Today, I\u2019m talking with Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon. Jack last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago<\/a>, in the summer of 2021, and a lot has changed on the internet and in the creator landscape since then, so I was very excited to talk to him again, especially since his ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically as big social media platforms have gotten more closed off and more flooded by AI slop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In fact, you\u2019ll hear Jack say that he now thinks of Patreon as an \u201cindex of small business media companies,\u201d a major change in perspective that\u2019s led him to make Patreon a more direct competitor to social platforms like Instagram and TikTok.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Verge<\/em> subscribers, don\u2019t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder<\/em> wherever you get your podcasts. Head here<\/a>. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This is a huge change. In fact, the last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon. But then Patreon built those features \u2014 to help people discover content from new creators. Jack\u2019s reasoning for that change will be very familiar if you\u2019ve been listening to our media conversations here on Decoder<\/em>: Jack says if Patreon didn\u2019t build its own audience platform, then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences \u2014 and customers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019ll hear Jack say that the current way platforms treat creators is \u201cdisgusting,\u201d and you\u2019ll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone\u2019s work however they want, and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But you\u2019ll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon\u2019s plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s way more in this one \u2014 Jack came fired up for the Decoder<\/em> questions, and we spent some real time talking about his approach to how meetings feel, something you just won\u2019t hear from many other CEOs. This was a pretty refreshing conversation; I think you\u2019ll really like it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay: Patreon CEO Jack Conte. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jack Conte, you\u2019re the cofounder and CEO of Patreon. Welcome back to <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thanks, Nilay. Good to be here again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s good to see you again. It has been five years since you were last on the show. I can\u2019t believe it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n A lot has changed. The creator economy has changed. The idea that everything is a TikTok clip has now totally upended the culture. Patreon itself has changed. Maybe we\u2019ve all changed. Really, the true creator economy is the friends we\u2019ve made along the way. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n How has your idea of Patreon changed over the last five years? I feel like there has been a lot of change. How would you describe Patreon today in 2026?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You know what\u2019s so funny, Nilay? I think my answer to that is probably similar to your answer around the media industry. At the end of the day, Patreon is essentially an index of small business media companies. That\u2019s what we are. We help those small business media companies thrive, get paid, and reach their fans. And so, when they\u2019re hurting, we feel that burn as a business, and we feel that burn for them as our customers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The biggest shift over the last five years is really what happened up-funnel \u2014 what happened with TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The shift is really one main thing:the move away from follower-based paradigms and true subscriptions into an interest-driven distribution system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are so many problems with that, so many problems. It\u2019s hard to even outline all of them. There are societal-level problems around mass polarization, addiction, loneliness, and all the things that I think a lot of consumers are feeling. And then there\u2019s a bunch of problems on the creator side as well, because when you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator\u2019s deterministic line of reach to their fans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If a creator can\u2019t reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build a true community around their work, but they also can\u2019t build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy, that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business, is this shift of the internet away from follower-based paradigms and into interest-based paradigms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s very similar to Google Zero<\/a>. It\u2019s the same concept. It\u2019s when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade-plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms as their top of funnel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It starts to become very clear to everybody that these people were never our users, they were never our community members, they were never our fans. They were Facebook\u2019s users. And Facebook has made that loud and clear to creators, to the media industry, and to publishers. That has created a whole set of very important product launches and problems that Patreon has had to solve over the last five years, which has been the center point for our strategy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I love it. We\u2019re in it. We\u2019re in the heart of it. My criticism of the media industry over the last five years is that these platforms have just been looking us in the eye and saying, \u201cWe\u2019re going to kill you.\u201d It hasn\u2019t been subtle in any way, shape, or form. They\u2019ve just been very clear that these are their audiences, and they can remix attention in ways that serve them. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n They\u2019ve basically even said that to marketers who pay the bills for them, their advertisers. Meta, in particular, is like, \u201cWe\u2019re going to kill you too. We will just make the ads.\u201d <\/strong>Mark Zuckerberg has sat on stages and said<\/strong><\/a>, \u201cLook, my vision is that you just show up with some money, and we deliver you some customers, and everything in the middle is AI.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s going to work out or not, but they\u2019ve been pretty blunt that these are truly their audiences, and they will do with them what they will, and anybody who gets in their way is probably going to die.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It feels like, in the publishing company media world where I live, , approximately zero has been done to address this. It\u2019s like this industry has just decided to die, and <\/strong>maybe now they\u2019re all saying Google Zero<\/strong><\/a>, and maybe the future of <\/strong>The Verge<\/em><\/strong>\u2019s revenue is that I just charge licensing fees for it. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re saying in the small business world, this is equally the same problem, as the platforms go from follower-based to interest-based graphs. Is there a concerted effort beyond Patreon to do something about it in the smaller creator world?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I wish there was something systemic or organized, but honestly, it\u2019s very hard to fight the network effect. At the end of the day, that is what\u2019s happening. And honestly, the only reason creators are still using these fucking platforms is because that is the only place where you can grow your audience. It is not the software that is valuable about those companies, although, in many cases, the software is good. They have built a bunch of features that are useful for media hosting, uploading, and reaching people.It is more the fact that that\u2019s where the foot traffic is. That consolidation of traffic and of attention is one of the core problems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s also one of the reasons I was so excited about adding [Flipboard CEO] Mike McCue to our board, and about what he\u2019s doing with Surf<\/a>. At the end of the day, it would be amazing. The only way to truly systemically address this is if the people own the network effect instead of the platform. Ultimately, that\u2019s what Mike is trying to address with Surf, and that\u2019s one of the reasons I\u2019m excited about Bluesky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There does seem to be this early-stage effort to build an ecosystem around the open social web. That\u2019s not on our road map right now, but it is something I\u2019m following very closely and very excited about. Because at the end of the day, I think it\u2019s probably one of three main things that needs to change to stop something like this from happening again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you look back at the last 20 years, essentially, I think it\u2019s fair to say social media is a failed experiment that has failed humanity and been really bad for humans. I\u2019m not saying there aren\u2019t some good things about it. We\u2019ve all been connected up. We\u2019ve been given multiple pipelines to reach people. There are now millions of channels, instead of three channels. People who didn\u2019t used to have voices now have voices. There are some really wonderful things about it, but I would argue that those things are attributes of the internet, not of the current platforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The internet is beautiful. The internet is important. Connecting people and giving people a way to reach each other, and speak, and make media, and distribute that media, that\u2019s awesome. But the systems and subsystems that we\u2019re using layered on top of the internet, like social media, those systems are a bad implementation of those principles that have had a really harmful effect on humans at a scale that is hard to even comprehend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Something needs to change. When we look at the next 20 years of human collaboration and media distribution, I think we need to do some deep thinking. What are the architectural elements of these two decades of failed experimentation that have had such a bad effect on us, and what do we need to do differently next time to make sure it doesn\u2019t happen again?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a bunch of ideas in there. I want to come back to a lot of them. In particular, federation and Mike McCue, who\u2019s the CEO of Flipboard, which <\/strong>runs a platform called Surf<\/strong><\/a>. Surf is like a feed builder and browser for Threads and Bluesky and Mastodon, all the open social networks. There\u2019s a lot there that I want to come back to, particularly in this idea of the architecture of social networks.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was <\/strong>talking to Hank Green<\/strong><\/a> a couple weeks ago, and he said, \u201cIt feels like the end of one internet, and we need to think of it as the beginning of another.\u201d That would be great. I would love to live fully in that zone. The problem is, we have to contend with the end of the internet that we have today \u2014 the end of the platform era, if it is truly the end of the platform era.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tell me about Patreon right now in this moment. Maybe we see our way through the other side, but Patreon has to operate today. How is Patreon organized today?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We should spend some time getting into this because it\u2019s a really important point. The irony of all this is that in order for Patreon as a business and on behalf of our creators to fight this \u2014 in order to give our creators the audience growth and the reach that they need, and the ability to continue to grow and continue to grow on the platform \u2014 we have had to build discovery systems into our platform. I actually don\u2019t remember if I talked about this the last time I was on the show<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You were opposed to it the last time you were on the show. You did not want to do that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Exactly, and that\u2019s the irony. Now we have had to do that, because what we\u2019ve learned is, if we don\u2019t provide our own top of funnel for creators, then we\u2019re just relying on Facebook to be the top of funnel, and that is not a good business strategy for creators or for Patreon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Essentially, the stage that we\u2019re in as a company now, as for the last few years, is that we\u2019ve been building a bunch of media tools, distribution tools, and hosting tools. We\u2019ve built native video, we built chat, we built discovery, we built short-posting tools, we built a feed. We have built all these new ways for creators to essentially start providing the growth for themselves, start providing a top of funnel for themselves, and for Patreon to have a top of funnel for our creators as well. That\u2019s the irony of all this.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, that is the right strategy for us, given where the business is, where our creators are, and the current media landscape. That was not our strategy six years ago. That\u2019s something that we\u2019ve implemented over the last four to five years, and we\u2019ve implemented it out of necessity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The main reason is because I don\u2019t want to wait for the platforms. They\u2019re looking us in the eye, and they\u2019re saying, \u201cWe\u2019re going to kill you all.\u201d And I believe them, and I don\u2019t want to wait for them to do it. I want to prep way ahead of time. The good news is, a lot of this work has actually worked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For example, one of the things we\u2019ve built since we last talked is free memberships. What is a free membership? It\u2019s a follow. It\u2019s a line of deterministic reach to people who choose to follow you. You get the email address associated with the account that signs up for you, and then when you make a post to your followers, it triggers emails, and you also see those posts in the feed that get ranked above other posts to make sure that your followers actually see your posts. That is very different from how other feeds work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That product has been an amazing success. I think now we have 185 million free memberships on the platform, and that\u2019s up like 2x year-over-year since last year. So, clearly there\u2019s a lot of fan-side demand and a lot of creator demand for a better follower system that is true to the actual word \u201cfollower.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We built native chats, which is also something we didn\u2019t have before. We were relying on creators to have Facebook groups and communities on Instagram and we were saying, \u201cHey, we\u2019re the payments architecture.\u201d That\u2019s different now. Now, we have native chats on the platform.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n lLast year, I think we had something like 35 million chat messages sent back and forth, and 110 million hours of video have been watched on Patreon. We were previously relying on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube for a lot of these tools and a lot of these experiences. We can no longer rely on them to do those things, and our creators can no longer rely on them to do those things. They need a way to reach people deterministically on the platform.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019ve invested heavily in a lot of those communication and media-hosting tools, and they\u2019ve been very well received, which is why we\u2019re seeing that kind of adoption on the platform. It is very different from where we were six years ago, but necessity is the mother of invention. This is the place that we\u2019re in as an ecosystem, this is where the internet is, and this is exactly what Patreon needs to be doing right now to help creators succeed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re describing a lot of change. Again, five years ago, when we talked, you were very focused on payments and being the payment rails. People would basically show up and be like, \u201cI have a lot of Twitter followers and I need to monetize them,\u201d and Patreon would be there. That\u2019s over. I think we all understand that that\u2019s over. Twitter itself is over. It\u2019s called X now. It\u2019s the everything app. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019re familiar with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n [Laughs] No, that\u2019s interesting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s everything, I\u2019m told. You don\u2019t make all your credit card payments through X?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re describing a very different company. That means you obviously have had to restructure and refactor the company. How many people work at Patreon? How have you organized them today?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are hundreds of people that work at Patreon now.Technically, by manager, we\u2019re organized by function. We\u2019re a functionally organized company. The people who report to me run functions, which, ironically, comes with all kinds of dysfunction. To solve for that, the way that we\u2019re actually organized is by objective.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you look at how we talk and what the company works on, it\u2019s working on objectives. Teams are cross-functional and collaborative, and all the work ladders up into those objectives. When we run an all-hands meeting, which I did this morning, or when we celebrate work that\u2019s happening, or when we do company planning, all of that is not thought of in the silo of a function. It\u2019s thought of cross-functionally under any given objective. And that helps solve some of the problems associated with sort of organizing functionally, but not all of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s been one of the biggest changes over the last maybe five years is organizing by objective. That has been the most transformational for Patreon. Because if you don\u2019t do that, then you have a marketing function with one set of goals, and an engineering team with a different set of goals, and that\u2019s totally dysfunctional.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re describing kind of the classic Google-style <\/strong>\u201cobjectives and key results\u201d<\/strong><\/a> framework, or is it something different than that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We do use some of that framework. It\u2019s not a perfect copy of objectives and key results. We have company-level objectives, and those have very clear key results associated with them, but I would say our system is different.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me give you an example. One of our objectives is to improve core experiences on Patreon. Our product is very wide. We\u2019ve made this shift from being a membership platform and bottom-of-funnel payments processing suite to being this top-of-funnel network and community and media product.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you do that, everything breaks \u2014 everything. You have to rebuild the entire product from the ground up, like architecturally, all the systems, with new infrastructure. And literally everything breaks: navigation, you have to build new privacy policies, you have to build everything. So part of our work is chipping away at all those things one by one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Making the core experiences fit into the current vision and product that we want is a really important objective for us. We have 10 fixes every quarter that we chip away at, and by the end of the quarter, we want to have shipped eight of them. There are tons of cross-functional teams that are working on that across the company. It\u2019s a little different from OKRs, but the spirit of it is the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The other question I ask everybody on <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> is about decisions. You\u2019re describing a very big decision. You\u2019re describing an existential change to the nature of Patreon, and what your relationship to consumers should be. In many ways, you turned into a social network, which is a thing you\u2019ve been fighting against.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tell me about your framework for making decisions, and explain how you brought it to bear on that choice.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sure. But before that, I have to combat the social network idea. I don\u2019t call it that internally. I don\u2019t say we\u2019re building a social media app. That\u2019s effectively, in my opinion, like saying, \u201cHey, we\u2019re building better cigarettes.\u201d Nobody wants better cigarettes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I mean, some people really want better cigarettes.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Fair enough. But I don\u2019t want to make better cigarettes. That\u2019s not how I want to roll into my grave. I don\u2019t want to do that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Also, I think, spiritually, it\u2019s important, because if we go out and say, \u201cHey, we\u2019re a social media app, what are we going to do?,\u201d then our teams are going to look at what happens on Instagram and what happens on Facebook and we\u2019re going to copypasta a bunch of features and it\u2019s not going to make sense for our systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our optimization function is really different for everything in the product. Our algorithms that provide creators with discovery and distribution are not optimizing for watch time. Actually, Nilay, I don\u2019t know what session time is on Patreon. If you were to ask me questions like, \u201cWhat\u2019s the average session time for users, for creators?\u201d I don\u2019t know. We don\u2019t track it. We don\u2019t A\/B test against it. That is not what we\u2019re doing. It\u2019s not our optimization function.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So, grouping us into social media is just not true. We\u2019re trying to build a fundamentally different system with different bones. Instead of looking at things like session time, we\u2019re looking at deterministic reach. Are you able to build long-term relationships with the people that follow you? Are you able to reach those people? Are you getting connected pieces of media, as opposed to unconnected pieces of media? Are we giving creators and fans agency in their experience, or are we hacking their limbic systems, which is what it feels like on social media right now? I feel like I\u2019m a lab rat. Are we optimizing for creator payments, which the platforms are not optimizing for?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are going to be some primitives that look like social media, but at the end of the day, the bones are different, and it\u2019s really important, at least for me, to acknowledge that. Let me answer your second question around decisions, though.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was very bad at making decisions, and I don\u2019t want to say I\u2019ve figured it out, because I think that\u2019s a kind of thing we\u2019re always learning. But there have been a lot of little things that I\u2019ve learned that I\u2019d love to share.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I hear a lot of heuristics that sound really great for decision making. There\u2019s like, \u201cListen, decide, communicate.\u201d There\u2019s all these simple things. That\u2019s not what\u2019s been effective for me in making better decisions. Let me just give you a bunch of really tactical, specific things that have helped me make better decisions over time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The first is, when we start a meeting where we\u2019re supposed to make a decision, one thing I like to ask is, \u201cHey, does anybody have a strong opinion? Off the bat, are there any strong opinions in the room? Does anybody disagree with the recommendation?\u201d Sometimes the answer is no, but sometimes somebody right out of the gate says like, \u201cYeah, I really disagree with the recommendation, and here\u2019s why.\u201d You just saved yourself half an hour of fluffy discussion at the top of a meeting. You cut right to the chase.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you really press somebody with, \u201cWhy do you disagree?,\u201d you hear three or four maybe genuinely good points, and then we can debate the merits of those good points. The whole room gets informed as you\u2019re making a decision like that. I like to put some pressure at the beginning of the meeting to cut right to the chase.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The second thing is I no longer trust the framing of the decision. Sometimes the decision will come to the group and it\u2019ll be, \u201cOkay, here\u2019s path A, here\u2019s path B. Let\u2019s choose.\u201d What I\u2019ve found is, more often than not, it\u2019s not actually path A or path B, and sometimes it\u2019s not even a decision. There\u2019s literally just four or five action items that we can discover as a group, and march through those things, and solve the underlying problem that the decision was attempting to solve. It\u2019s just having a discussion where we get clear on what the next steps are. Sometimes it seems like half of path A and half of path B, but actually, it\u2019s a more bespoke solution that is a better solution to a complex problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another thing is really great pre-reads. Man, you can spend 45 minutes just context-sharing. I feel very strongly about this. Meetings are not for information transfer. They are for debate and discussion. If we find ourselves spending 45 minutes in a meeting literally sharing context with each other, that\u2019s wasted time, and we\u2019re going to make bad decisions if people have information asymmetry. No wonder one person thinks we should take path A and another person thinks we should take path B. That\u2019s because we don\u2019t have shared context. Getting everybody to have shared context is huge, and pre-reads are a great way to do that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay, let me give you a couple more. Naming that there should be a decision-maker. Oh my God, I\u2019m still learning how to be better at this. Sometimes I find myself in a meeting where we\u2019re all just arguing with each other, and then it\u2019s like, \u201cHey, who is the decision-maker here? Who\u2019s actually making this?\u201d Having clarity around who the DRI is for that decision can be really helpful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That stands for directly responsible individual.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And then let me give you one more. About halfway through a meeting, if I find myself starting to be swayed in one direction or another, I just name that, and I say, \u201cHey, team, here\u2019s what I\u2019m thinking so far. Here\u2019s where I think we should go based on the conversation we\u2019ve had, based on what I know. If you think that\u2019s wrong, tell me why.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What often happens at that moment is that someone brings up three or four really good points for risks of taking that path that we hadn\u2019t named before, and saying we\u2019re going to go in this direction is what surfaces those extra risks and that extra click down in the debate, because it starts to become visceral if people feel like, \u201cOh, we are going in that direction.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then we can spend the next 30 minutes talking through those items and realizing things like, \u201cOkay, do we want to build mitigation plans for those risks, or do we want to choose path B instead?\u201d Just telling the team where I\u2019m thinking and where I\u2019m leaning in real time has created a little bit of pressure to get the real conversation out, and to identify more problems with the path as we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I have a bunch more lessons that I\u2019ve learned over the years, which I\u2019d be happy to share, but honestly, I keep these lessons like at the top of a doc when I\u2019m having a meeting, so that I can just remind myself like, \u201cHey, do these things in a meeting to help drive it to conclusion.\u201d And it\u2019s been really helpful for me to just do that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is great. I have a <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> book coming out, and we\u2019re going to give you a whole chapter.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What I like about this, what I\u2019m curious about, is there\u2019s a lot of Amazon in there. DRIs are a very Amazon kind of idea, that there needs to be a decision-maker, and you need to identify them. And then there\u2019s what I would describe as you paying attention to the emotional tenor of a meeting and making sure that\u2019s driving it forward.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is that just because you\u2019re in a band and you understand the creative process? Because most of the executives I talk to think about this, I would say, mechanistically. \u201cWe\u2019re going to go from here to here to here, and these are the steps.\u201d You\u2019re very much describing how it feels to be in a meeting and controlling that feeling.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are benefits of that, and there are drawbacks. I\u2019m a creator. I\u2019m a YouTuber. My background is not as an engineer. I didn\u2019t come from product management. I came from literally making music videos on YouTube. I think it\u2019s fair to say that my job for a long time was transferring my emotions to other people. That\u2019s how I made my living, right? That\u2019s the job of an artist: Can you make somebody feel something that you\u2019ve felt? Can you communicate that feeling to somebody?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m very aware of that in a meeting, and I think that can be really helpful because you can add a little bit of pressure and push a conversation forward. It can also be dangerous because I can over-rotate on feelings sometimes. I\u2019m not in the Elon camp that empathy is the curse of all humanity. I\u2019m very opposed to that philosophy. I do not agree with that by any stretch of the imagination. But I do have to be careful that I\u2019m not over-rotating on feelings. I think that the desire to make everybody happy can really drag things down sometimes, so I have to constantly be aware of that tendency in myself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Put this all into practice for me. You described, instead of needing path A or path B, we\u2019re going to drill down and find just the action items, and actually the decision is already made, and we just need to move forward. I\u2019m curious for a real example of that, and then I want the bigger picture of, \u201cOh, I need to drastically change what Patreon is.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n lLet me answer your second question first, and along the way, I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll think of a specific example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For the bigger decision around this adjustment to Patreon strategy, the truth is, there is some element of top-down decision-making associated with a change like that, and there is some element of emergent strategy that comes from the organization. It\u2019s necessary to embrace and even put some kindling against it to get it to be more holistic and full-bodied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It started in 2020 probably, with bringing in more of a consumer product leader, who was thinking more about consumer experiences and less of a SaaS-focused organization. So less of the kind of B2B2C go-to-market motions, and more of the consumer product motions and talent and teams and company structures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That was a big shift in and of itself, just bringing in that leadership, and honestly, just a lot of learning for me, because this is my first job. I\u2019ve literally never worked at another company before. In some ways, I don\u2019t see the water, I don\u2019t see the air around me. There was a lot of learning for me like, \u201cOkay, how does this look different?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then as we were doing that, teams were suggesting things that we wanted to do differently, and a lot of that is coming bottom-up. Before, we were against native video. But then it was like, \u201cOkay, but if we\u2019re going to have discovery for creators, we need to have free accessible media on the platform.\u201d You can\u2019t have identity-based discovery. We\u2019ve run those tests, they don\u2019t work. If you land on a creator\u2019s page, and there\u2019s no free accessible media, you\u2019re not going to pay that creator. You have no reason to. You don\u2019t know who that person is. You have never fallen in love with their work. You need a way to fall in love with their work, which means you need free accessible media on the platform.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That was an emergent piece of the strategy that came from the organization. It wasn\u2019t just like, \u201cAh, let\u2019s turn on discovery, and put different creator profiles in front of everybody\u2019s page.\u201d We tried that and we tested that. It didn\u2019t lead to conversion. The organization learned. We had systems to make sure that bubbles up to PMs and product leaders and to me and to the executive team. Then you keep chipping away at that flywheel, and over a period of two years, you start to home in on precisely what the right strategy is. There\u2019s some amount of top-down push that comes, and there\u2019s some amount of bottom-up strategic emergence that comes from the organization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me ask you about just building a product in that kind of environment, when it\u2019s the age of AI and you sit right in the middle of a totally polarized debate. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On the one hand, every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they\u2019ve ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of tokenmaxxing. Then in creator world, the audiences hate it, and they don\u2019t want the slop, and every platform is overrun with slop, even though the audiences don\u2019t want the slop, and something very bad is happening.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n How are you bridging that divide? Because it\u2019s obvious that the future of software companies looks AI-enabled in some way, I\u2019m not sure which way it is, but it\u2019s obvious that it\u2019s some way. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all, because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This has been really challenging, especially in the modern environment of the internet. But I\u2019ll tell you what I did. I just said what I really thought, and I spent a long, long time putting together my full thoughts. The end product is 45 minutes of me talking through these issues<\/a>. And then I posted that. It is self-conflicting, and I\u2019m holding two opposing beliefs at the same time, and I\u2019m terrified, and I\u2019m excited, and I\u2019m really pissed at how all this has been rolled out and how little agency creators have gotten through this process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Also, I find the technology magical. As an independent creator, I\u2019ve always been interested in new technologies that help me accomplish my goals. I remember when the first digital audio workstations (DAWs) came out in the late \u201890s and 2000s, and tools like Pro Tools where I learned I could record and I could make a record at my house, in my bedroom, and that led to the emergence of Pomplamoose, which was my band. I was obsessed with that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Now, there were a lot of analog recording engineers at the time who hated the idea of a DAW. They thought it sounded cold, it wasn\u2019t warm, it wasn\u2019t analog gear. You\u2019re not respecting the technology of recording, the skill set, the craft of recording. The same thing happened with YouTube and distribution systems when we started uploading to the internet. There was this whole backlash around that not being the real way to do music.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The real way to do music is to sign a record deal and go on tour, and Pomplamoose didn\u2019t do that. We just distributed our own music through YouTube and sold MP3s on iTunes, and made enough money to buy a house, literally, off of MP3 sales. So, there\u2019s always been this piece of me that embraces new technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The truth is that I am holding all of these ideas in my head at once, and I myself feel very conflicted about it. At the end of the day, though, here\u2019s what I think is happening. The algorithms and social media platforms are so good at polarizing humanity, sorting and filtering us into one of two camps on basically every issue, whether it\u2019s politics or news or technology or anything. The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps, and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m not saying there aren\u2019t serious drawbacks and concerns, and that I\u2019m not seriously angry about it. I am, but I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation around these technologies right now. Everything is changing for people, and this is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans. I think we\u2019re at this place where boycotting AI is like boycotting the internet. That\u2019s not a good strategy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t like what Instagram has done. I disagree with a lot of their decisions. I still have an Instagram page. I still post and reach my community. I don\u2019t like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year<\/a>. I really disagree with those decisions. I don\u2019t think they\u2019re fair for creative people. I think they\u2019re hurtful for creative people. And here I am on my iPhone. I don\u2019t like what my federal government is doing right now, on so many dimensions, and I still pay my taxes, and I still live in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sure, I get it. I mean, I understand this sort of \u201cyet you live in society\u201d argument, and I find it very frustrating too. I used to read <\/strong>Guitar World<\/em><\/strong> when I was a kid, and I\u2019d read the angry screeds from analog recording engineers about Logic being cold. Fine, but I had a cassette four-track at that time, and I was like, \u201cThis thing sucks. I would much rather use my computer to record my music.\u201d It was just very obvious. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Logic hadn\u2019t stolen all of the music in the world to make Logic. And in fact, it was very obvious that the people behind Pro Tools and Logic and whatever else had a deep and meaningful appreciation for the music industry, and they were trying to make tools for musicians. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The internet and social media have huge stacks of problems, and maybe they need to be addressed in different ways, but the value exchange of Instagram, I think, is reasonably clear to people. You run a lawn-mowing business, you can go find some customers on Instagram, and you\u2019re good to go. Or if you just want to post dance videos on TikTok and reach an audience, maybe that\u2019s the easiest thing that\u2019s ever been in world history to do. The value exchange for AI, I think, is so much more diffused that people hate it. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But you\u2019re a musician. I know tons of musicians who are like, \u201cLook, AI is everywhere. Suno is everywhere in the music industry.\u201d We just had <\/strong>Harvey Mason Jr. on the show<\/strong><\/a>, he runs the Recording Academy. He\u2019s like, \u201cIt\u2019s everywhere, and our line to give you a Grammy Award is you have to be mostly human.\u201d That is as fuzzy of a line as can possibly exist.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re saying you\u2019re sitting in it. I think I have the exact same kind of conundrum as you do. I love new technology. We have an audience of people who love new technology. We\u2019re going to post this clip on the internet, and people are going to tell you, \u201cOf course, it\u2019s clear that you should hate it.\u201d That makes no sense to me, because those same people are probably using it in some way. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But you\u2019re sitting in it, and you run a software company that services the needs of creatives who hate it. There\u2019s no doubt in my mind that the software company side should be in full embrace of AI, and maybe the creative services part of the company, which is what the software makes, should not. Can you smash those together, or are you just trying to keep those far apart?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No, no, no. You nailed it, and this is the core of our approach. But actually, before I even get into that, let me just say that what ultimately is happening to creative people right now is disgusting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Every 10 years, there\u2019s this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology, and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim that, \u201cWell, it\u2019s this new technology, and it\u2019s either fair use, or copyright doesn\u2019t apply because it\u2019s transformative in some capacity.\u201d This was the Google Books case<\/a>, this was the YouTube case, where Viacom sued YouTube for $1 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/chorus\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/24792604\/The_Verge_Decoder_Tileart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400\"\/)
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