Sources describe turmoil at Kickstarter under founder and CEO Perry Chen, who retook the top job in March, as ~50 of 120 staff have left, including 7 top execs
but there's been no public announcement about this move. https://www.buzzfeed.com/... Davey Alba / @daveyalba : New from me: As a PBC and a cultural standard-bearer, Kickstarter is a model company in a lot of ways. But some people think there has been nothing exemplary about the recent turmoil there. https://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands mid-arc in Kickstarter's leadership churn: co-founder Yancey Strickler had already announced his departure from the CEO seat in 2017, and founder Perry Chen quietly retook the top job in March 2018 without any public announcement. BuzzFeed's sourcing now puts numbers on the cost — roughly 50 of 120 staff gone, including seven top executives.
What follows confirms the instability wasn't a blip: within a year Chen was out again, handing the CEO title to Aziz Hasan while staying chairman (TechCrunch reported the step-down), and the staff exodus fed directly into an employee unionization push driven by workers who felt the company's altruistic image didn't match internal reality.
First-order effects
- Kickstarter loses seven top executives and over 40% of its workforce in about a year under Chen's return, hollowing out the leadership bench of a company whose brand depends on being a cultural standard-bearer among creators.
- Creators and project backers face continuity risk on a platform where trust in the institution — not just individual campaigns — is the product.
Second-order effects
- The departures deepen employee distrust of management, strengthening the organizing effort that surfaced publicly in 2019 around moderation decisions like the 'Always Punch Nazis' comic ban and Hasan's 'inherently adversarial' framing of unions.
- A smaller staff forces triage: by April 2020 Kickstarter was circulating an internal memo flagging likely layoffs and restructuring as projects fell ~35% year over year with no clear rebound.
Third-order effects
- The episode becomes a case study in founder-return risk: a mission-driven PBC that swapped a long-tenured CEO for its founder saw executive attrition, unionization, and eventual downsizing — pressure other purpose-branded platforms will feel when governance and culture diverge.
- If the pattern holds, values-forward platform companies face a structural reckoning where their reputational capital with employees and creators is an asset that evaporates faster than it can be rebuilt through messaging.
The trend: Mission-driven platform companies are discovering that founder-led turnarounds can accelerate rather than arrest the erosion of the trust-based workforces their brands depend on.