jackconte

Also - YouTube uses the "Watch Time" algorithm to recommend and surface videos across the whole platform, which effectively promotes videos that lead to long session times on YouTube - not necessarily videos that are "good" (and what IS a good video?!?!?). I've found this to be particularly frustrating.

For instance: if a band comes out with a music video that has a link to buy the song at the end, and the song is SO GOOD that a ton of people LEAVE YOUTUBE to go buy the song, then YouTube FLAGS that video as a video that ENDED the user's session. In other words, they will purposely demote that video in their recommendations algorithm! EVEN THOUGH IT WAS SO GOOD THAT PEOPLE BOUGHT THE SONG!

So it effectively punishes people who make videos that cause users to leave YouTube. Since Grey also encourages conversations to happen on Reddit instead of YouTube comments, he's also stopping a lot of user sessions, which probably end up demoting his videos somewhat. I can understand how that's supremely frustrating

Howdy - Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon here. An IPO isn't on the near horizon for Patreon, but it's not out of the question in the long term future of the company. One of the most insightful pieces of advice I ever got was from a partner at Union Square Ventures, who said that I should start thinking about the long term relationship between patron, creator, and shareholder as soon as possible.

A lot of folks get really concerned about a company going public because it can lead to this inevitable kind of spiral with lots of shareholder pressure to hit quarterly numbers instead of focusing on community and long term utility for users. And that's super important to me. I like to think about Patreon as a long term company, and I cringe at the idea of making sacrifices just to hit numbers and keep shareholders happy.

Right now, the shareholders in Patreon are our employees and our investors (including Index Ventures, CRV, Freestyle, Atlas, and many angel investors). BUT, we've been ULTRA careful about who gets to have a stake in this company.

Danny Rimer, the only board member besides me and my cofounder, is an incredible human being. He was an art history major. His house is filled with commissions from incredible artists around the world. He's on the board of SF Moma - he DEEPLY cares about art and creativity. That's the kind of person that we want as a shareholder in Patreon. People who understand our long term mission and share our faith in the eventual ubiquity of the patronage model.

The danger with going public is that you lose that tight knit community of hand-picked shareholders. One of the hardest jobs I have as CEO is figuring out how to build a self-propelled culture of people -- employees, board members, advisors -- who have a deep care for creators and who will always do what's right for THEM. This is the hardest thing, and, perhaps, the most important thing that I can contribute to Patreon as a company as it grows up.

So yes - maybe an IPO eventually, way down the road, but we have a lot of work to do and value to provide before we're even close. And until we have a self-propelled machine of Creator First, creator-centric behavior and decisions, we'll stay a private company.

Gosh I love this question - this is a struggle, and one that Patreon is aware of.

So first of all - Patreon is NOT a paywall. Creators can use it however they want. MOST creators don't use Patreon as a paywall - I think, actually, only about 30% of creators use it for exclusive content - most creators keep releasing everything for free for all their fans. That's how I use it, it's how pomplamoose uses it, and that's how most creators use it.

Second of all - I understand what you mean about the internet getting smaller. But Patreon is BUILT for diversity and for smallness. Hanging on our walls is art from 50 of our creators. ALL KINDS of stuff. Maybe my favorite thing about the internet is that "niche" audiences have to be redefined. Is 100,000 people really NICHE?? 100,000 people?!?! That's a crap ton of people. And I don't think "niche" applies anymore.

Finally - of all the options available, it turns out that joining forces was, in this case, BEST for Subbable creators. The other option was logging in next month to realize that paychecks were down 30 or 40%, which is totally no good.

NOPE, good try, though.... hehehe.

Subbable got an email from Amazon about 3 months ago saying that they would have to ask ALL their users to re-authorize payments, because Amazon was switching from FPS (flexible payments system) to Login and Pay with Amazon (a new payments infrastructure).

That would require Subbable to rebuild their entire payments architecture AND ask their users to RE-SIGN up.

Can you imagine asking 12,000 users to RE-SIGN up?!?! There would be attrition, no matter what. Some users just wouldn't do it.

So Patreon proposed a solution - instead of re-building your entire backend, have the creators launch on Patreon. And to reduce the effects of attrition, Patreon would match the first 45 days of pledges up to $100,000.

That would make sure that creators have a solid paycheck, even if 100% of their users don't migrate over at first, AND it would create awesome incentives for patrons to support even more, because they would know that their pledges would be matched.

AND -- finally -- YES, this is an acquisition, and there is money flowing, but MOST of the money (literally most, like almost all of it) is going toward this matching program, not to Hank and John. That's the way they wanted it. We used all the resources we had allocated for the deal to minimize attrition for creators.

If I could hop in on a side note here - it's really easy to assume negative or selfish intent about people. The media and headlines like to portray companies, and especially Silicon Valley companies, as sharky deuchebags who are all about the benjamins. This makes me sad. I have not been in SV very long (less than two years) but most of the people I've had the pleasure of working with care more about impact than they do about getting rich. That is ESPECIALLY true of Hank and John. They could have set up this deal so that they made an extra 100k in cash, and instead, they wanted it to go to creators.

That was one of the greatest nights of my life. My heart exploded with joy that night. "Brainwash" - that's the name of the cafe/laundromat where we played. Damn. What a night.