Sam Yam (Patreon) - Surviving the Startup Grind

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2013, Sam Yam teamed up with his former Stanford roommate Jack Conte to create Patreon, a platform that connects content creators with members who provide recurring revenue. As co-founder and CTO, Yam built Patreon into a service that has funded more than one hundred thousand creatives, channelling more than one billion dollars to musicians, podcasters, and artists of all kinds. He describes the intense grind of scaling Patreon and looks at three central challenges that face most entrepreneurs, then focuses in on what makes the entrepreneurial path worth it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner.
0:13.0	On this episode, we're joined by Sam Yam, co-founder and CTO of Patreon.
0:19.0	In 2013, Sam teamed up with his college roommate, Jack Conti, to create a platform that connects
0:25.6	content creators with members who provide recurring revenue.
0:30.6	Seven years later, Patreon has funded more than 100,000 musicians, artists, and other creatives
0:35.6	to the tune of $1 billion.
0:38.3	Here's Sam.
0:40.3	Tech is getting an increasingly bad rap, sometimes with regards to its influence on society.
0:48.3	And I think it's already well, sort of widely understood that startups are difficult in their own right to do.
0:56.0	They can be really stressful.
0:58.0	They can be just requiring a lot of effort.
1:03.0	The thought was to go through my personal experiences
1:07.0	and think through like what makes it worth it to go through the process
1:13.6	and how you like get through the mentality of doing startups in this sort of
1:22.6	environment which is highlighted on the sort of title that everything is worse than you think.
1:29.0	And I figured a great place to start is just sort of a run through of my own life in
1:37.8	sort of highly curated Instagram story fashion through my experiences this past holiday in Bali.
1:46.1	So here we go. Oh Oh
2:01.6	Aww
2:04.6	Oh
	...

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