Overshare Podcast: Yancey Strickler on Life After Kickstarter
WORKING NOT WORKING
Overshare is a podcast and event series hosted by Working Not Working co-founder Justin Gignac. In a world of carefully curated portfolio sites and Instagram feeds, Justin sits down with his favorite creatives to get past the highlights and discuss the tough stuff we don't talk about in public often enough.
For the 10th episode and premiere of Season 2, Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, joins Justin on stage in front of a live audience for a candid conversation about life after Kickstarter. He reveals his rule of believing in everything, the ego benefits of seeing an astrologist, the importance of putting more love into the world, and why he grew a Beatles-inspired mustache to help in writing an ambitious book.
Yancey also shares many insights from his last decade at Kickstarter - taking it from a simple idea with two co-founders to a platform that has generated more than $3.5 billion in funding for more than 125,000 creative projects. "None of us had any entrepreneurial intentions. This was before being an entrepreneur was cool. This was, 'The White Stripes are still cool.' Then it changed. Julian Casablancas goes down, Mark Zuckerberg goes up. The world gets worse."
But over the course of his run at Kickstarter, Yancey did ultimately pick up a few entrepreneurial skills that he's now applying to his future. "I’d spent a lot of time strategic planning. Thinking about where we should go, imagining different futures. And I just thought, 'I should treat myself like I’m a company.' And so I did like two weeks of strategic planning on Yancey Inc. And I just thought about what I could be. I just looked at everything in my history and went through all of these different nerdy, eye-rolling frameworks that I would do with the leadership team. It was great. I found clarity on a number of things."
For those of you who couldn't make the live event, we have good news: you can listen to the entire conversation below on our podcast. Subscribe to Overshare on iTunes, Soundcloud, or with any other podcasting app via our RSS feed.
