Digital Medici

You no longer need to be rich to be an arts benefactor. But can crowdfunding site Patreon save creators from the starvation wages of online advertising?

- Kathleen Chaykowski

It’s 10 pm on a Sunday in November at California’s Burbank Airport, and Jack Conte, the typically beaming, bearded half of the husband-and-wife musical duo Pomplamoose, is leaning back in a chair, his hoodie pulled over his head, trying to get some rest. Conte, 33, spent much of the weekend in Los Angeles jamming with his funk band, Scary Pockets, and now it’s time to return to San Francisco for an entirely different type of gig: His day job running Patreon, a website and mobile app where fans pay monthly subscriptions to support their favourite creators, from painters to podcasters, singers, dancers, writers, game designers and photographers.

The moment perfectly captures what Conte lightheartedly calls his “identity crisis”: Being CEO and founder of a 100-person startup (valued in September at an estimated $400 million) without completely giving up on his passion for music, which is what led him to invent Patreon in the first place. “A lot of creators depend on us being a high-performance team,” Conte says. “That’s the most important thing in the world to me, so there’s less time for music.”