20: Yancey Strickler - Constellations of Creativity
Yancey Strickler (Website, X, Metalabel) is a writer, entrepreneur, creative, and founder of Metalabel, a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He is also a board member, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter and is currently working on establishing a new kind of corporate structure, the Artist Corporation.Yancey's life and work has revolved around what it means to be a creative individual, and how to improve the cultural and mechanical forms that enable artists and creatives.We talk about how much of modern society is rooted in individualism, how that wasn't always the case, and how the internet is evolving our sense of self. We get into creativity, the term's surprisingly recent origins, and why Yancey believes the 21st will be the "Creative Century." Then, we go beyond the individual and discuss the deeply-rooted longing that all of us have to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Yancey suggests that is not simply about being subsumed by a collective, but by maintaining our individual star while becoming part of larger constellations—like the labels that have empowered the distribution of ideas for centuries. Finally, we discuss the forms Yancey has or is helping to build and imagine a future where even more of the world creates professionally.May we all shine more brightly and find others who inspire us to make wonderful things.Full transcript and all links available at https://dialectic.fm/yancey-strickler.---This episode is brought to you by Hampton, a private, highly vetted membership for founders.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 20 with Yancey Strickler. Yancey's a writer, entrepreneur, and currently the founder of MetaLabel, a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He also founded Kickstarter, where he was previously the CEO and is a current board member, and is also working on a new corporate form called the Artist Corporation. We talk about all of these and more, and frankly, those only scratch the surface of Yancey's creative life and work. At Root, I think he spent his career thinking about what it means to be an individual and what what it means to be a creative in the modern world and how the internet is shaping all of that.
Much of this work has been specifically around new types of forms that enable artists and creatives. The first half of the conversation is really focused on a backdrop around how the world is so shaped by individualism and by creativity, and how while the internet has ultimately empowered both of those dramatically, it's also left many people longing to be a part of something bigger than themselves, especially creatively. And so we spend the rest of the conversation talking about how that can happen and Yancey's notion that we should creatively conspire together, effectively acting both as individuals who can shine brightly as stars, but also as part of a constellation we are proud to be in.
All of this rolls into Yancey's notion that the 21st century will be the creative century, where increasingly more of us will find work and more importantly, meaning in what we make. With that, here's Yancey. Speaker B: Yancey, we're here. Speaker A: Thanks for doing this. Speaker B: We're here. We're so here. Speaker A: On a moody Friday in New York. Perfect time to talk about so many things. We're going to start with individualism. A couple of quotes for you that seem to be favorites of yours. One in particular from Cahill and their Youth Mode essay.
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