Can Patreon fight fire with social media fire?

A lot has changed on the internet, in the creator landscape, and at Patreon itself since CEO Jack Conte was last on the show in 2021. AI and platform shifts have stolen creator content and decimated artists' reach and revenue streams, and Patreon has made some pretty existential changes to the way it works in response. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: My thoughts on AI | Patreon I tried to prove I’m not AI | Howtown Patreon: Apple’s 30% tax is the price of staying in the App Store | The Verge Welcome to hell, Elon (2022) | The Verge Reality is losing the deepfake war | Decoder Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire | Decoder Incorruptible | Simon & Schuster Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:37Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neilan Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Jack Conti, the CEO of Patreon. Jack last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago, in the summer of 2021, and it's safe to say that a lot has changed on the internet and in the creator landscape since then. So I was very excited to talk to Jack again, especially since his ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically as big social media platforms have gotten more closed off and more flooded by AI slop. In fact, you'll hear Jack Jack say that he now thinks of Patreon as an index of small business media companies, a dramatic change in perspective that's led him to make Patreon a more direct competitor

• 2:20Speaker 04

  to social platforms like Instagram and TikTok. That's a huge change. In fact, the last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon at all. But then Patreon built those features to help people discover content from new creators. And Jack's reasoning for that change will be very familiar if you've been listening to our media conversations here on Decoder. Jack says if Patreon didn't build its own audience platform, then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences and customers. Jack has really strong opinions about this. In fact, you'll hear him say that the current ways platforms treat creators is disgusting. And you'll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone's work however they want,

• 3:03Speaker 04

  and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag. But you'll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon's plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists. There's way more in this one. Jack came fired up to answer the Decoder questions, and we spent some real time talking about his approach to how meetings feel, something you just won't hear from many other CEOs. All in all, this was a pretty refreshing conversation. I think you're really gonna like it. Okay, Patreon CEO Jack Conti, here we go.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Jack Conti, you're the co-founder and CEO of Patreon. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks, Eli. Good to be here again. It's good to see you again. It has been five years since you were last on the show. I can't believe it. So much has changed. A lot has changed. The creator economy has changed. The idea that everything is a TikTok clip is now totally upended the culture. Patreon itself has changed. Maybe we've all changed. Really, the true creator economy is the friends we've made along the way.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  How has your idea of Patreon changed over the last five years? I feel like there has been a lot of change. How would you describe Patreon today in 2026?

• 4:31Speaker 05

  You know what's so funny, Eli? I think, I think my answer to that is probably similar to your answer around the media industry. Because at the end of the day, Patreon is essentially like an index of small business media companies. Right? Like, that's, that's what we are. We, we help those small business media companies thrive and get paid and reach their fans. And so when they're hurting, you know, we feel that burn as a business and we feel that burn for them as like our customers. And so like the biggest shift I would, I would say over the last five years, the way I would characterize it is, is really what, what happened to, what happened up funnel? What happened with, you know, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram?

• 5:15Speaker 05

  And the shift is, is really one main thing, which is the move away from follower-based paradigms, from true subscriptions, into an interest-driven distribution system.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  There are so many problems with that, so many problems. It's hard to even like outline all of them. There are sort of societal level problems around mass polarization and addiction and loneliness and all the things that I think a lot of consumers are feeling. And then there's a bunch of problems on the creator's side as well, which is, when you move away from a follower paradigm, you, you ruin the creator's deterministic line of reach to their fans. And if a creator can't reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build like true community around their work, but they also can't build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business

• 6:09Speaker 05

  is this shift of the internet, you know, away from follower-based paradigms and, and into interest-based paradigms. And it, you know, it's, it's very similar to, you know, to, to Google Zero. It's the same concept. It's when, when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms as their top of funnel. I think it starts to become very clear to everybody that like these people were never our users. They were never our community members. They were never our fans. They were Facebook's users. And Facebook has made that loud and clear to creators and to the media industry and to publishers.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  And that that has created like a whole set of like a very important like product launches and problems that like Patreon has had to solve over the last five years, which has kind of been the center point for our strategy.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  I love it. We're like, we're in it. Like, we're in the heart of it. You know, my, my criticism of, I guess, the media industry over the last five years is these platforms have just been looking us in the eye and saying, we're gonna kill you. Like, it hasn't been subtle in any way, shape or form. They have, they have just been very clear that these are their audiences and they can remix attention in ways that serve them. They've basically even said to marketers who pay the bills for them, right? They're advertisers. They're basically like Meta in particular is like, we're gonna kill you too. Right? We, we will just make the ads. Like Mark Zuckerberg has sat on stages and said, look, my vision is that you just show up with some money and we deliver you some customers and everything in the middle is AI.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  I don't know if that's gonna work out or not, but it's just, they've been pretty blunt that these are, these are truly their audiences and they will do with them what they will and anybody gets in their way is probably gonna die, right? And it feels like, you know, in sort of media world where I live, like publishing company media world, approximately zero has been done to address this, right? It's like this industry has just decided to die. And maybe now they're all saying Google Zero and maybe the future of the Verge's revenue is that I just charge licensing fees for it.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  You're saying in small business world, this is equally the same problem, right? Is the platforms go from follower base to interest-based graphs?

• 8:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  Is there a concerted effort beyond Patreon to do something about it in like smaller creator world?

• 8:29Speaker 05

  I wish there was something systemic or organized. But honestly, it's very hard to fight the network effect. Like, at the end of the day, that is what's happening. And honestly, the only reason creators are still using these fucking platforms is because that is the only place where you can grow your audience. Like, it is not the software even that is valuable about those companies. Although, in many cases, the software is good. They have built a bunch of features that are useful for, you know, for media hosting and uploading and reaching people. But it is more the fact that that's where the foot traffic is.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  And so that consolidation of traffic and of attention is like the, you know, one of the core problems. That's also one of the reasons I was so excited about adding Mike McQ to our board and what he's doing with Surf is because, at the end of the day, like, it would be amazing. The only way to truly systemically address this is if the people own the network effect instead of the platform. And I think, like, ultimately, that's what Mike is trying to address with Surf, and that's one of the reasons I'm excited about Blue Sky. There does seem to be this early-stage effort to build an ecosystem around the open social web. You know, that's not on our roadmap right now, but it is something I'm following very

• 9:50Speaker 05

  closely and very excited about because, at the end of the day, like, I think it's probably one of three main things that needs to change to stop something like this from happening again. You know, if you look back at the last 20 years, essentially, I think it's fair to say social media is a failed experiment that has failed humanity and been really bad for humans. I'm not saying there aren't some good things about it. We've all been connected up. We've been given multiple pipelines to reach people. There are now millions of channels instead of three channels. People who didn't used to have voices now have voices. There are some really wonderful things about it.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  But I would argue that those things are attributes of the internet, not of the current platforms.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  And the internet is beautiful. The internet is important. Connecting people and giving people a way to reach each other and speak and make media and distribute that media, that's awesome. But the the systems, the subsystems that we're using layered on top of the internet, which is, you know, social media, those systems are a bad implementation of those principles that have had a like a really harmful effect on on humans at a scale that I think is like even hard to even comprehend. So, um, so, yeah, I mean, something needs to change. And and when we look at the next 20 years of human collaboration and and media distribution, I think we need to do some deep thinking about like, what what are the architectural

• 11:23Speaker 05

  elements of this two decades of of failed experimentation that that have had such a bad effect on us? And what do we need to do differently next time to make sure it doesn't happen again?

• 11:33Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of ideas in there. I want to come back to a lot of them, in particular, Federation. Mike McHugh, he's the CEO of Flipboard, which runs a platform called Surf. Surf is like a feed builder and browser for Threads and Blue Sky and Massal, all the open social networks. There's a lot there that I want to come back to, particularly in this idea of the architecture of of social networks. I was talking to Hank Green a couple of weeks ago, and he said, "It feels like the end of one internet, and we need to think of it as the beginning of another." That would be great. Like, I would love to live fully in that zone. The problem is you have to contend with the end of the internet that we have today, the end of the the platform era, if it isn't truly the end of the platform era. Tell me about Patreon right now, in this moment, right? Maybe we see our way through the other side, but Patreon has to operate today.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  How is Patreon organized today?

• 12:19Speaker 05

  The irony of all this, and I I think we should spend some time getting into this because it's a really important point. The the irony of this is that in order to, in order for Patreon as as a business and on behalf of our creators to fight this, in order to give our creators the audience growth and the reach that they need and the ability to continue to grow and, you know, continue to grow on the platform. We have had to build discovery systems into our platform, which I actually don't remember if I talked about this the last time I was on the show.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  You were opposed to it the last time you were on the show. You did not want to do that.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  Exactly. And that's the irony. The irony is now we have had to do that because what we've learned is if we don't provide our own top of funnel for creators, then we're just relying on Facebook to be the top of funnel and that is not a good business strategy for creators or for Patreon. Essentially, what we're like the stage that we're in as a company now is for the last few years, we've been building a bunch of media tools, distribution tools, hosting tools. We built native video. We built chats. We built discovery. We built short posting tools. We built a feed. We have built all these new ways for creators to essentially

• 13:34Speaker 05

  start providing the growth for themselves, start providing a top of funnel for themselves and for Patreon to have a top of funnel for our creators as well. That's the irony of all this. Now that is the right strategy for us where you're like, given like where the business is and where our creators are and the current like media landscape, that is not, that was not our strategy, you know, six years ago. That that's something that we've implemented over the last four to five years and and we've implemented it out of necessity. They're looking us in the eye and they're saying, we're going to kill you all.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  And I believe them. I don't want to, I don't want to wait for them to do it. I like, I want to prep way ahead of time. And so the good news is, you know, a lot of this work has actually worked. So for example, one of the things we built since we last talked is free memberships. What is a free membership? It's a follow. It's just, it's like a line of deterministic reach to people who choose to follow you. You get the email address associated with the account. That signs up for you and and then when you make a post to your followers, it gets, it triggers emails. And you also see those posts in feed that get ranked above other posts to make sure that your, your followers actually see your posts, which is very different than how other feeds work.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  And that product has been an amazing success, right? We've had, I think now we have 185 million free memberships on the platform and that's up like 2X year over year since last. Last year. So clearly, there's like a lot of fan side demand, a lot of creator demand for for a better follower system that is true to the actual word follower. You know, we built native chats, which is also something like we didn't have before. We were relying on creators to have Facebook groups and to have communities on Instagram. And we were saying, hey, we're the payments architecture. That's different now. Now we have native chats on the platform. And so, you know, last year, you know, I think we have like something like 35 million chat messages that are sent back and forth. 110 million hours of video have been watched on Patreon.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  So like a lot of these tools and a lot of these experiences that were previously happening that, you know, we were relying on to, you know, well, we were relying on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube to do those things. We can no longer rely on them to do those things. And our creators can no longer rely on them to do those things. They need a way to reach people deterministically on the platform. And so we've invested heavily in a lot of those communication and media hosting tools. And they've been very well received, which is why, you know, we're seeing that kind of adoption on the platform. So it's, it is very different from where we were six years ago. But, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Like this is the place that we're in, like as a, you know, as an ecosystem. This is where the internet is.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  And I'm like, this is, this is exactly what Patreon needs to be doing right now to help creators succeed.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  You're describing a lot of change. Again, five years ago, when we talked, you were very focused on payments and being the payment rails. Like people would basically show up and like, I have a lot of Twitter followers. I need to monetize them and Patreon would be there. That's over. I think we all understand that that's over. Twitter itself is over. It's called X now. It's the everything app. I don't know if you're familiar with it. We do everything there.

• 16:32Speaker 05

  What's, what's their strategy?

• 16:34Speaker 04

  It's everything, I'm told. You don't make all your credit payments through X?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  You're describing a very different company. That means you obviously have had to restructure, refactor the company. How many people work at Patreon? How have you organized them today?

• 16:49Speaker 05

  There are hundreds of people that work at Patreon now. And the way we're organized, you know, by manager, it's organized by function. So we're like a functionally organized company. The people who report to me run functions, which ironically comes with all kinds of dysfunction. And so to solve for that. Actually, the way that we're organized is by objective. When you look at how we talk and what the company works on, it's working on, you know, objectives. And then teams are cross-functional and collaborative. And, and all the work ladders up into those objectives. And so when we run an all hands, which I, you know, did this morning,

• 17:32Speaker 05

  or when we celebrate, you know, work that's happening, or when we, when we do company planning, all of that is, is not thought of in the silo of a function. It's thought of, you know, cross-functionally under any given objective. And that helps solve some of the problems associated with, with sort of organizing functionally. But, but not all of them. But, but I would say it's, it's, it's, that's been one of the biggest changes over the last, maybe five years, is like organizing by objective. That has been like the most transformational for Patreon. Because if you don't do that, then you have, you know, a marketing function with one set of goals and an engineering team with a different set of goals, and that's totally dysfunctional.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  You're describing kind of the, the classic Google-style objective and key result framework? Or is it something different than that?

• 18:23Speaker 05

  We're, we're not. So we do, we do use some, like, some of that framework. It's not a perfect copy of objectives and key results. We have company-level objectives. And those have like very clear key results associated with them. But I would say we're less, one of our objectives is to improve core experiences on Patreon. Our product is very wide. We've made this shift from being a membership platform and sort of a bottom-of-funnel payments processing suite to being this top-of-funnel network and community and media product. When you do that, everything breaks. Everything. You have to rebuild the entire product from the ground up. Like architecturally, all the systems, new infrastructure, like literally everything breaks.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Navigation, you know, you have to build new privacy policies. You have to build everything. And so, part of our work is chipping away at all those things one by one. And so, making the core experiences.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  Fit into the current vision and product that we want is a really important objective for us. And we have 10 fixes every quarter that we chip away at. And by the end of the quarter, we want to have shipped eight of them. And there's tons of cross functional teams that are that are working on that across the company. So it's a little different than objectives and key results. It's a little different than OKRs, but it's the sort of spirit of it is the same.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  The other question I ask everybody, Nick Doherty, is about decisions. You're describing a very big decision. You're describing an existential change, the nature of Patreon and what your relationship to consumers should be. In many ways, you turned into a social network, which is a thing you've been fighting against. Tell me about your framework for making decisions and explain how you brought it to bear on that choice.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  Sure. But before I have to combat the social network idea. I just like, I don't call it that internally. I don't say we're building a social media app. That's effectively, in my opinion, it's like saying, hey, we're building better cigarettes. Like, nobody wants better cigarettes.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  I mean, some people really want.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Okay, okay.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  They're very popular.

• 20:28Speaker 05

  Fair enough, but but I don't want to make better cigarettes.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  That's not how I want to roll into my grave.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  I don't want to do that. And also, I think spiritually, it's important because if we go out and say, hey, we're a social media app. What are we going to do? We're going to like, our teams are going to look at what happens on Instagram and what happens on Facebook. And we're going to like, copy pasta a bunch of features and it's not going to make sense for our systems. And the truth is like, our optimization function is really different for everything in the product. Right? Like, our algorithms that provide creators with discovery and distribution are not optimizing for watch time. Actually, Neil, I don't know. I don't know what session time is on Patreon. If you were to like, ask me questions like, what's session time? What's the average testing time for users, for creators? I don't know. We don't track it. We don't AD, we don't AB test against it. Like, that is not, that is not what we're doing. It's not our optimization function.

• 21:19Speaker 05

  So I think grouping us into social media is just, is just not true. We're trying to build a fundamentally different system with different bones. And so like, we're looking at things instead of, you know, like session time, we're looking at deterministic reach. Are you able to build long term relationships with the people that follow you? Are you able to reach those people? Are you getting connected pieces of media as opposed to unconnected pieces of media?

• 21:45Speaker 05

  Are we giving creators and fans agency in their experience? Or are we sort of like hacking their limbic systems? Which is kind of what it feels like on on social media right now. I feel like I'm a lab rat. You know, are we optimizing for crater payments? Which, you know, the platforms are not optimizing for. So there are going to be some primitives that look like social media. But at the end of the day, it's just like the bones are different. And I think it's really important to, at least for me, like, I, you know, to acknowledge that. So, OK, let me answer your second question around decisions, though. Yeah. I was very bad at making decisions.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  And I don't want to say I've figured it out because I think that's the kind of thing we're always learning. But there have been like a lot of little things that I've learned that I'd love to share. I hear a lot of like heuristics that sound just like really great for decision making. You know, there's like, listen, decide, communicate. You know, there's all these like simple things. That's not what's been effective for me in making better decisions. So let me just give you like a bunch of like really tactical, specific things that have helped me make better decisions over time. The first is when we start a meeting, like one thing that where we're supposed to make a decision, one thing I like to ask is like, hey, does anybody have a strong opinion off the bat? Are there any strong opinions in the room? Does anybody disagree with the recommendation? Sometimes the answer is no. But sometimes somebody right out of the gate says like, yeah, I really disagree with the recommendation and here's why.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  And you just like saved yourself a half hour of kind of fluffy discussion at the top of a meeting. You sort of cut right to the chase. And if you really press somebody, why do you disagree? You hear like three or four, maybe genuinely good points. And then we can debate the merits of those good points and the whole room gets informed as you're making a decision like that. So I like to just sort of put some pressure at the beginning of the meeting to sort of cut right to the chase. The second thing is I don't, I no longer trust the framing of the decision. So sometimes the decision will be, it'll come to the group, it'll be, OK, here's path A, here's path B, let's, let's choose. And what I've found is like, more often than not, it's not actually path A or path B. And sometimes it's not even a decision.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  There's literally just like four or five action items that we can discover as a group and march through those things and solve the underlying. Problem that the decision was attempting to solve. So just like having a discussion where we get clear on what are the next steps. Sometimes it seems like half of path A and half of path B, but actually it's a more bespoke solution that that is a, you know, a better solution to a complex problem. Okay, another thing is like really great pre reads. Man, you can spend 45 minutes just like context sharing. I feel very strongly about this. Meetings are not for information transfer. They are for debate and discussion. And so if we find ourselves spending 45 minutes in a meeting, literally sharing context with each other, that's wasted time.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  And, and also we're going to make bad decisions if people don't, you know, if people have, you know, information asymmetry, then no wonder we think, you know, one person should take path A and or and another person thinks we should take path B. Like that's, that's because we don't have shared context. So getting everybody to have shared context is huge and pre reads are a great way to do that.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Okay, let me give you a couple more.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  Naming that there should be a decision maker. Oh my God, I'm still learning how to be better at this. Sometimes I find myself in a meeting where we're all just arguing with each other and then it's like, hey, who is the decision maker here? Who's actually making this? So having clarity around who the DRI is for that decision, I think can be really helpful.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  That's directly responsible individual.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. And then let me, let me give you one more.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  About halfway through a meeting, I like to tell people, like if I find myself starting to be swayed in one direction or another, I just name that. And I say, hey, team, like, here's what I'm thinking so far. Here's where I think we should go based on the conversation we've had, based on what I know. Like, if you think that's wrong, tell me why. And what often happens at that moment is someone brings up. Three or four like really good points for, you know, risks of taking that path that we hadn't named before. And saying, we're going to go in this direction is what surfaces those extra risks and that extra click down in like the, in the debate and the, because it starts to become visceral if people feel like, oh, we are going in that direction.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  And so then we can spend the next 30 minutes talking through those items and realizing like, okay, do we want to build mitigation plans for those risks? Or do we want to, you know, choose path B instead? So, so just like telling the team where I'm thinking and where I'm leaning in real time, I found has created a little bit of pressure to like, get the real conversation out and to identify more, more problems with the path as we go. I have a bunch of more lessons, you know, that I've learned over the years, which I'd be happy to share, but honestly, I keep these lessons like at the top of a doc when I'm having a meeting so that I can just like, remind myself like, hey, do these things in a meeting to help drive it to conclusion. And it's been really helpful for me to just do that.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  This is great. I have a decoder book coming out and we're going to give you a whole chapter.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  I'll take it.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  What I like about this, what I'm curious about is there's a lot of Amazon in there, right? Like DRIs are like a very Amazon kind of idea that there needs to be a decision maker and you need to identify them. And then there's what I would describe as you paying attention to the emotional tenor of a meeting and making sure that's driving it forward. Is that just because you're in a band and you understand like the creative process? Because most of the executives I talk to are, they think about this, I would say mechanistically, right? We're going to go from here to here to here and these are the steps. And you're very much describing how it feels to be in a meeting and controlling that feeling.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there are benefits of that and there are drawbacks. I, I definitely, yeah, I'm a creator. I'm a YouTuber. I'm not a, you know, my background is not, you know, an engineer. I didn't come from product management. I came from literally making music videos on YouTube. So like, I think it's fair to say that just, you know, my. Yeah, I, I, uh, my job for a long time was transferring my emotions to other people. That's how I made my living, right? That's the job of an artist. Can you make somebody feel something that you felt? Can you, you know, communicate that feeling to somebody? So, yeah, I'm very aware of, of that in a meeting.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  The, the, and I think that can be really helpful, right? Cause it can, you can add a little bit of pressure. You can push a conversation forward. It can also be dangerous because I can over rotate on feelings sometimes. Which, you know, I'm not in the Elon camp that, you know, empathy is the curse of all humanity. I'm very opposed to that philosophy. I do not agree with that in, in, you know, by any stretch of the imagination. But, um, but yeah, I, I do have to be careful that I'm, I'm, um, I'm not over rotating on, on feelings. I think the, the desire to make everybody happy can, can, can really drag things down sometimes. And so I have to constantly be like aware of that tendency in myself.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch. In Bev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

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  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it. When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Patreon CEO Jack Conti about some of the changes he's made to Patreon's structure. So put this on to practice for me. You described, instead of needing Path A or Path B, we're going to drill down and find just the action items. And actually, the decision is already made and we just need to move forward. I'm curious for a real example of that. And then I want the bigger picture of, oh, I need to drastically change what Patreon is.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Well, let me answer your second question first. And along the way, I'm sure I'll think of a specific example. For the bigger decision around this adjustment to Patreon's strategy, the truth is, there is some element of top-down decision-making associated with a change like that. And there is some element of emergent strategy that comes from the organization. That's like, I think, necessary to embrace and even put some kindling against to get it to be more holistic and full-bodied. You know, it started in 2020, probably, with bringing in more of like a consumer product leader,

• 31:45Speaker 05

  who was thinking more about consumer experiences, less of like a kind of a SaaS-focused organization, less of the kind of B2B2C, go-to-market motions, and more of the like consumer, you know, product motions and talent and, you know, teams and company structures.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  And you know, that was a big shift in and of itself, just like bringing in that leadership and, and honestly, just a lot of learning for me because I, you know, this is my first job. This is literally, I've never worked at another company before, right? So in some ways, I'm, I'm, I don't see the water. I don't see the air around me. And so there was a lot of learning for me. It's like, okay, how does, how does this look different? And then as we were doing that, teams are suggesting things that we want to do differently. And a lot of that is coming up, you know, coming bottoms up. Okay, we need to have, you know, before we were against native video. Okay. But if we're going to be, you know, if we're going to have discovery for, for creators, we need to have free accessible media on the platform. You can't have identity based discovery.

• 32:52Speaker 05

  We've run those tests. They don't work. If you land on a creator's page and there's no free accessible media, you're not going to pay that creator. You have no reason to. You don't know who that person is. You have never fallen in love with their work. You need a way to fall in love with their work, which means you need free accessible media on the platform. That was an emergent piece of the strategy that came from the organization. It wasn't just like, ah, let's turn on discovery and put different creator profiles in front of everybody's page. We tried that. We tested that. It didn't lead to conversion. The organization learned. We had systems to make sure that bubbles up to, you know, PMs and product leaders and to me and to the executive team. And then you kind of keep chipping away at that flywheel. And over a period of, you know, two years, you start to hone in on precisely

• 33:34Speaker 05

  what the right strategy is. So yeah, there's some amount of like top down push that comes and there's some amount of bottoms up strategic emergence that comes from the organization.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Let me ask you about just building products in that kind of environment, right? Where it's the age of AI and you sit right in the middle of just a totally polarized debate. On the one hand, every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they've ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of token maxing. And then in creator world, the audiences hate it and they don't want the slop and every platform is overrun with slop, even though the audiences don't want the slop and something very bad is happening. How are you bridging that divide where it's obvious that the future of software companies looks AI enabled in some way? I'm not sure

• 34:25Speaker 04

  which way it is, but it's obvious that it's some way. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  This has been really challenging, especially in the sort of modern environment of the internet. But I'll tell you what I did. What I did was, I just said what I really thought. I spent a long, long time putting together my full thoughts. It took me, the end product is 45 minutes of me talking through these issues. And then I posted that. And it is self conflicting and I'm holding two opposing beliefs at the same time.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  And I'm terrified and I'm excited and I'm I'm really pissed at how all this has been rolled out and how little agency creators have gotten through this process. And also, I find the technology magical. There's a piece of, like, for me as a creator, I've always been interested in new technologies that helped me accomplish my goals as an independent creator. I remember when the first DAWs came out, you know, digital audio workstations in the late 90s and 2000s, you know, tools like Pro Tools. And I learned I could record, I could make a record at my house, in my bedroom. You know, that led to the emergence of Pomplamoose, which was my, you know, my band. I was obsessed with that.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  Now, there are a lot of analog recording engineers at the time who hated the idea of a DAW. They thought it was like, it sounded cold, it wasn't warm, it wasn't analog gear, you're not respecting the technology of, you know, of recording, you know, the skill set, the craft of recording. The same thing happened with YouTube and distribution systems when, when, you know, we started uploading to the internet. There was this whole backlash around, you know, that not being the real way to do music. The real way to do music is to sign a record deal and, and go on tour. And like Pomplamoose didn't do that. We just distributed our own music through YouTube and sold MP3s on iTunes and, and made enough money to buy a house, literally off of MP3 sales. And so there's always been this piece of me that embraces new technology. So the truth is, like, I am holding, like, all of these ideas in my head at once.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  And I myself feel very conflicted about it. At the end of the day, though, here's what I think is happening.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  The algorithms and social media platforms are so good at polarizing humanity, sorting and filtering us into one of two camps on basically every issue, whether it's politics, or news, or technology, or anything. The algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps, and they push us so far apart. That is absolutely happening now with AI. And I'm not saying there aren't serious drawbacks and concerns, and that I'm not seriously angry about it. I am.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  But I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation around these technologies right now. Like, everything is changing for people. And this is going to be a transformative shift for artists, for employees, for humans. And I think we're at this place where boycotting AI, that's like boycotting the internet, you know? Like, that's not a good strategy.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  I don't like what Instagram has done. I disagree with a lot of their decisions. I still have an Instagram page. I still post and reach my community. I don't like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year. I really disagree with those decisions. I don't think they're fair for creative people. I think they're hurtful for creative people. And here I am on my iPhone. I don't like what my federal government is doing right now.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  On so many dimensions. And I still pay my taxes, and I still live in the United States.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Sure, I get it. I mean, I understand this sort of "yet you live in society" argument, and I find it very frustrating, too. You know, I used to read Guitar World when I was a kid, and I'd read the angry screeds from analog recording engineers about Logic being cold. And, fine, but I had a cassette four-track at that time, and I was like, "This thing sucks. I would much rather use my computer to record my music." It was just very obvious, but that didn't have... Like, Logic hadn't stolen all of the music in the world to make Logic. And in fact, it was very obvious that the people behind Pro Tools and Logic and whatever else had a deep and meaningful appreciation for the music industry, and they were trying to make tools for musicians. The internet and social media, huge stacks of problems, and maybe they needed to be addressed in different ways.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  But the value exchange of Instagram, I think, is reasonably clear to people. Right. You run a lawn mowing business. You can go find some customers on Instagram and like you're good to go. If you just want to post dance videos on TikTok and reach an audience, maybe that's the easiest thing that's ever been in world history to do. The value exchange for AI, I think, is so much more diffuse that people hate it. But you're a musician. I know tons of musicians who are like, look, AI is everywhere. Suno is everywhere in the music industry. We just had Harvey Mason Jr. on the show. He runs the Recording Academy. He's like, it's everywhere. And our line to give you a Grammy award is you have to be mostly human. And that is as fuzzy of a line as can possibly exist. So you're saying you're sitting in it. And I think I have the exact same kind of conundrum

• 39:55Speaker 04

  as you do. I love new technology. We have an audience of people who love new technology. We're going to post this clip on the internet and people are going to tell you, of course, it's clear that you should hate it. And that makes no sense to me because those same people are probably using it in some way. But you're sitting in it and you run a software company that services the needs of creatives who hate it. There's no doubt in my mind that the software company side should be in full embrace of AI and maybe the creative services part of the company, which is what the software makes, should not. And can you smash those together or are you just trying to keep those far apart?

• 40:27Speaker 05

  No, no, no. You nailed it. And this is the core of like our approach. Before I even get into that, let me just say like, what ultimately is happening to creative people right now is disgusting. It happens every 10 years. There's this techno-legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology and it breaks the current systems. It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim that, well, it's this new technology and, you know, it's either fair use or copyright doesn't apply because it's, you know, transformative in some capacity.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  You know, this was the Google Books case. This was the YouTube case, you know, when Viacom sued YouTube for a billion dollars. And then, you know, there's sort of like industry mayhem around that.

• 41:26Speaker 05

  That's where we are now. We're in the industry mayhem part of this cycle.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  We should be there. There should be a lot of lawsuits. And in my opinion, there should be regulation to prevent this type of thing from happening with regard to AI. Because what's essentially happened is these models have borged the entirety of the free creative web from all these creative people without paying them, without letting them opt out, and without even giving them credit.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  That is bad, not only for those creators, but it's bad for society. Like, the reason copyright exists, the reason IP law exists, is to create a societal level incentive around novelty creation. Like, that is the purpose of those laws. Like, that comes from the Constitution. Like, Congress was given the power to promote the sciences and the arts. Yeah, the arts, too. They wrote in "the arts" because it's important to promote and to protect people who invent within the arts. It's important for those rights holders to have rights. That's why they're called rights holders. So it's fucking crazy to me that these models are allowed to just use all the work and then claim transformation and

• 42:39Speaker 05

  then have a fair use case and get around it. So, all that is terrible. Okay, so I think your question is like, Jack, how do you reconcile that with being a software CEO? So I'll tell you, it's like a very practical approach, which is if Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company, we are ultimately a product and engineering company. If we do not fully embrace these tools and use them to give the power back to creators, we as a company will be dead in three years. Look at what happened with the mobile shift, right? These platform shifts are material. They have a massive impact on the people who are playing in these ecosystems. And if the companies don't keep up with these new technologies, they will die. Patreon is much more useful

• 43:22Speaker 05

  to creators if we are alive, if we are shipping more valuable products at a faster clip that are higher quality. And so we 100% are embracing these tools internally. And I've told our creators, we are embracing these tools internally. We are using LLMs to...

• 43:40Speaker 05

  Write more features to, you know, our engineers are using LLMs when they, when they code. We're using LLMs to organize the team. We're using Notion agents to crawl through pages, you know, our own internal documents and create summaries and help teammates understand who to talk to for which sorts of problems. Like, we must embrace those tools. That is not a choice that we have. Because I want us to, to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people. So what we have done with our product strategy, and here's, here's how we've, I don't know if you want to say resolved the tension, but this is how we thought of it, is, you know, there's a lot of companies that are sort of going to market loud and proud with, now we're an AI company. Creators don't want us to be an AI company, and they don't need us to be an AI company. Like, we don't need to build a whole bunch of forward-facing features for creators.

• 44:22Speaker 05

  If you look at what a feed on Instagram looks like now versus two years ago, it looks pretty much the same. There's not a whole bunch of changes because of AI. Like, there's a consumption experience, there's a community experience. In many ways Patreon is similar. There are some experiences that are different. And the way we think about where to use AI is, if you imagine a bullseye diagram, at the center of the bullseye is

• 44:45Speaker 05

  creators making their creative work. And what creators have told us is Patreon, get the fuck out of the way. Let me make my work. Don't give me script ideas. Don't build me an agent that helps me come up with a video thing. Don't title my post for me. Let me do the making. Get out of my way. So we get out of their way on like creators making things. And then one rung out from that bullseye is the packaging of that material. Now creators, to us, have been a bit more open to using AI to package their works. And so what does that mean? Like automated chapter markers and things like that. Cutting long-form podcast episodes into clips. One rung out from that is like marketing. So helping a creator, you know, like with automated, you know, email flows and, and things like that. And then one rung out from that is managing my business.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  And creators have even more openness to, to using AI tools to help them manage their business. And so the, the best quote we heard from our user, user research interviews was, hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don't need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet. And that is our product strategy. Our product strategy is help creators do their taxes and clean their toilets. Using AI and like but but we're not we're not like going out and saying we're Patreon at AI now and everything is going to be an AI feature. So I've I've explained all this to our creators in this very long 45 minute video. And I think for the most part like creators understand that like Patreon has to keep up and use these tools internally. And also, it's

• 46:11Speaker 05

  important for us to be an advocate right now for creative people and and fight on their behalf. So that they're not forgotten about through this this new techno legal cycle that we're going through.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  You published that video, it was a little bit ago, not so long ago, but a little bit ago, you sat with some feedback. Did you change anything about your strategy? Did anything about the feedback to that video shift your thinking?

• 46:30Speaker 05

  Yes. One of the things that came up in that process and a lot of the comments were around, okay, but Patreon, how are you? How are you going to prevent the platform from being overrun with slop? What are you doing from a policy and trust and safety standpoint to make sure that Patreon just doesn't get clogged up like other platforms are getting clogged up? And that was amazing feedback. We had already started thinking about that, but we accelerated those work streams. Actually, I have a meeting next week with a team that has a draft proposal for that. And that's a really hard problem, right? Actually, YouTube made an announcement about that this week. But the problem there is like, how do you what do you label? Or do you label?

• 47:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And how do you even detect it?

• 47:11Speaker 05

  And how do you detect it? And like, and if you can detect it now, what makes you think you can detect it a year from now? Right? There's no canonical system that there's no API you can call and say with certainty whether something is AI generated or not. Right? Like, that's not that doesn't exist. And and even if it does, somebody's going to build a tool that breaks that. So

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Our poor reporter Jess Weatherbed is, you know, her beat is AI labeling systems. And she's like, what are we doing? She's been on the show and she's like, we keep pretending that these are going to work because we have to. But there's no evidence that they ever will.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  And so then there's the reverse, right? Which is, okay, maybe you label human-generated work. You know, I remember in growing up in the 80s and 90s, when manufacturing shifted to Asia, and there were all these "Made in the USA" stickers. And that became sort of like a hallmark of like, hey, you should buy this thing loud and proud. You're voting with your dollars here. And so I can imagine some type of future where something is labeled as "human-generated", and that's like a loud and proud moment for people. So that's another way to solve the problem. Actually, How Town, Joss Fong, who used to be at Vox, made an amazing video about this, just like flipping the labeling game on its head by labeling "human-made work".

• 48:26Speaker 05

  There's a bunch of different ways to solve it. Anyway, we're thinking through all those problems. That was like a result of feedback that we got from the community as we rolled out some of this thinking.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  You have platform competitors who are a little more wide open, have lots of similar features. I'm in particular thinking of Substack, right? Whose approach to moderation is famously laid out on the show is, "Screw it. Do Nazis on Substack." That's just their vibe. I assume they're going to allow tons of slop. There's already a ton of slop on Substack. They have the same core set of features. And I realize you don't want to be called social media, but the feature, so if you just list them in a bullet point chart, they're all the same, right? You have a Twitter-like function, you've got podcasts, they're pushing into videos, you've got follow features. Substack's promise to everyone is, "We'll take 10% of your revenue, but we will deliver you the next new follower." And they do it in all kinds of ways. I would even describe a lot of ways to do it as just straight-up dark patterns.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  You subscribe to one newsletter, oops, you're subscribed to nine more, right? And some creators have gotten pretty antsy about this, and a bunch of big publications have left. Like, The Ancler just left, and now they're on Ben Thompson's platform, which I believe is called Passport. You're sitting in that same zone, right? Is your promise, "We will help you get the next new subscriber" in the same way as Substack? Or is it, "People are going to download this app, and we will just surface stuff until they show up"? Like, Substack very clearly makes the promise that they will deliver the next new subscriber to you. Are you making the same promise?

• 49:51Speaker 05

  We don't frame it quite like that, but we absolutely are going out and telling creators now, "Hey, we're helping you get discovered. We are helping you find and grow your community." That is a big piece of our value proposition now. And we're talking about it loud and proud. I mean, we are sending now 1.5 million new followers to creators on Patreon per month from our own systems. And 750,000 free followers are becoming paid followers per month on those systems. One of the big differences between us when we last talked and us now is, audience

• 50:33Speaker 05

  growth was not in our set of value propositions that we talked about, but it must be now. Unless, this is the whole point around being your own top of funnel for your own creators. If you rely on Google to do that, if you rely on YouTube for the audience growth, and you provide no audience growth, you are a bottom of funnel company that will be Google-zeroed. You just are. Lesson learned the hard way. So, we don't want to wait for that. Okay, now that said, I think there are good ways to do that, and I think there are bad ways to do that. And I think you're, I'll go back to Elon's takeover of Twitter. You wrote

• 51:14Speaker 05

  that amazing article on how with social media platforms, the product is the policy, right? The product is trust and safety. It is content policy, which I think Elon learned the hard way. And now we see it. SpaceX filed their S1, and we got to see their revenue cut in half since the purchase. I think he learned very clearly that content policy, trust and safety is the product. And so, I think that's a big piece of what we do, and that is a big differentiator for us versus Substack. We don't allow Nazis.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  You know, we don't allow that. We have much more, I think, thoughtful moderation. You know, there's some people who think that your content policy should be the First Amendment. That's not, that's not how we think about it. You know, there are things on Patreon that we think are good for the mission. There are things on Patreon that are not good for the mission. And so, you know, we've been, I'm like very proud of our content policy. I wrote the first version of it in 2013. It was 40 pages with, you know, with the help of an outside consultant. And we've iterated on that policy over the years and I think done a really good job of enforcing it. So like, yeah, I'd say one of the biggest differences between Substack and Patreon is our content policy, which is not a by the way. That's like a main feature for us.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  And a lot of creators have left Substack and come to Patreon because of our content policy.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  We need to take a quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them? That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out. In. Dashboard. Confessions.

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  I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand", when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

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• 53:45Speaker 06

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition, even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  We're back with Patreon CEO Jack Conti. Before the break, we dove deep into Jack's complex thoughts about AI. Now I want to switch to another really thorny topic for a platform like Patreon, its relationship to payment processors and the pressures to moderate content like a social network. It's time now to talk about the sexiest topic of all, which is your relationship to payment processors. This is what all the kids have been waiting for. As you go up to the top of the funnel, right? You have a more direct relationship with consumers. The pressure to moderate more increases and it increases from a number of different directions. I think when you were just the payment processor for a bunch of creators, you could get away with a lot more. In particular, you could get away with adult content. You could get away with people selling nudes. Patreon has a long history here.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  Now you're it. You're an app icon on people's home screens, direct relationship with consumers that you're trying to pass on to creators. And payment processors like Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, they can look right at you and say, don't do this. And you've had to comply. Talk me through that. This is pretty controversial, like a lot of adult creators make their living on Patreon or did make their living on Patreon. And it seemed like you had no choice but to agree. I'm curious if you thought there was an ability to push back or if there's another way forward.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  There was not a way to push back in the early days. And, you know, I think we're far enough down the road now. I sent many 3 a.m. emails to CEOs begging for them to reconsider.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  And that's like the CEOs of Stripe?

• 55:50Speaker 05

  Of payment partners and processors, actually never Stripe, but other payment processors. That was a real challenge for us, Neelai.

• 56:00Speaker 05

  It's a challenge because if they're threatening to not be a partner to us anymore, it's not just that one creator's income that's at stake. It's the $10 billion that we've processed on behalf of creators since the company was founded. We're processing over $2 billion a year now. That's a lot of income that we need to be a rock for those creators and make sure that that income is protected for them. And so these issues are really serious. So we did a couple of things. One, over the years, we worked very closely with payment processors to understand their

• 56:41Speaker 05

  content policies and their constraints and make sure that our content policy was acceptable to them. And we co-iterated on those policies together, and we also continue to coiterate on them because culture changes. Content policy is a living, breathing thing. It has to change as culture changes. It has to change as the internet changes. Now there's non-consensual AI-generated nudity. That was not a thing that platforms and payment processors had to worry about four years ago. Now you have to worry about it, and you need a clear policy around it. So one is we worked with those partners to make sure that we had parallel content policies.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  The second thing that we did is we built hot-swappable payments architecture so that as the company got bigger, we could just unplug one processor and plug in a different one. And what that did is it gave Patreon a little bit of leverage, not a little bit, a lot of leverage in those conversations. Because we're processing billions of dollars annually, those processors want that volume. And if we can hold back volume from them because we're not happy with their content policy decisions... That helps us. That helps us fight on behalf of our creators and have the right content policy that we want for us. So it gives us some negotiating leverage in those conversations. Now, sometimes, it's not even the processors themselves, it's the banks behind those processors, or the acquiring banks behind them. This stuff goes like all

• 58:08Speaker 05

  the way up the chain. I wish it didn't work this way, but this is how it works. And so, we've had to both be more collaborative and also build some systems that give us more agency, like this swappable payments architecture, to kind of solve that problem over time. Now, we're at the point, you know, over the last few years, we haven't had any P zero payments processing issues, because we've done so much work on that. We learned the hard way over the first chapter of the business. But that was a big problem, like in the early years.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Do you have adult content on Patreon right now?

• 58:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, we do. We have an 18 plus category. We don't have porn, and our content policy does not allow porn. There are people who say you can't define porn. That's not true. You can define it, and we have. And we've done that in a lot more-

• 58:55Speaker 04

  What's your definition of porn?

• 58:56Speaker 05

  Well, there's way more detail than I'm going to elaborate on live on a podcast.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  But we have detailed that, like pedantically, like in legalese. Because the point of content policy, you want 10 humans to be able to look at a policy and look at a piece of media and then have nine of them make the same decision, right? Like, that's how we try to write our policies in terms of level of detail. And so, we do have that level of detail baked in, and we know, like, this is pornography, this is not pornography. And so, one of the things we want to allow for is, like, we're an arts platform. Like, we have to have free, like, human expression in some capacity. And so, we allow nudity, we allow, you know, there's like marijuana creators, and there's people who talk about whiskey, and there's like people, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. I want that stuff on Patreon. I want artists on Patreon. I want people who push the edge. I want people who expand the

• 59:45Speaker 05

  Overton window. I want people who are out there. You know, I don't want people who are just in the center of the bell curve. I want the people who are on the edges. Like, this is, those are the people who push society forward. And so, we have, like, in some ways, we have like a liberal content policy, and that's important to me on some dimensions. So, yeah, I want all those things. We've built policies to allow for those things, and now we have the payments architecture to support it as well.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  I'm just like personally required. I feel like I have to say this every time. Justice Potter Stewart, who came up with I Know It When I See It, regretted it for the rest of his life. And like even like at the end was like, I really wish I hadn't said that. Because it is it is possible. You don't have to be that subjective. Let me ask you about the other payment processor conflict that seems omnipresent in the history of Patreon. You mentioned it already, which is Apple. We live in a world where Apple is constantly in some sort of legal fight. It's on or off with Epic, the European Union, or whoever else it is, about the 30% fee. They pushed you into forcing creators to be on monthly subscriptions as opposed to some of the other plans you've had. You've changed some of your payment terms. I think everyone's flat fee 10% now, as opposed

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  to eight or 12, which you had before. This all seems like just a big swirl to me of kind of the same problems with Apple. Describe your current relationship with Apple and if you think anything else is about to change.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  I don't think anything else is about to change. I hope not.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Are creators still paying the Apple tax?

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  Yes. I disagree with that decision. I think that's bad for creative small businesses. I don't think it's creator first. I told, you know, App Store employees at Apple that to their faces. You know, I tried to be polite, but but also tried to advocate as best I could on behalf of creators. We have been advocating for that for years and years and years. Apple was like very, very clear with us that, you know, IAP was non-negotiable for them. The in-app payments system that they built was was non-negotiable. We had

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  these legacy billing models that the billing structures did not work with IAP and Apple was not going to support. They were not going to build new features into IAP that would make those legacy billing structures work. And as a result of like having to, you know, adopt that, we have to basically deprecate those legacy billing structures. That's very painful for our creators. So not like there are two problems here. One is creators have to pay the 30% tax for for memberships that come in through the iOS app. Um, natively. And then the second-

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Are you allowed to kick people to the web now? Is that one of the outcomes of the epic?

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, so-

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  Litigation that you can just tell people it's cheaper on the web?

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  Uh huh. And, and, and so, um, we, we did that and we built that. And actually, within, I think, after that epic ruling, you know, within, um, I think within like 48 hours, we had a new build submitted to the App Store.

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  Where we, where we built that flow. Apple at first was okay with it and we had sort of pushed back this initial deadline that we had around our legacy billing model deprecation. That, yeah, it, it, it didn't hold. They got in touch with us later and were very clear again.

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  And that's when, you know, I, I, I've had a tumultuous relationship with over the, you know, with them over the years, like, um, when things come to a head, you know, I'm personally in the room with them, talking about these issues with them. You know, they did extend the deadline for us. They, they gave us, I think, uh, you know, uh, to the end of this year as opposed to, you know, a shorter time period, which I thought would be really catastrophic for creators because they have all these workflows and, and business models that they need to uphold.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  Oh God, look, even as I'm talking about this, like, I just, I, I, I am so upset, honestly, I'm just so upset at, at, at this. I, I, they have such a stronghold on the system and they're, they're able to throw their weight around. And now here I am talking shit about Apple Live on a podcast and maybe that's going to bite us. But, um, man, it was hard working with them. And I, at the end of the day, I disagree with their decisions and I wish they had given creators more leeway.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  Can you kick people to the web still? Do they, do they hold that update when you shipped it? Were they weird about it? I've, I've heard that they did not like it when other platforms shipped those updates.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, they didn't. And that, that, that's what I just talked through. I mean, they, they wrote us back and, um, and sort of, you know, that's when we had to change the deadline for the, or-

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:19Speaker 05

  Re-instate the, the, the deadline for the deprecation.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  And so, but the, the kick to the web is still there and that flow still works?

• 1:04:26Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. And so, so what we did is we gave our creators a way to up the price for, um, because we wanted our creators to have income continuity, right? It's like a 30% hit on your revenue is unacceptable.

• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  So we built a system that allows creators to- For memberships on the iOS, charge an increased amount for those memberships, such that the net impact to them is flat. Now, what that ultimately does is it passes the extra fee on to the fan, which is also a bad experience. But, but, you know, we pride ourselves on being a creator-first company. And so, we told our creators, like, hey, we're building the system. You can pass the fee on to your, on to your fans. And a lot of them are doing that now. And then they just tell their fans, like, hey, if you want this for, you know, without the extra fee, you can go become a member on web.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  You know, that basically allowed creators to preserve their income. But it's still a drag. It still passes the end fee on to the consumer, and then the fan ends up paying more. And there's, yeah, there's, there's problems associated with that. You know, it's, it's, yeah, it was, it was not a good experience.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  I want to end by, by talking about how you might push back against platforms. We've talked a lot about different kinds of platforms and the different kinds of pressures they can impose on a creator and things you're building to let creators take some control back. The last piece of that, you mentioned at the very top of the show, is maybe there are new kinds of networks to be built, where creators own their audiences, they own their follow graphs, where users feel more in control, where you can pick your own algorithm, right? Blue Sky is, is run by very idealistic people who seem to think that picking your own algorithm will solve the whole problem in the end. And maybe to the detriment of all other product improvements, they're laser-focused on that. Threads exists, it runs on Activity Pub, right? No one has yet inter-operated with Activity Pub, such that that made it, makes any sense for Threads, but they keep doing it.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Mike McHugh built Surf, you can browse Blue Sky and Threads and Mast on all the open social networks. You have Quips, which is a social-ish product, they make social-ish objects on the Patreon. You said you're not federating it, but you could. What do you see as the benefit of going to inter-operate with those networks? Is it just bigger distribution? Is it bringing more content onto the Patreon platform? How, how should this work?

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  It's, it's creators owning their audiences. That's, that's the benefit. When we launched in 2013, We gave, I think we're the first platform that gave creators the email addresses of their fans when they signed up. And we did that despite advice that we got when we were raising money. You know, people were saying like, hey, this, this, um, this sort of reduces switching costs. Like, why would you let creators be able, like, why would you give them emails? Because then they can just like email their fans and tell them to go to some other platform. And our whole point was like, yeah, that's exactly why you should do it. Because that lights a fire under our ass to build a product that's valuable enough to keep creators and to keep their trust.

• 1:07:30Speaker 05

  And so we, you know, that was part of the V1 of Patreon. It's been in the product since. So I, sometimes I like to say, we were, Patreon was the original Web 3 before Web 3. Like, we were, like, we were, we were trying to do things, we were, we had the spirit of building things, you know, on, in a decentralized way, using protocols. You gotta be careful with that, because that definitely sounds like you were doing crypto scams. No, no, no. I was robbing you blind before, before any of these NFTs ever showed up. No, but seriously, like, the spirit of it was like emails based on a protocol. And there's something really beautiful about that. And so we want to make sure that we can pull that into Patreon as much as possible. And so, um, yeah, what is the benefit?

• 1:08:11Speaker 05

  The benefit is creators having confidence that the platform isn't going to fuck them. That the platform, even if the platform changes or shitifies, or does something that is abusive to their users, they can then take their audience elsewhere and use some different front end to interact with their network. That is ultimately the benefit. That's like a pretty, that's like, that's, that's a signal that the company believes that power is shifting away from institutions and towards individuals, which I believe. And I believe that companies that embrace that, um, over the long run, are going to be the companies that like empower that movement and are chosen by people and used by people. And the companies that fight that ultimately, I think, will, um,

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  We'll lose. And so I think it sends a very powerful signal to the market that like we want to treat people well and that we want you to own your data. We want you to own your social graph. We want you to own your relationships, not us. And you can hold us accountable for building a great experience because if we don't, you can just choose somebody else.

• 1:09:17Speaker 04

  I feel like I could do a full hour on that with you because I'm very curious if there are products to be built with these technologies that aren't just signaling and there have yet to really be any, like the existing platforms built on these technologies are actually, they still appear to be closed, right? Like Threads is maybe the most algorithmic of them all, even though it's built on an open technology. And I'm very curious if it is all just signaling or if the actual accountability mechanism of you can leave exists.

• 1:09:48Speaker 05

  I think it's really early right now for that technology, right? Like it's not in mainstream consumer consciousness yet. Like the only way, and Mike talks about this, but the only way that we sort of think about it is the fact that we own our phone numbers, right? You can change providers and keep your phone number. And so in that sense, like you own this unique identifier that you can carry across different networks. But that's not, people don't think of the internet like that yet. I think eventually people will think of the internet like that. Again, this isn't on our roadmap. Like I'm not, I'm not saying this is something we're gonna go do next quarter, but, but it is something I think about because I would say it's like one of three things that ultimately

• 1:10:30Speaker 05

  is what, what is what humanity needs to do differently for like the next two decades of networks. It's three things. I think the first is like the business model and the optimization functions of the platforms. Like are you optimizing for watch time? Are you optimizing for things that are actually in concert with human flourishing? The second thing is. Does the platform own the network effect? Or do the people own the network? Do you own your own data? Do you have access to that data? Or are you blocked into a walled garden? And then the third thing is governance. Governance that keeps platforms focused on the mission and the customer in a way that I think they're not right now. Case in point is Twitter.

• 1:11:15Speaker 05

  There needs to be more structural integrity around governance systems for companies over the next phase that pushes them to do right by users and the people that are, the people that make the product what it is. And this, there's a guy named Eric Ries who wrote this book, Incorruptible, who's talking a lot about these new types of governance systems. And the book is amazing. I think his thinking is amazing. I think it's actually a very big idea. I think it's one of the most economics, one of the best ideas in the field of economics that I've heard in the last, well, certainly since I've been alive. And I think it could potentially change the way companies are organized and structured. So that's kind of like the third leg of the stools, like governance that is robust and allows a company to be true over a long period of time.

• 1:12:00Speaker 05

  If you do those three things, like different business model and different optimization functions, the people own the network instead of the platforms, and then the right governance to keep the platform true to its mission and customers over the long run, that I think is a pretty good bet for the next two decades of networks. I think that will do a better job than the last two.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Well, Jack, I can't think of a better place to end it. It also sounds like we gotta go talk to Eric Ries for the next episode of Decatur.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, you gotta get him on. He's, seriously, this book is, I think it's world changing. I really do.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  Jack, we gotta leave it, you gotta come back sooner than five years because it feels like a lot of things are coming to an end and the new internet is being born. I want to catch up with you on it. Thank you so much for being on Decatur.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  Thanks, Neelam. I appreciate it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  I'd like to thank Jack Conti for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're also at DecoderPod and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with a five-star review. Decoder is production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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