Kickstarter’s second hire moves on

Fred Benenson will step down as the Vice President of Data at Kickstarter on Feb. 19, he wrote in a Medium post published Tuesday.
“‘All or nothing’ describes Kickstarter’s unique model of fundraising ,” he wrote in a long post detailing what he’s learned and what it’s been like at Kickstarter. “It has a way of really focusing a collective energy towards that single goal. It’s also a mindset that has shaped my career and philosophy working for the company.”
Benenson came to Kickstarter after his project, Emoji Dick, was successfully funded in 2011. Emoji Dick was a crowdsourced project that translated the Victorian-era classic Moby Dick by Herman Melville entirely into emojis. It’s a work which has been called, “Astoundingly useless.”
Benenson said he figured if Kickstarter could fund something like that, there had to be something there. He came on as the company’s second employee in 2011. Here he recounts the early days, when Kickstarter was still run out of an apartment on the Lower East Side.

It seemed like every day confronted us with a new issue to think about and a new decision to make. Suddenly the concept of being “in business” and creating “a product” didn’t feel so foreign — it was the consequence of good judgment, trust, great people, and focus. It’s hard to describe how invigorating that mix was: We were putting something good into the world that people wanted, and that thing was working.

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