Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor & Chime CEO Chris Britt at Semafor World Economy

Everett, Chris, hello. Thank you for joining us. Yes. See you coordinated your outfits today. Great work.

Chris, let's start with you. Chime has been moving towards wealthier customers a bit, but your core customer was historically making what, $50,000-$75,000 a year out of middle class. Can you give us a consumer gut check on that set right now? What you're seeing in account balances and spending?

Chime is itself not a bank.

Overdraft protection, early wage access, those kinds of things.

Some for World Economy is business development. Great. Can you see how they're spending their tax refunds?

Everett, Kickstarter obviously a platform where people fund creative endeavors that is the definition of a discretionary purchase. How resilient is that sort of creative funding community right now?

Yeah, I mean it's been really incredible. In 2025 we had our best year of all time by far. Record-breaking numbers revenue-wise, GMV-wise, users-wise. And so, we're seeing this incredible uptick. And I think one of my hypotheses is about the economy in general. You know, you have massive layoffs. People are finding alternative ways to go into entrepreneurship. The creator economy is exploding. And so, we're seeing that, but also people are realizing that Kickstarter is more than just a crowdfunding platform. Many people use this for pre-order. Many entrepreneurs are using this to build audiences. And you know, Kickstarter isn't the place people are raising $10,000, $15,000. People are raising $20, $30, $40 million on our platform selling products across different categories. And so I think it's been a place where a lot of people are now saying like, 'Hey, there's millions of people using this app and this website every day. I want to tap into that.' And also this is an age of independence just due to the economy and people being forced into being a creator in entrepreneurship or people just want to be independent now.

How much of this is there's some embedded cultural backlash to AI that has people streaming towards, you know, Etsy has leaned into this in some way. There is some sense of like the last true thing that a human being is doing. We want to gravitate towards that. Have you leaned into that marketing? Is that something that your creators are counting on?

Yeah, it's interesting because you know we have such a big platform that we have people on both sides right? We have people who are like 'yay AI', you know, some of our biggest growth were with like AI-enabled tech products and physical products. But then on the other side with creatives, you know, we have so many filmmakers, writers, filmmakers, music that are actually pretty anti-AI. And so, you know, we are focused on making sure that we're serving both. You know, we're one of the first major tech companies to come out with our own like pretty concrete AI policy to protect creative people. People have to say that they're actually using AI in their projects or their products. And if they're not, they're taken off the site. And so, we're doing our best to protect creatives, but at the same time, we're trying to empower people who are using AI tools to be able to be successful on the platform.

Have you, how do you police that? You found any bad actors, kicked them off the platform?

Yeah, I mean we have different software, external and internal built software to be able to track and see those things, but it's not something that's foolproof, right? Like you can't catch everything, but I think we catch a great deal. And then also our community is on it. Like when they see something AI that has not been flagged, they will absolutely let us know on social media, in our DMs, everywhere.

So you're crowdfunding the projects and some of the enforcement user generated. Yeah. Chris, we had the CEO of Fifth Third, Tim Spence, the big super regional banks here the other day talking about financial deregulation and he said from the banking perspective, he said be careful what you wish for that banks may be getting quite a bit of what they want on capital relief and other things, mergers, but that deregulation is very good for fintechs and crypto too. Should the banks be afraid of you?

But a lot of the fintechs of your generation launched kind of staunchly anti-bank. And then a lot of them ended up getting a bank charter or buying a bank. And there was a point where they wanted to do things that would require them particularly to lend and have a balance sheet. And in fact, we had PayPal CEO on this stage last year asked him whether they'd ever become a bank. He said that's not the plan and then they went and did it. So just to throw down a marker, what plans, you know, is there ever a point where Chime can't continue to be reliant on these community bank partners that operate mostly in the background and actually goes whole hog itself?

Treasury is clearly certainly more so than ever right now. They want more banks. They want de novo charters. If you were to, if I can just like trap you a little bit, if you were to think about that, is acquiring a bank the right way to go? A full national charter? We've seen a lot of these sort of slim down state licenses in Utah and some other places. Like what product would you be looking to offer that you don't today that a license might be helpful for?

Got it. Everett, Kickstarter launched in 2009.

Yes.

The creative economy was not a thing then or a glimmer in the eye then. Obviously, it had a big push from, you know, layoffs from the recession and then the rise of social media platforms. But since then we have Substack, we have Patreon, the sort of 800 pound gorilla that is YouTube. What is your moat in that world?

Yeah, I mean that's a great question. I always love to see competitors fail when they try to upstart. It's our audience. It's genuinely our audience. You know, we have millions of people that this is a unique audience of people that are doing e-commerce in a different way, right? Where they know that, hey, they might not get the product tomorrow like on Amazon. They might get it, you know, a month from now and two months from now, three months from now. So, it's a very unique audience of people that are early adopters, first adopters, people that have very very niche interest, whether it's comic books or games or films or tech products. And so I think the audience that we've been able to develop and all of the tooling since I got there, one of my missions was to build out from pre-launch to post campaign, building out all the tools that a creator would need throughout a creator's journey. And our most successful creators are repeat creators because they want to continue to tap into that audience. They've developed audiences of tens of thousands of people where they don't have to worry about the social media algorithms. If you build 50,000 followers on Instagram, maybe 50 people, 100 people see your post, no offense, and then or if you do that on Kickstarter and you launch something new or whatever, all 50,000 of those people get notified, right? And so it's become such a strong platform and in a toolkit of creators to be like, hey, when I'm launching something or doing something new, I want to go to Kickstarter as well, and I have all the tools there to be successful.

But if YouTube decided tomorrow that maybe in a bid to share less of their ad revenue with their creators, they were going to launch a fundraising channel or some kind of more commercial channel, which they've actually stayed away from despite having a huge audience. Wouldn't that put you out of business pretty quickly?

Don't give Neil any ideas, right? Neil is a nice guy. Neil, we've established. No, no, no, no, no. I don't listen. I don't think it's just that easy, right? Like we've built this brand and reputation. We've built out this flow. I've talked to other big CEOs who have like tinkered and thought about it and they realize that we have a very special moat in this space and I think it's something that you know we're growing. I mean we had our best year of all time last year by far, we're already up 52% over last year right? And we've been every year I've been CEO been growing steadily fast and like Kickstarter has become that place and I don't think it's just easy for anyone to step into our space. I won't let it happen either.

Chris, do you plug into the creator economy in any way? Do you have a sense of how many Chime users are sort of non-traditionally employed in interesting ways?

How many jobs have you had in your career?

I did Baskin-Robbins. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Good. Retail is just good. It builds character. It had its perks. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Shifting gears a little bit. We're in Washington. You know, the administration has done a lot of interesting things in financial services. The biggest one right now, I think, is the Trump accounts and sort of how they're trying to think about retirement. Sort of curious quickly for Chris, is there anywhere for Chime to play in that world?

Can they do that through their Chime app?

But do you have or do you need a brokerage business to actually participate in the plan?

As you launch us, you said single stock investing apps like what do you make of the kind of gamification of investing and bleeding obviously into prediction markets? Do you want people on Chime, do you want people to go on Chime and think about it as their primary bank account and they're managing their household finances or do you want them to be able to hit buy on something?

Okay. And then Everett, in the time we have left on the Trump accounts and the retirement, you know, there's a question of how that's going to filter into the gig economy and you know those are your creators. Is there a place for you to be a distribution channel for that? Are you an advocate? How do you think about that?

I'm really big on focus. You know, one of the things that we've been focused on is like we have a unique value in the creator economy and in the gig economy and like we have so much more room to grow. I can't wait for you all to see all the innovations that we're bringing. I'm not thinking about Kickstarter as a crowdfunding company anymore. I'm thinking of it as a creator company and so we're really focused on the things that we do well and I'm supportive of all those things as well, but we're very focused on our roadmap.

That is all the time we have. Thank you both so much.