Jack Conte: Draw the Next Page

**Jack Conte** (0:00)
I've never had a tech job. This is the only company I've ever worked at in my life. This is my first job.

**Jackson Dahl** (0:05)
Really?

**Jack Conte** (0:05)
Yes, my read of the Valley is people undervalue brand and narrative and creativity and storytelling. It's things that in my world, where I come from, those are the things. And in Silicon Valley, the main thing is the product. But you can know that the product is a thing and care about narrative and creativity and storytelling and brand. And I think if you don't care about those things, it's very hard to influence culture and to build a brand that people love and to have trust with your customers. And it's very hard to do those things. A lot of those things are a completely different skill set. There's a lot of operators who, if it doesn't show up in the P&L, they don't believe that it's real. I think it is possible to make art and also to want to get paid for your art. I think selling out is doing something other than making art. If you get paid for your art, that's the opposite of selling out. That's making sure that you're setting up your future so that you can make more art. I'm on a mission in life and in this company to help creative people understand that they have meaning in the world. We've been looking at these fucking dashboards on social media companies for 20 years now that tell us, you just got three million views and that's worth $18 in ad revenue. That's your worth to the world. I think that's a load of horse shit. The Internet has enough stuff. We don't need more stuff on the Internet. We need things that people are deeply proud of. I sat down at my kitchen table and I sketched out the idea that became Patreon. It took about 14 pieces of printer paper, I did it with a pencil and I felt so dumb.
I'm a fucking YouTuber. What am I going to do? What am I going to do with these drawings? And I literally had to say to myself, this isn't going to work. That's okay. Draw the next page.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:38)
Welcome to Dialectic episode 52 with Jack Conte. Jack is the CEO and co-founder of Patreon. And I talked to him about art and business, about his prolific creation himself over the course of the last 20 years on YouTube and music in his multiple bands, including Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets, and running Patreon and his commitment to building a platform that is first and foremost for creators themselves under the view that people should be able to make a living for their art. One thing that is certainly clear is that Jack deeply loves artists and creators and wants us to live in a world where they can flourish for a very long time. I have a lot of respect for what he has built at Patreon and what he is going to continue to do for years to come. Before the conversation with Jack, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. As I joked to Jack during the episode, Notion is essentially my patron. They are the presenting partner of Dialectic and they are a huge part of what makes the show possible. Notion's a creative workspace for your life's work that you and your team can use now with AI and agents to have far more leverage on creating whatever it is you've set out to. Notion has become something of an AI-native operating system for you and your team's work. And the critical part of that is because they spent the last 10 years building a platform that houses all of your context and makes it an immediately useful place to have the benefits of AI and agents. They've also natively integrated custom agents, which are little guys who work in your workspace and help you have more time for the important work by automating away the busy work. There's been a number of recent developments in Notion's world.
One of the most exciting is the developer platform and the combination of all the extensibility and workers, which allow you to have cloud hosted agents that are working on your behalf within your Notion workspace and elsewhere across all of the other software that you use. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.
And now here is my conversation with Patreon's Jack Conte.
Jack Conte, thank you for joining me, or thank you for having me, I should say.

**Jack Conte** (3:47)
Gosh, thanks for being here.

**Jackson Dahl** (3:49)
This is a pleasure. We have a mutual friend who really raves about you, and it's an honor to have gotten to kind of dumpster dive the archive and get to chat with you.