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Kickstarting The Conversation On Crowdfunding

Co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler hosts the Kickstarter and Creative Communities BB Sessions during the Sundance London Film and Music Festival 2014.
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Sundance London
Co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler hosts the Kickstarter and Creative Communities BB Sessions during the Sundance London Film and Music Festival 2014.

Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality headset. The “Veronica Mars” movie. Beloved video game “Undertale.” What do all these things have in common? They were crowdfunded into existence.

While the practice of crowdfunding actually began in the ‘90s, it didn’t truly pick up steam until the foundings of its two largest modern vehicles: Kickstarter and GoFundMe.

Since then, many types of products, projects and services have been brought to life thanks to the generosity of the online community. Trips abroad, board games, medical procedures and all kinds of tech. You name it. It’s been crowdfunded.

But is crowdfunding necessarily the way some of these things should be financed? Can this system be abused? And what are those in Silicon Valley doing to ensure this democratic process isn’t corrupted?

Produced by Stacia Brown.

GUESTS

Yancey Strickler, Co-founder of Kickstarter and author of ‘This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World’; @ystrickler

Andy Yang, CEO, Indiegogo; @andyyangstar

Rachel Monroe, Contributing writer for The Atlantic; @rachmonroe

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

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Copyright 2019 WAMU 88.5