Founder Stories
‘Can I Do This Job and Still Be Me?’
On leadership and self-doubt
I was standing in line at the grocery store when the magazine caught my eye. The cover was splashed with red, yellow, and a list of menacing phrases.
“Be paranoid.”
“Go to war.”
“Disrupt yourself.”
Was this Guns & Ammo? The National Enquirer? Adbusters?
It was Harvard Business Review.
At the time I was Kickstarter’s CEO. I’d been one of the company’s co-founders and leaders for nearly a decade. But in the time since I’d taken the CEO seat almost two years before, Kickstarter had grown to more than 100 employees. What had been an exciting adventure began to feel more serious by the day.
To the outside world, we were a big success. In 2013, the leading tech site TechCrunch nominated Kickstarter for “Best Overall Startup” alongside Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, and Cloudflare. Despite being by far the smallest nominee by team size, Kickstarter won.
