Mutli-Millionaire CEO: The Simple Steps to Self-Made Success | Everette Taylor

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You're not gonna get the CEO job if it's an easy job. Like, they're not just giving you polished companies that are like, here's Apple. They're gonna give you a company that has a lot of problems. And me, I came in and I said, listen, mediocrity has no place here.

I'm gonna sit down with Everett Taylor, the CEO of Kickstarter. Today's episode is all about how to raise money and how to build trust, how to pitch without sounding desperate, and what it takes to be a CEO and an entrepreneur in a business. What are the biggest mistakes you see people making when they pitch their product for the first time?

If you don't catch my attention within the first 30, 45 seconds, like, it gets rough. Great pitch is something that you humanize and make people feel like you're relatable and what you're trying to do is relatable and they understand.

What do you do when you have to make a hard decision fast?

People may not like this answer, but my job as a CEO is to make sure that Okay, so you've been part of startups and product launches and now you're the CEO of Kickstarter.

But I'm curious, since you've seen it all, let's start for the person who wants to get their first $100K into their business or product. What would you tell them?

What would I tell them? Well, number one I would say is, can you sell yourself?

Mm-hmm.

You know, if you don't have any resources, if you don't have any connections, can you actually sell yourself? Can you sell the dream? Can you sell the vision? Like I tell people all the time, founders, you may not be a marketer, but you better be a marketer for yourself, right? You should be your own CMO, right? And so for people that are starting off and they don't have those connections, they need that first $100K, then they need to know how to sell theirselves. The second thing that I would say is you need to have a skill that's valuable to get you in the doors to make those connections. For me, it was marketing. I made a ton of relationships, valuable relationships, because I had a skillset that I could offer to people, right? So even if it was like, hey, I'm gonna do this for you, I'm gonna advise you on some strategy, et cetera, et cetera. Can you connect me to this investor? Can you connect me to this person? So really think about what value you have in terms of skills that you can give to others.

I love that. What do you think the formula is for selling yourself?

Number 1 is like, this is the opposite of what I preach of self-awareness. You do need self-awareness, but like you have to have like outside, outsized confidence. Like I've seen people who haven't had a dollar to their name or was talking completely BS, but they are so confident and they speak so confidently. And when you're able to speak confidently, people believe you. They, they, they really grasp onto that. When you don't speak confidently and you don't have that confidence in yourself, people see right through it.

So true. I was just actually had a member of my team and he's one of our writers and he— I told him to work with a few others and they were going to pitch this other company to do a partnership with. And he opens up the pitch with, I know this probably won't work. And I think like, you know, maybe it's for the next go-round. And I was like, shut up, get to the side. Like, what are we doing here? But you're right. I was like, you know, I'm going to make up a name because I don't want to out him. I was like, Brad, you will always lose if you start out telling all the reasons why not to invest in you or bet on you or partner with you. So that delusional confidence, you're right, is so important. And I think people, I asked him later, I was like, why'd you do that, man? Like, you just undersold yourself. Like, I actually wanna know what's going on in here. And he said, well, I didn't want him to lose respect for me. And I thought, fascinating. So like, what have you seen? You see thousands of examples of that every year. Why aren't people confident? Or how do you get yourself confident and get outta your own way?

Well, I tell people all the time, one of the number one traits that you need to be an entrepreneur are two things, or two number one traits is mental toughness and emotional regulation, right? Like you have to be, have real mental fortitude, right? You have to be mentally tough. If you have imposter syndrome, if you're doubting yourself, all that stuff bleeds through in your leadership. It bleeds through when you're launching Kickstarters, it bleeds through when you're communicating, when you're marketing your products, you have to have a level of mental toughness and then emotional regulation. Hey, if you're feeling like not confident or you're not feeling this way or that way, or you're feeling sensitive about things, like you have to be able to emotionally regulate that, you know, and you have to show up strong, consistent, consistently in boardrooms, pitching, anywhere that you're going to be.

What have you bought on Kickstarter? What are the ones you're like, I backed this one and why?

You know, I'll be honest, like I'm very big on the cultural categories on Kickstarter. So the cultural categories obviously don't make as much revenue as like the products themselves, right? Like the tech gadgets, the games, those are our two biggest categories. Design and technology and gaming are our biggest categories. I tend to like to support arts and music and fashion and things like that. And so that's what I genuinely like to support. Like I just supported this film called Ricky, They're in theaters right now. They used Kickstarter for distribution. They wanted to distribute the film independently, and that was absolutely incredible. And so I'm all about creative independence.

I forgot that Kickstarter is for culture and arts too, because I've bought like— what have I bought? I've preordered a ton of stuff on there, like backpacks and like weird gadgets.

You know, I've seen some of the wackiest stuff do well. I actually, I think the beautiful thing about Kickstarter is that you have these projects like Eufymake that does $47 million selling 3D printers, but then you have these wacky projects. Like I backed this project where it was literally a robot that was making music on its own and created an album. Like, like just things that are just so weird and wacky that do so well. Like the, the beautiful thing about Kickstarter is I tell people, whatever your weird is, you can find it on Kickstarter. Whatever your niche is, you can find it on Kickstarter because there's a community of people that are going to engage with whatever you're doing, as long as you have obviously some type of product market fit. And so, yeah, I think if you market that the right way, I think it could go off on Kickstarter too.

We got a client of one over here. Um, you know, it's interesting because there's so many negative stories people tell. Oh, must be nice to have money I could never raise from other people. You know, does crowdfunding even work in 2026? You know, there's a lot of people who tell stories to get in their own way. And so I guess my question to you would be, dispel that. Say that there's somebody listening right now that goes, there's no— I don't have any rich friends. I'm not worth, you know, much money. Like, there's no way I can raise money. What would you say to that?

Can I curse? I don't know. Yeah, I would say that's bullshit, right? Like there's so many examples of people being able to do that. And Kickstarter is also like proof in the pudding. Like people without resources, without money, without things are able to scale and launch these products and these companies successfully. And so to me, it goes back to what I was saying before, like having a level of mental toughness. Like if you're already thinking that way, I don't know who's going to invest in you or who's going to believe in you. So whether you need to go to a therapist or like do some real self-reflection or really work on yourself is important because entrepreneurship is hard. Running a business is hard. And like, if you're not mentally strong and mentally tough and believe in yourself, you're going to fail. That's just, that's just straight up. There's going to be so many hurdles. This is a journey. I tell people the life of an entrepreneur is a marathon. And the first thing you, You can't do is doubt yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so true. Is there a category where you're like, don't do this on Kickstarter?

Yeah. Guns. We're not going to allow it. We've had people try to 3D print guns on the platform. So yeah, anything that's weapons or harmful.

Yeah.

Yeah. Save that. You can maybe go to one of our competitors or whatever.

Let's talk about how to do pre-orders. Yeah. I think pre-orders are one of the most underrated ways to get money into your business without you having to be the one to do it and without raising venture capital and giving away all your equity.

Yeah.

So will you explain, one, what are pre-orders, and then two, how do you do them well, uh, in order to not give away or spend a bunch of money, uh, on your business when you're starting?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we were talking a little bit before this, like there's a misconception around Kickstarter that it's just pure crowdfunding. A lot of the most successful people on Kickstarter use it as a preorder, right? They have the resources and the means to actually create the product. They want to use it to scale marketing. We have an audience of millions of people that are using the app and the website, and they want to be able to tap into that audience. So that's really, really important to them to use that as a marketing lever and also to, to see if they actually have product market fit with their product, with these, this audience of early adopters. The people that I see be really successful with preorders are the people that have a plan after. Like, they know their manufacturing, they know their fulfillment, they know how they're going to leverage the audience that they've built on Kickstarter to be evangelists for them moving forward. And so when it comes to pre-order, the people that are most successful understand their cost, right? That is the downfall of a lot of pre-orders. Like, are you, are you correctly having the right cost of these products on the platform, right? Have you made sure that you understand the shipping, the tariffs, all those things that come with distributing a product? And number 3, what is your plan after, right? Kickstarter is just the beginning. So how are you gonna leverage that audience to scale that into retail partnerships, into investments, into all of those things?

That's a good point. So basically you go like, let's say I've got a ring company.

Yep.

And I'm selling rings.

Yeah.

And nice ring, by the way. Thank you. I thought it was cool. Cool. And I go to put my ring on Kickstarter and I'm like, sick, I'm going to give the first 100 people that buy it get it for $50. And so that gives me some working capital to start with and then I'm off to the races. But I don't realize that actually with shipping, because I haven't included that, and variable costs of goods and packaging that I didn't think about, it actually cost me $60. Yeah. So now I've lost money on it.

Yeah. You've made a good point too that I forgot to say is that preorders work well when you have something valuable to put towards it. Like, hey, if you buy it here, this is a discount. Like, this will, this is normally going to be $200, but you're going to get it for $125 or $100 on Kickstarter. Discounts is a huge value. And then like some type of exclusivity. So like, if it's like, hey, this, the color of this ring, the, you know, this shade or this ring is only exclusive to Kickstarter. So when it comes to pre-orders, you have to also have this feeling of like, hey, this is, this this is something that's valuable. You have to drive urgency with that preorder to make people say, hey, why wouldn't I just wait for you to launch this thing? The other thing that you said was like the shipping and the other costs. One of the things that I did when I came in Kickstarter was when you used to come into Kickstarter, it was like you raised your money, right? And then Kickstarter was like, good luck, have fun, figure it out. Now we actually have pre-launch tools that help you before you launch a campaign. And now also post-campaign tools like pledge manager, to help with shipping and taxes so you don't have to— before you had to charge shipping upfront and be like, well, I hope these shipping prices don't go up or go, go crazy later. Now we have dynamic shipping prices through our pledge manager that you can charge shipping later.

That's so, that's so important. These things sound sort of little, but they're so important in business and it's the difference between making or losing money. So does it go— so if I want to sell something, and I wanna do a preorder. I have like a little pyramid of what matters, my preorder pyramid. And the preorder pyramid is basically exclusivity, urgency, value, timeliness, something like that.

Yes. Yes. And, and, and building trust.

And trust.

And trust is huge because people are like, am I gonna get this? Like, you have to instill trust in them. You have to show that you're fully equipped to actually make this happen because on Kickstarter, Like with our pre-orders or, or crowdfunding or whatever you wanna call it, like there is no guarantee. Now, 90-something percent of people on Kickstarter fulfill, but there's still a small percentage of people that don't. And so you really have to drive that level of trust to make people feel comfortable that you're actually gonna deliver on time. And you gotta communicate with people constantly. Like that's one of the things that I see a lot of people mess up with on Kickstarter is that they're not communicating to their audience. And keeping them up to date on what's happening.

Give me the secrets. You gave us some of those there. But if, if I'm okay, so like if you want to launch your product and you want people to give you money and you want to build trust, what are the secrets to doing that? What do you have to do? What do the best companies do?

Well, the best companies, number one, like they create incredible videos. Like I tell people all the time, people don't want to read a whole long Kickstarter page. They want to click on that video, right? When you're launching on Kickstarter, launching a video is like the number one thing I see for people that are successful on the platform. I lie to you not, like most of the time when I see a Kickstarter fail, they didn't even care to do a video. Like video is the way, like people are reading less. They're not reading full pages. Your ability to create a video that is enticing to backers, that shows your passion, that tells them that you have the expertise and ability to actually make this happen goes a long way for supporting your Kickstarter campaign and it being successful and driving that trust that you need.

So good. We call it show, don't tell. Yeah, because when you're yapping at people, they don't believe you anymore. Everybody's a yapper on the internet and everybody can say things. But, you know, it's funny, I'll actually include right here, if you remind me, David, my new favorite launch video that I just saw on X, and it's for an AI company, which is actually quite hard to do a launch video for because you can't touch it, you can't see it.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And it's such a sexy video and it starts with like a guy in a field and he's talking to his grandma and it's real, his real grandma about AI and it's sort of about how like work-life balance, you know, his grandma's like, well, how are you gonna launch a business and like, you know, not lose all of your life and all of your joy? And the, the business is called Co-Founder and it basically uses AI to help you launch a business so you don't have to do everything.

That's cool.

It's very cute. And so I think there's a way to do a video about just about anything.

Anything. And like video, we're becoming video first everywhere, right? And like one of the things that we're doing at Kickstarter this year, give you a little bit of exclusive, is that we're going to become a lot more mobile first and video first on our platform because we do realize that people, they like within a 30-second video, you can sell somebody. It happens all the time. And so the people that know how to get people excited make people feel like they can trust you very quickly through video, I think is the number one thing on Kickstarter in terms of seeing success in building trust.

One thing Everett and I keep coming back to is this: most people think the hard part is raising money, but if you don't already have a business, the hardest part is figuring out what the business is you should actually raise for. That's why we built Main Street Millionaire Live. What if you could raise money to actually buy a business that's profitable from day one? Not hopes and dreams about what could be possible. Main Street Main Street Millionaire Live. It's our 3-day virtual event where my team and I show you how to find, fund, evaluate, and own a real cash-flowing small business. It gives you a real look at the businesses that are profitable that you could own and covers the entire deal-making process. I think we give you in 3 days more than most MBAs do. This is for the person who knows there's money in business but maybe doesn't have the brilliant idea to do themselves. That is exactly the human that we want. If that's you and you've been curious about buying a business, then you're going to want to come to Main Street Millionaire Live for the cost of a couple of cups of coffee. We'll teach you everything you need to know to figure out if it is right for you to buy a business. You can go to MSM.live. Let's get back to my conversation with Everett. What's the biggest mistake you see people make when they— well, we maybe talked about two of them. I don't know if cost of goods or lack of video are the two biggest mistakes, but what are the biggest mistakes you see people making when they pitch their product or post their product? For the first time?

I think pitching in general, the biggest mistake that I see is people that are just not concise and they don't get to the point. I'm just like, you'll lose me. Like, if you don't catch my attention within the first 30, 45 seconds, like, it gets rough. And like, you realize that about society in the world. Like, our attention spans are so much shorter. And so people are— they don't get straight to the point. So A great pitch is something that, like, you humanize and make people feel like you're relatable and what you're trying to do is relatable and they understand. And then also you capture their attention really, really fast. But when I tell people, when you're thinking about pitching, say, venture capitalists versus Kickstarter, it's very different. Like when you're pitching VCs, you're pitching for the long term, you're pitching for like the big picture. Like you're really saying like, hey, this company can be worth $50 billion one day. On Kickstarter, you're trying to deliver immediate desires and rewards, right? Like, it's a much more short-term thing. You're saying, hey, I can do this in a very short amount of time. When you're pitching something like that, you're trying to build trust, you're trying to build, uh, people feeling secure about you actually being able to deliver and that you can actually make the thing, uh, actually make the thing happen. And so it's a very different thing. You're not trying to pitch people on getting equity of a $50 billion thing. You're pitching people on like, hey, if you give me $100, $200, $500, I'm going to actually be able to deliver this in the timeline that I'm able to.

Yeah, it's so good because I think a lot of times when I was an early entrepreneur, you, you assume that you got to do these big crazy things to win. And I was actually talking to, I think one of my favorite stories was actually from Daymond John from Vuvu?

Yeah, I just saw him this weekend. No way!

Okay, I love him. And so he's been on the pod and we've stayed in touch, but he told the story about one, how he used to like go around to shops and just say like, can I put a cool, you know, kind of graffiti thing on your, what are those things called when you pull them down? Like the gates, like the roll-down gates or something.

I don't know what those are called, yeah.

And he's like, so I did those all over town. It was like free advertising, but it was cool. And he's like, and then he's like, the benefit that I often gave these shop owners was like, you'll be the first one to get our exclusive shirts here if you buy this. And it's sort of like early day online crowdfunding. And he just did the same thing. Exclusivity, scarcity, timeliness, and again and again.

Yeah, absolutely. And people get super creative. Like, think like, never put yourself in a box, right? Like, whatever your resources are, whatever, how much money you have, like, you can get creative. You can think outside of the box. You see the best entrepreneurs like a Daymond John and others, they think outside of the box to make things happen.

Yeah. Are there businesses or business owners that come to you that you're, that are like, you should just go get venture capital, just go raise a bunch of money, don't bootstrap it?

It doesn't happen often. Uh, but I, I often tell people like, if you're building like a big B2B SaaS company, like why the hell are you coming to Kickstarter? It's a very consumer B2C type of platform. Number 2 is like, if it's super capital intensive, like if you can't do the thing without, like, imagine like SpaceX or something like that, or Hyperloop or some of these companies that have started that are like super capital intensive. Like those are the people that need to go raise millions and millions and millions of dollars. Like I tell people that are coming to Kickstarter that if you have something that you can deliver and of value and You know, within a 12 to 18 month timeline, like Kickstarter is really, really for you. But like, if it's super capital intensive, that's not it. And also the beauty of Kickstarter is that, you know, you don't have to build a billion dollar company. You can build a lifestyle company. You can build a side hustle. Yes. Have billion dollar companies launched on the platform. Absolutely. But it doesn't have to be that on Kickstarter.

Yeah. I also think a lot of people don't want billion-dollar companies. It's pretty miserable.

The bigger—

I mean, you know, you run a big company, I run a big company. The bigger the company, the more problems you got. And so, you know, we were talking about beforehand, it's like, be really careful what you wish for, because having a business that makes $1 million a year in top line and you get to keep, you know, with 15 to 30% margins, $150K to $300K a year, that's a pretty sexy thing, especially with taxes.

Absolutely.

And like, those exist every day. I mean, how many of those do you think you've seen in your career and on the platform?

Oh my God.

So, like, so many. Like, that to me is like one of the sweet spots of Kickstarter is like these businesses that are like anywhere from $1 million to $100 million in revenue, right? Where they're like building a business. It's not like a super large team, super large company, but they're profitable. They can provide great lifestyles for themselves. Like, Listen, when you go out and you raise billions of dollars, like, one, or some people raise billions of dollars, but millions of dollars, one, like, that company isn't yours anymore. Like, you have to deal with, like, you know this, having a board of directors, that's like fucking Game of Thrones. Like, it's board governance. Like, I'm telling you, it's a thing. Like, it's really a tactical, like, chess moves constantly when you have a board and you don't own all of your company. And also, like, I have this story of a good friend of mine who— a lot of people don't realize this— when you raise venture capital, they need that outsized, like, return, right? So what might be impactful to you where you're like, oh man, I can make $50 million here, this is going to change my life forever, they're like, no, no, no, we need to sell this thing for billions. I had a good friend of mine who early on I think he was like Series A, got a quarter of a billion dollar offer for his business. He would've left maybe a hundred something million dollars with that sale, even with, you know, giving, giving money to his investors back. And his investors pushed him not to sell the business. Right. And that business didn't end up scaling the way that he wanted to, and he didn't make that much money from it. Uh, and so So that money could have been life-changing and he couldn't take it because he raised venture capital.

It's so true. It's funny because we have a venture capital fund and somebody reached out to me the other day because one of our companies, it's a great company, sold and we got in early. So it's cool. It's like a 4x for us, but we put a lot of our own capital in and we keep our fund small. So when we get multiple, like I think we've had less than 10% default rate and we've had a couple 100xs, but we've had a lot of 4 to 5 to 7xs.

Yeah.

And one of the other venture capitalists called me and was like, what the fuck? You know, I thought this guy was going to run this forever. You know, I can't believe he's bailing on this. And I was like, this is life-changing money for him. This is like $20 million in his pocket. Plus he gets to go work at this strategic company and get equity in that company. We get a little bit to ride along. I go, this is, this is a good outcome for him.

You're one of the good ones.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's all about incentives, right? Like I have enough of my own money in there and operate a company. I know how fucking hard this is.

Yeah.

You know, a lot of these, a lot of these investors are salaried investors. They got no skin in the game.

No.

And they've never actually run anything. No.

And they're ruthless in their approach, right? Like at the end of the day, it's like one of the things that people don't think about when raising money is that when you raise money, you then take on not only the reputation of the firms and the people that are investing in you, good or bad, but also how, what they want and what they want out of a deal, right? What, that you may want may be different than a general catalyst or Andreessen Horowitz, right? Like for them, like a 4x return, they're like, why are you wasting our time? Yeah. Like they need that 100, 200x return.

Yeah. You know, I, I always thought like one of the better ones was like the Sequoia model where like, you know, and, and I don't know everything behind the scenes and everybody's got skeletons, but I always liked that they were like, 90% of our companies have been acquired, sold, or IPO'd.

Yeah.

Like they actually care about the 90%, whereas most investors, 90% fail. They only care about the 10% that win. Like, literally, fuck off every other one. And I get it because, you know, your best founders don't usually need your help.

Yeah.

You know, it's the ones that are on the lower end that do. But I think it's good that you guys don't glorify venture raising because these days it's not even how profitable is your company. Nobody cares about that. It's how big is your revenue and how much money have you raised?

Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's, it's crazy. It's gotten out of control, I think. But we could go on and on about that.

Well, I wanna talk about like for the small business that is gonna bootstrap.

Yeah.

How do they try to think about how much money to raise and what a successful raise looks like when you're doing pre-orders and thinking about it this way?

Yeah, I think when you're thinking about like a company that's bootstrapping, I think number one, you wanna make sure that you're covering your cost, right? Yeah. Like you don't wanna be underwater because you did a Kickstarter or because you did a pre-order. That, that happens too. People that are inexperienced, that don't know how much things cost, they haven't thought about, you know, what could, like, the worst thing that could happen. Like, so if you say, you know, you, you want to raise, you want to sell X amount of products and you want to raise half a million dollars, then you should probably say, I want to raise $700,000, $800,000, because there's going to be unforeseen things that you don't know that's going to pop up, right? And so you need to always add a little cushion for the things that you cannot see. Even the smartest entrepreneurs, the most skilled entrepreneurs, they can't predict that, you know, like, you know, a few years, like, could you have predicted that we were going to have tariffs the way that we were? Like, who, who can predict something like that? Right. And so you have to add a little bit of buffer in everything that you do. But then also, hey, have a very clear strategy on how you're going to utilize all of the capital that you're coming in. So like, say, hey, you're selling this product in pre-order crowdfunding for $100. It costs you X amount of dollars to make it, shipping, thinking about marketing costs. Like, hey, you're going to run ads, you're going to do things to like actually sell this product in pre-order. Like, you want to make sure that you're still coming out in the green after marketing costs, after, uh, shipping, manufacturing, all of those things. You want to make sure that you have a buffer to come out in What do you think a good buffer is?

Is it like 25 to 30% more than you think?

I would say it depends on the product. It depends on the thing. Like, for example, like comic books. I think we might sell more comic books than anybody else in the world. Like, all the independent comic companies launch on Kickstarter. Uh, comic books, like, that's like, when you're launching comics, it's like, that's a very, like, straightforward thing. Like, there's very well-known manufacturers, publishing, et cetera, et cetera. So, So like there's a little less risk. Also, it's lightweight. It's like not heavy shipping costs. So like maybe you only need to like have a 10 to 15% buffer. But if you're talking about like heavy hardware that you're shipping from China and like all these things, you might wanna have a bigger buffer of like 25, 30%.

That's a great suggestion. That's fascinating about comic books.

Yeah.

I would never think you could get money from people. For a comic book. Tell me about that.

Oh yeah, the comics are crazy. We don't— we can't say this for sure, but we're, we're like almost confident that we sell more comic books on Kickstarter here than anywhere else in the world. And comics is, is interesting the same way games and design and technology and these audiences that we've built, it has become the go-to for publishing comics and like manga and all these different things or graphic novels, right? And to the point that like now we're having celebrities like Charlamagne tha God and others, when they release a graphic novel or comic book, we had Jeremiah Love, who was the number 3 pick in the draft, this NFL draft this year, a Heisman finalist, you know, launch a comic book with us. And so—

How'd it do?

They all did really, really well. And so—

What's really, really well? Hundreds of thousands?

No, we've had people, they didn't raise millions, but we've had people raise millions of dollars just on a comic book campaign.

Charlamagne launched a comic book?

Yes, he did. A graphic novel.

Yes.

Yes.

What's the difference?

A graphic novel is more like a book. It's like a kind of like actual novel, like a book. But comics are lighter weight, et cetera, et cetera.

But— Interesting.

But yes, so we have that. And it's because we've built this like really crazy audience of people that are super engaged in that space. And that's where we do the best at Kickstarter is that we've garnered an audience around design and technology and tech gadgets. We've garnered an audience around gaming. We've garnered an audience around publishing. In comics and these things and film. And so that's what makes Kickstarter so valuable is that we have a ready-made audience for you on the platform to tap into. And for comics, it's like, what better way to kind of like get rid of the risk by just being able to get all the money up front?

Yeah. So let's say that you want to write a comic book.

Yeah.

Could you get the comic book ready, kind of have all your ideas, create a cool video launching it, You know, put a couple thousand maybe into the quote unquote marketing and product design, then put it up there. And if you don't get any pre-orders or if you don't get enough, you just pull it and give money back.

Yeah. So Kickstarter is all or nothing. So like if you don't hit your goal, then, you know, all that money goes back. So Kickstarter is amazing because you can actually see in real time, like how much demand you actually have. For your product. And then, like, listen, if you don't hit your goal, then it's like, okay, I didn't waste a bunch of money. And you know exactly how much, how many comic books that you have to make. Like, I know people are very controversial about Kanye. Kanye is one of the biggest crowdfunders, preorder people in the world. They know exact— he knows exactly how many Yeezy boots, Yeezy shoes, all of that. That's just crowdfunding and preorders, right? And so Knowing the specific number instead of being like, hey, I'm gonna print out 1,000 comics. Well, you only sold 700, so now you only have to make 700.

That's great. Yeah. So you would just come back and be like, all right, now I'm gonna do another one, but I'm just gonna do, I'm just gonna do it for 700.

Yes.

And so I can just start small and then scale my way up.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Oh, that's so smart because, you know, I think a lot of people think, well, 'cause we were told, if I build it, they'll come. Yes. And you're like, no, they won't. You gotta drag 'em kicking and screaming.

I think that's like a Wayne's World thing, right?

If you build it, They will come.

Yeah, that is true. So what else would surprise, like, is there anything that you're like, I'm kind of shocked that this raised this much money or most people wouldn't realize?

I mean, we just had a board game raise $28 million. It was a trading card game, but, uh, Cyberpunk just raised $28 million. So it always astounds me. Like, you know, we think about, like, we have a lot of video games on the platform, but we have a very healthy audience of people that do tabletop and trading card games and things like that. That's still a thing, right? Like, that's still a thing that people are really engaged with and people are constantly— today we had someone raise, I think, $2 million in the first 30 minutes for a board game, right? So a lot of people don't realize how popular— people know video games are very popular. A lot of people don't realize how popular board games, trading card games, role-playing games still are.

Yeah, that's true. Also, So I have a couple people on my team that play Dungeons Dragons, which I did not know was a thing, but that weird little micro niche is crazy too.

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of money behind it, yeah.

Interesting. So this is trading cards where like—

Trading cards, yes.

So like Pokémon trading cards.

Similar, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting, I'm sounding like such a boomer right now. I know this is like really big with the kids, but I got into it with Logan Paul on this 'cause I was like, I think this is a terrible investment strategy and I think anybody who buys, you know, it's okay. For the super rich people to buy like a $7 million card or whatever. They don't fucking care. That's like one one-millionth of their, you know, net worth. But for a normal kid who doesn't have much money, probably doesn't even own a house yet or any assets, to say that like trading cards are going to hold their value long term just because they have over this last cycle freaks me out.

Yeah. I mean, well, there's different types of trading cards, like there's the Pokémons and like Pokémon is actually tied to a game, like the Cyberpunk trading card game is actually tied to a game that you can play with people, right? So, but as opposed to you just hold it instead of like, oh, I have the Michael Jordan rookie card, et cetera, et cetera. That's, that's very, very different. So the beauty in trading card games on Kickstarter, they're often things that people are just playing and they're having fun and they're not thinking about this thing that is going to hold value. Don't get me started on the trading card thing. I think it's so ridiculous, by the way.

I know he was like, oh, but careful if you say it on the internet, because people will be like, blah!

Yeah, I know, I know.

And I go, no, I'm going to save the receipts on this. Come at me in 3 years. I know, but I don't want to be right. I'd rather that they made money and I was wrong, but I don't think that's going to be what happens.

Yeah, well, I think it's like everything, like the NFTs, card games, all this stuff. The powers that be— Codie, you know what I'm talking about— there's certain people that have influence and they say this thing is worth this, right? And everyone does that. And the people, the powers that be, they end up making a bunch of money. And then there's a lot of people that lose a lot of money because they're trying to follow that trend.

Yeah, they just hold the bag. I think it's a real issue when you buy things that don't have inherent value. I mean, I'm like old school, like Buffett. Like, a house is always going to have a value because you have to live in it.

Yes.

You know? Absolutely. And a car, you can utilize it. Commodities, we need it for the economy. But you know, anything that you trade, even art, which has held its, you know, its value over many, many years is tough if you hold it just for value because who's, who are you gonna trade with quickly if you need some cash? That's tough.

I used to run, run a big art platform called Artsy. So it is—

Wait, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I liked Artsy a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah. Is it still around?

Yeah, still around. And they just merged with Artnet and formed a super art company. But art is a super valuable asset. As I said, if you know what you're doing, if you don't know what you're doing, it could be a terrible investment. But if you know what you're doing, like so much of my net worth is actually tied into my art collection. You can take out loans against your art collection, all these things. So there's a lot of tricks to the trade when it comes to art.

What's the most expensive piece of art you bought?

Ooh, Codie Sanchez, I'm not going to say.

Too much?

I'm not going to say, but I've done very well.

Fascinating. Do you have specific artists you like buying from? Are they like, like really well-known ones like Picasso or Warhol? Or these like modern artists?

I stay typically contemporary.

Okay.

I try to do living artists. I have some artists that are not living. My philosophy starting off was that I wanted to support Black artists, right?

Yeah.

And now it's shifted to like, I want to support artists that are meaningful to me, but also are solid investments as well. And so I'm tracking everything from like where they went to grad school, what galleries represent them, what museum acquisitions they have, what other collectors are buying them, like what are they trading, how are they trading privately, how are they trading publicly in the auctions? Like I'm tracking all that stuff.

You have a saying that I really liked, which is as a CEO, you should think that nothing is beneath you. You. Yeah. Can you talk to me about that?

I think the components of a good CEO is mental toughness, which I've talked about a lot. Like, being a CEO is lonely. It's hard. You have to get through a lot of stuff that most people are never going to relate to or never empathize in your situation. People don't feel sorry for CEOs like they don't. Like, if you want, if you want to be in a job where people don't give a shit Be a CEO, right? That's, that's, that's the, that's the key. So you have to have that, that mental toughness to deal with all of the things that, that's going to come with it. I think number 2 is having the level of humility to know that you need people like you need the right talent, the right people around you. You have to have people that you can trust. I want to be the dumbest person in the room with my exec team. Like I want people, I want killers. I want people who are, who are subject matter experts. I want people that that are just absolute geniuses in whatever their craft or field is around me at all times. I think also as a CEO, you really have to be willing to do anything and everything, right? Like, you know, this morning I was doing like some customer support stuff where like I had an angry creator or angry backer or whatever. Like you gotta be able to roll up your sleeves and do whatever it takes to make things happen and drive the company forward. And so to me, it's really that mental toughness, having a great team, but also just being able to roll your sleeves up and do all the things and fill in the gaps, right? Like you have to make that work, right? And it's also keeping a mind of creativity and innovation and always thinking forward. Like you have to be thinking 10 steps ahead all the time. And most people don't think like that. Most of the people you work with are not gonna think like that. And so they might get upset with you because you're thinking 3, 4, 5 steps ahead where they're thinking only in the short term.

I think CEOs have to make a lot of hard decisions too.

Yes.

You have some decision-making frameworks, like what do you do when you have to make a hard decision fast?

Yeah, for me it's like, it, it's a no-brainer. What is the best thing for the company? Like my job as a CEO, and people may not like this answer, but my job as a CEO is to make sure that this company goes on for the next 10, 15, 20, 100 years. And to drive shareholder value. Take the emotions out of it. Right. That's gonna hurt some feelings, but my job, why they hired me, is to make sure that this company continues on, continues to grow, and to drive shareholder value. This is business. It's not personal. And people have to understand that.

Yeah. People need to hear that more. My last two questions. One is, Um, you run a fully remote company now. What is the key to managing people and to being a leader to remote workers?

Yeah, I mean, trust is huge, right? Like, you know, the ability to give people that much freedom is that you really have to trust in the talent acquisition part of the job, bringing the right people, the right people with the right morality, the right ambition, the intensity in that environment. Like you, you need that, right? They have to be really locked in. But also this is the not fun part. And the part that probably people hate for me as a CEO is like, you gotta be even more aggressive about your goals. You have to be more on top of people's performance, like performance management, setting aggressive goals, making sure that people are actually locked in, like is really, really important because I've learned personally that if you don't If you don't give people enough work and if you don't set high enough goals, people are going to naturally slack off. Like if you set the goal here, when you can set it here, people aren't going to go beyond that. They're going to, they're going to meet you there. So I try to set ambitious goals to make sure that people are locked in. And then also communication is key from Slack to Zooms to Google Meets to having people meet in person. Like that is an integral piece of it. We still have to have in-person moments every year that people can really feel that camaraderie.

Everett's words about being a CEO really hit me, and that's because you guys know if you're a CEO too, it's really hard. You're like a bad hire, a couple bad expenses, a bad agency or two away from your business being in real problems. And that's exactly why we built the Growth Boardroom, because we don't think you should ever have to make those potentially million-dollar decisions alone. So in Boardroom, we have a board of advisors all of our tools and systems that we use to run private equity style companies that are profitable and consistent over time. Inside the Boardroom, our advisors help owners find their next lever, the next person, system, cash flow fix that helps the business run more smoothly so you can actually enjoy running it. If you've ever thought that you need help and you want somebody else alongside you in this game of ownership, this might be for you. You can schedule a call with my team here and we'll see if you're a fit. And if you are, we'll invite you into Boardroom, where you get access to our advisors, where you get access to our quarterly planning and all of the technology we use to run profitable, consistent businesses that we actually love to run. You can click the link below or go to contrarianthinking.co/boardroom. My last question, I suppose, is really what do you think you've done? I mean, Kickstarter has been through a lot over the years.

Yes, yes.

And you, from many accounts that I've heard when I asked around about you, have turned around this company, uh, and it didn't seem like it was very easy.

It was not easy.

So what, what was the key? Like, how did you change the culture of a fully remote company?

On a 4-day work week too. Oof.

I mean, fuck, dude. I need to hire you.

I know. I was at this, this conference, uh, this weekend and there was a panel of, uh, really incredible Fortune 500 Black CEOs., and they said something that rung true, and they said, you're not gonna get the CEO job if it's an easy job. Like, they're not just giving you polished companies that are like, hey, here, like, here's Apple, here's, you know, here's Microsoft. Like, no, they're gonna give you a company that has a lot of problems and a lot of issues. You know, we were down over 20% in revenue year over year when I took over. Increased competition. We had a completely remote team. We had 4-day work week. We had a lot of things working against us. And me, I came in and I said, listen, mediocrity has no place here. I do not accept mediocrity in any form in this company, how we deliver products, how we serve our customers, how we show up every day. As employees and team members, like, that's really, really important. So for me, it was like, I wanted to bring a level of intensity that Kickstarter never had, a level of urgency that Kickstarter has never had. And like, I wanted to be customer first. We started to build out things and build products that our customers and users and backers have been asking us for years. And we're just like, nope, we're, you know, we're a big company, billions of dollars, you know, raised on the platform. We don't have to do these things. And I was like, "No, we need to start listening to our creators and our community." So I aggressively had the focus to start building for them. I had the focus to reshape the team, get the people out of there that didn't need to be there, bringing in new talent. This is a new day at Kickstarter. And then, like, just having a level of ambition with our goals to really rethink what Kickstarter is, reshape the brand. Like, this is not begging for money. This isn't just crowdfunding. We are helping people build build real businesses. We're creating careers of some of the, the biggest artists and creatives in the world. Like, this is what it is, and we want people to know that. And then also building out more than just crowdfunding from pre-launch to crowdfunding to post-campaign. We've added 3 new business lines since I've gotten there. So like really just reshaping what Kickstarter could be.

I'm so excited to see what comes next.

Thank you.

Here's what we'll do. We'll go donate to 10 Kickstarter campaigns. I'm gonna correct We'll go buy, buy or buy or buy or back 10 Kickstarter campaigns off of this. We'll link them below in the YouTube show notes. And if anybody has a Kickstarter campaign and you want us to consider it even after we do the 10, drop them in the comments and we'll go back some cool-ass companies on there. Thank you so much for being on here. Thanks, Codie Sanchez.

Appreciate you, Everett.

Thank you.

Everett, where do people follow you on Kickstarter and They can follow me on all the social platforms.

What's your favorite?

Let's give them one.

Ooh, what's my favorite? Threads is my favorite. Threads is my new favorite thing.

This is just you and my 65-year-old mom.

Yo, Threads, I love it. So I'm just @Everett on Threads, but I'm @Everett everywhere on LinkedIn and Snap. And I don't even use Snap like that. I don't know why I said that. Instagram, etc., etc.

Okay, so we'll follow Everett on Instagram and Threads. Yes. At Kickstarter. Thank you for being here, man.

Thank you. I appreciate you.