About Perry Chen: Perry Chen is a New York City-based artist best known for being the creator of the funding platform Kickstarter, which he launched in 2009 along with co-founders Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler.
Kickstarter was already up and going when I got the Fellowship. Spending time with the other Fellows was about camaraderie, and I talked to a lot of amazing and creative people.
Kickstarter has been such a heads-down thing.
I'm born and raised in New York. I've lived between New York and New Orleans for the last 16 to 17 years.
I wonder if people really know what the definition of crowd-funding is. Or, if there's even an agreed upon definition of what it is.
Video is so primal. When you can hear a person talking about the project, and can see his or her passion, it is unbelievably powerful. I don't want to make it seem like projects without a video fail.
I don't consider myself a social entrepreneur, but I'm thrilled to be doing good, if that's what I'm doing.
For most of the people who have a lot of success, it's because they were the ones who didn't quit. It's not necessarily because it was just laid out for them. It won't apply to all cases, but I think it's pretty good advice.
I remember early on, in the first couple of years especially, I would run into some people that would try to put Kickstarter under the 'social good' label. And I actually had this very visceral reaction - I just didn't like that at all.
The kind of system Kickstarter uses has been used for hundreds of years. Unlike Medici-style patronage, where the richest people in town give large amounts of money, Kickstarter's system relies on the general public for funding projects, and rewards ...
We'd love it if everybody had a Kickstarter project. I believe that everyone has some kind of creative project that they think about - whether it's something small they'd like to do over a weekend with friends, or it's the film they've always wanted ...
