Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
Kickstarter’s New CEO on Blockchain, Decentralization, and the Future of Crowdfunding
TechCrunch | Brian Heater | Oct 4, 2022
Everette Taylor is jumping in with both feet. It hasn’t been a full week since Kickstarter appointed the former Artsy CMO to the chief executive role, and from the sound of it, he hasn’t wasted a moment.
- Lots to work on: The past few years have been rough for Kickstarter, with layoffs, a butting of heads around unionization and some bad publicity tied to blockchain plans.
- Doing rounds: This past week was me really being able to get so much feedback, positive and negative, from our community and learn so many of the challenges that Kickstarter faces and our users in our community really want to see us succeed.
See: Kickstarter plans to move its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain
- Blockchain plans: I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there. People think that we’re turning Kickstarter into a web3 blockchain company.
- We’ve started a protocol as a separate entity.
- We’re exploring the opportunities that’s there in the blockchain to alleviate some of the challenges that we face as a centralized crowdfunding company.
- We’re not committed to moving Kickstarter to the blockchain or doing anything specific there.
- Elevator pitch for decentraliztaion: Think of a world where, if you’re raising, you’re not limited to one platform. That’s the beauty of that. If Indiegogo’s on the protocol, if Kickstarter’s on the protocol, everyone can benefit from each other.
- 60% of employees unionized: I just met with the union reps last week, it was incredible. They genuinely care so much about Kickstarter. They’re giving their free time committed to providing a better experience for not only themselves, but their colleagues and also the future people that work at Kickstarter. I think that’s incredibly inspiring. Here’s the thing: these are things I want to do anyway. These are the things that I want to do to support the members of our team.
See: Intellectual Property and NFTs: What you need to know
- 40% layoffs: Kickstarter is a very healthy business from a financial perspective and very profitable. At the time of the decision, there was a lot of uncertainty. I can’t even imagine being in Aziz’s shoes and trying to predict are people going to create product projects during the pandemic? I think [the reorg] gave Kickstarter two things.
- Number one, it gave us a little bit more financial flexibility in terms of headcount.
- And number two, it provided us with strategic thinking of what do we actually need?
- Helping creators and smaller projects: We should be doing a better job engaging our users and letting them know about the things that they’re going to be most interested in on the platform.
- If you’re somebody who’s shown a history of backing music projects, or you’ve shown a history of backing people from Tacoma, Washington — if you’re showing that you have intentions of wanting to support a certain thing, then we should be letting you know about those things.
See: Need to Bootstrap Your Business? Here’s What You Need to Know in 2022
- I think the future of crowdfunding if we do this right, is we provide a platform for anybody to make their dreams come true. Anybody that has an idea, they feel like they have an option to actually make it come true.
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