Our Next Great Leap

Today I’m announcing that we are beginning the search for Kickstarter’s next CEO.

I’ve spent the last 12 years working on Kickstarter in many different roles. As a co-founder, as our first community support rep when we launched in 2009, as an evangelist sharing Kickstarter with creators, as a team-builder who has hired and supported so many wonderful people, and most recently as CEO.

Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. As a Public Benefit Corporation, we strive to be a leader in thoughtful corporate governance. We’ve empowered more than 100,000 people to bring their book, album, movie, artwork, game, play, or product into existence. Kickstarter distributed more than $170 million to independent creators over the last three months — the biggest three-month stretch in our history.

Since 2014 when I became CEO, we made several great leaps: tripling the total dollars pledged to projects, launching Kickstarter to creators in 16 countries, and building an exceptional team of leaders at every level. Now we’re looking for someone who can push us to make our next great leaps.

Let me be the first to tell you: the job is great. The team is seriously ridiculous. 2017 will be our eighth straight profitable year. Great stuff is cooking in the oven. Being the CEO of Kickstarter is an unreal opportunity for someone with a deep connection to creative projects, someone who doesn’t believe in putting profit above all, and someone who’s excited by the challenge of building on a successful business that’s oriented to the long term.

While I’ll step down sometime later this year, I’ll continue to be out in the world sharing our story as a cofounder and #1 fan. And I’ll be getting up to some new projects, too.

I want to thank my cofounders Perry and Charles, our board, and the team for fighting the good fight together. Hell yeah!