Kickstarter received $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz

The once-hot startup tried to stay relevant by briefly pivoting to blockchain with the help of VC Chris Dixon. Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg—Getty

If you were in New York circa 2012, you’ll recall the city was having a tech moment—the Flatiron district was buzzing with VC energy while startups like Etsy, Tumblr, and Foursquare threw rooftop parties and gave out swag. This was also the era when Kickstarter, possibly the coolest of the east coast cool kids, was on everyone’s lips. The crowdfunding platform, which launched movies like Veronica Mars and the VR headset Oculus Rift, was going to change everything about art and entrepreneurship—until it didn’t.

Today, Kickstarter is still around but it’s about as hip as cronuts, Lena Dunham, or other artifacts from that era. So what caused the startup to lose its appeal? For the most part, the startup choked on its own purer-than-thou ambitions that went side-by-side with a slacker work culture. As Fortune recounts in a fun new feature:

“There was the obligatory rooftop garden, solarium, and movie theater. Employees would stop by with their friends late on a Saturday night and still find people hanging out. The flip side was a tetherless haze of a work culture, where projects languished and some employees only worked a few hours each day.” Nice work if you can get it—thought that didn’t stave off a union drive.

Then there was the ill-advised pivot to crypto. The Fortune feature spills the beans on how, in 2021, the once-hot startup tried to stay relevant by briefly pivoting to blockchain with the help of VC Chris Dixon and a $100 million tender offer from his a16z crypto fund. The pivot, which involved trying to reengineer Kickstarter’s platform around the off-brand blockchain (and a16z investment) Celo, wasn’t responsible for the startup’s decline. But it certainly didn’t help. As Fortune reveals, trying to force-feed crypto onto Kickstarter’s do-gooder staff and community went over about as well as steak tartare at a PETA gala.

Ultimately, the short-lived crypto pivot didn’t sink Kickstarter, though it did add more drama and strategic drift to the startup’s feckless workplace culture. And while I’ll always be amazed at how VC firms are willing to set money on wire, I don’t fault Dixon for trying in this case. Sure, it was a dumb idea in retrospect, but at the time it was worth a shot—especially for someone like Dixon who believes in Web3 as a vehicle to remake the creative economy based on bottom-up technology.

That’s how innovation goes. For every smashing success like Kitty Hawk, there are numerous other literal and figurative crashes involving the same endeavor. Sooner or later, like the Orville brothers’ famous airplane, blockchain will figure out how take off into the mainstream. But for now, it’s a good bet that this breakthrough won’t be launched on Kickstarter—though you can still find other quirky pastimes on the platform, including this clock that uses AI to write a new poem every minute.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

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