AMES, Iowa -- Perry Chen, creator and chairman of Kickstarter, will present the Murray Bacon Center for Business Ethics Lecture at Iowa State University.
"How Kickstarter is Redefining Success" will be at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 2, in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. Chen's talk is free and open to the public.
Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Since its launch in April 2009, more than 10 million people have pledged more than $2.2 billion to fund more than 100,000 creative projects, including an Oscar-winning documentary. Projects range from helping individual artists and musicians complete and promote their work to covering the development and production costs of an independent film or video-gaming system.
Chen will talk about Kickstarter's mission and definition of success. The company measures success by how well it achieves its mission, not by the amount of profits. Because of its commitment to the mission, Kickstarter recently reincorporated as a benefit corporation. Benefit corporations are for-profit companies that consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders.
Chen received a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business in 1998. Eleven years later, after holding a number of jobs, he co-founded Kickstarter (with Yancey Stricker and Charles Adler) and served as CEO until 2014 when he was named chairman. A TED Fellow in 2010, Chen was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2013 at the age of 36.
Chen's talk is co-sponsored by the College of Business and the Murray Bacon Center for Business Ethics, and by the National Affairs Committee and the Committee on Lectures, which are funded by Student Government.
More information on ISU lectures is available online, or by calling 515-294-9935.