Patreon CEO Jack Conte on why creators can’t depend on platforms

Today’s guest on Decoder is Jack Conte, the co-founder and CEO of Patreon, a platform that allows people to pay their favorite creators directly in the form of monthly memberships.

If you’ve been listening to Decoder or reading The Verge, you know that the idea of paying creators directly is popping up on social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and in a range of new startups, like Substack. Basically, every platform is looking for a way to let creators charge their audiences directly, while taking a cut along the way.

The buzzword for all of this is the “creator economy,” which is just an overloaded way of saying that individual creatives can become businesses with multiple lines of revenue and a direct relationship with their audiences, instead of relying on a platform’s advertising model.

Patreon’s been supporting that economy for eight years now and has grown into a formidable business because of it, tripling its valuation to $4 billion just this past April. Several weeks after securing the investments that earned Patreon its new valuation, Jack announced the company was laying off 36 people from Patreon’s product and design team to refocus on a new product approach.

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