Kickstarter: Perry Chen (2018)

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2018

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 2000s, Perry Chen was trying to put on a concert in New Orleans when he thought, what if fans could fund this in advance? His idea didn't work at the time, but he and his co-founders spent the next eight years refining the concept of crowdfunding creative projects. Today Kickstarter has funded over 155,000 projects worldwide. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," we check back in with Dustin Hogard who co-designed a survival belt that's full of tiny gadgets and thin enough to wear every day. (Original Broadcast Date: July 31, 2017.) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Hey, happy New Year everyone. If you're listening to this podcast on December 31st, it is the last day of the annual public radio fundraiser, so please pitch in right now.
0:37.0	When you give to your local public radio station, you are showing your support for our show.
0:42.0	So go to donate.npr.org slash built to get your contribution counted for 2018. And thanks.
0:51.0	Okay, now onto today's show. If you happen to be planning a brand new project or launching a new idea in the new year, we thought you might get some inspiration from my interview with Perry Chen.
1:01.0	He launched Kickstarter in 2009, and a year later, Time named it one of the best inventions of the year.
1:09.0	This episode first ran in July of last year, and hope you enjoy.
1:14.0	More than you getting stressed out that somebody else is going to beat you to the punch and do the same thing.
1:23.0	I think that certainly comes to mind, but I think there's also like, we couldn't have tried to go any faster. There was just not that much was in our control.
1:31.0	We didn't have a lot of money, we didn't have a lot of influence, we didn't have a lot of connections.
1:35.0	So we're moving as fast as we could, and that's kind of as much as you can do.
1:41.0	From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:53.0	I'm Guy Raaz, and on today's show, how Perry Chen built Kickstarter, and with it, the culture of crowdfunding ideas that might have never gotten off the ground.
2:08.0	You know, there's a kind of mythical narrative around startups, especially if we're talking about tech startups, and it goes something like this.
2:23.0	Founder has an idea, then founder recruits some friends, then friends sit in a room and start writing code, and then they try to get the app or the website out to the world as fast as possible.
2:35.0	And then it just explodes, it blows up millions of customers sign up and investors start beating down the door.
2:44.0	But today, we have a somewhat different story. This is the story of Kickstarter, and it did, of course, start with an idea.
	...

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