Yancey Strickler

Current Company

Kickstarter — Co-Founder

Crowdfunding a Creative Revolution

When Yancey Strickler co-founded Kickstarter with Perry Chen and Charles Adler in 2009, the idea of asking strangers on the internet to fund your creative project seemed eccentric at best. Traditional funding for creative work — record labels for musicians, publishers for writers, galleries for artists, venture capital for product designers — came with strings attached: creative control, ownership stakes, and the constant pressure to optimize for commercial appeal rather than artistic vision. Kickstarter proposed a radically different model: creators would pitch their projects directly to potential supporters, who would pledge money in exchange for rewards (a copy of the finished book, an early version of the product, a credit in the film) rather than equity or ownership. If the project reached its funding goal, the money was collected and the creator went to work; if not, no money changed hands.

The platform's early successes — the Pebble smartwatch, which raised over $10 million; the Veronica Mars movie, which proved fan-funded entertainment was viable; the Oculus Rift, which launched the modern virtual reality industry — demonstrated that crowdfunding could finance not just niche art projects but genuinely transformative products and cultural works. Under Strickler's leadership, Kickstarter facilitated the creation of projects that traditional gatekeepers would never have funded, proving that there was a vast market of creative work that existing funding mechanisms were systematically failing to support.

Beyond Kickstarter: Rethinking What Capitalism Can Be

Strickler's most lasting contribution to the business world may be his decision to reincorporate Kickstarter as a Public Benefit Corporation — a legal structure that requires the company to consider its impact on society, not just its financial returns to shareholders. The move was controversial: some investors and board members argued that a company's primary obligation was to maximize shareholder value, and that adding social considerations to the corporate charter would create confusion, legal liability, and competitive disadvantage. Strickler argued the opposite — that the narrow focus on financial maximization was itself the source of the dysfunction that plagues modern capitalism, and that companies could be both profitable and purposeful if they were willing to define success more broadly.

After stepping down as CEO, Strickler wrote 'This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World,' which articulated a vision of business and economics he calls Bentoism — a framework inspired by the Japanese bento box that encourages individuals and organizations to consider not just their immediate self-interest but their future self-interest, the interests of the people around them, and the interests of future generations. The book's argument — that the dominance of financial maximization as the sole measure of value has produced a society that is economically productive but socially impoverished — resonated with a generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders who were beginning to question whether growth at all costs was a sustainable or desirable model for building companies and communities.