Quotes from Jack Conte

We, the creative class, are finding ways to make a living making music, drawing webcomics, writing articles, coding games, recording podcasts. Most people don't know our names or faces. We are not on magazine covers at the grocery store. We are not rich, and we are not famous.

Successful musicians are entrepreneurs - they work hard, way beyond 9 to 5.

Within two months of Patreon's launch I starting making $6,000 a month for my work with the support of my 'patrons.' The platform makes creators legitimate members of the workforce and is really helping to break the idea of the 'starving artist' by allowing them to earn a regular income.

Hard work works.

Releasing two, fully produced music videos per month is way more than a full time job.

When I was 6 my dad taught me the blues scale, and I started writing songs and improvising.

Kickstarter is not appropriate for a blogger who writes weekly articles - he doesn't need a big chunk of money, and he has no big project to use it for. He needs monthly income, and Patreon brings crowd funding away from singular one-off projects and into the realm of regular content creation.

We want Patreon to be safe, and we have no tolerance for hate speech. That's something I think other platforms have been behind on. They've been allowing their platforms to become toxic places. We don't want that. I don't feel apologetic about that at all.

Medium is like the Instagram of the corporate world. It's the layer that we want everybody to see, but not actually how it is. It feels like content marketing.

I love the idea of shifting power away from institutions and toward individual creative people.

I don't love using synthesizers, but I do use synthesizers. I'm more inspired by acoustic instruments - as long as there's something making the sound it's something I really like.

If your company is mostly men, make sure to have women on the interview team. While you don't want to 'tokenize' someone for their identity, it's important to show potential candidates that you're making an effort.

I will probably get creamed for saying this, but as a CEO, I've felt a little scared to talk about diversity and inclusion - not because I don't want a more diverse team, but because I've been afraid to use the wrong language or say the wrong thing. My guess is that this is a common sentiment among many CEOs in tech. That fear will crush you.

The only reason why a company like Patreon works is because of transparency, being open with people and telling them what's going on, and having them support you.

I can't see any possible future where there isn't a media site that isn't paired with crowdfunding.

How can you have a site where there are millions of people enjoying content from millions of creators and there's no direct monetary interaction between those people? That future does not exist. It's impossible.

If you want to attract executives who value diversity, then build a system that leads to diverse interviewing teams without 'tokenizing' people.

The music world is a big world, and chances that you're going to happen to know somebody are slim. Pomplamoose really just got lucky in that we got a connection at iTunes.

Being in an indie band is running a never-ending, rewarding, scary, low-margin small business.

The whole idea behind YouTube is accessibility and openness.

When I graduated college, I didn't get a job. I started making YouTube videos. I used to spend my days making art, and I love that. And, if I'm being honest, what's the hardest thing? I think it's just becoming a CEO from this path of being a YouTuber.

We're not trying to get 2 billion people on Patreon to compete with YouTube.

A lot of people hear the Pomplamoose story and think the moral of the story is to post your stuff on YouTube. I don't think that's the moral at all. The moral is, go where the people are, and be innovative and different. Make something unusual.

At the end of almost every video in my YouTube catalog since Patreon's launch, I talk about my work at the company.