New Beginnings

To the Kickstarter team, creators, backers, and friends:

I've decided to step away from the CEO position at Kickstarter to focus on high-level and long-term company needs in my role as chairman of the board.

We're just about a month shy of Kickstarter's 10th birthday. Ten years ago, I took a leap with Yancey and Charles to create a platform with a simple mission: bring people together to help bring creative projects to life. And in doing so, Kickstarter came to life in ways I never could have imagined. In just ten years, we have accomplished so much together, with over $4.2 billion pledged to projects and nearly 160,000 projects from all over the world being successfully funded.

When I returned as CEO in 2017, I initially intended to spend about six months working to set up a long-term foundation to ensure Kickstarter remained aligned with its mission, and to set the next leader up for success. Those months quickly became two years dedicated to developing a better way to deliver on the core aspects of our service through a robust operating system, a strong product, and the team we have assembled at Kickstarter today.

I feel confident in what we've been able to accomplish, and even more confident in the next generation of leaders. And as a part of this decision, I'm happy to announce that Aziz Hasan, the head of Kickstarter's Design & Product teams, will be stepping into the role of running day-to-day operations as interim CEO-with the Kickstarter PBC board working with Aziz over the next weeks and months to make this role permanent.

Aziz is an experienced leader who joined the Kickstarter team early last year. He is deeply committed to the work, mission, and staff, and I cannot imagine Kickstarter in better hands.

It's been a true honor to serve as CEO for the first five years of this company and again for the last two. As we've been saying around here ahead of our milestone birthday, 10 is just the beginning. And I cannot wait to see what the next 10 years of Kickstarter will bring.

LINK:	https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/new-beginnings...
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