Starting out by giving yourself options

- This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. (upbeat music) - I'm excited to share some of the story of technologist, designer, entrepreneur, and one of the original founders of Kickstarter, Charles Adler. By now, I'm sure most of you have at least heard of Kickstarter, maybe helped fund a project, or possibly launch a project. But for those who may not be familiar, Kickstarter's an American Public Benefit Corporation based in Brooklyn, New York that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity and merchandising. (upbeat music) The company's stated mission, is to help bring creative projects to life. Kickstarter has reportedly received more than 4 billion in pledges from 15.5 million backers to fund over 250,000 creative projects, such as films, music, stage shows, video games, technology and food related projects, just to name a few. People who back Kickstarter projects are offered tangible rewards or experiences in exchange for their pledges. This model traces its roots to subscription models of arts patronage, where artists would go directly to to their audiences to fund their work. But for more on that, let's get to know Charles and how we found his way to this once in a lifetime opportunity. I started with the only question I could think of which is, how in the world did you even get this opportunity? Brilliant, I know. (upbeat music) - Yeah, so it actually, I would say two things. It has to do with dropping out of school, has to do with the place that I worked when I dropped out of school. I would argue the community within that corporation, and it very much had to do with subsistence, and then maybe the other part of this like, nomadic part of my life, which is to say I move quite a bit, and I was living in New York at the time. So how that all comes together is, there was a friend of mine, or a guy who became my friend, at this company that I was working at, this agency that I dropped out of school for. - In Chicago? - In Chicago, he was in Chicago and this is now, 90, sorry, 2006. So I had moved around a lot in that period of time from 96 to '06 and in '06, I was living in New York, I just quit that agency that I'd worked at, and was starting up my own design practice, web development, product development practice, which is to say, I quit bought a Mac and said, I'm open, right? And so this friend of mine I would say, connecting the, I think connecting the dots outside of just like skill, right? And so when I say skill, what I was doing for the majority of that time was, at the end of it was, strategy. I became a partner at this firm, partner, business strategy if you will, or product strategy, but also information architect which I think is still maybe a word, but, you know architecting the information for website and some development and design. And so, him knowing that, and him also being college friends with one of the guys that would end up partnering with on Kickstarter-- - So before we get too far into this story, let me first talk about the three original partners. Kickstarter launched on April 8th, 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles, since it's launch time magazine for example, called it one of the best inventions in 2010, and one of the best websites in 2011, just to name a few of its accolades. All three of the founders are creatives in their own right, and coalesced at just the right time. (upbeat music) - They were freshman college roommates, and so it was the typical call where Perry, Kickstarter co-founder number one, I'm number three, calls Scott Hebel mutual friend, and says, yo, do you know anybody who can help with like design or strategy or product development? And he's like, well, I know there's one guy who, right, and so that's how the connection was made. And so that was maybe the end of '06, beginning of '07, Perry was living in Brooklyn, I was living in Brooklyn, and so we just got in touch, jumped on the phone and what I would say that moment when Perry was describing what would become Kickstarter what was in his mind, and I can give you backstory of his story, but at least at the moment we got introduced, he was telling me this story, not an elevator pitch, right? Kind of like this conversation, my recollection is, you know, stopping him two or three minutes into the conversation saying, I got it. (upbeat music)