In the fall of 2009, we met the founding team at Kickstarter. Perry, Yancey, and Charles had built a marketplace where anyone could fund and follow creativity of all kinds. We were immediately taken with the team and the idea.
We are all well aware of what is happening to the existing models for funding creative ideas. But what we have not seen enough of, yet, are new models to replace them. Creative people will continue to produce amazing works. We do not think technology and the Internet will change that, other than possibly to accelerate the rate of creativity. But how will these creators get the funding to produce the work and put food on their tables and roofs over their heads? That is an open question and one we are very interested in helping to answer.
We believe that Kickstarter is a very important and fundamental idea that will most certainly be part of the answer. Simply put, Kickstarter allows everyone to fund the projects they want to see come to fruition. The creators set the amount of funding they need and the marketplace determines whether the project is worthy of funding.
When we made the investment, it was decided that we’d keep it quiet for a while. We never had a great reason to change that posture. And so we ended up keeping it quiet for over a year. Recently the company has been getting a lot of attention and it has become clear to all of us that the quiet period is over. So now we get to add the Kickstarter logo to our investments page and we can talk about the company publicly as much as we talk about it privately. We are all looking forward to doing that.