paid a dividend. How do you get someone to put more money into Kickstarter? And also, why do you need more money? Yeah, so I'll start with the first one. Maybe it's faster. I think the way we've always approached it is like we're always happy to talk to people who we think are simpatico partners.

Right. And whether you're going to raise money for them now or whether you're building a dialogue. So in the future, if there's something you want to do that helps you better the mission or in the time of need that you have, that dialogue is already established. In the space we're in, like the way we operate, there's a very small group currently of investors that could fit with Kickstarter because, as you say, we're not creating a big liquidity event of selling or IPOing.

And so if you join us, we need you to be a very long-term partner or a permanent partner, like invest and then be happy with, in the years we're able to, have a dividend or theoretically sometime in the future, sell to another kind of approved investor that's willing again to have

So the way you're going to get your money out of this is either through a dividend or down the line, maybe someone else is going to put money in and buy some of your stakeout. Right. And so the people that we're talking about are now, it's not people who are trying to maximize profitability for their investment. You're talking now about people who, or organizations that are basically both looking at the impact Kickstarter makes in the world like they would a nonprofit.

And then also, yes, there's some potential financial upside as well. And then they can look at both those things together and say, this is worthy for us. This makes sense for us.

And that's the group. Like everyone else in media, when you're not technically a media company, you're describing Lorene Powell Jobs. I'm assuming she's going to write you a big job. I think that there's a group that I've seen over the past four years or so. And I feel like it's funny, like in a lot of ways with Kickstarter, with Public Benefit Corporation, with this conversation now, which is tied to that stuff, alternative models in a way, is I've had both the opportunity and the challenge of kind of being...

out there in uncharted territory. And so having this conversation the past three, four years with potential partners, fascinating partners, you see both like often you're sitting across the table from each other and you want to work together. But like there's some structural challenge to it, you know, and I just gave a talk at the Skoll Forum that'll come out shortly. And it was specifically on this, like trying to go to that Mecca, which I've never been to before, and just try to like let people know that, hey,

There's often, say, institutions that we might talk to or even foundations that will invest for profit. And they'll also do a lot of impact work. And somehow because we are in the middle, we're a blind spot.

And they don't intend for that to occur. It's just that they've built their administration to yesterday. Yeah, there aren't many of you, right? Yeah, there aren't many of us. And Patagonia, which is a great public benefit corporation model, is a privately held company by the Chouinard family. And as far as I know, I don't think that they have capital needs. And so as the other really prominent

alternative kind of structure in the US, a public benefit corporation, I do see like I'm kind of out there a little bit and having these conversations and seeing these challenges that exist right now and trying to spend time to like call them out and bust through, not just for Kickstarter. Because what I feel is like we're going to need a non-binary world of corporate structure.

We need somewhere in between rapacious profit-making and nonprofit. Yeah, and we need that, right? And it's not to say I'm not trying to impugn nonprofits. It's just more to say, like,

We need that suite of things. And to do that, you need models and you need them to be validated and things like that. So I think often for years about the bridge to somewhere, if we all remember the great Alaskan bridge to nowhere, you know, that I think was the House or Senate project, some pork, the bridge to somewhere, right? And I think that public benefit corporation is a piece of it.

You know, I have, since we formed that, entrepreneurs reach out all the time and say, "Hey, I'd really love to form a public benefit corporation or be not a profit maximizing thing. How do I do it? Is this model good?" And when we get to the point where people are like, "Is this harder to get funding?" Right now it is. It's not impossible and we did it and I wouldn't, I don't tell anybody to like not go for it and there's other interesting ways. It's better than ever every day.

So that Venn diagram is widening out a little bit. It is, but busting through that wall I think is important. And the thing that I know, it's just like when Kickstarter started. And again, we're still talking about money on all these things. Kickstarter and this, the intent was always there.

You were always going to give your, if your friend was like, I want to make the short film and like trying to raise 10 grand, you always had the intent to help them. But what are you going to do? Be like, oh, that's cool. Here's $10. It's so weird. So once the form came of Kickstarter, then it wasn't so weird. And that's the same thing with all these things. Like as the language is established, as the forms like the way are established, as the ways to measure these things are established, you

The intent is there. There is money out there. There is good money out there that is willing to support things like Kickstarter. Just all this stuff is like, needs to be developed for this next year or two. And just to go back to, what do you need the money for? Is it to buy out the Fred Wilsons of the world who put money in 10 years ago and they want an exit? Or do you need to, is there something you want to fund as a company? I think there's so many things we'd like to solve for. I think there's probably like five, six things. I think one is like,

Yes, I would love to be able to have more capital for Aziz and his team. - As the new CEO. - Aziz Hasan is the new CEO. To be able to try to do more, right? We've never tried to be big. We're 150 people now, but just a little more. Then a little more cushion. Again, we're not a profit maximizing entity. We're not a rich, rich company. All the money we made in the first five years, we used to build the office space. - It's a nice looking office. - Thank you.

And then, yeah, I think like helping facilitate some early shareholders and early employees and like people who, you know, like... You worked for us for below market wages 10 years ago. You gave us money without hope of getting it back. Here's a check. Yeah. And like, again, not this crazy like, you know, you wake up and you're a millionaire. Just like, again, fair...

And like cycling out, like allowing those shareholders who've been in for such a long time to move on to somebody or an institution or somebody who's there and like, great, we're good. And checking those boxes. And there's like a bunch of things like that that are kind of really, you know, they're kind of like esoteric things, but they're really kind of just like public benefit corporation. The ultimate goal is...

trying to create something that in perpetuity can dynamically and better focus on helping creative projects come to life. And so now my focus is kind of going in that direction, which is like we're capitalists, one piece of it, corporate governance structure, like public good and benefit corporation, things like that are pieces of it. It's like the above the head stuff, you know what I mean? And so it's important, esoteric stuff. What is it?

Honestly, like geekily cool. Five, six years ago when I was talking about this stuff, like people were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like now I see people like, oh. They're nodding. Yeah, I mean, it's inside baseball still a little bit, but people get why it's important. Well, no, I mean, we're having this conversation more often, right? This is a political conversation now, right? Totally. I mean, this is, if this is, this is at least on the Democratic side, like what is capitalism? On the right too. Yeah. I mean, surprisingly, yeah.

i'd say the one thing is that you know we have these binary conversations all the time like capitalism socialism binary what do you want to be again there's no there's no academic capitalism that's in play in this world there's no academic socialism in play there is only things in the middle every regulation pulls you one way or deregulation pulls you one way or the other

Right. Even culturally, those things pull you one way or the other. So these conversations have to be non-binary. And in America, you know, we decide by each regulation whether we want to be a little bit more academically capitalistic or a little bit more academically socialistic. Right. And so we understand we should stop talking about in this way of like where it's really binary and start to like get under the hood a little bit.

and see things like, for example, the current Delaware law that mandates that companies have shareholder primacy, which ends up being maximized shareholder value. Right. This is the sort of accepted standard definition of capitalism. This is the source code. This is the source code. I love the conversation people have today about like, last couple years about AI. And people are talking about like, let's imagine a world

where you tell your AI, go to the store and get me some water. And to do that, it just kills everybody because it's the fastest way to get it some water. It's like this is the boogeyman of the AI. And I get it. That's some scary stuff. And how do you teach the AI to have X values? To not kill people. Yeah. Let's have this conversation. I applaud everybody who's doing this. I mean, it's critical. But the underlying thing is there is that you'll tell some things. You'll tell this intelligent something and will execute it in this way.

that may be literal and that the outcome is not what you wanted. What I would say is that since the 80s, springing out of Chicago school Milton Friedman in the 70s, we've been doing the exact same thing already, which is that the way our law is around the mandates of profit maximization and the religion of this kind of very specific American capitalism that has come out of that, is it has been doing the exact same thing we fear.

which is that people go and work inside organizations that are telling them that you have to maximize, you have to be a legalized sociopath. Here's the crazy thing. Like, my last thought is this. We live in a country where no matter what you do, no matter how unethical it is, that we allow the answer to be, you can just say, well, I'm a business person. That's insane.

And why do we do that? Because we just say, oh, that's the law of the land. And that's just how things are because we're not, you know, whatever, Soviet era communists. It's broken. This is going to be an interesting year to watch that conversation evolve or maybe not evolve. This is great. I promised a baggy conversation and I meant that in the best possible way. We got it. Thanks, Perry. My pleasure. Thanks for joining us. Recode Media is produced by Golda Arthur. She's great. Jill Robbie edits this podcast. He's great. You guys listen. You're great. We will talk to you very soon.

Thank you.

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