Yancey Strickler – Keynote Speaker

Yancey Strickler is a writer and the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter.

Since introducing the world to crowdfunding a decade ago, Kickstarter has helped creative people raise more than $4 billion in funding for their projects. Among the projects that got their start on Kickstarter: Cards Against Humanity, Oculus Rift, multiple Oscar-winning films, projects by Spike Lee, Neil Young, Marina Abramovic, and thousands of albums, books, comics, artworks, gadgets, plays, and restaurants.

In 2015 Kickstarter became a Public Benefit Corporation, choosing to focus the company’s mission, as the New York Times wrote, on “altruism over profit.” A study by the Wharton School of Business that year found that Kickstarter projects created more than 300,000 full- and part-time jobs.

Yancey Strickler has been recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People. He’s spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, Tribeca and Sundance Film Festivals, Web Summit, SXSW, Walker Art Center, Stanford, Columbia University, and NYU.

Strickler is co-founder of the artistic resource The Creative Independent and a former music journalist. The London Spectator called him “one of the least obnoxious tech evangelists ever.”

Strickler’s first book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (Viking/Penguin Books), will be published in October, 2019.