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Kickstarter Co-Founder Talks Up Veronica Mars, Crowd-Funding Zeitgeist

Stampede to fund a movie version of the popular TV series is 'sort of like a perfect storm,' Yancey Strickler tells the crowd at Engadget Expand.

March 16, 2013
Yancey Strickler

SAN FRANCISCO—The stampede to fund a Veronica Mars movie is "sort of like a perfect storm," according to Kickstarter co-founder and head of communications Yancey Strickler.

Kicking off Engadget Expand here on Saturday, Strickler acknowledged that the Veronica Mars movie is the latest sensation to take Kickstarter by storm, following on the heels of crowd-funded projects like the Pebble smartwatch and the Ouya game console.

"We're excited that people responded to that project, and it'll be interesting to see how it works out," he said, brushing aside the notion that a mainstream property like Veronica Mars being funded on Kickstarter would diminish the "indie" creds of the site.

In less than a day, the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign topped $1 million, which a Kickstarter spokesman confirmed is the fastest a project has ever reached that number. The previous record was held by the Kickstarter for the new Ultima game, Torment: Tides of Numenera, which reached $1 million in about seven hours. The Veronica Mars project hit $1 million in 4 hours and 24 minutes, Kickstarter said.

A Veronica Mars film has been on fans' minds since the TV series was canceled in 2007. There were a few false starts along the way, but funds and scheduling issues delayed the effort. The project wound up hauling in more than $2 million in pledges over 24 hours, causing show creator Rob Thomas, who turned to Kickstarter on a hunch, to gush: "Holy cow, what a day."

Kickstarter, though known more for crowd-funded tech, has a pretty strong track record for getting movies off the ground.

"Ten percent of the films at Sundance [this year] raised money on Kickstarter," Strickler noted, adding that 63 Kickstarter-funded films have made it into theaters, including Academy Award-winning documentary short Inocente.

The site's backers have also funded journalists and recording artists—and there's even been a Kickstarter-funded opera, Paola Prestini's Oceanic Verses, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. last year.

But tech remains the engine that's driven Kickstarter since its launch on April 28, 2009. The top 10-funded projects on the site are a mix of hardware ventures like the Pebble and Ouya, and video games like Project Eternity and Double Fine Adventure.

What makes Kickstarter special, according to Strickler, is the collaboration between creators and backers, which he said offers unmatched transparency into the process of going from an idea for a product through to manufacturing and shipping it.

"Kickstarter is sort of like a store but it's way better than a store. It's a place where people are coming together to make things," he said. "There's a radical transparency to this, where everybody watches and discusses all of your moves as you go from funding to shipping a product.

"So by being a backer of the Pebble you know what it's like to make something in China … you know that Chinese New Year's is a really tough time to get something done," Strickler added, pointing to videos posted by Pebble during its manufacturing process as the startup raced to ship its smartwatches to Kickstarter backers.

What's the current state of Kickstarter? Strickler offered up some raw numbers —as of today, the crowd-funding site has enabled more than 3.5 million backers to pledge a whopping $526 million to Kickstarter hopefuls, with some $438 million of that money going to fund 37,676 projects.

For more, see PCMag's Dec. 2011 interview with Strickler.

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About Damon Poeter

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Damon Poeter

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.

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